h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Dear Friends

Posted Jun 3, 2003

As you'll have noticed, I haven't been exactly h2g2's greatest Journal-ist! But this is just to mention my entry at A1050986. In case you haven't seen it, it's about cancer. It's a journal, really.



Bels

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Latest reply: Jun 3, 2003

Posted Mar 19, 2002

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Graffiti

Posted Mar 6, 2002

The following is a brief excerpt from Robert Fritz's book, "The Path of Least Resistance".

A Lesson from the Ghetto

Recently I was traveling from New York's La Guardia Airport to Manhattan. My cabdriver chose to avoid the congested trafflc on the East River Drive. His route brought me through my old neighborhood in East Harlem.

I had moved there after getting a master's degree from the Boston Conservatory of Music. What a contrast that was, cultural Boston and "culturally deprived" East Harlem. For a musician just in for the New York music scene, East 110th Street between Second and Third Avenue was just the right price in those days.

Most of us have a talent for selective memory. We remember the past as containing many more good experiences than bad ones. (My grandmother had it just the other way around.) And so, as I studied my old turf, I was flooded with wonderful memories of my ghetto days. Suddenly I was brought back to the present by an extraordinary example of ghetto art, graffiti.

This art form developed years ago. Its origin was the wanton vandalizing of property. When I lived in East Harlem, graffiti was not yet an art form. Just kids, spray cans, and walls. Mostly the kids used the walls to express their hostility by painting expletives in large, sloppy letters. Occasionally a kid would express his romantic tendencies with great declarations of love; Jose loves Judy.

Over the years the letters became more artistic and then developed into complex artistic creations. The young artists became competitive with each other. Originality and craft became the norm. The bravado of youthful energy came to be expressed in painting rather than in gang warfare. Bold designs gave way to bolder designs. The color was strong, direct, primary.

The city became the canvas. These artists would stalk at night and paint on whatever surface they found. They used up the available walls quickly and then found the perfect symbol of their art: subway cars--owned by the society the artists were separate from, vital to the movement of the populace, gray, drab, dilapidated, lifeless and institutional.

The graffiti writers would break into the railway yards and spend the night painting subway cars. Then the Transit Authority would spread their works to a mass audience throughout the city. Influenced by each other's work, the artists' creations got better. The authorities became alarmed and put armed guards around the railway yards. But by that time the highbrow art world had taken notice. Some of the best ghetto artists were sought out by art dealers. The artists switched to real canvasses. A fad rose and fell in short order.

Gallery success might have been temporary, but the artists kept on painting, growing, and developing. New artists emerged, pushing the art form further and further still. Later the city of Tokyo would invite one of the best graffiti artists to come to Japan and paint long murals on their subway cars.

What a story. Too strange to be fiction. If someone had told you twenty-five years ago that someday in New York City the "culturally deprived," undereducated children of welfare would rise up, not in violence, but in art and in dance (break dancing) and in poetry (rap), you might have asked to examine that person's sugar cube for traces of LSD.

What caught my eye and captured my imagination that day in East Harlem was a new evolutionary step in graffiti art. It was the choice of colors. Pastels. No longer the bright, bold, shouting colors of a few years ago, but colors that were soft, translucent, subtle, and penetrating.

Somewhere in the destructive life of the inner city, a young artist is thinking about color. Experimenting with quinacridone violet and cerulean blue. Mixing and blending opposite colors to create illusions of space and dimension. And somehow, because of this, I experience hope for our civilization.

There is a profound lesson here. It is partly about the human spirit. We have been led to believe that the circumstances of our life determine our ability to express ourselves. That for us to explore new dimensions of our being, our conditions need to be favorable. If that were true, how could such creativity, originality, and vitality come from such humble and adverse beginnings as the ghetto? How is it that it was from there, and not the sacred institutions of academia, that new thought, born of what is highest in humanity, developed and grew? Perhaps our true nature is that of creators, who can bring forth new life out of any set of circumstances.

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Latest reply: Mar 6, 2002

Robert Fritz on graffiti

Posted Mar 6, 2002

The following is a brief excerpt from Robert Fritz's book, "The Path of Least Resistance".

A Lesson from the Ghetto

Recently I was traveling from New York's La Guardia Airport to Manhattan. My cabdriver chose to avoid the congested trafflc on the East River Drive. His route brought me through my old neighborhood in East Harlem.

I had moved there after getting a master's degree from the Boston Conservatory of Music. What a contrast that was, cultural Boston and "culturally deprived" East Harlem. For a musician just in for the New York music scene, East 110th Street between Second and Third Avenue was just the right price in those days.

Most of us have a talent for selective memory. We remember the past as containing many more good experiences than bad ones. (My grandmother had it just the other way around.) And so, as I studied my old turf, I was flooded with wonderful memories of my ghetto days. Suddenly I was brought back to the present by an extraordinary example of ghetto art, graffiti.

This art form developed years ago. Its origin was the wanton vandalizing of property. When I lived in East Harlem, graffiti was not yet an art form. Just kids, spray cans, and walls. Mostly the kids used the walls to express their hostility by painting expletives in large, sloppy letters. Occasionally a kid would express his romantic tendencies with great declarations of love; Jose loves Judy.

Over the years the letters became more artistic and then developed into complex artistic creations. The young artists became competitive with each other. Originality and craft became the norm. The bravado of youthful energy came to be expressed in painting rather than in gang warfare. Bold designs gave way to bolder designs. The color was strong, direct, primary.

The city became the canvas. These artists would stalk at night and paint on whatever surface they found. They used up the available walls quickly and then found the perfect symbol of their art: subway cars--owned by the society the artists were separate from, vital to the movement of the populace, gray, drab, dilapidated, lifeless and institutional.

The graffiti writers would break into the railway yards and spend the night painting subway cars. Then the Transit Authority would spread their works to a mass audience throughout the city. Influenced by each other's work, the artists' creations got better. The authorities became alarmed and put armed guards around the railway yards. But by that time the highbrow art world had taken notice. Some of the best ghetto artists were sought out by art dealers. The artists switched to real canvasses. A fad rose and fell in short order.

Gallery success might have been temporary, but the artists kept on painting, growing, and developing. New artists emerged, pushing the art form further and further still. Later the city of Tokyo would invite one of the best graffiti artists to come to Japan and paint long murals on their subway cars.

What a story. Too strange to be fiction. If someone had told you twenty-five years ago that someday in New York City the "culturally deprived," undereducated children of welfare would rise up, not in violence, but in art and in dance (break dancing) and in poetry (rap), you might have asked to examine that person's sugar cube for traces of LSD.

What caught my eye and captured my imagination that day in East Harlem was a new evolutionary step in graffiti art. It was the choice of colors. Pastels. No longer the bright, bold, shouting colors of a few years ago, but colors that were soft, translucent, subtle, and penetrating.

Somewhere in the destructive life of the inner city, a young artist is thinking about color. Experimenting with quinacridone violet and cerulean blue. Mixing and blending opposite colors to create illusions of space and dimension. And somehow, because of this, I experience hope for our civilization.

There is a profound lesson here. It is partly about the human spirit. We have been led to believe that the circumstances of our life determine our ability to express ourselves. That for us to explore new dimensions of our being, our conditions need to be favorable. If that were true, how could such creativity, originality, and vitality come from such humble and adverse beginnings as the ghetto? How is it that it was from there, and not the sacred institutions of academia, that new thought, born of what is highest in humanity, developed and grew? Perhaps our true nature is that of creators, who can bring forth new life out of any set of circumstances.

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Latest reply: Mar 6, 2002

Sakharov entry in PR

Posted Feb 28, 2002

A697746 Andrei Sakharov: the USSR, the H-Bomb, and Human Rights has been succesfully submitted to the Review Forum 'Peer Review'.

You can find the Review Conversation at F48874?thread=169439

Your comments in that Conversation will be most welcome

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Latest reply: Feb 28, 2002