World War II – Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder

Top 10 Russian football songs: No. 10: Argentina-Yamayka 5-0, by Chayf (1999)

Our women forgive us our weakness / Our women forgive us our tears / They forgive the whole world its laughter and mirth – / Even Argentina.

Right to left: Vladimir Shakhrin, bronze of an old warrior by Dashi Namdakov from the Mongolian-Chinese borders, fan.

Ernst Jünger and the Libyan revolution

Chunks of Heliopolis and Eumeswil dealing with smartphones, language and power meet up with the Gaddafis.

Arthur Ditchfield, The Casbah and the Ravine of the Centaur, Algiers (1873), at the <a href='http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O125738/oil-painting-the-casbah-and-the-ravine/'>V&A</a>

All the world’s a barrel organ

From Wikipedia’s entry for Reinhard Heydrich, president of the forerunner of Interpol and architect of the Holocaust: On 2 June, during a visit with Himmler, Heydrich reconciled himself with his fate by reciting a part of one of his father’s operas: “The world is just a barrel-organ which the Lord God turns Himself. We all…

Ben Shahn’s maypole

Something puzzling me on V-E Day on May 8 last week: no one seems to have noticed that Ben Shahn‘s Liberation is a French maypole scene. I believe from the MOMA@NY blurb that it draws on a Cartier-Bresson image, but if it’s a maypole it must surely be celebrating the end of the war in…