A gallery for the weekend: I’ve spent a few hours (instead of working) browsing the artwork of Walter Martin Baumhofer, one of the artists that made a name for themselves in the pulps.
Baumhofer did covers for Street & Smith, and is responsible for the look of Doc Savage on the eponymous magazine covers.
You can’t be more iconic than that.
But Baumhofer was very versatile, as today’s gallery is likely to prove…
(click on any thumbnail to see a larger version of the image) Continue reading
Role models.
Everybody needs one, right?
Well, as a kid growing up in suburbia, insight of the toxic smokestacks of the FIAT plants in Turin in the 1970s, I had three role models.
One was Robert Culp, as Kelly Robinson in I Spy.
One was Patrick Macnee, as John Steed in The Avengers.
And one was Georges Descrieres, as the eponymous character in Arsene Lupin.
I’ll talk about all three, just because, in three posts; and I’ll start with the latter, just because.
In his comment to my Robin Hood post, Keith Taylor said…
Just put me down as a fan of Robin Hood from way back, and of King Arthur too.
Which came just at the right time as I had been walking down memory lane with a few friends, here, these days, reminiscing about Arthur of the Britons, a 24 episodes British series that first aired in 1972 and I caught the next year when it was distributed in Italy.
And boy I liked it! Continue reading
A quick heads-up, tonight, for a very thorough and interesting article on OpenCulture.org, about the available contents of Weird Tales magazine online.
Turns out you can download, or browse online, a number of issues of The Unique Magazine, for free.
And it is indeed an illuminating experience – if you like pulps, or supernatural fiction – because you can read the stories in their natural environment, together with the illustrations, the ads, the letters column etcetera.
Quite a different feeling compared to reading the same stories in an anthology.
The article also points to a number of other resources, and it is quite a find.
The Turin Horror Film Festival, a long-standing and well-respected showcase for scary movies, will take place in the second week of October.
The big news (for me, at least) is that this year I will be part of the jury, in the Shorts section.
Short films is usually where new talent and raw ideas get tested, and I am very excited at the prospect of spending a week watching some of the best short horror movies around.
I’ll keep you posted!
I
n my search for a workable definition of sword & sorcery (but it’s more complicated than that) I landed in what is, apparently, a pretty far-away place: David N. Meyer’s A Girl and a Gun: the complete guide to Film Noir on Video.
Published in 1998 by Avon Books, Meyer’s delightful book was essential in building my noir movie collection, and in helping me discover a lot of movies I would otherwise have missed.
And sure, books like The Encyclopedia of Film Noir by Alain Silver (and a lot of other books by Silver and his associates) are more in-depth and technical, but as a fast and easy gateway to noir, Meyer’s almost 20-years-old book remains unsurpassed.
Now, I thought of Meyer’s book because Meyer’s book defines noir through example – and that’s what I usually do with my friends and colleagues when we try and define sword & sorcery. We may start with a working definition or a bit of history (just as Meyer does), but then we end up listing movies and books. Continue reading
Sometimes words are complicated.
For instance, I had a hoot reading Varla of Valkarth by Glen M. Usher and Steve Lines, published by Rainfall Books.
It’s a fun story – the first in a series – set in Lemuria, and directly referencing, from the cover on, the old stories about Thongor, Lin carter’s barbarian swordsman.
The old Thongor stories were not highly sophisticated, but were fast, furious and fun, and Varla of Valkarth follows in Thongor’s footsteps: it’s good unsophisticated fun.
And I realize that unsophisticated sounds like a negative word, but really it is not – not in this case, at least Continue reading
Karavansara 