I honestly don’t remember the original of this song, but heard the cover on KEXP this am while driving to work – very cool! The band is Tame Impala, but this cover isn’t on any of their current records, apparently, it’s more recent.
here’s the original (from 1996, which is probably why I never heard it the first time, wasn’t paying any attention) – actually pretty good…even if he’s doing his best Diana Ross look in this video:
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I vaguely remember this house being at odds with development in nearby Ballard, but don’t remember the rest, nor that it inspired Up – one of the more somber, yet touching Pixar movies…
The Real-Life Story That Inspired “Up” Is Even More Heart-Wrenching Than The Movie
Viva Tiny Mailmen! 🙂
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Finally got a chance to watch 2010’s Senna this past weekend with my father (the original car nut – I am only a pretender :)) This was a very interesting movie – although if you don’t care about car racing or F1 in particular, you may find it somewhat the opposite – be forewarned.
The movie details the rise of one of the world’s most famous and skilled car racers, Ayrton Senna of Brazil – who ultimately climbed to the top, claiming the F1 world title 3 times before his sad crash and death a few years later in the early 90’s. He was only 34 years old at the time.
Having been a perennial car mag subscriber at that time, what I mostly remember is that the press largely loathed Senna and constantly came to the aid (deserved or not) of his established rival, French driver Alain Prost. So as a result, I largely remembered Senna as a ‘bad guy’ who was hypercompetitive but largely an enigmatic jerk. I’m glad I watched this movie, because although it’s fairly pro-Senna in outlook, it’s a better look at the man himself, his era, the races and his rivalry with Prost.
While Senna, unlike some racers, did not come from poverty or even the middle class – his family was pretty well off before he started his career – he has to have been one of the most ‘driven’ [sic] car racers in history. There is even a scene in the movie where he all but tells off Jackie Stewart to his face about a controversial race, and manages to advocate for driver safety at the same time (which ultimately was his undoing in the crash, but inspired Stewart and others to force F1 to take safety seriously, and there have been no fatalities since).
What the movie also brings out (and the wikipedia article here) is that Senna had his causes too – he wasn’t just a rich playboy driver with the trapping of wealth to keep him amused (although he had some of that, too). He was an intensely personal man with strong religious beliefs, and it later turned out that he had donated literally millions to help poor children in Brazil throughout his career, especiallly when he became so famous and successful – but he did it very low-key, obviously because he cared about the cause and not the notoriety it would gain him.
And as observed by my dad – it’s kind of amazing the amount of footage in this movie – you’d think he had a camera crew on him the entire time he was in F1 nonstop – weird.
The movie doesn’t paint a positive picture of Prost – arguably he’s just as fierce a competitor – but he also reminded me of whiny NBA players complaining all the time when they don’t get their way – there are at least two major examples in the movie, one of which Prost actually managed to get a Senna victory overturned. It didn’t help (Senna) that the chief guy running F1 at the time was French – not at all (smirk). But as noted on wikipedia, even Senna forgave Prost in the end.
His end was pretty sad – but he certainly passed doing what he wanted to do, and ONLY what he wanted to do. It’s patronizing in some ways to say Senna was a complex man – because that’s what such personalities are always described as when we don’t completely understand them. But I’ll bite – he definitely was, and the sport was far poorer for his passing. Great movie!
R.I.P., Ayrton.
other voices:
Rotten Tomatoes
Metacritic
Christian Science Monitor
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Just finished reading Pete Townshend’s memoir Who I Am, which I got from Kerewin on my recent birthday.
Being a huge Who fan for at least a couple decades now and having read (or own) most of the Who bio-type books out there (Maximum R&B by Richard Barnes; Before I Get Old by Dave Marsh; Dear Boy: The Life of Keith Moon by Tony Fletcher; Full Moon by Peter “Dougal” Butler; countless other Mojo and similar articles) I’ve read a lot about them besides enjoying their music, and am familiar with much of their history, successes and demons over time.
But this book is quite different, no doubt intended that way by Townshend – it’s much more personal and revealing, and to me, not always in a good way – but again, as implied or outright stated by Townshend in the book in several places, that’s exactly the way he wanted it.
On the plus side, you get to see a fairly different view of The Who and its principal songwriter. The Keith Moon books (Butler, Fletcher) paint a varied picture of a semi-fulltime lunatic who played drums brilliantly at his peak, but sunk pretty low or perpetually lived in a fantasy land when not, often to the sometimes extreme detriment of those around him. There is no real book directly dealing with John Entwistle or Roger Daltrey that I know of, and as the former is sadly dead, besides possibly a book on his massively powerful and influential bass-playing, I suspect there won’t be – Roger of course can still write his and may be in fact doing so, not sure. Both Dave Marsh and Richard Barnes give a pretty good look at Roger in their books, however.
And so we come to Pete, who ended up being the creative driving force behind the band over time and arguably the real engine behind its success. In this book Pete tries to come to grips with many personal demons in explaining his life story and role in The Who’s peaks and valleys, and confesses to being a potential cause of several of the latter. And it was nice to see – say by comparison to the recent Ginger Baker movie I watched – that he usually takes responsibility for his failures, even if he doesn’t always learn from them (womanizing, drugs, booze). He even calls himself a self-obsessed prat at intervals depending on the story he’s telling.
For me a bit of downside came in all the womanizing – sure, he had a tough childhood – much tougher than I knew of, and fraught with loneliness and alienation from his flaky/lame parents – And surely being married at 25 with two kids amid crazy sudden fame and pressure to keep delivering hits might drive anyone mad. But, I still don’t see why he got married if he was going to carry on with groupies while on the road with the band? Surely any/all rock star womanizing isn’t ‘good’ anyway generally – but at least those who aren’t married aren’t kidding themselves (and those they fool around with), either? Just seems extremely lame to me.
The alcohol and drug abuse – pretty par for the court in the rock world of that time (and since), and most of Pete’s contemporaries went through much of the same, including most of The Who and its surrounding posse. But despite knowing a lot about and being a fan of Pete and The Who, this whole ‘user/abuser’ scenario is simply so outside my experience, I really can’t relate to it. I’m just glad he survived it, even if a lot of it was his own doing.
I guess I would have liked knowing more about his inner thinking when writing songs – I felt I got glimpses of it here and there but the book is more a story about experiences and consequence (to me, anyway) than about methods. And perhaps that stuff is too hard to put on paper, or simply too hard/too private to put in even a memoir. I would have also liked to know more about his usage and experimentation with sounds, synthesizers and the like – he mentions them all the time in passing, but doesn’t provide much detail.
I think the final conclusion for me is/was that Pete is very human, with all the positives and negatives that can come from same – I’m thankful for the great music he’s created with The Who, and still remain a huge fan – even at his worst – he still kicks a**!
Other thoughts on the book:
Wikipedia
American Songwriter
LA Times
Rolling Stone
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to Gojira’s return! But in the meantime (april 4), it looks like Gina Carano may have to do – what she does so well – kick a**!
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Go Chelsea Handler! PM is such a douche-canoe….click through for the clip….
Chelsea Handler slams Piers Morgan during interview: ‘You have to pay attention to the guest’
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