Sweet find among lost gems on cool site

YouTube gets its share of criticism that it's a cesspool of junk, but it's also a historian's dream. So are sites such as Wiped News and Missing Episodes, sites that highlight long-lost radio or TV broadcasts and films.

Case in point in this video of glam rockers Sweet -- long a favorite of mine -- performing "Action" on the "Top of the Pops" music show.

What's interesting is this 1975 video -- missing from the BBC archives -- was recorded by Sweet singer Brian Connolly on a home video recorder. This is 1975, when consumer VCRs were in their infancy. In a story behind the video, Wiped News estimates Connolly's VCR would have cost him the equivalent of $10,000 dollars at the time.

Even at that price, there's some choppiness to the recording. But for you oldsters out there, can you recall the first time you saw a VCR in action? It was pretty powerful stuff.

"The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo"

It’s not often I stumble across a novel that’s all consuming. But the $6 Kindle pricing and rave reviews enticed me to jump on the Steig Larsson bandwagon this past week and I have to admit that “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” was a blast. 

"The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" was Steig Larsson's first novelThings start slow as Larsson introduces us to the main characters – an embattled journalist, a disturbed computer hacker and an aging industrialist committed to solving a decades-old family mystery -- but the story quickly picks up steam and doesn’t let up, with twists and turns every few pages. The characters are so offbeat and richly detailed that it’s easy to see why Larsson’s books have become best sellers. There’s nothing cookie cutter in this mystery, which makes it stand out in a genre full of hackneyed storylines and sappy endings.

Larsson died a few years ago, shortly after “Dragon Tattoo” was released in his native Sweden (where most of the book is set). But before he died, Larsson completed a trilogy of mysteries based around the “Dragon Tattoo” characters. “The Girl Who Played With Fire” is a current best-seller and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest” is set for its U.S. release next spring. The reviews are consistently good, so I’m looking forward to tackling the second book over Christmas vacation when there’ll be time to immerse myself once again into the adventurous world of Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander. 

An instrument that's still ahead of its time

 I spent some time this weekend catching up on recorded TV shows, including one from this summer titled “Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey,” an odd 1995 documentary about one of the strangest musical instruments – and inventors – of our time. 

Leon Theremin – inventor, Soviet spy and all-around odd duck -- created his crazy self-titled electronic instrument about 90 years ago, and even today the theremin is something of a mystery despite playing prominent roles in dozens of Hollywood movies and hit songs like The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations.”

Lydia Kavina plays a theremin (Courtesy of Wikipedia)The theremin is hard to describe, but in short it’s an odd-shaped electronic instrument in which the musician moves his/her hands near metal rods – without physically touching them – to create and manipulate sound waves. Its sound is wide-ranging but has been pigeon-holed as device to create spacelike sound effects. Visualize audio sine waves expanding and contracting and you’ve got the gist of how it sounds. 

I first learned of the theremin years ago, from a musician friend named Blake Jones, who regularly plays one on stage and on his recordings, both solo and with his band Trike Shop. His most recent CD, in fact, is titled “Theremins of Mystery” (listen to the audio samples for a flavor of the instrument’s odd sound or check out a bunch of videos featuring Blake’s theremin handiwork).

As the famous Robert Moog noted in the documentary, Theremin laid the groundwork for the electronic synthesizers — including the Moog -- that gained popularity beginning in the 1970s. But what strikes me is that 90 years later, the theremin is just as oddly fascinating now as it was when it first wowed high-brow audiences at Carnegie Hall, who heard it used to re-interpret classical standards. 

Perhaps these days, the theremin's future is not as a physical instrument but as an iPhone or Android app. Hmmm.