Birdboy: The Forgotten Children (Spanish: Psiconautas, los niños olvidados; festival title: Psychonauts, the Forgotten Children) is a 2015 Spanish animated drama-horror coming-of-age film written and directed by Alberto Vázquez and Pedro Rivero, based on the comic Psiconautas by Vázquez. It is the follow-up to the pair’s short film Birdboy, following the titular character, a shy outcast in a post-apocalyptic society, and Dinky, a teenage mouse runaway fleeing her desolate island home. (wiki)
timespace coordinates: Oxford > London, parallel ~Edwardian era Britain (or Brytain) // “The Trout” inn, the Priory of St. Rosamund, Jordan College
The setting is a world dominated by the Magisterium (commonly called “the Church”) an international theocracy which actively suppresses heresy. In this world, humans’ souls naturally exist outside of their bodies in the form of sentient “dæmons” in animal form which accompany, aid, and comfort their humans.
La Belle Sauvage is a fantasy novel by Philip Pullman published in 2017. It is the first volume of a planned trilogy entitled The Book of Dust and is set twelve years before Pullman’s His Dark Materials. It presents events prior to the arrival of the six-month-old Lyra Belacqua at Jordan College, Oxford.
The story follows 11-year-old Malcolm Polstead and his dæmon Asta, and a village girl named Alice and her dæmon Ben, who become the protectors of the infant Lyra Belacqua and her dæmon, Pantalaimon, in Malcolm’s canoe, La Belle Sauvage, during a flood. Malcolm forms a friendship with alethiometer specialist Hannah Relf, allied with the secret freedom-seeking organisation Oakley Street, and is drawn into their fight against the growing strength of the Magisterium, which has learned of a prophecy concerning Lyra. Malcolm and Alice are pursued by the maniacal villain Gerard Bonneville, an ally of the Consistorial Court of Discipline (CCD), as they struggle to reach London and Lyra’s father Lord Asriel, in order to gain the protection of Jordan College for the baby. (wiki)
timespace coordinates: AMC describes the series as a “modern fable set in Long Beach, California about a disarmingly optimistic local ex-surfer, Dud (Wyatt Russell), who’s drifting after the death of his father and collapse of the family business.” In the first season, Dud joins a fraternal order known as the Order of the Lynx, hoping the Lodge can put him “on the path to recover the idyllic life he’s lost.”
Lodge 49 is an American comedy-drama television series created by Jim Gavin. It aired on the television network AMC in the United States from August 6, 2018, to October 14, 2019, spanning two seasons and 20 episodes.
The title alludes to the novella The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, which Gavin references as an inspiration. (wiki)
In Welcome to the Greenhouse, award-winning editor Gordon Van Gelder has brought together sixteen speculative [climate fiction (cli-fi)] stories by some of the most imaginative writers of our time. Terrorists, godlike terraformers, and humans both manipulative and hapless populate these pages. The variety of stories reflects the possibilities of our future: grim, hopeful, fantastic and absurd.
Included is new work by Brian W. Aldiss, Jeff Carlson, Judith Moffett, Matthew Hughes, Gregory Benford, Michael Alexander, Bruce Sterling, Joseph Green, Pat MacEwen, Alan Dean Foster, David Prill, George Guthridge, Paul Di Filippo, Chris Lawson, Ray Vukcevich and M. J. Locke.
The Falling Sky is a remarkable first-person account of the life story and cosmo-ecological thought of Davi Kopenawa, shaman and spokesman for the Yanomami of the Brazilian Amazon. Representing a people whose very existence is in jeopardy, Davi Kopenawa paints an unforgettable picture of Yanomami culture, past and present, in the heart of the rainforest–a world where ancient indigenous knowledge and shamanic traditions cope with the global geopolitics of an insatiable natural resources extraction industry.
In richly evocative language, Kopenawa recounts his initiation and experience as a shaman, as well as his first encounters with outsiders: government officials, missionaries, road workers, cattle ranchers, and gold prospectors. He vividly describes the ensuing cultural repression, environmental devastation, and deaths resulting from epidemics and violence. To counter these threats, Davi Kopenawa became a global ambassador for his endangered people. The Falling Sky follows him from his native village in the Northern Amazon to Brazilian cities and finally on transatlantic flights bound for European and American capitals. These travels constitute a shamanic critique of Western industrial society, whose endless material greed, mass violence, and ecological blindness contrast sharply with Yanomami cultural values.
Bruce Albert, a close friend since the 1970s, superbly captures Kopenawa’s intense, poetic voice. This collaborative work provides a unique reading experience that is at the same time a coming-of-age story, a historical account, and a shamanic philosophy, but most of all an impassioned plea to respect native rights and preserve the Amazon rainforest. (amazon)
“When I come back from a trip among the white people, the dizziness leaves my eyes after a while and my thought be-comes clear again. I no longer hear cars, machines, or airplanes. I only lend an ear to the tooro toads and krouma frogs that call the rain in the forest. I only hear the rustling of the leaves in the wind and the rumbling of the thunders in the sky. The ignorant words of the city politicians gradually vanish in the quiet of my sleep. I become calm again by going to hunt and making my spirits dance.
The forest is very beautiful to see. It is cool and aromatic. When you move through it to hunt or travel, you feel joyful and your mind is slow-paced. You listen to the chirping of the cicadas in the distance, or the cries of the curassows and the agami herons, and the clamor of the spider monkeys in the trees. Your worries are eased. Your thoughts can then follow one another without getting obscured.”
The Curious World of Hieronymus Bosch directed by David Bickerstaff features the exhibition ‘Jheronimus Bosch – Visions of Genius’ at Het Noordbrabants Museum in the southern Netherlands, which brought the majority of Bosch’s paintings and drawings together for the first time to his home town of Den Bosch.
TimeSpace Warps 