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[ by Charles Cameron — exploring recursive form as a mode of pattern recognition ]
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I was explaining what this series of posts is about to a friend the other day. I said it’s a compilation of tweets that in some way reflect a “serpent bites its own tail” form, which some people seem to be particularly attuned to, and which almost always exposes some point of humor, irony, paradox or discovery that’s worth paying attention to. And then I read my friend fifteen or twenty examples from the last post in the series straight through — and taken neat, one right after another, they’re hilarious.

Here’s a sampler:

CONFIRMED: Nothing coming out of Syria is confirmed.
News photographer .. decided to put his camera aside and walk into the photo he would have clicked.
Please donate to my Kickstarter to help fund my search for a great idea for a Kickstarter.
Why coups beget coups By Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson | Foreign Policy
For $3,200 I can pay for open access to my 5,000 word essay on open data.
The Business of America is Spying on America
The conference call that wasn’t. How’s that for responsible reporting that isn’t?
Poitras also finds herself in a strange, looking-glass dynamic, because she cannot avoid being a character in her own film
This is what we’ve come to: I am ordering packing tape from Amazon so I can seal up a box I need to return to Amazon.
The BBC says anyone who accuses it of bias – is biased
Writing your name with a marker on your arm so that if you are killed your body can be identified.
Important personal details about Junipero Serra: he loved chocolate and self-flagellation.
Decapitated snake bites itself (warning: it’s kinda creepy)
The joke of the century: Al Jazeera accuses the Copts of burning their own churches! Talk about irresponsible reporting, unbelievable!
Whoops! Surf City Riot Suspect Arrested After “Liking” His Own Photo On Police Facebook Page
Scientists Unlock Self-Fertilizing Crops

There’s real tragedy there, and comedy aplenty — and also simplicity, beauty:

All that is visible rests on the

— Teju Cole (@tejucole) August 16, 2013

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In one of my academic byways, I came across this parenthesis, which is now my favorite parenthesis of all time. It’s from a scholarly discussion of an early “magical” treatise, the Picatrix, which is of interest among other things because it contains the earliest known description of the experimental method in science:

(with the parenthesis that speech is a kind of magic)

That’s from a summary of the Gayat al-Hakim or Picatrix, from Martin Plessner’s introduction to “Picatrix” Das Ziel des Weisen von Pseudo-Magriti. And it’s almost a Matrioshka parenthesis…

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I’ll be continuing to collect these serpent-eats-tail tweets in the comments section here, but will probably try to hold off on individual examples until I have a bunch to post at once, to avoid constantly occupying the list of recent comments when I run across these things quite regularly…

First cluster coming right up…

[ by Charles Cameron — exploring recursive form as a mode of pattern recognition ]
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In this post, I’ll continue my collection of interesting examples of snake bites tail self-references in tweets and elsewhere, begun in A feast of form in my twitter-stream today.

Impact of hitting a bullet with a bullet — how Standard Missile-3 obliterates threats in space: http://t.co/iwetNva01B

— Raytheon (@Raytheon) July 26, 2013

Does this tweet — today’s offering — qualify, for instance?

As I compile more and more items that match my sense of what belongs in this category, I’m also becoming aware that it’s a very fuzzy and subjective category indeed — closer to Wittgenstein’s “family resemblance” than to a logically exact and exacting definitional set.

[ by Charles Cameron — “found objects” as they call them in the art world, relating directly to my DoubleQuotes forrmat ]
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Here’s a terrific example, visual with textual accompaniment, of the power of DoubleQuotes, and the spontaneous uses that others make of them:

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The textual element is kindly provided in translation by this tweet from Will McCants:

Playboy vs. Prayboy (Left caption: "Every Month of the Year," Right: "Only during Ramadan") http://t.co/phw5jU8WVS? h/t @bassem_sabry

— Will McCants (@will_mccants) July 10, 2013

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I’ll be using this post as a place to capture other instances of DoubleQuotes in the wild, just as I’ve been using A feast of form in my twitter-stream today to capture and comment on a series of instances of recursion in the twittersphere.

Ramadan Mubarak…

[ by Charles Cameron — with an assist from Wm Benzon, under-appreciated and brilliant film and literary critic, musician, author of Beethoven’s Anvil ]
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Screen-time is valuable: movie directors don’t just throw it away.

Here are screen-grabs of two moments in Greg Barker‘s HBO bin Laden documentary, Manhunt, offered for your consideration:

and:

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As you know from my review of Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo) and Black Friday (Kashyap), I’m a film buff.

Screen time is the life-time of story: every second counts. And thus it is that if a director uses the same shot with variations at two or more points in a movie, they don’t just follow along, the way the elements in the narrative through-line follow along, one after another — they stack up. They “mean” cumulatively, synchronically…

Putting that in musical terms, they take on the function of rhythm rather than melody — and it is rhythm that can make the body dance, just as it is melody that can make the heart soar.

So, this repetition, this striking parallelism — why?

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Here’s my friend Bill Benzon, writing about the use of parallelism in Apocalypse Now:

The Assassin and the Surfer

Now for the less obvious parallel: Willard and Lance, the only member of the boat crew to survive. One can’t miss the parallel killings nor Willard’s statement of kinship with Kurtz. This parallelism, on the other hand, is easy to miss. That is to say, it may well elude conscious notice. Unconscious notice, on the other hand … Well, what is that?

Here’s three frame-grabs that point up the parallel. The first is from the opening montage of Willard in Saigon just before he gets his orders:

The second shot comes much later in the film. Clean has been killed (bullet), then the Chief (spear). Lance is the one who floated the Chief’s body down the river. Now they’re heading upriver toward Kurtz again, with Lance in the bow of the boat:

He’s doing a martial arts dance. Not the same one as Willard did in the opening montage, but a martial arts dance. No one else in the film does such a thing. Clean does some dance moves while listening to the Rolling Stones, but they’re in an entirely different style; faster, jerkier, more angular.

Finally, we have this scene in Kurtz’s compound. Willard’s in the foreground, and Lance is in the background:

One might suggest that this parallel is a mere accident, one might. And perhaps it is. In cases like this, however, my default assumption is that it is not an accident. It may not be there by conscious intent and deliberate plan; but it is not there by accident. The people who made this movie are too skilled to do such things inadvertently.

That final remark of Benzon’s makes exactly the point I was hoping to make here, before commenting on those two screen-grabs from Manhunt:

The people who made this movie are too skilled to do such things inadvertently.

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There’s actually a third shot in Manhunt with a view of a dangling rear-view-mirror ornament — let’s take a look:

This one’s from the van Peter Bergen and his cameraman, Peter Jouvenal, took in the docu’s re-enactment / flashback to their CNN interview with bin Laden, back in 1997. I don’t think this one is a rosary-like thing though it might be — I think it’s just the sort of tassel decoration you’ll find on saddle-bags, or decorating a camel or a car in Afghanistan.

The other two, however, seem clearly religious, both of them are shots of the cars in which American counter-terrorist folks would have gone to work during their efforts to track down bin Laden — and I find it significant that one features a (Christian) cross while the other very likely shows (Muslim) prayer-beads.

I say “very likely” because the beads could be (secular, Greek) worry-beads — but they look more like a tasbih to me. And why would that be interesting — why would a film-maker be interested in such a parallelism?

Besides the fact that these shots allow voice over and show us the various folk involved going to work, they specifically point up the fact that those working to defeat bin Laden were not all kuffar but included Ali Soufan of the FBI and “Roger” — the fellow described by Greg Miller in this March 2012 piece in WaPo, At CIA, a convert to Islam leads the terrorism hunt.

Am In right? I don’t know. But the subliminal message, if I am, is that the manhunt for bin Laden was indeed not a “Crusaders against Islam” affair.

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May I recommend Wm. Benzon’s Beethoven’s Anvil to all who read here who have an interest in cognition and / or music?

For more on parallelism in cinema, see David Bordwell, Julie, Julia, & the house that talked, to which Benson also pointed me.

[ by Charles Cameron — here’s another post in my importance of form in intelligence series ]
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Form is pattern, and pattern recognition is insight.

A while back, I started a series of posts [1, 2, 3, 4 and 5] in which I suggested that form is, from an intelligence point of view (and however you may parse “intelligence”) as important to humans as content. I’ll be saying more about this today, but wanted to complete this old and never quite completed post in that series right away, in response to a comment Grurray made today regarding Venn diagrams and the vesica piscis.
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If you’ve seen a Venn diagram, you’ve seen overlap. And the simplest form of overlap — between two classes, ideas, or whatever — is the one that’s Venn diagrammed (below, left) as the overlapping of two equal circles — known to artists as the vesica piscis or eye of the fish.

MasterCard uses it for its logo (right) —

— as do Gucci and Chanel:

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But let’s go back to that first pair of images:

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Long before commerce took note of it, the vesica was a sacred image — back in the days when geometry, like nature herself, was sacred.

Like the illuminist of the Codex Bruchsal (ca 1220) with his Christ Pantocrator (above, left), Jan Valentine Saether makes sacred use of the vesica in his book The Viloshin Letters, which I hope to see published shortly — the exquisite suite of prints that accompany the text have already been exhibited to acclaim.

In his text accompanying this particular plate, he writes:

I was not sure. But a new wonder has been moving towards us. That which is… has a new presence. Entering here from elsewhere, the holy spirit manifested again in the vernacular last Wednesday, September 16th.

We were standing around, being together in our own fashion, when suddenly through our common imagination, right there on the floor in the old barn, the donna and the madonna, the loose one and the holy one, merged and became visible.

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It seems to me there is more to the glory of God than there is to the glory of handbags and perfumes — but your mileage may vary, credit cards are handy little items, and then again, it’s all part of the glory in my opinion.

A neat koan, that.