In the 1980s, video stores sold eighteen inch statues with oversized heads of celebrities from music, TV and film. From the 1950s to the 1990s, Esco Products of Brooklyn fabricated hundreds of different figures, from Groucho Marx to Louis Armstrong.
Category Archives: Chicago
Give me a call
The mixing of entertainment and news can be traced back to the penny press, but the
for the model of New Yorker style personal journalism, we might look to The Spectator
column from the nineteenth century magazine The Outlook.
Get Up
In 1996 a scene from the film That Old Feeling was shot in the lobby
of the Royal York Hotel. The Empire Room at Chicago’s Palmer House
was a legendary supper club that feature vocal greats from Frank Sinatra
to Peggy Lee.
Has it Really Come to That
Lynn Throckmorton was known for his research comparing the evolutionary speed
of fruit flies, but from 1986 until his death in 2009, his academic career
appears to be lost.
This is Ben
The term Fanzine was coined in 1940 to distinguish fan created publications from professionally produced Hollywood fan mags. Later, the shortened term zine became associated with a punk rock DIY aesthetic and often featured interviews with iconoclastic musicians like Weasel Walter.