Strange – or not so strange – connections.
I was going through the Talbot Mundy catalog and, leaving Yasmini behind for a moment, I checked out The Nine Unknown, one of Mundy’s most Theosophical novels, originally published in 1923 in Adventure magazine.
And I mentioned it with my brother, who is the serious Orientalist in our home, and thus I found out that the Nine Unknown Men are not something the Theosophists or Mundy cooked up, but are actually part of the real history of India. Continue reading →
Today is the 80th anniversary of H.P. Lovecraft’s death.
I think I read all of the Gentleman’s stories, multiple times, and I liked them quite a bit.
I discovered HPL in high school, when I was reading all the fantasy and SF and horror (but not much horror) I could lay my hands on. Then I re-read it while in university, back when all of a sudden HPL was starting to make the news, to be critically appreciated. And I still read some of his better stories now and then, for nostalgia’s sake.
Now, according to a sort of scientific study I did with my old friend Fabrizio, the Lovecraftian reader’s evolution goes through three phases: Continue reading →
The joys of Youtube.
I’ve spent the last few nights watching old episodes of the BBC’s Blake’s 7, a space opera series that aired between 1978 and 1981, and that was never distributed in my country.
And I must say I’m positively impressed.
Because it’s an old show, and produced on a very short and frail shoestring budget, but what the heck, it’s good fun and great storytelling. Continue reading →
During lunch break I spent some time watching League of Gods, a 2016 Hong Kong fantasy movie featuring Jet Li, the ubiquitous Tony Leung Ka-Fai and the absolutely gorgeous Fan Bingbing, among many others. I always liked Hong Kong movies, and it is nice to take a break from Western imagination once in a while.
The movie is – pretty loosely, I guess – based on a 16th century novel called Fangshen Yanyi (variously translated as Investiture of the Gods or The Creation of the Gods).
As you can see from the trailer, the movie is heavy on CGI, and has a strange mix of adult situations and somewhat of juvenile humor that can raise a few eyebrows among the audience.
I know my eyebrows did a little gymnastic while I was watching the film. Continue reading →
Edwin Georgy was an American painter and illustrator that worked for magazines and publicity. He was self-taught, a fact that I find impressive – just as impressive as his experience as a WWI pilot.
He was especially well known for his women, and it seems fitting to post a gallery of Georgi’s women on the International Women’s Day.
Back then long time ago when grass was green1, back when the internet was very different from what it is today, I started developing an interest for the first half of the 20th century – the gilded age, the roaring twenties, the sophisticated thirties.
I started watching movies, reading books and listening to music.
And back then I discovered a thing called Past Perfect – a record company specialising in remastering, through a complex resampling method, the original records of those ages past. The guys “simply” acquire as many good copies as possible of records from the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s, and then resample each track, using redundancy to repair damage to the tracks: the idea being that hardly two old records will be scratched in the same spot, and therefore, if you get enough copies, you can patch together a single clean, undamaged record.
And it works!
I was able to track them down through that early internet, and I ordered a few records – and these are still among my favourites.
And only a few days ago I found out that Past Perfect has now a YouTube channel, where you can listen to their collections, and then order them through various online shops.
Here’s one of their records, just to give you an idea – but check out their channel, and their online catalogue – you’ll find lots of great music, remastered from the original 78 RPMs
I was taught to be grateful for the small things.
Today was a bad day – bad news, discussions, a tonne of bills to pay, the loss of a pair of paying markets, some gratuitous aggression, dark clouds on the horizon.
Which is nothing special, mind you – there’s a lot of people out there that’s in much worse trouble. But it is heavy, because you see everything unravel and it’s beyond your control. It makes working harder, it makes writing harder, because too many preoccupations clog your mind.
And if I don’t write, the light gets cut, the water and the phone get cut.
But then three things happened that let the pressure up a bit – not solutions to the problems, but small good things, unexpected. Psychological relief – which means that the problems remain, but now one can try and solve them, and if nothing comes out of it, one’ll be at peace, because one did what one could.
Small things to let one feel less into a dead end.
First, I got a copy of a book in the mail that I’ve been waiting to read for a long time, and tonight I’ll dig into it, and tomorrow I’ll post about it.
Second, I was reminded of a movie which I saw when I was a little kid, when my mom and dad were still alive and took me to the movies, and will do a post about that too.
And finally I saw this, and I’ll start by sharing it with you.
Today is the 80th anniversary of 
Back then long time ago when grass was green
I was taught to be grateful for the small things.
Karavansara 