Hollywood goes lubki

lubok_terminator.jpg

The Terminator

The lubki (sing. lubok), simple printed pictures coloured by hand and often called broadsides, popular prints, folk prints, folk etchings, or folk engravings, are a vivid and fascinating page in the history of Russian culture. Folk prints were known in many other countries (in the Far East as early as the eighth century and in Western Europe from the fifteenth); in Russia they appeared in the middle of the seventeenth century and survived until the beginning of the twentieth.

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The Matrix

Impossible to trace the provenance of these things since the page they’re from is in Russian but they’re hilarious. I still haven’t worked out all the movies they’re supposed to be depicting but that’s part of the fun. Would be nice to have a translation of the inscriptions also.

Via BibliOdyssey.

The Department of Prejudice

So 2.5 million people party in Brazil’s gay parade (below). Meanwhile, in that bastion of freedom to the north, it transpires that the Pentagon still regards being gay as a mental illness. Illegal wars, torture and imprisonment without trial are perfectly sane behaviour, no doubt. I wonder what the Pentagon thinks of the gay British soldiers currently serving alongside the US army in Iraq. And what do those soldiers feel about being insulted like this?