You KNOW graffiti is beyond overground when the WALL STREET JOURNAL is actually REPORTING on battles:

A GAME OF TAG BREAKS OUT BETWEEN LONDON’S GRAFFITI ELITE
Slight Brings Robbo Out of Retirement; Cobbler Won’t Let Rival Tread on Him
By Gabrielle Steinhauser | Wall Street Journal, March 3, 2010

LONDON—In the predawn hours of Christmas morning, a 40-year-old shoe repairman who goes by the name Robbo squeezed his 6-foot-8-inch frame into a wet suit, tossed some spray cans into a plastic bag, and crossed Regent’s Canal on a red-and-blue air mattress.

Robbo, one of the lost pioneers of London’s 1980s graffiti scene, was emerging from a long retirement. He had a mission: to settle a score with the world-famous street artist Banksy, who, Robbo believes, had attacked his legacy.

The battle centers on a wall under a bridge on the canal in London’s Camden district. In the fall of 1985—just 15 years old but already a major player in London’s graffiti scene—Robbo announced his presence on that wall with eight tall block letters: ROBBO INC.

The work, written in orange, red and black on a yellow background, had been in good shape for nearly 25 years and was considered a local icon, surviving long after Robbo himself vanished from the scene 16 years ago.

But recently, Robbo’s work was dramatically altered by an unlikely rival: Banksy, the stealthy Bristol-born artist who has made a lucrative art of graffiti. The work of Banksy—who, like Robbo, doesn’t disclose his name—sells for big money and is widely merchandised. His first film, “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January and is due out in U.K. theaters this month.

In early December, Banksy did a series of four pieces along the Regent’s Canal’s walls. Inexplicably, one of them incorporated Robbo’s piece into Banksy’s own work, painting over half the Robbo original in the process. The resulting work, in Banksy’s typical stencil technique, shows a black-and-white workman applying colorful wallpaper that is, in essence, the remnants of Robbo’s piece. Click HERE to continue reading at the Wall Street Journal…

TIME OUT LONDON has just released a “collectors item” issue featuring a cover story BANKSY interview with matching poster to boot (order HERE). Have a read:

AN INTERVIEW WITH BANKSY
By Ossian Ward | Time Out London, Mon Mar 1 2010

Reclusive street artist, Banksy, comes out of the shadows to tell Time Out about his notoriety, ongoing graffiti wars and increasing the value of London property. But not to plug his new film.

Many people claim to have done so, but I have indeed met – albeit accidentally – the real Banksy, an unremarkable, medium-build man wearing glasses, at an East End graffiti jam a few years ago. However, direct access to him is strictly limited nowadays. Banksy nevertheless agreed to an exclusive interview to settle some scores and to create a brand new piece of work for Time Out’s cover, in which he revisits some of his classic pieces featuring royal Foot Guards variously pissing or spraying graffiti on walls. After lots of waiting and furtive messaging, the trail having gone cold many times, he responded to our questions from his bomb-proof bunker. But like Kirk Douglas, I had to make sure that this really was Spartacus first…

Is this definitely you? After all, some hacks have been duped into unofficial interviews with imposters, naming no names (the Guardian Guide)…
I wish you were talking to an imposter. I don’t have much of a personality, so it’s difficult to “be” one. Also I want to talk up the film, but I don’t want to talk about it – I’m worried I might ruin the ending. Can we just run a blank page that people can draw on?

Can you at least say why you’ve dubbed this the first ever street-art ‘disaster movie’? Does that mean it’s your last film?
I consider this whole experience to be a disaster on many levels. I think it will be known as my first movie, the one that didn’t lead to a career in filmmaking.

First came the art, then your move into animatronics, then a feature film… does that make you the next Walt Disney?
I’d never thought about it like that. I guess opening a giant theme park for vandals would be next. I was at a holiday camp when ìLicense to Illî by the Beastie Boys came out. Practically every kid had a VW badge hanging around their necks that they’d stolen off a car in town. I remember the police raided the camp and the mayor came and gave us a stern lecture by the paddling pool.

Now that your mugshot has appeared in the paper, do you get recognised on the street?
I know a couple of years ago a bloke claimed he was Banksy to get into a nightclub in Shoreditch and when word went around he got a kicking off some other graffiti writers. It’s in my interest not to comment on any of the photos doing the rounds.

What’s this battle with Robbo and Drax all about, then?
I didn’t deliberately start a battle with Robbo – have you seen the size of him? In the ’90s him and Drax were infamous enough that we’d even heard about them in Bristol. The truth is I didn’t paint over a piece that said “Robbo”, I painted over a piece that said “nrkjfgrekuh”. But either way, I don’t buy into the idea a wall “belongs” to a certain writer, or anyone else for that matter.

Traditional graffiti writers have a bunch of rules they like to stick to, and good luck to them, but I didn’t become a graffiti artist so I could have somebody else tell me what to do. If you’re the type who gets sentimental about people scribbling over your stuff, I suggest graffiti is probably not the right hobby for you.

You are accused by the graffiti community of selling them out? How do you plead?
It’s hard to know what “selling outî means – these days you can make more money producing a run of anti-McDonald’s posters than you can make designing actual posters for McDonald’s.

I tell myself I use art to promote dissent, but maybe I am just using dissent to promote my art. I plead not guilty to selling out. But I plead it from a bigger house than I used to live in.” Click HERE to continue reading at Time Out London…

CHILE EARTHQUAKE MAY HAVE SHORTENED DAYS ON EARTH
Space.com | March 2, 2010

The massive 8.8 earthquake that struck Chile may have changed the entire Earth’s rotation and shortened the length of days on our planet, a NASA scientist said Monday.

The quake, the seventh strongest earthquake in recorded history, hit Chile Saturday and should have shortened the length of an Earth day by 1.26 milliseconds, according to research scientist Richard Gross at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

“Perhaps more impressive is how much the quake shifted Earth’s axis,” NASA officials said in a Monday update. The computer model used by Gross and his colleagues to determine the effects of the Chile earthquake effect also found that it should have moved Earth’s figure axis by about 3 inches (8 cm or 27 milliarcseconds).

The Earth’s figure axis is not the same as its north-south axis, which it spins around once every day at a speed of about 1,000 mph (1,604 kph). The figure axis is the axis around which the Earth’s mass is balanced. It is offset from the Earth’s north-south axis by about 33 feet (10 meters).

Strong earthquakes have altered Earth’s days and its axis in the past. The 9.1 Sumatran earthquake in 2004, which set off a deadly tsunami, should have shortened Earth’s days by 6.8 microseconds and shifted its axis by about 2.76 inches (7 cm, or 2.32 milliarcseconds). Click HERE to continue reading at Science.com…

Have a look at the Paris project in detail HERE…