1096 – Bone Tomahawk (2015)

timespace coordinates: 1890s  small town of Bright Hope > “Valley of the Starving Men”

!extreme violence!

by Matthew Woodson for Mondo

Bone Tomahawk is a 2015 American western horror film directed, written and co-scored by S. Craig Zahler (1052, 268), and stars Kurt Russell, Patrick Wilson, Matthew Fox, Richard Jenkins, Lili Simmons, Evan Jonigkeit, David Arquette and Sid Haig. (wiki)

In the dying days of the old west, an elderly sheriff and his posse set out to rescue their town’s doctor from cannibalistic cave dwellers.

imdb   /   rt

1093

“Bella Ciao (Goodbye Beautiful)” by Marc Ribot (feat. Tom Waits) from the album ‘Songs Of Resistance 1942 – 2018,’

“Bella ciao“ (“Goodbye beautiful”) is an Italian folk song that was adopted as an anthem of the anti-fascist resistance. It was used by the Italian partisans between 1943 and 1945 during the Italian Resistance, or the resistance of Italian partisans against the Nazi German forces occupying Italy, and during the Italian Civil War, or the Italian partisan struggle against the fascist Italian Social Republic and its Nazi German allies. “Bella ciao” is used worldwide as an anti-fascist hymn of freedom and resistance. The song has much older origins though in the hardships of the mondina women, the paddy field workers in the late 19th century who sang it as a protest against harsh working conditions in the paddy fields in North Italy. (wiki)

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Tom Waits – “God’s Away On Business”

1092

Homer used two adjectives to describe aspects of the colour blue: kuaneos, to denote a dark shade of blue merging into black; and glaukos, to describe a sort of ‘blue-grey’, notably used in Athena’s epithet glaukopis, her ‘grey-gleaming eyes’. He describes the sky as big, starry, or of iron or bronze (because of its solid fixity). The tints of a rough sea range from ‘whitish’ (polios) and ‘blue-grey’ (glaukos) to deep blue and almost black (kuaneos, melas). The sea in its calm expanse is said to be ‘pansy-like’ (ioeides), ‘wine-like’ (oinops), or purple (porphureos). But whether sea or sky, it is never just ‘blue’. In fact, within the entirety of Ancient Greek literature you cannot find a single pure blue sea or sky.

Yellow, too, seems strangely absent from the Greek lexicon. The simple word xanthos covers the most various shades of yellow, from the shining blond hair of the gods, to amber, to the reddish blaze of fire. Chloros, since it’s related to chloe (grass), suggests the colour green but can also itself convey a vivid yellow, like honey.

The Ancient Greek experience of colour does not seem to match our own. In a well-known aphorism, Friedrich Nietzsche captures the strangeness of the Greek colour vocabulary:

How differently the Greeks must have viewed their natural world, since their eyes were blind to blue and green, and they would see instead of the former a deeper brown, and yellow instead of the latter (and for instance they also would use the same word for the colour of dark hair, that of the corn-flower, and that of the southern sea; and again, they would employ exactly the same word for the colour of the greenest plants and of the human skin, of honey and of the yellow resins: so that their greatest painters reproduced the world they lived in only in black, white, red, and yellow).
[My translation]

How is this possible? Did the Greeks really see the colours of the world differently from the way we do?    read more:

The Sea Was Never Blue

By Maria Michela Sassi

1083 – The Wind (2018)

timespace coordinates: the Western frontier of the late 1800’s

The Wind is a 2018 American supernatural western horror film directed by Emma Tammi in her directorial debut. The film was written by Teresa Sutherland. It stars Caitlin Gerard, Ashley Zukerman, Julia Goldani Telles and Miles Anderson. (wiki)

The character Emma seems to enjoy Gothic literature. Among the books from her collection that read aloud at various points in the film are Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Ann Radcliffe‘s The Mysteries of Udolpho.

imdb   /   rt

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“Towards evening, they wound down precipices, black with forest of cypress, pine and cedar, into a glen so savage and secluded, that, if Solicitude ever had local habitation, this might have been “her place of dearest residence”  (Ann Radcliffe)

1078

pulpmags.org – an archive of all fiction pulpwood magazines from 1896 – 1946

The Pulp Magazines Project is an open-access archive and digital research initiative for the study and preservation of one of the twentieth century’s most influential print culture forms: the all-fiction pulpwood magazine. The Project also provides information and resources on publishing history, multiple search and discovery platforms, and an expanding library of high-quality, cover-to-cover digital facsimiles.

1034 – Frostpunk (2018 city-building / survival game)

timespace coordinates: The game is set in an alternate 1886 where the eruptions of Krakatoa and Mount Tambora, the dimming of the Sun, and other unknown factors caused a worldwide volcanic winter. This in turn led to widespread crop failure and the death of millions. This event roughly lines up with the real world 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, a volcanic event that led to global cooling. In response to this, several installations called “generators” were built by the British authorities in the coal-rich North, designed to be city centers in the event that dropping temperatures force mass migration from the south. In all scenarios, the player is the leader of a city around a generator, and will have to manage resources to ensure the city’s survival. (wiki)

Frostpunk Full Campaign Gameplay 

steam   /    frostpunkgame   /   The Art Of Frostpunk

1032 – The Last Samurai (2003)

timespace coordinates: 1876 – 1877 California > JapanThe Last Samurai is a 2003 American period action drama film directed and co-produced by Edward Zwick, who also co-wrote the screenplay with John Logan and Marshall Herskovitz. The film stars Tom Cruise, who also co-produced, with Timothy Spall, Ken Watanabe, Billy Connolly, Tony Goldwyn, Hiroyuki Sanada, Koyuki, and Shin Koyamada in supporting roles.

SONY DSC

Tom Cruise portrays a United States Captain of the 7th Cavalry Regiment, whose personal and emotional conflicts bring him into contact with samurai warriors in the wake of the Meiji Restoration in 19th Century Japan.

1877 — In 1877, nine years after the Meiji Restoratin, a major rebellion in Kyushu concentrated the opposition of conservative elements to the westernization of Japan. The traditional forces, including for example samurai infuriated at no longer being allowed to carry swords, were defeated by the new conscript army. Thousands were executed. Here the brave new officers in their western-style uniforms accept the surrender of un-uniformed rebels. — Image by © Asian Art & Archaeology, Inc./CORBIS

The film’s plot was inspired by the 1877 Satsuma Rebellion led by Saigō Takamori, and the westernization of Japan by foreign powers, though in the film the United States is portrayed as the primary force behind the push for westernization. To a lesser extent it is also influenced by the stories of Jules Brunet, a French army captain who fought alongside Enomoto Takeaki in the earlier Boshin War and Frederick Townsend Ward, an American mercenary who helped Westernize the Chinese army by forming the Ever Victorious Army. (wiki)

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