1920s Japan

I'm trying to figure out what it was like to grow up in 1920/30s Japan. I think I'm going to interview my grandmother at some point in this, but I'm doing a more cursory look at references in the meantime.

Maria Montez

This post comes to us from artist and aestheticist satellite contributor Christopher Richmond, who keeps his own fascinating research blog, Something, Something, Hill of Bees.

Blue (1993)

Against a plain, unchanging blue screen, a densely interwoven soundtrack of voices, sound effects and music attempt to convey a portrait of Derek Jarman's experiences with AIDS, both literally and allegorically, together with an exploration of the meanings associated with the colour blue.
Writer / Director Derek Jarman
Blue (1993) on IMDb

FireSides #1 - Part 1: Cellini's Rave

FireSides is a repository of histories, legends, and anecdotes. Many of these stories are based in fact, while others are only rumored to be true. Like the flickering campfire, these tales aim to briefly illuminate life's mysteries, fueling the flame of curiosity.

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Here's what we know for sure:

While virtually all other Italian city-states had since adopted some form of monarchy, the Republican Commune of Florence remained a bastion of civil liberties. It's people took massive amounts of pride in knowing that no matter what station of society they were born into anyone could rise to the top. But this golden hippie paradise was perched atop a tenuous thread. Ambitions from within and without were constantly threatening to destabilize this brotherhood. When they weren't stringing people up in la piazza, power mongers in Florence were commissioning massive art projects in order to sway public opinion into their favor.

Tonträger: 60's Rock and Roll goes Krautward

The Berlin Wall performed more than just the geographical slicing of Berlin, it also neatly divided two distinct cultures, philosophies, and political ideologies for almost 30 years. During the Soviet stranglehold of the East, counter-cultural punk and rock bands rose, influenced by their Western counterparts, whom they viewed illicitly on banned radio and TV stations - and with more to fight against, namely the systematic pulverization of privacy by the government, they were arguably more authentic. After the Wall fell, the cultural vacuum kicked in. German punk became so ubiquitous it is now a tired cultural cliché.

America's powerful cultural influence on Germany continues to this day, but with Tonträger, a Berlin-based indie classic rock 'n' roll band, that inspiration reaches way back to rock's roots:

The Face of Garbo

This post comes to us from artist and aestheticist satellite contributor Christopher Richmond, who keeps his own fascinating research blog, Something, Something, Hill of Bees.

Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre, when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced. A few years earlier the face of Valentino was causing suicides; that of Garbo still partakes of the same rule of Courtly Love, where the flesh gives rise to mystical feelings of perdition.