Dig this nifty mini-doc (27 packed minutes) that is not about Raymond Chandler per se. It’s about the corrupt doings of Los Angeles in the 1930s and how they inspired and impacted what Chandler wrote about as his mid-life career as a writer was launched (he’d been an executive at
See that top video of New York City in 1956? See the video below it of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier Book 2? Roll them both simultaneously (the NYC footage has no sound) and spend a few minutes of your Friday taking a poignant time travel trip to a New York
On November 9, 1965, shortly after 5PM, New York City began experiencing the ominous signs of an impending blackout due to a gradual loss of available electricity. The cause of the failure was the setting of a protective relay on one of the transmission lines near Niagara Falls. The safety
Here is a most peculiar piece of footage (and short–only 28 seconds) showing a garden party at Francis Ford Coppola’s Napa Vally home sometime in the mid 1970s. We see Francis quaffing white wine in a plastic cup, George Lucas picking his teeth, Dennis Hopper bedecked in cowboy duds and
To finish off this weeks Marilyn M. expedition, let’s view this very short but very interesting clip of film from the abortive ‘Somethings Got To Give’ shoot. It’s a brief moment just after the shot’s been slated but before Cukor has said ‘action’ (or ‘camera’ as was his habit) in
Yesterday we looked at some creepy silent footage shot the morning of Marilyn Monroe’s death at her house in Brentwood. Today we look at some equally creepy footage–but creepy for an entirely different reason. Apparently the house was offered up for sale in 2010 but for whatever reason didn’t sell–it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtXlX7uAlCQ I’m reading James Ellroy’s magnificent new novel ‘The Enchanters’, much of which has to do with the still mysterious death of Marilyn Monroe. Most of the Monroe material thus far (I’m halfway through) revolves around her house in Brentwood, where she was discovered dead of an overdose of barbituates
Here’s some gorgeously colorized footage of lower Broadway and the surrounding environs at the beginning of the last century. Unlike the colorized footage of the city in 1947 that I posted last week, this includes the black and white version of the same footage–it comes after the colorized stuff finishes
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