Street Art

books 'Go the ---- to Sleep' by Adam Mansbach Mansbach's hilarious, profane picture book for exhausted parents, from renegade independent publisher Akashic Books. By the numbers: 11 weeks on the L.A. Times bestseller list; four weeks at No. 1 on the L.A. Times bestseller list (including Aug. 21); 115 days in Amazon's Top 100; six printings, totaling 450,000 copies. Why it worked: This profane, irreverent book is just short enough for even the most sleep-deprived parent to get through before nodding off - and the bleary-eyed can opt for the audio version, read by actor Samuel L. Jackson.

Bruce Springsteen eloquently eulogized his friend of more than four decades and E Street Band saxophonist Clarence Clemons Tuesday at a private funeral at a small church in Palm Beach, Fla. The roughly two-hour service for the 69-year-old Clemons, known as the Big Man and Springsteen's main foil onstage over their long careers, was at the Royal Poinciana Chapel on this manicured island of the rich and famous. Faint strains of music could be heard outside the small gray church. Springsteen, among those delivering eulogies, spoke of his long kinship with Clemons, according to those leaving the church.

FAMILY All street art is temporary, but the vibrant murals splashed onto the pavement at the Pasadena Chalk Festival are particularly fleeting. Over two days, about 600 artists will cover the concrete with original art. Awards will be given to select pieces. The event also features live music and children's activities. Paseo Colorado, 280 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena. 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Sat. and Sun. Free. (626) 795-9100. http://www.pasadenachalkfestival.com.

The obvious, already-engaged debate about "Art in the Streets," the show that L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art bills as "the first major U.S. museum exhibition on the history of graffiti and street art," is whether the genre deserves to be certified as museum-quality or decried as vandalism. But look beneath that surface, and the show at MOCA's Geffen Contemporary also poses questions that have roiled the museum world for the better part of a decade. In planning and executing an exhibition, when is it OK for a nonprofit art museum to forge ties with a profit-seeking art entrepreneur?

The Museum of Contemporary Art expected to make some waves when it launched "Art in the Streets," billed as the first major U.S. museum survey exhibition on graffiti and street art. But the LAPD said the show has also become a target of taggers who want to leave a mark of their own outside the Little Tokyo exhibition space where the show opened Sunday. In a city considered one of the birthplaces of street art, the exhibit at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA has intensified an already fierce debate about whether something that is illegal can also have artistic value.

Ahead of MOCA's sweeping "Art in the Streets" exhibition, opening April 17 at the Geffen Contemporary, The Times interviewed three street art pioneers from the show: Chaz Bojórquez, Craig Stecyk and Risk. A Q&A with Stecyk follows below; read the rest of the story here and here . Craig Stecyk helped define the surf-skate-punk-graffiti aesthetic of Venice and Santa Monica in the 1970s by publishing his photographs of Dogtown and Z-Boys skaters in various magazines.