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Lawrence Levi and David Kamp, the Film Snob brain trust, appeared on Tuesday, February 13, on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show to discuss films, snobbery, and the Oscars. You can listen to us here. One charming postscript to our appearance: In discussing nominee Helen Mirren’s oeuvre, Lawrence brought up her killer performance in 1980’s The Long Good Friday but couldn’t remember the name of that movie’s director. Seconds after we were finished with our segment, a WNYC staffer alerted us that Martin Scorsese was listening, and had instructed his assistant to call in to tell us that the director of Long Good Friday was John Mackenzie. Thanks, Marty! What a wonderful way to underscore what we say about you in the book: that you’re an “effervescent enthusiast,” a film buff rather than a snob, because you wish to share your knowledge rather than hoard it. February 13, 2007 More Film Snobbery »
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Leslie, the. Hefty chunk of audio hardware originally designed as an amplifier for the HAMMOND B3 organ. The Leslie is distinguished by a high-range speaker horn that rotates atop its cabinet, lending a strange vibrato and distortion to the sounds that are processed through it. The Beatles forever expanded the utility of the Leslie when, eager for a dramatic effect in the final verse of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” they broke into the circuitry of the cabinet and fed John Lennon’s vocals through the speaker. Ever since, the Leslie has been put to similarly exotic uses—to make guitars sound like sitars on the Box Tops’ 1967 hit “Cry Like a Baby,” and to make Mick Jagger’s vocals sound sinister on Exile on Main Street. More recently it has enhanced Portishead vocalist Beth Gibbons’s atmospheric keening on a song entitled, in tribute, “Leslie.”