https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIhj_xFKtM4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZc1TdJFAFs Back in 1994 (thirty years ago–Jesus!) I took a few flying lessons from a fellow who taught out of Santa Monica Airport, near where I then lived. I have no idea what spurred this interest, though I later found out that Prozac, which I then took, often results in
On December 16, 1960, two airplanes had collided in midair over Staten Island. One, a United Airlines DC-8 from Chicago heading to Idlewild (now Kennedy) International Airport, smashed into buildings in Sterling Place, just west of Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn . Apparently many thought a bombing occurred. Above
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fURATK5Yt30 Lets kick off the week with a…I’m almost said ‘bang’ but halted myself just in time, preventing a rare lapse in taste on my part. The Hindenburg disaster of 1937 was documented by a number of newsreel companies, with the above British Pathe footage probably being the…I almost said
Here’s another of YouTube artist NASS’s wonderful colorized views of old New York City (with added sound bed of urban atmosphere). This time we are exclusively on Fifth Avenue in midtown. The year is somewhere between 1936-1938 based on the automobiles. The city is unusually clean–the streets literally look polished
This is pretty messed up. I’ve been re-reading James Ellroy’s ‘The Black Dahlia’, the first novel in his L.A. Quartet and one that I haven’t revisited in many years. Thus, it’s fair to say that I am fully immersed in the post WW2 L.A. noir of it all. Now, YouTube
In December, 1929 the above remarkable footage was shot in the Times Square Theater during rehearsals of the Gershwin show ‘Strike Up The Band’. I’ve posted this before but every so often I rewatch it and am freshly amazed at what a rare and peculiar document it is. In it,
In 1931 George and Ira Gershwin went to Hollywood for the first time to compose the score for a Janet Gaynor/Charlie Farrell musical called ‘Delicious’. No popular songs of any particular note came out of this endeavor but, Gershwin being Gershwin, a symphonic masterwork somehow snuck its way into existence.
Last week (or was it the week before?) I posted an experimental 1929 film called ‘Skyscraper Symphony’ by Robert Florey, which was a paeon to art deco New York and the then startling proliferation of the massive and impressive buildings of the era. On a very different note, avant garde
Alfred Hitchcock’s first sound film, ‘Blackmail’ (1929) was shot in both silent and sound versions, a typical one-foot-in one-foot-out practice at the time. Above is a sound test made, it would seem, to see if the voice of the lead actress Anna Ondra would be suitable for recording. As you
One of my favorite underrated directors of the past is Charles Vidor. Among the top films in his filmography are ‘Cover Girl’ (1944) starring Gene Kelly and Rita Hayworth, which is certainly one of the best musicals of its era and the delightfully sensuous and darkly peculiar ‘Gilda’ (1946)–really the