November 20, 2008

Zip! Toscanini leads the greatest of bands

The big time-sink news this week was that Google has begun to digitize the Life magazine photo archive. Will this result in anything actually productive? Well, it does allow us to catch a diva in a little white lie....

From Anna Moffo's New York Times obituary:
Ms. Moffo caused a scandal in Italy when she appeared to be nude in a scene in the film "Una Storia d'Amore." In later years she insisted that she had not been totally unclothed.
Oh, really? Link NSFW, unless you've fallen through a wormhole into Alma Mahler's house. Which reminds me—Alma Mahler!

2 comments:

Lisa Hirsch said...

Of course I got sucked into the Life archive this morning too, where I found a photo of a fully-clothed Eva Turner at the opening of Norma in Chicago in the fifties. (She was not singing in it.)

I think I work for one of the few companies where on your first day at work you sign an acknowledgment that you might see porn in the course of your work. That doesn't apply to everyone's jobs - I'm a tech writer, for crying out loud, we never have any fun - but it certainly does give NSFW a slightly different flavor.

Robert F. Jones said...

And where else would you find Leonard Bernstein conducting Hindemith's "Mahler der Maler" (perhaps that's a typo for "Matisse der Maler")?

http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=714722545b29371a&q=mahler+source:life&ei=fFkpSdfgG6X8NJHXyZ0C&sig2=c12cUGqXRRsDGdEkRma71w&usg=__YeHhVFDIWge5vdUq57iWlO_bdk4=&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dmahler%2Bsource:life%26hl%3Den