This Scottish group became the Marmalade around 1966, at which point they recorded the proto-Hendrix single “I See the Rain.” By 1968, they were a UK hit-making machine with songs like their no big deal cover of “Ob-la-di Ob-la-da” (a UK #1) and their biggest US hit, the memorable “Reflections of My Life” (1970). But back to DF and the Gaylords – I think “That Lonely Feeling” is a masterful slice of early Beatle-ish balladry and wow, that guitar solo is a remarkably tasteful little affair.
Posted by Stanislav (Planet Earth)
The most recent Werner Herzog movie “The Wide Blue Yonder” is delicious brain candy. It’s about an intergalactic trip from the Milky Way to Andromenda. What’s fascinating about it is the way that Herzog pulls it off by using nothing but documentary reels linked together with several sequences narrated by one single actor (the wild-eyed Andromedian Brad Dourif reminds me of Kinski). Of course, the farthest humans ever reached with their bodies was the Moon, a ‘mere’ 2.9 million light years short of Andromeda and there is no documentary footage of extragalactic landscapes. Everything in this movie was shot either on Earth or in its immediate orbit. Herzog uses his cameraman’s footage of a polar underwater expedition as landscapes of a planet in the distant (although closest to us) Andromeda galaxy. The Earth spaceship on its way to Andromeda is nothing but a spaceshuttle and mathematicians are actual NASA employees. This film works on at least three levels for me:
Enviromental: The fact that we have places on Earth that look and sound so outlandish that they seem like they’re millions of light years away shows just how much we know about our own planet. The underwater scenes accompanied by voices of Sardinian singers do not look convincingly extraterrestrial, but that was not the point anyway. They are amazing and shocking. Most viewers of this movie have probably never seen anything like this before unless they are polar divers and live on Sardinia. In his highly sardonic way, Herzog serves up The Wide Blue Yonder as a requiem for our dying planet. The solution for our planet, which somehow gets squeezed out by linking oceanic footage with NASA footage, is that humankind needs to leave the Earth and move to some other planet. On the other hand, Herzog clearly does not believe that intergalactic travel will ever be possible, although he’s attempting to convince us, even mathematically, that it is. Which brings me to the next level of this movie…
Mathematical: I can only think of several popular science shows where mathematics and mathematicians are represented the way they truly are. In fictional movies, mathematicians are mad scientists, deeply disturbed, egotistical people without any sense for community. Just watch Straw Dogs, Pi, Good Will Hunting, A Beautiful Mind or most recently, Proof. Not only do these movies fail to show the way mathematicians’ thinking processes work, but you can’t even learn any mathematics from watching them because there are no mathematics in them. But Herzog has finally found a way to put mathematics in a fictional movie. Three mathematicians “act” as themselves, with one of them giving a mini-lecture on a blackboard on how people utilize planetary pulls to accelerate vehicles inside the solar system. The lecture is fun and contains completely accurate mathematics. While the mathematician talks, the other one is listening. This really is one of the ways mathematicians communicate their results within their community. The third mathematician speculates on how the existing theory could be extended to interstellar trips farther away. The concept of completion and generalization is possibly what defines mathematics as a distinct science, and we see it here for the first time ever in a fictional movie!
Economical: An idea that you can make a movie recycling footage from previously shot reels is not new. B movies utilized this technique many times and even mainstream cinema has done it (Trail of the Pink Panther), but the results (and reasons) for “patching” are usually questionable. In Herzog’s case – the recycling is the starting point that gives birth to everything else in this movie. It’s the whole point, and you especially see this in the context of its enviromental aspects.
http://www.wildblueyonder.wernerherzog.com/
Today’s Sunday service takes place in Carnegie, Oklahoma thirty-five years ago. The Indian House label in Taos, New Mexico, by the way, is still in full swing.
Kiowa Indian Pentacostal Church – “All you humans…”
This one’s not in the Mingo lunchbox book – a big strike against it, I’m afraid.
A fun flip-through despite memories of the sixth grade coat room, where forgotten lunchboxes with tuna sandwiches were frequently allowed to work their magic.
I amassed the whole collection circa 1974 by being good and waiting in the car while my mom went in to the grocery store to pick up a few things. (Shut up – everyone’s moms did this in the seventies.) They were available for purchase in a cookie jar by the cash register. I remember their distinct vinyl smell.
Here’s a slithering organ riff to creep into your skull. This aired on French TV in 1963 and I don’t think it ever saw official release until it showed up on a 2000 compilation. Gillian Hills was a British actress/singer who worked the Paris circuit during the early ’60s. Would a native French speaker pick up on her accent, I wonder, and would that give this particular clip starring the predatory Gainsbourg an edgy “lost girl” aura? Hills and future Gainsbourg duet partner Jane Birkin would later share a tumble with David Hemmings in Blow Up (1966).
This is the only Alice Cooper song I ever lived. Too young to have taken in his shock-rock heyday in real time (only through my friends’ big brothers’ record collections), “Clones” is the song that blasted irresistibly at the roller rink and circled around and around in my head until I’d finally drop allowance money on the 45. Outside Skateland, though, Alice was being run down for losing his balance in a disorienting new decade.
Bassist Pete Comita joined Cheap Trick in 1980 and was gone by early ’81, so he was in the group just long enough to (1) co-write and record “Reach Out” for the Heavy Metal movie soundtrack and (2) appear in the group’s historic view master photo shoot.
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