Quentin Tarantino has countless fans all around the world, increasingly many of whom are too young to ever have rented a tape from a video store. But when those twenty-something cinephiles learn his origin story as a filmmaker, they must suspect they missed out on a valuable experience in the VHS era, whatever its inconveniences. When Tarantino broke out in the nineteen-nineties with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, he was publicly celebrated not just for those films, but for his having made them as a video-store-clerk-turned-auteur.

Indeed, it really does seem true that Tarantino’s cinematic sensibility owes something to the years he’d spent exercising his movie expertise behind the counter at Video Archives in Manhattan Beach. When the store closed in 1995, the freshly ascendant Tarantino seized the opportunity to buy up its thousands of VHS tapes. Roger Avary, his fellow Archives alumnus and collaborator on the screenplay for Pulp Fiction, bought the Laserdiscs. Though much of Avary’s collection has succumbed to the “disc rot” that notoriously afflicts that format, Tarantino’s collection has held up for more than a quarter-century.

Now Tarantino’s […]

The Wizard of Oz came out more than 80 years ago, but there must still be a few among us who remember seeing it in the theater. Only they would have felt completely the power of its famous scene when Dorothy leaves black-and-white Kansas and enters the colorful land of Oz. Much of the power of art comes from contrast, and this particular contrast could hardly have been a more persuasive advertisement for the power of Technicolor. After a development history of more than twenty years, that color motion-picture process had by 1939 reached the stage of its technological evolution called “Process 4,” which enabled studios to make use of not just some but all of the spectrum.

This final form of Technicolor enraptures viewers even today, reproducing colors as it did at intense, sometimes borderline-psychedelic depths of saturation. The process found its ideal material in the fantasy of The Wizard of Oz, with its yellow brick road (choosing whose exact shade inspired about a week of deliberation at MGM), its ruby slippers (calculatedly changed from the silver shoes in […]

Is re-playing or re-recording a song written and performed by someone else an act of love or predation? Your host Mark Linsenmayer is joined by Too Much Joy’s Tim Quirk, the Gig Gab Podcast’s Dave Hamilton, and the author of A Philosophy of Cover Songs Prof. P.D. Magnus to talk about different types of and purposes for covers, look a little at the history, share favorites, and more.

A few of the many cover songs we mention include:

• Too Much Joy’s “That’s a Lie” and “Seasons in the Sun“
• Otis Redding’s “Respect” (not a cover; this is the lesser known original adapted by Aretha Franklin)
• The Clash’s “Police and Thieves” (the original is by Junior Murvin)
• R.E.M.’s “Superman” (much more famous that the original by “The Clique“)
• Bitter […]

Joni Mitchell almost quit the music industry in 1996, two years after releasing what critics called her best album since the 70s, 1994’s Turbulent Indigo. “I was in a losing fight with a business that basically, you know, was treating me like an also-ran or a has-been, even though I was still doing good work,” she told an interviewer at the time. “Everything about the business disgusted me.”

But show business has never really been about the show or the business for Mitchell. From her deeply personal songwriting to her vocal vulnerability, she imbues her music with the deepest parts of herself. Then there’s her brilliantly idiosyncratic guitar playing. “Her guitar doesn’t really sound like a guitar,” Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers writes at Acoustic Guitar. “The treble strings become a cool-jazz horn section; the bass snaps out of syncopations like a snare drum; the notes ring out in clusters that simply don’t come out of a normal six-string.”

Mitchell “mastered the idea that she could tune the guitar any way she wanted,” says David Crosby. She tuned to “the numbers in […]

Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris stars Owen Wilson as a Hollywood screenwriter on vacation in the French capital. Alas, the City of Lights as it is in the twenty-first century doesn’t satisfy him. When he walks his streets he thinks only of the nineteen-twenties, when a traveler in Paris could easily cross paths with the likes of Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, and Edgar Degas — as well as expatriates from Pablo Picasso and Djuna Barnes to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Or so he imagines, at any rate, and so he goes on to experience when he finds himself transported back in time to the city of the “Lost Generation” at each stroke of midnight.

With the video above, you, too, can take a trip to nineteen-twenties Paris — as well as nineteen-twenties New York, Chicago, San Francisco, London, Berlin, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Nice, Geneva, Milan, and Venice. A compilation of period footage sourced from the Prelinger Archives, it lightly colorizes, adds ambient sound, and in other ways enhances its disparate materials to make them feel all of a piece.

And indeed, […]