Graffiti

Graffiti impresario Banksy and airbrush-wielding guerrilla artists blanketed the walls of an abandoned London tunnel with offbeat murals Friday as part of a three-day stencil-art street party. Banksy marshaled more than three dozen international artists for what he's calling the "Cans Festival" -- and is encouraging visitors to contribute their own graffiti starting today. "I'm hoping we can transform a dark forgotten filth pit into an oasis of beautiful art -- in a dark forgotten filth pit," Banksy was quoted as saying in the Times of London, which carried a preview of the exhibition Friday.

Several violent incidents, including the shooting of a 13-year-old boy, have sparked worries of renewed gang activity in a northeast Los Angeles neighborhood where city authorities have invested many resources to combat a notorious gang. Years after a largely successful effort to clear a subgroup of the Avenues gang from Drew Street in Glassell Park, authorities say it appears that rival gangs are looking to exact revenge on, or humiliate, a once powerful and predatory enemy. "I think there's payback a little bit there," said LAPD Lt. David Kowalski, supervisor of the Northeast Division's gang unit.

Hard-core Harry Potter fans who devoured the books, camped out for the movies and trekked through the theme park now have a new way to relive the boy wizard's adventures. PHOTOS: Making of Harry Potter studio tour Debuting Saturday, the Making of Harry Potter behind-the-scenes tour at theWarner Bros.studios in England will let wizards, mudbloods and muggles pull back the curtain on the movie-making secrets of the most successful film series of all time. Located 20 miles outside of London, the three-hour self-guided tour will take visitors past sets, props, costumes, models and special effects exhibits from the eight "Harry Potter" movies.

To think deeply and compassionately about South Los Angeles as we approach the 20th anniversary of the L.A. riots is to inhabit a middle ground between optimism and bleak defeat. A lot of good is going on in the inner city. But the last two decades have also underscored how many problems remain, as stubborn and persistent as a strangling weed. "It's been a schizophrenic journey, these 20 years," said John Mack, my tour guide to riot ground zero a few days ago. SHARE YOUR STORY: L.A. riots South L.A., Mack said, "is a mix of success and failure.

A TV police drama that filmed a scene in Lincoln Heights featuring graffiti with the name of a real gang and the moniker of one of its members has infuriated residents, who are demanding that the scene not be included in the upcoming episode. The graffiti on the front of a house was primarily painted by a production company artist, who inadvertently allowed a man police say is a gang member to add his moniker, said Scott Brazil, executive producer of "The Shield."

For as long as many can remember, the section of the Los Angeles River that runs east of downtown has been an open-air gallery for taggers. No more. Members of the self-described "Metro Transit Assassins" used the river's sloping banks for massive tags of their acronym that stretched for blocks and could be seen from passing aircraft. "Buket," who gained notoriety for tagging the Hollywood Freeway overpass, put his black-bordered, mint-green moniker here at its biggest and boldest.

One last word on graffiti painters--get a canvas. LOIS MARX Los Angeles

The flood channel near Interstate 10 has been scarred by hundreds of graffiti tags and, like a wound that never heals, treated countless times with drab paint. Beneath the layers of beige and gray are jagged markings that dominate San Bernardino Police Sgt. Dwight Waldo's world. He has tracked them for two decades - chasing taggers through back alleys, recovering hundreds of weapons from their hangouts and memorizing, then forgetting, more than 5,000 tags. What many in law enforcement once viewed as petty vandalism, mostly the work of teens with spray cans, early on became something more to Waldo.

Taggers have left their mark all over Los Angeles. On buildings and bridges. Trees and cars. And even tombstones. But on Monday, Angelenos saw graffiti in a place they've probably never seen it before: the sky. Saber, a Los Angeles native and professional graffiti artist, hired five skywriters for an unlikely art installation and protest in the crisp, cloudless sky above downtown around noon Monday. The skywriting didn't have the artistic flourishes of high-style street art, but the white lettering hammered home a point.

If life imitated art, it would be a simple matter to follow the dotted line and snip a 200-foot dam near Ojai off the face of the earth. For years, an alliance of environmentalists, fishermen, surfers and officials from every level of government has called for demolishing the obsolete structure. Now, an anonymous band of artists has weighed in, apparently rappelling down the dam's face to paint a huge pair of scissors and a long dotted line. The carefully planned work popped up last week and is, no doubt, Ventura County's most environmentally correct graffiti by a dam site.

When the Aaron Brothers chain of art supply stores created an "Artrageous" promotion for retail locations in Los Angeles and elsewhere, it planned to offer demonstrations by well-known graffiti artists and to hand out free "Graffiti Starter Kits. " That prompted Los Angeles City Councilman Dennis Zine to fire off a letter denouncing the company's celebration of graffiti as an encouragement of vandalism. Company officials responded swiftly, canceling the artist appearances in the Los Angeles area, scotching the art kits — which only contained markers and paper — and assuring Zine in a letter that "Aaron Brothers does not support illegal artwork on any public or private property.

Dy, a.k.a. "Dysprosium," a name taken from a rare chemical element and meant to suggest his elusive nature, glides across the underbelly of the edgy city. It's after midnight in Kabul, approaching a favored hour for would-be suicide bombers to enter the city while security forces sleep, so they can strike during the morning rush. Dy, however, is armed only with cans of spray paint, and his intentions are peaceful: to alter the drab contours of this embattled city. Identifying a wall, Dy pulls the paint cans out of his bag and works quickly, writing slogans and crafting images that rail against corruption, repression and the malign influence of drug money.

Is graffiti the most influential art movement since Pop burst on the scene in 1962? That's the head-turning claim made by "Art in the Streets," a controversial exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The show has been drawing the ire of social critics, alarmed by what they perceive as an institutional celebration of vandalism, all while drawing curious crowds (often young) to the museum's Little Tokyo warehouse space. Graffiti is identified as a global artistic phenomenon that is thriving 40 years after it first emerged as a cultural marker around 1971.

MOCA's can of worms Re "Tagging MOCA," Opinion, May 1 Heather Mac Donald was right on the mark. Like some others, the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles chooses to glorify vandalism instead of condemning the urban and suburban blight it has brought to the L.A. area. Now we are all paying the price for the proliferation of graffiti vandalism. Mac Donald also singled out the parents and their apparent and appalling lack of control as a major contributor to this plague.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles is celebrating graffiti, but not on its own property. MOCA's pyramid-topped headquarters on Grand Avenue is conspicuously tag-free. In Little Tokyo, the museum has always painted over the graffiti that appears occasionally on the outside walls of the Geffen Contemporary, its satellite warehouse exhibition space. And now that its latest show — proudly billed as the first major American museum survey of street art — has triggered a predictable upsurge of vandalism in the area, MOCA is even cleaning up graffiti on neighboring businesses.