Cucolla

Latin America,  languages, legends, medieval europe, arthuriana and animals // football:  PSG, Atletico, Manchester United, Brazil NT | 31 yo 

[diioonysus]

yoruba mythology | deities

[desertedinurban]

HIGH FASHION BIRDS BY - Deserted In Urban

[alwayswasalwayswillbeourland]

I was today years old when I learnt about what those symbols in Aboriginal art represented I honestly can't believe we never got taught that, even when I was studying art. I always assumed they had meaning but no one [no white person] had ever bothered to mention it. I'm glad I learnt something new today.

Yeah, I think a lot of people tend to look down on Aboriginal art because they think it's a form of abstract art that is just lines and shapes but almost all of them tell a story. Sometimes it's a very obvious story, such as the emu dreaming where the waterhole flooded, and sometimes it's more symbolic.

the circle in the middle is a waterhole/dam or billabong. The squiggly lines coming out of it are small rivers. the dots represent the earth but because they are in neat lines, it almost feels as if they have been flattened by the flooded water, especially as the vector lines draw out from the waterhole in the middle. the emu tracks are heading toward the waterhole, and the three lines in the middle are marks left by their tail, implying that they are wading through the mud to get there.

It's a birdseye view of a moment just after the waterhole floods and afterwards the emus go looking for food.

It's Interesting, because the original artist D. J. Ross was from Yuendumu which is in central australia, so this would have been a rare time that there was enough rain to flood the waterhole.

Dreaming stories, kinship links, sacred rites, keeping track of biodiversity and songlines are some other topics covered by Aboriginal art.

In the same way monet painted the middle class and the local landscape in the late 1800's/early 1900's Aboriginal people also paint the average lifestyle of our people. It just looks different.

For example, this picture shows a LOT of activity. The men at the top left of the picture are doing a cultural burn near and around a sacred site, the women at the bottom left are digging for food. across the river, on the right the people are preparing food and in the center, two people (presumably elders) are preparing for a ceremony.

I wouldn't say these all happened at the same time, more that this was a common undertaking over a set of time.

it takes time to understand and not all symbols are the same in all areas, but once you do understand them it becomes easier to see the story being told.

So yeah, I hope this gives you the chance to look at Aboriginal art with new eyes

[writing-is-a-martial-art]

truly some people have no genre savviness whatsoever. A girl came back from the dead the other day and fresh out of the grave she laughed and laughed and lay down on the grass nearby to watch the sky, dirt still under her nails. I asked her if she’s sad about anything and she asked me why she should be. I asked her if she’s perhaps worried she’s a shadow of who she used to be and she said that if she is a shadow she is a joyous one, and anyway whoever she was she is her, now, and that’s enough. I inquired about revenge, about unfinished business, about what had filled her with the incessant need to claw her way out from beneath but she just said she’s here to live. I told her about ghosts, about zombies, tried to explain to her how her options lie between horror and tragedy but she just said if those are the stories meant for her then she’ll make another one. I said “isn’t it terribly lonely how in your triumph over death nobody was here to greet you?” and she just looked at me funny and said “what do you mean? The whole world was here, waiting”. Some people, I tell you.

[suturesque]

vodun day, 2020 benin. julio sacristan

[katelouisepowell]

‘The Shortest Day’ illustrations by Carson Ellis

[worldsandemanations]

Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer (French, 1865-1953) Les calanques au coucher de soleil

[crystalis]

There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.

At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.

Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.

Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.

The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.

At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.

Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:

仁智懷德聖虞唐，

貞志篤終誓穹蒼，

欽所感想妄淫荒，

心憂增慕懷慘傷。

In pinyin, it is:

Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,

zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,

qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,

xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.

Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng

The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."

Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:

傷慘懷慕增憂心，

荒淫妄想感所欽，

蒼穹誓終篤志貞，

唐虞聖德懷智仁。

The pinyin:

Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,

huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,

cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,

táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.

It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén

And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."

That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!

At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:

詩圖璇玑，始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."

Or reversed:

蘇氏詩圖，璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."

Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.

For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (kangshiw.com/contents/461/2…), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.

Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%87…).

Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:

- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.

- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.

- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions

- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.

So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:

- A love letter (expressing personal longing)

- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)

- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)

- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)

- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision

And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".

Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.

The heart at the center was filled after all.

[ymutate]

Roy Thomas (1949-2004). Canadian indigenous artist

Moose and Wolves, 1977 silkscreen

[hyperlexia-1]

Rene Lalique

"Serpents" corsage ornament c. 1898-99

Gold and enamel

Calouste Gulbenkian Museum

[neechees]

Me realizing I cant use the word "Moose" in my God of War fanfic to describe Moose because the word is from the Ojibwe Mooz

[thedeadtalker]

Go with "Bison." Bison were EVERYWHERE before white people came.

[neechees]

Did the Europeans call Moose "bison" pre-Turtle Island contact? Because the fic takes place in 500 A.D and there's just a few mentions of Moose (which, also exist in Europe historically afaik) and takes place in Norway. Afaik Europeans would just call Moose "Elk" before the introduction of the Ojibwe word

[cucullas]

Hi sorry idk if its alright to comment but I just wanted to tell you, you are correct: In Europe the Moose was called Elk pre-contact and as you correctly said there is a variety of European Moose now found in Scandinavia.

The term Elk to refer to Elk/Wapiti was brought later by colonist because by the Middle Ages Mooses were extinct from the British Isles and "Elk" meant "large deer" as people were not longer familiar with mooses.

Elks (cervue canadensis) existed in Asia but i think they were called "red deer" in Europe. Not sure about last one.

[cucullas]

I appreciated the crafting of the movie and it is a love letter to the book and a beautiful gothic fable but as a Frankenstein enthusiast who reads the book almost everyear I prefer Shelley's Victor he is an asshole but of another brand, nothign wrong with adapting just I think this movie the end specially doen't hit the same like what was that apology and he accepted it ? in movie it makes sense but man

[diaryofandnwoman]

[weaselbeaselpants]

An animated film junkie's personal picks for the 'real' most disturbing animated films

An addendum to reddit, ofc. View my iceberg chart on where and how I find movies like Watership Down or Animal Farm on the 'upsetting'-ometer.

For now though, these are my objective picks for decent media that's also absolutely horrific.

Plague Dogs. Don't watch this with you dog. Your dog will hate you because you'll just keep hugging them and dogs don't like hugs. To me this movie is so much better at Isle of Dogs in illuminating the importance and struggles of dogs as a species. Part of what hurts so much about this story isn't just human's preexisting protection of dogs, it's how it accurately shows how quick mistreat/dispose of them as monsters for being the carnivores that they are or having trauma indicative of any animal -dogs don't exist for our pleasure. The fact that the book isn't nearly so grim and how this movie's existence makes that ending feel somehow 'fake' or insincere also doesn't help. Infinitely better and more intimate, sad and better told than Watership Down.

It's Such a Beautiful Day. Don Hertzfelt has that affect with his movies where they illicit such strong emotions out of you despite the characters being stick figures. It really is a very sad story and situation. I cried my ass off at this.

When the Wind Blows. It's everything everyone's already told you. Despite it being a fictional story and nowhere near as horrific as the real stories of survivors, it's just not fun watching two old people who sound/act somewhat like your own parents or grandparents die slowly.

Padak. God this fish movie slaps so hard. It's so genuinely good and shows you how much you can make a person care for animals even by just picturing what it'd be like in that situation where you're surrounded by reminders that you're going to die horrifically...which is saying something considering it was meant to be an allegorical film about human emotions and not even an animal-rights flick. PeTA, eat your sexist-racist hearts out you could never make something like this.

Grave of the Fireflies. As other anime-viewers have pointed out, what makes this movie more than just a super sad story is how and why it happened at all. How it's a plea for 1980s era kids to see what their parents had to go through while also a plea to those same parents to remind them that their own Greatest Generation is the same as their kids- impulsive, set on thinking they're right like Seita is. To me it never comes off as accusatory . It's about how, with or without war, childhood is a dangerous time of life and one not everyone's can or SHOULD be in control of everything just because they're an older sibling or they have 'responsibilities' now.

Barefoot Gen. Hardly need to divulge much without just trauma-dumping on you. Trauma-wise the moment that sticks with me is never the bombing-scene despite that being the part everyone knows. It's the immediate and lingering aftermath of the bomb and Gen's family dying. The part where Gen holds his baby sister and then calls out to his father, brother and sister that they need to be seeing her and not dead brings waterworks every time. Also the accurate details of the rotting or dying corpses are as horrific as they ought to be. I swear if you only watch the bomb scene you don't have any idea about how truly grim and tragic this film actually is.

The Wolf House. I wouldn't recommend this film to anyone who has acute sensory problems or schizophrenia. While I love it and it's sound design it's also that aspect of the film that's what's so intense. From the moment it starts to it's final image you know you're watching something from a deeply darked, cursed place yet the images brought forth feel like the imaginings of the victim and not the perpetrator telling the story. It's like, as if, Humbert Humbert was narrating the story of Lolita while we personally see what's in Dolores' mind- yet ALL without ever showing you any actual onscreen ab*se. Wonderful, disturbing work.

Waltz with Bashir. The ending scene. That bit. You're seeing real footage of death (of children). People who say it's somehow hypocritical of me to list this movie when I'm pretty sure Ari Foleman is not anti-Israel, but to me this is exactly the kind of dialogue needed to start this talk. Much of Waltz with Bashir feels like a jumpy but mostly basic war drama where Ari and the soldiors are just told to go places and not think of their safety. It's purposeful dissonance. And then, in the end you get the massacre scene. It shows you the reason for this dissonance. It shows you what it is this 'war' is really for and what exactly everyone has been doing. If anything's sus about this film it's frankly how no one talks about that moment.

Mad God. Gross. I love it.

Kill it and Leave this Town. Mad God and this movie both feel like nightmares that last too long and which you feel at the moment you're having them that you can never escape. Mad God feels like the kind of nightmare where you know and can follow what is happening loosely and keep following it despite knowing it's not going to get any better. Kill it and Leave this Town feels like a lucid horrific dream where every awful image and memory you've ever had comes up to haunt you and you can't help but wallow.

Runners up now that I've finished seeing all of them:

Unicorn Wars and Birdboy: The Forgotten Children. I can't for the life of me decide which one is "more" messed up; Birdboy is so much more depressing though I think it's also the inferior of the two (still good, just flawed). Unicorn Wars feels more brutal than it does disturbing, think less Come and See and more Apocalypse Now, if you know what I mean.

The Peasants. Honestly REALLY should change the ranking on my iceberg chart and put a stronger warning on it now that I've finished seeing it and made the mistake of not spoiling it for myself. This movie is from the same people who made Loving Vincent and it's about the goings on of a polish peasant woman having an affair with a married farmhand but being married off to his older father. In no short terms, she suffers a LOT in this movie and even though the ending's supposed to signify better things it doesn't feel that way. No VVitch-level retribution here. Prolly not the film to show your girlfriend.

Belladonna of Sadness. Belladonna of Sadness is technically an erotica. So the ab*se that you do see, while meant to be horrific, is also as graphic as the other smex scenes even if the former aren't nearly as drawn out, which is why it goes at the bottom of my iceberg chart. Because of this sheer volume of nope and also it's abstraction in telling it's story it feels more to me like an acid-trip but yeah there it is.

The Breadwinner. I put this one on for a rewatch after having watched Wolfwalkers with my sister in 2020 and I highkey forgot how damn brutal and sad it is. I was bawling my eyes out and said out loud "why did I rewatch this?!" several times. It's good but it hurts. Still one of Cartoon Saloon's best.

[holespoles]

作者不詳 （unknown、1868-1912頃制作） 『大なまづ　ねこのたハむれ』 （Big Catfish and Comical Cats）

[folkfashion]

Aymara women, Maribel Casilla and Maritza Ticona, Bolivia, by Manuel Seoane

[escuerzoresucitado]

The time has come for France to own up to the massacre of its own troops in Senegal

One of the darkest moments of France’s colonial history has never been properly acknowledged. That could be about to change.

[evilwickedme]

Thiaroye massacre - Wikipedia

^ Just so people know the official name for further googling