VHS of the Month: "Zelig"

[VHS of the Month covers movies only - or best - commercially available on VHS.]

Woody Allen has always treated his work strangely by Hollywood standards: he usually refuses to talk about old films, and though his movies are often cited for their brilliant use of music, he generally hasn't sanctioned the release of soundtracks. Unsurprisingly, probably on his insistence, his classic movies have been sparsely issued on DVD. Most were simultaneously released in 3 volumes of box sets called "The Woody Allen Collection," each movie including a short booklet, a theatrical trailer, and French and Spanish subtitles. The transfer and packaging on the discs was uniformly fine, and it's probably a testament to the lavish treatment movies are accustomed to that his DVDs seem like a raw deal. That said, Annie Hall probably holds the unfortunate distinction of having the least supplemented DVD of any film to ever win Best Picture. (It's a shame, because even among Best Pictures it's a film of unusual quality.) Yet the Woody Allen movie that could most benefit from a lavish modern release has to be Zelig, an undeservedly overlooked masterwork in Allen's filmography.

The film, released in 1983, is a mockumentary centered around the phenomenon of Leonard Zelig, a man whose chameleon-like ability to physically and socially transform himself to blend in with any crowd in which he finds himself makes him an unlikely celebrity of the Roaring Twenties. In addition to being an extremely touching and funny movie, Zelig was a visual miracle, seamlessly integrating Zelig into archival photographic and video footage a decade before computer imagery made such a feat commonplace. Exploration of the technical achievements of a film like this is the very sort of thing special edition DVDs were designed for. Whether or not such a release will ever take place is hard to say. Until then, used VHS editions are not only absurdly cheap, but in many ways, even a more appropriate way to enjoy one of the last and greatest accomplishments to have been literally created on film.

My Top 10 Albums of the 90s: (3) The Soft Bulletin - The Flaming Lips

[This is the eighth in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

The early story of the Flaming Lips was one of minimal creative success. Following the arrival of the brilliant drummer/guitarist Steven Drozd, though the band experienced a minor hit in 1993 with the goofy "She Don't Use Jelly," it nonetheless felt trapped by the idiosyncratic version of typical mid-90s alt-rock that defined its sound. Looking to branch out artistically, frontman Wayne Coyne conducted a number of "parking lot experiments," where he rounded up large crowds and played pieces of music – perfectly synchronized or otherwise – out of multiple boomboxes surrounding the fans. Along with the ascendancy of Drozd following the departure of guitarist Ronald Jones, these experiments led to 1996's fascinating Zaireeka, a 4-CD album that required the use of 4 stereos, ensuring that no two listens could be quite the same. The music on Zaireeka signified as dramatic an evolution in the band's identity as did the album's elaborate physical conceit. Lush arrangements, thunderous, intricate drum patterns, and experimentation with intense frequencies of sound resulted in intense, detailed soundscapes that lent the lyrics a weight that the band could never have achieved before. Coyne, too, was maturing rapidly: his songs came to deal more with serious explorations of life, love, and death (even as they retained their bizarrely quirky use of imagery and storytelling), and his singing fully embraced the strained upper-register style that would become his calling card and give his songs their emotional foundation. These changes would come together on 1999's The Soft Bulletin, with an execution and unity of vision that even the impressive strides forward on Zaireeka could never have anticipated. Opening with the sweeping Zaireeka­-era track "Race for the Prize" – which thankfully proved impossible to satisfactorily mix to four CDs – The Soft Bulletin flows effortlessly from track to track with songs of unyieldingly high quality. The eternal comparisons to Pet Sounds are fully warranted: both are symphonic, in sound and scale; both use everyday occurrences as launching points for emotional exploration (sailing and spider bites, for instance, respectively); and both have their soul centered squarely in the middle of the album, with the stunning "Waiting for a Superman" serving as The Soft Bulletin’s "God Only Knows." Yet the album has a sublime quality all its own, as beautiful as it ponders mortality on "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate" as when it basks in the unfettered glow of love on "What Is the Light?" and "Buggin'." With their superb 2002 follow-up, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, the Flaming Lips would complete one of the greatest back-to-back album sequences in the history of popular music. In the meantime, The Soft Bulletin marked the summation of a decade of remarkable growth and a note-perfect way to ring out the departing millennium.

[NOTE: Despite its relatively recent genesis, The Soft Bulletin has already seen many different releases on CD and LP, with varying tracklistings and runtimes. The CD included in the 5.1 Surround Sound release is by far the best and should be considered definitive.]

Voodoo Macbeth

In 1936, 20-year-old Orson Welles staged a production of Macbeth in Harlem starring an all-black cast, composed largely of non-professional actors. Carried out under the auspices of the Federal Theater Project (one of the many bureaus of the WPA established by FDR to jumpstart the American economy during the Great Depression), the play kept the basic plot and dialogue of the original intact, but transposed the action to a fictitious Caribbean island modeled on Haiti and changed the witches to voodoo practitioners. The resulting "Voodoo Macbeth" was something of a historical milestone: against all odds, it was an enormous commercial success, and it marked one of the first instances in American theater of a serious production starring black actors that was respected and sustained by white audiences. The play would go on tour, and the publicity would be a major factor in Welles' rise to fame. (He would go on to direct and star in a more traditional - if typically idiosyncratic - film adaptation in 1948.)

Unfortunately, not much of Voodoo Macbeth remains. The bulk of the production is detailed only in Welles' annotated promptbook, which gives an outline of the structure of the play; contemporary reviews also preserve something of the character of the show. Luckily, the last 4 minutes of the play were preserved in a WPA film called We Work Again, which documented the bureau's efforts to provide black Americans with work during the 30s. It's a priceless glimpse into a small but sadly overlooked event in the history of American entertainment. You can see those four minutes below, or download We Work Again for free courtesy of the Internet Archive.

Brian Wilson - "Our Prayer (Freeform Reform)"

A week ago, news broke that Capitol/EMI is going to officially release SMiLE, the legendary lost Beach Boys albums that Brian Wilson planned as his follow-up to the immortal Pet Sounds but proved unable to complete in 1967. The project had seen innumerable promises of and attempts at ressurection over the years, but outside of bootlegs, the album has never seen the light of day. The release is set for a still-to-be-determined date in 2011, and as is standard industry practice nowadays, it will be available in a wide assortment of normal and deluxe editions.

Assuming the plan comes to fruition, it will provide an even happier ending to the strange story that, in fact, already had one. Though bits and pieces of SMiLE had been released on Beach Boys albums throughout the rest of the 60s and into the 70s, in 2004 Wilson decided to revisit and newly record the album. This time, the project was a success, and SMiLE was rapturously received upon its release, marking the end of a remarkable comeback for Wilson himself after decades of instability in every sense of the term.

An odd footnote to the 2004 album was the release of the ethereal opener, "Our Prayer," in the form of an electro remix single by London DJ Freeform Five. Pressed on one-sided, clear 10" vinyl, released only in Europe, and limited to 1000 copies, it's unclear who the release was intended for - though it sounds nothing like anything else in the extended Beach Boys catalog, it bears Wilson's name on the label, rather than the DJ's. That said, according to Freeform's Soundcloud account it was "approved by Mr. Wilson himself," and evidently, also by his label, Nonesuch Records. The song gives you what you would expect from a solid electro remix, and though it omits the composition's sublime final hum, it nonetheless does justice to the source material. It's never seen a digital release, but interested parties can check it out below or download it here.

Out of Print Gems: The Pink Floyd Holy Grail

Simultaneously one of the most endearing and irritating aspects of the resurgently popular LP format is that (at least) once during the playing of each album, you have to get up and flip the record over to continue. The most noteworthy aspect of the persistently unpopular, defunct 8-track format is that it plays in a continuous loop until stopped. Countless bands designed their albums with the 2-sided format in mind: an easy example is Led Zeppelin IV, on which each side begins with 2 rockers, is followed by a ballad, and ends with a 7-minute+ song of absurdly epic proportions. Even at the height of the 8-track, though - and it's easy to forget that there was a time when the ridiculous tapes were enormously popular, especially in cars - few bands, popular or otherwise, tailored their albums to the format.

The most notable exception by far was Pink Floyd, who by the late 70s were riding high in the wake of The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here, and were, with the possible exceptions of Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones, the most popular band in the world. In 1977, the Floyd released Animals, the second in a trilogy of albums which toyed with the idea of cyclical music. 1975's Wish You Were Here was bookended with two halves of an extended song, "Shine On You Crazy Diamond," and 1979's The Wall ended with the question fragment "Isn't this where..." and began with its completion, "...we came in?" Similarly, Animals was bookended by two short acoustic song fragments, "Pigs on the Wing," parts 1 and 2. Given the nature of the 8-track format, the band decided to record a guitar solo that would connect the 2 halves of the song and explicitly bring the album back full circle. Floyd associate Snowy White was assigned the task after David Gilmour's take was accidentally erased, and the resulting "complete" version of "Pigs on the Wing" was included exclusively on British and American pressings of the 8-track tape when the album was released.

As time passed and the 8-track went extinct, though the Floyd remained as popular as ever well on through the beginning of the CD era, this solo slipped out of the discography as the catalog was standardized to reflect the more familiar tracklisting associated with the original LP. As time went by, Snowy White's solo took on mythic stature among the band's fanbase, particularly as reissues continued and it became the only commercially unavailable piece of music the band had ever officially released.

Spurred by a love of outmoded electronic crap and the challenge of tracking down a cartridge that included the solo (and there were 2 unsuccessful attempts), over my last year in college, I procured an 8-track deck and the original British-release tape. You can listen to the long-lost track in the video below, and until such time as the song sees an official re-release, an mp3 ripped from the tape can be downloaded here.

A Polychrome Glimpse Through Time

Over the course of the past week, the first (and probably only) color photos have hit the internet of San Francisco in the wake of the 1906 earthquake. They were taken by Frederic Eugene Ives, an early proponent of color and 3D photography and an inventor whose halftone process is still used for newspaper and magazine photographs today. The images were intended for use with his own Krömgram system, a cumbersome and expensive system of producing color 3D images that could be viewed through the device seen above. The color imagery was created with a process that used mirrors and filters to create separate slides for each primary color of light, which were bound together in a special order with cloth tapes. The Krömgram was a commercial failure: the viewing device cost $50 when it came out in 1907 (equivalent to $1000 today), was complex to operate, and according to Smithsonian photography curator Shannon Perich, suffered from "poor product placement and advertising." These photos, then, largely represent the last legacy of the failed format, but they're a remarkably contemporary-feeling look into a bygone era (or for that matter, century/millenium).

Most of the reproductions of these images floating around the internet are extremely low quality. You can find the full resolution files from the Smithsonian archives here; below, you can see smaller resolution versions of those images as well as a few details that I found particularly amazing. The first was taken from the roof of the hotel where Ives was staying at the time of the quake, the Majestic (still extant, at 1500 Sutter St.):

 Magnification of the rubble skyline...

...and a house either already being reassembled or having picked a tragic time to begin construction.

Photo 2, taken from the neighborhood of City Hall:

Photo 3, taken at Van Ness Blvd.:

Three close-ups of remarkably clear ads:

The last two photos, stills of Market St. produced from a slightly different angle from the same spot. The still-standing Flood Building is prominent in the foreground, and the Ferry Building can be made out just out by the horizon:

And in this particularly touching set of contrasts, the enlargement on top is of a man wandering Market St. and a cable car off in the distance, while the bottom shows both of them, perhaps by some Krömgram fluke, vanished into a yellow haze - rather like the former skyscrapers that lay in ruins around them.

Radiohead - "The King of Limbs"

The most common reaction by Radiohead fans to the release of the band's eighth studio album has been to note the appraisal of other Radiohead fans. Though most agree that The King of Limbs isn't as phenomenal as 2007's In Rainbows, there's been a uncharactaristic unwillingness to take a firm stance among the group's notoriously rabid fanbase. The most curious allegation that's surfaced has been to deem the album "Radiohead by numbers": though it aptly encapsulates many fans' confusion with Limbs, it also seems to demonstrate an inability to approach the new piece on its own terms. In fact, the album represents an approach that Radiohead - a band which has had more discrete stylistic incarnations during an uninterrupted existence than any band in recent memory, outside of U2 - had never attempted before: low-key. Indeed, beyond an intrinsic strangeness, the only thing tying together the band's previous lows and highs was an unrelenting impression of bigness, from the often offputtingly pubescent semigrunge roars of Pablo Honey through to the masterfully quiet revolution announced on Kid A. But everything about The King of Limbs is self-consciously small, from the absurd introduction of the record (announced just five days before its intended release, and in fact released after only four) to the short running time and nature of the music itself. Opening on a strong note with the up-tempo, Eraser-esque "Bloom," Limbs proceeds through its first half at a similar gallop but nonetheless proves sedate. "Morning Mr. Magpie" contrasts its jittery nature with an eerily laid-back delivery; "Little By Little" (a lesser "All I Need") and the instrumental "Feral" similarly seem content to provide subtly gyrating atmospherics and leave it at that. They work better in context than they would standing alone, serving as an extended lead-in to the album's brilliant second side. Though the most visible of the remaining four tracks is the strong lead single "Lotus Flower" - whose music video and subsequent video remixes became immediate internet sensations - the twin gems "Codex" and "Give Up the Ghost" are the true highlights that lend Limbs its staying power. The former is a beautiful piano ballad every bit the equal of Hail to the Thief's ethereal "Sail to the Moon"; the latter, a spectacular acoustic guitar-driven song embellished with the fullest expression yet recorded of the delicate self-harmonizing that Thom Yorke has made his studio trademark. The album comes to a satisfying conclusion on "Separator," a quietly propulsive track built around a thumping Colin Greenwood bassline and another "human drum machine" performance by Phil Selway, whose wonderfully unadorned solo debut Familial may well have helped to inspire The King of Limbs' identity. It remains to be seen whether the understated approach will constitute a new phase for Radiohead, or merely a brief foray. (If fans are right, and lines like "If you think this is over then you're wrong" are a hint, it may not take long.) Either way, The King of Limbs is a worthy addition to the rich discography of the world's greatest active band, and one that with time will no doubt come be loved for what it is.