For the 539th
Soundtracks of the Week we're listening to
Lele Marchitelli's music
for Paolo Sorrentino's The Young Pope.
Actually the first thing on here is a solo vocal
number by Korean singer Sumi Jo, who had also contribute
an Academy Award-nominated song to Sorrentino's Youth.
Called "The Dream", it's a haunting and beautiful piece,
gracefully powerful.
Then we get into Marchitelli's score, which blends
acoustic and electronic instruments in subtle and
effective ways. One of the best things about The Young Pope
is the opportunity it gives for Sorrentino to compose
images and create excitement and suspense with camera
movement and editing. Marchitelli's music works with
the visual element hand in glove. Listening to it on its own, without the image, does
lose something, though. On the more light-hearted end of the spectrum are the
bouncy "The Cardinals" and "Hair". The latter has a hint
of Afro-pop, perhaps, an idea that's developed more in "Later". "The Blackmail" gets the dark and dangerous mood across
just with piano and cello in a short but effective piece. While most of the tracks on the album fit these profiles,
a few stand out for doing something a little different,
such as the swirling textures of "The Parents" and
the slow, atmospheric, electric guitar-driven "Maddalena Ventura". "Dreaming of You" and "Voiello Soul" also have great
electric guitar sounds. I'd love to know who's playing it.
2018 October 12 • Friday
American television of the 1950s has always interested me
in a general way. Two volumes of rare programming from that
time have recently come out on DVDs and have some content
that interests me in a more specifi way.
Television's Lost Classics Volume Two Featuring
Four Rare Pilots was the first to appear in my mailbox
and I went straight to the 1959 pilot for a Nero Wolfe
series that was never picked up. We lost our chance to have the best Nero Wolfe movie
ever when the cast of John Huston's adaptation of The
Maltese Falcon was never assembled for such a project. That never happened, though. Marlene Dietrich apparently
tried to drum up interest in a Nero Wolfe movie with a circa-Touch of Evil Orson Welles as Wolfe and herself as
a female Archie. I would have loved to see that, too. But we're left with the attempts we have, and this 1959
pilot is pretty decent. It begins promisingly with a cool opening credits
sequence that has some similarities both in music and image
to the original opening credits of The Avengers.
It's no surprise that the music is so good since it turns out
to be by the great Alex North. Whoever put the show together certainly knew the books.
We start in the famous Wolfe townhouse on W. 35th St.
Archie brings Wolfe breakfast in bed, Fritz is mentioned along
with Wolfe's appreciation of his adding sage to his breakfast
dish.
It's very true to the structure of the books, though I believe this particular story is original to the television program.
The writers wanted to get Wolfe's love of orchids in there but instead of taking the time and money to show us his orchid collection on the top floor they take Wolfe out of character to show him standing and holding an orchid while playing it Scarlatti, which he says he believes will improve its colors.
The young William Shatner is an excellent choice as Archie, though he's a bit too much the standard-issue stereorypically wolfish and devil-may-care freewheelin' guy. Certainly some of that is in Archie and the writers do also manage a neat moment near the end that demonstrates Archie's own intelligence and deductive skills.
Kurt Kaznar does a fine job as Wolfe and although he doesn't look like my idea of Wolfe, he has a good voice for the role. It's a shame that there weren't more of these. I would have enjoyed them.2018 October 10 • Wednesday
One of the reasons that Hank Williams was a proto-rock and roll
star is that he was writing and recording hit songs that, in 1951,
had lyrics like this: "I got a hot-rod Ford and a two-dollar bill /
And I know a spot right over the hill / There's soda pop and the
dancin's free ' So if you want to have fun, come along with me".
Those elements—fast cars, money, dancing/sex/courtship and
sensual pleasure—would end up more or less defining and dominating
most of
rock and roll when the genre took over a few years later. And so we're looking at an actual hot rod magazine from 1956,
several years after Hank Williams died in the back seat
of a Cadillac on the way to a gig.
The layout of the cover caught my eye, as it no doubt
was intended to do. The graphic design of the interior pages
is similarly robust.
There's an interesting article about solving the radio paradox.
You need to listen to music while you drive but the antenna
ruins the look of the car. Introducing the No-Tenna system!
This might be only the second hot rod magazine from this time
that I've looked at, and like the other one there's a feature
on some female hot rodders. This story is about two young women
who tow their junker of a car from Fort Worth, TX, to a custom shop in California,
have it redesigned to their specifications, enroll in a local
college while they wait for the work to be done, and then tow
it back to Texas!
And finally there's this mixed media advertisement
presenting us with a literal realization of a metaphor.
2018 October 08 • Monday
A week ago Stelvio Cipriani passed away. He's
been the composer of a couple of our
Soundtracks of the Week in the past
and now we'll do another of his for our
538th: La Notte degli squali.
The cover made me think that this was a Jaws rip off,
but it's from 1988, which is kind of late in the day for that
sort of thing. Reading the plot description on Wikipedia makes
me think that it's kind of all over the place. It has a very
low rating on imdb but I would probably watch it.
The score is very synth-heavy and pounding. The main title
theme has a late-Goblin feel. Cipriani juggles different rhythms and atmospheres
with ease and cruises in and out of different melodic
and harmonic ideas. "Cacciatore di squali" is a good
example of how well he can navigate different kinds
of dramatic terrain in just a few minutes. Some of the other cues, such as "Bandidos", are
agreeably similar to the music for Miami Vice,
which was perhaps a conscious choice considering the popularity
of both the show and its music at the time.
2018 October 05 • Friday
Well, here's a ridiculous book and artifact of a certain
time and certain tendencies in certain streams of pop culture:
John Quirk's The Tournament.
This is actually the third book in a series, but the front
and back cover copy seem to be hoping you'll think it's the first.
This accompanies a new design, a new publisher
and a new presentation of the author, here John Quirk but in
the previous two John Q. I believe I picked this up in Cape Cod for twenty cents.
It's interesting to see how the worlds of books and movies
responded to the massive success of James Bond. By the time
of The Tournament the whole genre was morphing
into self-parody and this book is definitely heading that way. Its purpose seems to deliver sex and violence with an
irritating male protagonist who excels at and always
attracts both. Peter Trees is
a millionaire ex-commando (or something), often
referred to as the Survivor, grins a lot, has lots of experience and knowledge
and skills, yet is also strangely ineffective,
quite early in the book being completely railroaded, captured,
doped with truth serum and avoiding death only by a typically
ludicrous maneuver that's as unconvincing as it is familiar.
The writing style is loose and sometimes melodramatic. The first line is "Bullshots, that's what the men drank,
the princes and their friends, consommé and vodka". The immediate defining of "men" to be "princes and their friends"
launches the reader on a snob appeal/luxury porn journey. The Tournament appears to have been meant
to be read quickly and soon forgotten and if so, mission accomplished.
Martinelli closed the great double
doors behind his back, using both hands. Martinelli, short,
slim, lined, gray-haired, urbane, accustomed to the power
of extreme wealth. Martinelli. After all this time, the
face-to-face confrontation, Trees and Martinelli. Martinelli,
the great manipulator; he was a five-foot-seven Italian giant.
Martinelli, the international socialite, the dilettante
Communist, the giver of sex parties. Martinelli, who had
sent the assassins after Bottle and his fuel injector
in the affair of the Chocolate Bunny. Martinelli, who had
plied Roberto Alvarez with an elaborate orgy, seeking to
seduce him from the rail spur in Guerra. Martinelli.
Twice there had been conflict between the empires. Twice
Peter Trees had one for Archangeli, and twice Martinelli
had known the strange, coppery taste of defeat.
2018 October 03 • Wednesday
Deception, manipulation, distraction, misdirection and outright lying
have been around longer than humans have and are never going away.
Now that so many people in so many places are virtually connected
via ubiquitous electronic devices, the number of opportunities for
being fooled, swindled or just plain robbed has increased
exponentially.
And there are still plenty of real world pitfalls to avoid,
whether they manifest themselves to you as a shell game,
a pigeon drop, a jam auction, change raising or some other
such scheme. If those phrases are new to you, I recommend R. Paul Wilson's
book The Art of the Con, which is where I learend
about them. It's an entertaining and educational
guide to various grifts and confidence rackets, most still
around today, some offered up for their historical interest
and with some special attention paid to how they can flourish
in the digital age.
One point that Wilson makes over and over is that he hopes
to provide protection to the reader in the form of information.
By reading about all these various cons and scams, many of which
Wilson pulled off himself for his various series on BBC television—he
always gave the money back to the "mark" and explained what
happened and why—readers can get an idea of how easy it is to be
fooled, how entire phony environments (the "con bubble") can be
created to steal money from strangers.
Which is another point. Most con games are like being
mugged, just without the violence. But Wilson mentions
that if you recognize the con being pulled on you, it's a mistake
to try to outsmart the grifters. If you think they're going
to be chastened once you reveal that you're smarter than them
and you were onto their trick from the start, they might
just pull a gun or a knife or beat you up to take your money. A common criticism Wilson says he faced is that his book
is basically an instruction manual for how to cheat people.
Certainly he does show how these things work, but he does
it for the victims, not the predators. He asserts, and it seems
like reasonable enough to me, that con artists already know how
to do all this stuff. He learned it from them! Your only
defense is knowledge, having a sense of the structure and psychology
of these things, so when something doesn't feel right, you'll play
it safe. You'll remember that when something seems too good to be
true, then it probably is. And it is fascinating and entertaining reading. One con had
a few people set up their own counter and cash register in a
large department store and take any customers who would pay cash
for whatever they wanted to buy. A few hours in a busy holiday season
would make them thousands of dollars and they can just walk away.
2018 October 01 • Monday
For our
537th Soundtrack of the Week
we're digging into the vinyl again and
out we come with Wild, Wild Winter, one of several
post-Frankie and Annette teen romp movies.
Frankie Avalon had left the beach for a Ski Party
so it's only natural that the slopes would see some action from
some of the other players again.
The A side is songs from the groups given prominent billing
on the cover. The B side is score, mostly by Jerry Long. Maybe.
It's a little confusing. Next to each piece, Jerry Long's name
occupies the "composer's name" space, with the exception
of the Main Title theme, which is credited to Chester Pipkin.
Under the track listing it says "Instrumentals Directed by
Frank Wilson". It's not clear what "Directed" means in this context.
Arranged? Conducted? Both? Something else? Just to make it even less clear, in the liner notes is
the assertion that what one hears is "background music by
Frank Wilson and arrangements by Jerry Long", which is the opposite
of what' it just said's written a few inches to the left. So I don't know. But it's a nice record for
the fans of this sort of thing. And finally, just to add even more confusion to the matter
of who came up with this music in the first place,
the "End Title", a reprise of the "Main Title", which
was supposed to be by Chester Pipkin, is credited to Jerry Long. Whatever the case, I hope that all fees went to the right people.
