BRAD NEELY’S WORDS WILL EAT YOUR FACE FOR BRUNCH!
Bruce Springsteen Concert Commercial (2008)
By Brad Neely
[note: the above commercial is not the subject of Neely’s writing but merely a suitable example from Springsteen’s run of 2008 television spots]
We need to see him ourselves after seeing the commercial about seeing him.
In the frame he’s running with his shoulders up and his eyebrows up. Singing not one word. His face, child-happy, flushes a few heart attacks worth of red.
Watch him throwing guitars at a band lady who catches them with a “no-big-shit,-could-care-less,-fucking-boss-is-at-it-again” style grin.
A guy with a pillow cover as a skullcap does a flip, lands on his back and rolls while holding a guitar. This shows that merely playing well is for loser cripples.
These people are not dancing; they are performing the opera moves that signal the curtain to drop… over and over… from the absolute beginning.
They are willing to rack themselves on the cameras, sing into grown men’s seasoned mouths and sweatily dry hump the ghosts of all our ideas of entertainment - all in hyper light stadium bights.
This commercial uses the frame like the ancient and always portal of life and looking. It opens with his head emerging from the depth like both the birther and the birthed: both states enraged by inexorable change. He’s appeared and cannot be unseen. He rages. He reddens. We widen.
All eyes ride him. Like apes eyeing Adam, we think differently of our coming deaths; “Bring them, for we cannot ascend to this.”
Just look.
Mouth: in fuck’s heavy stride with breath like a plasma.
Body: a black wax candle, damp with heat from his pink, head-shaped flame.
Face: like sun spit.
Face: like all unrecorded bedroom histories.
Face: like that of a Jesus who’s not as good as the original Jesus when it comes to hiding the fact that crucifixion feels exhilarating to a demigod, am I right Hercules!?
Face: like a future weapon in womb, hot with extrapolating cells becoming him, becoming the weapon that has a face like himself in the womb.
This is what happens when you see him in a commercial on a fucking TV. You become pregnant with many hims. If you give him actual audience you become a missile base waiting to launch him.
Our forearms rise like sewn farmland, bulging with his uncanny emotional fecundity. He seems to issue fertility from all his exits. All variety of life swarms after him, dropping and dragging their eggs in his sweat, hoping to upgrade their next generations.
He can’t hold it in any longer and gushes upon the audience by way of flung forehead film and actual cup contents. He empties the reservoir. Our clothes team with his fluids. Our pores lodge with his wriggling seed. It comes in buckets from he above. We love it like soil loves a secret rain in the night, away from the jealous sun. Here in this mini-hemi of a concert hall our SunSteen rains and shines populating us with teeming springs.
He has the eyes of a murderer who gives one life by breaking another. The singing kind of murder. This Holy Murderer’s eyes blink, ready for the flawing of the claw, the jets of blood and the ejecting spirit of the murdered entities (our painful, unhappy selves) that shoot up from under his weight while we are reborn as happy dancers in the dark.
His face is the snake that crawls into its own ass without cessation. He’s yelled off his name, yelled away time, flooded the grouts of social recognition with the hottest sweat ever sweat. Everything known is unknown. He has brought us to the first and only instant.
Conclusion: to see this face is to see the circle of life. He is the sum of every human’s story, the story of life’s violent fight for dominance through time towards a plateau on which it, life, might rest and display tenderness before descending again upon the valley in search of time giving blood. We are happily the blood in his valley so that he may be born over and over.
Watch Brad Neely’s video Office Hours
