movies

1104 – The Wandering Earth / 流浪地球 (2019)

timespace coordinates: In the future, the Sun has aged and is about to turn into a red giant, pushing the nations of the world to consolidate into the United Earth Government, a world government, to initiate a project to move the Earth out of the Solar System to the Alpha Centauri system, in order to preserve further human civilization. Enormous thrusters running on fusion power are built across the planet to propel the Earth. Human population is reduced severely due to catastrophic tides that occur after the planetary engines stop Earth’s rotation, and later as the planet moves away from the Sun, much of the surface is frozen due to lowered temperatures, forcing humans to live in vast underground cities built adjacent to the engines.

The Wandering Earth (Liu lang di qiu) is a 2019 Chinese science fiction film directed by Frant Gwo, based on the novella of the same name by Locus Award and Hugo Award-winning author Liu Cixin. It stars Qu Chuxiao, Li Guangjie, Ng Man-tatZhao JinmaiWu Jing and Qu Jingjing. (wiki)

According to The Hollywood Reporter, The Wandering Earth is China’s “first full-scale interstellar” film.

imdb   /   rt

movies

1096 – Bone Tomahawk (2015)

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

!extreme violence!

XPTUhvd
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 RussellPatrick WilsonMatthew FoxRichard JenkinsLili SimmonsEvan JonigkeitDavid 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

documentary, music, Uncategorized

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)


Tom Waits – “God’s Away On Business”

quotes, Uncategorized

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 (kuaneosmelas). 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