Arts – An Echo That's Reversing

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.)

Barbarella the Smuggler–That tonality thing

Work on the piece has been slow but satisfying. Well, unsatisfyingly slow but what little has been produced lets me see a way forward. I’ve become much more tonal but am using the structural and procedural techniques that I used in Figures to organize that tonality. And I have better headphones good god the sound was awful for several years.

An empty Manhattan, some scribbled sheet music, and a somewhat constrictive work space. Why am I not getting more work done?!?

The Ballad of Barbarella the Smuggler

While hunting for different editions of the Barbarella comic, I came across a rarity from Virgin Record Stores in the UK from 1981. Around that time, the second collection of Barbarella comics, Le Coleres du Manges-Minutes, was released in various editions internationally and Virgin Records printed a four-issue series in English under the title The New Adventures of Barbarella (this title was also used in the German Heyne editions a decade earlier with Die Neuen Abenteuer der Barbarella). Those Virgin Records publications had become my white whale in both their rarity and cost. Rarity being the biggest barrier because for a while I could only find visual records of their existence and none for sale. Eventually, I pieced together numbers 2, 3, and 4 for a decent and not embarrassing price. The cost of my collection as a whole is embarrassing, but only for a few editions am I actually uncomfortable confessing how much I paid.

But still the Virgin Records issue number 1 was elusive.

Dov’ero io? Italia nei circonscrizioni di Nuovo York

Back in my takin’-Italian-lessons days my teacher sent me a message that Carmen Consoli was touring in the US for the next several months. A few lessons prior, she had given me homework that included some of the history of Italian popular music from, say, the 1940s to the early 2000s. Many of her lesson slides had dated information so there were no artists included from the 2010s… and certainly not the 2020s. The newest artist that was referenced, and simply from a photo, was Carmen Consoli, active from the mid-90s to around 2010. I did a quick search and listened to ripped albums on YouTube (do albums exist in any other form?) which really hooked me, maybe/probably more because it was alt-pop in Italian than that I liked the music.