At noon today, when the fringe of the typhoon was still dumping significant rain on San Francisco, I came across a block-long line on Polk Street in front of City Hall waiting to enter Bill Graham Civic Auditorium for a concert.
"When do the doors open," I asked one of the line-tenders, and he replied, "6:30 this evening."
I returned at 6:00 PM and the line stretched around the entire Civic Center Plaza and then snaked inside around the plaza and the various treelines. I have never seen such a queue.
The entertainer who is inspiring such fanatic devotion is Troye Sivan, a 21-year-old Australian from a South African family who moved to Perth when he was two. He has starred in a trilogy of highly successful South African films about a prep school boy named Spud, and was the boy in the recent X-Men origin story movie. He also started putting up music videos on YouTube which is where he developed his 240 million listeners. This was the opening concert of his worldwide "Suburbia Tour."
He's also Jewish, openly gay, and the perfectly sensitive, dreamy teenage symbol of the moment. Check out the videos on his website, which are as unexpectedly fresh as the film My Beautiful Launderette. I just hope his devoted fans didn't get pneumonia standing in line for six hours in the rain hoping to score the best General Admission seating.
Darn it, now I just want to go home and watch Laundrette. SO good!
ReplyDeleteDear Rachel: So glad you got the Launderette reference. When I went to Troye's website and saw the videos, I was expecting your basic Justin Bieber teenybopper heartthrob schtick, and when he started kissing the guy instead of the girl, it was one of those "What?????" moments, rather like Daniel Day-Lewis kissing his best Pakistani buddy from high school in that scene in Launderette. And the fact that Troye's still a heartthrob for teenage girls means we've crossed some kind of cool threshhold.
ReplyDeleteYes! I had to watch Launderette in college for a class and had no idea what it was about, then we watched and I was hooked. One of the best films from the 1980s, in my opinion. And who can resist the young Daniel Day-Lewis? No one, that's who. Good stuff. How fun. And if you haven't read any of Hanif Kureishi's work, I can't recommend it enough.
ReplyDeleteI'll have to check out this Troye Sivan fellow.