Warning: the above video contains a very violent race car crash. It also contains some truly bitchin’ footage shot from inside one of the cars that collided–you get to see and feel what it’s actually like to be in one of these formula racers. Two nights ago (Sunday the 16th–which
In 1971 at the Indy 500 a ‘Pace car’ (or safety car) went off the track as soon as the race began and crashed into a stand holding the photographers. Somehow there were no fatalities. The whole event is covered in nice, blurry old color footage in the above video
Of al the dopey sports that I don’t get, car racing tops the list (or takes the cake, if you prefer). Cars zooming around a track at dangerous speeds. Is this really any fun? Not unless somebody crashes. And then you feel like a heel for enjoying the disaster, for
Yesterday I posted an hour of Muzak called ‘Sounds of the Department Store’. Today we listen to another 90 minutes of this gorgeous old stuff, this time with images largely picturing supermarkets of yore. According to the YouTube poster these are: More great tunes from Bruton and other classic music
Yesterday I was in a restaurant in midtown Manhattan–not a full-tilt restaurant, more like a La Pain Quotidion style joint–and I was having trouble having a conversation over the din of the music that was playing. Was it even music? It’s hard to describe the sounds emanating from the speakers
A mere five years before portraying Franklin D. Roosevelt in the network mini-series ‘Eleanor and Franklin’, Edward Hermann portrayed “one of the country’s leading bachelors” in the very amusing Panasonic Stereo commercial posted above. We are deep in the early 70s groove here and Hermann’s portrait of the era’s swinging
The above 1973 commercial for a Pioneer home stereo system plays more like a current day SNL parody of a 1973 Pioneer home stereo system commercial than the real thing. Yet it’s the real thing. Did we really look, act and talk like that? The early 70s are becoming as
In the mid-to-late 1920s Jack Benny was a star monologist in Vaudeville, big enough to be tapped to be the ’emcee’ of the MGM musical ‘Hollywood Revue of 1929’. But as the above short film ‘A Broadway Romeo’ (1931) will make clear, this is not the Jack Benny that we
This week we’ve been looking at Bix Beiderbecke on film. Now let’s listen to his friend and collaborator Hoagy Carmichael for a few minutes discussing Bix. I don’t know when this radio interview is from nor who the English chap is conducting it. But he manages to get the normally
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmD7jeIEkfg (NOTE: HIT ABOVE ‘PLAY ON YOUTUBE’ BUTTON TO WATCH VIDEO. THE GUY WHO POSTED IT APPARENTLY THINKS HE OWNS IT). When I was a kid in the early 70s getting into jazz and old movies, two great revivals were taking place. One was The Marx Brothers revival, which began