Plenty Style

Found on the G train.

Kevin Reilly Has A Small Dick

When I went to KevinReillyHasASmallDick.info, there wasn't any info about Kevin Reilly, his dick, or anything else, just an place to subscribe to an announcement list.

Found on the 6 subway line.

Mariah vs. Janet

The publicity blitz for Mariah Carey's new E=MC2 album is on. On this one subway poster, a Janet Jackson fan has taped up an ad for that corporate pop diva's new release, "Discipline."

At least Janet Jackson could define discipline, while I doubt that Mariah Carey could explain the equation E=MC2.

Found in Long Island City.

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!

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.

What Money Can Buy

Found in the subway. This is the sermon, preserving the emphasis:

WHAT MONEY CAN BUY
Money Will Buy
A bed BUT NOT sleep.
Books BUT NOT brains.
Food BUT NOT appetite.
Finery BUT NOT beauty.
A House BUT NOT a home.
Medicine BUT NOT health.
Luxuries BUT NOT culture.
Amusement BUT NOT happiness.
A crucifix BUT NOT a Savior.
A church pew BUT NOT heaven.

The rest is an appeal to let Jesus be your savior.

Seeing how many churches in NYC are being converted into luxury condos, it looks like Jesus is literally losing ground to dead presidents.

On 12th Street between 3rd and 4th Avenues. You can see already how the remains of the church will be completely overwhelmed by the building behind it.

The Christian Scientists will remain on the bottom floor but the upper floors will be residences.

On West 4th Street between 6th Avenue and Washington Square Park. God just can't afford to live in this neighborhood anymore.

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.

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?

Housing a Constitutional Amendment XXVII

Housing a Constitutional Amendment is an ongoing series of flyers that are like the rantings of a homeless person committed to paper. The first one I picked up put a Christian spin on the issue.

Later, I found this even stranger example. The eccentric details include "PHONE BLOCK ESCORT SERVICE CALL CONGRESS", "SURRENDER YOUR DRIVER'S LICENSE" and "COUNTER IN CULTURE".

The back of the flyer lays out a plan wherein the homeless can sue those who are responsible for their condition. It's written in poor English and riddled with typos.

Is this flyer calling for a protest of non-violence?

This one takes on prostitution and the sex industry. Best quote: "Masturbation law in topless clubs repealed; with regulation. Man must no ex pose him self (sic) and secretion must be confined inside clothes."
The back states "There are three major Industries proven to assist forced homelessness. 1)AUTOMOBILE INDUSTRY 2)SOCIAL, RECREATIONAL, AND ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY 3)THE SEX INDUSTRY."

It targets the Village Voice for a boycott because of all the adult services ads in the back. part of the rationale is "We found every organization in the paper practicing Social Control. Under this Social Control, a person in need of socializing would find all avenues closed accept (sic) the pornography and prostitution the Village Voice offered."

The creator of this campaign is very concerned about AIDS, writing "So we investigated Safe Sex. We found only One Way of not catching the AIDS VIRUS through a five step process. THE FIVE STEP PROCESS: 1) Proper dating skills 2) A proper dating environment 3) A courting period (dating period) 4) An AIDS TEST of both partners before any sex 5) No cheating sexually on your date."

Next up is drug law reform and I'm guessing that the ideas here is that marijuana should be tolerated more and alcohol less, the same program suggested by the late comedian Bill Hicks.
The back of this flyer has the same text as the prostitution reform flyer.


Nothing in the text follows up on America's oil consumption.


And now it's back to sex...


The author calls on reforms for topless clubs but how many men have either gotten or given AIDS at strip joint?


Every version has the wording of the proposed amendment and a P.O. box to write to if you want to help the cause. That part of the flyer is written in proper English but, if you ask me, a constitutional amendment guaranteeing housing is the craziest idea here.