A Journey Round My Skull: Persian Handstands

 

Mihr Ali, Fath Ali Shah, Qajar Painting, 1813-14
above and below images come from wikimedia

Mihr Ali, Qajar Painting, 1813-14


Anonymous, from the Shahinshahnameh, 1810
(detail of freaky camels)


Muhammad Hasan Afshar, portrait of Nasir al-Din Shah, with cherubs, 1854-55

Muhammad 'Ali, portrait miniature of Muhammad Shah, c. 1845


Unknown (again the Shirin painter?), A girl standing on her hands

These paintings come mostly from two books: Qajar Paintings (1972) and Qajar Portraits (1999) (the latter going for an obscene $500 on Amazon at the moment).
Read about Qajar art on wikipedia.
From a Sotheby's auction: "Court painting in Qajar Persia gave particular importance to the representation of women. From the mid-seventeenth century onwards, royal artists were attracted by European depictions of female subjects, borrowing certain poses, imagery and stylistic techniques into their own work."
Women were often the focal point of the Shirin Painter, and I can't wait to dig up more of his acrobats. Qajar Paintings contains a group of these, but not in color (hence that last scan).

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Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Surveillance State, U.S.A.

posted November 12, 2009 11:12 am

Wars come home in strange, unnerving ways -- as Americans have just discovered at Fort Hood. Even before Major Nidal Malik Hasan went on his killing spree, that base, a major military embarkation point for our war zones, was already experiencing the after-effects of eight years of war and repeated tours of duty. The suicide rate at Fort Hood was soaring (with 10 on the base in 2009 alone). Divorce rates were on the rise, as were mental health problems, drug and alcohol use, domestic abuse (up 75% since 2001), and murders among war-zone returnees. Even violent crime in Killeen, the town that houses the base, was up 22% (though it was down, according to the New York Times, "in towns of similar size in other parts of the country"). In an era in which our last president urged Americans to support his Global War on Terror by shopping and visiting Disney World, it often seemed that, except for soldiers and their families, our wars abroad affected little in this country.

And yet for an imperial power past its prime, foreign wars, even ones fought thousands of miles from home, have a way of coming back to haunt. Alfred W. McCoy tends to be ahead of the curve in his writing. In the Vietnam era, he had to fight the CIA to get his book, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, published; in the Bush years, he was perhaps the first person to recognize that the photos from Abu Ghraib represented no anomaly but the product of a long history of CIA torture research -- and published a powerful book, A Question of Torture, on the subject.

His latest book, Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State, meets counterinsurgency, another topic direct from today's headlines, head on. It ends on these lines: "...a state, like the United States, that rules a foreign territory through political repression and pervasive policing soon finds many of those same coercive methods moving homeward to degrade its own democracy. Such are the costs of empire." In his latest TomDispatch post, McCoy lays out just how that impulse for repression and policing, so vividly and violently expressed abroad in these last years, is now quietly taking aim at us. Tom

Welcome Home, War!

How America's Wars Are Systematically Destroying Our Liberties
By Alfred W. McCoy

In his approach to National Security Agency surveillance, as well as CIA renditions, drone assassinations, and military detention, President Obama has to a surprising extent embraced the expanded executive powers championed by his conservative predecessor, George W. Bush. This bipartisan affirmation of the imperial executive could "reverberate for generations," warns Jack Balkin, a specialist on First Amendment freedoms at Yale Law School. And consider these but some of the early fruits from the hybrid seeds that the Global War on Terror has planted on American soil. Yet surprisingly few Americans seem aware of the toll that this already endless war has taken on our civil liberties.

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Gable acc. to David Thomson, film historian, understander of sexual charisma, smart guy

 

 

“Gable succeeded on-screen because of the promise of force behind the smile—that’s what made the smile knowing… He was like Jack Dempsey in a tuxedo…. Joan Crawford said [being near him made her have] “twinges of sexual urge beyond belief.”

- David Thomson, film historian, understander of sexual charisma, smart guy.

• Split screen photo grab by the fantastic Bohemea

The Footnotes of Mad Men.

The raw, the cooked and Claude Lévi-Strauss

Posted by Jonathan Jones

Wednesday 4 November 2009 guardian.co.uk

If it weren't for the great anthropologist, who has died aged 100, I would never have learned a radical new way of looking at art history

 

 

The news that Claude Lévi-Strauss has died at the grand age of 100 brings back memories of my student days, which coincided with the intellectual dominance of this great French anthropologist.

For young would-be intellectuals in the 1980s, his books The Savage Mind and The Raw and the Cooked had a biblical status. Lévi-Strauss was the high priest of structuralism. Building on the linguistic ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure, he argued that all myth, and hence all pre-scientific thought, can be understood in terms of binary oppositions – such as, er, raw and cooked.

The strange and troubling grandeur of Lévi-Strauss lay in his insistence on the "synchronic" and contempt for the "diachronic": that is, he was interested in structures of thinking that endure over the very long term. He was apparently not interested in history, in change. Paradoxically, his ideas were of great interest to historians….

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Copernicus—Faith and Scientific Inquiry (Harper's Magazine)

Jan Matejko, The Astronomer Copernicus (1872)

 

Neque enim ita mihi mea placent, ut no perpendam, quid alii de illis iudicaturi sint. Et quamuis sciam, hominis philosophi cogitationes esse remotas a iudicio uulgi, propterea quod illius studium sit veritatem omnibus in rebus, quatenus id a Deo rationi humane permissum est, inquirere, tamen alienas prorsus a rectitudine opiniones fugiendas censeo. Itaque cumecum ipse cogitatem, quam absurdum existimaturi essent illi, qui multorum seculorum iudiciis hanc opinione confirmatam norut, quod terra immobilis in medio coeli, tan quam centrum illius posita sit, si ego contra assererem terram moueri, diu mecum haesi, an meos comentrios in eius motus demonstrationem conscriptos in lucem darem…

For I am not so enamored of my own opinions that I disregard what others may think of them. I am aware that a philosopher’s ideas are not subject to the judgment of ordinary persons, because it is his endeavor to seek the truth in all things, to the extent permitted to human reason by God. Yet I hold that completely erroneous views should be shunned. Those who know that the consensus of many centuries has sanctioned the conception that the earth remains at rest in the middle of the heaven as its center would, I reflected, regard it as an insane pronouncement if I made the opposite assertion that the earth moves.

–Nicholas Copernicus, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, dedicatory letter to Pope Paul III (1543)

Copernicus—Faith and Scientific Inquiry (Harper's Magazine)

Obama's Choice: Failed War President or the Prince of Peace?

 

By Nick Turse

When the Nobel Committee awarded its annual peace prize to President Barack Obama, it afforded him a golden opportunity seldom offered to American war presidents: the possibility of success. Should he decide to go the peace-maker route, Obama stands a chance of really accomplishing something significant. On the other hand, history suggests that the path of war is a surefire loser. As president after president has discovered, especially since World War II, the U.S. military simply can't seal the deal on winning a war.

While the armed forces can do many things, the one thing that has generally escaped them is that ultimate endpoint: lasting victory. This might have been driven home recently -- had anyone noticed -- when, in the midst of the Washington debate over the Afghan War, a forgotten front in President Bush's Global War on Terror, the Philippines, popped back into the news. On September 25th, New York Times correspondent Norimitsu Onishi wrote:

"Early this decade, American soldiers landed on the island of Basilan, here in the southern Philippines, to help root out the militant Islamic separatist group Abu Sayyaf. Now, Basilan's biggest towns, once overrun by Abu Sayyaf and criminal groups, have become safe enough that a local Avon lady trolls unworriedly for customers. Still, despite seven years of joint military missions and American development projects, much of the island outside main towns like Lamitan remains unsafe."

In attempting to explain the uneven progress of U.S. counterinsurgency operations against Muslim guerillas in the region after the better part of a decade, Onishi also noted, "Basilan, like many other Muslim and Christian areas in the southern Philippines, has a long history of political violence, clan warfare and corruption." While he remained silent about events prior to the 1990s, his newspaper had offered this reasonably rosy assessment of U.S. counterinsurgency efforts against Muslim guerrillas on the same island -- 100 years earlier:

 

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Remarks by Václav Havel and Two Members of China's Charter 08 at the Ceremony for the Homo Homini Award

By Václav Havel, Cui Weiping, Xu Youyu

This is an online-only supplement to the April 30 issue of the Review.

Opening of the One World
Human Rights Film Festival,
Prague, Czech Republic,
March 11, 2009

I offer my congratulations to the recipients of this year's Homo Homini Award and I am happy they came here from China. Allow me to make a few remarks. First, I think I will be speaking on behalf of most signatories of Charter 77 if I say that we are both pleased and honored to have inspired the Chinese Charter 08.

Secondly, I would like once more to point out our experience, one that our Chinese friends should adopt in one way or another, the experience that one may never reckon with success, one may never reckon with the situation changing tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, or in ten years. Perhaps it will not. If that is what you are reckoning with, you will not get very far.

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Exhibition ]Myth Germania[ Shadows and traces of the Imperial Capital

from : Berliner Unterwelten e.V.

Shadows and traces of the Imperial Capital

The twelve years of the National Socialist regime – 1933 to 1945 – violently changed the face of Europe. Berlin, the imperial capital, was transformed beyond recognition as the Second World War returned to the place where it had begun. Yet even without the destruction caused by the war, the Nazis would have completely unhinged Berlin’s historical development with their plans to remodel the city.

The exhibition, “Germania – Shadows and Traces of the Imperial Capital” throws new light onto the historical site around the river Spree near Hauptbahnhof (Central Station) and the former ministerial gardens. The exhibit’s spectrum spans from the disastrous collapse during construction of the North-South S-Bahn line, to the planning of the “Great Hall”, through to the accumulation of rubble in so-called mounts of debris (like the “Teufelsberg”) during Berlin’s post-war reconstruction.This documentation brings together and demonstrates the relationship between selected construction plans; building techniques; organisational methods; and the social and political background of National Socialism in the historically controversial area between the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe” and the “Topography of Terror”. Particular attention is paid to the consequences of the “relocation plans” for Berlin’s Jews.

For this exhibition, the Berliner Unterwelten e.V. (Berlin Underworlds society) has assembled years of its own findings on this subject, together with the latest research available. A large variety of photos, building plans and architectural models – of the “Great Hall” and the “North-South Axis” – complement the prepared texts.

• Faltblatt / Brochure ]Mythos Germania[ 2009, deutsch/englisch Description Flyer Myth Germania, german and english Copyright Berliner Unterwelten e. V. File size 4 MB Status 29.12.08 Start downloading

Period

Mar. 15th, 2008 – Dec. 31st, 2009 (closed Dec. 24th-26th 2008, Jan. 1st 2009 and Dec. 24th-26th 2009)

How Muslims Made Europe

Volume 55, Number 17 · November 6, 2008

By Kwame Anthony Appiah

God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 570–1215

by David Levering Lewis

Norton, 473 pp., $29.95

The conception of the Mediterranean as the meeting of three continents goes back to classical Greece. But it took a further intellectual leap to conceive of their inhabitants as a collectivity. You can have Europe, Africa, and Asia without thinking of Europeans, Africans, and Asians as particular kinds of people.

David Levering Lewis's rich and engaging God's Crucible shows that it took two things to make Europeans think of themselves as a people. One was the creation of a vast Holy Roman Empire by the six-foot-four, thick-necked, fair-haired Frankish warrior king we know as Charlemagne. The other was the development, in the Iberian peninsula on the southwestern borders of his dominion, of the Muslim culture of Spain, which the Arabs called al-Andalus. In the process that made the various tribes of Europe into a single people, what those tribes had in common and what distinguished them from their Muslim neighbors were both important. This is, by now, a familiar idea. But God's Crucible offers a more startling proposal: in making the civilization that modern Europeans inherit, the cultural legacy of al-Andalus is at least as important as the legacy of the Catholic Franks. In borrowing from their great Other, they filled out the European Self.

Charlemagne's rule included at its high point most of France, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands, the west of Germany, Italy as far south as Rome, a strip in the north of Spain, and parts of Hungary and the Balkans. At nearly three and a half million square miles, it was larger than the continental United States. Charlemagne imposed Catholic orthodoxy on the pagan Saxons in the east at the point of a very sharp sword, massacring thousands of those who resisted, and suppressed heresy within Frankland with equal vigor. He created monastic centers of learning, drawing scholars from across his empire and beyond; and after the centuries of ignorance that had followed the collapse of the Roman Empire in Gaul and Germania, the works of men like the Northumbrian Alcuin (poet, theologian, and restorer of the classical curriculum) created a Carolingian Renaissance.

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These achievements perhaps entitled Charlemagne to his self-conception as Rome's heir in the West, author of a Renovatio Romani Imperii, an imperial restoration. .........

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