It’s not uncommon for yesteryears raciest things to be described in the current day as ‘tame’ or ‘now innocent’. But the 1920s had a lurid, highly sexually charged nature that was far ahead of its time, though it was soon to be quashed by much tamer subsequent decades. Nowhere is
Here’s a few minutes of grooving black and white footage shot from the rear of a car in Burbank, California in the late 1950s. We are in James Ellroy’s Los Angeles, a dead-ass Valley strip near Warner Brothers filled with places called ‘The Tick Tock Lounge’, ‘The Kings Arms Steakhouse’
My family moved from New York City to Los Angeles in 1969 when I was five years old. The house my parents bought was at the top of Laurel Canyon and Mulholland Drive. In terms of public schools this meant that I was able to go to schools either in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TtERu8NKf8 A few days ago I posted a video of Vincente Minnelli’s abandoned mansion in Beverly Hills. It’s a fascinating and acrid experience to witness the shards of a once worldly and elegant existence. So lets close the week with a more sophisticated and Minelli-esque moment and bring the man
Before you read any further let me quickly give you fair warning that the above posted videos are a complete and total waste of time, lacking in anything remotely akin to cultural interest, intellectual rigor or even pop-culture delight. Still, I find the mid-show plugs that aired in the middle
For many years I would drive by a large, dilapidated house that sits on the corner of Sunset Blvd. and Crescent Drive–the house is angled so as to be literally facing the Beverly Hills Hotel across the street–and wonder why the hell somebody didn’t buy it and fix it up.
Here’s one of those weirdly mesmerizing ‘history of a logo’ videos that are a staple of a complete Youtube diet. This is the history of the 20th Century Fox logo over a 100 year period. I knew that William Fox, an independent film distributor/producer, was the originator of things somehow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0emVTQEWhjM Dig a live radio remote from the premiere of Judy Garland’s 1954 “A Star Is Born”, featuring the voices of Judy Garland, Moss Hart (who wrote the script) and Kitty Carlisle (Hart’s wife). Moss Hart sounds like a man playing the role of a playwright named Moss Hart and
‘Healthy, Wealthy and Dumb’ (1938) is the 31st short comedy made by The Three Stooges for Columbia Pictures. The film was released on Friday, May 20th 1938 (the 140th day of the Gregorian Calendar). Dates of the actual shoot are for some reason missing but we can surmise it was
All week we’ve been dancing around the first ‘Crime of the Century’, the 1924 murder of a youth named Bobby Franks by two wealthy Chicago teenagers. So let’s end things with a nice, crisp History Channel doc on the crime. Aside from those dreadful ‘reenactment’ shots using non-speaking (and therefore