The Color of the Clouds

The Color of the Clouds (El color de las nubes) is a 1997 Spanish drama film directed by Mario Camus which stars Julia Gutiérrez Caba, Ana Duato, Antonio Valero, and José María Doménech.

The plot revolves around a house in a Cantabrian village owned by Doña Lola, from which a series of intertwined subplots spawn. Lola and her niece Clementina agree on hosting a Bosnian refugee child (sabotaged by impostor kid Bartolomé), an old fisherman and Lola's friend (Colo) finds a drug cache nearby, the former house owner's son tries to evict Lola, and Clementina develops a romance with a lawyer (Valerio).

Hoppípolla

"Hoppípolla" is a song by Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós from their 2005 album Takk.... It was released as the album's second single on 28 November 2005. The song title is a univerbation of hoppa í polla (the -a in hoppa is not pronounced), which is Icelandic for "hopping into puddles", and the lyrics are mainly in Icelandic, with some nonsensical phrases, a "language" the band calls Vonlenska ("Hopelandic").

A video for "Hoppípolla," directed by Arni & Kinski, was filmed in November 2005. It depicts two groups of elderly friends strolling around the suburbs of Reykjavík and acting like children; pulling pranks on people and battling with water balloons and wooden swords near a cemetery. When one old man is injured and suffers a nosebleed (as referenced in the lyrics), the opponents run away in fear, while the others celebrate their victory. The video shows several shots of the friends "hopping in puddles" of water along a path.

The band members are featured in the video: keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson plays the victim of a Knock, Knock, Ginger trick, guitarist and vocalist Jón Þór Birgisson plays the cashier at a shop where an old man steals and eats some pears, drummer Orri Páll Dýrason can be seen repairing his bicycle, and bassist Georg Hólm can be seen cleaning.

Morton Feldman

Morton Feldman (1926 –1987) was an American composer. A major figure in 20th-century classical music, Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminacy in music, a development associated with the experimental New York School of composers also including John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown.

His parents, Irving and Frances Breskin Feldman, were Russian Jews who had emigrated to New York from Pereiaslav, Ukraine.

Feldman's works are characterized by notational innovations that he developed to create his characteristic sound: rhythms that seem to be free and floating, pitch shadings that seem softly unfocused, a generally quiet and slowly evolving music, and recurring asymmetric patterns. His later works, after 1977, also explore extremes of duration.

Feldman married the Canadian composer Barbara Monk shortly before his death. He died of pancreatic cancer on September 3, 1987, at his home in Buffalo.

Hermann Scherchen

Hermann Scherchen (1891 –1966) was a German conductor, who was principal conductor of the city orchestra of Winterthur from 1922 to 1950.

He promoted contemporary music, beginning with Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, followed by works by Richard Strauss, Anton Webern, Alban Berg, Edgard Varèse, later Iannis Xenakis, Luigi Nono and Leon Schidlowsky. He usually conducted without using a baton.

Scherchen commonly avoided the use of a baton. His technique when in this mode sometimes caused problems for players; an unidentified BBC Symphony Orchestra bassoonist told the singer Ian Wallace that interpreting Scherchen's minuscule hand movements was like trying to milk a flying gnat. According to Fritz Spiegl, Scherchen worked largely through verbal instructions to his players and his scores were peppered with reminders of what he needed to say at each critical point in the music.

He died in Florence, survived by a number of children from five wives and other women.

Kouhyar Goudarzi

Kouhyar Goudarzi is an Iranian human rights activist, journalist and blogger who was imprisoned several times by the government of Iran. He previously served as an editor of Radio Zamane. He is a member of Committee of Human Rights Reporters (CHRR), serving as the head from 2005-2009.

Goudarzi was an aerospace engineering student at Sharif University of Technology before being expelled in November 2009 by order of government authorities and barred from continuing his education.

He was detained twice in 2006 during peaceful rallies and three times after the events following the disputed presidential election results of 2009.

In March 2013, faced with a 5-year prison sentence in exile in the remote city of Zabol, constant pressures, harassment and threats from the authorities, Kouhyar Goudarzi fled Iran to ensure his safety. He continues his human rights work from outside the country.

Several news outlets associated with the Iranian government have since published critical and hostile reports about Goudarzi, asking that he be brought back to Iran and be punished. One outlet, Bultan News which serves as a regime mouthpiece, referred to journalist and human rights activist Kouhyar Goudarzi as a "fugitive criminal who has fled the country" and demanded that "responsible agencies make the necessary arrangements to catch this fugitive and bring him to his punishment."

The Intruder

The Intruder is a British drama series made by Granada Television for the ITV network and was broadcast on Sundays from 2 January to 20 February 1972. There were eight episodes made, all of them running 25 minutes.

The series was based on the children's book of this same name by John Rowe Townsend, published in 1970. The series was shot on location, predominantly in the Cumbrian village of Ravenglass with some scenes filmed in Manchester and Anglesey.

The life of Arnold Haithwaite (James Bate), a sixteen-year-old English boy, begins to change when an overbearing and sinister one-eyed stranger called Sonny (Milton Johns) arrives in the small seaside village of Skirlston, claiming to be the real Arnold Haithwaite.

The Patriotic Guards (Gărzile Patriotice)

Guards equipped with WWII weapons; here the Czechoslovak ZBvz30

The Patriotic Guards (Gărzile Patriotice) were paramilitary formations in the Socialist Republic of Romania from 1968 to 1989.

Young female Guards posing with rifles next to an industrial complex

The Patriotic Guards were formed under Nicolae Ceaușescu as an armed force under the direct control of the Romanian Communist Party to provide additional defence and support in the event of an invasion of Romania. Membership included both men and women and adolescents as young as middle school age, with a peak of approximately 700,000 members across Romania in 1989.

They were formed after condemning the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring, conducted the Soviet Union, the Polish People's Republic, the People's Republic of Bulgaria, and the Hungarian People's Republic. Romania was a member of the Warsaw Pact but did not participate in the invasion as Ceaușescu tried to pursue a political line independent from the Soviets.

Ceaușescu appealed to anti-Sovietism within the Romanian population to ask for resistance against the threat of a Soviet invasion against Romania. The Romanian nationalist themes he used had their immediate effect in rallying large portions of the public, who began organizing and arming themselves under the direction of the ruling Romanian Communist Party (PCR).

In December 1989, during the Romanian Revolution, Ceaușescu attempted to mobilise the Patriotic Guards against anti-government protesters. However, the pace of events and the breadth of hostility to his regime outstripped this plan. Many Patriotic Guard members, who like most other Romanians were fed up with Ceauşescu's failed economic policies and suffering from declining living standards, actually joined the protesters.

French Customs Service

The French Customs Service was part of the military until the armistice in 1940. Connected to the elite regiment of Chasseurs a Pied, the Customs Service still holds the hunting horn of the Chasseurs in their logo.

Beret badge, 1st Model

During the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War, the brigades of Customs Officers (Douaniers) were used to form marksmen units and to track enemy units trying to infiltrate French lines.

During WW1, due to their knowledge of the areas and their experience in human tracking, they were part of Corps Francs (small units which were tasked to operate behind German lines to collect intelligence and perform sabotages on enemy targets). The red stripe on their uniforms is a remaining of the decoration of one of their officers, Capitaine Cutsaert during the Napoleonic wars.

Beret badge, 2nd Model

The military customs service fought in the early part of the Second World War but was disbanded on June 22, 1940 after the French defeat and was never reconstituted as a military service.

The most plausible reason was the downsizing of the French Military due to the 1940 armistice. Nonetheless small units of customs men from customs posts in French Indochina fought against the Japanese as guerilla units until the end of the war.

Douaniers in Marseille, after the armistice in 1940, with gunboat in the background

The Friend

The Friend is a 2024 American drama film based on the 2018 novel by Sigrid Nunez and stars beret wearer Naomi Watts. 

New York City writer Iris finds her comfortable, solitary life thrown into disarray after her closest friend and mentor bequeaths her a Great Dane named Apollo. The huge dog immediately creates practical problems for Iris, from furniture destruction to eviction notices, as well as more existential ones. 

Yet as Iris finds herself unexpectedly bonding with Apollo, she begins to come to terms with her past, and her own creative inner life.

Cas Oorthuys

Casparus Bernardus Oorthuys (1908 –1975), known as Cas Oorthuys, was a Dutch photographer and designer active from the 1930s until the 1970s.

In 1930 Oorthuys joined the municipality of Amsterdam as a structural engineer. In 1932 he, with many others, lost his job as a result of the economic crisis. Unemployed, he came into contact with the Communist Party of Holland, which he joined.

In 1936 he became a permanent photographer at De Arbeiderspers. He produced photography and graphics for communist and anti-fascist organisations; and in the tradition of "workers' photography" he documented poverty, police violence, the unemployed, homeless people and evictions for magazines.

During the war, Oorthuys helped forge identity papers and photographed clandestinely for De Ondergedoken Camera (the Underground Camera) to document the activities of the German occupiers, and also the awful Hongerwinter, the Dutch famine of 1944–45. During the postwar recovery, he recorded the Nuremberg war crimes trials and the rebuilding of his homeland.

From the Tromsø War Museum

Tromsø War Museum

 

Capitaine Chasseurs Alpins 6me Bataillon

Italian Soviet Style Berets

These days the Italian military wear berets like most other militaries around the world, but during WWII, the typical Soviet style berets were common. 

These beret were not knitted from one thread and then felted, but were made of various pieces of woven wool sewn together. 

They were even fitted with a cabillou-like piece of material at the center of the beret. The top photo is a M29 model of a paratrooper.

The remaining photos are of a medical doctor parachutist.

Nowadays, these type of berets are still manufactured in Poland and make for excellent headwear. 

Crows

 

Billy Childish's Crow Berets are among the Best of the Best; berets that have come to life in a collaboration between Billy Childish, the L-13 Light Industrial Workshop, Flamingo Berets from Japan and Boneteria Aotearoa.

Introduced in 2022, and there are a small number still available. 

Better still, these come with a signed large postcard of the Crow woodcut Print! Get yours here.

José "Cha Cha" Jiménez

José Jiménez (1948 –2025), nicknamed Cha Cha, was a Puerto Rican political activist and the founder of the Young Lords, a Chicago-based street gang that became a civil and human rights organization.

Started on September 23, 1968, it was most active in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Born in Caguas, Puerto Rico, Jiménez was taken as an infant by his mother to the United States in 1949. They lived for a time with his father near Boston, Massachusetts, but within two years the family moved to Chicago to join relatives. As a youth, he ran with a street gang but made a turn-around in 1968 and devoted himself to reviving the Young Lords to work on issues of human rights, beginning in Chicago. 

Issues included redlining, displacement of the poor, welfare rights and dignity, police relations, and community needs. In addition to establishing breakfast, education and health programs, they organized politically to negotiate with city officials. They also set up chapters in other cities with Puerto Rican and Latino populations, to work on social justice.

Chasseurs Alpins Fanfare

 From a time that music was carried on long play records...