Somebody’s Always Listening

Paramount Pictures/Ringer illustration            As the release of Francis Ford Coppola’s self-funded, $100 million extravaganza ‘Megalopolis’ nears, it’s worth revisiting ‘The Conversation’ from 50 years ago as a reminder of what it looks (and sounds) like when a master is at work"At my age, I can afford for film to be a passion and not a business." That’s what Francis Ford Coppola told me 15 years ago during an interview about his 2009 film, Tetro, a glossy, quasi-autobiographical melodram...

Journey to the Golden Age

There on a plain, a multitude. From a distance—a hill or the eye of a soaring bird—one could see numberless little dots in the shape of men assembled around a lesser crowd in the middle. There was a great distance separating them. Focusing the gaze, one could make out the silhouettes: a great many feathers brandished in the air over a palette of colors that gave the frenzy an almost carnival atmosphere. A pointillist would have had a field day with the scene, were it not for the shimmering, a...

Homer and the Arts of the Book - Homer in Print - The University of Chicago Library

Homer and the Arts of the Book The Iliad and the Odyssey have inspired artists in all periods and mediums. The dramatic scenes and detailed descriptions invite visual representation and stimulate creative interpretation. Ancient artists depicted scenes from the Homeric epics on vases, wall paintings at Pompeii, and miniature ...

Malcolm Gaskill: Quick with a Stiletto

On​ 23 March 1944 Italian resistance fighters ambushed an SS company marching up via Rasella, a quiet street in central Rome. At 3.45 p.m. Rosario Bentivegna, a 21-year-old medical student, lit the fuse on a bomb hidden in a dustcart, then walked away. Fifty seconds later the bomb exploded. Bentivegna’s comrades opened fire and hurled grenades, then fled through the backstreets. More than thirty SS men were killed and dozens were injured.In no other Nazi-occupied city had partisans succeeded ...

Abyssinia: The Only African Country to Avoid Colonialism

Ethiopians attend a parade to mark the 123rd anniversary of the battle of Adwa that marked the end of the first Italian invasion in 1896, photo taken 2020.   On October 23rd, 1896, Italy and Ethiopia signed the Treaty of Addis Ababa. The defeated Italians have no other option than to confirm Ethiopian independence and renounce their colonial projects in the region. Abyssinia, a thousand-year-old African nation, had resisted a drastically more developed modern army and became the ...

The spaghetti western and once upon a Time in the West

Underwater Balloon Gardens

Underwater Balloon GardensSourceURL: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=4565           Underwater Balloon Gardens Not really a prediction, but I can't resist this story about growing strawberries in a really hostile environment. (Underwater Balloon Gardens) This is a snapshot of life at one of the world's strangest farms. In the e...

John Law - Scottish Adventurer of the 18th Century