Single White Album

It's a bit late, what with even CDs being pushed into obsolescence by downloads, but I do like to play with my audio files and in doing so recently came up with my optimal one-LP version of The Beatles, the white album.

Side One

Back in the U.S.S.R.
Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey
Savoy Truffle
Sexy Sadie
Martha My Dear
Blackbird
Cry Baby Cry
Mother Nature's Son

Side Two

Dear Prudence
Happiness Is a Warm Gun
While My Guitar Gently Weeps
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
Piggies
I'm So Tired
Why Don't We Do It in the Road
Good Night

The Songs

Back in the U.S.S.R. First, I decided to keep the original opening and closing tracks. Anyway, kicking the album off with this musical hot rod, which gleams with the airstream style and crazed attitude of McCartney's beloved old-school rock 'n' roll, was one of the few things the Beatles did right when they sequenced the songs on this great but ill-assorted album.

Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey Putting this together I wanted to undo the facile contrasts and random clashes of the original sequencing and use songs to reinforce each otherand build. For example, the original track in this position, "Dear Prudence," is as different from "Back in the U.S.S.R." as can be, a serenely cyclical pastorale with warm lyrics of friendship and encouragement that make it Lennon's answer to "Hey Jude" (or the Beatles answer to the Byrds' "Goin' Back.") But this shot of clangorous energy keeps up and adds to the momentum. Also, I tried to move songs as far as possible from their original location to defamiliarize them, to jolt a little newness out of these overfamiliar recordings. When I heard how fresh that abrupt guitar-and-drums introduction sounds here, I knew it was working.

Savoy Truffle The third fast one in a row. Also, the third singer-songwriter, which gives the first three songs a nice intorducing-the-band subtext. A nice change of texture, too, from spiky to smooth.

Sexy Sadie I tried four fast ones in a row but it didn't work. But this provides continuity with "Savoy Truffle" on another level by matching its sugary-sour minatory tone. Anyway, I love the sound of this song, as well as the similarly-recorded "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" and "I'm so Tired," especially the grainy shimmer of the guitars.

Martha My Dear Yes, a contrast. I'm sorry. Moving this here was a last minute fix. But I like how it works. This and "Sexy Sadie" have similarities as well: medium-tempo songs that address a female character by name, so the contrast between "Sexy Sadie"'s smoky late-night cabaret and "Martha My Dear"'s sunny parlor isn't altogether random. One of McCartney's best and most overlooked songs, full of adroit tempo shifts and lovely scalar frills -- the fast bit in the middle, where strings augment the hard rock even more excitingly than in "Glass Onion," is one of my favorite Beatle moments -- it's also a good transition to the acoustic bloc.

Blackbird Acoustic hippie pastoral was the major new trend the white album incorporated, and no version would be complete without this exemplar.

Cry Baby Cry Why play around with this stuff? It's things like finding out how perfectly this follows "Blackbird." A curiously forboding song, it unfolds in the shadow of an ominous drone suggested (mostly) by the piano, while inspired touches like the drums' flamenco-like stutter in the chorus loft it into the (overcast) sky, a puff of aural mist from Strawberry Fields. Don't forget to trim the murmured dialog at the end of the CD track, which I say belongs at the beginning of "Revolution 9," because....

Mother Nature's Son This follows naturally from the McCartney coda of "Cry Baby Cry": it's the same instruments from the same session, though the guitar and percussion switch channels to try and hide this. I especially like the horns, which have a chilly, restrained power I associate with John Barry (or Anton Bruckner), and loom in the distance of this remarkably evocative song like snow-capped mountains.

Dear Prudence Perfect as a lead track in itself -- it's a tour-de-force that deserves to be shown off -- it also recalls the acoustic bloc at the end of side one without repeating it.

Happiness Is a Warm Gun "Dear Prudence" does set us up for the deceptive acoustic opening rather well, doesn't it? The exact musical equivalent of an R. Crumb comic.

While My Guitar Gently Weeps I tried to push this back further but then it stuck out in a corny way as the climax of the album.

Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da A song I always considered almost as obnoxious as "Don't Pass Me By," but too popular to leave off any realistic version of the album. But it sounds good here, benefitting not just from different surrounding tracks, so that it provides relief after "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" but, I think, from coming late in the album instead of early, giving it a slight tinge of retrospective melancholy.

(This post is under construction.)

Images

I love these subdued '70s tones. Shades of Jeff Jones and Frank Frazetta.

Images

"O Consuella!"

Eye, Third Eye, and Tabernacle

Another silent essay, defining one cluster of images and story points to suggest the web of implicit connections that holds it together.













Okay, almost silent. This is a little oblique even for me, so I'll cheat a little and provide captions -- descriptive captions, that is. For explanations you're on your own.

Above, Zed's view through Zardoz's eye as it carries him to the vortex. Below, May, one of the Eternals, the vortex-dwelling illuminati behind the false Zardoz-religion, ponders a display of Zed; the size and placement of his head recalls Zardoz.














May takes Zed to her biolab inside the looking-glass pyramid for study. Behind her, a display shows the view from her Tabernacle-crystal ring as it penetrates Zed's eye to reveal his inner essence. Below, May receives immortality as a Tabernacle-crystal is implanted in the third-eye position.














Zed first encounters the Tabernacle, the entity that runs the vortex, in the form of Arthur Frane's ring. Below, Zed gazes into the haughty Tabernacle itself, but without understanding that the crystal is merely a host for photons structured into a computer: an artificial intelligence made purely of light.














Trapped mentally by the Tabernacle, Zed finally escapes by killing his reflection. Your explanation of that one is as good as mine. Below, Zed regards his defeated adversary, the now-tamed Tabernacle, and gives it to May as she and her followers flee the doomed vortex.

The Vortex

Late at night, posting what I always do when I'm too tired to write but feel the urge to post anyway: images.

Random Question

Which is easier to make a model airplane out of and why: a banana peel or a wet sock?

If you fed banana peels to an infinite number of monkeys until they vomited, one would be sure to puke up a model airplane, whereas that wet sock isn't even a wet sock, it's a used condom!

Zardoz Screenshots

I haven't posted for over a month but still my site counter registers a trickle of hits, a spectral half-life composed of random searches and old links. Recently I noticed many hits were coming from the same Google page, which must be preserved in a link somewhere -- but where? -- a page of results for "Zardoz screenshots." On it, my site has moved up steadily from the second page to the top five.

That's what I get for trying to be campy.

As this is the largest response my blog has ever gotten, I can only oblige, even if you web rats never leave comments. Here's an index of Zardoz screenshots on this site:

Zardoz, the science fiction film (3)
Zardoz, the horror movie (part of my Halloween horror theme) (6)
Zardoz, the horror movie II (6)
Zardoz, the horror movie III (6)
Zardoz, the fantasy film (6)
Zardoz, the fantasy film II (6)
This post (2 old/3 new)
Zardoz: the Vortex (7)
Zardoz: Eye, Third Eye, and Tabernacle (9)
Zardoz: "O Consuella" (3)
Zardoz, the head film (6)
Zardoz, the head film II (6)
Zardoz, the head film III (6)
Zardoz, the head film IV (6)
Zardoz, post-apocalyptic action film (6)

Incidently, these screenshots are not from the DVD. They are from a VHS tape of a cable showing sometime in the late '90s. Despite not showing the full widescreen image -- and, looking at some of the images here, you can see where they were trimmed -- it comes much closer to the theatrical images I remember; rich, darkling, painterly. The DVD, though it's gotten good reviews, looks way too bright and clear to me, as if some unsympathetic technician had turned the knobs all the way up.

The creator of Zardoz, John Boorman, talks a little about its look and its cinematographer in his autobiography, Adventures of a Suburban Boy. "I had the great Geoffrey Unsworth as cameraman on [Zardoz]. He was a soft-spoken, courteous man, with the air of a distracted wizard. When colour arrived, cameramen continued to light as they had done for black and white, using shafts of direct light to separate objects and differentiate the various planes. Film is two-dimensional: lighting and camera movement are concerned with creating the illusion of a third dimension. In the black-and-white days on a typical set you would see a forest of black flags, arranged to allow slivers of light to pinpoint particular spots. Geoffrey, however, realised that colour did the job of distinguishing objects from each other, and that direct light made the colours very harsh and brash. He devised a radical new approach to colour lighting, using only indirect soft light. He combined this with diffusion filters, wide-open apertures in the lenses, and smoke on the sets, to soften and blend the elements together, rather than differentiating between them. It was the absolute contrary of the former style, attempting to meld the characters and the settings together, rather than differentiating between them. The result resembled an impressionist painting.

"The studios hated this technique. Subjected to mass, high-speed printing, the picture would tend to collapse into a fuzzy mush. It also looked murky on videotape and television. Today, the studios demand a crisp, sharp image, although all cameramen now use Geoffrey's system of indirect lighting." I wonder if something related happened to the DVD.















Some of you not only look at these images but upload them. Curiously, it's always one of the same two:
















I sense a pattern. Think they'd prefer these?