the thrilla in Manila with Diana and Camilla

 

Diana:  The Musical -- while critics in every media are virtually competing with each other to see who can have the most negative headlines on their reviews and who can spit the most poisonous-yet-witty invective about this musical play, I --

loved it.

Songs --

"The Worst Job In England"

"Whatever Love Means Anyway"

"Snap, Click"

"Underestimated"

"I Miss You Most On Sundays"

"The Words Came Pouring Out"

It's fun, and good, and even though it's a kind of modern tragedy, it still makes you laugh.  (...Which Diana Princess of Wales would have wanted, I think.  She loved to laugh, and she loved the people.)

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a day of training (yikes)

 

With all of these Internet opportunities to see various stories (movies, TV shows, series, documentaries...) I find myself processing simultaneously a multiplicity of art works:

The Crown

The French Lieutenant's Woman

Diana:  The Musical

Training Day

Designing Women

Then sometimes I like to go onto You Tube and type in the title and read comments under videos to find out what other people think of it.

More importantly, perhaps, than what they think of it is what they see in it:  I watched Training Day (2001 film with Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke) and when I went to You Tube and read comments, people were highlighting and exclaiming over moments in the film that I didn't even notice.

Different frames of reference.

There's a moment when they get into Denzel Washington's (Alonso's) car, the trainee asks where's the office and Alonso answers, "This is the office!" and he presses a button and the car "lifts" up above the tires so it's riding high, & music starts as he drives away.

The first time I watched it through, I didn't even notice that the car went up and I heard the music but I didn't know it.

        The kids in the comments are all enthused:  when the car goes up and Dr. Dre starts playing...!!!!!

(Me:  Oh-oooohhhh.  Got to watch that little scene again so I can see what the younger generation related to so strongly that I had only taken as basic movie atmosphere the first time around....)

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The French Lieutenant's Woman

 

The French Lieutenant's Woman is on Amazon Prime -- last Friday it said on there that it's only on for six more days, so must play it tonight and tomorrow before work -- I don't know if they started counting the six days on Friday or on Saturday, and don't know whether on the sixth day, that's the last day it will be on, or, on the sixth day that's when it disappears, one second after midnight.

(Those people are so non-specific in their communications....)

That movie is a mood.

A "vibe," as the Kardashians might say.

I saw it in the movie theater when it came out, soon after reading the novel.  I read about it beforehand (in TIME magazine, I think) and waited and watched for it's arrival.

That was near the start of Meryl Streep's career.  (It seems funny to think about that now, as she's an icon....)  At that time I had seen her in two movies before -- 

Kramer vs. Kramer

and

Woody Allen's Manhattan.

In the book, which was published in 1969, the author John Fowles "breaks the fourth wall" at the beginning of chapters, speaking to the reader, telling him what life was like for people living in Victorian England, in the 1800s, when the story takes place.  He describes it with the voice and point-of-view of the twentieth-century author that he is.  It's a lot of social history and social commentary -- when you get done reading it, you feel like an expert.

The question in 1981 was:  how would you do the author-speaking-to-audience parts in a movie?  You can't just put type-script up there on the screen -- well, you could, but they weren't going to.

So what they did for the film was make it a film within a film:

Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons play actors who are shooting a movie of the story about the fictional characters in the novel:  Sarah Woodruff and Charles Smithson.

I thought it was perfect.  Intensely involving for the viewer, memorable, and haunting -- the music gives the atmosphere, the visuals so beautiful, spooky, and  affecting, and the dialogue and style in which it is spoken -- spectacular.

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spoiled for choice

 

Last week I was writing here that when rock-and-roll burst forth in the 1960s, it was like a door had been opened -- today I read a comment on a Beatles article in The Guardian:

"I was 13 when they changed the world from black and white to technicolour."

Two more Comments:

-------------- I remember walking to school, aged 9, and my friend Steve claimed he knew an even better band than the Beatles called The Hollies.  Probably 1964 if my memory serves me correct...

--------------- Back in 63-64 favourites were so transitory and one great song replaced another in the charts and radio playlists.  Possibly the Hollies' "Stay" had just come out and "Please Please Me" had finally dropped from number 1.  We were spoiled for choice.

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help you on the way down the road

 

...And if they had the words I could tell to you

To help you on the way down the road

I couldn't quote you no Dickens, Shelley or Keats

'Cause it's all been said before

Make the best out of the bad, just laugh it off, ha

You didn't have to come here anyway

So remember, every picture tells a story, don't it

Every picture tells a story, don't it

Every picture tells a story, don't it, whoo!...

♪♪♪    ♪♪

These British guys --

Rod Stewart

the Rolling Stones

the Beatles

the Who

Eric Clapton

and many more.  What happened?  In the early 1960s these people just started exploding out onto the world with their revolutionary, positive sounds, and listeners were lifted and transformed, and life on earth was different from how it had been before.  It was as if a door had been opened.

When Rod Stewart references Dickens, Shelley, and Keats in "Every Picture" -- it's so typical of these English people -- they savor, treasure, and refer back to their history, literature, and traditions.

The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, named in the song "Every Picture," wrote these lines:

The sun is warm, the sky is clear,

       The waves are dancing fast and bright,

     Blue isles and snowy mountains wear

     The purple noon's transparent might,

       The breath of the moist earth is light,

     Around its unexpanded buds;

       Like many a voice of one delight,

     The winds, the birds, the oceans floods,

The City's voice itself, is soft like Solitude's.

--------------------------------------

Today's Rod Stewart song is not in the tradition of the last three, where they had movements, and different styles in various parts of the song -- this one is straight-ahead blues-based rock and roll.  Verses -- chorus -- instrumental break.

Go on You Tube, find the song

Hot Legs,

hold onto your hat,

and PLAY - !

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every picture tells a story don't it - WHOO!

 

Recently the subject of "story" keeps returning to my mind.

Stories.

I noticed and considered the fact that some stories (or maybe most or all stories) are told over and over again, sometimes under the same title, sometimes re-named.

The 1995 film Clueless is based on the Jane Austen novel Emma (originally published in 1815).

---------------------------------

Each of these is the same story (with some variations) --

The Front Page - 1928, a Broadway comedy, playwrights:  Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur

1931 - The Front Page, a pre-Code comedy drama film, starring Adolphe Menjou and Pat O'Brien

1940 - His Girl Friday (Rosalind Russell; Cary Grant)

1974 - The Front Page, starring The Odd Couple's Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, and directed by the venerable European immigrant Billy Wilder

1987 - Switching Channels

-----------------------------------------

And speaking of The Odd Couple --

first a Broadway play  (1965)

then a feature film, 1968

and then the 1970s television situation comedy series of the same name, starring Tony Randall and Jack Klugman.

___________________________________

In theater, Broadway to local community, there are always what they call "revivals" (not of the religious nature) but rather --

a revival of The Sound of Music

a revival of Cabaret

a revival of My Fair Lady

etc.

______________________________

My Fair Lady:

1913 - a stage play titled Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw

1956 - a stage musical, composers Lerner and Loewe, starring Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews

1964 - musical comedy-drama film starring Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn.

_____________________________

Each of these was built from the one before...

1939 - Goodbye to Berlin, semi-autobiographical novel by Christopher Isherwood

1951 - I Am A Camera, play by John Van Druten

1966 - Cabaret, a musical stage play, Kander and Ebb

1972 - Cabaret, movie - Liza Minnelli.

___________________________________

_________________________________

"I Am A Camera" -- we have got to love that title.

Today it would be "I Am A Smart Phone."

--------------------------- Rod Stewart's song, "Every Picture Tells a Story" is the third in a trilogy of Stewart songs we're featuring here, where the song has different tempos and styles in its various sections.  

Movements, like Beethoven.

Played back-to-back,

Maggie May,

Mandolin Wind, and

Every Picture Tells A Story

effectively represent a Rod Stewart musical style.

This style emerged in the 1970s, and can be listened to anytime.

You-Tube up

"Every Picture Tells a Story" (the song)

and play.

♪♪  ♪♪♪

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coldest winter - in almost fourteen years...

 

Another Rod Stewart song from the same era as "Maggie May" is "Mandolin Wind," and it too has a flexible, wandering structure, with different movements -- part of the song is one way, and parts of it are other ways, and each part leads naturally into the next.

The melodies are "answered" so satisfyingly in each section, I think the first time a person hears this song, they feel like they have somehow heard it before.

Like when the mind can occasionally turn a present-time observation into a memory immediately, resulting in what we call deja vu.

Rod Stewart is the deja vu songwriter, right?

When you go on You Tube to play "Mandolin Wind," a video I can recommend as having good sound was uploaded by "Radio King."

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