Marlene Dietrich and her pet black cat in Dishonored (1931)
“In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find — if it’s a good novel — that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night
In cinema too, although even more rare.
On this day, 8 August 1879, Emiliano Zapata, revolutionary and leading figure of the peasant army which helped overthrow Porfirio Diaz in the 1910 Mexican revolution, was born. Of Nahua and Spanish descent, Zapata organised alongside local Indigenous communities to fight against land seizures by wealthy hacienda owners, and occupy seized land. With the outbreak of revolution, he led a revolutionary militia, took part in many battles, and under the slogan “Tierra y Libertad” (“Land and Liberty”) kept fighting for the original goals of the revolution, most crucially land redistribution. After Zapata was assassinated, his followers kept up the struggle, and today, after an uprising in the 1990s, modern day Indigenous Zapatistas control a sizeable autonomous territory in Chiapas. More on Zapata and modern Zapatistas here in our online store: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/collections/all/emiliano-zapata
Obscure and very expensive - upwards of £360 on collectors sites - from 1977, happily reissued and back on the streets
These youngins were kicking Fetty Wap on steel drums in St Kitts
My home country
Woman in the Dunes (Suna no onna) 1964
RIP David Clayton Thomas
Goodbye to Language (2014), dir. Jean-Luc Godard
Gary Marecic.




