| Pop Culture Gadabout | ||
|
Friday, May 04, 2007 ( 5/04/2007 10:39:00 AM ) Bill S. WEEKEND PET PIC – With spring comes the occasion of Ziggy Stardust's big seasonal shave; here he is, midway through the process:  THE USUAL NOTE: For more companion animals, check out Modulator's "Friday Ark." And if you wanna see some more dogg blogging (and who doesn't?), there's the weekly "Carnival of the Dogs" at Mickey's Musings. # | ( 5/04/2007 08:57:00 AM ) Bill S.  "GREAT GOOGLY MOOGLY!" – Perhaps the most frustrating moment for an admirer of any period of Frank Zappa's considerable output comes as one of the bonus features to the Frank Zappa Classic Albums DVD (Eagle Rock Entertainment). In "Welcome to the Vault," we're taken on a tour through the Zappa musical archives – shelf after shelf of recordings in every possible format, going back to before the Mothers of Invention, all preserved with anal retentive diligence – and the Zappahead can't help but cry out, "Why aren't we hearing so much more of this undoubtedly cool stuff?"The prime focus of Classic Albums, though, isn't on what we haven't heard, but on the man's two biggest commercial successes: the early seventies jazz-rock long-players, Over-nite Sensation and Apostrophe ('). Both albums, we're told, were essentially made at the same time with much of the same personnel – keyboardist George Duke, percussionist Ruth Underwood, drummer Ralph Humphry, bassist Tom Fowler & trombonist Bruce Fowler, etc. – many of whom get to show us how much they've aged by appearing on-camera to talk about the experience of Working for Frank. No big surprises here: we learn that Zappa had a knack for hiring "amazing musicians" (a phrase repeated several times, including by Zappa admirer Billy Bob Thornton, who is also filmed rhapsodizing about "Dinah-Moe Humm") and for writing difficult parts for 'em to play. There's a charming moment where Ruth Underwood, thirty years after the fact, attempts to replay a difficult marimba passage from Apostrophe(') and makes three barely discernible mistakes: "one for each decade that I've been away from the music and the instrument." Though the documentary attempts to place Zappa's Big Hit Albums within the context of his long and frustrating career, it makes no attempt at answering what I've long considered the big dilemma for many of us first attracted to the man as a musical satirist: the point in his career where he shifted so much of his lyrical emphasis from strong cultural/political satire to soft-porn comedy. Though they both focus on sexual themes, there's a major intelligence gap between "Harry, You're A Beast" from the MoI years and Sensation's "Dinah-Moe Humm," yet unfortunately it was the latter that brought Frank his biggest coterie of fans. Talking about the "Humm," widow Gail Zappa notes that "the horror is that it's like the most madly requested" song (there's even a moment on one of the concert discs where we hear an obviously drunken fan ask for it), yet that was the story realm where Zappa increasingly spent his time. Small wonder, perhaps, that the man would later state that he much preferred writing the music to the words. That fannish bone-of-contention aside, Classic Albums does contain some tantalizing pieces within it: pointlessly sped-up film footage of Zappa in the studio; sequences where son Dweezil sonically deconstructs the sound of a cut, pointing out the "eyebrows" used as atmospheric embellishment to the song; snippets of concert footage and some muy blurry home movie footage; an interview with Valley Girl Moon Zappa where she confesses how, as a kid, she found the subject matter of Frank's songs "to be embarrassing." As bonuses, the DVD includes a live Roxy performance of "Montana" (arguably the best song from Sensation) and the original Saturday Night Live recital of the anti-teevee screed, "I Am the Slime," wherein SNL announcer Don Pardo performed the song's central monologue and later gleefully announces that he is the Slime. There's also a version by Dweezil Zappa and friends of "Camarillo Brillo," which is respectfully performed and thoroughly unexciting. One thing that this doc – especially in the Dweezil studio segments – makes clear, though, is that Zappa packed a lotta musical information into his studio albums: so much so that even a lesser album like Sensation stands up to decades of repeated playing. While I'd have liked to hear more about the actual process of compiling and editing which built to a work like Apostrophe(')'s extended Eskimo fantasia, "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow," that's a process that is lost in time. All we can do is sit back and marvel at the man's ability to balance so many sonic elements in his head. But if Classic Albums provides no true keys to Zappa's conceptual continuity (outside of a coupla interview snippets of the man himself telling that it's all connected), it still works as a tribute to a rock composer who made sounds like nobody else – despite countless attempts at emulating his music by his followers. May not've ultimately learned much from this DVD, but it inspired me to go back to the originals (and wonder, why no mention of "Uncle Remus"?) Had a good time with 'em both, but I've gotta admit I still prefer One Size Fits All as an example of this particular studio configuration at its best. For one thing, the songs're consistently funnier . . . # | Thursday, May 03, 2007 ( 5/03/2007 09:16:00 PM ) Bill S. THAT "NEW CAR SMELL" – Bought a copy of TV Guide for the My Name Is Earl scratch-'n'-sniff card, so we could more fully experience this week's episode, though in my considered opinion the episode's menu of odors (cheap cologne done twice?) paled in comparison to the ones featured in John Waters' scent-filled classic Polyester. (Still have my old s-'n'-s card from its first run at the Normal Theatre somewhere.) Earl's Oreo Cookie scratch was kinda cool, though . . . # | ( 5/03/2007 06:26:00 AM ) Bill S. MID-WEEK MUSIC VID – After briefly considering JB's Number Ones earlier this week, let's flash back to an outing of Soul Train to catch an early seventies performance of "Say It Loud – I'm Black And I'm Proud.": # | Wednesday, May 02, 2007 ( 5/02/2007 11:55:00 AM ) Bill S. "ZOON!" – Was saddened to read of the death of Tom Poston, a wonderful funnyman who I remember most strongly from his role as George on Newhart (one of the great All-American Sitcoms) and as the alcoholic ne'er-do-well in Norman Lear's Cold Turkey: he was a master at playing humorously out-of-sync types. Poston was probably more active as a teevee comic actor than in movies, but the Poston performance I keep remembering was in an early sixties kids matinee feature entitled Zotz!. The flick (which concerned hapless professor Poston's possession of a magic coin) was, apparently, director William Castle's attempt at crafting a Disney-esque children's fantasy a lá The Shaggy Dog or Absent-Minded Professor, but it was only a sporadic success. Still, watching Zotz! as a largely uncritical pre-teen, I remember getting a major kick out of it; I'll have to check it out again just to see what my older – if still immature – self thinks of it . . . R.I.P. Tom. # | ( 5/02/2007 08:29:00 AM ) Bill S.  "ONLY CRAZY FOLK CAN COME HERE" – From its title, you might think that Daniel Merlin Goodbrey's The Last Sane Cowboy (AiT/Planet Lar) was some sort of a pomo western, but this graphic stories collection proves to be something else again. Set in a "unfolded Earth," where reality has become much more malleable, Cowboy consists of a series of stories and amusingly Feiffer-esque monologues from the inhabitants of this world, a place where a man can bleed scorpions or a woman can smell the future; where one supporting character has a Labrador's head, another a dolphin's. In two of the tales ("The Man Who Fell to Earth," "The House That Wasn't Her,") characters express their profound sense of dislocation in this changed setting; in others, we see them striving to adapt to their Absurd New World.Rendered in a high-contrast style which blends computer-generated figures with grey-toned photo backgrounds, Cowboy's tone alternates between wryly deadpan and a more somber mournfulness, though the flatly static nature of the art tends to favor the former. To my eyes, the most effective pieces are the two extended stories, the title tale and "House That Wasn't Her," which both center on characters who have lost a part of their family – and venture into an increasingly more surreal landscape in the hopes of getting back what they've lost. In "Cowboy," a ten-gallon hat wearing woman enters the town of Insanity to bring back her fish brother: along the way, she's confronted by talking horses, six chattering skulls (a bit that reminded me more than a little of Bob Burden), the ghost of Abe Lincoln (murdered twice, we're told) and a giant scorpion who is guarding the saloon where her brother's being held. The saloon is the last vestige of sanity left in the town, but our heroine isn't allowed to enter because she's adapted so well to the madness all around her. "One saloon in a town full of mad folk," the cowgirl says. "And only the sane are allowed inside? That ain't just crazy. That's downright mean." Insanity, we quickly see, is the most travelled route in the unfolded Earth. In contrast, the hero of "House" remains stubbornly focused on the world – and love – he lost. Convinced that his house is no longer (literally) the same place where he once lived with his lover, he travels through an Escher-styled landscape in search of the place that was stolen from him, refusing to recognize the fact that even if he gets his home back, his loved one will still be gone. A surprisingly poetic meditation on the power of grief, couched in a series of dream-like images and absurdist tactics: not exactly the kinda comic you expect from AiT/Planet Lar (which more typically traffics in more straightforward genre storytelling). But perhaps that fact adds to The Last Cowboy's lingering effectiveness. This isn't a graphic collection that you put down and easily forget. Once a map has been unfolded, it's never quite the same . . . # | Tuesday, May 01, 2007 ( 5/01/2007 02:52:00 PM ) Bill S. "VIOLENCE DEVOURS ALL IT TOUCHES!" – Thanx to TCM's rerunning its first batch of "TCM Underground" movies late Friday nites (sans Rob Zombie's intros, apparently), I finally was able to record and view a flick that I'd long felt bereft for having only seen once too many years ago: Russ Meyer's Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Funny how tame this once daring piece of exploitation cinema looks on teevee today. Heck, the episode of Heroes I watched last night on NBC was bloodier and more violent (no one in Pussycat gets the top of their head telepathically sliced off) than Meyer's drive-in lady car gang classic. Of course, nuthin' on network television comes even remotely close to Jack Moran’s out-there dialog (part Flannery O'Connor; part Playboy Party Jokes) – or Meyer's witty way with his engagingly low-rent characters. At one point, watching the ultra-statuesque Tura Satana strut before Meyer's approving camera, it occurred to me that this flick could almost be seen as an antidote to the recently released Anna Nicole mess Illegal Aliens. Both movies feature a former Playboy centerfold in a lead role (in Pussycat, it's nice girl Sue Bernard); both center on a trio of very hour-glassy dames (in Aliens, they're alien cops; in Meyer's flick, they're a psycho girl gang); both films conclude with a scene where the big mannish villainess wrestles in dirt and sand with the protagonist. But where old-pro Meyer was able to take these elements and produce an enjoyable exploitation classic, the guys behind Aliens flop big time . . . # | ( 5/01/2007 01:38:00 AM ) Bill S. DON'T DRIVE, HE SAID – So we turned on Fox Monday night to watch Drive, only to quickly learn that Fox was rerunning a House in its place and had already cancelled the show after just three weeks. I swear, next time Tim Minear sells a series with Nathan Fillian in it to that network, Fox'll be canceling it three weeks before it even airs . . . # | Monday, April 30, 2007 ( 4/30/2007 08:25:00 AM ) Bill S.  "TAKE ME TO THE BRIDGE, MACEO!" – Can't argue with the idea of a collection of Number Ones (Polydor) when it comes to James Brown. During his commercial peak – from 1965-74 – Brown had a slew of Top Ten Hits, with a host of 'em taking the top slot on the R&B charts. Though he'd been making the charts with some consistency since 1955 (when "Please Please Please" grabbed number five), it wasn't until '65's "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag" and "I Got You (I Feel Good)" that the man truly became a Force o' Funk. Polydor's new set opens with these two dynamite tracks, though three songs in, the set breaks with chronology and pairs '59's slow-tempoed "Try Me" with '66's somewhat ponderous statement song, "It's A Man's Man's Man's World" before returning to a year-by-year syllabus in the Basics of Early Funk 'n' Roll.The approach makes sense, and nearly every hot hit track you'd want from Brown – whether backed with his first band the Famous Flames or the 70's machine the JBs (where guys like bassist Bootsy Collins first learned their stuff) – is strong. Where the one-disc collection falls short, however, is with so many of the "two-part" tracks that Brown cut in the 70's. With the exception of 1970's "Super Bad," which was a hit as Parts One and Two, the new set only provides us with the edited Part One singles. In some cases, the editing is smooth, but on a track like "Mother Popcorn, Part One" you feel Brown and his band building toward even more extended funky glory, only to have it cruelly snatched away from you: just as the man pleads with piercing saxman Maceo Parker to do his thing, the cut fades away. Yeah, I know that's the way it worked in the glory days of AM radio, but, with Brown, more is definitely more. To be fair, this issue also crops up on earlier JB sets, including the two-disc 50th Anniversary Collection. You want the extended tracks, than the man's still-available Star Time five-disc boxed set is the way to go. Meanwhile, Number Ones makes for a swell budget-priced intro to this ultra-essential rhythm-&-bluesman even if the un-pretty "Eco-Friendly" packaging (part of a series of such discs currently being released by UMe) means that the no-frills set contains no real liner notes to tell us which of Brown's myriad rhythm-men (drummers Clyde Stubblefield or Jabo Stark; bassists Collins or Charles Sherrell) provided the groove for each track. Brown was the man who made African poly-rhythms an indispensable part of R&B, and here's where he did it. The sound's still as hot and sexy sounding today as it was three decades ago. Over the weekend, I drove with this churnin' disc in the PT Cruiser, and with the Godfather of Soul reveling in the visual glory that was "Hot Pants," it couldn't have felt more like Spring. Say it loud: I'm funkandI'mproud . . . # | Sunday, April 29, 2007 ( 4/29/2007 09:17:00 AM ) Bill S.  "ACTUALLY, WE'RE TRYING TO SAVE THE WORLD, DICKHEAD!" – Odds are, if the low-budget Anna Nicole Smith vehicle Illegal Aliens (MTI Video) had been made two years ago, it would've shot immediately into direct-to-video limbo (much like the 1997 action dud Skyscraper). That the cut-rate sci-fi comedy is being released not long after the actress' death and subsequent news ascendance is an accident of timing: it guarantees that the flick'll receive more attention, but whether that proves a good thing for any of the surviving cast's careers is an entirely different matter.A rickety blend of Charlie's Angels (each of the flick's three heroines are given the name of one of the movie version's actresses) and Men in Black, Aliens follows three intergalactic shape-shifting policewoman (Smith, Gladise Jiminez and Lenise Sorén) assigned to the planet Earth to thwart intergalactic evildoers. We first meet our trio as their alien bodies fly through space toward our planet; the ANS alien has chosen the body of a pig so she can comically squeal, "I'm a Pig in Space!" (that's the quality of the jokes, folks!) But once they land in a crater in New York City, our heroines all take on the form of shapely babes because, as the narrator helpfully explains, "Really hot chicks have it easy!" The threesome moves to Hollywood where they work as stuntwomen between assignments – until a fourth alien shows up on Earth with plans to demolish the joint. Though our antagonist alien is a male named Rex, he takes over the body of a New York mobster's broad-shouldered wife (why he commandeers her bod instead of simply shapeshifting into a replicate of it is never explained). Said mobster's spouse is played by Joanie Laurie, the former wrestling diva a.k.a. Chyna, and, surprisingly, she's the only one who fares halfway decently in this exercise, at times coming across like a bustier Mary Woronov. (If anybody's considering an Eating Raoul remake . . .) Accompanied by a pair of sub-Bowery Boys henchmen (Dennis Lemonte & Woody Keppel), one of whom she keeps "comically" shooting, Rex steals the components to cobble together a "megagravitron," which will pull the moon into the Earth when completed. Our heroines try to stop her, pursued by an ineffectual INS agent (Michael D. Valentine), but, of course, they're continually thwarted until the big 11th hour showdown. Before that, we get a lot of flatulence jokes and scenes focusing on how just-bone-dumb big blond Lucy is (at one point, cleaning her ear out with a large pink vibrator). There's a bit stolen straight out of the first Naked Gun movie (perhaps an attempt at reminding us of Smith's genuine comic moment in the third Gun flick?) where an off-camera Lucy makes a series of increasingly more deafening bathroom noises while her alien gal pals futilely attempt to carry on a conversation. Frank Drebin did it better. That noted, I have to fess that there was one moment in Illegal Aliens which made me laugh. It occurs when evil villainess Rex explains her evil scheme to our heroine. As she does, a digital "Super-Villain Monologue Timer" pops up in the corner of the screen to clock her speech; when she reaches record time (1:12), tiny fireworks explode around the timer. Of course, the big question for ANS followers has nuthin' to do with the quality of the jokes or story and everything to do with "How does our gal look and sound in this turkey?" Well, Miz Smith doesn't speak her lines as much as squeal 'em, but at least she enunciates (which is more than ya can say for her old reality series). Her body's in its TrimSpa shape, though the unflattering costumes she wears look like they were swiped off the set of the Jim Carrey Grinch. Through most of the movie the onetime supermodel affects a series of goony faces and grimaces that ultimately prove more off-putting than amusing – so much so that when she breaks the action mid-film to suddenly ask, "Who do I have to screw to get off this picture?" and every male member of the cast steps into the frame with their hands raised, I personally didn't believe 'em! Think I'm gonna work on remembering Hudsucker Proxy or Naked Gun: 33-1/3 if I ever feel the urge to visualize ANS in her plastic glory . . . # | |
|
|
