Eight Miles High...

A few posts back I put up a video I'd found of the great old tune "Summer Wine" being performed by a couple I'd never heard of (ok, I live under a rock, sue me), Ville Valo and Natalia Avelon. I thought they did an awesome good job with the tune, one of the few times I've found a cover to rival if not exceed the original. The video with the song was good, but strange and confusing, it fit but not in any way I could quite pin to the lyric images. I'd always thought the song about a cowboy, silver spurs and all, and a saloon girl of some sort, not really a prostitute but certainly a seductress. Well, anyway, back on utube I decided to watch it again full screen, and by accident clicked on a slightly different version labeled as high definition... and yea, *grin* the full grown up version is most definitely very high definition. Natalia is one hot sister when she wants to dial it on. Song was the same, but the video was different in more ways than just Natalia trying to melt my monitor.

Anyhow, yesterday afternoon I went to the local video rental joint looking for something new to watch. Pretty well had to, local college boys are playing ball today, not much chance of getting a seat in any of my normal haunts. After a pass through the new stuff (rather sparse offerings IMO, only one find but one that deserves a post of its' own) I checked out the foreign section. Subtitles and all a lot of the foreign works are way good, the distance there to here acting like a filter I suppose. Here in the backwater boonies of Oklahoma only the better stuff makes it onto the shelf. Anyway, I noticed one titled as is this post, Eight Miles High. Kind of ready to leave the store (it was totally saturated in the most annoying variety of giggling high school girls for some reason), and thinking of the great old tune by the Byrds I snagged it up without really breaking stride. What the heck, for a buck I'll give it a look, and the title peaked my curiosity. Why would a foreign flick share a name with a Byrds tune?

Thirty seconds after punching 'play' all kinds of things started making sense. Summer Wine is a vintage tune from the sixties, as is Eight Miles High. The subject of the movie isn't from the realms of music, not really, but as the cover notes indicated Uschi Obermaier was just as iconic to the vintage in her own realms. And surprise! It was Natalia portraying her. Ok, they used Summer Wine as the theme song, the images for the video taken from the movie. It all fit together nicely, mystery explained, a lucky grab on my part in several ways. Yea, eight miles high, where fate likes to hang out waiting and watching what passes below...

I'm not going to say much about the movie itself, beyond saying it seemed very well done, I'd recommend it for all folk my age as a point of perspective on the vintage. At one point I entertained the idea Natalia was telling her mother's story, a few minutes later felt sad that no, that wasn't the case. In the extra material was an interview with Uschi when the film was made. Apparently there's no relationship (other than perhaps formed in the same mold) between Uschi and Natalia. But there is such a resemblance as to make it easy to see them as mother and daughter, or perhaps eldest and youngest daughters of a large family. They not only look a lot alike, they reflect much the same frequency in their glance, a fine work of casting. I found the movie quite entertaining, but it was more than entertaining.

Uschi, Natalia, against the one in a gazillion chance either of you might read these words let me say thanks. You see, I'm somewhere between you in age, I was eleven in the summer of love and living in southern California a mile from the beach. Even as a child I could sense the shifting pressures in the world. It dominated the secret vibe all parents give off, the one the children will sense but not understand, it was in the schools, it was at church, it was everywhere. As the years have run I've often used those days as a mid-point marker in my thoughts concerning the evolution of the world we live in now. What was driving those people, both groups, the establishment and the rebels, what force pushed them to be as they were? Intellectually I think I've got a better than average grip on what went down, and why, but for all the words written on the subject I've not really had much of an emotional reference, and your movie went a long way towards closing that gap.

You see, if you see water squirting up in the air and you want to crack open the science books that water will tell you several things. For example, if you've got a good guess as to how large a hole it's coming out of, and you know how high it went you've got what you need to take a good guess as to how much pressure was driving it. Uschi, you know this far better than I, but there really weren't that many of you, it wasn't that big a hole when it first broke open, but even so to throw the water eight miles into the sky? That... is a totally scary amount of pressure, enough to break a continent, or a culture. It was mis-named, the cold war was. It wasn't really a war, it was a pressure test. Test to fail, I might add. It's amazing, really, that the world made it through as well as it did.