It was already going to be a year of transformation for the beloved Bang on a Can Marathon. A New York new-music institution since 1987, the annual event was set to expand into a new three-day festival, Long Play, spread over several Brooklyn performance spaces.Then came the coronavirus pandemic. With Long Play canceled, the Bang on a Can collective’s founders and leaders — the composers David Lang, Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe — opted to try another first, if in a more familiar format: a six-hour livestreamed marathon, starting at 3 p.m. Eastern on Sunday, at marathon2020.bangonacan.org.Jazz figures like Vijay Iyer and Mary Halvorson will share a digital space with experimental-music veterans like Meredith Monk and George Lewis. Younger composers have had new pieces commissioned. The production values will be unpolished, but the marathon — which has varied in venue and length over the years — has never been too fancy. The emphasis on Sunday aims to be, as it always has been, on free-spirited variety, representation across musical generations and the intermingling of genres and artistic scenes.In a joint phone interview, the three Bang on a Can founders — Mr. Gordon and Ms. Wolfe, who are married, spoke from just outside New York at a friend’s house, and Mr. Lang from Houston — talked about the rejiggered marathon, some highlights they’re anticipating and their plans to organize more performance epics during the lockdown. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How long did it take to reset the plans for this year?DAVID LANG It took us a while to reorient ourselves. We had this gigantic idea of how to expand the marathon into Long Play. I’m sure we’ll do that again, should the world ever get back to normal. But we have these people who depend on us, who have no money. We have young people who are looking for opportunities. There are so many people who are in need of a venue.JULIA WOLFE It really came after a lot of discussion and soul-searching about what is important. Everyone’s getting compensated. We talked about a lot of different approaches — and came back to what we do. We started with a marathon in 1987. Over the years we’ve had so many amazing soloists; the Bang on a Can All-Stars [the collective’s resident ensemble] is made up of people who appeared as soloists. So we’re very oriented toward spectacular individual players. More

Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.At a New York Times printing plant in College Point, Queens, the soundtrack is usually the rapid thwap, thwap, thwap of blank paper turning into the next edition. But one night in February, thanks to a famous Beatle and the singer Dominic Fike, things got a little more musical.“Have you,” Mr. Fike sings in a music video shot at the plant, “read the paper?” The song is a cover of Paul McCartney’s “The Kiss of Venus,” and Mr. Fike is shown at the plant taking in the 14 miles of conveyor belts ferrying copies of The Times all around him.With the presses rolling and assembled copies sailing overhead, he glances at the dizzying activity and sings, in verses he added to the track, about people’s differences on issues and the media. “What’s your take on it?” he asks.The 78-year-old former Beatle himself makes a cameo at the end of the video, seated on a bench outside London. He whistles the tune as the camera zooms in on the copy of The New York Times International issue he is perusing. Mr. McCartney slowly lowers the paper to reveal wide eyes and a shock of gray hair. Then he raises his eyebrows and grins.“Paul whistled that perfectly the first time,” Jack Begert, who directed the video, said. “He’s elite.”Mr. Begert added that the image of Mr. McCartney enthusiastically poring over a copy of the paper underscores that he, ultimately, is the source of the music. “Even though Dom reimagined that song, at the end of the day, it’s a Paul McCartney song,” Mr. Begert said.Last year, Mr. McCartney wrote and recorded “The Kiss of Venus,” a smooth acoustic ballad, for his recent solo album “McCartney III.” Mr. Fike’s reimagined version — an R&B pop earworm — is part of the album “McCartney III Imagined,” out Friday, which features A-listers covering “McCartney III” tracks.So how did The New York Times score a starring role in Mr. Fike’s video?Mr. Begert said that he considered “The Kiss of Venus” a reflection of the stop-and-go energy of modern life — and that when the time came to conceptualize a video, his first thought was New York. “It’s still and beautiful, but also crazy,” he said.The video’s creative director, Reed Bennett, suggested the Times printing plant. “I was like, ‘That’s perfect,’” Mr. Begert said. “I wanted to link back to the theme of one person feeling small but also like they have a really important place in the universe.”The cavernous, 550,000-square-foot plant — about the size of 11 and a half football fields — prints copies of The Times each night, along with copies of Newsday and USA Today.At College Point in Queens, the presses are several stories tall. Clayborne BujorianThe presses are generally quiet during the day, but at night, the seven cerulean blue behemoths — each several stories tall — roar to life. “It gets your adrenaline pumping,” Nick D’Andrea, the vice president of production at the College Point plant, said. “You get that excitement as they start up to get the paper out.”The late edition of the paper goes to press at about 10:15 p.m., so a video crew of eight showed up a little before then on a Friday night in February to scout potential shots, Mr. Begert said. After that, the pressure was on: They had a few hours — max — until the presses shut down for the night.“We just knew we had to move as quickly as possible to get all the different shots we wanted,” Sam Canter, the executive producer of the video, said.Once they began shooting, Mr. Fike marveled at the organized chaos happening around him.“I don’t know what I expected, but it was surreal,” he said in an interview. “It felt like the North Pole, like Santa’s elf factory on the evening of Christmas.”Although Dominic Fike isn’t a frequent consumer of the news, he was struck by the machinery required to print it. Clayborne BujorianThis isn’t the plant’s first on-screen appearance. It got around two minutes of time in a scene in “The Bourne Legacy” — which took three days to shoot — and has been featured in episodes of “30 Rock,” “Elementary” and a couple of commercials.Mr. D’Andrea, who has worked at Times production facilities for 46 years, said visitors were often taken aback by the plant’s team of laser-driven robots, which glide around replacing rolls of paper on the presses.“People are always like, ‘I didn’t know you could do that,’” he said.But Mr. Fike had the opposite reaction. “I was surprised by all the original machinery and how old it was,” he said. “Everything that ever happened was printed there, recorded and written down.” Maybe not quite everything, but still plenty of history. Mr. Fike said he was particularly taken with a page (printed at a different plant) showing the 1969 moon landing.Although Mr. Fike is not an avid news consumer, the experience of seeing the presses and sensing some of the history there might have had an influence on him. “I’m not a news guy. But I love the NYT and I’m going to start reading the news,” the 25-year-old singer said. “That’s what people do when they get older.”Well, perhaps, but reading the news can help keep you young, too. Just ask a 78-year-old whistler. More

The film’s thesis is blunt: Put a woman in power, and she’ll be as sexually inappropriate and badly behaved as any man.Early in the new film “Tár,” an eminent conductor, played by Cate Blanchett, has strewn classical LPs over her floor. They’re designed in the old-school style of the Deutsche Grammophon label, which had the grandest maestros of the 20th century — the likes of Leonard Bernstein, Herbert von Karajan and Claudio Abbado — brooding from the covers of recordings of symphonies by Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner.Lydia Tár is sorting through them with her foot — as if in disgust, like she can’t bear to touch them. As if she’s toppled the whole patriarchal tradition and can now stand above it, a David who’s killed all the Goliaths.But we soon discover that she wasn’t mulling over the records in that spirit; she was merely looking for inspiration. For her new Mahler album, she’s decided that she wants to be photographed sitting alone — oversize score open, face solemn, lighting dramatic — in the seats of the Berlin Philharmonic’s home hall. Just like Abbado and the rest.Tár represents a radically different face of classical music. Barely any women — in the film or in real life — have done what she has: made it to the top tier of the world’s orchestral podiums. Let alone that of the Berlin Philharmonic, perhaps the most celebrated of them all, which Blanchett’s character rules with cool authority.“We don’t see women at the top of this food chain ever,” said Marin Alsop, who during her tenure at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra was the first and only female leader of one of the 25 largest American ensembles.But, as we gradually learn, Tár represents anything but a radical break with the past.In the music world, that past is embodied in the worship of maestros, whose hard-to-define, near-spiritual, silent yet crucial role as conduits of the great composers has long granted them fearsome dominance. Theirs is a position so flush with power that it has been all too easy for them to abuse it.Blanchett plays a powerful conductor in “Tár,” which posits that classical music is addicted to the myth of the all-knowing, all-hearing leader.Focus FeaturesIt’s become an assumption for many inside and outside the field that, as women and people of color slowly but steadily diversify the ranks of top conductors, the problems associated with maestro worship — that outsize power, eye-popping (even deficit-encouraging) salaries, sexual misconduct, anger issues, reactionary repertory choices, dependence on name-brand conductors to sell tickets — will ease.Not so fast, says “Tár,” written and directed by Todd Field.The film posits a more unsettling, intractable possibility: that classical music remains so robustly addicted to the myth of the all-knowing, all-hearing leader that it will continue to grant those leaders a degree of power that will inevitably corrupt women and men alike.For Lydia Tár is no better — certainly no better behaved — than any of the rageaholic, underling-seducing men we are often assured are going extinct.‘Tár’: A Timely Backstage DramaCate Blanchett plays a world-famous conductor who is embroiled in a #MeToo drama in the latest film by the director Todd Field.Review: “We don’t care about Lydia Tár because she’s an artist; we care about her because she’s art,” our critic writes about the film’s protagonist.An Elusive Subject: Blanchett has stayed one step ahead of audiences by constantly staying in motion. In “Tár,” she is as inscrutable as ever.Back Into the Limelight: The film marks Field’s return to directing, 16 years after “In the Bedroom” and “Little Children” made waves.Big-Screen Aesthetics: “Tár” was among several movies at the New York Film Festival that offered reflections on the rarefied worlds of classical music and visual art.That some of those men have, in recent years, undergone steep falls from grace for their misconduct doesn’t seem to give Tár pause. She is a sexual predator, imperious, controlling. She grants plum gigs to her crushes and turns up her nose at fresh sounds as she elevates the standards: The movie centers on her rehearsing the Berlin orchestra in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, which she decides to pair with Elgar’s equally classic Cello Concerto (featuring, of course, a talented young woman who has caught her eye as soloist).“Tár” says that the fundamental structure of the field — the persistent over-glorification of the podium, casting even benign conductors in a paternal role — is the problem. And it’s a problem that won’t necessarily be solved by changing the identity of the person holding the baton. The film’s thesis could be bluntly stated: Women, too, can be inappropriately horny and generally evil.The woman Field creates has achieved more power than any female conductor in history. She wields it malignantly, and she is humiliated for doing so, even more catastrophically than any of her real-life male counterparts.If that fantasy is persuasive, it’s because, for all its noirish, even horror-movie trappings, “Tár” is a largely realistic depiction of its subject matter. (Far more so than “Black Swan” in relation to ballet, or “Whiplash” to jazz.) Blanchett gestures on the podium like a real conductor; a few references to the symphony she is preparing as “the Five” — rather than “the Fifth” or “Mahler Five” — are almost the only slips of tone.Marin Alsop, here conducting the Baltimore Symphony in 2015, was the only female conductor of a top American orchestra, when she stepped down last year. (Now, a year later, there is again one.)Gabriella Demczuk for The New York TimesThe protagonist is clearly based partly on Alsop, who stepped down from the Baltimore podium last year — leaving the number of women in top American positions at zero until Nathalie Stutzmann became music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra this month.Alsop, like Tár, is a lesbian with a partner and a child. And like Tár, she founded a fellowship program for young women seeking to follow in her footsteps. Unlike Tár, Alsop has never been accused of misconduct, with the fellows or otherwise.When we spoke by phone recently, Alsop said that the premise that women would fall into the traps laid by traditional power structures was “premature.”“There haven’t been any women in those positions,” she added. “There haven’t been any people of color in those positions. To assume that they will also be taken under the spell of this maestro mythology, it really is presumptuous.”Presumptuous or not, the film is a reminder that the change we should hope and work for is as much about modesty as it is about identity: a vision of conducting as a vehicle for building community, for giving back, rather than solely for wielding authority in the service of a tiny group of pieces from the ever more distant past. (It is not only men who perpetuate this limited view of the repertory: Stutzmann, for one, told The New York Times recently that she would proudly be focusing on music from before the 20th century.)Cultural changes may well force modesty on the field, like it or not. In the wake of pandemic lockdowns, and as classical music continues to drift further from the mainstream, ticket sales that were once energized by the names and faces of beloved maestros have dried up. Audiences haven’t heard of almost any conductors. Deutsche Grammophon and the other record labels that hawked those brooding visions of paternal authority are shadows of what they were just a few decades ago.Conductors will always be responsible for wrangling a single vision from a stage of 100 musicians; for making decisions; for leading. But that leadership can be more demystified, more collaborative, more modest. It’s a change that must involve more diversity on the podium — but, as “Tár” cautions us, not just that.“I hope the premise that women or people of color will be just as autocratic can be disproved,” Alsop said. “I hope we’re given the opportunity to disprove it.” More

Michel van der Aa’s new opera weaves technology into a traditional form with masterly restraint for a sci-fi spin on a fundamentally human tale.AMSTERDAM — “I’m here, that’s for sure!” the digital facsimile of a father tells his daughter early in Michel van der Aa’s new opera, “Upload.”What exactly it means to be “here” — particularly when someone exists only as consciousness stored on blockchain data spread across thousands of servers — is up for debate, and guides the drama in “Upload,” a masterly weaving of music, film and motion-capture technology that opened at the Dutch National Opera here on Friday, ahead of a run at the Park Avenue Armory in New York next spring.But that sci-fi premise is little more than a veneer. Not for nothing did Mary Shelley give “Frankenstein” the subtitle “The Modern Prometheus”; the finest genre fiction has always examined humanity through allegory. So, too, does van der Aa’s spare yet richly complicated work, which is preoccupied less with futuristic speculation than timeless matters of the heart and mind, whether corporeal or in the cloud.Which is not to say that van der Aa is uninterested in the bleeding edge. Rather, for decades, and with mixed success, he has been at the fore of marrying traditional forms with new media — inventing software and putting his film degree to regular use — through, for example, 3-D technology in the opera “Sunken Garden” and virtual reality in the poetic installation “Eight.”The challenge, always, is in making sure the shiny new thing doesn’t overtake the music, but instead is gracefully incorporated into a balanced whole. Van der Aa achieved something like that in “Eight,” complementing the immersion of VR with a score of poplike directness. And “Upload” is the work of an artist in absolute command of his toolkit, employing a restraint that makes for smooth shifts between acoustic and electric, live performance and film, without any one thing drawing attention to itself throughout the opera’s brisk 80 minutes.Most important, van der Aa — who not only composed “Upload,” but also wrote the libretto, staged it and directed a film version streaming on medici.tv — tightly binds technology and dramaturgy. No deployment of theatrical magic is extraneous. Its transparent presence even enhances the drama, such as when the Father, at one end of the stage, sings into motion-capture cameras while the Daughter interacts with his digital avatar mere feet away in a paradox of proximity and unbridgeable distance.That father, the libretto slowly reveals, recently lost his wife. In a state of unbearable grief, made worse by thoughts of his own mortality and what it would mean for their adult daughter, he secretly undergoes a procedure to upload his consciousness — and in the process end his physical existence. It’s technology so new that, despite its thorny implications, has yet to be regulated. He then returns to his daughter, granted virtual immortality but unable to, say, give her a hug on the way in.We’ve seen this before, in fact and fiction — real-life chatbots imitating departed love ones or, on “Black Mirror,” given android form. “Years and Years,” Russell T Davies’s mini-series of our near future, ends with a terminally ill woman becoming the first person to live on as an uploaded consciousness that can speak through Alexa-like devices. If the technology isn’t inevitable, at least the aspiration to it is. As a scientist says in “Upload”: “Every piece of information in the world has been copied and backed up. Except the human mind. It’s the last analog device in the digital world. Until now.”Van der Aa’s take on this subject is not a cautionary tale — despite his gentle satirizing of the hubris of Silicon Valley culture in his treatment of the upload company’s chief executive (Ashley Zukerman of “Succession”) — but a focused study of an emerging technology and the questions it raises about what constitutes life, through one family’s story.As if to keep the piece rooted in its humanity, van der Aa begins with only a voice in the dark: the Daughter, sung by the soprano Julia Bullock with subtle longing as she lists bodily word associations like “expand — lungs,” “support — bones” and “pull — muscle.” The electronics track slyly enters, atmospheric, and she is joined by the Father (the baritone Roderick Williams, whose warm tone and charisma create a wellspring of sympathy for his character).The Father ends that poetic list with “weight — less,” which cues skittering sounds of the lively and nimble players of Ensemble Musikfabrik, under the assured baton of Otto Tausk. Van der Aa’s score here provides a tense transition, one of many to come, including a glitchy hybrid of acoustic and electronic music that introduces the first filmed sequence, establishing a parallel track to the Father and Daughter’s interactions.These scenes, spoken and performed by actors (among them Katja Herbers of “Westworld” and “Evil”), take place starting three months earlier, at the bucolic facility where uploads take place. They at first seem to tell more than show, explaining the procedure by way of a tour for prospective clients. But in also tracing the Father’s experience there, a complex portrait of him emerges as he undergoes the creation of a so-called Mindfile based on interviews with friends and family — pointedly, not the Daughter. He also develops a Memory Anchor, a crucial tool that keeps a digital brain from, as it’s described, “drifting off into open space like an astronaut”; his is of a place he used to visit with his parents as a child, where birds chirped as he tried to catch lizards along a stone wall that was hot to the touch in the summer sun.Williams in the opera, whose staging employs transparent, moving screens to smoothly incorporate live action, film and motion capture technology.Marco Borggreve/Dutch National OperaOccasionally, the spoken films overlap with live performance. Williams, in one moment, is shown singing words like “sheep” and “ship” into a machine to teach it the contours of his speech. But otherwise the singing is limited to the Father and Daughter’s scenes together; van der Aa’s musical writing for their exchanges follows the natural rhythms of the English language. But in their monologues, melodies take flight: long, lyrical lines — lushly delivered by Bullock with rending emotion — that are amplified, complicated and contradicted by orchestral undercurrents.When briefly in a “paused state,” the Father realizes that something failed in the upload; it should have suppressed the trauma of his wife’s death but didn’t, dooming him to grieve her for eternity. He wants to be terminated, an irreversible action that can only be carried out by his daughter.If that dilemma doesn’t feel entirely compelling or earned, it’s because the Daughter is never properly developed. She is introduced as curious about her father’s new form, but it’s difficult to imagine anyone feeling more than shock or anger in her place. Instead, she is shown only in various states of mourning. (And this might be too New York-centric a fixation, but how on earth can this young woman afford to live in an airy TriBeCa penthouse with a garden terrace?)Maybe it’s for the best, then, that we never see her decision. The parallel stories arrive at parallel endings: the past, the night before the Father’s upload, and the present, the night before his likely termination. In a stunning coup de théâtre, a white curtain springs out, suspended over the audience. On it are the Father and Daughter projected in split screen. Although at opposite ends of the stage, even different planes of existence, they are presented as if lying head-to-head.As they drift into sleep, we are left with the Father’s Memory Anchor, a dream rendered digitally — the green of the earth too green, the blue of the sky too blue. Everything we’ve heard about is there: the stone, hot to the touch, a lizard at rest. But the image occasionally flickers, defaulting to the 3-D line drawings of drafting software, until the resolution degrades into soft fields of color. Only the sounds of breeze and birdsong remain.It’s a mysterious final scene, but not one that requires any answers. Regardless of what happens next, someone will be forced to live with the pain of loss. And no technology, it seems, can spare us that fundamentally human experience.UploadThrough Oct. 8 at the Dutch National Opera, Amsterdam; operaballet.nl. More

A fan finds herself in a backstage hug, decades after she kissed her poster of the onetime teen idol.I was approaching the George Washington Bridge when my friend Lynn fired a text into the Shaun Squad group chat: “GET READY, PARTY PEOPLE!”My heart sank as the message piped through the car speakers in a robotic female voice.I dictated back: “OMG, Lynn, you better not be about to text something that’s going make me regret that I didn’t get my brows waxed for tonight.”“I am,” she replied.A flood of adrenaline sent my pulse racing.An hour later, I would be face to face with my original schoolgirl crush, Shaun Cassidy. Unruly eyebrows and all.In the late ’70s, thanks to the one-two punch of his starring role in ABC’s teen detective series “The Hardy Boys” and a run of hit singles, he was regularly on the cover of Tiger Beat and other teen magazines. His look — feathered hair, satin baseball jackets and skintight pants — launched a tsunami of adolescent hormones.Long before “nepo baby” was a thing, he rose to fame as the firstborn son of the musical star turned “Partridge Family” matriarch Shirley Jones and the Broadway legend Jack Cassidy. His half brother, David Cassidy, had preceded him in teen dream stature.Shaun’s most popular single was his cover of the Crystals’ “Da Do Ron Ron,” but my favorite was “That’s Rock ’n’ Roll,” a solid bop written by Eric Carmen. Centered on a narrator who’s 16 and sick of school, the lyrics preach the gospel of rock rebellion, and even in my grade school years, the song stuck.Each of his albums came with a poster — the record label knew its market — and my friend Kristin and I pretended to kiss him until we dissolved into giggles.As I marched into teendom, I moved from roller skates to combat boots, and my crushes took a more androgynous turn. MTV introduced a slew of British sad boys with teased hair and makeup, the most famous on American shores being Depeche Mode and the Cure. Their subtly subversive masculinity so besotted me that my real-life male contemporaries were a letdown. A memoir of my romantic coming-of-age could be titled “I Was Told There Would Be Eyeliner.”Then I saw Catherine Deneuve as the nightclubbing vampiress Miriam Blaylock in “The Hunger.” Kissing Shaun’s poster gave way to kissing a shy Goth girl under the poster for the film on her bedroom wall. But you never forget your first, and Shaun, with his faunlike visage, was the perfect gateway crush.I fell for him the second time because of the rats.Two years ago, one of his tweets appeared in my timeline. It showed a screen grab of a text from his wife asking him to talk with her about their “rat problem.” Shaun gave it a caption: “She is such a romantic.”Former teen idol turned Wife Guy? Sure, I’d follow that. Four of my friends also started following him on Twitter, and the Shaun Squad was born.So when the New York engagement of his “Magic of a Midnight Sky” solo show was announced, one Squad member, Joy, bought tickets the minute they went on sale, and Lynn contacted his tour manager, vowing to arrange a meet-and-greet.Not likely, I thought. But the girl in me held fast to the fantasy.As the club filled on the night of the show, our hopes for a meeting began to fade. Monica had a fresh keratin treatment, her hair a glossy curtain. Marjorie had found some old iron-on transfer paper and whipped up her own Shaun tank top. She even made us Swiftie-style “Shaun Squad” friendship bracelets. We were sighing dejectedly into our $18 cocktails when the tour manager appeared.“OK, let’s go,” she said. “But we’ve got to be quick.”We moved past the audience of women clutching vintage Shaun memorabilia. I noticed that one of them had brought her “Hardy Boys” lunch box.Up an elevator and down a narrow hall to the dressing room. And there he was — tall, his hair a mix of blond and gray, the shiny disco-era outfit traded for a black button-down and jeans.Shaun Freakin’ Cassidy, OK?I’m enough of an extrovert that I will go into a convenience store to buy chips and, five minutes later, end up saying, “What’s your Instagram?” to the clerk. But not now.Not now at all.I let my fellow Shaun Squad members go first, watching them angle in for photos and autographs while he chatted with them, the basso profundo of his speaking voice a pleasing rumble.Then there was nothing to do but move forward. I was like: “Why is he opening his arms? What is happening? Are we hugging? We are hugging!”It wasn’t a crazy hug — a quick companionable embrace, followed by that 1-2-3 closure pat — but it produced enough dopamine to make me unable to feel my face for the rest of the night.The show, even without a fan’s forgiving grading curve, was excellent, a mix of song and story. Given the heedlessness of 1970s celebrity culture, it’s a wonder that Shaun was able to survive the reverse panopticon of teen stardom.Tactful but candid, he talked about female fans tearing out chunks of his hair and his dad joking about putting his childhood bedroom up for rent when it seemed his son’s fame might eclipse his own. He also included a touching tribute to David, who died of liver failure at age 67 in 2017.Shaun made it clear that he wasn’t coasting on the fumes of his former glory, having segued from teen idol to television writer and producer. Yet he seemed comfortable enough with his cultural footprint that, in his side hustle as a vintner, his wine is branded My First Crush.Writing about a fangirl crush can make you feel like a goober, because it elicits contempt that is explicitly gendered. Female fandom — especially Top 40 fandom — carries a processed-cheese sheen. But a guy going on for an hour about a Bruce Springsteen chord progression or a Wilco set list? That’s depth, man. (And queer fandom? Big heteroblivious shrug.)But fandom cuts across all demographics, and everyone’s deserves respect. One of my favorite viral videos of recent years shows a subway car full of New Yorkers singing the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” in unselfconscious joy. We should not be pressured to be so mature in our tastes that we miss all the fun.In the Fugazi song “Bad Mouth,” the punk stalwart Ian MacKaye sang: “You can’t be what you were. So you better start being just what you are.” As a younger woman, I adopted those lines as a cri de coeur, taken by the hard stance against nostalgia and sentimentality. But I have since reconsidered.I drove home from the show listening to “That’s Rock ’n’ Roll” on repeat, knowing that a number of my friends were seeing the Cure that same night, my Gen X gloomster cohort having their own flashback moment. And I salute them.Nostalgia can be a blinkering agent, but it can also be a benevolent time lord, allowing who you were and who you are to join hands. Through the alchemical magic of fandom, you can occupy both phases of your life at once — sensible adult and keening fangirl. Steady sun and hormonal supernova, all of it just a song’s play away.That’s the crush spirit. That’s nostalgia. That’s rock ’n’ roll.Lily Burana is the author of “Grace for Amateurs: Field Notes on a Journey Back to Faith” and three other books. More