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If asked about your favorite dish, you’d do well to name something exotic. Gone are the days when a taste for the likes of Italian, Mexican, or Chinese cuisine could qualify you as an adventurous eater. Even expeditions to the very edges of the menus at Peruvian, Ethiopian, or Laotian restaurants, say, would be unlikely […]
“Tomorrow Never Dies” couldn’t be made today, and not just because the Beatles already made it in 1966. Marking perhaps the single biggest step in the group’s artistic evolution, that song is in every sense a product of its time. The use of psychedelic drugs like LSD was on the rise in the counterculture, as […]
Image by The USO, via Flickr Commons So you might think that if Stephen King – the guy who wrote such horror classics like Carrie and The Stand – were to rattle off his top ten favorite books, it would feature works by the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft or maybe J. […]
Inexplicable as it may sound to readers of this site, there are movie-lovers who claim not to enjoy the work of Stanley Kubrick. But even his most steadfast non-appreciators have to hand it to him for The Shining, his 1980 Stephen King adaptation widely considered one of the scariest — quite possibly the scariest – […]
If you head to the Louvre, make sure you visit the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, and Liberty Leading the People. But then swing by the Department of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Antiquities. There you might find (no guarantee!) a Roman mosaic featuring a rabbit riding a chariot pulled by geese. Discovered at Hadrian’s villa […]
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This is the first post in a series discussing the basic contours of life – birth, marriage, labor, subsistence, death – of pre-modern peasants and their families. Prior to the industrial revolution, peasant farmers of varying types made up the overwhelming majority of people in settled societies (the sort with cities and writing). And when … Continue reading Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part I: Households →
In the earliest days of cinema, when pictures moving at all was still shocking, one visionary saw the fantastical possibilities of this exciting new technology. Artist, magician, inventor, and director Georges Méliès created worlds filled with magic and adventure that revolutionized filmmaking when it was just beginning. He remains one of the most creative […]
“My object has not been to write a text-book on firework-making, but rather to trace the art from earliest times, and to give a description of the development and process of manufacture… My excuse for adding another volume to the literature of the art is that I am of the eighth generation of a family … Continue reading "The Fireworks King: Brock’s Pyrotechnics: The History and Art of Firework Making, 1922" The post The Fireworks King: Brock’s Pyrotechnics: The History and Art of Firework Making, 1922 appeared first on Flashbak.
Active in the 4th century BCE, the Sacred Band was an elite military unit composed of 150 pairs of male lovers. The central idea was that by placing each soldier alongside his beloved, they would fight more fiercely, to both protect one another and to avoid dishonoring themselves in their partner’s eyes. Through their […]
