Saturday, August 16, 2014

Me Ven! Me Siento!




We sat down and watched “Tommy” yesterday.  I’d gotten lured into a game of Clue at lunch with my little one and we were listening again to the soundtrack. We’d listened to it the previous day as regular readers already know and I was all ready to move on to introducing them to, say “Quadraphenia.”  But as my wife has more than once wisely intoned, kids don’t learn that way.  They need to experience something over and over before they can grasp it.  My little one said she wanted to see the movie and I went to Youtube to see if I could find it there. 



We wound up with one that had Spanish subtitles (me ven!, me siento!, me toca!, me cure!)  and sat down to take it on. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBNagysBeXE
Produced a full seven years after the original album it is nothing if not over the top.  I seem to remember it had somehow been a complete mess, but many compromises not withstanding it was, in fact, good fun, if a bit challenging to explain.  But stick a little blond boy in at the outset with mean parents and mean extended family and kids sympathies are locked from the start.   I looked in vain at the old reviews from 1975 to find people panning it mercilessly.  Rather Vincent Canby seems to have had fun and taken it all with a grain of salt: http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9C01E6D8163BE133A25753C2A9659C946490D6CF

A few quick remembrances; Daltrey did better than I expected.  And by the time he can finally have his voice, it is rather welcoming to finally hear him singing, on say “I’m Free” as opposed to all the other people singing the original score which involves many, many compromises.  The special effects though, as Roger runs around liberated were so cheesy that all of us had to laugh when we were supposed to be inspired. Oliver Reed oozes ‘bad news’ and effortlessly secured the ire of my daughters.  (Alas, I’ve just taken a 30 minute segue of looking at clips of him and Keith on line.  Poor Oliver.  There are many, many, unflattering, drunken interviews with the man.) 

Keith in the movie is however, forever entertaining.  I particularly enjoyed his organ playing with his feet as he welcomed the disciples to the camp.  I spared my daughters the Uncle Ernie scene though, of rubber gloves and fiddling about.  Pete and John suffer from having to put up with backing rolls during two musical numbers and don’t really get to shine at all.  They, like Clapton seem buried beneath their beards.  Elton John does a reasonable job of looking frustrated and it is certainly hard to imagine how, with a face like that he ever launched a career to stardom.  Ann Margret does a good job of looking very lovely, very ugly and very plain during the course of Tommys’s arc.  We all seemed captivated by the spewing television scene.  Main compromise was not simply watching it on a computer scene but listening to it on one, as anything involving The Who should have been 振聋发聩[1]. Guilty pleasures, for sure.  But I was very, very, happy to get to talk about The Who with my kids for a while, leave the mountain of work at bay in the middle of a Saturday afternoon.



I’m not sure what The Who would have thought of Micachu and the Shapes.  This is a contemporary version of over the top.  “Experimental” would be one adjective one could use, “confrontational”, “enchanting”, might be others.   Born in Surrey when I was in my Junior year of college in 1987, Mica Levi, whose stage name is Micachu was classically trained, and commissioned to write a piece for the London Philharmonic. I’m listening to the 2012 album “Never” which a friend emphatically recommended.  And this song "OK" is consistently unpredictable, sounding significantly better with a good head set than it does on my tinny laptop speakers.  I found something called “Golden Phone” on Youtube that has “The Shapes” looking rather young and innocent indeed. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TRkZpFgJcI  This other one “Lips” is a bit more edgy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoEA_xYaLBw  I’ll see what the reaction is to contemporary music by 24 year-old ladies as opposed to bearded rockers from forty years prior. 

Quickly now gazing across the Times this morning to be sure the world was still spinning, we see that the U.S. high command is down in Vietnam trying to make nice.  The Pope is over in South Korea trying to be pleasant as well and apparently Buddhists and Animists are all fine with this, North Korea even provided a sixteen gun salute, and it is, like some anachronistic scene from Northern Ireland or the Thirty Years War a distinctly unwelcoming tone from the nation’s Protestant churches who claim the Whore of Rome has arrived.  And across the way, Abe has decided this year not, to visit the Yasakune Shrine.  All of these, in their own way, gestures that concern or are meant to signal things to China, who miraculously seems to have managed to stay out of the news this morning. 


In the other room, the ladies are listening to a French tape, practicing their ordinal numbers.  I think I’ll go join them.






[1] zhènlóngfākuì:  lit. so loud that even the deaf can hear (idiom); rousing even the apathetic

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