I've got a DVD of an early Frank Zappa film called Baby Snakes from Quickflix, which I'll watch next weekend on the home theatrette and evaluate it as multimedia. I'm not a diehard Zappa fan, not even a fan, as I've hardly heard any of the jazz-rock fusion music on the Hot Rats, Burnt Weeny Sandwich and Weasels Ripped My Flesh albums.

The film is structured around a late-'70s (1979?) Halloween stand in New York City with digressions throughout the first half for backstage antics, band interviews, and some outlandish clay animation from Bruce Bickford. Zappa is in transition from being a social commentator in a satirical mode to an act that veered between jazzy music concrete and scatalogical Dadaism.

My understanding is that Baby Snakes is a collection of concert footage, dressing-room slapstick, and clay-figure animation. The concert runs almost uninterrupted from the midway point of the DVD to the end, with many of the played in the set coming from the Sheik Yerbouti. album.

I've had a brief look at the DVD and I guess that many would see the stream of conscious blend of music and imagery as a shapeless, inexcusably long concert film full of particular blend of avant-garde pretension.