the book's myspace page is back!
posted Thursday, August 21 2008
here's the write up from cleveland's scene magazine......
THE CLEVELAND SCENE"PLEASE GOD, SAVE US" MYSPACEOh My
Local authors booted from MySpace
Maybe it was the dirty-looking angels perpetrating various offenses against defenseless humans, including pissing on them. Or maybe it was the frightening red elephants, meant to represent a political party that had sold its soul. Then again, it could have been the "crosstikas," blasphemy depicted in six simple pen strokes.
Most likely it was all of the above plus the accompanying text, which further confronted the innumerable distortions and hypocrisies of the conservative movement.
Whatever the case, MySpace last week abruptly booted the page for Please God Save Us, the new book by Cleveland artist Derek Hess and writer Kent Smith. The book is based on a 2006 Hess exhibit called Please God Save Us From Your Followers, and in his introduction Smith wrote: "Neither the art nor the words claim to be fair and balanced; just factual and correct." The many essays touch on the false pretenses for launching the Iraq war, Halliburton's profiteering, the farcical "debate" over evolution and many other elements of the mutually beneficial 30-year alliance between social and fiscal conservatives.
Smith, who has contacts at MySpace's corporate offices, says that on Friday he was led to believe that the page had been frozen and would be restored. "Then Saturday morning, it was gone," he explains in an e-mail to Scene. "If Derek and I did something wrong, we were not provided with an understandable explanation of what we did to jeopardize our page, and we were certainly not warned to stop doing something before the book's profile was deleted."
Smith adds, "Every time we posted something favorable about Barack Obama, we got 'spam' complaints levied against us."
Another possibility - the skewering of Fox News. In the book, Smith explains how Fox News grew out of the GOP attack machine, and a Hess illustration - titled "Good Dog … or Jihad on the American Aljazeera" - shows the artist's pooch Jose throttling a red fox that has the FOX logo on its belly. (The caption notes drily, "Dogs can sense evil.")
MySpace is owned by Fox Interactive Media. A MySpace spokesperson tells Scene that the page was flagged for "spam" complaints stemming from friend requests and will be restored.
But Smith doesn't understand why no one at MySpace will tell him when. "Interestingly, Chapter 10 is about rock and roll and censorship," writes Smith, "and Derek and I clearly argue the point that censorship does not work in capitalistic nations that have a free press." - Frank Lewis
