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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiWpmprZDrAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufop72Q74fA Here are two deleted scenes from ‘Cafe Metropole’, a 1937 20th Century Fox musical (sort of) starring Tyrone Power, Loretta Young and Adolphe Menjou. Both feature tap-dancing legend Bill Bojangles Robinson, who already had made screen history by dancing with Shirley Temple in another Fox movie ‘The Little Colonel’
This fascinating footage appears to be Jerry Lewis rehearsing a bit for his nightclub act in front of a live crowd–though they’re not the regular audience but rather a ‘test’ audience. Jerry was known to shoot footage of himself in order to play it back and see what things were
Yesterday in my post about New York City’s Elevated Trains, I mistakenly added 10th Avenue to the many streets that once hosted El trains. Actually, 10th (and 11th) Avenue hosted something much more interesting (and grim) than an El train. For many years before the construction of the High Line
Our ‘transportation series’ (see Tuesday’s post) continues with this marvelous ten-minute short film about the history and vanishing of New York City’s elevated trains. In the first half of the twentieth century the city was jammed with El trains–2nd Ave, 3rd Ave, 6th Ave, 9th Ave, 10th Ave all had
After a year-long hiatus my podcast ‘Movies Til Dawn’ has returned to the ether-waves, with none other than Orson Welles as my first post-reboot guest. How did I make contact with Orson, you ask? Via Ouija Board perhaps? No. I won’t even pretend that I interviewed the man (the way
The YouTube artist known as NASS has posted another of he/she/they’s wonderful updated urban history videos in which, by use of colorization, frame rate adjustment and an added soundbed, an old piece of documentary film becomes a most convincing and seductive new journey through the past. This is New York
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nFupfJk4T8 Yesterday we visited Vienna in 1896. (And on Monday we visited London in 1931. It’s been that kind of week.) Today we’ll watch an AI colorization of a few mintues of ‘Berlin–Symphony Of A Metropolis’, a documentary film by Walter Ruttman shot in 1927. Click here for an excellent