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Love On Tour was something I honestly never
thought was going to happen. After watching con-
cert after concert get postponed and eventually
canceled, my hopes of actually attending tapered
off.
This fear of cancelation was a rain cloud looming
over me up until the concert. The excitement I used
to get leading up to those big nights was noticeably
absent for my first concert in over two years. It didn’t
really hit me until I’d found my seat and the lights
went down that I was actually there. When you’re
staring at Harry Styles live and in the flesh it’s hard
to maintain incredulity.
Styles’s latest album, the pop-rock hit Fine Line,
came out in December 2019 with Love On Tour
marking the album’s stage show debut; contribut-
ing to the majority of the setlist, Styles performed
11 songs off the album, alongside five from his pre-
vious self-titled album and one from his One Direc-
tion career.
Styles played a variety of songs throughout his
show ranging from bright rock to soulful ballads
and managing to hit everything in between. At
times the song transitions were jarring, lacking a
cohesive musical style to tie them together; howev-
er, Styles opted not to sing large sets of songs back
to back, which helped minimize this effect. On
many of his songs, he sang harmony lines or tried
out new vocal riffs, keeping the music relatively
new and exciting even for those intimately familiar
with his repertoire.
Soaring, upbeat opener “Golden” set the tone for
the whole show. Also the first track on Fine Line, it
was a perfect beginning that sent the crowd into a
frenzy that did not waver for the remainder of the
night. Other musical highlights included guitarist
Mitch Rowland ripping through the guitar solo in
“She,” Styles’s extended improv in “Sunflower, Vol.
6” as well as extended outros on popular singles
“Adore You” and “Lights Up.”
The video board effects and lighting design
were evocative of the psychedelic sounds flow-
ing within the music, creating a cohesive experi-
ence between the visual and auditory space in the
venue. The music wholly encompassed the space,
immersing the listener in an experience far greater
than just listening to a song.
Although Little Caesars Arena is a larger venue,
the concert had the intimate air of one much small-
er. This was due in part to the stage layout, which
was centered on the floor with fans on all four sides
rather than pushed off to one end, as well as Styles’s
stage presence as he joked and interacted with the
18,000 fans in attendance.
Through all the music and the cheers, the defin-
ing moments of the night were the ones created
between the audience and Styles, as his charisma
and quick wit made jokes and rapport unique to the
night’s attendees. Despite the melancholy nature of
much of the material, he managed to keep an over-
whelmingly positive energy throughout the course
of the show; Styles never stopped smiling, dancing
and interacting with his fans.
Love On Tour in Detroit was a breath of fresh
air, despite the masks required by the venue. Styles’s
effort to keep the concert light and entertaining
reflected well on his skills as a performer, and it will
be exciting to see where they take him next.
When I was 16, I walked by my old
friend’s house on New Year’s Eve. Other
stops on my walk were the church I grew
up in and the forest trail where I used
to walk my dog. I was feeling particu-
larly wistful and a little depressed. I liked
watching older movies like “10 Things I
Hate About You” and “13 Going
on 30” to feel better. Rom-coms
filmed after about 2015 are cursed
by streaming services’ high turn-
over rate. They don’t have the
same heart as the older ones.
“When Harry Met Sally”
is the quintessential romantic
comedy. I’m pretty sure I heard
the, “I’ll have what she’s having!”
joke long before I understood its
context. I never thought it would
be a movie that would make
me cry, but seeing Billy Crystal
(“Monsters, Inc.”) run through
the streets of Manhattan on
New Year’s Eve to catch up to
Meg Ryan (“You’ve Got Mail”)
always gets me. They just don’t
make rom-coms like they used to.
I’ve talked about this before, but a really
overlooked part of the rom-com is the nar-
rative downswing: the sad, tear-jerking
parts when the protagonist fights with her
best friend or loses her job. You can’t have
comedy without tragedy. “When Harry
Met Sally” is hysterically funny, no doubt
about it. It’s hilarious (and evocative of the
’80s career woman) that Sally’s sexual fan-
tasy doesn’t even involve sex. But that same
vignette is also tender.
Sally doesn’t want sex; she wants
someone to rip her clothes off. The man
in her dreams is “faceless.” All she wants
is someone to look at her, without the
masks or the wallpaper. She just wants
to be seen. There’s an unfinished vulner-
ability in her dream, as her friendship
with Harry for most of the film. They
talk about their lives for 18 hours when
they first meet, then they don’t even see
each other again for five years. How
heartbreaking is it to know someone so
deeply but not feel like you can call them
your friend?
The happy ending is where the film
reminds you that it’s a romantic comedy.
Still, it’s not frivolous. It’s New Year’s Eve,
and Harry made it to the party and told
Sally he loved her, but she either doesn’t
believe him or doesn’t care. They’re push-
ing through the crowd — one chasing,
one retreating — and the countdown goes
to zero. There’s cheering and kissing all
around them, but they’re so angry with
each other for their missed love.
Eventually, Sally stops running.
There’s confetti covering the shoul-
der pads all around them. Harry says,
“It’s not because I’m lonely, and it’s not
because it’s New Year’s Eve. I came here
tonight because when you realize you
want to spend the rest of your life with
somebody, you want the rest of your life
to start as soon as possible.”
He didn’t say that he wasn’t lonely,
because he was. But he feels his love for
her more than he feels his loneliness.
There’s an Alexi Murdoch song called
“Through the Dark,” where he writes, “I
love you, girl, I love you more than I can
say / Even with my heart in the way.” His
broken heart won’t stop him from loving
her. Love isn’t always as much of a feel-
ing as it is an act. It’s a late-night call, an
argument about Casablanca, a cheek-to-
cheek dance, the feeling of a cable-knit
sweater.
It’s “Auld Lang Syne.” Harry won-
ders aloud what that song even means:
“Should old acquaintance be forgot?’
Does that mean that we should forget old
acquaintances? Or does it mean that if
we happened to forget them, we should
remember them, which is not possible
because we already forgot ’em?”
And Sally says, “Well, maybe it just
means that we should remember that we
forgot them, or something. Anyway, it’s
about old friends.”
I think that’s what’s missing from
the perishable, replicable, forgettable
romantic comedies we see getting
churned out now. Yes, “The Kissing
Booth” and “Someone Great” do have an
understanding of narrative arcs. There
is some point when the protagonist gets
down on their luck only to be lifted up
again, but there’s no weight to any of it. It
doesn’t seem to mean anything.
This isn’t to say all rom-coms that
came out after 2000 are hollow: “Palm
Springs” and “Love, Rosie” are a couple
of lighthearted-ish movies that actu-
ally stick with you past the time that
you close your web browser. I think they
achieve that by leaning into the weight
in their characters’ lives. Not every rom-
com has to deal with the inevitability of
death or the futility of life, but it has to
mean something. If it doesn’t mean any-
thing, we have no reason to remember it.
And I guess that’s what I’m getting at
with “When Harry Met Sally.” Love is
about remembering who we’ve forgot-
ten. I don’t know if I nailed it by watch-
ing rom-coms or walking by an old
friend’s house, but what matters, to me,
is that I remember them.
Harry Styles’s Love On Tour
comes to Detroit
Courtesy of Gabby Ceritano
HADLEY SAMARCO
Daily Arts Writer
‘When Harry Met Sally’ and the
art of the rom-com
MARY ELIZABETH JOHNSON
Daily Arts Writer
Courtesy of Erin Ruarg
Brian Teare’s walking meditations for
the Zell Visiting Writers Series
I often wonder what people do on rainy days. Ones
where the sky is so gray that you can hardly look ahead,
where the damp pavement makes your bike wheels skid
a bit as you try to swerve past people on the Diag, where
your wet clothes stick to your skin like sweat on a sum-
mer day. Personally, I stay inside, unapologetically, wher-
ever inside may be. This time I escaped the rain in the
Stern Auditorium at the University of Michigan Museum
of Art, listening to the rhythmic words and syncopated
breaths of poet Brian Teare, the most recent guest of the
Zell Visiting Writers Series.
It felt good to be back in the auditorium, “gathered in
poetry,” as Teare says, listening from up close and not
through my laptop’s microphone — which was refresh-
ing. So there I was: third row, ears, eyes and heart open to
discovering the beauty of yet another wonderful author.
At the event, Teare, who grew up in Tuscaloosa,
Alabama, was presenting
his sixth book, “Doomstead
Days,” a collection of eight
poems within 150 pages.
From the Bay Area to Ver-
mont to Philadelphia, the
poems illustrate a landscape
of things he saw and felt, and
that we, the listeners, could
fully embody in our minds,
thanks to his lyrical depic-
tions and vivid descriptions.
The first piece he read
wasn’t a part of this book,
instead, it was an essay called
“Tell me about your weath-
er.” It had come about as a
response to a friend’s inquiry
to do just what the title indi-
cates. Set in Virginia in 2019,
where he was teaching poetry at that time, this poem
deals with climate as “a fiction, an abstraction.”
He talks about the wind in a personified manner: “I feel
its touch but can’t feel I’ve touched him back.” He looks
around and realizes things aren’t permanent as they slip
from his grasp and control — the clouds, the sun and the
way climate change is making the bird population decline.
It’s the ugly truth, exposed with pretty locutions.
The second poem, titled “Olivine, Quartz, Granite,
Carnelian” was long. Fast. Intense. It mimicked a walk-
ing meditation, and we were walking alongside him. A
melodic internal monologue that activated all five senses,
I could smell the pines, see the colors of the land ahead,
hear the sounds of nature and “sing song sing song” of
birds. I could feel the wetness of rain on my skin and
taste the bitterness of belonging to a race that is “making
all natural things human.” Teare exposed our environ-
mental guilt while simultaneously deadening it; a “sort of
ruin that seems livable until it isn’t.”
Teare slightly swayed from side to side as the words
left his mouth, increasing in pace as the poem went on.
Soon, we were met with a long grocery list of ways in
which we are doomed. Among descriptions of fungi in
bats, of microbes, nukes and tubes, Teare inserts scien-
tific facts of climate change and global warming. These
were hidden among held-back sighs and measured notes,
yet clear enough to leave the auditorium thinking of the
rain outside differently.
After he was done with reading, Teare sat down with
English MFA Matt Del Busto for a Q&A. When asked for
his formula for writing long poems, he said the secret
was syllabics
— composing by ear and always looking to
“make facts sing.”
Throughout his reading, I had noticed the musicality
of his words, the rhythm in the way he structured lines
and the dance that he ignited in my feet — moving in a
similar manner to when I listen to jazz manouche. Teare
had been a musician before he was a poet. But he was
also a walker, making the length of poems coordinated
with the time he spent on his stroll. The walk was “the
skeletal map, a semantic map” that was finished sitting
on his desk at home.
When the Q&A opened to the public, I asked a ques-
tion myself. I had been curious to know if, as a teacher, he
ever felt that he had to write as a means of educating oth-
ers. To this, he answered that the poems were a means of
educating himself first and that teaching the reader was
the collateral result. “I go on walks just to go on walks,”
he said.
I left yet another Zell Visiting Writers Series want-
ing to tell everyone I encountered about it. I went home
and took my bike — it was still raining, but I didn’t care. I
rode my bike and began noticing how the world around
me reacted to rain. Those who run and those who hide,
those whose ponchos cascade water in a halo around
their shoes and those who use an umbrella too small to
keep them dry.
Teare left me with a sudden urge to write about every
living thing around me. He made me realize that we are
vulnerable at all times and are conditioned to catastroph-
ic change. So until the time comes, I will walk, observe,
meditate and write. I’ll make a habit of it, especially when
it rains.
CECILIA DURAN
Daily Arts Writer
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