THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAS
THURSDAY AUGUST 18, 2012
AMERICAN GRAFFIT
PAGE 11E
ASSOCIATED PRESS
In this July 27 photo, graffiti artist Angel "LA II" Ortiz, 45, poses with one of his creations in a schoolyard on New York's Lower East Side. A number of New York's graffiti artists of the 1970s and '80s still have the urge to tag.
TOO OLD TO TAG
ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK — In torn jeans and saddled with a black backpack, Andrew Witten glances up and down the street for police. The 51-year-old then whips out a black marker scribbles "Zephyr" on a wall covered with movie posters. He admires his work for a few seconds before his tattooed arms reach for his daughter, holding her hand as he briskly walks away.
Witten and a generation of urban latchkey kids who spray-painted their initials all over Manhattan in the 1970s and '80s and landed in the city's street art scene are coming of age — middle age, that is.
And like Witten, a 51-year-old single father, some street artists considered now to be graffiti elders are having trouble putting away their spray paint cans. As Witten says, "I'm ready. I could go tonight."
"I'm chronologically old to be out there doing it," Witten admits with a playful smile. "I'm sure I can't run quite as fast."
Witten built a reputation as a master at spray-painting extravagant graffiti pieces on freight and subway trains, called train-bombing, in the neighborhoods where he now teaches his 6-year-old daughter, Lulu, to skateboard. For
him, spray-painting other people's property with his nickname, or tag, is almost an addiction, and danger is part of the drug. Crawling under barbed wire, ducking from police officers, even being shot at is all part of the experience.
But with an artist's heart, Witten describes painting graffiti in more poetic terms. He calls it a freeing experience, in which the silence of night gives way to the hiss and mist of the spray rising into the moonlight.
Angel Ortiz recently served 41 days of a 50-day sentence in the Rikers Island jail system after being busted for spraying his tag, LA Roc, on a billboard in March of last year. For decades, Ortiz, 45, has been known on Manhattan's Lower East Side as LA II. A traumatic loss of a girlfriend brought him out of a 14-year hiatus from graffiti writing. He has since been caught three times spraying his tag on property, each time while walking a friend's dog.
"Everywhere that dog stopped to pee I would write my name," Ortiz says. "The streets were like my canvases. I just started writing my name everywhere."
spray can or marker in his pocket to satisfy that incessant itch to tag mailboxes, signs and fire hydrants.
When a pair of police officers smelled the fresh paint and nabbed Ortiz, they asked whether he saw himself as too old to be doing graffiti. But even now, Ortiz keeps a
Ortiz often recalls those golden days in the '80s, when graffiti became the focal point of the counterculture art world and he partied with Madonna and Andy Warhol. He still lives in the neighborhood where a young art school dropout named Keith Haring showed up at his doorstep in cutoff jeans and glasses asking about his tagging style.
Graffiti documentarian and photographer Henry Chalfant looks back at Ortiz's heyday as a revolutionary time period in street art.
"The culture is gone really," Chalfant says. "The culture that was alive in the '70s and '80s doesn't exist anymore."
Artists gleaned the raw style off street kids, while tunnel-hopping graffiti writers honed in on their artistic abilities to be commercially successful. It was a time when graffiti tagging exploded into battles over the artists who could produce the most visually edgy, elaborate murals in the most dangerous, inaccessible places without getting caught.
Chalfant says change came when the Metropolitan Transportation Authority took over the New York regional train system and manufacturers started to build paint-
resistant trains. Police also aggressively cracked down on graffiti in the '80s and '90s.
"The whole scene has evolved to something beyond just writing your name," Chalfant points out. "Artists are making comments about culture, about society. It's a personal vision of an artist."
Ortiz now spends his days painting, pedelling his art to galleries and buyers. He never quite rose to the level of fame as some of his graffiti counterparts, and the appetite for graffiti art has diminished in the U.S. art world.
Long past Haring's death, Ortiz claims he rarely gets credit for the collaborations he and Haring did together, although his LA Roc tags are displayed on numerous Haring pieces.
Witten's brush with fame now often comes with his freelance art writing and his sporadic visits to his daughter's school, where he teaches her classmates how to draw. Lulu knows her father draws "crazy art," a term she picked up from seeing graffiti on trains.
From time to time, the thought of spending a few hours in a deserted freight yard still crosses Witten's mind. Taking into consideration his daughter, he won't admit if he still train-bombs. But he won't say he doesn't, either.
RUSSIAN ROCK
Feminist punk band on trial for anti-Putin church protest
ASSOCIATED PRESS
MOSCOW — A Moscow judge wrapped up the trial of three feminist punk rockers last week and said she would issue a verdict in the controversial case next week.
Prosecutors have called for three-year prison sentences for the Pussy Riot band members, who have already been in custody for five months after giving an impromptu performance in Moscow's main cathedral to call for an end to Vladimir Putin's rule.
The three women — Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 23; Maria Alekhina, 24; and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 29 — high-kicked and danced as they belted out their "punk prayer" in Christ the Savior Cathedral in February.
Tolokonnikova, dressed in jeans and a blue T-shirt, said in a trembling voice, looking at prosecutors: "We have more freedom than all those people from the prosecution in front of me — because we can say what we want."
They were charged with hoo-liganism motivated by religious hatred, which carries a maximum sentence of seven years.
Their case has sharply divided Russia. Some believers felt offended, while other Russians have been angered by what they see as repressive treatment for the expression of
"With every day an increasing number of people start to realize that if the political machine turned against girls who performed in the Christ the Savior Cathedral for 40 seconds, this means only that this political system is scared of the truth and the sincerity that we bring." Tolokonnikova said.
The trial has been seen as part of the widening government crackdown on dissent that followed Putin's election in March to a third presidential term.
political beliefs. Orthodox leaders have ignored calls to pardon the women and urge the court to dismiss the case.
Defense lawyer Nikolai Polozov said Wednesday that Putin's remarks indicated that "he virtually has found them guilty already and only meant to say that the court's punishment shouldn't be too harsh."
Violetta Volkova, another defense lawyer, said an acquittal "would be the only chance for the judge to save face — not only for her, but for the entire Russian political system."
Putin last week criticized the Pussy Riot stunt, but said the band members should not be judged too harshly.
Stanislav Samutsevich, the father of one of the defendants, voiced concern that the women's anti-
During a Tuesday gig in Moscow, Madonna had the words "Pussy Riot" written on her bare back and also dunned a ski mask, or balaclava — symbol of the band. The punk rockers perform in bright-colored homemade sk masks.
Amnesty International has called the women prisoners of conscience. Musicians including Madonna, The Who's Pete Townsend and Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys have urged their release.
The defense lawyers said that activists around the world will show their solidarity with the band by holding a global protest on Aug.17, the day Judge Marina Syrova is to issue her verdict.
Early in the trial, the band members apologized to all Orthodox believers, saying that they did not mean to offend anyone and that their performance was aimed against Putin and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, who had urged Russians to vote for Putin.
Putin rhetoric might have antagonized the judge.
Prosecutors and lawyers for church employees, who were described as the injured party in the case, insisted that they saw no political motives behind the band's actions, only blasphemy and hatred toward Orthodox believers.
Supporters in the courtroom greeted Alekhina's speech with enthusiastic applause, to which the judge responded, "This is not a theater."
Before their church stunt, the band became an Internet sensation for performing a song that praised last winter's massive anti-Putin protests from a spot on Red Square used in the past for announcing czar's decrees. The group members have described themselves as feminists and accused the Russian leadership of infringing on the rights of women and the gay and lesbian community.
About a dozen Pussy Riot supporters also gathered outside the courthouse, and at least three, including a protester wearing a balaclava, were detained, the Interfax news agency reported.
and clumsy stunt, brought so much trouble?" Alekhina told the court. "How can this happen in a healthy society? And now it takes thousands of people around the world to prove the obvious, to prove that the three of us are innocent."
"How did it happen that our performance, which was a small
GOLDEN OLDIES
90s rockers reunite for summer tour
IMCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
ST. LOUISE — Everclear singer Art Alexakis is putting '90s radio rock music on a pedestal with his new tour, Summerland.
The tour also features Sugar Ray, Gin Blossoms, Lit and Marcy Playground.
"People have been talking about doing a '90s tour for a while, but it never seemed like the right time and it never got together," says Alexakis, whose band released "Sparkle and Fade" in 1995. "And I heard about bigger bands trying to do it — bands who can tour on their own. But they couldn't get their egos together."
With likely fewer egos to check among Everclear, Sugar Ray and Gin Blossoms, Alexakis pulled together the tour. Instead of waiting for someone to call him, he made a call himself in search of a partner in the venture.
"I needed someone with high visibility and energy for days, and the only person I could think of was Mark McGrath," he says of the Sugar Ray lead singer. "He was totally down with it."
"I hadn't felt compelled to make an album until two years ago," he says. "Before, I didn't have a deal or much money sitting around. Now I've got something to say."
"It sounds like old school Everclear but contemporized," he says. "That's what I was shooting for."Alexakis says he wanted to make a record that demonstrated he is playing by his own rules, no matter the cost."That's indicative of me at 50," he says. "I've been on a roller coaster. I've been up and been down, and one thing I know will happen if you're down is you'll come back up. This is me, this is my band, and we put our hearts and souls into this."
"It doesn't offend me at all. There is a certain nostalgia," he says. "Everclear has a foot in the past and a foot in the future. We're still doing it. I still got that fire in my belly."
He says the tour, which is like a rock summer camp for him and the other performers, is something different for fans.
Some may call the tour an attempt at a comeback or something representing the "new nostalgia," but Alexakis says he doesn't care.
That fire still burns with the band's new album "Invisible Stars," its first in six years. Alexakis says it took a long time to get "Invisible Stars" going because he wasn't feeling inspired.
"Its giving value and giving people what they want," Alexakis says. "The word of mouth has been huge. We're bringing something to people that is bigger than any of us, and none of us could do this by ourselves."
"Invisible Stars" shows off Everclear bringing together the old and the new.
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