“the rain surrounded the cabin… with a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of rumor. think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the world with water, washing out the places where men have stripped the hillside… nobody started it. nobody is going to stop it. it will talk as long as it wants, the rain. as long as it talks i am going to listen.” Thomas Merton
Tag: reading
0307 – Annemarie Schwarzenbach
Annemarie Minna Renée Schwarzenbach (23 May 1908 – 15 November 1942) was a Swiss writer, journalist, photographer and traveler.
Annemarie Schwarzenbach: Une Suisse rebelle (2000)
Based on unreleased archive material, this first film about Annemarie Schwarzenbach explores the life of woman born within a very rich Swiss family with open inclinations towards the Nazi Order. A writer, a journalist and a reporter photographer, Annemarie stood up against her aristocratic family and she travels around the world to denounce, European fascism as well as the exploitation of American workers. Annemarie Schwarzenbach doubts and disturbs.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0902252/
Die Reise nach Kafiristan (2001)
In 1939, the author Annemarie Schwarzenbach and the ethnologist Ella Maillart travel together by car to Kabul.
293
“whence it appears that in the smallest particle of matter there is a world of creatures, living beings, animals, entelechies, souls. each portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full of plants and a pond full of fishes. but each branch of every plant, each member of every animal, each drop of its liquid parts is also such garden or pond.”
0280 – A Sound of Thunder (2005)
spacetime coordinates: Chicago, 2055 > the cretaceous
A Sound of Thunder is a 2005 science fiction thriller film directed by Peter Hyams, and starring Edward Burns, Catherine McCormack and Ben Kingsley. It is a co-production film between the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, and the Czech Republic.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318081/
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a classic example of “failed return” or “no return” cautionary tales is A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury published in 1952. on a personal level i love both the EC comic book adaptation with artwork by Al Williamson and the 2005 movie adaptation by Peter Hyams that was a box office flop and has receive mostly negative reviews by critics. the original story features one of the first instances of the butterfly effect, in particular as applied to time travel paradoxes and uncontrollable evolutionary/ political outcomes. this was way before it became a meteorologic mainstay of chaos theory after its use by Edward Lorenz to describe stormy ripple-like effects on nonlinear systems, seemingly very sensitive to minute initial conditions.
the movie A Sound of Thunder features a time travel tourist agency from the year 2055. Time Safari Inc. is a chronocapitalist enterprise that organizes prehistoric retro-hunting expeditions to far-off epochs where dinosaurs roamed the earth. in order to do that, mankind is cheating on the big dinosaur mass extinction. long after humankind has killed most of the big game life on earth it tracks down other, more elusive and ferocious megafauna. the whole ‘hunting’ for the ultimate predator T-Rex (or an Allosaurus in the movie) turns out to be a very complex business. the paleo-poaching is based on hiding your acts under the cover of natural occurrences, trophy hunting pretending to be a mass extimction event. in order to fake the killing shot one must plan ahead every retro-killing move. practically Time Safari Inc. is cheating evolutionary history by trying to synchronize with ‘naturally’ occurring death events and extract entertainment value out of impossible inter-species encounters, normally separated by enormous gulfs of time. (…)
geohistory becomes a perfect crime scene – where the time traveling expedition has to erase all traces – all influence that might otherwise impact the future with definite catastrophic (especially anthropic future) results. as often, humans are kind of role-playing hide and seek with natural selection. in this bizarre and strange inversion of the anthropocenic stratigraphic proof – masquerades as natural force, where a devious human causality is trying to hide behind a pre-human mass extinction event. it is almost the same principle guiding the climate denialist that pretends to hide behind previous catastrophic climate fluctuations.
as one might expect, it’s a chronoclysm waiting to happen. all the clients of Time Safari Inc. are prone to making mistakes, and not only do they leave marks (the absolute no 1 rule of time travel is non-intervention) but they also bring back something (the 2nd most important rule) basically invariably smuggling the prehuman past into the future. somehow a prehistoric dead butterfly makes it through the biofilter (a great example of what I would call New Wallace Lines) that is scanning every living reentry into the present, every possibility of warping the timelines. the alteration of the past produces a chronoclysm that manifests itself as a rhythmic, rapidly accelerating ‘time waves’ that transform the city and its denizens. more to the point in the Peter Hyams movie, the first divergence is a sudden appearance of teeming swarms of beetles and a gigantic strangler fig-like tree bursting through a Chicago high rise building, while the main characters Ryan and Rand make a narrow escape. it is by no means accidental that swarms and insect swarms in particular are associated with time waves. multiply proliferating and and highly distributed, swarms are chronoclysmic purveyors that help carry and suffer the radical effects of timeline distortion.
there are reports of global increases in temperature and humidity and plant life seems to prosper, while this time warped climate change suddenly seems to be echoing sweltering hot pre-human conditions of long gone geological epochs and dead jungles. (…)
stefan tiron – Cosm/c Dr/ft & T3mporal D/vergence (2016)- EXIT THE PORTAL: The Strange Comeback to a Weird Earth
207 – A Quiet Passion (2016)
spacetime coordinates: 19th century Amherst, Massachusetts
A Quiet Passion is a 2016 biographical film directed and written by Terence Davies about the life of U.S poet Emily Dickinson. The film stars Cynthia Nixon as the reclusive poet. It co-stars Emma Bell as young Dickinson, Jennifer Ehle, Duncan Duff and Keith Carradine. Despite its title, the film isn’t quiet at all.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2392830/
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“Goodbye to the life I used to live,
And the world I used to know;
And kiss the hills for me, just once;
Now I am ready to go!
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The carriage held but just ourselves –
And Immortality.
We slowly drove – he knew no haste
And I had put away
My labour and my leisure too,
For His civility.
We passed the school,
where children strove,
At recess – in the ring –
We passed the fields of grazing grain –
We passed the setting sun –
Or rather – he passed us –
The dews drew quivering and chill –
For only gossamer, my gown –
My tippet – only tulle –
We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground –
The roof was scarcely visible –
The cornice – in the ground –
Since then – ’tis centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses’ heads
Were toward eternity –
This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me, –
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.
Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!”
200
spacetime coordinates: 80’s – 90’s Brooklyn New York City // Las Vegas, Baltimore, San Francisco, Los Angeles
Notorious (2009)
Notorious is a 2009 American biographical drama film directed by George Tillman Jr. that follows the life and murder of Christopher Wallace, an American rapper better known by the stage name “The Notorious B.I.G.”. The film stars Jamal Woolard, Angela Bassett, Derek Luke, and Anthony Mackie.
Criticism by Lil’ Kim
All Eyez on Me (2017)
All Eyez on Me is a 2017 American biographical drama film about hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur, directed by Benny Boom and written by Jeremy Haft, Eddie Gonzalez and Steven Bagatourian. Titled after Shakur’s 1996 fourth studio album of the same name, the film stars Demetrius Shipp Jr. as Shakur with Kat Graham, Lauren Cohan, Hill Harper and Danai Gurira in supporting roles.
Historical accuracy
160 – Orlando (1992)
spacetime coordinates: 1600>1992 // Elizabethan era // Constantinople
Orlando is a 1992 British film loosely based on Virginia Woolf‘s novel Orlando: A Biography, starring Tilda Swinton as Orlando.
the film was particularly acclaimed for its visual treatment of the settings of Woolf’s 1928 novel. Potter chose to film much of the Constantinople portion of the book in the isolated city of Khiva in Uzbekistan, and made use of the forest of carved columns in the city’s 18th century Djuma Mosque.
Orlando (Tilda Swinton) in the film Orlando Scene 25 Photo by Liam Longman © Adventure Pictures Ltd
the title role in Orlando allowed Swinton to explore matters of gender presentation onscreen which reflected her lifelong interest in androgynous style. Swinton later reflected on the role in an interview accompanied by a striking photoshoot. “People talk about androgyny in all sorts of dull ways,” said Swinton, noting that the recent rerelease of Orlando had her thinking again about its pliancy. She referred to 1920s French artist and playful gender-bender Claude Cahun: “Cahun looked at the limitlessness of an androgynous gesture, which I’ve always been interested in.”
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107756/
TimeSpace Warps 