From a 1995 article in The Independent, an account of how the CIA promoted and funded US and other Western artists during the Cold War, including abstract expressionists like Rothko and Pollock.
The decision to include culture and art in the US Cold War arsenal was taken as soon as the CIA was founded in 1947. Dismayed at the appeal communism still had for many intellectuals and artists in the West, the new agency set up a division, the Propaganda Assets Inventory, which at its peak could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information organisations. They joked that it was like a Wurlitzer jukebox: when the CIA pushed a button it could hear whatever tune it wanted playing across the world.
The next key step came in 1950, when the International Organisations Division (IOD) was set up under Tom Braden. It was this office which subsidised the animated version of George Orwell's Animal Farm, which sponsored American jazz artists, opera recitals, the Boston Symphony Orchestra's international touring programme. Its agents were placed in the film industry, in publishing houses, even as travel writers for the celebrated Fodor guides. And, we now know, it promoted America's anarchic avant-garde movement, Abstract Expressionism.
(via @sippey)
Tags: art CIA Cold War
Upstream Color is weird, and beautiful, and haunting in a way that had us still thinking about it days later. We sat down with writer/director/editor, composer/whathaveyou Shane Carruth the night after his film debuted at SXSW to get his views on his new film, how much a trailer should reveal, and how important memory is to identity. [ 
Microsoft today 
(The Old Reader’s team before March 13, photo by 
Yeti with GPR antenna in tow at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station
James Lever, U.S. Army's Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory
Earlier this week, 
