Lighthouses in Cleveland, Ohio

Interesting inclined park in Cleveland

Sunset

Great restaurant menu cover, in Mexicantown, Detroit

This dog nosed its way into the exam room to keep me company while I wait for the optometrist

Started this the other day—supposed to be a forerunner of modern espionage/spy stories. Feels like the plot is only just beginning to appear, about a quarter of the way in. But it’s got a comfortable Sherlock-Holmesy Englishness to it, and I’m enjoying the dynamics between the main two guys on their increasingly mysterious, out-of-season sailing cruise.

Last night’s beer flight at Royal Oak Brewing. First time there. The “Chai Tea Mild” was pretty nice — overshadowed the rest with its pretty niceness.

Abstract art as a Cold War psy-op, from “Aftermath” by Harald Jähner:

The insistence on figurative painting in the GDR made it easier for Western artists to present themselves as an aesthetic alternative and establish abstraction as the West’s trademark artistic style. Seen as the art of freedom, it acquired a charisma that was effectively a political statement, and was all the more convincing in that it did not have to explicitly present itself as such. It represented a playful celebration of being, which embodied pure vital energy, and was played out freely on large canvases. And because of the excessive application of paint, which was trowelled, trickled and applied in thick encrusted layers, abstract painting represented an extravagance which in a sense appealed to a higher form of affluence and continued to shape the post-war era almost as a kind of inner compulsion.

The American propaganda strategists recognised very quickly that art could be very useful in the promotion of democracy. Like the Soviets, they grasped the importance of painting for post-war nation building, but unlike them they found it harder to guide art in a suitable direction. For them, abstract art was a good aesthetic programme for the denazification of the imagination, but even better than that, it was well suited to standing up to the Soviets and giving West Germany an aesthetic identity of its own. By means of abstract painting the Americans were able to make “Socialist Realism look even more stylised, more rigid and confined than it actually was,” the American CIA agent Donald Jameson said. The Americans put a huge amount of energy into encouraging abstract art. They organised grants for young painters, financed exhibitions and bought paintings in large quantities. At the same time, private initiatives and state sponsorship went hand in hand. Often high-ranking military officers bought art and recommended individual artists to the various funding bodies.

[…]

“If that’s art, I’m a Hottentot,” President Truman had said in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1947, confident of the thunderous applause this statement would receive from the majority of Americans. That didn’t prevent his Cold War strategists from seeing that very same art as the best way of putting America effectively on the world stage. Certain that Congress would never authorise the funds required to export that art, the CIA turned abstract expressionism into a clandestine operation. So it was that artists who were mocked in the US Congress as heretical daubers were deployed by American foreign policy experts for aesthetic propaganda. Rothko, Pollock and Motherwell might have seen themselves as homeless radicals and lonely individualists at home, but abroad a concerted exhibition effort turned them into ideal representatives of America.

On smoking cigarettes in Germany after World War II:

German men scrambling in the dust for a few cigarette butts flicked away by occupying soldiers is one of the most vividly described post-war scenes. The image filled many with contempt, others with bitterness. So this was what the master race had come to. They enviously watched the casual smoking of the Allies. Young Germans clumsily copied their gestures. Special attention was paid to the moment of throwing the cigarette on the ground and stamping it out. No occupying soldier held the stub long enough for it to almost burn his fingers. They tossed away the cigarette butts with a heedlessness that simply couldn’t be copied. The German lads from the black market never quite managed that, but they did try to act, when smoking, as if they had enough cigarettes in the cellar to do them till the end of time. … Since cigarettes served as currency, the smoker was like a person burning banknotes. More than ever, smoking became a celebration of the moment, with which one triumphed over thoughts of the future. Women, too, wanted to have access to that feeling. The old right-wing saying “German women don’t smoke” was now once and for all a thing of the past.

From “Aftermath” by Harald Jähner.

Somebody finally got tired of their Valentine’s balloon