[ by Charles Cameron — AQ, iPad, importance of graphics, importance of tech savvy ]
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I found this online on May 26 2011, and posted it to a private conference I belong to. Today I discovered that the original link it came from [ stashbox.org/1120308/sahab.gif ] is down, perhaps permanently. I’m posting it here because I think it strikingly documents the sophistication of some as-Sahab graphics — and sophisticated graphics, like finely-tuned anasheed, are powerful motivational tools.
Admittedly, this graphic is almost a year old. If you’ve already seen it, don’t mind me — just blink and move on.
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Edited to add:
I see Florian Flade had a heavily watermarked version of the same graphic up at Jih@d under the title Al-Qaida’s Apple Fetish, with some interesting commentary. Florian identifies the iPad as an iPad 2.
[ by Charles Cameron — politics and esthetics of revolutionary graffiti ]
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At first, I was looking to see whether Anonymous made an appearance in the graffiti of the Egyptian popular uprising, and yes indeed:
What I found in my searching around included some pretty striking graphics — and a well-wrought English pun-slogan, too!
One image that struck me featured “Tantawi’s underpants” — a popular motif, apparently, and one that seemed to me to make an interesting response / riposte to the iconic “blue bra girl” so shamelessly exposed by the Egyptian police:
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So you can find a modern, maybe even a post-modern Egypt, up on the walls however fleetingly. But there’s also a sense of Egypt ancient and sophisticated — and this, too, I though worthy of your attention:
These two murals are grieving / protesting those who died in the “Port Said massacre” which followed a football game between rival Egyptian teams.
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There’s much more to be seen — from “Facebook” and “the revolution will not be tweeted” to “no more guns” and images of a young man throwing a molotov cocktail… to graphics of cross and crescent intertwined.
The point being that this kind of “unofficial” art, like the anasheed of jihad, can give us a glimpse into the substrate of feeling that constitutes the morale of a given movement — which can at times be raw and stark, and at times strikingly beautiful, too.
Do I own any of the airspace above my property? If so, how high up? If not can somebody float camera-laden drones up to first and second story windows without breaking trespassing laws? How about following a person walking on their private property or in public by hovering uncomfortably nearby their personal space? Flying over privacy fences or at an angle to peer over them?
A remote-controlled aircraft owned by an animal rights group was reportedly shot down near Broxton Bridge Plantation Sunday.
Steve Hindi, president of SHARK (SHowing Animals Respect and Kindness), said his group was preparing to launch its Mikrokopter drone to video what he called a live pigeon shoot on Sunday when law enforcement officers and an attorney claiming to represent the privately-owned plantation near Ehrhardt tried to stop the aircraft from flying.
“It didn’t work; what SHARK was doing was perfectly legal,” Hindi said in a news release. “Once they knew nothing was going to stop us, the shooting stopped and the cars lined up to leave.”
He said the animal rights group decided to send the drone up anyway.
“Seconds after it hit the air, numerous shots rang out,” Hindi said in the release. “As an act of revenge for us shutting down the pigeon slaughter, they had shot down our copter.”
He claimed the shooters were “in tree cover” and “fled the scene on small motorized vehicles.”
Generally, laws permit you to film (but not always audiotape) people in public but not always where an expectation of privacy exists and certainly not via criminal trespass. If I own thirty acres, and your drone flies up to my house you have negated the value of owning so much property as to keep the public at a reasonable distance.
I can see how people might not find that acceptable and might start using strategies to discourage that. If I “accidentally” crash my drone into yours (Oops! Sorry) a court might perceive that as a risk entailed in such hobbies. I beam your craft with my DIY energy weapon and you are out $300 and can’t legally come on my property to retrieve it.
Or maybe, if I know who you are, I buy a drone and send it out after you. Or, if I have a screw or two loose or are from the shady side of the street, worse.
….Into the breach strides eminent diplomatic historian John Lewis Gaddis, offering a magisterial 784 page biography, a quarter- century in the making, George F. Kennan: An American Life. Gaddis, a noted historian of the Cold War and critic of revisionist interpretations of American foreign policy, has produced his magnum opus, distilling not only the essence of Kennan’s career, but the origins of his grand strategic worldview that were part and parcel the self-critical and lonely isolation that made Kennan such an acute observer of foreign societies and a myopic student of his own.
Gaddis, who is a co-founder of the elite Grand Strategy Program at Yale University, had such a long intellectual association with his subject, having been appointed Kennan’s biographer in 1982, that one wonders on theories of strategy at times where George Kennan ends and John Lewis Gaddis begins. Giving Kennan the supreme compliment among strategists, that he possessed in the years of the Long Telegram and the Policy Planning Staff, Clausewitz’s Coup d’oeil, Gaddis does not shy away from explaining Kennan’s human imperfections to the reader that made the diplomat a study in contradictions….
[ by Charles Cameron — Whitney Houston, RIP, Rumi, a broken reed, Federico Garcia Lorca, the duende ]
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Live performance — Whitney Houston singing Amazing Grace.
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Blog-friend Peter J Munson just recently tweeted this quote:
“Through the empty archway a wind of the spirit enters, blowing insistently over the heads of the dead”
That’s from the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, from an essay of his that I remembered vividly when I heard the other day that Whitney Houston had died. I wrote, then:
So Whitney Houston has died, far earlier than one might have wished, and the question comes up again whether some gifts essentially “demand” a life that breaks one — as though there’s a liquid inside the anger, the pain, the hurt, that must be set free for the voice to sing.
I didn’t post that here, because it felt at the time a little too private — but Peter Munson’s quote from Lorca reminds me that I followed up that observation about the “liquid” with this:
My sense that there might be “a liquid inside the anger, the pain, the hurt, that must be set free for the voice to sing” comes from the way her voice breaks, and breaks again, as she’s singing “a wretch like me” — from about 1’45” with the liquid finally spilling at 1’51″….
in the Amazing Grace video above…
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If you’re interested in the background to that idea of mine about the liquid, I’ll admit to two sources here — the first is Jalaluddin Rumi, who compares himself in the opening of his Masnavi with a reed, severed from its roots in the marshes to become a flute:
“Ever since I was cut off from my reed-bed, men and women all have lamented my bewailing. I want a breast torn asunder by severance, that I may fully declare the agony of yearning. Every one who is sundered far from his origin longs to recapture the time when he was united with it. In every company I have poured forth my lament, I have consorted alike with the miserable and the happy: each became my friend out of his own surmise, none sought to discover the secret in my heart. My secret indeed is not remote from my lament, but eye and ear lack the light to perceive it. Body is not veiled from soul, nor soul from body, yet to no many is leave given to see the soul.
As Rumi himself comments:
This cry of the reed is fire, it is not wind; whoever possesses not this fire, let him be naught!
My second source, echoing to us perhaps from the Cordoba of the Sufis, is Garcia Lorca, in his astounding essay, Theory and Play of the Duende — from which these paragraphs, like Peter Munson’s quote, are torn:
Once, the Andalusian ‘Flamenco singer’ Pastora Pavon, La Niña de Los Peines, sombre Spanish genius, equal in power of fancy to Goya or Rafael el Gallo, was singing in a little tavern in Cadiz. She played with her voice of shadows, with her voice of beaten tin, with her mossy voice, she tangled it in her hair, or soaked it in manzanilla or abandoned it to dark distant briars. But, there was nothing there: it was useless. The audience remained silent.
In the room was Ignacio Espeleta, handsome as a Roman tortoise, who was once asked: ‘Why don’t you work?’ and who replied with a smile worthy of Argantonius: ‘How should I work, if I’m from Cadiz?’
In the room was Elvira, fiery aristocrat, whore from Seville, descended in line from Soledad Vargos, who in ’30 didn’t wish to marry with a Rothschild, because he wasn’t her equal in blood. In the room were the Floridas, whom people think are butchers, but who in reality are millennial priests who still sacrifice bulls to Geryon, and in the corner was that formidable breeder of bulls, Don Pablo Murube, with the look of a Cretan mask. Pastora Pavon finished her song in silence. Only, a little man, one of those dancing midgets who leap up suddenly from behind brandy bottles, sarcastically, in a very soft voice, said: ‘Viva, Paris!’ as if to say: ‘Here ability is not important, nor technique, nor skill. What matters here is something other.’
Then La Niña de Los Peines got up like a madwoman, trembling like a medieval mourner, and drank, in one gulp, a huge glass of fiery spirits, and began to sing with a scorched throat, without voice, breath, colour, but…with duende. She managed to tear down the scaffolding of the song, but allow through a furious, burning duende, friend to those winds heavy with sand, that make listeners tear at their clothes with the same rhythm as the Negroes of the Antilles in their rite, huddled before the statue of Santa Bárbara.
La Niña de Los Peines had to tear apart her voice, because she knew experts were listening, who demanded not form but the marrow of form, pure music with a body lean enough to float on air. She had to rob herself of skill and safety: that is to say, banish her Muse, and be helpless, so her duende might come, and deign to struggle with her at close quarters. And how she sang! Her voice no longer at play, her voice a jet of blood, worthy of her pain and her sincerity, opened like a ten-fingered hand as in the feet, nailed there but storm-filled, of a Christ by Juan de Juni.
Perhaps we could say that Houston’s inspiration was a duende-haunted angel…
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Another live performance a few years later… the solo:
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Pondering these things, and thinking of that “liquid” I mentioned, my friend William Benzon quoted Lena Horne to me, as reported by David Craig in On Performing:
And then when they killed [Robert] Kennedy and Martin Luther King, it seemed like a floodgate had opened. There had been a lot of deaths in my own family. … and when I say, I was different. I began to “listen” to what I was doing and thinking. I listened to the audience. Even to the quiet. I had never listened to it before. … I was different because I was letting something in. The tone was developing differently. I could do what I wanted with it. I could soften it. I wasn’t afraid to show the emotion. I went straight for what I thought the songwriter had felt at a particular moment because he must have felt what I’d been feeling or else I couldn’t have read that lyric, I couldn’t have understood what he was saying. And I used my regretfulness and my cynicism. But even my cynicism had become not so much that as … logic. Yes, life is shit. Yes, people listen in different ways. some nights they’re unhappy at something that has happened to them. OK. I can feel that knot of resistance. OK. That’s where I’m going to work to. … And the second “eight” would be different than the first because the first was feeling it out and the second would change because I could come in “to my mood.” … It developed out of this relaxation … a tone that was softer, more liquid.
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My life had no troubles while I was listening to those tracks.
Zenpundit is a blog dedicated to exploring the intersections of foreign policy, history, military theory, national security,strategic thinking, futurism, cognition and a number of other esoteric pursuits.
