Greetings from Asbury Parc des Princes

"Je suis venu a Paris pour vous," Bruce Springsteen told me-- and thousands of other people at his concert Friday night at French stadium Parc des Princes. With these words, he then played a heartbreaking piano solo version of the song For You off my favorite album, Greetings from Asbury Park, which almost made me cry and I now count among my greatest musical experiences ever.

Whatever Bruce Springsteen means to you-- lyrical poet, symbol of America, documentarian of Americana blue collar struggle, hometown nostalgia or inexplicable New Jersey cult aging rocker, -- he is awesome in concert. He played for 3 hours straight. 28 songs. Not only was this the longest concert of continuous music I'd ever attended, but he also interacted more with the crowd than any other musician I'd ever seen and-- get this-- he took requests. He was ready to play any one of his songs that night. Fans held up hand-lettered signs with the titles of their favorite songs (sometimes in broken English) or shouted their requests. "Dites-le-moi," said Bruce, backed by the non-French speaking E Street Band, "vous voulez entendre quelle chanson?"

The fact the Bruce is back with his original band makes me oddly nostalgic for a time that I never knew-- when he and the E Street Band used to play my hometown. New Jersey and Delaware aren't very far away and I embrace all Jersey cult bands as representing Where I'm From. Hearing Bruce sing about Atlantic City in Paris made me wonder if French people had ever heard of AC, as we used to call it back home. Yes, to me it's a romanticised version of Americana that all of a sudden it becomes about my life, but it also made me think of Le Spleen de Paris, Baudlairean prose poem still-lives about unheroic parisians-- another example of a region described by romantically unromantic images.

Paris is probably the most frequently romanticised place in the world-- often by Americans, often in annoying blog entries that make people who really live in Paris ask questions like, well, remember stepping in dog shit all the time? What about the lack of any form of customer service at all in Paris? Did you love the city of light when you had to argue with France Telecom for 12 weeks to get them to turn on your phone line?

Do I have the same lack of perspective when I start to think the Bruce Springsteen songs actually accurately describe my life in America? I've always listened to him away from the east coast-- from San Francisco and now Paris, and he always represented on some level something I left behind but that at the same time never really existed. I wasn't born to run, Thunder Road doesn't appear on my American road map and I've never hidden on the backstreets. The word "nostalgia" comes from the Greek "nosteo," which means to return home. As the cliche goes, you can't go home again-- but as the film Grosse Point Blank added, you can shop there. Delaware is the home of tax-free shopping.

After the concert, someone accosted me and asked if I were lucky enough to be from the same country as Bruce Springsteen. I assumed (given the influence of French irony and inability to give sincere compliments) that the guy was making fun of me, but turns out he was sincere. I don't expect anyone in France to be pro-American in any way, so this actual admiration of something American shocked me. I spend most of my time criticising Bush and American foreign policy with the French, agreeing with them that I hope McCain loses and Obama becomes president and rolling my eyes at them when they ask why Americans are so fat and why they eat Mcdonalds for every single meal, every single day. I wasn't born in the USA, but contrary to what the average French person and Ronald Reagan might think, that song is not a patriotic anthem, but a criticism of the Land of the Free. Bruce also supports Obama.

Seeing Bruce in Paris was a bit of a collision of worlds for me. And small things irritated me in this car crash (I'm sure there's some relevant Bruce song about such a topic that I could quote here). When Bruce said he came to Paris for us, some French smartass yelled that we were actually at Boulogne (Parc des Princes is a little outside Paris) and I wanted to challange this precision-seeking loser to construct one coherent sentence in English. In the French press, they also kept writing about Bruce and the E period Street Band (they always write it E. Street) , and it makes an American realise that the old world and city of lights will never get modern urban basics like building cities on grid systems. In Paris, instead of a grid, they have a star-with-no-individual-lanes system under the Arc de Triomphe.

The next day, the French paper Le Monde had a concert write-up, complete with the standard poorly punctuated band name, but it warmed my French-influenced but American heart nevertheless when they described Bruce as "le plus grand showman rock de son temps." Notice that this sentence also contains multiple English words...