How Arkansas’ West Memphis Three went from convicts to L.A.’s cause célèbre
by Stephen Lemons Originally published in LA Weekly, Sept. 5, 2003. Seated behind a pane of smudged Plexiglas, his white prison garb a suggestive contrast to the puke-colored walls of the dingy cubbyhole he’s in, prisoner #SK931, Damien Echols, is explaining how he became Jyoti Priya Karuna, Lover of the Light Compassion. “That’s the name my teacher Reverend Karuna Dharma gave me,” says Echols, his voice muffled through the wire-mesh strip along the bottom of the Plexiglas. “She’s the abbess of the IBMC, the International Buddhist Meditation Center, in Los Angeles. Your teacher gives you a new name once you’re a novice monk, as I am. The teacher’s name becomes the student’s last name.” It was Frankie Parker, another prisoner on Arkansas’ death row, who introduced Echols to Zen Buddhism. Parker, known as Jusan, was executed by lethal injection on August 8, 1996, despite appeals for clemency by the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela and others. After Parker’s death, Echols “took refuge” — was inducted as a Buddhist layperson — with the Zen priest who had been Parker’s teacher. In 2001, Echols took the first steps toward total ordination with Reverend Karuna. “I practice zazen meditation, yoga and tai chi,” says Echols, 28, his dark eyes staring out from behind wire rims that make the gaunt, raven-haired inmate look like a graduate student. “Any form of martial arts is really frowned upon here, so that’s out. When I first started, I was doing up to five or six hours of meditation a day. Now it’s more like an hour in the morning and an hour at night during weekdays.” Read more by way of The Wayback Machine. Artist Becca Midwood, painter of haunting outdoor portraits, is getting a reputation as the "female Basquiat."
by Stephen Lemons Originally published in Salon, May 22, 2001. Becca Midwood's little girls haunt the City of Angels like some ragged army of the undead. Cherubs in blue nighties clutch cloth dolls and nap in alleyways or on abandoned buildings. Sweet bloody colleens with gaping bullet holes in their temples stand politely on construction-site snipe walls. Fetching nymphets with gore dripping down their thighs play on busy bridges and overpasses. And redheaded maidens, carrying lit firecrackers in their dainty fingers, keep the homeless company on skid row. The elder sisters of these apparitions don't fare much better. Their creator, best known to art mavens and ordinary Angelenos by her childlike signature (becca), posts them in some of the rougher parts of East L.A. and downtown, as well as the seediest bits of Hollywood and the glitziest stretches of the Sunset Strip. A seamstress in pearls works her sewing machine in the infamous Belmont Tunnel graffiti pit, a spray-paint-covered area known to every gangbanger in the city. A Donna Reed mother figure guards a boarded-up doorway with a bowl full of greenery. A sultry lady of the evening sits amid the graffiti tags, her green dress hiked to reveal scarred shins. "Everyone knows who Becca is, don't they?" asks Mat Gleason, the L.A. publisher of the scabrous, influential bicoastal art mag Coagula. "I mean, if I was talking to somebody, and they said, 'Who's Becca?' I would think, 'This person doesn't know shit about art.'" Indeed, Becca is a bona fide art star -- not in the New York, art-whore sense of the term, in which painters ape the glitterati they so vainly wish to become, but in the up from the street, crafting a legend through her own originality, persistence and sweat, sense of the term. Read more by way of The Wayback Machine. |
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