Not many know that the creator of the world’s best-known secret service agent — Ian Fleming and James Bond, respectively —also designed the blueprint for what in the post-World War II scenario would be known as the Central Intelligence Agency or CIA. The letters that mention the details are part of the exhibits at London’s Imperial War Museum, writes Ginanne Brownell in Newsweek. The paraphernalia include props from film sets, as well as original manuscripts and ticket stubs from casinos and bars where Fleming carried out his research. Interestingly, Fleming, the master planner for naval intelligence, chose his character’s name because he “wanted something bland”.
War Games, The New Yorker
A video game, based on a kind of modernist chess developed by Marxist philosopher and filmmaker Guy Debord in 1977, attracted its share of controversy when it was displayed at Columbia’s Buell Center. ‘Le Jeu de Guerre’, as the board game is called, is a strategy game, with elaborately laid out arsenals, fortresses, artillery, mountains and cavalry. The online edition, Kriegspiel, however, made Debord’s widow furious. “The seeming irony of a revolutionary Marxist pursuing copyright claims against a free video game” did not strike her, writes Ben McGrath in The New Yorker.
From Nazi Bunker To Artistic Haven, Der Spiegel
The redemptive passage of time has left its mark on the five-storey Nazi era concrete bunker in Berlin, now a haven for a private collection of contemporary art. In the 1950s, this Albert Speer-designed structure stored imported fruit from Cuba, writes R Jay Magill, Jr in Der Spiegel, while the 1990s made it the site of sado-masochistic rave parties. Now it houses esoteric contemporaneous art collected by advertising entrepreneur Christian Boros, who, quite candidly states, “I collect art that I don’t understand”.
Blog: Media Matters
Media Matters, the blog, observed that the three major American network TV channel —ABC, CBS and NBC — chose to ignore the story broken by The New York Times on hidden ties between media military analysts and Pentagon, but covered at length the Vanity Fair photographs of tween star Miley Cyrus. It also notes that CNN continues the trend of “uncritically airing” John McCain’s false attacks on the Democrats’ health plans, and that neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama has proposed a Government takeover of healthcare.
