time machine // database // travel guide
spacetime coordinates: late 2010’s Iceland
Lamb (Icelandic: Dýrið, “The animal”) is a 2021 Icelandic drama film directed by Valdimar Jóhannsson, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Sjón. The film stars Noomi Rapace, and marks Valdimar Jóhannsson’s feature-length directorial debut. Rapace and Béla Tarr act as executive producers. (wiki)
imdb / rottentomatoes / trivia
For our non-Romanian speaking viewers (which seem to be the large majority of our daily visitors), here is some tremendous research into the byways and routes of socialist and east bloc subcultures. There’s lots of legends and while it’s not mythbusting, they’re pulling the veil on a lot of things. The Arhiva de Sunet and Centrul Dialectic are making interviews and trying to orient non insiders through the Romanian cultural space – recovering and recording an oral history from the 1960s on, via the stories of its stil living protagonists. Anecdotes lay out the ‘thick’ tissue of daily life and embed it in lived examples. Hiw was it to make & consume music back then?
Even if very hard to recover or to convey the feelings of listening something the very first time – they allow imagination to do its work. You can hear the soundtrack of youth subcultures to back it up in between, even if the words may be unreachable to you, you can still check the Playlist.
This season of podcasts relates the history of music, rock music in particular (with its various offshoots and under currents) from the city of Timisoara in the region of Banat, an important urban cultural center, and yet with a marginal-central (in the words of the writer interviewed) geopolitical position, as more of a place of exile during the Ottoman & Austro Hungarian empires. Socialism in Eastern Europe was not a wasteland of passion and it was not all grim gulags. The regime tried to nurture pop phenomena in the hope they would revive its own stasis. There was repression yet there were also bizarre hybrids and traffic going on. The central power was sometimes overstretched when it had to deal with 500km away centers like Timisoara. It is a funny quirky joy ride through the way various people, bands & taste communities have received influences from abroad, interpreted them and how music and material culture from discs to tapes to venues helped circulate precious information under restricted controls of the Ceausescu era. It is a story of how political it was everything or how much control there actually was and how one wondered about other versions of home grown socialism (from Hungary lets say or ex-Yugoslavia) while listening to these bands. What I like most is the way – the escape to a western fr world is portrayed, as protagonists recall a certain disenchantment with the capitalist music production and a sobering effect emigration had on them. An overall remarkable work.
Cu ce a rămas Timișoara? Cum era Timișoara în muzică în anii ‘80? Cât timp a avut Timișoara dominație otomană? De ce era, pentru turci și austrieci, o catastrofă să fii trimis la Timișoara? Ce înseamnă să fii la periferie? Cât timp a fost Timișoara capitala Imperiului? De ce apare în Timișoara desantul rockist de la sfârșitul anilor ‘60? Care era avantajul pe care îl avea Timișoara? Cum intra muzica din Occident în România? Există un sound timișorean al rockului? Ce film i-a tușat iremediabil pe Nicu Covaci și Ilie Stepan în anii ‘60? Ce trupă maghiară îl face pe Ilie Stepan să înțeleagă că Republica Populară Ungară construia un alt fel de socialism? Sunt subculturile subversive de rock specifice în Est? De ce îi apreciau hipioții și pe Lenin, și pe Lennon? Ce putea fi folosit de la punkiști și rockeri pentru resuscitarea socialismului? Răspunsurile le aflați numai din Arhiva de Sunet: Timișoara, episodul 1.
La ce terasă se întâlneau tinerii timișoreni în anii ‘60 și 70’? Ce operă rock a fost cenzurată în Timișoara? În ce s-au deghizat membrii formației Progresiv TM? Ce se întâmpla în România când apărea la Londra „Jesus Christ Superstar”? Care a fost reacția consumatorilor de muzică la lipsa de posibilități? Ce apare într-un magazin de casete din Timișoara în anii ‘80? Cum se vedea de la București teatralitatea din muzica timișoreană? Răspunsurile le aflați numai din Arhiva de Sunet: Timișoara, episodul 2.
spacetime coordinates: London – 2010’s << the Swinging Sixties
Last Night in Soho is a 2021 British psychological horror film directed and co-written by Edgar Wright. The film stars Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy, Matt Smith, Michael Ajao, Terence Stamp and Diana Rigg. It marks the final film appearances of Rigg and Margaret Nolan, who both died in 2020. The film is dedicated to the memory of Rigg. (wiki)
spacetime coordinates: 2020 in Boston, Massachusetts
Black Friday is an American horror comedy film directed by Casey Tebo. It stars Devon Sawa, Ivana Baquero, Ryan Lee, Stephen Peck, Michael Jai White, and Bruce Campbell (who serves as producer). (wiki)
spacetime coordinates / Synopsis: 2010. Meguro City, Tokyo, Cat Earth, a world of corporations and commercialism, where a giant mechanical Colonel Sanders wanders the streets with an axe embedded in its head, loudly advertising the restaurant. Tamala, bored with the city, leaves her home against the wishes of her human mother and flies away in a personal spaceship bound for her birthplace, Orion. Her ship is shot down by the Mysterious Postcat, and lands on the outskirts of Hate City on the Planet Q
TAMALA 2010: A Punk Cat in Space is a 2002 Japanese animated film written, directed and featuring music by the two-person team t.o.L (“trees of Life”), known individually as K. and kuno. The film features both 2D and 3D computer animation, and is mostly black-and-white. The characters, designed by t.o.L and Kentarō Konpon, are reminiscent of Sanrio‘s Hello Kitty and 1960s anime and manga such as Astro Boy. The creators admit that one of the film’s central plot points, about a cult operating as a postal service and corporate monopoly, is influenced and adapted from Thomas Pynchon‘s novel The Crying of Lot 49.
TAMALA2010 was originally envisioned as the first episode of a trilogy – the latter two parts were given the working titles TAMALA IN ORION (which would chronicle Tamala’s search for her real mother) and TATLA (which was to explore the character of Tatla in greater depth). A colour TV series was also planned, with the working title TAMALA IN SPACE. As of 2020, none of these has surfaced – instead there have been two shorter works, the t.o.L written and directed TAMALA ON PARADE
and TAMALA’S “WILD PARTY“
–two short stories from different writers, storyboarded and directed by Shūichi Kohara and animated by Studio 4°C. Both of these are included on the TAMALA ON PARADE DVD, released in Japan in August 2007. This DVD does not have English subtitles.
A sequel named TAMALA 2030: A PUNK CAT IN DARK has been under production since 2019. (wiki)
Red Notice is a 2021 American action comedy film written and directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber. It stars Dwayne Johnson Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot. With a $200 million production budget the film became the most-viewed film on Netflix during release day.
spacetime coordinates: 2016 Johannesburg, South Africa
Chappie (stylized as CHAPPiE) is a 2015 American dystopian science fiction action film directed by Neill Blomkamp and written by Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell. It stars Sharlto Copley, Dev Patel, Hugh Jackman, Ninja, Yolandi Visser, Jose Pablo Cantillo, and Sigourney Weaver. The film, set and shot in Johannesburg, is about an artificial general intelligence law enforcement robot captured and taught by gangsters, who nickname it Chappie.
Blomkamp said he “wrote Chappie as a trilogy” and expressed interest in making sequels if they were “economically feasible”. As of November 2016, no sequels are planned. Blomkamp said the film did not perform well enough. (wiki)
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