some #brucechile thoughts and stats

Last night Bruce played Santiago, Chile, for the first time ever, and by all accounts (that I’ve read) it was a magical show. See, for example, Maria Alejandra’s and George Smith’s. The highlight of the evening was, of course Bruce singing Victor Jara’s “Manifesto”:

Rolling Stone has a brief overview and translation of what Bruce said in the introduction to the song (update: here’s an English translation of the “Manifesto”). I encourage you to read the Wikipedia entry on Jara. In 2012, Smokestack books published a volume of Jara’s verse, His Hands Were Gentle: Selected Lyrics of Victor Jara. Pete Seeger (Seeger will find his way into many of my posts, I suspect, as my wife and I just named our second son, Seeger, after Pete, so I’m always looking for connections and amazed when they keep appearing) was the first American to record one of Jara’s poems, “Estadio Chile,” which Jara wrote on the morning of his death. Legend has it that the poem was smuggled out of jail in someone’s shoe. Here is Seeger reading the poem:

Bruce singing Jara’s “Manifesto” sums up very neatly one of the many reasons why I’m a fan and admirer: he’s always teaching me something new. But, more on that in another post.

Here are some of the stats (the amazing one at the end):

• Total #brucechile tweets: 360 between 12:55:38 AM GMT on 9/13/13 and 12:36:20 AM GMT 9/14/13
• Number of links: 184
• Number of RTs: 186

Visualization of the tweets:

Here is the amazing statistic:

• 3,920: number of times “Springsteen” and “Jara” were mentioned together in tweets between 9/10/13 and 9/14/2013 (most did not use the #brucechile hashtag)

I’ll have to so some work on these in the future….