Click on the above (or perhaps you’d be better off clicking here for mysterious reasons) and you will be treated (I guess that’s the correct word) to a whole pile of New York/New Jersey regional television commercials from the early to mid 1980s. Why do these things mesmerize me? Partly
Subscribe in a reader What on earth was the above video made for? It’s a short film in the style of a tourist-lure travelogue promoting New York. Only its point is how lousy New York is. The Youtube poster is at least ten years off in his estimation of when
Yesterday’s posting of a TV commercial advertising the 70s swingers club ‘Plato’s Retreat’ has provoked a good deal of controversy in the…oh, I can’t lie. It provoked no controversy whatsoever. And so I will double down with more on the infamous sex club. Above is a 1985 local New York
1970s New York was messy, smelly, worn-out and stale. Plenty has been written (and much of it romanticized) about 70s New York, so what else is there to say? Well, watch the above commercial for ‘Plato’s Retreat’, a sex club that was located in the Ansonia Hotel on Broadway and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMI4WAZnn24 Above is a ten-minute ‘doc’ about director William Dieterle, whose film ‘Jewel Robbery’ I posted about yesterday. Actually the above isn’t a doc so much as it is Dieterle’s Wikipedia entry as recited by a robot-voice. (The giveaway is when Mr. Robot says ‘David O. Selznick’ but puts a
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oicmvvec4q8 Last night I attended a screening at the TCM Film Festival in Hollywood of a 1932 pre-code William Powell/Kay Francis movie that I’d never heard of, the somewhat generically named ‘Jewel Robbery’. What an unexpected delight this perfectly preserved antique was. Smart, surprising, filled with the usual saucy pre-code
‘When they met they way they smiled I knew that I was through…oh, you crazy moon, what did you do?’ With that opening line the stage is set for a song that depicts a nauseating moment for anyone who’s experienced it; the moment when the one you love suddenly fixes
See my previous post (if you haven’t already wallowed in it) in which I discuss the sub-genre of songs in the American Popular Songbook that deal with cuckoldry. Yesterday’s song, ‘Two Cigarettes In The Dark’, featured a husband coming upon his wife in flagrante delicto with her lover. Today we
The great songs of the 20s/30s/40s/50s mostly have as their subject love. True love, unrequited love, past loves etc. It’s very sweet that this was what the ‘music of the street’ focused on and, if you’re a deep fan of the so-called ‘Great American Songbook’, you’ll know the really great
On April 21st, 1954, Garry Moore–host of the TV game show ‘I’ve Got A Secret’–welcomed one of the Marx Brothers as a special guest. The gimmick was that it was Chico but that he was dressed up as Harpo, with wig, trench coat, horn, the whole number. The panelists had