She captures the indefinable and turns it into music

Welcome to Xenon

Photo courtesy of Pinside

As an addendum to this week’s pinball post, I wanted to share this delightful video clip: Suzanne Ciani Creates The Soundtrack For A Pinball Machine. It’s some sort of TV segment about the efforts of Cianni, a still-active Grammy-nominated electronic composer, to craft music and sounds for the 1980 Bally release Xenon (which we played at Silverball!). 

There’s so much I love about this video.

All the analogue buttons and knobs. The plummy British narrator. The weirdly staged scenes, and Ciani’s game and even flirty attitude toward the artifice. The unexpected, spit-take lewdness of the soundtrack itself. And of course the portrayal of the creative process behind a key part of a fascinating pinball machine. It’s very much worth your seven minutes. 

As a side note, searching for Xenon just now introduced me to the Pinside website, which is a news engine, database, and social network for pinball nerds. So now there’s that. 

Busy week, short post, but here’s a media roundup: 

Books finished: 

• C Comics #2, by Joe Brainard and friends - a reprint (courtesy of my favorite comic shop and small publisher Desert Island) of a very rare art/poetry comic spearheaded by the late art polymath Brainard and featuring contributions from many great poets associated with the New York School - John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, Kenward Elmslie and others. A fascinating, fun, medium-straddling artifact. 

Books started: 

• Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, by Claire Dederer

• Who Will Make the Pancakes: Five Stories, by Megan Kelso

Movies: 

• Barbie - We finally got to see this on a visit to CT because it kept being sold-out in Brooklyn! So much ink has spilled on this one that I don’t have anything unique to add other than that we all really enjoyed it. Allan 4-eva! 

• The Scarlet Empress - Josef Sternberg directs Marlene Dietrich as Catherine the Great. It’s hard to know what’s baroque - the mind-boggling expressionist sets or the blinding lighting on Dietrich’s face at all times. A true slice of Depression era weirdness. 

Until next time!