A Long Memory

Published Dec 5, 2011 Degenerate Art had been denounced by the Nazis as un-German ie Jewish or Bolshevist. Josef Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, organized an exhibition of Entartete Kunst in 1937. The SS acted as curators for the show by confiscating the works of modern artists from museums and private collections. The assembled paintings, books, prints, and statues were arranged into three genres of insults to the German people. The opening in Munich was such a success that Goebbels sent the exhibition of an eleven city tour of the 3rd Reich, after which the choice pieces were distributed to the Nazi hierarchy. Over 4000 were torched by the Berlin Fire Brigade possibly inspiring Ray Bradbury to write his science-fiction classic FAHRENHEIT 451.

In November 2001 a Koln auction house offered a Wassily Kandinsky watercolor in its modern art sales. “Zwei Schwarze Flecke” had been given to a young lady by the artist. The aquarelle had been confiscated by the Nazis from a museum, although the auction house stated to the press that the family had given away the painting in the 1920s.

“The sale will go ahead, We think this claim is totally unfounded.”

This opinion differed with that of the heirs, whose ancestors were exiled to Siberia and died in poverty.

I checked Friday results of Lempertz Kunsthaus sale without finding a record of the painting being sold.

Please go to this URL : http://www.lempertz.com/444.html

The art world lifted its head from the trough of Art-Basel/Miami to react to my friend's blog citing an article in bloomberg.com

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-01/nazi-loot-claim-fails-to-hinder-planned-cologne-kandinsky-sale.html

UK female - mmm sounds like North American aboriginal claims using oral evidence. Yesterday at 7:34pm · Like

Art

Spive - Shameful

Me - the indian were here before that cute johnny apple seed and the nazis financed their power through theft. the truth will out

Female French - Did max ernst's 'the fair gardener' ever resurface? it was categorically field in 'entartete kunst', as "insult to german womanhood". its like 1 of francis picabia (sympathiser / collaborator!) "transparencies". late in life, max ernst made a sequel work, 'the return of the fair gardener'.

UK Female "grab what you can" the auction house for the present owner/the claiment heirs?

Furious Male - Clearly the heirs deserve this work. It is part of their heritage in that their ancestors had the taste/foresight/vision to show an interest in it and buy it. I am just thinking of the auction houses..."grab, grab", and using any legal or other loophole they can find - even if the only loophole is a feigned uncertainty about the provenance.

Zionist Female - BOO HISS SO ANTI-SEMITIC, the auction houses who don't give back nazi looted art that belongs to jewish owners who suffered in the holocaust. such great art!

Furious Male - How long have they had this stuff, or at least, how long have they waited to let the owners consign it? If they could have held out another 50-75 years maybe nobody would have noticed. I still have living relatives who fought in world war...

Of course this vector pertains to many injustices in the world and I decided to enter a new subject into the fray.

ME - on a tangent trajectory how does this subject pertain to the Palestinians right to return?

Degenerate Art had been denounced by the Nazis as un-German ie Jewish or Bolshevist. Josef Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, organized an exhibition of Entartete Kunst in 1937. The SS acted as curators for the show by confiscating the works of modern artists from museums and private collections. The assembled paintings, books, prints, and statues were arranged into three genres of insults to the German people. The opening in Munich was such a success that Goebbels sent the exhibition of an eleven city tour of the 3rd Reich, after which the choice pieces were distributed to the Nazi hierarchy. Over 4000 were torched by the Berlin Fire Brigade possibly inspiring Ray Bradbury to write his science-fiction classic FAHRENHEIT 451.

In November 2001 a Koln auction house offered a Wassily Kandinsky watercolor in its modern art sales. “Zwei Schwarze Flecke” had been given to a young lady by the artist. The aquarelle had been confiscated by the Nazis from a museum, although the auction house stated to the press that the family had given away the painting in the 1920s.

“The sale will go ahead, We think this claim is totally unfounded.”

This opinion differed with that of the heirs, whose ancestors were exiled to Siberia and died in poverty.

I checked Friday results of Lempertz Kunsthaus sale without finding a record of the painting being sold.

Please go to this URL : http://www.lempertz.com/444.html

The art world lifted its head from the trough of Art-Basel/Miami to react to my friend's blog citing an article in bloomberg.com

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-01/nazi-loot-claim-fails-to-hinder-planned-cologne-kandinsky-sale.html

UK female - mmm sounds like North American aboriginal claims using oral evidence. Yesterday at 7:34pm · Like

Art

Spiv - Shameful

Me - the Indians were here before that cute johnny apple seed and the nazis financed their power through theft. the truth will out

Female French - Did max ernst's 'the fair gardener' ever resurface? it was categorically field in 'entartete kunst', as "insult to german womanhood". its like 1 of francis picabia (sympathiser / collaborator!) "transparencies". late in life, max ernst made a sequel work, 'the return of the fair gardener'.

UK Female "grab what you can" the auction house for the present owner/the claiment heirs?

Furious Male - Clearly the heirs deserve this work. It is part of their heritage in that their ancestors had the taste/foresight/vision to show an interest in it and buy it. I am just thinking of the auction houses..."grab, grab", and using any legal or other loophole they can find - even if the only loophole is a feigned uncertainty about the provenance.

Zionist Female - BOO HISS SO ANTI-SEMITIC, the auction houses who don't give back nazi looted art that belongs to jewish owners who suffered in the holocaust. such great art!

Furious Male - How long have they had this stuff, or at least, how long have they waited to let the owners consign it? If they could have held out another 50-75 years maybe nobody would have noticed. I still have living relatives who fought in world war...

Of course this vector pertains to many injustices in the world and I decided to enter a new subject into the fray.

ME - on a tangent trajectory how does this subject pertain to the Palestinians right to return?

Thirteen years later and still no response.

SHOOTING AT THE MOON by Roger Warner

The airbases fo Issan are relatively quiet now. A few arrivals a day from Bangkok, but during the Viet-Nam War these runways were scorched by US fighters and bombers flying missions over Hanoi and more secretively Laos. This supposed secret war was run out of a small complex on the Udon Thani air strip basically by 2 CIA agents vividly portrayed in SHOOTING AT THE MOON a non-fiction account of the clandestine conflict by Roger Warner also author of Haing Ngor: CAMBODIAN ODYSSEY.

Laos in the 1960s was a bucolic sideshow to Vietnam with the various fractious factions locked in a polite stalemate. Neither the Pathet Lao nor the Lao Royalist Force Armee Royale known as the 'fast army running' to the CIA insiders, had no intentions of fighting each other. Their leaders on both sides were related by royal blood and combat consisted of shuffling strategic positions according the the weather, until Washington decided to arm the Hmong tribespeople to stiffen the resolve of the lowland anti-communist troops.

The entire operation was run by Bill Lair, who chose the Hmong fighter Vang Po to lead his tribesmen against the enemy. The superstitious Hmong fired flintlock rifles into the sky during lunar eclipses to secure the celestial frog from swallowing the moon. The CIA thought them provincial, but these montagnards effectively harassed the Pathet Lao for most of the 60s. Unfortunately they never fielded the numbers to destroy those forces, especially once the communist forces were reinforced by North Vietnamese regulars protecting the threatened Ho Chi Minh Trail. Mr Lair promised the Hmong a refuge in the West should all hell break loose. As one agent said, "It doesn't matter how horrible you are, as long as you take care of your people." SHOOTING AT THE MOON recorded the unfolding tragedy, as CIA higher-ups raised the ante in Laos with deadly results, most culpable are the station chief Theodore Shackley and CIA Director William Colby. The Blond Ghost abandoned the Hmong and moved to South America, where he orchestrated the overthrow of the the Pinochet regime in Chile. A true piece of shit, who didn't care a fig for Laos, which was bombed more heavily than Germany in WWII.

The author of SHOOTING AT THE MOON Mr. Warner purported that this war was a success as long as it was small, a theory of soft force that Pentagon planners should research for their present quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq, but those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it and usually more than once. Check out William Shawcross' SIDESHOW and you'll vote that prick Henry Kissinger a war criminal. ps there are no quotes by Theodore Shackley on Google. The Blond Ghost knew better than leave a paper trail.

Cut And Walk

Ten years ago the Coalition of the Willing initiated Operation Enduring Freedom against the Taliban in Afghanistan in revenge for harboring Osama Bin Laden, the leader of Al-Quada. The Northern Alliance backed by NATO air strikes easily routed their fundamentalist foes, but the defeat partially came, because the war-ravaged country was on the verge of a winter of famine. The Taliban took to the hills. Al-Quada went into hiding. Osama Bin Laden fled to Pakistan where he lived under the aegis of the ISI, the Pakistan Internal Security Forces. George W Bush, his neo-con staff, and the Pentagon congratulated their success. Democracy was the next step in the plan, however the initial optimism met with on-the-ground reality. Afghanistan was a country often occupied, but rarely conquered by invaders as the Russians learned through their misadventure south of the Oxus River during the 1980s. The Taliban resumed combat in 2003 and the majority of their attacks were aimed of the local populace, despite Islamic leaders condemning such actions. GW Bush's Pentagon sought to fight this war on the cheap, since the Big One was in Iraq. The costs of this miscalculation was paid with the lives of ISAF troops and Afghani civilians. A new president was trapped into continuing the war albeit at an upscale tempo. A troop surge pushed back on the Taliban and the cost of war increased 50%. At his point the USA has spent nearly a trillion dollars with a loss of 14,000 allied lives versus some 39,000 Taliban fighters. No one has an accurate body count on the civilian dead. President Obama was promised to withdraw combat troops by 2014, but this month an errant air attack on a Pakistani position has led to the closure of two supply routes to Afghanistan. North of the Oxus a former Soviet satellite has called for the removal of all NATO forces as soon as possible. These two setbacks leave airlifts as the only method to supply the 130,000 soldiers of the ISAF. Only three words come to mind; Dien Bien Phu, the massive defeat for the French Forces in Indochina. Maybe I'm just a little pessimistic, because the British commander in Afghanistan expressed a different opinion to the Guardian. "Having made this investment in blood, I am more determined. If I didn't think we could do this I would take a very different view but I am confident we can do it." "Let's mark [his] work. If he was serious about overthrowing the government and grabbing a portion of Afghanistan for his own, you have to do three things. You have to secure your own heartland in Kandahar and central Helmand. Is he doing that? No. They lost their safe havens around Kandahar in 2010 and they didn't take them back in 2011. They are not holding their own heartland." "Secondly, you have to spread your influence around other areas. There is absolutely no evidence anywhere in Afghanistan that they are doing that. Thirdly, you have got to affect the seat of government. There have been lots of headlines, but Kabul has about 20% of the population and less than 1% of total violence in the country. Not only is the seat of government unaffected, but Kabul is a flourishing capital city that is much safer than Karachi." That last statement echoed the statement of a GOP congressman who said in 2007, "Returning troops have indicated to me that 80 to 85 percent, in a conservative fashion, of (Iraq) is reasonably under control, at least as well as Detroit or Chicago or any of our other big cities. That's an encouraging sign." I've been to Detroit and Chicago. None of them had car bombs exploding in the streets, except on Hell Night in Detroit, when anything goes. British generals tend to study history. This commander has chosen to ignore 1842. The British forces in Afghanistan were wiped out on their retreat from Kabul. I say cut and walk is always better than cut and run, especially when there is nowhere to run. Bring the troops home for Xmas along with a lot of hashish.

Oh Yoko

The Touch Of Art

Famed ad exec and art collector Charles Saatchi lambasted the present hideousness of the art market on the UK Guardian's commentary pages on the art market. "Art critics mainly see the shows they are assigned to cover by their editors, and have limited interest in looking at much else. Art dealers very rarely see the exhibitions at other dealers' galleries. I've heard that almost all the people crowding around the big art openings barely look at the work on display and are just there to hobnob. Nothing wrong with that, except that none of them ever come back to look at the art – but they will tell everyone, and actually believe, that they have seen the exhibition." http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/02/saatchi-hideousness-art-world There is nothing with not looking at Art. Back in the early 80s I was living in Paris. My nights-off from the Bains-Douches were spent at Le Studio, a Tex-Mex Restaurant in a courtyard off Rue Du Temple. The clientele consisted of American ex-patriots and stunning models from the covers of VOGUE and ELLE. The long-haired bartender was a southern boy from Lower Alabama. Tony Bowers traded free margharitas for persona grata status at the Bains-Douches. It was a good deal for both of us and I cooked BBQ on Monday nights to earn a little more money. Living in a small Marais hotel wasn't cheap. Tony was more into Lynard Skynard than opera and we loved twisting the volume dial to 10 to play YOUR DADDY IS RICH and SWEET HOME ALABAMA at the night's end. The few neighbors hated us, but we placated their anger with free drinks and a little Johnny Halliday. It was a good time to be in Paris and we traipsed across the city like soldiers from a conquering army. The French economy was recovering from the 70s recession. We were above the lingering crisis. Both of us were paid in cash. Barmen and waiters treated us with respect. They loved Le Studio and Le Bains-Douches. A smile and a little extra cognac in our glass bought free entrance into the Bains and an top-off of marghartia at the Studio. Once a month Tony and I visited the Louvre to expand our art acumen. The former home of the Bourbon suffered from institutional neglect and the galleries were devoid of tourists. Tony and I conducted various walks through the long dusty halls; fastest trip, Orientalism only, but our favorite was the Art-No-Art hike. "We'll walk through the museum without looking at any paintings, tapestries, or statues." I suggested this approach to art appreciation after we had memorized the paintings in one of long galleries from floor to ceiling. "Let the art look at us." Tony pronounced in his Mobile accent. He was a cracker with all his teeth. "Got it." We strolled through the museum talking about women, music, and fast cars. Our peregrination ended before the MONA LISA. We lifted our eyes to Leonardo's classic portrait of another man's wife and after visually confirming its presence we spent the usual fifteen seconds staring at the enigmatic smile before turning to view the state of a herma hermaphrodite endormi, a Roman copy of Greek statue. The guards were only interested in protecting La Jocunde, which had been stolen in 1911 and subject to vandalism attacks twice in the last century. No one cared about the statue with of a man who was also a woman. Tony and I would bring young models on occasion and have them touch the marble with trembling hands. It really turned them on. To look and sometimes to touch. That is how the senses work. Both then and now and in the future.

Collect Call to the After-Life

This summer my brother visited me in a dream. My deceased mother and I were sitting in a ramshackle cottage on Cape Cod. My brother said he was going to meet friends. He looked happy, as he ran out the door. It was a little too short, but I was happy to see him and so was my mother.

I hope he's having a good time.

ps Michael Charles Smith is the smallest and I am the tallest of the boys.

World AIDS Day

My baby brother Michael Charles Smith. Gone sixteen years. Forever with us. World AIDS Day. It's for all of us and all of them