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violetsystems · 1 year ago

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#personal

I've been enjoying a long bout of complete sobriety since late May. Breaking out of any routine can be a bit behaviorally jarring. But I don't really know that anyone noticed the change because I keep to myself. I'm sure the dispensary misses the chance to set up revolutionary actions behind my back. But for the most part, dealing with the personal pizza of the political around my own home is psychedelic enough for me these days. With Bastille Day in full swing, I got to thinking this morning about Derrida and consequentially the remake of the outer limits. The writing in that show is perplexing enough to wake up to the subtitles in the middle of the night. But one particularly episode where a poltergeist is loose in someone's home is questioned by the male friend. "Have you heard of Occam's Razor?" You'd swear he was about to mansplain Roko's Basilisk. But it's something I've needed to hear lately. Basically that the simplest of theories is the most logical in a realm of competing conspiracies. Derrida explains this in the concept of ghosts as simple being a symptom of the future. Whereas the nostalgia of the past movements, holidays, and systems tend to be firmly rooted there. Sventlana Boym describes this pretty well in a book called The Future of Nostalgia in which she describes the hyper reality going on around people during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ghosts to me have spoken louder than the drama around me. One quote more than many by Gil Scott Heron echoed by the late DJ Rashad building off the revolution not being televised. Nobody ever sees the revolution in your mind. And this speaks to me as the future in terms of Derrida. How the individual freedom of the mind and soul is somehow lost upon the order of the past. The future is always chaotic. Always in flux. Some Scientologists come up with complex science fiction mythologies to root it back in the past with timelines and infinite versions of the self. Some Hindus and Buddhists describe the ego death and the inescapable binding of karma. Neo Marxists tie themselves to a book by a bearded guy who wrote about labor before the internet. Jesus, ironically, outside the tenets of religion is the ultimate ghost and was punished quite famously for it.

My point is not to berate the freedom of belief and religion but simply talk about the fear of a future tied to individuals. What I took freedom in America to be was the right to personal liberties, life and pursuit of happiness as protected by the constitution itself. Which seems to have been infinity stoned out of relevance by money, greed, and lawyers. Speaking on Rashad who I shared a tangential group relationship with post humorously in a Chicago footwork crew called teak dj's? Rashad was a community organizer. He was a movement maker. He was effortless and tireless in pushing forward a sound that would take him all around the world with the help of a movement that was rooted in the decaying paradigm of MK Ultra EDM festival culture. Something that grew like a cancer from the drug scenes of the Rainbow gathering and Grateful Dead. When he had a falling out with this, he dropped out of the music scene for a spell and created a renegade crew with Traxman which was a combination of Ghetto Technicians and Ghetto DJ's (pardon the proper spelling.) It really was just him and Traxman continuing another movement called "gutter" in which people just went in the studio in one take and made music. Just like the blues, white people came around and commodified something that was simply an individual expression. And thus like Kurt Kobain, Lil Peep, Van Gogh and many other individual tours de force they were stapled back in the ridigity of the broader movement as martyrs. Enshrined for all eternity as a voice that either rattled the chains on the walls of EDM or inside the minds of those still deconstructing what he was trying to say rhythmically personally. It's a tempting thing to want to be a part of something. To have clear rules, validation and order to what you do. But you will always ultimately feel failed by the middling out of a group and their broader agenda. Sort of like how Adam Curtis describes the failure of the occupy movements. The passion was so fierce at first but descended into nothing but an organizational chart and discourse battle of what was acceptable. Labor has this same feeling lately. A constant argument on enshrining the moment into history and burying it altogether. Accepting yourself as an artist, a writer, or even just a human being outside of the norms of society is hard enough. Especially when everything seems to adopt the army mentality of beating your individuality out of you to make you work as a cohesive unit.

Emotionally speaking, Anarchy is a haunting in and of itself. One that maybe I sought out ordering within by the ritual of psychedelics like thc. It dulled my dreams to the point where I never had any nightmares. Never any lucidity. Never had any visions other than these four walls that I banged around in. Individualism is a haunted state in and of itself. People are always trying to exorcise this spirit out of you for the greater good. Demonizing what doesn't fit in or can be easily pigeonholed into a movement. These movements are no more than folders for people on Tumblr. A way to organize the chaos of the future. To box it in instead of embracing the chaos within the self. I'm not saying it isn't torture to suffer alone. To be your own person and worship in your own way. To not have an organization to be affiliated with economically so you can incur income in a normal way. Everything is locked out to the individual in American society and demonized as selfish and narcissistic in a masked class war. I shouldn't be able to write here even though I do not get paid or tipped for any of it. While Andrew Tate is out there making twenty k from a billionaire who bought a platform to bury his affiliation with a sex trafficker. What makes me so free of sin? The ghost of Jesus Christ I guess? I'm not part of a church but I was raised Christian for what it is worth. Jesus to me was the ultimate anarchist. More so than the guy who tacked the blog post on the Catholic church's door for the record. You always have these people who ask you on the street the question whether you have accepted this guy as your personal lord and savior. And in the haunted sort of way you should be able to say yes and go about your day. But in America like every other movement, relationship and association there are things expected of you. And this is not personal freedom. It isn't respect. It's the constant confrontation of a graveyard. People want to reduce you to a monument that they can add to their collection rather than a ghost who walks free saying hi to forever. There is somehow something sinful about being free. No man is free from sin they say. And yet the paradox of Jesus as a ghost is pretty simple if you believe that sort of thing. I'm not here to lecture anybody out there about the past or even their personal beliefs on religion. I'm trying to live in the future and haunted by it consistently. The only holiday I'm celebrating is canceling my adobe subscription. I'm the same person I was with less baggage and this includes people speaking for my mind without giving me a voice. I've always said what I feel here. And I've always spoken it with love. Now you should ask the group if you are allowed to do the same. <3 Tim

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kinoindiatv · 2 years ago

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Watch Indian Movies Online in Russia

индийские фильмы - самая большая база в Рунете! Огромная коллекция фильмов разных жанров с 1936 по 2023 год. Присоединяйтесь к любителями кинематографа Индии.

During the Soviet era, Indian films were extremely popular. These films were shown in the cinemas of the USSR. They were screened with subtitles. They were also distributed on cable television. Although Indian productions were popular in the USSR, their quality was low. The films were dubbed in Russian.

Raj Kapoor, the heartthrob of Soviet times, was the first star of Indian cinema to be seen in the cinemas of the USSR. His roles were chaplinesque, which was especially popular in the USSR. He was known for his innocent do-gooder characters. His movies were released in all 15 Soviet republics. His films were known for their optimistic themes and comical walk.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, India and the Soviet Union were engaged in sustained cultural diplomacy. The two countries were actively engaged in film productions. They worked together on projects such as the International Film Festival of India in Moscow. However, after the collapse of the USSR, the culture diplomacy ended. This resulted in an increase in the popularity of Bollywood in Russia. Some Russian cinemas began to show Indian films again.

The film 'Awaara' was a major hit in Russia and across the world. It sold more than 63 million tickets in Russia alone. It was also the first Indian film to be shown in Russia in over 20 years. The film's director and lead actor were both Raj Kapoor. The film was released in 22 screens in the country.

Another popular Indian movie was 'Mamta'. It was a 1969 movie that focused on a city that was struck by a terrible illness. The city's residents had to find a way to escape from the reality. They turned to movies to escape their everyday lives. They also found hope in the hope of a miracle. The film was a success, and brought a new audience to the combined cinema network.

In the past, Indian films were also distributed by the Central Partnership. It is the largest Russian film distributor. The company has previously worked with Hollywood studios. In July, Eros International Plc released the Hindi film 'Munna Michael' in Russia. It was directed by Tiger Shroff. The film was a huge hit, and its audience was the largest ever in the country.

During the same period, Indian cinema also appeared in the media. The former deputy prime minister of Russia, Vladislav Surkov, had a love affair with Indian cinema. He kept his passion for the genre a secret from his friends. In one of his columns in Russky Pioneer, Surkov said that Bollywood films featured a clear distinction between good and evil, and the films had triumphant moral simplicity.

The Russian film fraternity has been criticized internationally. They have been accused of being anti-Russian, and a major studio has ceased releasing movies in the Russian market. While this could provide opportunities for filmmakers in the country, it could also pose problems. The film fraternity is under attack from both Russia and the west. In addition, many of their online platforms have been shut down. They may have to find a way to evade these sanctions.

#индийские фильмы

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koufax73 · 3 years ago

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Soviet Studio Festival 2021: parte la nuova edizione

Manca oramai pochissimo al Soviet Studio Festival, una due giorni di concerti dove si esibiranno ben 12 realtà del roster, assieme a un ospite

Manca oramai pochissimo al Soviet Studio Festival, una due giorni di concerti dove si esibiranno ben 12 realtà del roster, assieme a un ospite. Il festival, che ha visto la sua prima edizione nel 2008, si terrà questa volta in Villa Albrizzi Marini, una meravigliosa villa veneta del ‘500 immersa in 9 ettari di parco e circondata da boschi e colline, situata a San Zenone degli Ezzelini, in…

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#2021 #anna bit #bob balera #elisa erin bonomo #joe shamano #lo strano frutto #soviet studio festival #the mills #villa albrizzi marini

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thinkingimages · 3 years ago

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juices of a carved pomegranate soaking through a piece of white linen...

Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates is a poetic biography of the eponymous 18th-century Armenian minstrel and bard, Sayat Nova, the “King of Songs”, recounting the stages of his life as writer, lover and priest.

Bold in its avant-garde imagery, mesmerizing in its patience; at only 77 minutes it is well and truly an epic. A film about poetry that is in and of itself poetic.

The film opens with a male voice proclaiming “I am he whose life and soul are torment” from a Sayat Nova poem. In his 2013 book, The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov, James Steffen states: “Much of the film’s thematic richness and emotional resonance derive from its dual vision as a film about [the poet] and as a coded autobiography of [Parajanov].”

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Born Sarkis Yossifovich Paradjanian of Armenian parents on 9 January 1924 in Tbilisi, Georgia, Sergei Parajanov transferred from the Tbilisi Institute for Railway Engineering (1942) to study song and violin at the Tbilisi Conservatory of Music (1943-45) before gaining admission to VGIK, the Soviet All-Union State School for Film Art and Cinematography (aka Moscow Film School) in 1946. He graduated as a film director in 1951 under the tutelage of Ukrainian directors Igor Savchenko and Alexander Dovzhenko and found employment at the Kiev Film Studios (later renamed the Alexander Dovzhenko Studios).

Parajanov began his career by making the same film twice and with the same co-director, Yakov Brazelian. Shortly after completing their diploma film, Moldavian Fairy Tale (1951), shot in the Ukraine, he assisted his mentor Igor Savchenko on Taras Shevchenko (1951) and then remade with Brazelian their graduation short as a feature-length children's film titled Andriesh (1955). Moldavian Fairy Tale appears to be lost, although Parajanov claimed to have kept a copy at his home in Tbilisi. Three documentary films followed: Ballad(1957), about a choral group and made for the anniversary of the 1917 Revolution; Golden Hands (1958), about folk art and co-directed with two other documentary filmmakers; and Natalya Ushviy (1959), a portrait of a prominent Ukrainian stage and screen actress. All three documentaries can be found in the Kiev archive. His next three feature films at the Dovzhenko Studios -- The First Lad (1959), Ukrainian Rhapsody(1961), and The Flower on the Stone (1962) -- generally followed the prescribed principles of Socialist Realism, yet each did contain scenes that went against its grain.

Parajanov's ninth film in Kiev, Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964), caused an uproar by smashing to bits the principles of Socialist Realism in Soviet cinema. Although awarded at several international film festivals, it was given only limited release in the Soviet Union. In trouble with the authorities for also protesting the arrest of Ukrainian poets and intellectuals, Parajanov accepted an offer from Yerevan to make a documentary on Akop Ovnatanian (1965), an Armenian portrait painter who had lived and worked in Tbilisi. Portraits by Ovnatanian were later incorporated into scenes in Kiev Frescoes (1966), a production interrupted at the Dovzhenko Studios after a fen weeks of shooting. Only fragments of Akop Ovnatanian and Kiev Frescoes remain today. The same fate befell Sayat Nova, shot under primitive conditions in Armenia. When the director's cut was confiscated, Sergei Yutkevich cut 20 minutes out of the original in an effort to save the film and re-edited the remainder into The Colour of the Pomegranates (1969) for limited Moscow release. "My masterpiece no longer exists" (Paradjanov) -- although an attempt has recently been made in Armenia to reconstruct the original version.

All further attempts to make a film proved in vain. After years of intrigue and suspicion, Parajanov was arrested in Kiev on 17 December 1973 and, after a court hearing, sentenced on 25 April 1974 to five years imprisonment at the Dnepropetrovsk camp for hardened criminals. The charges were given as "business with art objects," "leaning towards homosexuality," "incitement to suicide," and "black-marketing." In 1978, as the result of world-wide protests and petitions made by friends and artists, he was released and allowed to return to his family home in Tbilisi, but not permitted to find work in a film studio. On 11 February 1982, he was arrested again by the KGB, "for bribing a public official" to help a nephew gain entrance to the university, and detained in the Voroshilovgrad prison until November 1982.

After 15 years on a blacklist, Parajanov received the support of Eduard Shevarnadze, First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party, to make the feature The Legend of Suram Fortress(1985), co-directed by actor Dodo Abakhidze, and the documentary Arabesques on the Theme Pirosmani (1986) at the Gruziafilm Studio in Tbilisi. His last film, Ashik Kerib (1988), a Georgian-Armenian-Azerbaijan co-production, has received limited release in these countries. On 4 June 1989, he began shooting the first scenes from his autobiographical film, Confession, at his family home in Tbilisi. Three days later, he was taken to a hospital with respiratory problems. An operation for lung cancer in Moscow followed, then radiation treatments in Paris. Sergei Parajanov died on 20 July 1990 at the age of 66 in Yerevan, where he is buried.

#The Colour of Pomegranates #Sayat Nova #Sergei Parajanov #Սերգեյ Փարաջանով #Cinematic Still #Film #Still #Stills

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canmom · 2 years ago

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Animation Night 116: Milan Blažeković

Dobra večer, prijatelji! Vrijeme je za Večer animacije.

Good evening, friends! It’s time for Animation Night. Tonight we’re heading over to Croatia, to look at the films directed by Milan Blažeković, namely Čudesna šuma (The Elm-chanted Forest, 1986) and its sequel Čarobnjakov šešir (The Magician’s Hat, 1990).

Why? Well, my dear @mogsk has been working on translating a Ukrainian fansub of the latter film into English, which to our knowledge does not have an extant English sub. So, I don’t want to boast that this film has never been seen with English subtitles because I have no way of verifying that, but at the very least right now you won’t be able to get it anywhere else~

So, who’s this guy, what are his films like? I’ll admit, I was unfamiliar, so let me bring in a scholar who knows a thing or two, Midhat Ajanović Ajan, who writes the following in introduction to his biography of Blažeković:

If it did not sound like a cliche, slightly shabby from overuse, I would have called this article, and the entire book for that matter, A Croatian Disney. There is not a single animated filmmaker in Croatian, or the entire region, who is generally betternsuited than Milan Blažeković to be compared with the giant of animation and film. Blažeković's life and work are inseparably linked with the famous American, who remains the synonym for the art of the animated image. Blažeković made three animated feature films in the classic cel animation technique, which placed him in the select company that has fewer than a dozen European members and brought him as near as possible to his great idol. He made the films despite the fact that he was creating in an enviroment which had made a global impact by moving away from Disney's canons and by opposing the domination of his esthetic model.

I can’t find any copy of said biography on libgen, so the actual contents will have to remain a mystery. The way Mogs describes it to me, however, it fits into a broader tradition of frenetic, creative Eastern European animation, similar to such films as the wonderful Bulgarian Treasure Planet we watched back on Animation Night 7. (Sadly, like many early Animation Nights, I did not write this one up in the depth I would have liked. One day I hope to revisit a lot of these earlier issues!) There is less concern with the weighty realistic motion prized by Disney or the realist school in Japan, and more concern with ‘life’ of a different kind: unexpected, weird, surprising motion.

Such animation was the result of an explicit philosophy at the Zagreb School of Animtation, described in this article by Sanja Bahun...

“Life is warmth. Warmth is movement. Movement is life. Animation can be lukewarm or boiling. Cold animation isn‟t animation; it is like a stillborn child. To make animated cartoons means to rub tree trunks against each other until there is a spark perhaps or just a little bit of smoke. Take a kilogram of ideas (if possible not too confused), fifty kilograms of talent, and a few thousands of drawings. Stir it well and then with a bit of luck you won't get the right answer to your question.” (quoted in Petzke 1996: 53)

For the Zagreb School of Animation, one of the arguably most significant phenomena in both Croatian and Yugoslav cinematography, to animate never meant to imitate reality, but rather to give it a design, or, better still, an “interpretation” (Vukotić 1978: 15).

School here is in the sense of ‘school of thought’, like the ‘realist school’, not a literal building - but the Zagreb School was associated with a studio, Zagreb Film, and a long-running animation festival, Animafest (the second animation festival in Europe after Annecy). In Bahun’s account, its origins come in the 50s, at which point Yugsolavia had but recently split from the Soviet union under Tito, creating the context for an anti-Soviet animated film The Great Rally directed by Fadil Hadžić, the editor of a satirical magazine.

From this was born Duga Film, a short-lived production company which launched the careers of a lot of animators; this gave way to Zagreb Film, the centre of the ‘Zagreb School’. Although very stylistically varied, their films tended to focus on the struggles of a ‘small man’ defying, often unsuccessfully, a larger world; this later gave way to...

a loosely testimonial narrative structure, where the subject‟s interior landscape interacts with the objective world in a string of visually or auditorily commanding phantasmagorias (Dragić‟s Diary [Dnevnik, 1974] and Gašparović‟s Satiemania)

and then by the 80s, a turn to horror. The main thing unifying them all was a commitment to limited animation techniques: loops, reusing cels, and multiplane effects - though, in a sense more like the oldschool Fleischers than TV anime.

But! We’re not really here to talk about the Zagreb school, but what came next. So, The Elm-Chanted Forest: this was the first feature-length Croatian animation, an American collaboration which came at a point when Zagreb Film was in decline, but nevertheless carrying a lot of its spirit. It tells the story of a painter transported into a fantasy world, in which he encounters a series of oddities. Their US collaborators were New York-based Fantasy Forest Films, although I can find out almost nothing about them on a quick search, with databases like imdb listing no credits beyond this one film. Mysteries upon mysteries!

In any case, the work largely seems to be Croatian, although the story was adapted for screen by Fred P. Sharkey. The film was produced by someone called Doro Vlado Hreljanovic, who has a very weird career: grindhouse films in the 70s and early 80s, this one upbeat animated fantasy film, and then made two volumes of the news-footage snuff/shock series Faces of Death in the 90s. A fascinating rabbit hole given I had not even known this series existed, but otherwise unrelated...

So... let’s at last talk about the director, Milan Blažeković! He had previous directed short films such as Largo and episodes of the popular TV series Professor Balthazar.

Here’s an episode of Professor Balthazar narrated in English:

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Further short films include The Fish, Ikarus, Vergl and Gorilla Dance (1968) and The Man Who Had To Sing (1971), and animation for Vladimir Petek’s experimental film Zaklon (1967). He also contributed animation to longer projects, such as the Croatian-Canadian animated environmental film Man: The Polluter - I suppose Yugoslavia’s position as a ‘non-aligned’ country made it possible to collaborate with NATO countries like Canada? I would like to expand more on these, but unfortunately it is unclear where to find most of them. Here’s The Man Who Had to Sing, at least, a dark little story about a child who won’t stop singing and gets rejected by just about all of society.

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So. Elm-chanted was released in 1986, as far as I can tell simultaneously in Croation in Croatia and English in the US. The Croats loved it, but the Americans largely didn’t get it, which in Bahun’s account is likely because it’s an odd hybrid of the Disney school and the Zagreb school, with very flat staging. Nevertheless, a copy managed to make its way to the house of @mogsk, where it became a cherished childhood memory which would decades later inspire her to go looking for it... and that brings us to the second film, The Magician’s Hat:

Although more elaborate in its animation, this sequel was no longer an international collaboration, and released only in Croatian. Which means it’s almost unknown outside of Croatia, but we can thank the efforts of the Ukrainian fansubber Magmator, founder of RG Gliger (gliger.at.ua), a fansubbing site specialising in pokémon but also other animated films. Thanks to them, a Ukrainian-language .srt file was available which Mogs could machine translate, cleanup, and re-time. (Of course, if a Croatian speaker could help, we could make a better fansub~)

So what’s this one about? It centres on one Thistle the Magician, the redeemed antagonist of the first film, now battling against a certain Car Mrazomor (Emperor Frostbite), leader of the Frost Witches.

Following this film, the Soviet Union would complete its fall, and Yugoslavia would collapse in an extremely bloody war. Blažeković survived, and in 1997, two years after Croatia became an independent country, he would release his third feature, Lapitch, The Little Shoemaker (Čudnovate zgode šegrta Hlapića), adapting a children’s story in a similar model as his previous films. Returning to Bahun, she says...

To an audience made up of children who grew up exposed to gory television footage, curfews, and air raid sirens, and adults exhausted by the seemingly perpetual cycles of violence, Lapitch, The Little Shoemaker was a welcome escape: it soon became the highest-grossing Croatian animated film ever.

It received a much wider international release, and hopefully we’ll get a chance to see it down the line.

That’s about everything I can find out about these two movies... so now, for the first time (maybe) in English, let’s go and enjoy two truly obscure gems of traditional animation from Croatia! And thank you so much again mogs, who did basically all the work for this one, not just creating an entire fansub but also finding the sources to write about it <3

So... Animation Night 116 will be going live now over at picarto.tv/canmom and films will be rolling in about 30 minutes - hope to see you there!

#animation night #croatian animation #zagreb film #milan blažeković

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architectuul · 3 years ago

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The Story Of The Abandoned Car Factory Pragovka

Prague is a city of postcard-perfect architecture: from immaculate works of Gothic beauty – like St. Vitus Cathedral and the 13th century Old New Synagogue in Josefov – to the statue-lined Charles Bridge, or the monumental neo-Renaissance building of the National Museum looking out across Wenceslas Square. It is not a city that most would associate with industrial decay, however Prague’s former palaces of industry are no less grand, even while history is in the process of burying them.

The Praga Car Factory Pragovka. | Photo via E-Factory.cz

The Praga Car Factory Pragovka on the city’s eastern edge was once the beating heart of the Czechoslovak manufacturing industry. It played a significant role in the city’s 20th century history, but it was here at the Prague’s darkest days was set into motion. In 1968 workers at Pragovka sent a letter to the Soviet Embassy requesting support in the fight against liberalisation. This letter, published in Pravda, would then be used as justification for the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.

The Praga Car Factory today. | Photo Katka Havlíková

Pragovka is abandoned since the turn of the 21st century and is now a sprawling ruin, its extravagant factory halls succumbing slowly to time and nature. In 2017 I went to explore what was left of it. The Car Factory was founded in 1907 as a manufacturing site in the eastern suburbs of Prague, with just 30 employees. Two years later, its parent company adopted the name ‘Praga’ – the car brand used the Latin form of the city’s name in the hope of sounding more international. During WWI the Praga factory (then known as the First Czech-Moravian Machine Factory) supplied the Austro-Hungarian army; then after 1918 and the independence of Czechoslovakia, it began to focus more on passenger cars.

The main hall of the Pragovka factory in 2017. | Photo Katka Havlíková

The large, angled windows allowed plenty of natural light to enter, reducing electricity costs. | Photo Katka Havlíková

In 1927 Praga was incorporated into the new ČKD (Českomoravská Kolben-Daněk) group, one of the largest engineering companies in Czechoslovakia. Among other vehicles (including tanks, locomotives, tractors, motorcycles and metro cars), ČKD produced cars under the Praga, Škoda and Tatra brands, and was famous for making the Tatra T3 tramcar – a design which would sell almost 14,000 units, and become an iconic sight on the streets of socialist cities from Sarajevo to Tashkent. Meanwhile as many as half of the taxis on Prague’s streets had rolled out of this factory.

Left: Cover of a 1962 sales brochure from Strojexport, featuring the Tatra T3 tramcar. Right: Vintage poster featuring the Tatra T77.

In recent years, the Pragovka complex has been recognised as a heritage site and some of its spaces have been developed into an arts district. There is a retro-themed ‘Pragovka Cafe,’ and the place hosts film screenings, concerts and festivals. Reportedly as many as a hundred local artists have studios now on the former factory grounds, while the large E-Factory building has been converted into a gallery space.

Some outer buildings still remain, linked by covered walkways. Other buildings have been bulldozed. | Photo Katka Havlíková

There’s talk of building apartments here too in future, a trendy new community rising up amidst the industrial decay. A large part of the complex remains off-limits for now though – and it was here that we entered. During the visit of Prague was fortunate enough to be offered a tour of its best ruins the local photographer Katka Havlíková.

Raised gas pipes above an overgrown courtyard. | Photo Katka Havlíková

The factory has been abandoned long enough for creepers and graffiti to cover many of its surfaces. | Photo Katka Havlíková

Katka picks a careful path through the debris-field, towards the first of the factory’s grand production halls. | Photo Katka Havlíková

She led us around the back of the factory where we scrambled up a slope of rubble to reach a promontory at the corner of the former yard. Ahead of us lay a sea of green. Thick vegetation hid the concrete courtyard, with only the occasional street light, rising like drowning hands from water, to suggest that anything unnatural lay beneath. The main buildings, those still standing, were just visible through the trees and so we cut a path down through the overgrown wreckage towards the old factory halls.

The largest of Pragovka’s manufacturing halls looks no less grand today with its full-height windows. | Photo Katka Havlíková

After poking around in a few of the outer buildings that rise now out of bushes and debris, we made it finally to the main manufacturing halls of Pragovka. It was strange to see a building this grand left to ruin. The complex was built back in a time when factories and power plants were temples of the people – places of pride, not merely function, their spaces defined with grand architectural flourishes. This main hall could have been a train station, not a car factory. Natural light illuminated the hall from floor-to-ceiling windows (much of their glass still intact), while pillars supported an arched ceiling high above.

Nature creeps into Pragovka – vines find a way inside through broken window, letterboxes, or any other breach in the outer wall. | Photo Katka Havlíková

We didn’t see the new arts district at all – a fact indicative of just how large this complex was – but it was hard to imagine how any small business or community project could successfully take over a space like this. The factory halls were beautiful, but built on such a scale that maintenance and repairs would be an extraordinary burden, particularly after all these years of decline.

Two levels of offices lined the wall. | Photo Katka Havlíková

A staircase connects floors inside the main building. | Photo Katka Havlíková

The seeming inevitability of this factory’s ruin cast a melancholy mood over the few hours we spent wandering the halls of Pragovka. Right now, like this, with the warm sun slicing in sideways through the dirty glass windows, and the greenery of nature’s scouts – along with bursts of bright graffiti – lending fresh colour to the otherwise muted palette of pastel-painted walls and pillars: Pragovka might never look this good again.

Old ledgers amongst broken glass in the courtyard.| Photo Katka Havlíková

When Pragovka falls, much of its history will be buried with it; and perhaps for some, that might be for the best. Pragovka is remembered not only as the heart of the Czechoslovak manufacturing industry, but it is also a place where the communists made their stand – forever linking these buildings with a historic victory for the pro-Soviet movement. In 1968 the Soviet Union and its allies led an overnight invasion of Czechoslovakia – to suppress the Prague Spring, a growing liberalisation movement under First Secretary Alexander Dubček. Although history remembers the event as an act of totalitarian foreign aggression, that invasion was not, in fact, universally unwelcome.

A wall has collapsed to reveal the stairwell inside. | Photo Katka Havlíková

Numerous workers’ unions in Czechoslovakia supported Soviet intervention in their country, and one of the key triggers of the invasion was a letter of invitation, that was written here, at the Praga Car Factory. In 1971 the Czechoslovak journalist Josef Maxa authored A Year is Eight Months, which recounts the events of the Prague Spring and leading up to the invasion. “Moscow’s Pravda published a letter from ninety-nine workers in the Pragovka factory in Prague to the Soviet Embassy,” he wrote. “The letter denounced the Czechoslovakian enemies of socialism and of the Soviet Union.” That document was known as the “Letter of the Ninety-nine Praguers,” and it warned the Soviet Embassy how: “the manifestations of the democratisation of society in our republic threaten the building of socialism and in so doing, attack the blood-hardened friendship between the Czech and Soviet peoples” (as paraphrased by Martin Půlpán).

Rooftop above one of the manufacturing halls.| Photo Katka Havlíková

The letter claimed that all honest citizens of Czechoslovakia felt safer in the presence of Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops occupying their country. When Pravda printed the letter, on 30 July 1968, along with all ninety-nine signatures, the document would be used as justification for the swift invasion that followed in August. The incoming normalisation government that subsequently took charge of Czechoslovakia would valorise the authors of that letter – raising a memorial plaque at the main entrance to Pragovka, that read: “In the revolutionary tradition of this great workers’ nation, a letter with ninety-nine signatures was sent to the USSR in the critical year of 1968, requesting support and assistance in fighting anti-socialist forces.”

A bright and airy side room near the main factory floor. | Photo Katka Havlíková

Nowadays that plaque is long gone. The gates of Pragovka stand barred, and the halls where the letter was written are lost to a maze of rubble, weeds and graffiti. The factory’s decline today is an inevitability – it is a temple to a lost industry, a relic displaced from its time and no longer fit for purpose in the new industrial landscape of the Czech Republic.

The wall in a former office space. | Photo Katka Havlíková

Though Pragovka’s political history likely doesn’t help to endear these halls to the citizens of contemporary Prague – and it’s hard not to read some level of symbolism as this celebrated factory, once enshrined like a victorious battlefield in Czechoslovakia’s communist historiography, is slowly carved up, and crushed, by the oncoming future.

by Darmon Richter

[adapted with permission from an article at Ex Utopia]

#foma

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sound-art-text · 3 years ago

Video

vimeo

Electromagnetic Sound Art - Disinformation + "National Grid" - 1996 to 2021

“Communism equals Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country” – Vladimir Ilyich Lenin 1921 Electronic music producer, researcher and installation artist Joe Banks discusses “National Grid” - the highly influential sound installation, recording and performance concept, which Joe produces under the aegis of the art project Disinformation. “National Grid” is a work of electromagnetic sound art, originally created using VLF-band radio technology, later using direct line noise from live mains electricity. “National Grid” was first performed live and published on LP in 1996, and first exhibited as an art gallery sound installation in 1997. “National Grid” has since been exhibited and performed nearly 40 times, most recently at the Fort Process Festival, Newhaven, in 2018. This presentation discusses technical, musical and symbolic aspects of “National Grid”, in relation to art history, to experimental and classical music, and in relation to literature, featuring short readings from the writers H.G. Wells, William F. Temple and Bruno Schulz.

Documentation + audio commentary, featuring – Disinformation “National Grid”, Bruce Gilbert remix 1997; “National Grid”, LP version 1996 (CD re-issue 1997); “National Grid”, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst (Leipzig) “New Forms” CD 2000; Disinformation, live at the Dom Culture Centre (Moscow) 28 Sept 2000, featuring Mike Walter + Andy Knight; Disinformation + Strange Attractor, live at New Corsica Studios (London) 19 Nov 2004, featuring Mark Pilkington; H.G. Wells “Lord of the Dynamos” (extract) 1894; William F. Temple “Four Sided Triangle” (extract) 1951; Bruno Schulz “Sklepy Cynamonowe” (extract) 1934; Disinformation “Barcelona” (unreleased) remix 2017. Total running time 41:19. Listening Arts Channel - use headphones - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO_AP2LlN6E Original broadcast commissioned March 2021 - https://www.wereallbats.co.uk/nationalgrid https://rorschachaudio.com/2021/05/23/william-f-temple-electric-symphony-national-grid/ https://rorschachaudio.com/2021/05/23/bruno-schulz-electricity-national-grid/

#National Grid #Joe Banks #listen #sound art

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balticapocalypse · 3 years ago

Text

🌞🌛LITHUANIAN ETHNOASTRONOMY, ASTROLOGY and COSMOLOGY.

INTERVIEW WITH ETHNOASTRONOMER and VAIDILA (Priest) of ROMUVA,

JONAS VAIŠKUNAS.

(Please note that this is a google translation!)

(Monika Virvičiūtė-Rybelienė, a journalist with the Lithuanian history newspaper Voruta, talks to ethno-astronomer Jonas Vaiškūnas.)

When more and more current people are looking for answers to their questions by looking back at the past, drawing ideas from old experiences, and the Baltic religion is becoming more and more popular, we decided to talk to Jonas Vaiškūnas, one of the cultivators of the old faith, ethnoastronomist.

For many, this person is well-known as the organizer of the annual spring green festival "Jorė" in Molėtai district, for others - as an ethno-agronomist or the author of critical speeches and articles on websites. So this time about everything little by little.

- When and why were you interested in Baltic religion, astronomy, ethnocosmology?

- I have been moving gradually towards these areas of cognition. Books and memorable DEFA film studio films about North American Indians were the first textbooks on ethnology. At the same time, the starry sky attracted attention and awakened the imagination.

The telescope, made with his own hands from a paper tube and spectacle lenses, successfully brought the seas and craters of the Moon closer, opening the eagles of the stars of Chandelier - in 6th grade I already knew what I wanted to be. While studying at the Faculty of Physics of Vilnius University, I became interested in Eastern culture and philosophy. However, my classmate Evaldas Grušelionis, with whom I had to live in one of the dormitory rooms, kept talking about turning from Eastern cultures to his own.

He was then introduced to the people who were already firmly on the path of Baltic culture at that time. The folklore books of Matas Slančiauskas and Silvestras Davainis-Silvestraitis, acquired in 1985 or 1986, opened my eyes, I realized that what my parents are telling me is also a great wealth of the nation. Then I tried to write a folklore from my mother and father myself. Soon E. Grušelionis introduced me to a young active historian Vytautas Musteikis, who at that time led the folklore ensemble of historians of Vilnius University.

In this way I became involved in the gathering of people who were deeply interested in our old traditions and spiritual culture. Since then, we have traveled and lived in Lithuanian villages in winter and summer, collecting old Lithuanian songs, customs and beliefs, deepening the meaning of calendar holidays and traditions. I was significantly influenced by the “ethnocultural” worldview and lifestyle, and along with like-minded people, I became involved in monument protection activities. Together we established the monument protection club "Talka" in Vilnius.

We organized work on the maintenance of mounds, worked in archeological excavations in the Stone Age settlement of Kretuonas and Vilnius Lower Castle, participated in meetings and discussions related to the fate of cultural monuments, organized pickets and actions, defended cultural monuments destroyed by Soviet government and bureaucratic structures, We wrote to the press, we published a monumental self-published newspaper "Talka", we raised the issue of the reconstruction of the Palace of the Dukes of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. public meeting in the hall of the Academy of Sciences, where we established the Lithuanian Restructuring Movement…

I turned to ethnoastronomy with the desire to reconcile my physical education with my interest in ethnic culture. After graduating from the university, I worked at the Department of Laser Electronics of the Institute of Physics of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences. At that time, I was attracted by the idea of a museum of the history of paleoastronomy and astronomy matured at the Molėtai Astronomical Observatory. Then I moved from Vilnius to Molėtai and from 1987. I started working at the Molėtai Astronomical Observatory.

In the first days of my work, I told the research director of the observatory, Professor Vytautas Straižis, that although I am formally hired as an observer engineer, I intend to deal exclusively with ethno-astronomy, that is, to study Lithuanian ethnic knowledge of the sky.

I was convinced that anyone in the world could engage in laser technology and astronomical observations, and neither the Americans, the Japanese nor the Chinese would certainly collect or study our knowledge of Lithuanian national folk astronomy. I decided it was a task of my life. In the same year, I prepared and published a special questionnaire for the collector of Folk Astronomy in two editions. During the ethnographic expeditions, I started to gather knowledge of Folk Astronomy according to this questionnaire.

At the same time, together with our colleagues Gunars Kakars, Libertas Klimka, Janius Appa and Donatas Macijauskas, we started to take care of the establishment of the Ethnocosmology Center. After convincing the Lithuanian communist leadership at the time that such an original center would be a unique educational and cultural institution and make Lithuania famous, funding was received for its construction. This is how I found myself among the founders of the Center for Ethnocosmology, later called the Lithuanian Museum of Ethnocosmology. I worked here until 1998. Later I had to move to the Molėtai Region Museum, where I still work.

Research in the field of ethnoastronomy and ethnocosmology has been greatly stimulated by acquaintances with researchers in this field abroad. Since 1994 became a member of the International Organization for Cultural Astronomy (SEAC) in 2003. I was elected vice president of this organization. 2005 I became involved in the council of another international archaeoastronomy organization, ISAAC. 2007 In cooperation with these international organizations and Klaipėda University archaeologists, for the first time in Lithuania we organized a world conference on archeoastronomy and ethno-astronomy “Astronomy and Cosmology in Folk Traditions and Cultural Heritage”.

The fact that in addition to ethnic culture and ethno-astronomy, the topic of Baltic religion - “guilty” religious researcher Jonas Trinkūnas - appeared in my interest and research, the works of Norbert Vėlis, Vladimir Nikolajevičius Toporovas, Algirdas Julius Greimas and Gintaras Beresnevi And lately, the achievements of Dainius Razauskas, a fellow mythologist and religious researcher, have been the most inspiring.

- The old Lithuanian religion, what it was - customs, traditions… What are its manifestations in today's Lithuania?

- It is believed that before the establishment of Christianity in Lithuania, there were two main strata of the Lithuanian religion: the old religion of the peasant-agricultural class and the official state religion of the soldiers-rulers. Peasant religion was based on a natural, inherited, and rooted in the traditional rural culture, the totality of spiritual and moral values embodied in the customs and folklore of the nation.

The religion of soldiers and rulers, although also based on the local ancestral tradition, was reformed and deliberately structured, and in some respects apparently codified, following the example of the neighboring Scandinavian and Christian religions.

The aim was to legitimize political power and justify the social cohesion of the state. Although the two religious systems coexisted, there must have been some separation and opposition between them, similar to that which always arises between the worldviews and ideologies of the ruling elite and the general public. These two elements of the Lithuanian worldview were awarded by G. Beresnevičius, a religious researcher.

According to him, the post-reform religious system of soldiers and rulers had to be based on a hierarchy of gods - a pantheon whose structure was called to legitimize the political and social content of state ideology. The celestial God Thunder is believed to have ruled at the top of the pantheon of gods.

And the peasant tradition relied on the archaic layers of deep natural religion. Its central religious power was to be concentrated on the earthly goddess Continent and the rich mythical content of its mainly chthonic beings: masks, kites, the spirits of forests, plants, land and water. With the rise of Christianity, the official religion of the state was destroyed and, in part, simply transformed into Christianity.

Despite persecution, the peasant religion existed until the 19th century. Later, pagan rites and traditions were continued in harmony with the Christian cult and liturgy of the saints. 19th century the nobility and the intelligentsia also began to take over the foundations of the old religion from the peasants.

Part of the intelligentsia turned to its nation, to its language, history, and religion. The spirit of romanticism, the idealization of Lithuanian history, the Lithuanian language and the old Lithuanian religion became the ideological impulse that united the nation for the restoration of the independent state of Lithuania (1918).

XX a. Lithuanian ethnic heritage became one of the most important sources of revival of authentic Baltic religiosity. The growing interest in the customs of the rural people, the collection of ethnographic and folklore material, the study of historical sources, the study of the Baltic worldview and religion were all natural reactions of the reborn nation leading to self-knowledge and consolidation.

This process did not stop during the years of Soviet occupation. The living interest in the worldview of his ancestors was not limited to cabinet research.

Knowledge was immediately passed on from rural people on trips and expeditions. Not only the researchers, but also the young people interested in the traditions and worldview of their nation wrote folk songs, mythological stories, beliefs and other knowledge.

Later, that knowledge became a means not only for scientific studies, but also for the development of national self-awareness and the transmission of the Baltic worldview and religion. The collected songs were sung, the described festivals - celebrated, recorded ceremonies - were performed.

Decades after traveling in Lithuanian villages and searching for the wealth of folk wisdom, the Roma managed to get to know and take over the knowledge, customs, folklore and spiritual wisdom of the Lithuanian pre-war generation, who cherished and practiced the traditional Lithuanian worldview.

Thus, the foundations of our ancient religion, which were gradually receding with the dying Lithuanian peasant village, were taken over by a part of the Lithuanian public. It was the ethnic heritage that became the intermediate link that helped to combine the knowledge of the Baltic sources of religion and mythology of the past with the modern culture and traditional way of life.

After the restoration of Lithuania's independence, conditions and the need arose to legalize the movement of followers of the old Baltic faith. 1992 The Baltic faith community Romuva was registered in Vilnius. Ten years later, the ancient Baltic faith communities operating in various parts of Lithuania merged into the Ancient Baltic religious community, the Lithuanian Romuva.

Therefore, the adaptation of the adopted old tradition to satisfy the spiritual needs of today's man and to ensure the fullness of his life has become the task of Romuva in Lithuania. Romuva took over the Baltic moral and spiritual values cherished by his predecessors, his approach to nature, man and gods, the most important family and calendar holidays, symbols and other celebrations. All of this is creatively rethought today and used in modern spiritual life.

- The Romans are the successors of ancestral work, attracting more and more young people to their ranks. What do you think, and why is a young person attracted to the old religion?

- One of the most important features of our natural worldview, the currents of which reach us through ethnic culture, language and all of Lithuania, is uniqueness and uniqueness. Peculiarity, simplicity, sincerity, a living relationship with the world and the customs and precepts preserved by its ancestors.

The living spirits of our ancestors flow into our hearts and our souls flow, inspiring us to continue the work they have begun. And the greatest gift and the fire of inspiration burns the joy of discovering the deeply hidden, spoken, and forgotten essences of one’s life.

- What was the knowledge of our ancestors about the lights of heaven, according to which they counted the time? What do the stars say about the current situation in Lithuania?

- The vault of heaven and the lights of heaven shining in it have been associated with divine powers since ancient times. And today there is no doubt about the importance of the Sun in our lives, how its position in the vault of heaven affects all living and non-living nature, affects our well-being and health.

In the past, when there were no clocks, calendars, meteorological services or scientific ways of predicting the future, and human life depended on the seasons, the sun, moon and stars were indispensable helpers and the first signs of space and time to capture time and space. predict future events and phenomena.

The cyclically moving celestial lights became the first clock and calendar, the first compass and the first predictor of the future. For centuries and millennia, observing the vault of the sky and comparing the position of the lights with other rhythms of nature, our lights have become significant signs, a kind of "book" of destiny in which they read the future of the divine world. By uniting the stars scattered in the vault of heaven into recognizable and memorable signs, assigning them eloquent names, the ancestors immortalized their life experience and wisdom in them.

Today, astronomers still seem to be able to answer everyone's questions about human existence because they are "looking to the sky."

Stars can only speak to us and about us if someone in heaven, like the letters in the book, assigns them spiritual, cultural, or some other valuable content. A message can be read if it has been “recorded” by someone, and only if there are still teachers explaining the meaning of those “records” to the students and if there are students willing to accept those interpretations.

Today, we look at the stars, as well as many other things, through the glasses of materialism, so we see many spiritless bodies both in heaven and on earth. If no one is tired of inspiring them with spirit, can we expect any answers from them, what impetus for our spiritual insights? What if we looked at the scripture as a bundle of sheets of paper suitable for a home fireplace? We would warm our bodies a little and light the room for a while. The spiritual essences of the scriptures would never have illuminated and inspired our fabricated souls…

- You spent a lot of time researching the Lithuanian Zodiac, what is it like? What was it made of? What was its significance for the man at the time?

For a long time, nothing was known about the possible Lithuanian Zodiac. The zodiac as a system of astronomical knowledge was to be characteristic only of the higher educated strata of society at that time.

Therefore, there was little hope of finding out anything, because the destroyed class of clergy of the old religion did not necessarily take away their cherished knowledge and experience. It is probable that the classical Zodiac in the manor house should have been known even before the introduction of Christianity in the 13th century, and perhaps much earlier.

Until now, we could only speculate about it if, by a happy coincidence, a pagan ceremonial bucket with 12 original images of the signs of the Zodiac had not survived to our time. This bucket was accidentally discovered after the Second World War in the basement of a church in Grodno, between which old church inventory was thrown. It stood out from the other buckets in the museums for its impressive size. There are 12 ancient drawings on this bucket.

The drawings were discovered by scraping paintings of Christian saints painted in color from a bucket. We managed to prove that these are not just calendar signs for themselves, but the Zodiac.

When read clockwise, two lines connecting almost at right angles are shown from the bucket handle. The top line ends with an extension reminiscent of an arrowhead (a sign that is difficult to see) - "Pisces". The figure is similar to a hairy armpit - sheepskin - "Aries". Rider - Tauras. The two fighting soldiers are the Gemini. The bird is like a peacock, turning left - "Cancer". The bird is like a peacock, turning to the right - "Leo". Winch - "Virgin". Two Suns, one at the bottom with swastically curved rays to the right, the other with straight rays - Scales. Deer with a deer - "Scorpio". Spearman - "Sagittarius". Goat - "Capricorn". The horse is Aquarius.

By all accounts, this sign system forms a peculiar Zodiac that may have formed at the crossroads of the Mediterranean and local Baltic tradition. The system of the Zodiac, used in the cultures of the Mediterranean peoples, the Greeks and the Romans, and having entered the environment of the peculiar local Baltic culture, could be taken over and adapted to the local mythical images. Such an adaptation itself shows the existence of a rather strong local mythology of celestial luminaries. For if the Zodiac had been taken over without having its own established knowledge of the lights of heaven, there would have been no need to change some of the signs.

It is not clear who and under what circumstances replaced the traditional signs of the Mediterranean Zodiac with their own calendar signs, adapting them to local customs. The Baltic countries have had close ties with the Mediterranean and the East since time immemorial. These ties were primarily guaranteed by the Amber Road, which has been trading with the Mediterranean since the 2nd millennium BC. Amber road branches stretched from the Baltic Sea to Greece, Italy and even Asia Minor. Astronomical knowledge was needed to make contact with these distant lands alone.

For in those days, traveling both by land and by water, inevitably had to follow the path of the stars. Historical sources often point out that an astronomer helped travelers find their way. For example, in the Chronicle of Bychovc (1520–1530), which conveys a legend about the Lithuanian origin of the Romans, it is written: And they sailed the Mediterranean Sea, taking with them an astronomer who perceived the stars. There are still many unimaginable riddles hidden in the nebulae of the past, the story of the Zodiac.

While it is true that it was integrated into a harmonious system of 12 celestial signs in Mesopotamia, it is also certain that as the Zodiac spread to foreign lands, it not only affected the local cultures but also experienced significant metamorphoses. The original Lithuanian variant of the Zodiac should also make its contribution to the history of this phenomenon, which has not lost its magical charm so far.

- What did our ancestors know for many years, what do we not know now, and again the present man is rediscovering those things?

- Apparently, we are born to rediscover and redo everything. Even the wise, Plato said that our knowledge is only a remembrance of what has been known for a long time. The unfading truth of these words has at all times encouraged recourse to the wisdom of the ancestors. In this way, we discover and realize that the worldview of the ancestors was not out of the question, but a peculiar and effective totality of moral, spiritual knowledge and actions that ensured the coexistence and survival of society.

Modern society, moving rapidly in the direction of modern technology, must inevitably rediscover and rediscover the law of Sustainability between nature and human necessity. In order to survive, we will have to embrace the wisdom of Sustainable Culture, long cherished in the worldview of our ancestors, based on the creative values of Sustainability, Skalsa, and Eternal Fire.

And it is worth remembering the now rapidly forgotten truth that it is up to us to fill our life horizons with meaningless material-only bodies, or to be able to penetrate them even with a living spiritual essence…

- The identity of a modern person, what is it in your eyes?

- Identity - as a focus. You try to concentrate, to focus so that you can solve the task as best you can, and the environment tries to identify us, knocking us out of the tracks of peculiar self-expression, lifestyle, language and thinking. As we lose our lands, our people, we still keep shrinking and bleeding.

When we regained our independence, we fell into the path of even greater trials and tribulations. We have been able to overcome wars, occupations and exile, and now we are clinging to being free. The test of oppression provoked resistance and was therefore defeated, but not everyone overcomes the test of freedom. Freedom gives birth to relaxation and loss of alertness. Not only does good grow with freedom, but so do its opposites.

The false nationality of the cradle of deceptive freedom about the EU, NATO, 'European standards', 'Europeanness', 'integration', 'tolerance', the 'euro', the 'Structural Funds' and the wake-up call late.

However, in spite of the grunt of various hair and obsessive experimenters seeking to dismantle the Lithuanian identity, we are still Lithuanians. It will not be easy to stay that way now. The state has stopped caring about the national and civic education of the younger generation. The official media has willingly succumbed to a largely adaptive "politically correct" cosmopolitan worldview that seeks to humiliate and downplay what remains of our traditional values.

Attempts are being made not only to deny the basic moral rules of the nation's way of life enshrined in the Lithuanian Constitution, but also to break down the long-standing pillars of the family structure. People who advocate traditional national values are increasingly being called "clerics", "nationalists", "chauvinists"

When it is already reported on TV that it is not retirees who stand for traditional families and moral values with broad public support, but a “group of homophobes” who have been raised on the basis of Lithuanian Dora and Darna, inspired by respect for the Father, Mother, Family and It remains to be seen that Vydūnas was the largest "homophobic" of the Lithuanian nation, and Jonas Basanavičius was the fiercest "Taliban"…

There is still a lot of talk about the Soviet legacy. It seems that with this spell, more and more often without realizing it, we are obscuring not some mystical feature of our consciousness formed by the Soviet government during the 50 years of occupation, but a feature of adaptability characteristic of most people of all times. Now, as in those days, most people have adapted to the intertwining of the prevailing ideology and political system, to its entire bureaucratic and, at the same time, repressive apparatus.

As we would call today's society - post-Soviet or European - its adapters are also the favorite. A young person who consciously lives only after the 1990s doesn’t even feel it. To him, this seems a modern norm. Only for those of us who lived in that Soviet system and found themselves in this system are not only the typological but also the genetic identities of the two systems clearly visible. The Singing Revolution, the Sąjūdis, did not change the essence of human adaptive nature.

Like most in the past, and this is probably normal, it is adaptable and loyal to the current - normal, formal - order, whatever it may be. And only a minority is in the opposite camp to adaptability, whatever power and order it serves… Today, the new mythical hero is made an amorphous man, free from obligations to his homeland, nation, family and even his gender… Any long-term relationship or obligation is declared a restriction of individual freedoms. Adorability and amorphousness and liquidity of identity are key values.

Identity is a peculiarity, it is an inseparable set of meanings of self-perception of a person and society, based on the permanence and inheritance of self-awareness. It is the creation and affirmation of your center, your axis, your self. Identity puts a person at the center, giving him an axis that allows him to twist his creative circle. Any peripheral identity is just fiction - the stamp of the cultures of other (foreign) centers in our consciousness. My duty as a modern Lithuanian is to return the center of the world to the land of my ancestors, where Lithuanian is spoken.

- In Lithuania, you are a respected person, especially young people, because you write a lot on the Internet, you study even the most sensitive problems of the country without being afraid of a sharper word, criticism, and why did you create your Blog? What prompted you to present your thoughts in public?

- It is impossible to remain indifferent to what is happening in Lithuania. Sometimes, when you see what's going on - it's just boiling blood, flooding with resentment - in times of free or loose media, taking care of things and taking care of things that can't keep you indifferent without expressing your opinion, your thoughts.

While living in the forest, a hermit has less opportunities to drive, run to join a rally, picket or other social action. It's more common and you resort to feathers…

Sometimes you just weigh whether it’s worth driving a few hundred miles and engaging in a public action with your body, or rather writing a sharper essay. The essays usually win. They represent rallies and pickets for me… It is easier when you write out thoughts and feelings.

It is hoped that this will also serve the common cause, form an opinion, bring together like-minded people, and perhaps even determine decisions or self-determination. And I started writing a blog begging for a restless snake of self-expression. After all, not all thoughts and essays are accepted and published by the official media. And here you are the editor and boss yourself.

- What would Lithuania be like today if the old faith had survived?

- If the old Lithuanian religion had survived, then not only the history of Lithuania, but also of Europe, and maybe the world, would have been different. If we distance ourselves from modeling complex political and social events and talk only about worldview and culture, then I think we could imagine Lithuania as a kind of third civilization intertwined between the so-called Eastern and Western cultures, between Byzantine and Roman European cultures, as a peculiar spiritual and cultural space. a kind of living reserve of Baltic-Indo-European culture, a land of distinctive culture and worldview, resembling India and perhaps Japan.

I am convinced that the connection between the values of the old Lithuanian faith and the achievements of Western civilization would have given a strong movement to creativity and the development of the spiritual and material industry, as has happened in Japan. The vital powers of a destroyed and still-destroyed Nation would have had an unprecedented expansion. There is no need to talk today about the disastrous emigration, which is almost turning into a global evacuation and the disappearance of the nation…

The precepts of the legendary Brothers Brutenis and Vaidevutis of Prussia, who entered the flames of self-sacrifice in the name of their endangered nation, would not have been fulfilled: Know, my people, that without your Gods you will get nothing good, nothing joyful. Know that God gives all good, all happiness, all joy and bliss.

I believe that our Lithuania would be magnificent.

🌞

⚡️COSMOLOGY OF THE ANCIENT BALTS:

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1997JHAS...28...57S

⚡️SAMOGITIAN SANCTUARY

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samogitian_Sanctuary

⚡️SAMOGITIAN SANCTUARY

https://magical-europe.com/2019/09/08/samogitian-sanctuary-lithuanian-zemaiciu-alkas-a-revived-pagan-astronomic-observatory/

⚡️MUSEUM OF ETHNOCOSMOLOGY

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_Museum_of_Ethnocosmology

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theluworld · 4 years ago

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AFM 2020 Hot List: Projects With Emma Thompson, Dave Bautista and Armie Hammer Generating Sales Buzz

7:45 AM PST 11/9/2020 by Scott Roxborough

There's no shortage of new independent films heading to the online-only American Film Market this year, even if COVID-19 is changing how everyone does business.

Cinemas across Europe have gone back into lockdown, theaters in much of the U.S. — including L.A. and New York City — remain shut, and the studios have pushed or pulled nearly every one of their big tentpoles (will the new James Bond, No Time to Die, ever hit theaters?).

......

Gabrielle Stewart, managing director of HanWay Films, which will be pitching Cold War thriller The Billion Dollar Spy, starring Armie Hammer and Mads Mikkelsen, and Sia's directorial debut Music to AFM buyers, thinks these online-only markets favor "packages with clear hooks, clear talent and in clear genres." Discoveries, however — films from an unknown director with lesser-known talent — might need physical markets or festivals to generate buzz. "For a discovery, you sell off the heat in the room," she says. "That's hard to replicate online."

The Billion Dollar Spy

HanWay is shopping Cold War thriller 'The Billion Dollar Spy' to buyers at AFM

Sales: HanWay Films (international), CAA Media Finance/Endeavor Content(U.S.)

Director: Amma Asante

Stars: Mads Mikkelsen, Armie Hammer

Buzz: Spy thrillers with A-list casts are precious rarities on the indie market, which should boost pre-sales bidding on Asante's upcoming feature. The based-on-real-life drama stars Hammer as a CIA agent who develops a bond with a Soviet engineer (Mikkelsen), who has access to military secrets that could change the course of the Cold War.

.....

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/afm-2020-hot-list-projects-with-emma-thompson-dave-bautista-and-armie-hammer-generating-sales-buzz

#armie hammer #mads mikkelsen #billion dollar spy

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emerald-studies · 4 years ago

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The iconic, beautiful, intelligent Angela Davis...

Who is still alive today!

“Angela Davis is an activist, educator and author. She is the author of eight books and has lectured throughout the United States as well as in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. Davis gained her international reputation in the early 1970s, when she was tried for conspiracy and imprisoned, and later fully acquitted, after being implicated in a shootout in front of a California courthouse. As a member of the Advisory Board of the Prison Activist Resource Center, Davis focused on exposing racism that is endemic to the US prison system, and exploring new ways to de-construct oppression and race hatred.Angela Davis, the daughter of an automobile mechanic and a school teacher, was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on January 26, 1944. The area where the family lived became known as Dynamite Hill because of the large number of African American homes bombed by the Ku Klux Klan. Her mother was a civil rights campaigner and had been active in the NAACP before the organization was outlawed in Birmingham. Davis attended the segregated Carrie A. Tuggle Elementary School, and Parker Annex, a middle-school branch of Parker High School in Birmingham. By her junior year, she had applied to and was accepted at an American Friends Service Committee program that placed black students from the South in integrated schools in the North. She chose Elisabeth Irwin High School in Greenwich Village in New York City. There she was introduced to socialism and communism and was recruited by a Communist youth group, meeting children of some of the leaders of the Communist Party, including her lifelong friend, Bettina Aptheker.Davis was awarded a scholarship to Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, where she was one of three black students in her freshman class. Feeling alienated by the isolation of the campus, Angela Davis worked part time to earn enough money to travel to France and Switzerland before she went on to attend the eighth World Festival of Youth and Students in Helsinki, Finland. She returned home in 1963 to an FBI interview about her attendance at the Communist-sponsored festival. Angela Davis would go on to study at the Sorbonne in Paris and later the University of Frankfurt finally earning her master's degree from the University of California San Diego campus and her doctorate in philosophy from Humboldt University in East Berlin.In 1969 Angela Davis was known as a radical feminist and activist, a member of the Communist Party, and an associate of the Black Panther Party. She was working as an acting assistant professor in the philosophy department at UCLA. When the Federal Bureau of Investigation informed the California Board of Regents, that Davis was a member of the American Communist Party, they terminated her contract in 1970.Angela Davis became active in the campaign to improve prison conditions. She became particularly interested in the case of George Jackson and W. L. Nolen, two African Americans who had established a chapter of the Black Panthers in California's Soledad Prison. On the 13th of January 1970, Nolan and two other black prisoners were killed by a prison guard. A few days later the Monterey County Grand Jury ruled that the guard had committed "justifiable homicide." When a guard was later found murdered, Jackson and two other prisoners were indicted for his murder. It was claimed that Jackson had sought revenge for the killing of his friend, W. L. Nolan.On August 7, 1970, Superior Court Judge Harold Haley, along with several other hostages, was abducted from his Marin County, California, courtroom by gunpoint and murdered by 17 year old Jonathon Jackson during his effort to free his brother George Jackson. The firearms used in the attack were purchased by Angela Davis, including the shotgun used to kill Haley, which had been purchased only two days prior and sawed-off. Numerous letters written by Angela Davis were found in the prison cell of George Jackson as well. The California warrant issued for Davis charged her as an accomplice to conspiracy, kidnapping, and homicide. On August 18, 1970, Davis became the third woman to appear on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List. Davis became a fugitive and fled California. She evaded the police for more than two months before being captured in New York City. John Abt, general counsel of the Communist Party, was one of the first attorneys to represent Davis for her alleged involvement in the shootings. While being held in the Women's Detention Center there, she was initially segregated from the general population, but with the help of her legal team soon obtained a federal court order to get out of the segregated area. In 1972, she was tried and the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. The mere fact that she owned the guns used in the crime was not sufficient to establish her responsibility for the plot. John Lennon and Yoko Ono, wrote the song "Angela" on their 1972 studio album Some Time In New York City to show their support. and Mick Jagger, of the Rolling Stones, wrote the song "Sweet Black Angel" in her support. The song was released in 1972 on the album Exile on Main Street.In 1979 Davis visited the Soviet Union where she was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize and made a honorary professor at Moscow State University. In 1980 and 1984 Davis was the Communist Party's vice-presidential candidate.

Angela Davis has been an activist and writer promoting women's rights and racial justice while pursuing her career as a philosopher and teacher at the University of Santa Cruz and San Francisco University. She achieved tenure at the University of California at Santa Cruz despite the fact that former Governor Ronald Reagan swore she would never teach again in the University of California system.An author of eight books, a persistent theme of her work has been the range of social problems associated with incarceration and the generalized criminalization of those communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination.Angela Davis is a member of the executive board of the Women of Color Resource Center, a San Francisco Bay Area organization that emphasizes education of and about women who live in conditions of poverty. She also works with Justice Now, which provides legal assistance to women in prison and engages in advocacy for the abolition of imprisonment as the dominant strategy for addressing social problems. Internationally, she is affiliated with Sisters Inside, a similar organization based in Queensland, Australia.” (source)

#blm #blacklivesmatter #blackwomenmatter #black women matter #black activists

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impressivepress · 4 years ago

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Live like a Rockefeller — The Rivals by Diego Rivera

At first glance, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and the Mexican artist Diego Rivera couldn’t have been more different. She was the daughter of a prominent Republican senator and had married into one of America’s most famous capitalist families; he was a devoted member of Mexico’s Communist party, who had visited Moscow before his first U.S. mural commission in San Francisco.

Abby, however, was a huge admirer of Rivera’s art. He’d developed a reputation as one of his generation’s leading modern artists, and she knew all about his triumphs as a muralist in his homeland (in buildings such as the Ministry of Education in Mexico City), not to mention his mural for the Pacific Stock Exchange Tower in San Francisco. She purchased a number of Rivera’s oil paintings, sketches and watercolours. Her first purchase in 1929 was May Day Parade, a Rivera sketchbook (now in the collection at MoMA), which he had completed on a trip to Moscow.

In 1931, in her capacity as co-founder and trustee of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Abby invited Rivera for a solo exhibition at the institution, making him only the second artist, after Matisse, to receive that honour. It is likely that Mexico had been on her mind for decades, ever since her first trip to the country in 1903. Rivera embodied everything that Abby and Alfred Barr, MoMA’s first Director, were looking for in terms of the museum’s programming: he was both a modernist genius with a towering body of work and as Mexico’s leading muralist, he was the foremost proponent of a genuine art movement from the Americas to the world.

On arrival in New York, Rivera paid a visit to the Rockefellers’ Manhattan home with his wife, the artist Frida Kahlo. ‘He was a very imposing and charismatic figure: tall and weighing three hundred pounds,’ Abby’s son, David Rockefeller, recalled in later life.

Rivera brought with him a new canvas, titled The Rivals, which Abby had commissioned and which he had painted in a makeshift studio aboard the steamship, the SS Morro Castle, en route from Mexico. The painting depicts a traditional festival from the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca known as Las Velas, a colourful celebration in observance of local patron saints and of the natural bounties of spring.

‘It’s undoubtedly one of Rivera’s masterpieces,’ says Virgilio Garza, Head of Latin American Paintings at Christie’s. ‘Compared with his murals — which are epic in scale and content, with sweeping vistas and narratives that are often ideologically or historically driven — this easel painting is equally monumental in presence, yet devoid of Rivera’s politics. It’s a much more intimate scene focused on regional traditions, and the brushwork is deliberately looser.’

Others have praised the rich combination of bright colours, reminiscent of Matisse (whom Rivera knew from the decade he’d spent in Paris, between 1911 and 1921) but also, more pertinently, reflecting the vivid hues evident across Mexico: from its flora to its architecture. ‘And then there’s his modern conception of space through the use of multiple planes of colour that recall the formal effects of synthetic Cubism,’ says Garza. ‘Forms and figures are synthesised and reduced to their essential elements. The viewer’s gaze recedes in stages, from the men in the foreground, to the brightly dressed women under the hanging papel picado. Rivera’s brilliant composition of intersecting planes creates a cinematic narrative.’

The Rivals was as popular with Abby as Rivera’s sell-out MoMA retrospective proved to be with New York’s public. In 1932, she approached the artist about another project: completing a mural for the lobby of the RCA Building, the centrepiece of the Rockefeller Center, her husband, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s new complex in Midtown Manhattan.

Rivera’s idea was a fresco on the twin themes of human cooperation and scientific development, and he sent Abby a planned sketch of it along with a letter saying, ‘I assure you that… I shall try to do for the Rockefeller Center — and especially for you, Madame — the best of all the work I have done up to this time.’

In the process of painting the mural Man at the Crossroads, Rivera made several changes to his original sketch that would have fateful consequences. Chief among these was the addition of Lenin’s features into the face of a labourer. When news of this change in the mural reached Nelson Rockefeller, David’s older brother, he asked Rivera to substitute the late Soviet leader for another figure.

The painter, despite many attempts to persuade him, refused. Equally vexing to the Rockefeller family was the depiction of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. on the left side of the mural drinking among a group of men and cavorting with women of questionable repute. The latter was a striking image given the family’s devout religious views and their abstinence from drinking and smoking, as well as the Rockefellers’ firm support of U.S. Prohibition-era laws. With no compromise reached, Rivera was dismissed, and although he was paid in full the mural was destroyed. ‘The mural was quite brilliantly executed,’ wrote David Rockefeller in Memoirs in 2002, ‘but not appropriate’.

Rivera would go on to recreate Man at the Crossroads, in modified form as Man, Controller of the Universe, on the walls of the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. Here again, Rivera depicted John D. Rockefeller, Jr. clutching a martini amid scenes of gambling and excess, while the other side featured workers and various Communist leaders.

Despite all these events, Abby and her sons Nelson and David remained admirers until the end. She would donate many of the Rivera works she owned to MoMA, although The Rivals was one piece she held on to. As a sign of how highly she valued it, Abby gave it to David and his wife Peggy McGrath as a wedding present in 1940. They, in turn, would give the painting pride of place, for decades, in the living room of their summer residence, Ringing Point, in Maine.

David Rockefeller’s interest in Latin America and its art and culture spanned many decades. In January 1946, after completing his military service in the Second World War and before he started work at Chase Bank, he and Peggy decided to take ‘a second honeymoon’. They settled on Mexico as the destination for their six-week holiday.

‘This was our first direct exposure to Latin America, and we were very much taken with what we saw,’ David wrote years later. ‘We were especially fascinated by the remarkable pre-Columbian monuments and artefacts, as well as by the charm of much contemporary Mexican painting and folk art.’ He recounted how keen they were to see the famous Mexican frescoes of Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City and Cuernavaca. ‘We especially wanted to see Rivera’s murals, since I had met Rivera with my mother when he first came to New York in 1931,’ he recalled. ‘I had always found him to be a very sympathetic person, and I liked his painting.’

The couple had travelled to Mexico armed with letters of introduction from Nelson Rockefeller, who had been appointed Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs by President Roosevelt and had subsequently visited virtually all the Latin American nations. One letter was addressed to Roberto Montenegro, an artist friend of Nelson’s, who introduced David and Peggy to other contemporary Mexican artists.

At the beginning of his long career with Chase, one of David’s first assignments was in the bank’s Latin American division. In 1965 he assumed the chairmanship of both the Council of the Americas and its new cultural adjunct, the Center for Inter-American Relations (CIAR). The latter was responsible for introducing Americans to the cultures and artists of Latin America, including staging the first one-man show in New York for Fernando Botero.

In 1991, he endowed the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard, which continues to explore Latin American politics, society, and culture, and after his retirement from the bank David was made chairman of The Americas Society, which afforded him, he said, ‘many new opportunities to visit the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean, and to appreciate their diverse art and culture.’

~ ROCKEFELLER COLLECTION | AUCTION PREVIEW · 9 May 2018.

#diego rivera #painting #abby aldrich rockefeller #artist biography #man at the crossroads #Christies

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chrryblssmninja · 4 years ago

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Kino Klassika Foundation, in association with the Centre of Contemporary Arts Tashkent presents TASHKENT FILM ENCOUNTERS, a film programme spotlighting classic film from Central Asia. This season continues Kino Klassika’s long standing undertaking to showcase classic films of the Soviet, Russian and Caucasian film traditions, as well as expand the offering to include contemporary classics of Central Asian cinema. A selection of modern classic filmmakers from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan will be spotlighted. Films will be available online for a week, free to view and will take place each Tuesday from the 21 of July to 18 of August 2020.

The main programme will take place online at the Kino Klassika website, www.kinoklassikafoundation.org. This is a unique co-operation between Kino Klassika, the Centre of Contemporary Arts Tashkent and directors and studios from the region. This season includes rarely screened and remarkable recent works from great directors including highly acclaimed Darejan Omirbaev of Kazakhstan whose recent work, Student, competed in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, as well as Aktan Arym Kubat of Kyrgyzstan, one of the great directors of Asian cinema.

The initial offering seeks to spotlight films whose directors are engaging with post-Soviet reality and the mission of each country to create post-soviet identities. As always with Kino Klassika screenings, each film will be accompanied by specially commissioned programme notes.

#film

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randomvarious · 4 years ago

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Scorpions - “Wind of Change” Kuschelrock 6 Song released in 1990. Compilation released in 1992. Pop-Rock / Hard Rock / Hair Metal

From an oral history of the Scorpions' early 90s hit, "Wind of Change," published in 2015 in Rolling Stone:

[Lead guitarist, Rudolf] Schenker: In the Scorpions we have this kind of saying: Love, peace, and rock & roll. The love stands for "Still Loving You." The rock & roll stands for "Rock You Like a Hurricane." And the peace? That's for "Wind of Change."

When it comes to Hannover, Germany's Scorpions, Americans basically know the band for those three songs mentioned above, plus, of course, "No One Like You." But the Scorpions are way more than just a handful of classic rock radio hits. They've actually been around in some form or fashion since nineteen sixty-fucking-five. I mean, think about that. The Scorpions actually predate Revolver, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and the Velvet Underground. That's really not how anyone actually thinks of them in the timeline of rock history.

But that's because they took a long while to catch on, especially in the States. While 70s-era Scorpions represents the most technically perfect time in the band's tenure, largely because of lead guitarist Uli John Roth's wizardry, it didn't end up translating to American sales. It would take Roth's departure, which ultimately caused a change in the band's overall sound, to do that.

The Scorpions would find a way to adapt throughout the decade of excess by freely indulging themselves in crassly commercial hair metal, unleashing the instant guitar-squealing classic, "Rock You Like a Hurricane," in 1984. But if you know the tried and true hair metal formula, you know that for every few hard rockin' singles that a band pumps out, there's a power ballad to go along with them. And the Scorpions didn't just become known for their brash brand of metal; they could create quite the power ballad, too.

But while most power ballads tended to be about tender romance or sad heartbreak, the Scorpions decided to turn to more important things, like politics. And they were well-equipped for it. Unlike their American contemporaries who never faced a real day of political hardship in their lives, the Scorpions directly experienced the horrifying effects of Germany’s split into East and West. Not only that, but they were also raised by the generation that either subscribed to Nazism or, at the very least, failed to do anything to halt its rise.

So when the Scorpions were afforded the opportunity to be one of the first rock bands to play behind the Iron Curtain in Leningrad in 1988, they jumped at it, with two ideas in mind. One was to acknowledge the absolute terror that their ancestors had wrought upon the Russian people during World War II, showing that they were part of a new, peace-loving generation of Germans who found the actions of their ancestors to be awful and abhorrent (By this logic, US bands should be playing in just about every single country every single day. That goes for English bands, too). The other was to bring an implied message of hope and freedom to people who had been largely cut off from western art and culture. Not that Russians didn't know the Scorpions. Popular western music had been smuggled into the Soviet Union for years, but actually having the people who made that music performing right in front of their very eyes was, symbolically, a very big deal.

The Scorpions' Leningrad shows were so successful that they were invited back to play at the Moscow Music Peace Festival alongside Ozzy Osbourne, Mötley Crüe, Cinderella, Skid Row, and Russian bands Gorky Park and Brigada-S in 1989. It was during this trip that lead singer Klaus Meine was inspired to write both the lyrics and music for "Wind of Change." Because of their adoption of glasnost, the Soviet Union was opening itself up, which generated a feeling of positivity that the Cold War was finally coming to an end.

It just so happened that a few months after the song was written, the Berlin Wall fell, which marked the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. "Wind of Change" would then appear on the Scorpions' eleventh studio album, Crazy World, in November of 1990, and be released as a single a couple months later. The music video would feature images of the Berlin Wall falling and Germans rejoicing and reuniting after having been forcibly separated from each other for decades.

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But contrary to popular belief, and probably thanks to the music video, "Wind of Change" was not about the Berlin Wall or Germany. It was strictly about Russia. The lines,

I follow the Moskva Down to Gorky Park Listening to the wind of change

make reference to the Moskva River, which runs through Moscow, and Gorky Park, a park in Moscow named after author Maxim Gorky. A Russian stringed instrument called the balalaika is also mentioned before the song's guitar solo.

But Klaus Meine was right about the fact that change was indeed coming. He just didn't know how much and how soon. Nevertheless, the world events that conveniently took place not long after "Wind of Change"'s completion would help propel the song to the top of the charts in multiple countries and amass something like 14 million copies sold worldwide. It was the #1 song in the world as it's now cited as the soundtrack to the fall of large-scale global authoritarian communism. And it was also the Scorpions' last real triumph.

But the "official" story about this global hit might not actually be true. A limited series podcast was released just this year called Wind of Change which alleges that the CIA may have actually written the song. A journalist received the hot tip from a trusted ex-CIA confidant and attempted to track down the story. And it's not really all that farfetched. The CIA has been surreptitiously involving itself in the production of pop culture for years with the latest credible allegations coming out of Venezuela. But when confronted with this question of who actually wrote "Wind of Change," Klaus Meine categorically denied the CIA's involvement between fits of laughter. But then again, he could just be gaslighting us all at the direction of the CIA.

Truthfully, in hindsight, this song sounds wistfully corny. And there were probably people who found it corny then, too. I mean, the whole idea of a hair metal band acting as liberators feels absurd, doesn't it? And that "sound that emanates from my electric guitar represents freedom and democracy" schtick feels almost transparently propagandistic. Plus, you can totally picture a bunch of suits in a room trying to figure out how to make a catchy song and someone going, “what if we put in a whistle?,” right? (The Rolling Stone oral history says there was a push and pull between band and label about whether or not to include it)

But what power ballad, political or not, doesn't sound corny today? We can still like this song from an ironic distance, can't we? Despite what we may think of it right now, we have to appreciate the cultural impact it had. Like it or not, it's one of the most important songs ever made. In 2005, the German TV network, ZDF, revealed that its viewers considered "Wind of Change" the song of the 20th century. And maybe its whole "We Are the World" charity single vibe is another reason to think that the CIA wrote it, but still, media, no matter how lame you might think it is, affects people's actions. If it didn't, the CIA wouldn't be in the pop culture business. And a song that aides in world-changing events, regardless of who wrote it and how it sounds nearly three decades after its release, deserves to be written about, don't you think?

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