Here’s another marvelous view of a now very vanished New York City, courtesy of the YouTube artist known as NASS. The city is seen in color (via colorization–it was originally shot in black and white) with an added soundbed of city noise, which somehow works wonder in terms of bringing
As a jazz pianist–in other words as a decrepit hipster wallowing in a musical genre that few people care about anymore–I should find it easy to mock the ‘easy listening’ pianists of the 1950s and 60s as total squares who sold-out for big money, playing unbelievably sappy and simple arpeggio-ridden
Yesterday I posted about Burton Holmes, travel guru and the inventor of the ‘travelogue’–movies showing the public exotic lands that they could never hope to travel too. The post shows views of Hollywood in the early 1930s, by then Holmes adopted home base. Above is another reel of Hollywood-based Holmes
Below is a marvelous short series of clips of Hollywood in the early 1930s as photographed by the then famous (and now forgotten) Burton Holmes, inventor of the ‘travelogue’. Holmes was a moderately successful ‘travel lecturer’ beginning in the late 19th century when this was a particularly exotic profession. He
This extraordinary piece of film is a new one to me. It shows sections of a trolley ride–the camera mounted in the front of the car–down Broadway, from Herald Square to Union Square sometime in the very early twentieth century. Though the quality of the picture is poor, there is
Above is a charming reel of a few old RCA Victor television and radio ads. As always with ads for old technology, the yuk-yuk factor is easy, low-hanging fruit. Of course old TV sets look silly. So do the annoucers who sit there extolling their virtues. (They also sound silly–the
The LaserDisc made its debut in 1978 with a high-quality version of ‘Jaws’, exciting film lovers the world over with its superb visual and audio quality, its inclusion of the then brand new concept of extras and chaptering and its handsome packaging. It died the death of a dog in
Music has been delivered for decades on various forms of discs that spin and scratch, from the 78rpm shellac recording through the 45 to vinyl and finally, in the mid-1980s, the Compact Disc. It’s hard to remember that the CD was once a miraculous piece of technology–especially now that most
Some rarities of the past are so deeply weird–so obscure and near indecipherable–that viewing/listening to them is akin to discovering hieroglyphics of long dead civilizations and attempting to translate them into something relatively meaningful. Which brings us to ‘The Voice Of Hollywood’, a series of short films produced by Poverty
Recently I decided to unearth a pile of delicate, glass 78rpm records that I’ve been dragging around with me from one house to another over the years, each move threatening the life of these beauties. I hadn’t played them for many years–most were acquired when I was a kid and