My professional reading has taken me to Gena Caponi-Tabery’s 2003 book Jump for Joy: Jazz, Basketball, and Black Culture in 1930s America. It’s literally a history of jumping. An interesti
Why Husbands Flirt is a recently recovered 1918 film. It was part of the haul of undiscovered film found in New Zealand a few years back. I wouldn’t call this a great film, but it is an amusing
We started the day with Poe, let’s end the day the same, with this wild 1928 version of The Fall of the House of Usher, from a live performance in 2010 with a new score. This is really a remarka
This little 3 minute cartoon from 1916 is a harsh look at poverty in the early twentieth century, focusing on a guy so hungry that he tries to get in an accident so he can cash in on his insurance pla
Slade Gorton died today. Despite the Times obit saying he was a moderate, ol’Slade was not a moderate. He was a mean, nasty racist who especially hated Native Americans. In fact, when the tribes
In the 1980s, the CIA realized that the only way to get Reagan to pay attention to what they were saying was to make movies for him. So they did. This is a film, I think from 1984 or 1985, that is an
The few opportunities we have to see Django Reinhardt’s hands in action are well worth including in this series, even more so when he is playing with St茅phane Grappelli. Enjoy.
I just finished reading Arturo Fontaine’s remarkable novel La Vida Doble, a story of a Chilean underground fighter in the 1980s who gets captured and tortured and then totally turns on her old c