Stolen

Found at 5th Avenue and 10th Street.

My instincts were right - there is dognapper loose in the neighborhood. "Peter" might also have stolen this dog and this one too.

When you read about this in the New York Times you can say that you saw it here first.

Parade Without A Permit

The Radical Homosexual Agenda has a problem with the city's parade permit rules. You can read all about their issues with City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and New York's Finest on their website, but the gist of it is that they don't like it that The Man decides who gets to march and who doesn't.

With a name like The Radical Homosexual Agenda you're just begging to have your permit denied.

Leviticus - Part 10

Another mass promotion from Leviticus. These were taped up all over the Union Square area.

Union Square has become the Times Square for NYC residents. It's got everything that Times Square has, like theaters, big box retailers, street performers, crowds and a major subway hub, but without the tourists. Add a park and some political unrest and voila!

W is not healthy for children and other living things.

More from those who think that everything that President Bush says, thinks and does is evil, stupid and unhygienic. It's America's inability to separate personalities from policy that got W elected in the first place - voters preferred Bush over Gore and Kerry because Bush was the guy that they felt that they could sit down with and have a beer.

Homeboy Sandman

Homeboy Sandman, an enterprising rapper, took over the advertising space of a subway car, slipping his own series of flyers under the plastic that holds paid ads.

All of the ads speculate that famous rappers like Jay-Z and 50 Cent would be fans if they had heard his music and, in the case of Big Pun, were still alive.

Prosecute Karl Rove

This takes bumper sticker politics one step smaller. I found this four-and-a-quarter-inch demand on a subway exit in Long Island City.

Twenty % Tippers - Part 4

The Twenty%Tippers sent me another one of their stories in the mail. It's eight pages long, too long to tape up in a subway station or for me to transcribe here.

The title is "Man in a Diaper" and the premise is that the city of New York decides to provoke Islamic militants by seating a man in a diaper - one of the Twenty%Tippers is selected for the job - atop the Freedom Tower spire. The plan is based on a misinterpretation of an obscure passage in the Koran .

The Tipper's website has a collection of their previous stories and perhaps this one will be posted soon, or at least in time for the 7th anniversary of 9-11.

This is another leg in their campaign to give away their free CD. The Tippers are ahead of the major labels who still haven't gotten it through their heads that recorded music has become a free commodity. They might as well give songs away with six-packs of Coke, like when I was a kid and they would sometimes put a Bobby Sherman record on the back of a cereal box.

Lots of Money

Any offer that skips what the job is and goes straight to the piles and piles of cash you can earn is always suspect. Especially when the people who have figured out how to make these vast sums can't even afford a computer and printer. Still, all of the tear off tags were gone when I found this.

Found in front of the C-Town supermarket in Long Island City.

RAB1501

The mystery of who wheatpasted the illustration of the Dakota in Washington Square Park is solved. While on 5th Avenue on the Upper East Side, I found a few more images from the same artist. This one includes the artist's handle, RAB1501.

He has a Myspace page where you can read all about his work. In one of the pictures on his page I noticed that he had a show with our usual suspect Leviticus and I think I recognized the Freestyle family logo too.

To my eye his drawings look like spot illustrations, the kind you find in the Black Book.

9-11 Roundup

Tomorrow is the 6th anniversary of 9-11, an event that people still feel strongly about. Here's some of the messages that have been posted around NYC.
I remember the days of "united we stand." That was before the country was divided over the Iraq war. Even the World Trade Center is still a hole in the ground because no one can agree on what to build there.

By the time I found this on a sidewalk in Long Island City, the poster looked like it had taken more of a stamping than terrorism.
For some, 9-11 marks a new era a fascism in this country brought about by the Bush administration when the threat of terrorism is merely a tool to frighten the populace into submission. You can find more stickers and posters ready for printing at www.strike911.org.
And then there are the conspiracy theorists who I wrote about earlier. The activists at NY 9/11 Truth are trying to create an NYC 9/11 ballot initiative enabling residents of NYC to vote for a new, independent investigation of 9/11. I get the feeling that even if there were an independent investigation revealing the conspiracy behind 9-11 there would still be people claiming that the independent investigation was a cover up and that there is an even deeper conspiracy behind the attacks, involving the Vatican, the Trilateral Commission, the Federal Reserve and Home Depot.

Custom Pen & Ink Drawings of Pets

Found along 5th Avenue, near Union Square.

The thought of going into the pet portrait business occurs to so many artists. Does anyone make any money doing this?

Of all of the pet portraitists I've seen, Keith Romano is one of the better artists. He also does pen and ink portraits of houses.

Labor Day Consists Of One Day Of Work

Eventually most American holidays lose sight of their original intention. Labor Day was created to honor the working man but has been transformed into summer's last hurrah. Writing a poem to point this out is not much of a revelation.

Is it so bad that Labor Day is about "blowout sales" and "up to ten thousand barbeques per square foot"? It shows just how far the working stiff has come if he's taking a day off from the job to buy a flat-screen TV and throw a burger on the grill.

The line "it's abundantly clear that things have gone in the wrong direction: 'Hail to the Chief'" wants to hang some sort of blame on the President but nothing else in the poem makes it at all clear how President Bush has perverted or diminished Labor Day. Like a lot of left wing political expression, it's assumed that everything that goes wrong in the world - paper jams, burnt casseroles, crying babies - can be traced back to the President.

P.S.1 Courtyard

P.S.1 MoMA in Long Island City is one of my favorite places to see art, second only to the Whitney. Here's evidence that their interests and mine are in alignment.

The courtyard in front of the museum is covered with a canopy supported by wooden poles that look very much like the ones that carry telephone lines. Affixed to these poles are flyers that span a few decades.
This flyer, for the early 80s SoCal punk band the Plugz, was a bit of nostalgia for me. I remember seing those guys back in the day.
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The same can be said for this one for Black Flag.

The contemporary Oneida get the nod from the art world as well. They played P.S.1 on Saturday, September 1st.

Not all of the flyers were for bands and they all seem to have been picked for their hip factor and graphic design.

I should think about how to organize my flyers into an installation so when I get the phone call from a gallery or institution I'll be ready.