Behold. “Steamboat Willie” was the first Mickey Mouse cartoon. [First distributed in theaters, not first produced —Ed.] It premiered November 18, 1928, at the Colony Theater in New York City. It was also the first cartoon to have synchronized sound. If you watch the whole thing, which I had never done until last year, you’ll [...]
A great talent whom I’d meant to write more about sooner. He died today. I knew his work through the New York Review of Books, for which he’d been drawing for nearly 50 years. Some of my favorites of his include: He drew with an appealing wit and detail. The circumstances of the job meant [...]
It’s fun to take pictures from high up. A few years ago, a friend working as a wedding planner let me roam around the top floor of the Bank of America building as she set up someone’s wedding ceremony. These were the best sustained views of San Francisco I’ve ever had. In the picture above, [...]
I finally saw the 2005 film The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I thought it was pretty good, actually, despite the initial criticism. Anyway, Pieter Breugel the Elder’s The Tower of Babel, 1563, has been on the mind of late. The Old Testament, keeping things interesting.
On Tuesday, I wrote about the financial mess on Wall Street, and pointed out that the gold-medal-winning US women’s soccer team rang the closing bell on Monday. “There’s no investment like gold,” I wrote. Gold! I should have put my money where my blog is. Wednesday, the price of gold rose more in value that [...]
Rough day in the markets today. We saw it coming last night (we’ve seen it coming). Choose your loser. But it ended on a high note, right? The champion U.S. Olympics Women’s Soccer Team was on hand to ring the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange. So there were a few winners on [...]
1969+clever teenager+John Lennon+reel-to-reel audio tape = Oscar nominated short film. Go to the Youtube site for a high-res version.
Would be nice to have a little color around here. You’ll learn something, too. Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo. Posting will be slow, er, slower, until the home internet thing is straightened out.
I recently saw a scene from a film called The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed), accompanied by original score, on an arts channel a couple of weeks ago. Here’s a short clip of what I saw, with a new score by the Khoury Trio. Achmed has escaped to China with the [...]
Grace Paley died two days ago. She was a sweet and humane poet and short story writer, one of those individuals for whom many will admit a familiarity with the name if not a specific knowledge of the work because some high school English teacher somewhere along the line (but a fan, truly) assigned a [...]
One of my Flickr contacts is a talented photographer named Simon Crubellier. I like his photos very much. They possess a certain elegance, such as this haunting, lovely photo of Canary Wharf. And there must be something to the kind of person whose interests would run to “urban paranoia and dereliction,” part of the description [...]
An older and very accomplished journalist once wrote to me that the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he went, is “a jealous god.” And sometimes, I think, so am I. Let’s say “demigod.” That accursed Wes Anderson. He is so good, our sensibilities are so complimentary, I would love to make the movies [...]
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