Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • 14

14 bucuuii unicago inuuiitf, ivKjiHJdy, rtJLMuaiy uux FROM PAGE ONE Mideast: Few signs of success for Powell on 1st visit. Continued from Page 1 imr -O-. -if m. AP photo by Diane Bondareff The Brooklyn Museum of Art has felt the mayor's wrath before. In 1999, an exhibit of young British artists' work was assailed.

Giuliani's decency war revives an old tactic i t. i i i A 1 i 1 'l Arafat are dedicated to finding the answer for." There were few signs of immediate success. While the Israeli army announced Sunday night that it was ending a blockade that in effect had cut the Gaza Strip in half, violence continued during Powell's visit. Just outside Ramallah, a Jewish settler was seriously wounded in a drive-by shooting. Later, another settler was injured by gunfire near the settlement of Ofra.

After the meetings, neither side expressed any change in its entrenched position. Sharon and Arafat continued to trade blame for the violence that has killed more than 400 people. Sharon said he laid out several steps he is ready to take to help alleviate the economic hardships plaguing the Palestinians, but he said Arafat must first stop all violence against Israelis. He told Powell he is ready to resume negotiations with the Palestinians but "never under the pressure of terrorism." Sharon denied holding talks with the Palestinians currently but said he was keeping open "channels of communication" so Arafat knows what the Israelis expect. Arafat said the Palestinians expect "quick protection" against Israeli military force, normally part of his demand for an international intervention force.

And he demanded that any future negotiations must take into account progress made under caretaker Prime Minister Ehud Barak, despite U.S. and Israeli insistence that all previous proposals are void. "No government can erase the work of previous governors," Arafat said. The meetings were part of Powell's four-day, six-nation Mideast tour, during which he hopes to "reenergize" the multinational coalition behind the economic sanctions on Iraq. After leaving Ramallah, he flew to Jordan to meet with King Abdullah II and then to Kuwait for celebrations marking the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

During Powell's visit in Israel and the West Bank, he also met with Barak and Israeli President Moshe Katsav, received a security briefing from Israeli army Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz and visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, Powell said he was "quite dis Museums, artists wait to see what standards are set. A Continued from Page 1 could be adopted by other cities or states seeking to keep controver-( sial art out of taxpayer-supported institutions. "I think it's absolutely outra-f geous and dangerous to even contemplate appointing such a com-Ymittee," said Elizabeth Smith, chief curator at Chicago's Museum Contemporary Art, echoing a V' common sentiment among mu-tseum officials across the country "It runs counter to freedom of ex-i pression and differences of opinion." i' In the two weeks since the photo il "Yo Mama's Last Supper" was un-oiveiled as part of a large exhibit of photographs by contemporary artists, the New York art -t world has been roiled by Giuliani's denunciation of the photo and his proposal to set up a task force "that rtcanset decency standards for those -) institutions that are using your money, the taxpayers' money." jcI-The photograph, a five-panel tvqrk in which photographer Renee QMCportrays herself as a nude Je-sus at the Last Supper, was the a showdown last week be-" tween Cox and William Donohiie, U-iW president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, which joined Giuliani in condemning the photo. don't care if Christ is depicted -ras a black man and black woman," i Done-hue told Cox during a debate. i'Tlrere would be no problem if you had kept your clothes on." While the controversy swirls, the if mayor has released few details about the board, other than to say its members would "presumably be decent people." But the practice of scrutinizing art, drama and books to ensure -1 they contain nothing morally or po-; rlitically offensive stretches back centuries.

Shakespeare's plays had to pass muster with the Lord Chamberlain before they could be per John Dixon looks at Angel," a sculpture by artist Ron Mueck at the "Sensation" exhibit in 1999. New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was outraged at some of the artwork and wanted the show canceled. gerous Abrams' said. "When you pick out the notion of decency and appoint a panel to enforce it, you are doing just what the court said may not be done." Even if such a panel were set up, art experts point out that arriving at a definition of decency is harder than defining beauty. "There will never be agreement about what is offensive," said Carol Becker, vice president for academic affairs at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which made it through two controversies in the late 1980s over an American flag that was placed on the floor so people could step on it and a painting of the late Mayor Harold Washington wearing women's underwear.

"Public art institutions have the job of bringing the range of art-making to the table," she said. Not just what is safe, but what provokes and raises the difficult questions, so we don't all die of boredom." Tribune art critic Alan Artner contributed to this report. people have different concepts of decency," NEA spokeswoman Katherine Wood said. "The statute doesn't spell out what's meant by decency. So the way we're implementing the statute is through the panel review process.

And the court approved the way we're implementing the statute." Applications approved by the panels go to the National Council on the Arts and eventually the NEA chairman for final approval. The endowment funds about 1,600 grants a year, but the projects are judged on "artistic merit" and "artistic excellence," Wood said. A Giuliani spokeswoman said he mayor has not decided on the form his decency task force will take, but 1st Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams finds little maneuvering room. "The Finley case makes pretty clear that the one thing a community or state or federal government may not do is to use decency issues in a way designed to suppress 'dan Office, which purged movies of sexual references from 1934 to 1968 by mandating, for instance, that even married couples had to sleep in separate beds. The Hays censors were not strict enough for Chicago, which had its own movie censorship board for decades.

The U.S. Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 1968, but it lingered into the 1970s in an increasingly toothless form. The current movie ratings system replaced the Hays Office, and, after the Supreme Court struck down most obscenity laws in the 1960s, decency panels lost favor. Giuliani has indicated that the current, more conservative high court may support such a panel. His optimism is based on a 1998 court ruling upholding a federal decency statute that resulted from the controversy over the 1989 Cincinnati exhibit of Robert Mappleth-orpe's homoerotic photos.

The bitter debate about that exhibit, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, became the most celebrated battle in the conflict between artists and religious conservatives over the use of taxpayer dollars to support inflammatory art. After the Mapplethorpe imbroglio, Congress imposed a decency filter on the NEA in 1990. The arts agency was required to take "into consideration general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American Evanston native Karen Finley, a performance artist who charged that her grant request had been rejected for political instead of artistic reasons, was one of four artists who sued the NEA in a case that, as it wound its way through the courts, became a constitutional challenge to the decency statute. In 1998, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that the statute did not violate the 1st Amendment. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote that "avant-garde artists such as IFinleyJ remain entirely free to epater les bourgeois shock the middle class; they are merely deprived of the additional satisfaction of having the bourgeois taxed to pay for it." That was the sound bite from the ruling, widely seen as a defeat for artistic expression.

But a closer reading of the opinion shows just the opposite, according to James Well, yeah, in a sense," Garrison said. "But was he chosen for that reason? No. "He's an apt candidate for inclusion because he is, number one, at large; and, number two, he's a child pornographer with a history of making and trading it. "He could easily set up shop in, say, Denmark, teaching piano to young children there." The FBI hopes that putting Rosser in such company will serve as a deterrent, Garrison said. "We hope others might see Rosser's face all over the newspaper and say, 'I'm not going to do In Bloomington, reaction to seeing Rosser's picture all over the paper ranges from befuddlement to disbelief.

"We were shocked, all of Eric's friends here," said Jim Krause, a musician and one of Rosser's closest friends. "It's like finding out a close friend of yours is a neo-Nazi." At Bear's Place, where Rosser played regularly to a packed house, Sutton said: "I know the man just imagine trying to wrap your mind around that. This is a guy who's been in my home listening to Beeth-, oven's Sixth Symphony with me." To those who thought they knew Rosser, the question now isn't where he is but who he is. Many feel stunned and betrayed. Vicki Helber, a singer who occasionally performed with Rosser at local clubs, has thrown away all his CDs.

"We're all totally disillusioned and want to leave it all behind," she said. That might be hard to do until Rosser is found. He has been on the run for almost a year. Thai police raided his apartment in March, arresting him on charges of child molestation and possession of photo- Fitzgerald, a 1st Amendment attorney in Washington. "The 1998 ruling is famously misunderstood," he said.

"What you had before the court was an abstract proposition. The court said it was so unlikely that it would be applied that they weren't going to strike it down. But seven of the nine justices said that if in fact decency wa used by the NEA to punish what the court called 'dangerous then that would be clearly unconstitutional." As put into practice, the decency statute has been treated as "merely advisory," Fitzgerald said. The arts endowment, which has a budget of $105 million this year, sends the 2,500 applications it receives annually to advisory panels made up of art experts and ordinary citizens drawn from a cross-section of American life. To the extent that the endowment has decency advisers, these non-experts serve that function.

"In a pluralistic society, different graphs and videos of girls who appeared to be under 15 years old. After his father, Richard F. Rosser a retired Air Force colonel and a former president of DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind. posted bail of about $26,000, the younger Rosser failed to appear for a hearing. Richard Rosser, who lives in Racine, refused to comment.

Rosser's mother, Donna E. Rosser, a watercolor artist who lives in Delaware, Ohio, also declined to be interviewed. A native of Syracuse, N.Y., Rosser spent his childhood as a military brat and earned a bache Rosser lor's degree in music from Oberlin College in 1974. He received his master's degree from Indiana University in 1979. In Bloomington Rosser made a name for himself playing at local clubs.

"He was a little dweeby," Sutton said, "but he was great with the audience. He knew every TV theme song there was. They couldn't stump him." In 1979 Mellencamp discovered Rosser playing local clubs and enlisted him to join the band. In 1980 Rosser played keyboards on Mel-lencamp's album "Nothin Matters and What if it Did" and received credit on the liner notes under the name "Doc" Rosser. But Rosser wasn't enamored of Mellencamp, his friends say Perhaps the feeling was mutual; the 'Of i'l-'Sirm iiiiinr turbed" by Mofaz's briefing.

"The level of violence has been escalating, and it has many different pieces to it," Powell said. "Whether it's sniper fire, mortar fire, it is a very dangerous situation. And I think we all have to work hard every side, both sides to bring the violence under control, to get out of this terrible spiral of increasing violence where we have violence, counterviolence, provocation, counterprovocation. Powell also said Sunday that he was surprised at the level of animosity he found in the region in response to the air strikes against Iraq by American and British war-planes earlier this month. He reiterated the Bush administration's contention that the strikes were "routine" but conceded they were "a little more aggressive" than previous attacks.

"We probably could have done more coordinating, but I offer no apologies for it," Powell said. In Jordan, Powell heard only tepid support for sanctions on Iraq. Aides said Abdullah urged the U.S. to treat Iraq with "fairness" and that any United Nations actions against Iraq be "clear, just and take into consideration what Iraq has complied with as well as the difficult conditions" facing the Iraqi people. On the streets of Ramallah, Palestinians were far less polite.

Several thousand anti-American and anti-Israel demonstrators marched through downtown and converged on the police headquarters where Powell was meeting with Arafat. Among the crowd's grievances was the Bush administration's vow not to focus as narrowly on the Israeli-Palestinian question as the Clinton administration, and to build a more regional policy based on the need to contain Iraq. "It is an absolute illusion for anyone to think they can ignore the Palestinian issue," activist Mustafa Barghouti said. "The region's stability starts here and ends here, and the region will make Powell understand that sooner or later." The anti-American ire was not limited to the protests. It could be heard across town, near the ruins of a Palestinian police station bombed by Israel after the lynching of two Israeli reservists.

There, passersby said they were outraged at U.S. policy toward the Palestinians and Iraqis. "We have nothing against Colin Powell as a person. I hope he sees the suffering of the Palestinian people," said Raymond Joseph Reziq, 58, an antiques seller. "But this reaching out to Palestinians while they bomb the Iraqis, it's like saying we support you but we want to kill your brother." formed.

More recently, the movie industry had its own self-censoring decency panel in the form of the Hays Fugitive: musician now a 'Most Continued khom Page 1 Rosser, who moved to Thailand in the 1990s, seems an unlikely addi-! tion to a list anchoreclby the likes of Olympic bombing suspect Eric Robert Rudolph and Osama bin La-' den, who is wanted in the bombings of U.S. embassies that killed more than 300 people. "You'd think you'd be able to rec- ognize evil when you see it But evil is relatively banal sometimes, I guess," said Abbie Sutton, a wait-, ress at Bear's Place on the Indiana University campus, a music club where Rosser played everything from rock to "Rhapsody in Blue." Rosser's status as a fugitive and the international nature of the case he exchanged pornography with a man in Bloomington, according to the indictment captured the FBI's attention, landing him on the: most wanted list. But there were other considerations too. Rosser gives the nation a symbol for alleged crimes garnering more attention in an age of Internet sex and Increasing public awareness of child sexual abuse.

Though the 49-year-old musician has no prior re- cord and is no more or less dangerous than any other pedophile, he reflects a growing problem that first gained widespread attention in 1991 with introduction of the Na- tional Child Protection Act, said Doug Garrison, FBI spokesman in Indianapolis. "Is he a symbol of the U.S. govern ment effort to attack this problem? land, married a young Thai woman and stayed. "He seemed to have the world by the tail." White said. "He was teaching at a conservatory, he had a beautiful wife, he lived in an exotic part of town." But as a piano teacher in Bangkok, Rosser came into contact with children who allegedly became his victims, authorities say.

Rosser also is accused of crimes involving American children, including three girls in Bloomington who were used "to produce visual depictions of them engaging in sexually explicit conduct either by themselves or, in the case of one, with Eric Rosser." Rosser's alleged victims in Bloomington ranged in age from 9 to 11, Garrison said. Between August 1995 and August 1997, Rosser a regular visitor to Bloomington produced, transported, shipped or received pornographic photographs of the girls, according to the indictment. In April a federal grand jury in Indianapolis indicted Rosser on six counts of producing, distributing, shipping, transporting and receiving child pornography. Eight months later, FBI Deputy Director Ruben Garcia added Rosser to the most wanted list. What has become of Rosser is anybody's guess.

He marked his 49th birthday Jan. 17, his new life on the run lending haunting prophecy to the words he wrote to Krause and his wife. "Jeez, you guys, still not a single letter! Makes me sometimes feel sad and abandoned here," Rosser wrote in wobbly, almost childlike print. "I guess it's your revenge for me 'abandoning' you all but I haven't just Eric on another one of his crazy adventures rock star will not comment on Rosser save for a one-line disclaimer issued through his publicist that emphasizes how long it has been since they spoke: about 20 years. It was 20 years ago that Michael White, a Bloomington musician, met Rosser at the Runcible Spoon coffee shop.

White recognized Rosser from a Mellencamp video and recruited him to play keyboards on a CD he was making. "He typified a happy-go-lucky, artistic person," White said. Fame is different in a small town, at once loftier and more intimate, White said "The ones who make it are almost like astronauts to us." Rosser was one of those who seemed to have made it, but after two years playing with Mellencamp, he quit the band and got a job playing piano on the riverboat Delta Queen. Soon Rosser quit and took another short-lived job at a nightclub in Chicago. Then, he plunked down $800 for a 66-passen-ger Bluebird bus that would become the center of his world.

Christening the bus the Musi-Cruiser, Rosser enlisted a large group of friends to help him transform it into a traveling home and stage. Inside Rosser tucked a 1926 Steinway grand piano, and soon he was giving impromptu concerts on the courthouse square. In the early 1990s, Rosser abruptly left Bloomington and moved to Thailand, where he began giving piano lessons to children. He sent close friend Jim Krause a letter in which he wrote that he was "Musi-Cruised out." Rosser equated his latest venture with those in Chicago and on the river. "A couple of years I give it," he wrote.

But Rosser fell in love with Thai J-.