Art as a target for vandals: The cost of freedom

The News Review:

- Art as a target for vandals: The cost of freedom
- From Marcus Mosiah Garvey to the ghettos of Kingston town…Tony…
- NWAnews.com :: Northwest Arkansas’ News Source

Art as a target for vandals: The cost of freedom
International Herald Tribune – Oct 16, 2007
Then from the obscure and formerly bucolic university town of Lund in southern Sweden came news that a group of hooded vandals with crowbars and axes stormed into an art gallery and to the accompaniment of death-metal music destroyed several sexually explicit photographs by Andres Serrano. While the Parisian hooligans were undone partly because they were caught on the museum's security cameras the Swedish gang went them one better. They proudly advertised their crime on YouTube. So the other day I stopped into the Reina Sofía here to check on Picasso's “Guernica. ” The threat of violence is nothing new in Spain where Muslim terrorists blew up commuter trains a few years ago killing many and where the threat of killings by Basque extremists (there was a bomb attack in Bilbao last week a truce with the government having broken down in June) has again become part of the daily background noise of life.

From Marcus Mosiah Garvey to the ghettos of Kingston town…Tony…
New Statesman – Oct 16, 2007
She also had his son Menalik. Ethiopian history states that Rasta far I Makonnen is the 225th succession of this manifestation. After Rogers’ death Howell along with two other founders Archibald Dunkley and Joseph Nathaniel Hibbert set up the now famous Pinnacle camp. This was the commune or livity which would form the basis for later Rasta camps. The followers were given plots of land and encouraged to be self sufficient. Among them were East Indian servants who introduced Howell who was also a herbalist and self proclaimed bush doctor to the Hindu religion- in particular vegetarianism meditation and marijuana. The Indians had brought the ganjee as they called it with them from India… Howell and his community were constantly attacked by the police and over zealous Christian landowners offended by statements he made concerning the Queen and the Church. He openly condemned them as enemies of the black race for their role in the slave trade. Even after he had been committed to a metal asylum (the punishment for the early Black Nationalist) his community grew and prospered. When it was finally destroyed in 1954 by a conglomerate of police Christian landowners and British solders the numbers living on Pinnacle hill had risen to over 5000. It was after this dispersal that Kingston ghettoes and shanty towns became home to the faith. This for me is the embodiment of the true rastaman. These men were driven by a sense of trying to ‘right the wrong’ they believed their people had been victims of.

NWAnews.com :: Northwest Arkansas’ News Source
Arkansas Democrat Gazette – Oct 16, 2007
r maybe it’s more like a less-talented writer trying to write like Earle throwing in the occasional “boys” to fill out the meter. It sounds like Earle only dumber — at least in an English literature sense. n the other hand while the music is nicely stripped down (he fired his backing band the Dukes for this one electing to go mostly with a chorded acoustic guitar bass Earle’s plaintive vocals and machine-made drum loops ) and the production (by the man himself ) lean and taut for the most part it’s the songs not the way they are delivered that fail. “Fail” is a pretty harsh term when talking about a record I like (though not as much as The Revolution Starts Now or Transcendental Blues or I Feel Alright ) but I think it’s accurate. The populist choice for America’s best songwriter has put out an album full of relatively weak songs songs that under examination look like filler tracks. Earle probably realizes this better than anyone because he’s Steve Earle and presumably his standards are higher than those of most of us. He’s an artist after all; he hears and sees things we don’t and sometimes has access to a deeper level of empathy to which most of us are incapable.