The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com Arts Wednesday, October 6, 2021 — 5 619 east university avenue @ z place FRESH GROCERIES IN THE HEART OF THE CAMPUS Fresh Produce Fresh Chicken, Fish & Steaks Deli Meats & Cheeses International Foods Specialty Groceries Zingerman’s Bread Bottled Beverages thoughtfully-selected Wines & Beers for a quick, tasty meal, visit revive, our café next door! Open Mon-Fri 9am - 10pm Weekends 10am - 10pm Product information @ 734-332-3355 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 Design by Katherine Lee