No Smoking

Any Republican politician who takes a stand on an issue will be compared to Hitler. The comparison has been made so many times that it has become meaningless. So what will we do when the nationalist socialist workers find themselves a new leader?

YoU LIVE IN NYC AND YOU HAVE NO SKILLS?

I love the crazy ones. Here's the text, preserving the capitalization and emphasis:

YoU LIVE IN NYC AND YOU HAVE NO SKILLS?
TAKE ADVANTAGE OF LIVING IN NYC-!!!
BE GLAD YOU LIVE IN THE LAND OF THE INDUSTRIES OF OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE ARTS/EDUCATION/AND THE FOREFRONT OF HEALING!!!
ARTIST DEVELOPMENT
MUSIC/DANCE THERAPY SPECIALIST-DOCUMENT YOUR HEALING JOURNEY/ADVOCACY/ENERGY THERAPIES/ANIMAL THERAPIES/REFERALLS
LYRIC AND SONGWRITING
RECORDING
ENGINEERING
PRODUCING
MENTORSHIP
TUTORING IN MOST SUBJECTS-SCHOOL TO ARTS
PRIVATE TRAINER
VOICEOVERS
MIDTOWN STUDIO WITH
PARKING
RADIO ACCESS FOR MANY CLIENTS-ALL AGES AND GENRES

646-637-8584/portlife2@yahoo.com

Guardian Angels

The Guardian Angels are like the Boy Scouts - you know that they still exist, but their raison d'être expired a long time ago.

Corporate Vandals Not Welcome

I too am bothered by street campaigns by big corporations but where do you draw the line? How big can your band, magazine, website or improv theater get before you become a corporate vandal?

What's next for the iPod guy?

I got this Jews for Jesus pamphlet at the Union Square subway stop. Here's the text, preserving the emphasis:

Steve Jobs - you started in lowly circumstances...a garage in Los Altos, California. You founded Apple Computer and took a bite out of the rest of the industry. You pioneered a whole new way of computing.

Yes, you were ousted, but you went on to form Next Computer.

Then you came roaring back to Apple and became the King of Computer Style.
You co-founded Pixar. You brought us OSX. You invented the iPod, iTunes, and iDon't know what else.

Your critics said you had a Reality Distortion Field, but you created your own reality.

What could possibly come next? Nano-tunes? Ectoplasmic operating systems? Celebrity status on other planets?

Steve, you have done wonders for our Wired life.

But life is more than wires. Silicon can't satisfy the soul. Hi-tech won't heal the heart.

We'd like you to meet someone who is kind of like you. Someone who also started out humbly. Someone who had a good career. Someone who also took a fall and then, kind of like you did, came back to life.

Maybe you know who I'm talking about, Steve - it's Jesus the Messiah. He was born in a donkey's feeding trough, even more humble than a garage.

He was killed, but not in a power coup. He said it was his purpose to die - so that you and I could be made spiritually whole.

(You'll pardon the pun, but when Adam and Eve took a "byte" out of THE "apple," humanity lost something that no GPS system could ever locate.

When he rose from the dead, it wasn't with a new company but with new life for all of us who trust in him.

Steve, you might be able to run circles around circuits. But reality is found in Jesus. iKnow and uShould too, since your life story and his have more than a few things in common.

Besides, you know something about operating systems. Isn't it time you asked God to give you* a new OS?

Now that would be the best NeXTSTEP for you, * Steve.

*This offer not restricted to Steve Jobs.

This is like when Hollywood puts computers, the Internet and hackers into movies to try to seem contemporary. Usually it doesn't work. (Remember "Fear Dot Com"?) Just because half the people on the subway have iPods doesn't mean that they'll be able to relate to this message.

Supreme Trading

While we're on the subject of band names, punk is another genre where the pickings for fresh names are slim. Menstrual Tramps is good. So is Hymen Holocaust, although it's right next door to Anal Holocaust. Blackout Shoppers isn't bad either.

Congratulations to Endangered Feces for coming up with a name that combines punk aggression with a junior high school level of humor.

Drink 'Til You Piss Metal

It must be hard to think of an original name for a metal band. It seems that every moniker involving death and Satan is already taken, leading to bands calling themselves Planned Collapse and Killinit.

Yet Ramming Speed found one that had been overlooked. It sounds like the name of a second-tier band from the early 80s, and I mean that in a good way.

My suggestion for a metal band name - Hung Nun.

Outlaw Books!

I like the typography but don't get the message.

World War III

Found in Long Island City stuck to a lamp post. This sticker warns against World War III using an image from WWII.

Right now, World War III seems unlikely because the defining conflict of our day is the struggle between the western world and the Islamic world and the militants that we are up against have the good sense not to take us on toe-to-toe, tank-to-tank and plane-to-plane. They are developing different tactics that do not include the sort of large battles that we have come so associate with World War, ones like the image used in the sticker. If we decide to engage the enemy we will be faced with a situation more like a string of Iraq Wars.

The Giraffes

I looked around the East Village to find a complete version of this poster for a Luna Lounge gig by The Giraffes, a rock/surf/hardcore band from Brooklyn.

The guy with the needle is Dr. Harold Frederick Shipman. "a British general practitioner who was the most prolific known serial killer in modern history." His face is a maze and on either side of him are word find puzzles with no list of words to be found. It like a page from a sinister issue of Highlights magazine which I'm surprised to see is still in publication.

Leviticus - Part 7

Found on 23rd Street, a few doors down from the Home Depot. The poem reads,

THROUGH THE MISTY CHAOS A
SHATTERED STRUCTURE SURVIVING
BOUNCING BONES BLEEDING INSIDE.

This Man's Name Is Jonathan Daniel

I found this posted near Union Square. The text reads, "This man's name is Jonathan Daniel. He is also known as 'J.D'. He is a thief"

This is either a private dispute being made public or a very subtle guerrilla marketing campaign.

Leviticus - Part 6

Found this one taped to a bus shelter at 23rd and 8th Ave. Leviticus shares his name with the book of the Bible often cited as the God's condemnation of homosexuality. I think what's happening over the mountains is what the Bible is warning against. The scriptures say nothing against enjoying a hot mug of coffee, though.

Twenty % Tippers - Part 3

This is the third Twenty % Tippers flyer that I collected from a C train subway platform. If after reading the flyer's amusing copy you want a free CD, you can get it here.

While still at the University of Chicago I was approached by Ernest de Koven Leffingwell, a Ph.D. in geology, who offered me the job of anthropologist with the soon to embark United States Polar Expedition. The team was impressed by my essay contributing to the theory of grammatical gender titled "English Loan-Nouns Used in the Icelandic Colony of North Dakota," which first appeared in Dialect Notes, 1903. The major backers of the expedition came from the Geographical Society, which believed in the possibility of an undiscovered continent up in the Arctic Ocean. In the name of U.S. commercial and cultural interests, the expedition agreed to transport thousands of wax cylinder recordings by the U.S. music group Twenty % Tippers to the nothern-most Eskimo population, thus beating the competing Finnish expedition, which was transporting thousands of wax cylinder recordings of their country's cultural representative, the music group Classic Jew-Haters. If we could get the Twenty % Tippers recordings to the Eskimos first, the U.S. would thus capture the coveted nothern-Arctic market, making our nation's music number one with a bullet in this enigmatic region.

Meeting up with the United States Polar Expedition the following year at the whaling harbor at Herschel Island, just west of the delta of the Mackenzie River in northwestern arctic Canada, we continued north-easterly on the thirteen-ton gasoline schooner Duchess of Bedford, Captain Joseph Bernard master. The weather was forbidding, delays mounted, and in time food became scarce. Problems ensued as members of the Duchess of Bedford made alcohol out of the ship's flour and sugar, causing not only drunkeness but a shortage of supplies. Soon Captain Bernard complained about tonnage, threatening to jettison the crates holding the thousands of wax cylinder recordings of the Twenty % Tippers. de Koven Leffingwell then ordered that I lead a small contingent and take our chances over the winter ice, pulling a week's supply of food along with the several crates of Tippers music cylinders. Off we went. At first our team had luck catching a kind of scaly fish referred to as "connie" by the Hudson's Bay traders, whose name came from the French l'inconnu, "the unknown" fish. Eventually there was not enough food for our party of six, and we ate what we could scrounge, including the tongue of a beached bowhead whale, four years dead. There was scarce food for our dogs, and we ourselves, weakened by our inadiquate diet, often had to pull on the sleds. By the time we were fortunate enough to reach a Tuktoyaktuk Eskimo village near the Arctic Circle, we had been reduced to eating strips of bear skin dipped in oil. To our dismay, the village was grossly littered with scores of Classic Jew-Hater recoding cylinders which the Tuktoyaktuk Eskimos lacked the equipment to play. The Finnish team had beaten us.

After wallowing in an initial sense of failure, the idea came to me that we could simply announce to the world the capture of the Eskimo listening market by the United States team. Who would know otherwise? Now the race was on to beat the Finnish expedition back to the nearest telegraph office, hundreds of miles away, at Athabaska Landing. We began to race southward, across the mountains to the Yukon and down to te United States government wireless station at Eagle City, Alaska. In our haste, we abandoned the countless crates filled with Twenty % Tippers recording cylinders in the middle of nowhere. I must assume they remain there still, ready to be enjoyed - although for the life of me, I don't know why our backers hadn't instead decided on wax cylinder recordings of Nora Bayes singing "Has Anyone Here Seen Kelly", for the Ziegfeld Follies of 1907. Now that's music!

Twenty % Tippers - Part 2

This is another Twenty % Tippers flyer I found on a C line subway platform, promoting their free CD. Once again I'll write it out so that you can enjoy the text:

"The best time of your life," the parents kept whispering as we nervously scanned the local playground, vaguely aware of the strange world awaiting on the periphery: gangsters in snappy clothes lying at the bottom of the East River, Portuguese sailors in the Indian Ocean driving the dodo bird to extintion, Japanese soldiers torching the Shanghai Commercial Press Company, China's largest repository of classical history and literature, epediomologist Ernest Wynder painting the backs of mice with cigarette tar distillate to see how many would develop cancerous tumors. Autumn came and saw us dressed in bizarre tin foil and macrame outfits and deposited into the Third Avenue Ragamuffin Parade. Sometimes a creaky old black and white movie came on tv, pale lovers rendezvousing under the gazebo at the chime of midnight. Gee, maybe adult life wouldn't be so harsh after all?

Soon we were hustled through a series of antiquated brick schoolhouses to receive a lopsided education stressing home economics, jumping jacks, long division, driver's ed, and upon graduation found ourselves working a series a dreary day jobs in places you'd refer to as nowhere or nothing, taking orders from a boss always named Mr. Paris or Mr. London, unseen behind a frosted glass door, discussing revolving letters of credit with smiling bankers, screaming furiously into the telephone at ungrateful family members. On lunch breaks we spoke over and over of being born at a very fortunate sliver in time and narrowly missing compulsory military conscription, marvelling at our dumb luck again and again , our cheeks bulging with turkey meatballs, cheese triangles, sausage roll-ups, pickled eggs.

Outside of these day jobs, we drifted in and out of relationships with those as emotionally blindsided as ourselves, and upon reaching a certain age, married whoever we were keeping company with, like musical chairs when the recording stops. Due to our marked weaknesses and the absence of adults to ask a single question of, those who became closest to us were hurt profoundly.

But then there was the music, which was totally our own, distant from that was referred to as the music business or the business of music. We came up with original songs, slowly, cautiously, in one instance taking seven years to complete a four-line stanza. the music had to be good as it was the truest part of ourselves, the part we hoped would stanch a culture forced upon us without consent - cheap credit cards, breast implants, tuna salad without a trace of tuna, hysterical canned laughter, corpses floating down the Euphrates, university accreditation, bench-clearing brawls, an entire society of sore winners and sore losers.

We didn't know how to reach you, but hoped you might feel the same way. Meanwhile, we constantly scribbled notes on the backs of fast-food napkins and gas station receipts and in the patches of white-space from trash magazines, practicing what we'd tell you if and when we were to ever meet up.

Twenty % Tippers - Part 1

While taking the C train downtown, I found a series a flyers taped up along the 14th Street station platform. They were all promotions for the Twenty % Tippers, a quirky NYC band that may or may not be making a comeback, and their latest CD that you can get free.

While long copy isn't usually advisable for a band flyer, it works brilliantly here because waiting for a train leaves many of us with nothing better to do than read, especially when the writing is this good.

Since the type is too small peruse, I'll reproduce it here:

It was not a good time for the arts. We barely worked at all, and could not obtain a commission to present our songs during the five-day festival of Minerva. The atmosphere was grim and deteriorating daily. An occasional lyrical collaborator of ours, primarily a writer of Atellan farces, had just been burned alive in the ampitheater for penning a line which had an amusing double-entendre. Another collaborator, best known for the short poem in hexameters titled "Reply to Brutus' Eulogy of Cato," was accused of homosexual relations, both active and passive, with Mnester the comedian, and, as punishment, was sewn up in a sack with a dog, a cock, a snake and a monkey, and cast into the river. All pantomime actors and their hangers-on had been expelled from the city. People could now be executed for carrying a coin bearing Augustus' head into a lavatory or brothel. Foreign kings were detained in the capital - Maroboduus the German, Rhascuporis the Thracian, Archelaus of Cappadocia - all of whose kingdoms had lately been reduced to provincial status.

We survived on meager payment from the occasional private concert given on Sunday afternoon in the quarters of a wealthy family originating from Aricia, which boasted many ancestral busts of senators. Woe to us, the payment from these private concerts was made in barley bread instead of the customary wheat ration. While we played for varying members of the family, others congregated in the anteroom and gesticulated violently, plotting an attack on the Senate House to kill as many senators as convenient, bickering and accusing one another of incompetence for a recent failed attempt in which the ringleader did not give the agreed upon signal of letting his gown fall to expose the shoulder.

We waxed reflective on more prosperous times. Gone were the days when out great patron and protector held sway, and we were paid handsomely for our performances: ten pecks of grain and an additional ten pounds of oil, fresh hand-pressed cheese and green figs of the second crop. Back in those days of vanity, we would find the time to soften the hair on our legs by singeing them with red-hot walnut shells. Who among us cannot recall our great benefactor, resplendent in his glory, the abolisher of the half-per-cent auction tax, attending the garrison Games and throwing down javelins at a wild boar let loose in the arena? On the discovery of his passing, because of the dark stains which covered his body and the foam on his lips, poison was greatly suspected. With his death announcement, the populace threw their household-gods into the street, and princes shaved their beards as a token of profound grief. Not knowing how to survive in this difficult environment, we debated whether to consecrate all our songs jountly to Neptune and Mars, and cautiously venture far back into the wild interior, with the intention of subsisting there indefinitely. How else could artists such as we hope to practice their craft in such godless times?

Leviticus - Part 5

While walking to Father's Day brunch on Bleecker Street, I wandered into a Leviticus extravaganza.

He had posted a gaggle of these 5.5" x 8.5" works on paper between La Guardia Place and Sixth Avenue. I found more on 3rd Street, collecting nine in total.

It looks like it took longer to post these than to create them.

Theater Poster

The Circle in the Square Theatre on Bleecker Street is closed up and the posters for its last production are long gone. In the empty space, someone created this piece with a Francis Bacon vibe.

Greed Feeds This Country

It's true that the quest for cash motivates this country. That's capitalism, what the left-wing calls greed. And I'll go along with the notion that we as a nation have become too obsessed with wealth. Paris Hilton is the most stark example that we'll tolerate, even glamourize, any sort of behavior as long as it's associated with extreme sums of money. But this posting, wheatpasted in SoHo, is too shrill and cliche to be taken seriously, like saying that President Bush is a nazi. Having the words greed and feed form a cross - suggesting that Christianity and avarice are one in the same - is an extra layer of doctrine that's preaching to the Red Army Choir.

Leviticus - Part 4

Another one-of-a-kind assemblage of fabric and xerox. I found this at 23rd Street & 8th Avenue.

The text reads, "We are all in this ocean of consciousness enduring Every crashing wave of emotion alone in the sea of solitude searching for oursleves in the dark."

If the Freestyle Family decides to form an Emo band, they've already got their lyricist.

Paris Hilton

This already great piece of Soho street art has been improved by the elements. A few months of rot and exposure only add to the meaning of the image.

I think this is Paris Hilton who I assume is named after the Hilton Paris hotel. That means that she could also have been named Stockton Hilton, Waco Hilton, or Newark Airport Hilton.

Lost Liberty

This is a combination of images. A series of "Lost Liberty" posters were wheat pasted to the exterior of the now closed Tennessee Mountain BBQ in SoHo. Then someone came along later and contributed a new image to the text.

The Lost Liberty posters are intended as protest, but the addition of new image introduces an ambiguity that makes art.

Rack Tag Hustle

Another tour through SoHo found more brilliant street art. In this piece, I love the combination of graffiti culture and the Weekly World News.

New Nick Zedd Films

Nick Zedd is a truly independent filmmaker. This guy doesn't have to do an homage to to grindhouse films; he never stopped making the real thing. You can see for yourself at NickZedd.com.

There's an "NZ" in the bottom corner of this flyer so it looks like he drew this flyer himself to promote his most recent screening here in NYC.

A 40 Point Guide To Peeing In New York

I found this was stuck to a scaffolding pole

Stickers on the street is the perfect way to promote a book about peeing in New York. Every square in of this city has probably been urinated on at one time or another.

Ron Paul 2008

This landed in my wallet this week.

Ron Paul is a congressman from Texas seeking the Republican nomination for president. According to Paul's website, "Paul never votes for legislation unless the proposed measure is expressly authorized by the Constitution.

Paul strictly constitutionalist opinions landed him an appearance in "America - Freedom to Fascism", a documentary produced by Aaron Russo, a Hollywood producer who was also a nominee for the Libertarian Party presidential candidate in 2004.

Googling "America - Freedom to Fascism" led to the the promotional website which has clips from the film and related interviews. There's more interesting information there than I'll go into here but, to relate it back to the dollar bill, Russo believes that the primary goal of American citizens should be to shut down the Federal Reserve which he states is not a federal institution at all, but a private bank run by a cartel of the major banks in the U.S.

Russo feels that one of the many misdeeds of the Fed was to take the country off of the gold standard, an action that is gradually making our money worthless. According to the film, a US dollar today is only worth 4 cents of what it was worth in 1930.

So deface all you want, we'll make more!

Live.

I found this bolted to a traffic sign on Spring Street in Soho. Soho used to be an artist's neighborhood. Now it's fancy boutiques.

The East Village used to have more of this sort of thing, but with every new luxury high-rise that goes up we'll see less and less artistic espression at street level.

Wealth lacks imagination, and uses its means to create the monotony of more wealth.

Found:

The saddest of all flyers.

If Shakespeare had written a play called "Lost Kitty", it would surpass all of his other tragedies combined.

"To be, or not to be? That is the question" is like reading a cell phone contract when compared to "I'm a lost kitty! Which way is home?"

Open Source Resistance

When I saw this flyer I was intrigued by its obscurity. A Google search led to Open Source Resistance.net. The stated purpose of the site is "...an attempt to start a grass-roots information militia, so ordinary people can fight to prevent a world where civil rights AND natural resources are both being strip-mined for the convenience of multinational corporations and People Who Know They Are Right."

I was reminded of Insta-Protest whose flyers I wrote about in March. Only the O.S.R. site is way slicker.

If you have a poster, movie, bumper sticker or any other piece of protest art, you can send it to the O.S.R. and, if it passes the one-man selection committee, it will appear on the site. The one man doesn't say who he is.

I looked at the art that made the cut and it is far more sophisticated than the Insta-Protest signs. This is protest by professionals.

Looking further I checked out a movie of an O.S.R. meeting that was raided by the cops. It starts with a militant looking guy addressing a crowd of hipsters, telling them to "wake up and give a shit" about what's going on politically.

It was during this segment that I noticed the quality of the video, multiple camera angles, seamless editing and clear sound. This was no amateur production. I grew suspicious of this "grass-roots" movement and I hoped that it wasn't going to end up being a sneaker commercial.

Turns out it's part of the guerrilla marketing campaign for the new Nine Inch Nails album. After the short speech, the kids are rewarded with a concert by Trent Reznor and his band. The show is supposedly raided by the cops, but it looks staged.

This whole thing feels like the skillful manipulation of a target demographic by a major corporation. (Nine Inch Nails is part of Universal Music Group.) It leaves me feeling a bit more cynical, and these days cynicism is the ally of the groups that Reznor and his Open Source Resistance purport to oppose.

War Is Not The Answer

General Wes Clark is the face of stopIranWar.com, a grassroots organization trying to head off a war against Iran. Where those who protested the Iraq War failed, this movement will succeed.

President Bush can't drum up enough political support for an invasion for Iran, even with the threat of Islam with the bomb. The country trusted him once on a mission to eradicate weapons of mass destruction and won't get fooled again.

Secondly, our all-volunteer military is stretched too thin to invade and occupy yet another country. Entering Iran would require reinstating the draft which is politically impossible.

To ignore both of those points, Bush would be setting himself up for some serious Shakespearean folly.

All Out for Mumia

Mumia Abu-Jamal's is a case that has become a cause. I've seen this guy's face on flyers for as long as I've lived in New York.

The state of Pennsylvania says that Mumia (born Wesley Cook) killed a Philadelphia cop. The far left believes that he is a political prisoner of the global police state.

Mumia's death sentence was overturned so it looks like this battle will continue for the rest of his life.

Urban Decay - Part 1

There's something about urban decay that I find aesthetically pleasing, particularly the effects of nature on urban objects. The city, like any living thing, needs to continually regenerate or the elements will erase it as quickly as a dead pigeon.

From what I can make out from the obliterated type, this was a flyer for a French tutor.

Buy Fair Trade Coffee

While walking up 6th Avenue near West 4th Street, I passed through a swarm of elementary school aged kids handing out this flyer promoting fair trade coffee. The flyer is clearly designed by kids and they looked like a class group. I wondered if their teacher had put them up to this.


It reminded me me of when I was about to graduate from elementary school and all of the 6th grade classes were to perform at a culmination ceremony. This was the early 70s and our teacher had us singing hippy anthems like "Blowing in the Wind" and "If I Had a Hammer".

I knew that there was something wrong with this attempt to indoctrinate me with a left-wing political agenda. I was a punk rock kid before I even knew what punk rock was. My family left for our summer vacation before the ceremony happened so I didn't have to participate.

Leviticus - Part 3

Another Leviticus original, this time found in the West Village. The poem reads,

The only thing we have time for here is power
penetrating ebbs and flows
rushing
Volcanic power determins (sic) destinies dreams...

I always thought that Leviticus was the name of the guy that wrote the book of the Old Testament, but in fact it comes from the Old Latin title, "Liber Leviticus" (Book of Leviticus). This is an adjective suggesting the complete title "the Levitical book" or the "book pertaining to the Levites".

Boycot Saigon Grill

The move to boycot the Saigon Grill has been going on for several weeks and I can hear the chanting of the protesters all the way from my apartment. This Saturday they were especially loud so I went around the corner to investigate.

The New York Times ran an article about the boycot on April 15th. That and the beautiful spring weather brought out a gaggle of casual protesters, mostly college students. Also in attendance were a video crew and some of New York's Finest.


This is the flyer that the protesters have been handing out. The deliverymen claim that they are being paid below minimum wage and are otherwise mistreated by the restaurant. I'll believe every one of their claims and for that reason I have joined the boycot of Saigon Grill. Also, the first time I ate there I got diarrhea.

Iraq Out Now

This was wired to a sign post in Washington Square Park. The "Iraq Out Now" statement sent me on an Internet search for catchy anti-war slogans. I found these gems:

These colors don't run the world.
How did our oil get under their sand?
Who Would Jesus Bomb?
Don't blame me, I voted with the majority.
How many Lives per Gallon?

And my favorite:

Start Drafting SUV Drivers Now.

Leviticus - Part 2

I found this taped to a bus shelter in midtown, the xeroxed flyer placed in a photo album page. The text reads,

"Eating eachother and ourselves to live in this Hell hole smiling and talking and stealing

To the world of dancing Monsters In the Business of Death

Standing on piles of corpses shouting I was Survivor King I was loved I"

This posting has the email address leviticusart@gmail.com so Leviticus thinks of himself as an artist and he(?) owns a computer.