Jamaica issues Bob Marley coins
Jamaica issues Bob Marley coins
The coin's face value is 50 Jamaican dollars
The Bank Of Jamaica has issued 1,000 gold and silver coins to celebrate late reggae star Bob Marley.
The commemorative coins bearing the star's dreadlocked likeness are being sold for $100 (£55) each.
Made by the British Royal Mint, they were intended to mark the 60th anniversary of Marley's birth in 2005 - but have only been issued now.
"We've received quite a bit of interest already," said bank spokeswoman Jacqueline Morgan.
There was no explanation given for the delay in issuing the coins.
It is the second time the Bank of Jamaica has issued coins bearing Marley's likeness in his homeland.
"The coins to commemorate his 50th birthday have totally sold out," Morgan said.
Marley, who died of cancer in 1981, was one of the most iconic figures in music, and arguably one of the most famous Jamaican in history.
He shot to fame in the 1970s with hits such as No Woman No Cry and I Shot The Sheriff.
In February it was announced that his home in Jamaica was to be declared a national monument, 25 years after his death
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Visitors to the island in recent seasons may have noticed that a new artist is making his mark as well: Chuggy, a k a Chuck Proper. That mark usually involves a long strip of angry-looking scalded rubber, which can be seen on many of the island’s twisting roads.
For years, those marks and similar ones have left some locals scratching their heads and visitors anxiously clenching the wheel. It turns out that they are a kind of rural car- and truck-made graffiti — a byproduct of a longtime island ritual that gives this central Maine town character and provides some rugged contrast to the pastoral life here.
And while the work of Chuggy and the native tribe of so-called burners may never hang in one of the dozens of galleries in and near Stonington, their handiwork is being memorialized in “Tire Tracks,” a 40-minute documentary.
The film, which will have its premiere here at the end of the month, was commissioned by Opera House Arts, the nonprofit organization that operates the Stonington Opera House. A landmark originally constructed to satisfy the opera needs of the Italian stone cutters who arrived in the 1890’s, the Opera House has since been refurbished and transformed into a cultural center that provides year-round programming.
John Steed, a house manager at the opera and a first-time filmmaker, was the director. The Maine Community Foundation’s Expansion Arts Fund came up with a $5,000 grant to pay for the project.
In the movie young people and some adults (Chuggy is 50), in tricked-out pickups and well-muscled cars with tweaked transmissions, lay rubber by standing on the brake and flooring the accelerator. Before you know it, the back tires are spinning, melting themselves into the pavement.
The drivers use a combination of technique and raw horsepower to lay down as much rubber as they can, often fishtailing in the process and creating undulating streaks of inky black on the road.
The act of making a mark, in the movie, looks more comic than menacing. Some kid, egged on by his peers, will light up his wheels and go tearing down the road, sometimes blowing up the tire or dropping a drivetrain in the process, which leads to huge gales of laughter among the onlookers.
It is a spectacle, sometimes generating enough smoke to obscure the vehicle and accompanied by enough noise that it can make a Nascar race sound like a chamber concert. It takes money to burn, according to Melvin Eaton, who owns Marvelous Motors in Deer Isle and says in the film that he once sold 16 pairs of tires to one burner in two months.
The burners themselves do not spend a great deal of time in the movie discussing, say, the artistic merits of the so-called J-stroke, the curved mark that occurs when drivers shift from reverse to drive. But there are a few who are willing to lay a bit of meta-analysis on the practice of burning.
“It’s about asserting your masculinity and marking your territory,” Lily Lyons, a young island resident who has grown up watching the ritual, says in the film.
Ron Watson, owner of gWatson Gallery on Main Street in Stonington, says the burners are conscious of their own handiwork: “The first time I saw it, I thought there had been a bad accident. I don’t think that there are aesthetic reasons behind it, but they admire what they have done, like graffiti artists.”
Mr. Steed agreed. “Much like early graffiti, it says, ‘This is mine,’ ” he said. “The significance of the mark can sometimes be measured by the fact that no one else burns in that spot out of respect. Like a good tag, it will stay up for a while.”
There are also class dimensions to burning; one man’s folk art is another’s rend in the social fabric.
Those who come here for the peace and quiet of a Maine seaside town are sometimes jolted back to reality when a young lobsterman celebrates a day of good fortune on the water by spinning a doughnut or two on the pier, filling the air with smoke and racket.
“One of the reasons that the film seemed worth doing is that it asks whose town it is and how it is being used,” said Mr. Steed, sitting in a theater chair at the Opera House before screening a rough cut of the documentary. “There are not a lot of doctors doing it.”
In a town where thousands of moneyed interlopers come to take in the bustle of the Stonington harbor, the burners serve as a reminder that part of what sets the place apart is that it is a real harbor town, with more than 200 boats heading out in search of lobster every day.
“This is a working town,” Richard Avery, the town manager, says in the documentary. “Come and enjoy it and participate in it, but don’t turn it into a town where dirt and grit and noise and smell are banned.”
The village, which was dry until last year, is a long way from other diversions, so young people tend to make their own fun.
“These are working guys, and they are very proud of their trucks,” said Linda Nelson, executive director of the Opera House and one of four people who restored and revived it. “It’s like one of the guys says in the film, if you have a woman you love, you dress her up and take her out and, you know, show her off.”
Last week a 300-foot stretch of Route 15A, a few miles northwest of town, looked as if de Kooning had spent time there, only working with a truck instead of a paintbrush. One group of marks set up a wave that others embellished, and the effect, especially at night as the marks loom up out of the darkness, can be striking, with ribbons of black unwinding in a weave of black-on-black patterns.
Stonington’s twin identities — as an idyllic retreat for artists and vacationers, and as a hardscrabble coastal town — have had a working truce for decades. Usually the two inhabit separate worlds, but every once in a while they come together in the same frame, making something new. You can see this in a well-known painting of Stonington by Jon Imber.
The Opera House is the formal centerpiece of the canvas, dominating the huge hill that leads out of town. But there, plain as day on the road, is a set of wavy tire marks.
