Truman Capote, who knew a thing or two about the subject, once said of Marilyn Monroe that those who choose to become blonde are blonder than those who are simply born that way. Watch this video of ex-Hebridean and new American Craig Ferguson and ask if a similar principle does not apply to those who choose to become Americans:
LOVE the comment about families; I’ve been saying the same damn thing myself for decades!
Sorry, I’ve been writing gossip blogging headlines and am stuck in cheap pun mode. Still, LOOK at this thing:
Banksy has left Louisiana and is headed north, stenciling and skewering as he goes. Here he strings up the KKK outside Birmingham, Alabama.
Supertouch has the story:
British street artist BANKSY has been on a southern road trip of late, starting in a pre-Gustav New Orleans before moving on to ALABAMA where he paid homage to the great white powers-that-be with his stenciled image of a hung KKK member on an abandoned gas station. Taking matters into their own hands yesterday, irate locals broke out their own spray cans to let the world know what they think of a snotty English street artist pointin’ fingers at their good ole boys. Too bad they didn’t realize that simply cutting out the stencil & selling it on eBay would have been the sweetest revenge.
But like I said on the comments over there, by doing this the thin-skinned knuckle-walkers of Birmingham have given Banksy two news cycles instead of just one, illustrated his point with their own repressive actions, and turned a static work of art into a piece of social-engineered, community-based performance art, with themselves playing the trained monkeys.
Nice work, Birmingham!
And here’s what a local has to say about it. Turns out the owner of the gas station is a black guy who really liked the work:
I went down to Birmingham from Nashville Monday night to check this out…it’s not everyday something like this is happens so close. Got to the site around 11:30pm (not a good idea in that neighborhood that late!) only to discover that the piece had just been painted over. The paint was still drying…I was gutted.
So…we went back Tuesday morning to get a better look. We ended up sticking around for pretty much the entire afternoon. There was a steady flow of the people in the neighborhood stopping by to check it out as well as those tipped off by sites like this. It was really amazing to see the range of responses that this piece evoked. Some people saw it as death to racism…other just saw it as hate. As one local said…”Hate breeds hate”…it didn’t matter to him who was hanging from the noose…all he saw was hate. Overall…it really sparked some great conversations between people who probably never would have stopped to talk if it weren’t for this piece. Love it or hate it…I think the piece did it’s job.
While we were there…we had started talking to and older African-American man who ended up being the property owner. He had seen the image the day before and had come back to take video of the place – only to find it painted over. He understood the painting and appreciated the quality of work…but he had no idea what he was dealing with…so I got to fill him in and explain why so many people were coming by to take pictures.
Long story short…in an effort to protect this image from further damage or from disappearing altogether…I told him he might want to take the piece down himself. Not sure if I’ll get some flack for that on this site…but I thought it was the right thing to do. So…my friend and I ended hanging out with this amazing gentleman for the day and helped him remove the work. He did let us each keep one of the blank grey panels…so I guess I can say I own an original Banksy! HA!
Anyways…I told him I told him I’d help out and try to get an idea of what something like this could fetch if being sold. Any feedback would be great! I’d also be curious to know if anyone thinks there is any restoration that can be done. I’m not thinking there is…but I thought I’d ask.
and pictures of the sad de-Banksyfication of the site.
This is re-posted from the Multiply site. I know that this is a tragedy not only on ecological, but on sociological grounds as well; for every dollar a casino brings into a community it costs $1.60 in social services.
By Tina Alejandro, WBCP founding member
I still remember creeping up to a Black Crowned Night Heron chick as it was sitting as still as a telephone pole hoping I won’t notice it. It was alone and defenseless and reachable. It had nothing to fear from Robert and I and we were just euphoric at seeing a chick up close. In a comic sort of way, we humans and the chick were all motionless.
We were amidst an unimaginable number of nests in the center of the city and the birds were relatively undisturbed. Sticks of dry grass towered over us making it impossible to see just how many of them there were. The noises too were not familiar and at one point, I had visions of each one of us being snatched one by one and vanishing into the vast grass maze.
Untouched, unnoticed except by the wildlife, this was just a few meters across from a condo constructed across Manila bay. Such wonders we discovered amidst mundane looking roads and buildings.
These days you can see any one of these species in the area: Purple Heron, Little Egret,
Little Heron, Rufous Night-Heron, Black-crowned Night-Heron, Yellow Bittern, Philippine Duck, Barred Rail, Common Sandpiper, Tringa, Spotted Dove, Zebra Dove, Lesser Coucal, Collared Kingfisher, Common Kingfisher, Barn Swallow, Pacific Swallow, Yellow-vented Bulbul, Clamorous Reed-Warbler, Bright-capped Cisticola, Zitting Cisticola, Pied fantail, Long-tailed Shrike, Asian Glossy Starling, Chestnut Munia, Scaly-breasted Munia,and Terns.
We hear it is the last days of the mudflats. The government is turning the whole area into a casino complex… Pagcor city. My being sad is an understatement. Not just as an environmentalist or as a relatively decent person am I sad but also as a Filipino. These birds are what make us different from other nations. Casinos? Is this what we want to make our mark in the world as? We cannot compete with Las Vegas or Carlo but we can certainly compete in the area of biodiversity.
When I was in England for a month, I was hosted by a simple (yet well-heeled) retired couple. Knowing I was a naturalist, they hied me off a few streets away to a village lookout. It was a little wooden hut facing a pond but the one side was a one way mirror. You could see the ducks, geese, sparrows and such enjoying the tucked away corner of the bush garden. It was such a refreshing sight and unspeakably soul-enriching.
The insides of the hut contained illustrations coupled with information on the kinds of animals you could unobstrusively observe from its confines. The place was unattended, no guards to collect maintenance fees or locked gates to keep out unwanteds. It was a free for all sanctuary built by a private citizen to be shared to the community.
How glorious would it be if we had places like this in the city? It would do wonders for our world weary urban dwellers and it would teach so much more than mesmerizing pull of a roulette. If I were an influential person in government, I would ask what kind of a people do we ultimately want to be? The kind who places money above everything else? This is a self-destructive logic.
Though it may be a lost cause, I still hope for Filipinos to see the abundance that surrounds them, the riches they have which they do not value, one of the most (if not the most) diverse places per square inch in the world. I’m convinced we have the cure to the incurable right in our own backyard.
The last days of the mudflats are only a microcosm of the what’s happening all over the country, unless more of us open our eyes to protect what the good Lord has freely given us. Fingers crossed, earnest prayers said, may this not be paradise lost.
Another Olympic scandal tops the headlines this morning as it is revealed that, in a substitution reminiscent of the opening ceremony’s switched songstresses and faux fireworks, London Mayor Boris Johnson did not, in fact, attend the closing ceremony at all, but instead was replaced by a sophisticated computer-generated animation.
This shocking swap was insisted upon by the Olympic organizers, who had substantial reservations about Mr. Johnson‘s ability to accept and wave the flag without falling down, offending several of the participating nations, or fatally wounding a spectator in a misguided, yet historically correct, attempt to re-create one of the bloodier Olympic events of the Classical Age. After all, the Mayor’s track record is a very public one indeed.
The artificial Boris was, in fact, a compromise reached between the organizers and the British delegation. Originally, the Olympic ceremony management had planned to simply replace Mr. Johnson with a more attractive, dramatically-trained, lip-synching version of the same type.
It is understood that many in the Mayor’s own office have approached the Olympic organizers for permission to continue to use the replicant back home.
raincoaster 