technical fairy, first class

The remarkable resource, the Public Domain Review, presents a really fascinating retrospective of how animation studios let slip the dogs, rabbits and ducks of war with patriotic cartoons parallel to the enlistment of Hollywood’s live-action actors in the 1940s, with a special look at the instructional cartoon series of hapless and sometimes reluctant Private Snafu.

The familiar acronym and familiar state-of-affairs was made friendly for general audiences, but interestingly as propaganda films were part of the war-effort and not subject to the same standards of censorship that relegated the commercial box-office and were able to get away with quite a bit more adult humour and raciness. Production, handled as a top-secret operation, brought together quite a few creative talents who would go on to become the some of the luminaries of the industry, including Mel Blanc, Chuck Jones, Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss), whose later punchlines and story-telling styles were shaped by this wartime collaboration—the approach to refining GIs in a straightforward but engaging manner translated well into entertainment and indemnity.

vanguard

Though it is no excuse for barbarous behaviour, the sacking of Constantinople occurred in part because of a populace complacent, as was Rome in its time, and unwilling to entertain the unthinkable—that these barbarians at the gates might ever breach their defenses and that the great Queen of Cities might be vulnerable.

As the Crusaders encamped at Galata and launched endless and seemingly futile forays against the outer most ring of fortifications from their galleons, lashing masts together to try to turn the boats into ladders and siege-engines, it did seem that the city was safe and secure and would just be able to wait these interlopers out. In fact, the regular army of the Byzantine Empire was never mobilised against this nuisance, with only the personal guard of the Emperor, the Varangians dispatched to monitor the perimeter, making occasional counter-attacks with a sweep of arrows or pouring boiling oil on Crusader undermining operations at the base of the city walls. The Crusaders never really breached those fortifications—that accomplishment was reserved for many centuries later, but one diligent and unnoticed Venetian did manage to prise away a small piece of masonry (not much bigger than a womp rat) and opened up a crawlspace inside. The gates were flung open and the Crusaders stormed in.

These Varangian body-guards, while ultimately ineffectual, were a pretty interesting retinue. Taking a lesson from history, knowing how fickle the loyalties Prætorian guard could be, recruited from native sources and subject to prevailing influences, Byzantine emperors had a long-standing tradition of importing personal protectors—much like the Swiss Guard of the papacy. The Varangians were originally Viking warriors who had expanded east to the Rus—westward expansion discouraged by Englanders who were willing to keep paying the Vikings tribute (called Danegeld) not to attack them. Eventually these Scandinavians encountered the Byzantines and after some initial clashes and subsequent conversion of the Kievian-Rus to the Orthodox faith, the leaders of the Varangians pledged a division of its fiercest, professional warriors as a sign of peace. As the displacing of populations was picking up, the Vangarian stock soon expanded to attract other landless individuals to join this foreign legion. Chiefly this army began to be staffed with ranks of men of Briton extraction, themselves having migrated from Germanic lands and settled in England, who in turn were dislodged by the Norman Conquest—the Normans being Norse mercenaries themselves. Having lost hearth and home, many Britons sought their fortunes in Byzantium. I do wish, however, this Varangian vanguard had been able to rebuff the Crusaders’ advances.

beatnik

The inquiring minds over at The Curious Brain features a gallery of beautifully rendered, clever Hipster Animals, found at the artist Dynamoe’s Tumblr presence.
Not being terribly couth to all these new styles and affectations myself (I understand that there is a subculture calling themselves Lumbersexuals—and that is OK, I suppose), the sharp little barbs and references came out immediately. There were too many sly creatures, to a one all in the know, to choose from, so I’d encourage you to peruse the whole selection yourself, possibly also discovering your familiar or totem.

five-by-five

once and future sins: a projection on how future generations might judge us a century hence

club med: a look at the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations in Marseilles

the mads are calling: a chart to rate evil geniuses

she doesn’t even realise she’s a replicant: descend into uncanny valley with these interviews with robot and mind-clone, Bina 48

brainy, hefty, jokey: explaining secular stagnation through the lens of Smurf Village

rex mundi or spirits in the material world

The massacre of the Cathars in Europe—particularly in their bastions of southern France is not just a historical curiosity, a footnote or something merely comparable with the ongoing plight and persecution of the Yazidi under contemporary righteous bullies and deserves much more of a mention than a few lines sandwiched between the more well-known campaigns of the Children’s Crusades and the Reconquista. What little that is known for certain about the beliefs and traditions of people grouped under the name Cathar, which means pure one but may have been applied in the pejorative sense to a whole spectrum of individuals with unorthodox tenets, is scant and suspect since it was chronicled by those who sought to exterminate heresy in all its forms. A few common accusations of the inquisitors sketches at least a faint outline of the framework of their belief—the dichotomy between the material and spiritual world, which are the handiwork of distinct gods, the former faulty, evil and covetous and the later perfection, goodness and love, and born to the dual nature of mind and body, they believed that they were duty-bound (as reflected by their manner of worship) to try to reconcile this dual-nature through a series of reincarnation until finally pure, having elevated and shed that physical form.

With procreation seen as a way of perpetuating the cycles of death and re-birth, marriage was generally eschewed and couples practiced birth-control. As anyone might be reborn as anything, there was not the usual denigration of women and most of the sects practiced vegetarianism. Naturally, such beliefs were dangerous and subversive, as the community scoffed the authority of the Church, and while they believed that Jesus was a good man with admirable qualities and a prophet, the Cathars found it ridiculous to believe that a saviour would be made incarnate. Secular authority was questionable too, appealing as it did to the divine right of kings.
For decades, missionaries were sent into the Balkans, where the faith had probably originated, and into parts of southern France and Italy to try to reform the Cathars—but seeing no conversions for all their efforts and with the needed catalyst came in the form of murdered papal delegate, accompanied by Saint Dominic, and perhaps more pointedly, the tacit permission to sack Byzantium, a twenty-year long purge, called the Albigensian Crusade (named for the arch-diocese of Albi, which was in the centre of Cathar country), was launched to rid Languedoc of Cathar influences. Of course, frustrated clerics and nobles welcomed themselves to the spoils of the auto-de-fay. The story of this persecution, however, is an even greater crime than mankind generally unleashes on his own kind in that, like the destruction of Constantinople in terms of learning and culture lost to the world, the region that was home to most of the Cathars prior to the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Aude praire with the cities of Carcassonne, Narbonne, Perpignan, Nîmes, Toulouse and Avignon, was probably the chief contender for the most refined and advanced territory in all of medieval Europe—everything in between Ireland (with its monasteries, which were also irritants for the Church but remote enough to be left alone) and said Constantinople—which now toppled, exposed Europe to incursions from the Mongols and Ottomans.

Hints of this cultivation remain in the architectural tradition but little else, as the genocide was nearly total. Anecdotally at least, this indiscriminate slaughter was the source of the saying, paraphrased, “Kill ‘em all and let God sort them out.” Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius. Pockets endured in the most remote rural areas and Cathar communities were also incorporated into other sects of outliers, the new Protestants and the Moravian (Herrenhuter) of the German woodlands. On a lighter note, happily an international café chain affords us the opportunity to reflect and share our experiences with gnosticism and the Albigensian Crusade by branding the avatar of the dread and almighty Abraxas on all their merchandise.

font speciment

Knowing that my posts are absolutely lousy with typos—I tend to stall and duplicate little, mincing words and leave out the big, important ones quite often, and am bad, probably like a lot of us at proof-reading my own work, seeing what I expected my fingers to faithfully copy out of my head, I often wince with embarrassment when I look over an older entry. Since reading a few weeks ago, however, that garishly snubbed typefaces in the quiver of standard fonts may help stimulate rote, recall and improve structure and syntax by virtue of being nearly illegible and graphically off-putting, I have begun regularly to compose my first drafts in big, horsey letters. The incongruities raised when writing about serious topics and the lack of a reputable corporate image probably also cause a minor fugue in mind of readers and writers when scanning text. I don’t know if there’s any measurable enhancement that others might notice, but I do think that it is helping me to catch more errors that would be elided over when displayed in a smoother font.

five-by-five

exfoliate: make your own day-spa lady cheese and dip platter

mannerism: artist Matthias Jung creates beautiful architectural collages

landmark or bats in the belfries: cute series of animals posing as skyline familiars


psyc 101: some heuristic psychological hacks safe to try at home

singing telegram: tweets presented as antique wireless messages 

cowboys and indians: sacerdotal or the fifth crusade

I spoke ridiculously too soon when I claimed that the horrors of the misrouted Fourth Crusade which sacked Constantinople, ravaging the beautiful city, depleting its treasures and resulting in the very brief reign of a resented Latin emperor called Romania but failed to reunite the lands or the Church, had put Europe—or at least the guilty Church—off of crusading permanently. Far from it—in fact before the same Pope Innocent III rallied the European noble houses to again descend on the Holy Land—in keeping with his original vision of the campaign with a thrust through Egypt, there was a coordinated massacre of the Cathar gnostics at home, inspired in part by the papacy’s equivocal attitude when the Crusaders were attacking fellow Christians in Byzantium. Mainstream Christians had regarded this dualistic sect that believed in the transmigration of the soul and equality of the sexes with suspicion for some time and called them devil-worshippers and pagans for the tenet that God had a good and an evil aspect and were glad to have the excuse to be rid of them and take their lands in southern France.  The Reconquista heated up to drive the Moors from Spain and Portugal.

Separately, two charismatic shepherd boys in Seine-Saint-Denis and Köln gathered thousands of children, the poor and disposed to march on the Holy Land and convert the Muslims—both promising that the Mediterranean at Marseilles or over the Alps and in Brindisi would part before them, like Moses crossing the Red Sea. Once the horde made its way to the shore, the Mediterranean did not comply and those who did not try to start their young lives anew at these endpoints or try their fortune at going home were caught by Saracen pirates and sold into slavery. It’s hard to say if the adult population of Europe felt obliged to complete the mission their children were willing to undertake unquestioningly or not (some question the accounts or if such travesties even happened at all), but in any case, Pope Innocent was able to marshal the support of armies that might be able to fulfill the task of recapturing the Holy Land without too much variance. This time, however, the leaders of the Crusader States would rather that Europe didn’t try to help out again. The past few years had ushered in a time of relative peace and great prosperity and Christian and Muslims coexisted due to a constellation of conditions, including the death of Saladin and crises of succession among his heirs, lack of Crusader aggression and very lucrative and mutually beneficial trading arrangements.
The last thing that the County of Acre, then the dominant Crusader State, wanted was to have a bunch of uncouth holy warriors despoiling the calm but they were not in a situation to disinvite the coming armada of ships. A sizable Crusader fighting force landed at Acre and King John of the realm tried his best to occupy the restless men, who were additionally an onerous task to quarter, and as more forces from Hungary, Germany, France and Flanders arrived, King John was helpless to prevent the march on Egypt. The Crusaders sought control of the city of Damietta (Dumyāt) at the mouth of the Nile, which protected the waterway to the capital of Cairo, some two hundred kilometers downstream. Maneuvers were indecisive and guarded, the force strong enough to besiege the fortification but not strong enough to take the city outright and the months before the Crusaders decamped, they found that they had starved the population into submission. Once Damietta had fallen, the way-forward remained unclear as they were awaiting the arrival of relief-forces from the armies of Holy Roman Emperor Fredrick II that would give them an unstoppable numerical advantage and could thus safely proceed. The armies of Sultan al-Adil, Saladin’s brother, were watching events unfold in a similarly vacillating manner, as internal strife prevented them from a certain counter-attack.
While at this impasse, the sultan ordered the destruction of the defensive fortifications that protected the city of Jerusalem, preemptively entertaining the idea that the Holy City might become an important bargaining token in the near future and if it was to fall to the Crusaders, the Muslims wanted them to have a city not easily defended, just as Saladin had directed for the town of Ascalon to be demolished to stop the earlier Crusaders’ advance from Jaffa to the Holy City, then resolved to negotiate with the Crusaders in order to end this stalemate and attend to its own affairs. The offer that the sultan’s ambassadors brought to the table was unbelievably favourable—concession of Jerusalem and return of the True Cross in exchange for leaving Egypt in peace, but what was even more unbelievable was how the Crusaders rejected the terms. Maybe they were sly to the dismantling of Jerusalem and did not want to take it just to see it lost again, but I think the only plausible logic behind their stance—which was not universal among the ranks, was that they were sure that they were going to triumph, with the wealthy and powerful Egypt and not just out of the way Jerusalem as the prize.
The papal legate, nominally in charge of military operations, was flattered with a prophesy that he fancied to be a sure sign that he’d personally led the Crusaders to victory—and besides, Egypt was apparently being attacked on its eastern border by the long awaited cavalry from the land of Prester John and so there was no way that absolute triumph could be denied them. Except that the papal legate had misinterpreted the augurs and having waited so long in Damietta, the Nile had again flooded and was no longer navigable and the fighting-force was bogged down once again. Frustrated, the separate divisions splintered and sailed back to Acre and then back home to Europe. One last exception was that Egypt was not under siege from a magnanimous Oriental Christian Magi, but rather these skirmishes with an unknown and fierce tribe marked the first encounter that the Western world had with Genghis Khan and the Mongol Hoard, but all that is for another story-line.