Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA GFK, Jr.
AKA The Sly, Slick and the Wicked
AKA The Voodoo Child
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com
Armed and masked navy officers cut open more than 20 shark carcasses filled with slabs of cocaine after checking a container ship in the southern Mexican state of Yucatan.
X-ray machines and sniffer dogs helped uncover the drugs, said Eduardo Villa, a commander in the Mexican navy. “Those in charge of the shipment said it was a conserving agent but after checks we confirmed it was cocaine,” he said.
Drug gangs have been forced to develop increasingly elaborate ways to conceal narcotics bound for the United States – in sealed beer cans, religious statues and furniture.
President Felipe Calderon has sent 45,000 troops and federal police across Mexico to try to crush powerful smuggling cartels moving South American drugs north. But traffickers armed with a huge arsenal of grenades and automatic weapons are far from defeated, worrying Washington as violence spills over into US border states like Arizona.
Some 2,750 people have died in drug violence in Mexico this year, a pace similar to that of 2008, when 6,300 were killed.
Led by Mexico’s most wanted man, Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman, smugglers from the Pacific state of Sinaloa are fighting a turf war with rivals. Guzman seeks to control Mexican and Central American smuggling routes into the United States.
Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA GFK, Jr.
AKA The Sly, Slick and the Wicked
AKA The Voodoo Child
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com
The diamond necklace and earrings were modelled by the 22-year-old during the Elle shoot at Big Sky Studios in Islington, north London.
The jewellery, which was lent to the magazine by fashion house Dior for the day on June 6, was reported missing two days later.
Lohan is among a number of people present at the studio who could face questioning, the Sun reported.
A Yard spokesman said: “We had an allegation of theft made to us on June 8 and that is being investigated. There have been no arrests yet. We want to speak to a number of people in connection with the inquiry.
“It is alleged it is a necklace and earrings with diamonds with an estimated value of £250,000.”
A source added: “Jewellery is often lent out for big celebrities to wear on fashion shoots. Police are working out who had them when they went missing. People at Dior are very upset. It’s an embarrassment to the mag.”
“On my way back home
Now I’m in the zone
My Simcards a bomb
They blowing up my phone
Kicks Hong Kong
Bape in a garment
The face of hip-hop
My DC audience
And you n$ggas will acknowledge this
Born again social life thanks climate My climate is way higher then Lindsay Lohan nostrils on powder
Sorry Mark I don’t want offend your sisters good friend
But when my pen get in
It pretends it’s a soul in a entity
And it interferes and gets the best of me
So I’m one with that
I’m stuck with that
Y’all little ass n$ggas can’t fuck with that”
Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA GFK, Jr.
AKA The Sly, Slick and the Wicked
AKA The Voodoo Child
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com
Authorities say $1 million worth of aquarium rocks are missing after an underwater heist in the Florida Keys.
Miami boat captain Neal Novak told investigators that sometime in the past 18 months someone stole about 300,000 pounds of decorative live rock he had planned to harvest at his aqua farm in the waters three miles of Islamorada.
The rock is used in salt-water aquariums and reef tanks. Novak says it took him more than two years to place the rock on the ocean floor, where it became home to coral and plant life.
The theft was discovered May 13.
The Monroe County sheriff and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission are investigating. The theft is considered grand larceny of farm animal aquaculture species, a third-degree felony.
Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA GFK, Jr.
AKA The Sly, Slick and the Wicked
AKA The Voodoo Child
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com
Every so often, art breaks out of its confines to become an event. People who would never normally go to a gallery do so; they feel part of it when they would otherwise feel excluded. The last time this happened was when Olafur Eliasson put a giant sun and a mirrored ceiling in Tate Modern and teenagers rolled around on the ground making shapes they could see reflected in the roof.
And it’s happening now at Banksy versus Bristol Museum, the exhibition the elusive graffiti artist suddenly unveiled last week, in which he has his “remixed” the museum’s own collection by putting more than 100 of his own artworks among it – by far the largest Banksy show to date, of work mostly never shown in the UK before.
On Saturday, the first day the show was open to the public, the queue snaked down the street and the waiting time was more than an hour. In it were children, grannies, trendy types. Everyone was taking pictures with their mobile phones (Banksy doesn’t believe in copyright). The museum’s guards were proudly pointing out the new additions to their displays. People were inspecting the fossils to find the teeny-weeny woman pushing a pram hidden among them; they were on their hands and knees to look at the mouse with a back-pack who had clambered into a natural history case.
The visitors’ main focus was a large room lined with Banksy images. Here one can assess the work en masse. Lots of the art here is silly, lots of it obvious. The massive picture of a House of Commons populated by apes, for instance, is crass, schoolboy stuff.
Banksy Versus Bristol Museum
But the work here is also humorous and inventive. There’s a devastating picture of starving African children, one of whom has a T-shirt saying: “I hate Mondays”. There’s a hilarious image of two shoddily drawn stick men, prettily mounted, with one of them asking, “Does anyone actually take this art seriously?” The other replies, “Never underestimate the power of a big gold frame.”
Banksy is the master of the surprising juxtaposition. In another room, full of his animated sculptures, there’s what looks like a living, breathing cheetah, but when you see it from the back, you notice, with a chill, that it’s been made into a fur coat.
In the best piece of the exhibition, in among the stuffed animals, there is a lamb that has been muzzled. What does it mean? A lamb conjures innocence, the Lamb of God. Is this a piece about censorship, the distortion of the spiritual, the end of innocence? It’s very moving, reminiscent of Damien Hirst’s toying with religious iconography but, pleasingly, so much simpler. When Banksy has the nerve not to be didactic and leave his pieces open to interpretation, he becomes sophisticated.
It is to be hoped that the artist will move further in this direction. But in the meantime, Banksy Versus Bristol Museum succeeds triumphantly in its aim: it’s a museum show that is as cheeky and renegade – and communicates as directly with its viewers – as a piece of illegal graffiti.
I’ve attended some odd parties over the years – there was the one for Stannah Stairlifts, the Innocent Smoothies bash where I got driven around a Shepherd’s Bush car park in a giant banana, and the Walker’s Crisps event where everyone on the electoral roll named either Cheese or Onion was invited. But I’ve rarely been to one where neither the guests nor the hosts knew what they were doing there. “What is this all about?” I asked Ivan Massow on Monday night, at the launch of his new film spoof, Banksy’s Coming for Dinner. “No idea,” he shrugged wearily.
What is clear is that Banksy – the pseudo-anonymous graffiti artist – still provokes the same snorts of delight he drew at university, when the boys would huddle around his prints and marvel at the irreverence of it all. As party talk turned to the artist’s exhibition at the Bristol City Art Gallery, one guest described him as “a true genius”, another as “one of our greatest living artists”.
But it’s all old hat. Banksy’s poke-fun-at-museums impudence was done 100 years ago by Marcel Duchamp. His stencil technique (always good for easy effects, as every child knows) was perfected in 1968 by Ernest Pignon-Ernest and Blek le Rat, and his political opinions are plonkingly conventional. A House of Commons populated by apes? Sharp stuff.
To his credit, Banksy had excelled at keeping his origins a secret. The exposé last year that suggested he wasn’t the son of a painter and decorator, but educated at the £9,240-a-year Bristol Cathedral School, could have damaged the brand. As it was, being outed as an old friend of Samantha Cameron’s must have undone a decade of careful pixellation.
Michael Porfirio Mason
AKA The Peoples Champ
AKA GFK, Jr.
AKA The Sly, Slick and the Wicked
AKA The Voodoo Child
The Guide to Getting More out of Life
http://www.thegmanifesto.com
