Arts – An Echo That's Reversing

Sitting in on an auction

[ed.: This was back in Oct, just now cleaning up and posting even though I never really finished my thoughts.]

A month or so back I found a painting of Barbarella that Jean-Claude Forest created at Cinecittà Studios during filming of the Jane Fonda movie. It is one of only two that he painted there and one of them was up for auction at Heritage Auctions. According to the site, the painting/s were missing for almost 60 years. I could only imagine what it will sell for. Well, I guess I don’t have to imagine because I’m sitting in on the auction right now (12 Oct) just to find out (and because art auctions are kinda fun). Let’s go…

2024 October 12 – 13 International Comic Art Signature® Auction #7381

Jean-Claude Forest Barbarella Painting Original Art (Cinecittà Studios, 1967) at Heritage Auctions

Italian giallo and Gothic horror (3rd session)

I’ve finished the films I hadn’t already seen from the Arrow Giallo Essentials and have watched a few more from YouTube and kanopy (the streaming service from the public library system). The problem with those public sources, besides the risk of Extremely Low Quality, is they are rarely in the original Italian and so you have to suffer through the dubbed version. However, the new year brings with it an attempt to stay on budget so I won’t be buying any more Blu-rays if I can find it streaming.

Italian giallo and gothic horror (2nd session)

Since I’ve seen most of the streaming giallo films with Italian audio and English subtitles, I decided to see if I could find the Arrow Video giallo boxed sets, or at least some of them, for a decent price. Each has three films on Blu-ray but people try to sell them for wild prices like $100 and more. No. Luckily Arrow has most of them for $35 (well, all but one is sold out so I must’ve gotten really lucky). As a bonus, I picked up their Sergio Martino collection. One of the Martino films is also in the White collection (Morte sospetta di una minorenne) so that’s 17 films, 6 I’ve already seen. This will keep me busy.

Italian giallo and gothic horror

Back in July 2020 I burned through watching around ten or so giallo films over a couple of weeks, resurrecting my interest from years prior. A week ago I had a similar urge but this time to watch some 1950s/60s gothic horror–castles, curses, brooding women–and wanted to find movies in Italian with subtitles in order to get better listening and hopefully understanding. Some words and phrases will be less useful (i vizi morbosi, il mulino, lei è un strega) but there will otherwise be simpler dialog that uses probably 50% of my current vocabulary, and maybe repetition will help me pick up new words and provide examples of simple conversational phrases in context.

Atlanta art scene

Last week I got an email from an artist I’d purchased work from a couple of years back. She’d remembered I lived in Atlanta and her gallery was going to have a booth at the first annual Atlanta Art Fair this weekend at Pullman Yards. We’ll ignore the fact that a huge art event was happening in my relative hood and it took someone from LA to inform me. Thursday night was opening night so a perfect end of the week let’s go see some art and maybe purchase something! (Spoiler: None was purchased but bookmarks were place for some works at a future date.)