A few articles
Feb. 6th, 2010 02:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
One on the possible colors of the dinosaurs, for REAL this time.
Evidence Builds on Color of Dinosaurs
By CARL ZIMMER
Until last week, paleontologists could offer no clear-cut evidence for the color of dinosaurs. Then researchers provided evidence that a dinosaur called Sinosauropteryx had a white-and-ginger striped tail. And now a team of paleontologists has published a full-body portrait of another dinosaur, in striking plumage that would have delighted that great painter of birds John James Audubon.
“This is actual science, not ‘Avatar,’ ” said Richard O. Prum, an evolutionary biologist at Yale and co-author of the new study, published in Science.
Dr. Prum and his colleagues took advantage of the fact that feathers contain pigment-loaded sacs called melanosomes. In 2009, they demonstrated that melanosomes survived for millions of years in fossil bird feathers. The shape and arrangement of melanosomes help produce the color of feathers, so the scientists were able to get clues about the color of fossil feathers from their melanosomes alone.
That discovery prompted British and Chinese scientists to examine fossils of dinosaurs that are covered with featherlike structures. The 125-million-year-old species Sinosauropteryx, for example, has bristles on its skin, and scientists found melanosomes in the tail bristles. They concluded that the dinosaur had reddish-and-white rings along its tail.
The discovery, which the researchers reported last week in Nature, supports research showing that birds are dinosaurs, having descended from a group of bipedal dinosaurs called theropods.
Dr. Prum and his colleagues, meanwhile, had set out on a similar quest. “We had a dream: to put colors on a dinosaur,” said Jakob Vinther, a graduate student at Yale.
Working with paleontologists at the Beijing Museum of Natural History and Peking University, the researchers began to study a 150-million-year-old species called Anchiornis huxleyi. The chicken-sized theropod was festooned with long feathers on its arms and legs.
The researchers removed 29 chips, each the size of a poppy seed, from across the dinosaur’s body. Mr. Vinther put the chips under a microscope and discovered melanosomes.
To figure out the colors of Anchiornis feathers, Mr. Vinther and his colleagues turned to Matthew Shawkey, a University of Akron biologist who has made detailed studies of melanosome patterns in living birds. Dr. Shawkey can accurately predict the color of feathers from melanosomes alone. The scientists used the same method to decipher Anchiornis’s color pattern.
Anchiornis had a crown of reddish feathers surrounding dark gray ones, and its face was mottled with reddish and black spots. Its body was dark gray, but its limb feathers were white with black tips.
Given the full detail of the findings, Dr. Prum said, “it was like writing the first entry in a Jurassic field guide to feathered dinosaurs.”
Luis M. Chiappe, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County who was not involved in the research, praised the rigor and detail of the new study. “For a dinosaur scientist, this is like the birth of color TV,” Dr. Chiappe said.
The color pattern of Anchiornis is reminiscent of living birds. A breed of chickens called Silver Spangled Hamburgs, for example, has white, black-tipped wing feathers. Dr. Prum speculated that studying these chickens might allow scientists to determine the specific mutations that gave rise to Anchiornis’s plumage.
The color pattern on Anchiornis was so extravagant that the scientists are confident it served some visual function. “It was definitely for showing off,” Mr. Vinther said.
Some features, like the crest, might have allowed the dinosaur to attract mates. But white and black limb feathers might have helped Anchiornis escape predators. A number of living animals like zebras use similar color patterns to dazzle predators, so that they can run away.
The researchers expect many more surprises as scientists look at other dinosaur fossils.
“There is a big chapter of dinosaur biology that we can open up now,” Mr. Vinther said.
An editorial about Precious
Fade to White
By ISHMAEL REED
Oakland, Calif.
JUDGING from the mail I’ve received, the conversations I’ve had and all that I’ve read, the responses to “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire” fall largely along racial lines.
Among black men and women, there is widespread revulsion and anger over the Oscar-nominated film about an illiterate, obese black teenager who has two children by her father. The author Jill Nelson wrote: “I don’t eat at the table of self-hatred, inferiority or victimization. I haven’t bought into notions of rampant black pathology or embraced the overwrought, dishonest and black-people-hating pseudo-analysis too often passing as post-racial cold hard truths.” One black radio broadcaster said that he felt under psychological assault for two hours. So did I.
The blacks who are enraged by “Precious” have probably figured out that this film wasn’t meant for them. It was the enthusiastic response from white audiences and critics that culminated in the film being nominated for six Oscars by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, an outfit whose 43 governors are all white and whose membership in terms of diversity is about 40 years behind Mississippi. In fact, the director, Lee Daniels, said that the honor would bring even more “middle-class white Americans” to his film.
Is the enthusiasm of such white audiences and awards committees based on their being comfortable with the stereotypes shown? Barbara Bush, the former first lady, not only hosted a screening of “Precious” but also wrote about it in Newsweek, saying: “There are kids like Precious everywhere. Each day we walk by them: young boys and girls whose home lives are dark secrets.” Oprah Winfrey, whose endorsement assisted the movie’s distribution and its acceptance among her white fanbase, said, “None of us who sees the movie can now walk through the world and allow the Preciouses of the world to be invisible.”
Are Mrs. Bush and Ms. Winfrey suggesting, on the basis of a fictional film, that incest is widespread among black families? Statistics tell us that it’s certainly no more prevalent among blacks than whites. The National Center for Victims of Crime notes: “Incest does not discriminate. It happens in families that are financially privileged, as well as those of low socio-economic status. It happens to those of all racial and ethnic descent, and to those of all religious traditions.”
Given the news media’s tendency to use scandals involving black men, both fictional and real, to create “teaching tools” about the treatment of women, it was inevitable that a black male character associated with incest would be used to begin some national discussion about the state of black families.
This use of movies and books to cast collective shame upon an entire community doesn’t happen with works about white dysfunctional families. It wasn’t done, for instance, with “Requiem for a Dream,” starring the great Ellen Burstyn, about a white family dealing with drug addiction, or with “The Kiss,” a memoir about incest — in that case, a relationship between a white father and his adult daughter.
Such stereotyping has led to calamities being visited on minority communities. I’ve suggested that the Newseum in Washington create a Hall of Shame, which would include the front pages of newspapers whose inflammatory coverage led to explosions of racial hatred. I’m thinking, among many others, of 1921’s Tulsa riot, which started with a rumor that a black man had assaulted a white woman, and resulted in the murder of 300 blacks.
Black films looking to attract white audiences flatter them with another kind of stereotype: the merciful slave master. In guilt-free bits of merchandise like “Precious,” white characters are always portrayed as caring. There to help. Never shown as contributing to the oppression of African-Americans. Problems that members of the black underclass encounter are a result of their culture, their lack of personal responsibility.
It’s no surprise either that white critics — eight out of the nine comments used on the publicity Web site for “Precious” were from white men and women — maintain that the movie is worthwhile because, through the efforts of a teacher, this girl begins her first awkward efforts at writing.
Redemption through learning the ways of white culture is an old Hollywood theme. D. W. Griffith produced a series of movies in which Chinese, Indians and blacks were lifted from savagery through assimilation. A more recent example of climbing out of the ghetto through assimilation is “Dangerous Minds,” where black and Latino students are rescued by a curriculum that doesn’t include a single black or Latino writer.
By the movie’s end, Precious may be pushing toward literacy. But she is jobless, saddled with two children, one of whom has Down syndrome, and she’s learned that she has AIDS.
Some redemption.
An article about graffiti in NYC
Graffiti’s Story, From Vandalism to Art to Nostalgia
By DAVID GONZALEZ
Eric Felisbret stood by a chain-link fence, watching three men spraying graffiti on a backyard wall in Upper Manhattan. One man smiled and invited him over.
“You can go around the corner and when you see a sign for a seamstress, go in the alley,” the man said. “Or you can jump the fence, like we did.”
Mr. Felisbret, 46, chose the long way. Not that he is unused to fence-jumping. In the 1970s, that was one of his skills as a budding graffiti writer who stole into subway yards. Using the nom de graf DEAL, he was part of the Crazy Inside Artists, a legendary crew from East New York, Brooklyn. This time, though, instead of wielding a spray can, he pulled out a camera and took a quick snapshot of the artwork, done with the landlord’s permission.
“It’s really retro,” he said. “Look inside the 3D letters, how he added all those spots.”
He would know, and not just because the artist was his brother, Luke. Over some 30 years, the two men have amassed a photographic archive of New York City graffiti that is among the most comprehensive collections anywhere. Since 1998 much of it, along with interviews of artists, has been showcased on their Web site, www.at149st.com.
And now Eric Felisbret has published a thick, glossy new book, “Graffiti New York,” a survey of the art that mirrors his own life trajectory — from outlaw origins to mainstream respectability.
What started in the ’70s as a visual assault on commuters has attained a certain acceptability, if not cachet, thanks in part to the city’s crackdown on subway graffiti in the late ’80s. Today, ambitious aerosol canvases hang in galleries, while corporations like Nike, Coca-Cola and Sony hire graffiti muralists to paint storefront advertisements. Vintage photographs plucked from archives have inspired a small industry of coffee table books.
Old-school graffiti — with intricate tangles of kinetic letters and cartoonish characters — is just about everywhere except the place that was once its sole domain: the metal skins of subway cars.
While the city seems far removed from the days of entire trains slathered in spray paint, Mr. Felisbret believes there is probably just as much illicit graffiti in town, only more scattered — on trucks, rooftops or the upper floors of buildings. His book shows examples of all sorts.
But today’s renegade writers dazzle more with risk taking than artistic merit. Unlike the artists who executed elaborately drawn and colored tableaux decades ago, younger outlaws have little chance to develop into accomplished painters.
“The train yards used to provide the opportunity to do things illegally and creatively at the same time,” Mr. Felisbret said. “You had privacy and time. Now if you do something illegally, you have to be quick. You can’t stand on a corner and paint for hours.”
His Web site’s name is a nod to one of graffiti’s most famous spots — the “writer’s bench” at the 149th Street and Grand Concourse stop on the No. 2 line. During graffiti’s heyday, the bench was where artists gathered to trade ideas and admire rolling canvases.
Then, as now, photographs were the only lasting evidence that a piece had ever existed. But today the photos reach an audience that far outstrips that of even the most hyperactive All-City Bomber from the ’70s.
“The trains used to move your name around,” said Mr. Felisbret, who is a freelance graphic designer. “Now the Internet moves your name for you.”
Henry Chalfant, the photographer and filmmaker who was among the first to document graffiti’s boom years in New York, said Mr. Felisbret’s Web site and insider’s perspective have helped propel graffiti onto a global stage.
“His site is the most important one, along with Art Crimes,” Mr. Chalfant said. “It has transformed the scene internationally, where everybody can find out everything they need and link up with people.”
The site’s current mix of elaborate pieces and quickly written tags also underscores a tension in a community of artists that now spans several generations. To some younger artists, the beauty of an intricate wall done with permission — and time to spare — is no match for the adrenaline rush of fast and dirty bombing on the sly.
“You could paint 100 pieces legally, put them on the Internet, and somebody in Germany will say, ‘Wow!’ But they won’t know that the writer took no risks,” Mr. Felisbret said. “Face it, there are two ways to get credibility — artistic merit or the assumption of risk. And for traditionalists, the assumption of risk carries far more value in the culture.”
That might be why some European aficionados arrive and immediately start asking how they can paint the side of a train. (Mr. Felisbret says some also think that teenagers rule the city and all graffiti writers are break dancers.)
“They have this idealized view of the culture,” he said. “They have fetishized something that does not exist anymore.”
The teenagers who could once slip through fences and dart among the rails are now middle aged. Some, like Mr. Felisbret, stopped writing graffiti long ago and embarked on more mainstream jobs in the arts. Others, like Joe Lopez, consider themselves weekend writers who don’t need to break the law to pursue their art.
“You get a job, you make some money, you get married and things slow down after a while,” said Mr. Lopez, 52, who started tagging CLYDE when he was a teenager in the Melrose neighborhood of the Bronx. “The last time I did the trains was in the ’70s. Then I branched out to other things, Central Park.”
Where? “The whole park,” he said. “The rowboats, everything. Every boat was mine. For about two years I burned it.”
Now his name can be found — legally — on walls in the Inwood section of Manhattan, not far from the fabled “ghost yard,” a sprawling maintenance depot that runs north of 207th Street along 10th Avenue. He does his art for fun, not for money — and with permission from landlords.
“I don’t have to hustle,” he said. “I have a good job.”
His days of sneaking into a train yard are over. He can walk in through the gate.
“I work for the Transit Authority,” Mr. Lopez said. “Believe it or not, I’m a supervisor in the No. 4 yard.”
And an article about the fight by some in Germany to print an annotated edition of Mein Kampf and beat the racists to the punch
Rebuffing Scholars, Germany Vows to Keep Hitler Out of Print
By NICHOLAS KULISH
MUNICH — In Germany, an author is granted an ironclad copyright for 70 years after his death, apparently even if he is subsequently regarded as one of the greatest mass murderers in history and a dark stain on the national character.
Hitler’s copyright on “Mein Kampf,” in the hands of the Bavarian government since the end of the Nazi regime, has long been used to keep his inflammatory manifesto off the shelves in Germany. But with the expiration date looming in 2015, there is a developing showdown here over the first German publication of the book since the end of World War II.
Experts at the respected Institute of Contemporary History in Munich say they want to prepare a critical, annotated version of the book for release when the copyright expires 70 years after Hitler’s suicide in his Berlin bunker.
“We hope to prevent neo-Nazi publications by putting out a commented, scholarly edition before that,” said Edith Raim, a historian at the institute. “‘Mein Kampf’ is one of the central texts if you want to explain National Socialism, and it hasn’t been available in a commented edition at all in Germany.”
But the Bavarian government opposed the idea, citing respect for victims of the Holocaust. In a statement Thursday, the Bavarian Finance Ministry said that permits for reprints would not be issued, at home or abroad. “This also applies to a new annotated edition,” said the statement, adding that the state would use “all means at its disposal to proceed against any violations.”
There was also disagreement as to whether the book might be banned as Nazi propaganda. The Bavarian government said that even after expiration of the copyright, “the dissemination of Nazi ideologies will remain prohibited in Germany and is punishable under the penal code.”
But Ms. Raim said that diaries by prominent Nazis like Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler were already available.
Unofficial copies of “Mein Kampf” are easily accessible on the Internet already, and the book is legally published abroad, including in the United States.
Hitler wrote the book, which detailed his hatred of Jews, his desire for revenge against the French and the need for more space or “Lebensraum” in the east for Germans, while in Landsberg prison in Bavaria after the failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. The first volume of the book was published in 1925 and the second the next year.
More than 12 million copies of “Mein Kampf” were in circulation by 1945. The cities of Munich and Nuremberg, among others, gave it away to young couples as a wedding present, according to the Bavarian state library.
Stephan J. Kramer, secretary general of the Central Council of Jews in Germany in Berlin, said the publication of “Mein Kampf” continued to split the Jewish community in Germany, with many Holocaust survivors opposing its publication. “I have the highest respect for this opinion, but on the other hand I’m saying very openly: The copyright is going to be waived anyway. It’s a matter of time before the book is available in shops and libraries,” Mr. Kramer said.
Mr. Kramer said that with the book available on the Internet, it was important to have the work put in context by a responsible group like the Institute of Contemporary History. “Those who are already on the wrong side already have the book and already read it from their own point of view,” he said. “Let’s get it out there, and let’s get it out there with a commentary.”
Evidence Builds on Color of Dinosaurs
By CARL ZIMMER
Until last week, paleontologists could offer no clear-cut evidence for the color of dinosaurs. Then researchers provided evidence that a dinosaur called Sinosauropteryx had a white-and-ginger striped tail. And now a team of paleontologists has published a full-body portrait of another dinosaur, in striking plumage that would have delighted that great painter of birds John James Audubon.
“This is actual science, not ‘Avatar,’ ” said Richard O. Prum, an evolutionary biologist at Yale and co-author of the new study, published in Science.
Dr. Prum and his colleagues took advantage of the fact that feathers contain pigment-loaded sacs called melanosomes. In 2009, they demonstrated that melanosomes survived for millions of years in fossil bird feathers. The shape and arrangement of melanosomes help produce the color of feathers, so the scientists were able to get clues about the color of fossil feathers from their melanosomes alone.
That discovery prompted British and Chinese scientists to examine fossils of dinosaurs that are covered with featherlike structures. The 125-million-year-old species Sinosauropteryx, for example, has bristles on its skin, and scientists found melanosomes in the tail bristles. They concluded that the dinosaur had reddish-and-white rings along its tail.
The discovery, which the researchers reported last week in Nature, supports research showing that birds are dinosaurs, having descended from a group of bipedal dinosaurs called theropods.
Dr. Prum and his colleagues, meanwhile, had set out on a similar quest. “We had a dream: to put colors on a dinosaur,” said Jakob Vinther, a graduate student at Yale.
Working with paleontologists at the Beijing Museum of Natural History and Peking University, the researchers began to study a 150-million-year-old species called Anchiornis huxleyi. The chicken-sized theropod was festooned with long feathers on its arms and legs.
The researchers removed 29 chips, each the size of a poppy seed, from across the dinosaur’s body. Mr. Vinther put the chips under a microscope and discovered melanosomes.
To figure out the colors of Anchiornis feathers, Mr. Vinther and his colleagues turned to Matthew Shawkey, a University of Akron biologist who has made detailed studies of melanosome patterns in living birds. Dr. Shawkey can accurately predict the color of feathers from melanosomes alone. The scientists used the same method to decipher Anchiornis’s color pattern.
Anchiornis had a crown of reddish feathers surrounding dark gray ones, and its face was mottled with reddish and black spots. Its body was dark gray, but its limb feathers were white with black tips.
Given the full detail of the findings, Dr. Prum said, “it was like writing the first entry in a Jurassic field guide to feathered dinosaurs.”
Luis M. Chiappe, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County who was not involved in the research, praised the rigor and detail of the new study. “For a dinosaur scientist, this is like the birth of color TV,” Dr. Chiappe said.
The color pattern of Anchiornis is reminiscent of living birds. A breed of chickens called Silver Spangled Hamburgs, for example, has white, black-tipped wing feathers. Dr. Prum speculated that studying these chickens might allow scientists to determine the specific mutations that gave rise to Anchiornis’s plumage.
The color pattern on Anchiornis was so extravagant that the scientists are confident it served some visual function. “It was definitely for showing off,” Mr. Vinther said.
Some features, like the crest, might have allowed the dinosaur to attract mates. But white and black limb feathers might have helped Anchiornis escape predators. A number of living animals like zebras use similar color patterns to dazzle predators, so that they can run away.
The researchers expect many more surprises as scientists look at other dinosaur fossils.
“There is a big chapter of dinosaur biology that we can open up now,” Mr. Vinther said.
An editorial about Precious
Fade to White
By ISHMAEL REED
Oakland, Calif.
JUDGING from the mail I’ve received, the conversations I’ve had and all that I’ve read, the responses to “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire” fall largely along racial lines.
Among black men and women, there is widespread revulsion and anger over the Oscar-nominated film about an illiterate, obese black teenager who has two children by her father. The author Jill Nelson wrote: “I don’t eat at the table of self-hatred, inferiority or victimization. I haven’t bought into notions of rampant black pathology or embraced the overwrought, dishonest and black-people-hating pseudo-analysis too often passing as post-racial cold hard truths.” One black radio broadcaster said that he felt under psychological assault for two hours. So did I.
The blacks who are enraged by “Precious” have probably figured out that this film wasn’t meant for them. It was the enthusiastic response from white audiences and critics that culminated in the film being nominated for six Oscars by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, an outfit whose 43 governors are all white and whose membership in terms of diversity is about 40 years behind Mississippi. In fact, the director, Lee Daniels, said that the honor would bring even more “middle-class white Americans” to his film.
Is the enthusiasm of such white audiences and awards committees based on their being comfortable with the stereotypes shown? Barbara Bush, the former first lady, not only hosted a screening of “Precious” but also wrote about it in Newsweek, saying: “There are kids like Precious everywhere. Each day we walk by them: young boys and girls whose home lives are dark secrets.” Oprah Winfrey, whose endorsement assisted the movie’s distribution and its acceptance among her white fanbase, said, “None of us who sees the movie can now walk through the world and allow the Preciouses of the world to be invisible.”
Are Mrs. Bush and Ms. Winfrey suggesting, on the basis of a fictional film, that incest is widespread among black families? Statistics tell us that it’s certainly no more prevalent among blacks than whites. The National Center for Victims of Crime notes: “Incest does not discriminate. It happens in families that are financially privileged, as well as those of low socio-economic status. It happens to those of all racial and ethnic descent, and to those of all religious traditions.”
Given the news media’s tendency to use scandals involving black men, both fictional and real, to create “teaching tools” about the treatment of women, it was inevitable that a black male character associated with incest would be used to begin some national discussion about the state of black families.
This use of movies and books to cast collective shame upon an entire community doesn’t happen with works about white dysfunctional families. It wasn’t done, for instance, with “Requiem for a Dream,” starring the great Ellen Burstyn, about a white family dealing with drug addiction, or with “The Kiss,” a memoir about incest — in that case, a relationship between a white father and his adult daughter.
Such stereotyping has led to calamities being visited on minority communities. I’ve suggested that the Newseum in Washington create a Hall of Shame, which would include the front pages of newspapers whose inflammatory coverage led to explosions of racial hatred. I’m thinking, among many others, of 1921’s Tulsa riot, which started with a rumor that a black man had assaulted a white woman, and resulted in the murder of 300 blacks.
Black films looking to attract white audiences flatter them with another kind of stereotype: the merciful slave master. In guilt-free bits of merchandise like “Precious,” white characters are always portrayed as caring. There to help. Never shown as contributing to the oppression of African-Americans. Problems that members of the black underclass encounter are a result of their culture, their lack of personal responsibility.
It’s no surprise either that white critics — eight out of the nine comments used on the publicity Web site for “Precious” were from white men and women — maintain that the movie is worthwhile because, through the efforts of a teacher, this girl begins her first awkward efforts at writing.
Redemption through learning the ways of white culture is an old Hollywood theme. D. W. Griffith produced a series of movies in which Chinese, Indians and blacks were lifted from savagery through assimilation. A more recent example of climbing out of the ghetto through assimilation is “Dangerous Minds,” where black and Latino students are rescued by a curriculum that doesn’t include a single black or Latino writer.
By the movie’s end, Precious may be pushing toward literacy. But she is jobless, saddled with two children, one of whom has Down syndrome, and she’s learned that she has AIDS.
Some redemption.
An article about graffiti in NYC
Graffiti’s Story, From Vandalism to Art to Nostalgia
By DAVID GONZALEZ
Eric Felisbret stood by a chain-link fence, watching three men spraying graffiti on a backyard wall in Upper Manhattan. One man smiled and invited him over.
“You can go around the corner and when you see a sign for a seamstress, go in the alley,” the man said. “Or you can jump the fence, like we did.”
Mr. Felisbret, 46, chose the long way. Not that he is unused to fence-jumping. In the 1970s, that was one of his skills as a budding graffiti writer who stole into subway yards. Using the nom de graf DEAL, he was part of the Crazy Inside Artists, a legendary crew from East New York, Brooklyn. This time, though, instead of wielding a spray can, he pulled out a camera and took a quick snapshot of the artwork, done with the landlord’s permission.
“It’s really retro,” he said. “Look inside the 3D letters, how he added all those spots.”
He would know, and not just because the artist was his brother, Luke. Over some 30 years, the two men have amassed a photographic archive of New York City graffiti that is among the most comprehensive collections anywhere. Since 1998 much of it, along with interviews of artists, has been showcased on their Web site, www.at149st.com.
And now Eric Felisbret has published a thick, glossy new book, “Graffiti New York,” a survey of the art that mirrors his own life trajectory — from outlaw origins to mainstream respectability.
What started in the ’70s as a visual assault on commuters has attained a certain acceptability, if not cachet, thanks in part to the city’s crackdown on subway graffiti in the late ’80s. Today, ambitious aerosol canvases hang in galleries, while corporations like Nike, Coca-Cola and Sony hire graffiti muralists to paint storefront advertisements. Vintage photographs plucked from archives have inspired a small industry of coffee table books.
Old-school graffiti — with intricate tangles of kinetic letters and cartoonish characters — is just about everywhere except the place that was once its sole domain: the metal skins of subway cars.
While the city seems far removed from the days of entire trains slathered in spray paint, Mr. Felisbret believes there is probably just as much illicit graffiti in town, only more scattered — on trucks, rooftops or the upper floors of buildings. His book shows examples of all sorts.
But today’s renegade writers dazzle more with risk taking than artistic merit. Unlike the artists who executed elaborately drawn and colored tableaux decades ago, younger outlaws have little chance to develop into accomplished painters.
“The train yards used to provide the opportunity to do things illegally and creatively at the same time,” Mr. Felisbret said. “You had privacy and time. Now if you do something illegally, you have to be quick. You can’t stand on a corner and paint for hours.”
His Web site’s name is a nod to one of graffiti’s most famous spots — the “writer’s bench” at the 149th Street and Grand Concourse stop on the No. 2 line. During graffiti’s heyday, the bench was where artists gathered to trade ideas and admire rolling canvases.
Then, as now, photographs were the only lasting evidence that a piece had ever existed. But today the photos reach an audience that far outstrips that of even the most hyperactive All-City Bomber from the ’70s.
“The trains used to move your name around,” said Mr. Felisbret, who is a freelance graphic designer. “Now the Internet moves your name for you.”
Henry Chalfant, the photographer and filmmaker who was among the first to document graffiti’s boom years in New York, said Mr. Felisbret’s Web site and insider’s perspective have helped propel graffiti onto a global stage.
“His site is the most important one, along with Art Crimes,” Mr. Chalfant said. “It has transformed the scene internationally, where everybody can find out everything they need and link up with people.”
The site’s current mix of elaborate pieces and quickly written tags also underscores a tension in a community of artists that now spans several generations. To some younger artists, the beauty of an intricate wall done with permission — and time to spare — is no match for the adrenaline rush of fast and dirty bombing on the sly.
“You could paint 100 pieces legally, put them on the Internet, and somebody in Germany will say, ‘Wow!’ But they won’t know that the writer took no risks,” Mr. Felisbret said. “Face it, there are two ways to get credibility — artistic merit or the assumption of risk. And for traditionalists, the assumption of risk carries far more value in the culture.”
That might be why some European aficionados arrive and immediately start asking how they can paint the side of a train. (Mr. Felisbret says some also think that teenagers rule the city and all graffiti writers are break dancers.)
“They have this idealized view of the culture,” he said. “They have fetishized something that does not exist anymore.”
The teenagers who could once slip through fences and dart among the rails are now middle aged. Some, like Mr. Felisbret, stopped writing graffiti long ago and embarked on more mainstream jobs in the arts. Others, like Joe Lopez, consider themselves weekend writers who don’t need to break the law to pursue their art.
“You get a job, you make some money, you get married and things slow down after a while,” said Mr. Lopez, 52, who started tagging CLYDE when he was a teenager in the Melrose neighborhood of the Bronx. “The last time I did the trains was in the ’70s. Then I branched out to other things, Central Park.”
Where? “The whole park,” he said. “The rowboats, everything. Every boat was mine. For about two years I burned it.”
Now his name can be found — legally — on walls in the Inwood section of Manhattan, not far from the fabled “ghost yard,” a sprawling maintenance depot that runs north of 207th Street along 10th Avenue. He does his art for fun, not for money — and with permission from landlords.
“I don’t have to hustle,” he said. “I have a good job.”
His days of sneaking into a train yard are over. He can walk in through the gate.
“I work for the Transit Authority,” Mr. Lopez said. “Believe it or not, I’m a supervisor in the No. 4 yard.”
And an article about the fight by some in Germany to print an annotated edition of Mein Kampf and beat the racists to the punch
Rebuffing Scholars, Germany Vows to Keep Hitler Out of Print
By NICHOLAS KULISH
MUNICH — In Germany, an author is granted an ironclad copyright for 70 years after his death, apparently even if he is subsequently regarded as one of the greatest mass murderers in history and a dark stain on the national character.
Hitler’s copyright on “Mein Kampf,” in the hands of the Bavarian government since the end of the Nazi regime, has long been used to keep his inflammatory manifesto off the shelves in Germany. But with the expiration date looming in 2015, there is a developing showdown here over the first German publication of the book since the end of World War II.
Experts at the respected Institute of Contemporary History in Munich say they want to prepare a critical, annotated version of the book for release when the copyright expires 70 years after Hitler’s suicide in his Berlin bunker.
“We hope to prevent neo-Nazi publications by putting out a commented, scholarly edition before that,” said Edith Raim, a historian at the institute. “‘Mein Kampf’ is one of the central texts if you want to explain National Socialism, and it hasn’t been available in a commented edition at all in Germany.”
But the Bavarian government opposed the idea, citing respect for victims of the Holocaust. In a statement Thursday, the Bavarian Finance Ministry said that permits for reprints would not be issued, at home or abroad. “This also applies to a new annotated edition,” said the statement, adding that the state would use “all means at its disposal to proceed against any violations.”
There was also disagreement as to whether the book might be banned as Nazi propaganda. The Bavarian government said that even after expiration of the copyright, “the dissemination of Nazi ideologies will remain prohibited in Germany and is punishable under the penal code.”
But Ms. Raim said that diaries by prominent Nazis like Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler were already available.
Unofficial copies of “Mein Kampf” are easily accessible on the Internet already, and the book is legally published abroad, including in the United States.
Hitler wrote the book, which detailed his hatred of Jews, his desire for revenge against the French and the need for more space or “Lebensraum” in the east for Germans, while in Landsberg prison in Bavaria after the failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. The first volume of the book was published in 1925 and the second the next year.
More than 12 million copies of “Mein Kampf” were in circulation by 1945. The cities of Munich and Nuremberg, among others, gave it away to young couples as a wedding present, according to the Bavarian state library.
Stephan J. Kramer, secretary general of the Central Council of Jews in Germany in Berlin, said the publication of “Mein Kampf” continued to split the Jewish community in Germany, with many Holocaust survivors opposing its publication. “I have the highest respect for this opinion, but on the other hand I’m saying very openly: The copyright is going to be waived anyway. It’s a matter of time before the book is available in shops and libraries,” Mr. Kramer said.
Mr. Kramer said that with the book available on the Internet, it was important to have the work put in context by a responsible group like the Institute of Contemporary History. “Those who are already on the wrong side already have the book and already read it from their own point of view,” he said. “Let’s get it out there, and let’s get it out there with a commentary.”
