Monday, December 22, 2014

Download Free Music From Your Library

Do you have a library card?

li·brary kard noun \ˈlī-ˌbrer-ē kard, -ˌbre-rē kard; British usually & US sometimes : identification that permits someone to temporarily take home literary, musical, artistic, or reference materials (as books, manuscripts, recordings, or films) that are kept in a building and are for use but not for sale
I have a library card with the New York Public Library system. On my first perusal of the library system's web site one year ago this week, I found a link that lead me to Free Music!


Freegalmusic.com allows anyone with a current library card to download three songs a week for free. These songs are 256 kbps, in the MP3 format and contain no DRM encoding. In my recent searches I have seen some music that is currently out-of-print but still downloadable from the library system - which must have some ragged old compact disc in a dusty branch somewhere. What a treat!
Freegal also allows logged in users to stream three hours of music a day. FREE!
To find out if you can download and stream using Freegal Music, you'll have to search the web site of your local library to see if they partner with Freegal. You can connect to the web site from the New York Public Library site using this link and check out the music selection ... but cannot log in (or download) without a valid library card. Recently I've downloaded:

  • Carrie Underwood
  • Mark Ronson
  • Hozier
  • Michael Jackson
  • Bob Dylan
  • Kaye Ballard
  • Barbra Streisand
  • Foo Fighters
  • Beyonce
  • Elvis Presley
  • Pink Floyd
  • Miley Cyrus
  • Daft Punk
  • Pitbull
  • Miles Davis
  • Meghan Trainor

There's also an app for it! The Freegal App allows you to search and browse the Freegal Music collection of your library, and to download, store and play your Freegal MP3 files on your smartphone. OverDrive is another service. It is a virtual check out/return catalog of digital books and music. Good for Kindle/eBook/audiobook users. Not sure how the return actually works but I have no doubt that it does.

This information was originally published when I saw this sign, splashed with a picture of Leona Lewis, that I found in the Rose Garden branch of the San Jose Public Library when I lived on the left coast.


Sunday, December 21, 2014

How Colleen Moore Broke Into The Movies


Portrait from How I Broke Into The Movies

With the recent discovery, restoration, and availability on Warner Archive disc of Why Be Good? and Synthetic Sin, I thought this an opportune time to post the second world internet premiere from the book How I Broke Into The Movies. How I Broke Into The Movies was published in 1930 and contains articles on the title theme written by movie stars of the day like Joan Crawford, Buster Keaton, Mary Pickford, Clara Bow, Al Jolson, Greta Garbo, and 53 other notable actors. The first article from the book was published in my posting on Marion Davies. This second article was written by the inimitable flapper with the black helmet who starred in the discovered films previously mentioned, and might possibly be the first time (although not the last time) that Colleen Moore took pen to paper as a published writer.

This article continues after the WORLD INTERNET PREMIERE break.


How I Broke Into The Movies by Colleen Moore
Right click to open the image in a new tab.

Why Be Good? and Synthetic Sin are the last silent films Colleen made - although technically they are sound synchronized. In the time following Al Jolson's history-making You ain't heard nothin' yet, studios were transitioning to sound by releasing silent films with timed music and sound effects recorded to shellac discs. The disc was started when the movie began and thus movie and sound were synchronized. Why Be Good? and Synthetic Sin were both discovered in an Italian archive almost ten years ago; fortunately, the Vitaphone discs for Why Be Good? were complete and available but only the final disc of Synthetic Sin was found. For the theatrical showings and on disc, Why Be Good? is sound synchronized while Synthetic Sin has a piano score until the last reel when the disc is used.*


These pictures of domestic goddess Moore were published
in the January 1922 issue of Pantomime magazine.


Colleen's career started in 1917 with an appearance in The Bad Boy. She, like many other actresses of the time, wore her hair in long curls to emulate the most successful and highest paid actress of the time, Mary Pickford. It wasn't until 1923 when Colleen was begging First National Studio for the starring role in their film of the best-selling novel Flaming Youth that her mother offered this sage advice: Why don't we cut your hair and then make [the studio] give you a test for the part? Out came the scissors, Colleen got the part and Flaming Youth became her biggest film hit to date. The film made Colleen Moore a huge star (and for a time the highest paid actress in Hollywood). Girls everywhere cut their hair into a Dutch bob and copied her style of dress. Before Clara Bow, Louise Brooks and Joan Crawford, Colleen was the quintessential flapper.


This clip is all that remains of Flaming Youth the
film that put Colleen Moore, and flapperdom, on the map.

Several other films with Colleen are available online including the WORLD INTERNET PREMIERE of the (public domain) silent film Ella Cinders which I've (personally) scored using (public domain) jazz tunes from the 1920s courtesy of archive.org. Ella Cinders was a huge hit for Colleen in 1926. Based on the popular comic strip of the time (and the tale of Cinderella), Ella Cinders enters her hometown beauty contest to win a chance to make movies in Hollywood. Of course, there's a mean stepmother and two ugly stepsisters as well as a ball and a handsome prince, and Colleen excels as the put-upon Ella. At this point, her skill as an actress had been honed for almost ten years and her comic mug as she learns to act from a book (similar to the scene of Marion Davies' acting mug in Show People) is classic. Colleen is poignant, pretty and priceless.

WORLD INTERNET PREMIERE


I've uploaded Colleen Moore's Ella Cinders with a custom score
using jazz tunes from the 1920s to both archive.org and YouTube.
A list of the songs and artists is below.*

The Scarlet Letter is Colleen's last film, a 1934 talking version of the Nathaniel Hawthorne novel. It's a mashup of a movie, starting with humor and then veering down the dramatic path with the classic story of adultery. Colleen is fine in her performance but the movie is a little too mundane to be engrossing, coming down to a curio best viewed by fans of Colleen Moore.

The Power And The Glory was the first screenplay written by Preston Sturges to be made into a movie, and won the 1933 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. The film is often cited as a precursor in narrative style and theme to Citizen Kane. Colleen herself has called it out as her best and she is wonderful in an understated performance (aging from her 20s to her 60s) playing off her equally skilled co-star Spencer Tracey. The version available on YouTube looks to be from television with hard-coded Spanish subtitles (the credits are not original) and can be seen in six parts.

Colleen Moore was a smart woman and realized the historical significance of the motion picture business and her involvement in it. In 1944, she donated fifteen of her movies to the Museum of Modern Art where she felt they would be stored and protected. Unfortunately, MOMA did no such thing and the films were left to rot when they were finally discovered again in the 1970s. Thus, many of Colleen's films, if available, are incomplete and in poor condition. This is why the discovery and restoration of Why Be Good? and Synthetic Sin has been celebrated.

Colleen left acting after The Scarlet Letter and turned her talents to a hobby that she had since childhood: dollhouses. Her love for dollhouses started when she was four years of age and her father made her one out of cigar boxes. Over time, he made three more and Colleen began collecting miniatures for the houses. Kathleen's Collection (as it was called) continued into adulthood and bade her father to ask one day in 1928 Why don't we build a fairy castle to house your collection? The set designers and construction people of First National Studio became the architects of what was referred to as Colleen's Folly. The interior has running water and electricity, solid gold chandeliers (studded with diamonds and emeralds), scores copied in tiny notes by composers such as Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Irving Berlin and George Gershwin and leather-bound miniature books written in small-scale handwriting by Noel Coward, Sinclair Lewis, Thornton Wilder, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edna Ferber and John Steinbeck (among others). You will also see glass slippers small enough to fit a 5-inch tall Cinderella, a pistol so small enough to fire tiny silver bullets, a floating spiral staircase, unsupported and a carved ivory floor. Now referred to as Colleen Moore's Fairy Castle, it has a scale of one inch to one foot and has been on display at the Museum of Science and Technology in Chicago since 1949.

In 1968, Colleen published her autobiography called Silent Star. Although it certainly dealt with her films and marriages (three to the point at which it was published), she also recounts many stories of other actors that she lived through first hand or heard from others. She recounts among other infamous tales, the Fatty Arbuckle trials, the William Desmond Taylor murder, Wallace Reid's drug addiction and death, Mack Sennett and Mabel Normand, D.W. Griffith's fall from Hollywood grace, and the marriage of Jean Harlow and Paul Bern. It's a fascinating and charming look at the early days of Hollywood and the writing reflects Colleen's effervescence.

Having spent her post-Hollywood years earning a living in real estate and finance, the publisher of Silent Star asked her to pen a second book and in 1969, she published How Women Can Make Money in the Stock Market. In 1986 a third book was published in which Colleen played a major role. In 1967 King Vidor (a lifelong friend who also directed Colleen in The Sky Pilot in 1921) started researching the unsolved murder of William Desmond Taylor for a movie that financial whiz Colleen would produce. The film never came to fruition but Vidor's boxes of research were found after his death and became the nucleus for the best-selling book A Cast Of Killers by Sidney D. Kirkpatrick.

Colleen had no children of her own but was mother to the children of Homer Hargrave, her third husband who died in 1965; they had been married since 1936. In 1982, she married for a fourth time. She died six years later of stomach cancer, leaving behind a legacy of laughter, wonder and imagination.


This interview was published in a 1929 book by Lee Shippey called
Personal Glimpses of Famous Folks and Other Selections from the Lee Side o' L.A..


This interview was published in the March 1922 issue
of Pantomime magazine, an early Hollywood fan magazine.

See my Pinterest page for a slew of
pictures of Colleen from throughout her life and career.

*For more information on sound synchronized films, see the Vitaphone Project. Other Colleen Moore web sites include The Silent Collection featuring Colleen Moore and The Colleen Moore Project.

*Listing of songs used in Ella Cinders:

Friday, December 12, 2014

What is Art ... Amnesty?


Courtyard at MOMA PS1

As I warmed in the dinette with a cup of tea at MOMA PS1, the Long Island City adjunct to the Museum of Modern Art, the smell of hot lunch permeated the once-upon-a-time school building and the lining of my stomach, the latter causing some quiet growling. My friend arrived and we traversed the galleries finding ourselves fascinated by (the exhibits) Zero Tolerance, Samara Golden's The Flat Side of the Knife, Francesco Vezzoli's Teatro Romano and The Little Things Could Be Dearer. Nothing caused more discussion and consternation though than Bob and Roberta Smith's Art Amnesty. Art Amnesty begins in the museum courtyard with four dumpsters marked THROW YOUR ART AWAY. Somewhat perplexing but when we walked into the Art Amnesty gallery, I put two and two together, came up with four, and found a fascinating concept. According to the guidelines @BobandRoberta:
... are offering an opportunity for artists to dispose of their artwork at MoMA PS1, and to retire from making art. Beginning October 2, artists are invited to deposit their art in dumpsters located in the museum’s courtyard, which will be emptied as needed throughout the period of the Art Amnesty. Those who wish to exhibit their work one final time before it is destroyed may bring their art to the 2nd Floor Main Galleries, where museum staff will install it for public view. The museum will accept work under the Art Amnesty during regular hours, subject to certain restrictions outlined in the submission guidelines. The exhibition reprises and expands upon their Art Amnesty originally presented at Pierogi Gallery in 2002.


from Art Amnesty

The Art Amnesty gallery displays a lot of art; some of the larger pieces are actually very good, a scattered few wouldn't be out of place on their mother's refrigerator and much is very bad but all of it will be disposed of when the exhibit closes on March 8, 2015. There is some real garbage including a Merrel brand shoe marked as Champs that someone removed in the museum and a banana peel enclosed in an empty plantain chips bags. The exhibit seeks to answer the questions:
Why are some people artists while others are not? Was Joseph Beuys an idiot when he said everyone is an artist? Do artists think they are a cut above the rest of us? Are the arts a good in themselves, or is it much, much, more complicated than that?


from Art Amnesty

As I walked around the gallery I wanted to contribute. I surmised that the use of the word amnesty gives anyone the right to offer up art. At the very least I would've brought in a tshirt I designed for my crew d'tees line just to hang it in a nationally recognized museum - adjunct. But alas, all I could do was leave the gallery and visit the bathroom. I was still hungry so I ate a banana I had while listening to my friend urinate. When he had zipped up, I said that I should bring my banana peel into Art Amnesty. He was somewhat aghast but I countered that the point of the exhibit is amnesty, defined as a forgetting or overlooking of any past offense; in this case the offense being whatever the artist deems to be art. After some discussion, my friend pulled an empty bag of plantain chips out of his jacket pocket and said I might as well use this garbage too. When I realized that bananas and plantains were of the same fruit family but used (primarily) in different cultures I realized that by putting the banana peel into the plantain chip bag I was illustrating global assimilation. Much to my friend's consternation my art had turned into a collaborative piece.


Global Assimil- ation in Art Amnesty

I walked into the gallery and started explaining my thought process to the docent before asking if he really wanted to hear my thought process. He replied in the affirmative so I told him everything and he was perfectly fine with it - even smiling. Then I asked if he had some paper I could tape the bag to. He handed me a sheet and a stapler. Then I asked for a pen so I could title it. He directed me to a table with colored pencils and crayons and said I could use whatever was there. (Much of the art work in the gallery had obviously been done at this table.) So I wrote three lines on my paper:
  • GLOBAL in yellow signifying the sun
  • ASSIMIL- in blue signifying the sky
  • ATION in brown signifying the earth
I handed my art to the docent, filled out my I NEVER WANT TO SEE THIS WORK OF ART AGAIN pledge, signed the I WILL ENCOURAGE CHILDREN TO BE ALL THAT THEY CAN BE. CHOOSE ART AT SCHOOL. pledge (which is to be mailed to Jeb Bush), and my art was hung up (fittingly) next to the art work that I had deemed my favorite when I first walked through the gallery.


from Art Amnesty

As we walked home, my friend was resolute in his disgust. He said what I hung up was garbage, plain and simple. (What about the shoe? The Shoe!) No matter how much verbal diarrhea I explicated, my friend could not grasp the concept of Art Amnesty: that using the word amnesty in the exhibit's name allows anyone and everyone to contribute art, precluding judgment on said art and allowing anyone and everyone to proudly proclaim I am an artist. I might even go back with one of my crew d'tees tshirts!

PS: The day after my validation as an artist at MOMA PS1 I went grocery shopping and was asked to sign my credit card slip. When I handed the signed slip back to the cashier she told me I had the signature of an artist. That's two validations as an artist in one week!


Teatro Romano


Mirrors as The Flat Side of the Knife


from Zero Tolerance