This is a fascinating French documentary exploring the artistic connection between the oldest deck of Tarot cards known as the Tarot de Marseille and 15th century art. The documentary travels to Italy where Tarot was born to follow various leads and look at examples of the oldest Tarot decks and Italian art.
The work of Sandro Botticelli features prominently, as does Plato’s philisophical cave allegory which deals with the nature of reality and whether what we see is just a rough projection of reality. The connections between this idea and the Tarot’s Devil card are fascinating.
The documentary is entirely in French without English subtitles, so you’ll probably need to speak French to enjoy this.
In preparation for the upcoming Tarot section of this blog, complete with a brand new online Tarot reader, here is a television documentary on the history of Tarot cards. It’s narrated by the super-hammy Christopher Lee!
The best thing about the documentary is its brief outline of Tarot history. Its explanations of card meanings and interviews with Tarot readers are superficial and absurd. The interviewees tend to be of the type who predict actual events and make foolish assumptions rather than focus on what the cards suggest to a person and what they represent as possibilities in that person’s thinking. Most of the unfortunate people featured in this documentary are of the variety that the Tarot tradition should avoid at all costs. Pay no attention to them.
Enjoy the film for what it is and remember that if you have an interest in Tarot you won’t be disappointed in the new app which will be a very deep resource of information about the entire Tarot de Marseilles deck and will give full 10-card Celtic Cross readings with explanations and card details.
Imagine an insane alien astronaut who tunes into earth’s radiating television signals originating in the analog days of the twentieth century. The alien receives our entire TV culture in seconds, processing the sounds and images instantly, watching them all simultaneously… and the alien is crazy enough to find a message within.
This is an experimental film that is for all intents and purposes a continuation of my previous film, “The Magical Dead Sunstroke Valley,” which has been screening for the past year at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art (LACDA).
Councillor Mrs. Mary Potts described the magazine as ‘decadent’ and ‘utter filth.’
I can’t imagine a better compliment for a zine really.
This is a 1980 television documentary produced by the BBC’s Community Programme’s Unit which specialized in what amounts to local access television. This one is a very down to earth look at a small town British punk zine called ‘Guttersnipe.’ What’s great about this film is how it lets the people do the talking. It doesn’t make the mistake that a lot of television made back in the seventies and eighties when they tried to define the punk movement in rather stilted terms which only served to expose the terror of the producers themselves when faced with something they didn’t understand.
The young people in this film speak with honesty, frustration and great humor. They weren’t willing to accept boring so they made a culture with what was at hand. We can learn a lot from these Telford punks today when we seem so in the spell of technology corporations that it is hard to imagine ever creating a culture again. How do you ever feel unsatisfied when you have an iPhone in your hand and can read anything written anywhere on earth within seconds? How do you muster the energy to stop twiddling thumbs and print something? Or play a guitar?
Sure, I love computers as much as anyone else. I find them incredibly inspiring and empowering. Perhaps it’s really the Web that’s the problem. Not the machines.
The Web has become a nearly unusable up and down scrolling mechanism so burdened underneath the weight of endless and intrusive advertising that I personally dread visiting nine out of ten web sites. There is very little pleasure in browsing anymore. It’s not a nice environment. Things pause, pop into your face, jump around the screen, go inexplicably black, stop mid video, suddenly rewind, jump left, jump right, go totally blank and infect your computer. It’s basically hell. The Web as a reading experience stinks now. No question about it.
Makes one want a zine in one’s hands to sit back and read like humans were meant to read.
In a truly revolutionary and long overdue ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court has rendered invalid all laws across the United States that prevent same sex marriages.
It’s a day of celebration for all in recognition of a simple and profound truth: marriage is indeed a basic human right.
Justice Kennedy wrote this final paragraph of the Court’s ruling:
No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. The judgement of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is reversed.
It is so ordered.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, says it all. It’s a rebuke to the forces of bigotry. It should leave many people across the land hanging their heads in shame for ever suggesting that marriage is reserved for only one group of people.
If you held that belief at one time and have since changed, that’s a great step. You’ve come a long way.
If you still believe marriage is only for heterosexual couples, you may very well have some additional issues. I would suggest moving to South Carolina and hanging a confederate flag in your garage. Maybe you could buy lots of guns and ammunition for a final holdout. Whatever. The point I’m making is this: good riddance.
