Seventy-Eighty-Ninety-Oughty: Vinyl Therapy

A few more sleeves from the vinyl collection: Dated 1979 - 2008.  

Some were record store & flea market finds.  Others were gifts from friends.  

From The Vault: Vinyl Therapy

Several of my 1950s and 60s vinyl LPs, some of which are in frames on my walls.  The early 1960s "Music From Out Of Space" sleeve was probably the first vintage album cover I ever fell in love with.  It was, perhaps 20 years old at the time, but it felt like an artifact from a not-so-distant era... One in which everything looked MUCH better than it did in the early 1980s. 

Contact Sheet: Times Square 1967

A recent eBay purchase:  Contact sheet from 1967 showing the actor Robert Morse filming a scene from "How To Succeed In Business" in an illuminated Times Square, NYC. (CLICK TO ENLARGE.)

1957 Times Square: The Sweet Smell Of Success

Several stills from another NYC film great: Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis' dual-star vehicle called "The Sweet Smell Of Success".  The Times Square we see here (1956 - 1957) is decidedly less grimy than the one depicted in later film fare, but the latter-day film noir touches used here create a moody foreshadowing of the dark times this district would see a decade later.

1968 Times Square: Midnight Cowboy

Stills from ANOTHER one of my favorite films, which also happens to feature Times Square.  In this particular film, director John Schlessinger has not only used this area as a backdrop for Joe (Jon Voight) Buck's meanderings, but also cast the square as a character:  a seething witness to all things.

8MM Film Stills: 1950s & 60s Times Square

A collection of screen shots from several amateur 8mm films found on YouTube.  Pretty colorful stuff that serves to animate many of the photos of the square I've been collecting since I was about 8 or 9 years old.  

Cinerama: Taxi Driver (Filmed 1975)

Stills from Martin Scorsese's magnum opus on crime, isolation and despair. While Robert De Niro is the lead actor, the REAL star of this film is the steaming, lurid, neon-dappled grit of New York City in 1975. When asked the name of my favorite movie of all time, I always give this title.  As many times as I come back to it, I always find it completely satisfying for the vivid illustration of its themes: both conceptual and visual.

Seventy-Eighty-Ninety-Oughty: Vinyl Therapy