Category: All Posts

Recovering and restoring sounds and pictures

For Thanksgiving, WBUR’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook rebroadcast a program from last year, about the discovery and restoration of the Bill Savory collection of Jazz radio broadcasts from the late 1930’s and early 40’s.

[audio:http://audio.wbur.org/storage/2010/09/onpoint_0910_2.mp3|titles=On Point: The Savory Collection]

It takes a lot of technical know-how and painstaking work to copy old 78 rpm transcription records and then clean them up digitally, without losing the vitality of the original performance. Compared to dealing with old audio recordings, handling and restoring movie film is an even more difficult and expensive undertaking. Here’s a fascinating short documentary on the Chaplin at Keystone restoration project.

http://youtu.be/voEGsQj4CPs

As wonderful as it is that computers have made it possible to salvage, reclaim, and reinvigorate these materials to an extent never before possible, I wonder about the future. There’s so much technology involved, with so many different digital formats, how will people be able to see and hear this stuff in a hundred years? Which reminds me. I have VHS home videos from a full-size camcorder that I need to transfer to the computer.

Beaucoup Arlo & Janis

I am very happy to report that cartoonist Jimmy Johnson has published Beaucoup Arlo & Janis, a 256-page, hard-bound collection of over 900 carefully selected A&J comic strips.

If you don’t already know about this, you’ve missed your chance to pre-order an autographed copy, but starting next week Jimmy will open sales to any and all, for the fantastic price of only $25. Arlo & Janis is one of my all-time favorite comic strips, and after years of Jimmy’s fans begging him for a book, I am delighted that he’s made it happen.

Home, Cold Home

There’s still no electricity at home. The utility company says it should be back on by Wednesday night, but if it isn’t we’ll be looking for a hotel room. I’ve got the fireplace going in the evening, and I can run space heaters off the portable generator. I have a 5-gallon gas container, but I wish the generator’s tank were bigger. We have oil lamps, and they work great. I can see why sperm whales were hunted to near extinction before petroleum took over. My GE Superadio III, 17 years old, has been our primary source of entertainment.

Compliments of great guy Mark Sinnott, here’s a follow-up pic from the Albany Comic Con, with me on the right, with Denro and Joe Sinnott. Men with caps! As always, I make a point of not looking directly into a camera flash, which is painful for somebody who has lattice degeneration.

LIFE misses the Beat

LIFE Magazine, or what’s left of it, has an online George Harrison tribute. There’s also a print edition of the LIFE tribute to George, but it has an error that kept me from buying the issue. It’s a particularly annoying error, that was probably repeated from Bob Spitz’s useless, mistake-filled book, The Beatles: The Biography. The error is that Pattie Boyd appeared in A Hard Day’s Night with her sister Jenny. This is incorrect. Jenny “Jennifer Juniper” Boyd was not in AHDN. The girl with Pattie was, of course, my friend Prudence Bury. The paragraph below was scanned from Hunter Davies’ book The Beatles, in which Pattie mentions her two sisters (Jenny and Paula), as well as Prue.

A couple of years ago I said that Prue’s hair stylist was her friend Vidal Sassoon. Here is a picture of Prue sporting a Sassoon cut. Vidal is on the right, and the man in the middle is Alexander Plunkett-Green, husband of fashion designer Mary Quant.