zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — the belt-fed video camera, & ammo for women ]
.

A brilliant photo juxtaposing war and media in a single image.

Also reminiscent of that Yardley’s “A Woman’s Ammunition” ad from so long ago:

[ by Charles Cameron — time for some more surprises, this time in stone and jazz — plus an afterimage of WWI ]
.

First, a master-class in the craft of the blues:

Second, the moon:

And third, because of the violence in Kenya, Pakistan, Syria … get me a globe and I’ll spin it… and because I’ve talked with you before of my friend Heathcote Williams and he mentioned this to his followers today, here are his meditations on World War I, prepared for its centenary next bloody year:

Neither he nor my father ever explained the war to me. It was just something that had happened to them. Something irrational that hung over them. A grisly cloud of spectral blood. A tumor that fogged the psyche. Something in their history that had spoiled both their lives.

And them’s the blues for this week: go well, stay well.

[ by Charles Cameron — in recognition that Photoshop is a weapon that can turn enemies into friends, at least within Photoshop! ]
.

How to describe this? It’s a DoubleQuote in Two Tweets from Phillip Smyth in which [Almost] the Same Photo of a Guy with an Israeli Rifle Poses on Both Sides of the Conflict around the Sayyida Zaynab Shrine in Southern Damascus:

So the guy in the original photo does a bit of an enantiondromia thanks to Photoshop…

**

For some in depth reading:

On the Shia side of things, see Phillip Smyth‘s Hizballah Cavalcade posts at Jihadology.

For the same on the Sunni side, see Aymenn Al-Tamimi‘s Musings of an Iraqi Brasenostril series, also on Jihadology.

And for both and all else, well, there’s always Aaron Zelin‘s Jihadology itself!

[ by Charles Cameron — the first O of OODA, as one photographer applied it to Mubarak’s destiny ]
.

Angel's Trumpet, Brugmansia arborea, image credit BH&G

.

As you all know, I am fascinated by the intersection of the poetic (sacramental, irrational, magical, pre-scientific) and the prosaic (secular, rational, mundane, scientific) worldviews, so ably captured by John Donne with the four words “round earth’s imagin’d corners” in one of his Holy Sonnets:

At the round earth’s imagin’d corners, blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scatter’d bodies go…

One such intersection comes where prophecy meets prediction.

**

I was accordingly interested when Erin Cunningham pointed us to these two remarkable tweets, the first from earlier today:

As Mubarak lands at the Maadi hospital I’ll just leave this 17 day old tweet here: https://t.co/WfaWoWSMuu

— David Degner (@degner) August 22, 2013

and the second, to which the first refers, from two weeks ago:

The Military Hospital in Maadi is reinforcing their perimeter fence with sheet metal. Expecting a controversial patient?

— David Degner (@degner) August 4, 2013

I believe that second tweet permits photographer David Degner the (secular) rank of Prophet — but it would take, in my view, an entity with the secular rank of Angel, Recording Angel to be precise, to give us an accurate and complete timeline of mental, communications and physical events here, from the first stirring of an idea in the mind of some Egyptian judge, general or staffer through multiple discussions, decisions and levels of implementation, to today’s outcome.

One might even say that the IC with its all source intel aspires to, but will never quite obtain, such an angelic function… while for those of us wholly reliant on open source intelligence, observation and intelligent extrapolation (in the case of Degner) and keeping one’s eye on appropriate parts of the twitterstream (for the rest of us) seems to be the way to go.

**

How foolish of me, therefore, to be unaware of the tweets and works of Degner, whose photographs of Churches looted and burnt in Upper Egypt and current project on Liminal states in Egyptian Maharagan music are both of keen interest to me.

Egypt, from the prosaic to the poetic — our world is rich in both.

[ by Charles Cameron — on the proposition that no topic is more than a link or two away from beauty ]
.

I was butting in on a conversation about terrorism between JM Berger and Suzanne Schroeder — JM had said something about me and I chipped in, one link or tweet led to another, and soon we were at these two images —

The top one is a Magritte-like photo that comes from the mind and eye of Alexandre Parrot, hat tip to El Cid Barett — the second a still from Maya Deren‘s extraordinary film, Meshes of the Afternoon.

**

One beauty for the startled mind; one beauty for the ravished heart…