Pete Townsend Writes New (Rock) Opera

Espied this article on my Yahoo portal. (Portal - an opening home page that serves as an aggregate reader for news and information. The 1990s equivalent of RSS feeds.) Yes, I know. You're hardly likely in your lifetime to see the Met do Tommy. But, you have to give credit to a guy that probably has taken every illicit drug there is at any one time and still has enough brain matter to live to old age and compose another rock opera.

I have to admit, I have only seen bits and pieces of Tommy. And it seemed like, as a child of the 70s, Elton John was blasting out a version of "Pinball Wizard" every five minutes. I vaguely remember the "buzz" (as in, a gnat at your ear: something you, and the rest of the world, hardly notice) when Quadrophenia came out, but, again, that was more about who was playing the main character: A guy named Sting, lead singer and bassist from an up-and-coming band named The Police. But, like so many "old" composers, Pete Townsend instills a sense of respect from the musical community. People are willing to listen to whatever the aging composer puts out.

Handel churned out work after work in his old age. He had become famous in England by then, and there was no shortage of royalty during the mid-18th-century willing to pony up the money for whatever he wrote. By then, he had developed all of his formulaic techniques and could just churn out the pages for whomever. I wonder if the phrase "Sold out" existed back then. One could make that argument for Handel, as one might make the argument of any rock band in the 1970s.

Yadda-yadda...

What's that? You know I'm tech-head and gadgeteer and want to know what I think of the iPhone? Well, thanks, but I don't have one and have no plans to purchase one. And from the reading I've done, that's a good thing. Sure, it looks cool, but it's not the vast jump in technology that everyone was hyping it to be. As a matter of fact, as a phone, the general consensus is that it's awful. The sound is bad, it's difficult to dial manually or send text messages on the "virtual" keyboard displayed on the smooth glass face, and said face gets caked with oily fingerprints, making viewing a movie or a web page a less-than-stellar experience. The last complaint has been a continuing complaint about the iPods since they were first released.

Now, you have to understand, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool PC guy. I'm not an Apple-head. My heroes are (well, in some cases, were) Carly Fiorina and Bill Gates. Yes, I know, "artistic" types are supposed to swoon over every word that comes forth from the mouth of Steve Jobs and rush out to buy every product that he sells.

And I have to admit, I did break down and buy an iPod Nano, begrudgingly. And I've been very impressed with it. I probably have it two-thirds full of albums from my own "old" CD collection and have even bought a few things off of iTunes. I think iTunes says that adds up to about 2.2 days worth of music (about 58 hours of constant listening to music). And, though, you'll find quite a bit of rock and stuff, you'll also find a lot of early music, some jazz, and a little opera. To me--a guy who lugged around a 10-pound "boom box" throughout much of the late 70s and early 80s, then a large case of cassettes when the Sony Walkman came out, then a large case of CDs when the CD Walkman came out--the idea of holding two straight days of music in a box smaller and less-hefty than an old-style cigarette lighter, it's a dream come true. (I own a couple of non-iPod MP3 players that are equally amazing in their size but lack the intuitiveness of the iPod.) Yes, I do record the music in a compressed format (as opposed to Apple lossless), but the quality doesn't degrade that much. I love my Nano!

But when it comes to computers, I'm a PC guy. I was much more excited about the release of Windows Vista than I was OS X, and I'll scoff at the people that stand in line to buy Jaguar, the next Apple OS release, coming, well... whenever Apple gets the kinks out of it. (In Apple's defense, they do put out a polished and complete product, as opposed to Microsoft's release-it-and-we'll-work-out-the-bugs-later philosophy.) Part of this bias is that the particular field I work in uses PCs almost exclusively. I make my living off being able to make Microsoft Office stand up and beg for people. And what office productivity suite do most Mac-based-businesses using? Office for the Mac, which is very different from the PC version. Yes, there are alternatives to MS Office, but none of them have yet been developed to the point of overtaking the capabilities of the Microsoft product--this includes Corel's WordPerfect suite.

So, no iPhone for me, thank you. At least, not for the foreseeable future. As a matter of fact, I recently purchased a new Samsung phone which I'm very happy with. It can surf the web, sort of. I can play games on it, should I be so inclined, which isn't very often. And I have a contacts list on it, but just to facilitate dialing numbers. (If I need more in-depth knowledge of names and schedules "in the field," I have my trusty Palm Pilot, which, incidentally, syncs up very well with my copy of Outlook on my home PC.) The call quality on the Samsung is excellent, and it's Bluetooth enabled. So I have a wireless earpiece/mic arrangement which makes me look a bit like a cyborg. And the light on it blinks, which tells everyone around me that, yes, I am that important a person.