City-Wide Sidewalk Sale City-Wide Sidewalk Sale! Everything Must Go! ...
On August 19, the New York City Council passed two important bills that you may not have heard about. The street furniture initiative mandates the reconstruction of New York's newsstands, newspaper boxes and bus stops to accommodate corporate advertising, which will then be sold by an outside contractor. The cuddly-named Adopt-A-Park program, meanwhile, allows for the corporate "sponsorship" of public parks, including the posting of logos in green spaces across the city.
The result of these bills will be a saturating deluge of ads at ground level, a huge profit for a media giant (possibly Clear Channel) and some cash for the city?up to $1 billion, according to the mayor's office.
Most media accounts of the vote portray the bills as quality of life improvements that will also help fill city coffers. Reports on the votes have tended to focus on the feature of the street furniture bill that the city officials themselves highlighted: the much-vaunted 20 public pay toilets.
But that's a minor detail in a sweeping bill. Newsday's piece on the vote touted the toilets, and went on to describe a protest held against the legislation. Only they offered it without context?as if protesters took umbrage with the toilets.
While we think the public pay toilets are one of the stupidest ideas floated by the city administration in a dog's age, we've nothing against toilets. Just as the protesters have nothing against toilets. What people were, in fact, protesting, and what so little coverage of these bills mentions, is that public streets and spaces will soon be whored out in order to fund public services that we're already funding with our taxes.
If the mayor and city council members really want to help, we recommend selling advertising space on their bloated bodies. For every Nike swoosh tattoo on a high-visibility public-servant forehead, we imagine one less Clear Channel logo in our neighborhood park.
See New York Press, July 30, for an in-depth discussion of the street furniture bill.
Have Blog, Will Gawk
Leave it to the blog of choice for cultural carpetbaggers to know nothing about the original Apology Line. In June of this year, an advertisement appeared in these pages announcing the "apology number." That same ad recently ran in Time Out, prompting one of the breathless Gawker devotees to mention it to blogger Elizabeth Spiers, who clearly has never heard of the landmark 1980s New York City art project. For Spiers and other newcomers, some schooling:
The Apology Line started in 1980 when Allan Bridge made an answering machine available to the public and posted flyers around town urging people to call. Over the course of 15 years, thousands of apologies (confessions, really) were set to tape?from embezzlement to incest to schoolyard teasing to murder. The recordings were exhibited in museums and galleries, PRI's This American Life did at least one segment on the project and the 1986 tv-movie Apology adopted the line for its plot. Bridge also produced 10 issues of Apology magazine.
The key to the project was the ability to listen to the recordings, and many people became devoted fans without ever contributing. Before chatrooms and before the web, there were voicemail systems?the 80s version of the party line. Free of cost, anyone could listen to the confessions, which were organized according to sin and threaded for continuity. For dayjobbers in a pre-web era, the Apology Line was a mid-afternoon godsend.
Then, in 1995, Bridge was struck and killed by a jet ski while scuba diving. Marissa Bridge has kept the Apology Project alive at apologyproject.com, offering back issues of the magazine as well as CD compilations of early apologies.
A few months ago, a new apology line was started by a 19-year-old Vassar student named Jesse Jacobs. According to his father, Jeff, who funds the project, they knew nothing of the original Apology Line. They were simply?get this?"discussing the lack of apology mechanism in contemporary culture" around their dinner table up in Vermont. Now that's some high-minded supper talk.
"People are frightened to say 'I'm sorry,' frightened to tell the truth," the elder Jacobs told Page Two. "They can be sued, they can be fired."
What started as family chat became a $9-a-month voicemail service, a few advertisements and "four or five thousand" cards that Jesse surreptitiously drops around town?like "Johnny Appleseed."
A few months later, the young Jacobs has logged hundreds of apologies, mostly from people who have "betrayed their friends, betrayed their bosses."
As of yet they've had no "major" calls: "We haven't had anyone call in and say 'I murdered my sister.'"
Judging from its appearance on Gawker, we can only assume that Jesse's project will soon be flooded by calls from catchphrase culturists grown bored with their Friendster accounts. A murder or two can't be far behind.
The Second Victim
The mayor's war on cigarettes claimed its second victim last Monday. First there was Dana Blake, Guernica's beloved bouncer, who was stabbed to death two weeks after the smoking ban went into effect. Last week: an unidentified young man struck by a cab shortly after 6 p.m. while dashing across Broadway near 96th St.
At first the connection doesn't seem obvious, until you learn that the young man was on the run because he had just stolen a pack of smokes from a newsstand. While the proprietor was busy bundling up old newspapers for return, the man in question reached through the newsstand's open door, grabbed a pack of cigarettes, then fled across Broadway in an attempt to escape. He dodged one car, but not the second?and was taken to St. Luke's in critical condition.
Can we blame the mayor for this? It's not like this guy was killed for smoking in a restaurant, no, but the mayor's insane city taxes have pumped the price of a pack of cigarettes well past $7 a pack, making them the most expensive in the country. Bloomberg's clearly stated plan was to price them out of the reach of most people, and he's certainly done that. It's entirely possible that if cigarette prices here were more on a par with the rest of the country (where they cost half as much), the victim wouldn't have felt compelled to steal them?and wouldn't have had to attempt a panicked sprint across Broadway?all for the simple, civilized pleasure of enjoying a cigarette.
Lad-Mag Sweatshop
Maxim, what have you wrought? Ramp magazine, a third-tier name in the lad-mag world, fired its editorial staff last week. No surprise, as the media landscape is littered with corpses of Maxim clones (Celebrity, Controversy) and Maxim clones in critical condition (Gene Simmons Tongue). The weird thing is, the staff-less Ramp is going to continue production.
Ramp's parent corporation?which publishes magazines ranging from upscale travel magazines to some of the world's lowest fidelity porn?has farmed out the laddy to NJ-based graphic design firm Rainbow Design. Until recently, Rainbow Design spit out Stun! magazine, a downscale men's mag notable for its violently retarded editorial content and near-total lack of advertising.
Stun! was the product of one man, Bruce Schoengood, a man with one of the least- enviable positions in the media. Handed a bare-bones budget, his writers were paid cutthroat rates for articles such as "Shut Up & Put Out!: Hot Girls Who Talk Too Much," and he was reduced to buying photo sets rejected by other magazines. Magazines actually located in New York City, that is.
Imagine, if you would, what one former Stun! writer describes as "a media chop-shop":
"There were rows of computer monitors for graphic designers who just slapped shit onto pages. These guys had no talent, and didn't care. The salaries were low- to mid-20s."
Incidentally, Rainbow Design still owes our source for work on the Dec./Jan. issue.
First the legs. On Wednesday, August 20, a 21-year-old woman from Staten Island was shot in the leg in a drive-by incident. That same night, an 18-year-old was shot in one of his legs by a stranger in Crown Heights. Less than a week later, a 27-year-old in Jamaica was shot in the leg around 5 p.m. by an "unidentified man" with whom he was arguing about something or another.
Meanwhile, if you thought it was hard being 16, try 23. Again on the 20th, a 23-year-old was arrested for whacking his 17-year-old girlfriend with a broomstick (police still aren't sure what led up to the incident), while another 23-year-old over on Staten Island was arrested for purse-snatching. A 23-year-old in Queens was shot four times while driving his car, and the Wollman Skating Rink employee who was robbed of $17,000 on his way to the bank Monday August 25 was?23 years old.
Not surprisingly, there were also several crossover instances?23-year-olds who were shot in the leg for no apparent reason.
On Thursday, August 21, a 23-year-old man in Brooklyn was shot in the leg by "unknown assailants." A 23-year-old Bronx woman was shot in the leg as she was walking out of a bodega on the afternoon of the 26th, and at around 6 a.m. on Wednesday, August 27, a 23-year-old in Long Island City was shot in the leg by a man wearing a ski mask.
That's just two weeks' worth. What's going on? Coincidence? Or a new fad? Some 21st-century rite of passage? We're not sure. But we think the public-safety lesson to be learned here is a clear one: Don't go walking anywhere (especially on Wednesdays), and for God's sake, don't be 23.
Though, for the record, 32-year-olds don't have an easy time of it, either.
September is now officially Pander to New York City Month, as evidenced by these special-edition, eight-ounce bottles of Coke. A "portion" of the proceeds ($3.99/six-pack) will benefit the NYC & Company Foundation.
Page Two says: Drink water (and not Dasani).