Ranking Dire Straits “Romeo and Juliet” live performances: A Definitive List
No. 5 Dire Straits — Romeo & Juliet (Live at Wembley ‘88).
The true power of Mark Knopfler’s dead pan emphatic stage presence (and the TRUE power of extended Sax solos) is that nearly 3 minutes passes before the camera pulls in tight to reveal that Eric Clapton is on stage, playing rhythm guitar.
No. 4 Dire Straits — Romeo & Juliet (Live in Basil)
1992. Head bands. Dad jeans. Another big sax solo. Huge daytime crowd, hands waving above their heads. The song relents when the verse, “all I do is miss you”, as the organ takes over. Then it all stops and Chris White steps forward and brings it home.
No. 3 DIre Straits — Romeo & Juliet (Fridays Live)
An abridged version. This is a live studio performance for television, in 1980. Mark Knopfler was already into his 30’s before he gained any broad success. So, there’s like hope for me, too.
No. 2 Mark Knopfler Discusses The National Guitar (2009)
How the National Guitar found its way into song.
No. 1 Mark Knopfler: A Night In London
A very moving orchestral intro. A drummer who is rocking. Mark changes fucking guitars late in the song for a solo. The most emotional I’ve seen him. Imagine spending 30+ years with a song. Tons of artists do it, and it has to be hard to keep it fresh, stay connected. How MK and his band do it, I don’t know. For me, my first contact with this song came through Empire Records (a film that moved me deeply to, like, be the kind of character that would be in the movie), and when Mark feather dusts the ballerinas foot, I was hooked.
I mean, this is a very sad song, and, if you’re like me and you listen to it too much, one of two things can happen; (and this of course depends on who you really are as a person, too) you can become immune to this story, about two kids who came up on different streets, but fell in love just the same. You’ll let the lyrics move away like the remnants of a shore-break wave, it just goes back out the way it came in and you don’t even try to stop it—hold it near you. Or, you can let your eyes well up, let the heaviness of the “It was just the time was wrong” wash over you until you’re sure you’re in love, and really, anyway what you gonna do about it?
And so these are the Top 5 live performances of Romeo & Juliet. Enjoy, Won’t You?
The two of you took a train to get to a train so that she could get to a bus which would later in the evening leave the city. That bus, the vile and filthy Chinatown variety would carry her south, and into the mountains where she lives. You will stay behind because this is where you live.
New York City is no respecter of persons. It does not care that she’s spent 3 days here with you, and in those days you held hands and saw the island from the water, feeling both so large and so small. Oh, and in the nights you were tangled up together in your apartment, alternating big spoons, smiling a lot and, kissing like the couple that you’re not, but you want to be. This city doesn’t care that you got attached. New York City doesn’t care about your attachment because the immediacy is that she needs to get on that A Train to take her to where she needs to go and that train is not waiting.
Her hand is gripped around your arm, she doesn’t say it but you know the meaning; don’t go. The exchange that follows is summed up in that you will travel to see her soon. She wants to come back. She’s left a tooth brush in your apartment. The things you didn’t say are not important-there will be time later to say them. The only thing that matters is the way she felt in your arms, when you knew she was asleep, the smell of her hair which you hope never leaves your pillow and that you wrote this from a train that is both taking you away from her in the physical breadth of distance, versus time, which after enough passing will bring you back to her.
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You’re going to have dreams about her, and it’s going to freak you out. They’re going to be vivid but thankfully ephemeral (although that doesn’t mean they won’t be reoccurring). Why? Have you not allowed yourself to feel what your soul wanted you to feel? Have pushed down your sadness, your sense of loss, and that tiny flame of rage? Because she’s inside of your head at night, and you can’t control it. People will tell you this is indicative of something, and of course you don’t want to hear that, but it brings in the doubt. Do you miss her? Do you need her back in your life? In the daylight hours when you can wander out to your stoop and sit in the sun, where your head is the clearest, you know her time in your life has past. At night, at night though, your doubts run wild throughout your head. Close your eyes and take a breath. Brother, you are doing fine. Aside from physically removing her entirely from your life, emotionally you cast her out from the haunts of you soul, too. But still, maybe she lingers in your subconscious, but then again, so does everybody you meet. The people you know, knew, loved and hated all help shape you into the person you are. So let her have a few minutes a night, from time to time. Like most ghosts, she’ll disappear once you ignore her for long enough.
John Waite — “Missing You”
Because feelings are real, and whatever and amen. You know?
Never write it until you write it.
Jack Kerouac’s List of 30 Beliefs and Techniques for Prose and Life
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
Shattered Glass | Vanity Fair
At 25, Stephen Glass was the most sought-after young reporter in the nation’s capital, producing knockout articles for magazines ranging from The New Republic to Rolling Stone. Trouble was, he made things up—sources, quotes, whole stories—in a breathtaking web of deception that emerged as the most sustained fraud in modern journalism.
Wow
This is part of this thing I’m writing.
I haven’t been on a lot of airplanes. It’s just not something I’ve done much of, travel I mean. So each time I get to the airport all of the things that most folks find inconvenient I find interesting, and vaguely new and exciting. Though, lately every time I get on a plane it seems that I’m flying away from what I want and straight to what I don’t. I guess it all comes down to what we’re ready to leave, and what we are heading toward.
“The only baggage you can bring is all that you can’t leave behind.”
She said she hated me for leaving. Coming in and out of her life at my connivence. She said that it wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t. I didn’t know what else to do. This is all that I know how to do. How many more trips, how many places to see, how man lonely beds do I wake up in? Seems I find another her in every city I arrive in, and leave the last just the same.
In a perfect world we are both looking at the same setting sun. There’s this big window that I’m looking out of at the airplanes that are on the tarmac, but that window is more of a mirror. In it we see ourselves in the outside world. It’s designed that way, to reflect us upon the world. When we look at the world we’re forced to evaluate who we are in it. Maybe this is because life is cruel, life wants us to teach us something harsh. Either way, I can see my self, and I know she sees what I’m seeing. The setting sun lets us know when it’s time to go. We need the light, and when it’s gone, we know that we too, need to find it somewhere.
All of our suns go down. We always know, instinctively when it’s time to go.
Now.
No real, deep meaning here. Aside from the fact that I’m losing my mind sitting in an airport for the last 8 hours.
At the turn of the century when our family was still young we would spend our summer and autumns on the lake. Mother and I watching the children in the boats was one of our great pleasures, like living a Seurat painting. Now that the children are gone we can only, at best, sit and watch the lake for a ripple. A reminder of who we were, what we had, and what is now gone. The lake holds our secrets, like someone would hold a bowl.
I think I could be Garrison when I grow up.
There are—at times—places and people, acts, and sounds that seem out of place any other time than right when you’re experiencing them in those moments. In the mornings, over coffee when we think back your best choice is to recall what felt good about those moments, because you’ve got a lot of time in your life ahead of you to feel shame, or sorry about things. Fuck that.
In the retrospective haze of of those long afternoons I spent ashore— long after the time we spent aboard that vessel that brought us together and, eventually tore us apart I would sit near the dock and listen. Listen for the water as it splashed against the pilings below; the sound of the gulls above, and in the distance the howl of the light that guides even the most wayward ships to safety.
It was important you once said, to take life as it comes, and to not get too attached to much of anything that can’t be easily replaced. Things that were hard to replace, you said, were always more trouble then they were worth so it was best to let them drift back out with the tide as quietly as they came in. No use in worrying about something you know you can’t replace. It was no real surprise then when I awoke one morning to find a red sky and a note pinned to the bulkhead.
I mostly stay on land now, but, occasionally in the early morning, while it’s still calm I’ll take a dinghy and row out into the middle of the bay and try and listen for the answers as the wind crosses the water and moves over me.
Sometimes a Bike is Just a Bike: On the symbolism—and politics—of bicycling in D.C.
Here’s my story about bike lanes, race, semiotics, and change in Washington, D.C., on the cover of City Paper this week. Please read it, reblog it, and share it with your friends. I’d love it to reach some non-local readers—especially because bike lanes face vilification pretty much everywhere.
Life in the District used to be marked, in part, by the ability to reside in a suburbanesque neighborhood near the denser areas—but not so near that it felt like really living in a city. Part of that meant being able to drive downtown for work—or to shop or go to dinner—and not having to worry about where to park when you got home again. The newcomers who want bike lanes aren’t moving to the same D.C. For a lot of younger Washingtonians, bike lanes are attractive in the way that a condo in Logan Circle is attractive: Both draw in young professionals who want to live in dense, connected, and active neighborhoods with plenty of stuff to do nearby. They appeal not just to the adventurous, but also to those who find biking an easy, fun way to get around, from work to home to the bar and back again—as well as to those who want to reduce their cost of living by giving up their cars.
Alex’s first of hopefully many cover stories! Good work!
Destiny’s Child — “Survivor”
One year ago today my friend and roommate Megan drove me to the airport at 5 in the morning, after a night of heavy partying, and I got on an airplane and flew to New York City with only 2 bags and nothing else. There was no real big send off. I had said goodbye to all my best friends a week prior as they left for vacation in California. I had worked my last shift at Whole Foods and was basically sitting around drinking coffee and whiskey all week leading up to my departure.
For me, Moving to New York, was an all or nothing venture. I knew if I stayed in Florida I would die. By my own hand, purposefully or incidentally and so going to NYC was putting it all on the line. I had never been here before until last May when I visited for 3 days, and I know I had to be here. I went back to FL and put my two weeks notice in at work, and got my affairs in order to move. I knew two people here who didn’t know each other, so I basically had no friends, no job, and no apartment lined up. I had about 2,000$, and that was it. I couldn’t have been happier.
The day I arrived it was hot and I hadn’t slept in like two days. I had been up all night chatting on AIM with Aaron because I couldn’t sleep, and he’s swell to talk to and once I was on the ground and finding a cab all I wanted to do was pass out. But I couldn’t. I immediately went to work finding an apartment, which I did later that afternoon: a sublet in Bushwick.
It’s been up and down this year. I tested and pushed myself. I worked 6 days, sometimes 7 every week this year. I found an incredible job, where I started at the bottom and now I’m the general manager of one of our locations. I’ve got a too expensive, gigantic bedroom in Park Slope and I’ve got amazing friends. It’s honestly more that I could ask for, and certainly more than I deserve. Sometimes the universe just allows things to happen.
Some real life people in NYC who let, and helped me laugh, cry, and vent and be happy:
- Matt Struble
- Tristan and Robin Henry - Wilson
- Darrin
- And tons of people from Tumblr who gave me encouragement who are literally too many to name, but you know who you are.
It’s now not about an “I did it!” moment. It’s sort of like, now, I’m doing it.
This quote from the movie Blow: “Sometimes you’re flush and sometimes you’re bust, and when you’re up, it’s never as good as it seems, and when you’re down, you never think you’ll be up again, but life goes on. “
You are you, right now, but imagine yourself then, as you were. She had later exonerated you for your (in her words) ‘mischievous misuse of masturbation’ while watching movies together, after she fell asleep. She found it repulsive that, during the movie Kids, you would masturbate through the sex scenes, and then wanting to watch other such films. It’s shocking (her words) how much your cock resembles Vincent Gallo’s. A self-referential tirade followed by an argument in the street at 2am ends with you outside on the swing that hangs on the porch trying to explain to her why it’s OK for you to act out the way you do, because deep down, you’re just projecting your feelings about yourself onto her. Later, she lets you sleep in the bed, but you can not touch her. You are yourself right now, but you ought not be, at times.
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So maybe you’ve got a good job, and you work real hard, and things are squaring themselves away for you and you wake up early, and you quit smoking and you haven’t been tempted to even try to pick back up. Your love life, is alive, but it isn’t vibrant. People you know think highly of you. But you’re tired.
You have to walk home. The walk home is just almost exactly one mile. You walk it slowly in the evening. And you’re so tired, tonight. Turning the corner you see a woman sitting in front of a table piled with junk, and tinny, thin and loud you hear Mr. J, singing out the first lines. It’s sunset, on a Sunday. You don’t know why but you stop and peruse the junk, and it’s after a few moments that you realize that the reason that you’ve stopped is because at sunset, on Sunday, when you’re real tired, and people like you, and you’re not smoking even though you work hard, and you probably deserve it you understand that this song doesn’t really mean much, but rather that you understand it. It has a place, as you do. The entity of the song exists as you do, and sometimes you exist together.
Because that’s the way the weekend is suppose to wrap up. It shouldn’t be cliche if it’s actually true. If you try sometimes, you just might get what you need.
