A Black Friday sale actually worth spending money on

In a shocking development, there was one single advertisment in the avalanche of Black Friday gimmick sales spam currently suffocating my email inbox that is actually worth sharing with people of the history nerdly persuasion. I’ve written before about Exhibition on Screen productions, films capturing the background and execution of blockbuster art exhibitions. I’ve only had the opportunity to watch one of them on the big screen, but if I’d had my way, I would have watched them all. The distribution is just very limited is all.

For one day only, ie, today, Friday, November 24th, every film in stock on their website is 50% off. Some of them are on DVD and only available in PAL format so they won’t work in most players in the US. Many of them are digital downloads which are a) easily viewed anywhere in the world, and b) cheap as hell. I’m limbering up my clickin’ finger because there’s going to be a lot of compensatory binging in my near future. I might be amenable to burning them as a stocking stuffers, but I make no guaratees.

Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse, Michelangelo – Love and Death, The Impressionists and the Man Who Made Them, The Curious World of Hieronymus Bosch, Girl with a Pearl Earring – and other treasures from the Mauritshuis and Leonardo from the National Gallery London will all be mine. Oh yes. They will be mine. For less than $3.50 a pop.

My one crushing disappointment is that their Domus Aurea documentary is out of stock. You would not believe how little material is out there about the recent restoration and new virtual reality exhibition of Nero’s Golden House. The site doesn’t have a bookstore and the general bookstore had diddly squat about the palace beyond a few cheesy pages in a tour book that didn’t even begin to touch on all the new archaeological information and technology.

3 thoughts on “A Black Friday sale actually worth spending money on

  1. Black Friday here (in Australia in 1939) was the most catastrophic bushfire we have had in modern history. So many people and animals died, so many houses and farm buildings were left black and destroyed.

    Good choices by the way 🙂 The Curious World of Hieronymus Bosch and Girl with a Pearl Earring are great fun.

  2. According to a guy by the name of Aulus Gellius, and whom he referred to in 130AD (in ‘Noctes Atticae’, 5.17, himself citing Verrius Flaccus), the concept a of a Black day (or ‘dies ater’) was invented, when in the late 380ies (BC), …

    “Quintus Sulpicius, tribune of the soldiers, on the eve of fighting against the Gauls at the Allia, offered sacrifice in anticipation of that battle on the day after the Ides; that the army of the Roman people was thereupon cut to pieces, and three days later the whole city, except the Capitol, was taken.”.

    Thus, the poor and needy, i.e. the LUCKY ONES, could carry home sacrifice leftovers, likewise ‘cut to pieces’.

    Unfortunately, I don’t know anything about Hollywood nor any of those other States, but according to a neighbor, during modern ‘Black Fridays’, shootings are not unheard of (according to him, mainly in struggles for parking facilities and flat screen TV sets).

    Over here, on some of our weekends, pigs are ritually cut to pieces — without any doubt a ‘Black day’ for them — but unfortunately they are not at all free.

    :hattip:

    —————
    PS: Notably, poor ‘Ötzi’ was shot in 3200 BC, as he had managed to get hold of the complete production of all two copper blades, when finally his competitor shot him down, and then went away with one of those blades.

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