Tommy

If anyone mentions the Ken Russel movie, Tommy, I ask them about that Ann-Margret scene with the baked beans and usually, no one knows what I’m talking about. I think this is because the folks that sit down to watch Tommy usually smoke something first (maybe today it’s edibles) and they fall asleep before they ever get to the scene.

She rolls around in a soup of beans and suds, these being blasted at her and pouring all over her. Ann-Margret was gorgeous in that movie, and it was the era of the pointy, push-up undergarment that my friend used to call a “tits forward” bra. The scene is simultaneously sexy and disgusting, certainly on purpose, the beans likely being a fill in for diarrhea, for whatever reason.

I suppose this is to say that people don’t always see things, even when they intend to. They sit down and watch a movie, and the strangest scene in it doesn’t even register. If I say that Elton John sang “Pinball Wizard”, they have no idea what I’m talking about (“No, dear, that’s a song by The Who“). Sure it is. And there are songs by artists that are sung by other artists all the time. Frank Sinatra didn’t write “My Way” and the first version wasn’t even in English.

I think this comes down to two things 1) People are stoned out of their gourds while watching Tommy, just in general and 2) even if they weren’t, people don’t really see things a lot of the time, even if they have the intention to. I mean, you sit down to watch a movie and don’t even pay attention to it, not really. Same with eating dinner with friends, or going to a concert, or taking a walk. We’re so very seldom present and we don’t apply ourselves to remembering much about what we’ve seen and heard.

This is all to say that I’ve been reading my usual quantity of media, but I can’t register most of it at the moment. It’s too horrible in many places, too depressing. I’m not even stoned. Maybe I should be?

Anywho, that’s why I take photos of banal things sometimes. Just to remember. For example: