sway the vote

“It’s an eyesore, a blight on our city, which not many of our citizens enjoy,” said an older council member who’d received a handful of complaints from his affluent neighbors. “Therefore, I propose we keep allocating funds to get rid of it.” A few of his younger colleagues knew that it drew people to the city and gave it an authentic and inimitable character. They disagreed with him, but there were too few of them to sway the vote.

And, so, New York City joined a thousand other municipalities across the United States and fitted out squads of workers with paint rollers and long-handled scrapers. They loosed the workers on up-and-coming parts of town, giving them license to paint over, deface, scrape off, and otherwise remove the vast collections of street art that had theretofore covered otherwise blank and underutilized street poles. The workers attacked ten thousand and one unique examples of cunning artistic expression deemed mere trash by a group of disconnected bureaucrats who cared not for the creative potency of Big Apple denizens.

The workers scraped and sprayed and rollered, destroying countless pieces of the city’s unique cultural heritage. Adding insult to injury, the city council had not even had the decency, poise, or foresight to at least take pictures of said priceless works of art before having them trashed. In the wake of the art desecration squads, the city lay bare, raped of its color, efficiently monetized, franchised, and sterilized for the benefit of profits-hungry corporations. New York City’s street-side art museums are dying at the hands of her elected officials, and the world is a less beautiful place for it.

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

approaching 7 figures

Los Angeles, CA 28 July 2015

Shirleigh Ratchthwana, former war-crimes prosecutor and current head of Public Relations for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), denounced today the destruction of priceless cultural artifacts within a stone's throw of the museum's main entrance. “We regularly watch as groups of vandals deputized to their duty by the City of Los Angles (City) strip layers of art from our town's various walls, sign-posts, and switching boxes – daily and without relent. Examples of this art include stickers en collage or solo, pasted-up paper pieces, and those that are sprayed-on. By its actions and those of its deputies, City demonstrates an alarming lack of appreciation for such art as it presides over, regardless if that art should hang in a gallery or on a street corner.” Art that happens to be located in public, or street art, is created by daring and talented individuals who risk fines and abuse if caught in the act of application. Pieces by the most famous modern graffitos can fetch sums approaching 7 figures. Fundamentally human in its chaotic and spontaneous nature, street art – graffiti – is one of mankind's oldest documented yet least hallowed forms of artistic expression. Whether in the walls of Teotihuacan and Giza or the ruins of Stonehenge and Sumer, the scratches and scribbles of a million faceless graffiti-writers bridge the gaps of time.

“We stand now witness to a great extinction,” said Dr. Horatio B. Gherrt, professor of art history at Harvard's Schoullenbarg School for Contemporary Art. “This extinction, however, this mass die-off, is not of beast but of beauty, not of aardvark or antelope but of art itself. A solitary artist working by herself would take months – even years, or never – to create such pieces of perfectly blended chaos, such though-evoking combinations of logo, typeface, cultural icon, and slogan – old and new, obscure and obvious, crude and tender. Yet such collages spring into being on otherwise unadorned and publicly-accessible spaces virtually overnight and completely free of charge to the city, which then expends resources to scrape them down or cover them in dull, gray paint.”

With municipalities across the world continuing to criminalize the application of street art and refusing to recognize its value and beauty, the future still looks bleak for artists who follow the ancient human urge to mark their passage with note or scrawl (but without a by-your-leave). “So long as there are people, there will be graffiti,” said Ms. Ratchthwana. “Instead of simply destroying things they don't understand, we hope that City leaders will soon treat street art as they would treat a Van Gogh painting or Ming-era vase – as part and parcel of mankind's cherished cultural legacy, something that deserves to be protected.” City declined to comment for this article.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

on the profleshional

Immune to the lure of a priestly confessional she is the consummate, hardy profleshional. Taken to earning some bread on her back hers is a prodigious but plasticized rack. She takes local currency, euros, and dollars, she's loads of addicted and regular followers paying to bed her both daytime and night, like moths they are drawn to her subtle, red light. Starting mostly likely before time began her ilk has provided much pleasure to man, to soldiers and sultans, to peons and kings, she fancies much makeup and big hoop earrings. Known to cop, student, accountant, and sailor she conveys much pleasure to people who nail her, just make sure to wrap up that jimmy for sure before you're expose to her heady allure. To find her hit Bangkok or fair Amsterdam, don't go there with girlfriend of long-term madame, if there is one lesson this poem should teach, it is not to ever bring sand to the beach.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

today in BKK

Soaring towers all around, my feet are weary of the ground that punished them all morning long, the tuktuk drivers – how they thronged – enticing me to take a ride while just today the PM cried when high court rulings sent her sprawling, these mean streets may yet see brawling. I know not the creed or god of any pro-regime death squad that roams about this sweaty place, that waves its flags and yellow kerchief, here the mood is thick with mischief. Roadside stands serve the best food although the seating can be crude, broken stools and shaky tables but the cooks are quick and able, serving up thick beef-broth stew that dribbles down and stains my shoe. Bright possessions dot my room, my heart is clear of dross and gloom, for I now learn to love myself, which trumps dollar, yen, bhat – all wealth. A German maiden helped me hope, encouraged me back up the slope which I had slipped and skidded down, soon vagabond reclaims the crown that he'd abandoned long ago, with ruddiness his cheeks now glow. In Lombok she rejected me, her friendship now is all I see, but that is something I will cherish until such time as I shall perish, liberate of life's blood, face-down in cold and frozen mud. There is a blister on my toe, my pace won't be slowed for I shall wander, taking stock, of this great city, olde Bangkok. Maddening, her headlong pace, who shelters millions in her bosom, what a fierce but gentle race that sprawls from Bearing west to Chit Lom.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

anti-graffitos punished

In Los Angeles (LA) county court today, seventeen members of a graffiti removal team were charged with destroying and defacing public property. Armed with metal-scraper-tipped poles, the individuals had been seen poking at and otherwise leaving large and prominent scratches upon mile upon mile of utility- and traffic-signal poles throughout the greater LA area. In their defense, the accused stated that they had been hired by the city to remove stickers, wheat-paste posters, and any other adhesive street-art, and that the scratches were merely a byproduct of their lawful efforts. Judge K. D. Geisternand, presiding, allowed as evidence video footage from cameras operated by the city's Department of Transportation (LADoT), red-light-camera footage that showed eight of the seventeen accused individuals using paint-brush-tipped broom-sticks to apply to dozens of poles layer upon layer of a light-gray paint so thoroughly underwhelming as to cause passing drivers to fall asleep at the wheels of their cars. Pictures of the damage perpetrated by these Artwork Desecration Teams can be found at the LADoT's own website, under subsection Lunacy, by clicking the tab entitled Oh, My Word, What Have We Done.

When asked about the reasons why LA chooses to defile indiscriminately its very own precious and irretrievable graffiti, the honorable judge Geisternand stated from among the dark, shadowy recesses of her chambers: “How these people are allowed to deface and destroy this city's street art; how we pay them to thoroughly damage the structural integrity of pristine metal lamp poles; how they are sent out, in broad fucking daylight, to unceremoniously paint over some of the finest art the world has ever seen; these things I do not understand.” The seventeen counter-vandals were released with a severe warning, but Judge Geisternand docked the graffiti removal teams' organizer – a company owned by the company formerly known as Halliburton – a surliberty of ten whorphans, and sentenced its executive officers to life without joy.

場黑麥 ioanni elymucampus fecit

opinions not voiced

Preferring the proven tactic of smile-and-nod over direct confrontation or the voicing of his personal opinions, thirty-something whorphan Wellington Erasmoss Denyels of Shelter Bay, Connecticut, emerged from the belly of the beast largely unscathed. “Fuck,” he said aloud while driving back home through the early fringes of frankenstorm Sandy, his whirring wiper-blades the only things breaking the trip's growing monotony, before his inner monologue kicked in, saying: 'I'm glad no one pressed me on my political views, and I'm so happy that I didn't have to explain my shifting religious philosophies and say just how little I think Jesus is guiding the steps of my life.'

Thinking back to the night before, Wellington shook his head and forced himself to laugh as memories danced across his mind's eye – the woman asking if his wife were sitting in the chair next to him even though he was not even wearing a wedding band and there was no indication he had brought a date; the tattooed, self-proclaimed street minister insisting on pointing out the salient features on his chopper-style motorcycle while making sure to mention after each breath that “Jesus saves”; the condescending ease with which nearly everyone in attendance threw around the name of their religion's god while subtly sniping at each other and touting their own virtues and achievements to anyone within earshot.

Deactivating his vehicle's cruise control so as not to ram a slow-moving car that had lurched suddenly into his path, Mr. Denyels breathed a sigh of relief in the knowledge that he was leaving the South and that he would no longer have to drive past house upon house whose owners had chosen to cement six-foot-high Romney/Ryan signs into the ground mere feet from the edges of busy, narrow byways. He shuddered when remembering the fact that a majority of North Carolinians had but recent amended their state's constitution to restrict the rights of homosexual Americans and to define marriage according to the societal and religious rules of a Bronze-Age desert people, thus exposing their innocent neighbors to the harsh punishments of YHWH, the god of the ancient Israelites. His patience nearly shot and his gas-tank approaching empty, our whorphan exited somewhere in northern Virginia, to have a stretch and to sniff the air for hints of moral repression, of which there were thankfully few.

© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)

infitfada street

local minds blown

This past weekend, the sight of three men walking along the side of Route 30 was all it took to blow the minds of the people of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The townspeople stared, honked, swerved, honked again, and stared some more, flabbergasted that three healthy-looking, employed-looking, and respectable-looking individuals would dare to move their bodies by muscle-power six tenths of a mile down the road to a local eatery, where they were reported to have eaten a hearty breakfast.

Gettysburgians appear to be so accustomed to driving everywhere, so used to seeing only dirty and unwashed vagrants physically walking on the sides of roads, that the actions of these three apparently confused, seemingly car​-less individuals shattered the locals' views of the universe itself, a universe which runs on fossil fuels pumped from the ground by terrorism-supporting Arabs living on the other side of the globe. “We could see the restaurant from our hotel-room window, up on the third floor,” said one of the pedestrians, who asked to remain anonymous. “And we did consider driving, but, as we all agreed, we needed to work off some of the residual booze from the previous nights and to kick-start our metabolisms, which were struggling after a long weekend of drinking.”

Each of the three individuals stands over six foot and two-inches tall, and each is muscular and physically imposing, which, when viewed side by side, may have made them appear freakishly tall; and while two of the three are Americans of African Descent (AOAD), the third is an American of European Descent (AOED), which compelled the men – who while perambulating discussed the locals' strange behavior – to rule out blatant, uncalled-for racism, for which the area is, however, known. “As with many strange things that happen in life, having people flash their brights at us, honk at us, and yell out their cars' windows at us, for no reason other than that we were walking along the side of a road, is something that we must simply accept in our hearts as inevitable,” said another of the individuals, who is expecting his second child. “I went to college here for four years, and we just dropped fifty bones on breakfast. Just because we decided to get some exercise before eating does not mean that we are worth less than people who decided to drive around, being fat. Fucking small towns, man – most times, they suck.”

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

creativity supposedly ”still valid”

According to a report released recently by the office of the rear-secretary for Art-Specific Studies Among Urban American Populations (ASSAUAP), spontaneously occurring artistic creativity performed by individuals who are not paid specifically to be creative is still necessary for sustaining an upbeat, positive national consciousness. “We could not believe it, either,” said the project's lead researcher, Charong K. Charondibadi. “It did not matter how we tried to skew the numbers, or how many times we had those Bangladeshi typists re-enter the data – it turns out that uncompensated creativity matters, somehow.” The study, which bears the title, “Is creativity still valid?” furthermore indicates that works of art made and applied by individuals known as street artists enliven the General Public and enhances Its mood to such a large degree that all efforts to date to eradicate graffiti have been more detrimental to the continuing economic survival and spiritual buoyancy of the U.S.A. than the rise of the military industrial complex (which demands a state of perpetual war), the proliferation of the television (which has destroyed the art storytelling in this country), and the presidency of George W. Bush (which, via the Patriot Act, annihilated the Constitutional protections), combined.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

graffiti removal team warned in court

In county court today, seventeen members of a graffiti removal team were charged with destroying and defacing public property. Seen to be armed with metal-scraper-tipped poles, the individuals were witnessed poking at and otherwise leaving large and prominent scratches upon dozens of utility and traffic-signal poles throughout the greater Los Angeles area (LA). In their defense, the accused stated that they had been hired to remove accumulations of stickers, wheat-paste posters, and other street art, and that the scratches were merely a byproduct of their lawful efforts. Judge Geisternand, presiding, allowed as evidence tapes from cameras operated by the city's Department of Transportation (LADoT) that had filmed inadvertently at least eight of the seventeen individuals using paint-brush-tipped broom-sticks to paint a great number of poles with layer upon layer of a light-gray paint so thoroughly underwhelming as to cause passing drivers to fall asleep at the wheel. Pictures of the damage perpetrated by these Artwork Desecration Teams can be found at the LADoT's own website, under subsection Lunacy, by clicking the tab entitled Oh My What Have We Done.

When asked about the reasons why LA chooses to defile indiscriminately its very own precious and irretrievable works of art, the honorable K. D. Geisternand stated from among the darker recesses of her chambers: “How these people are allowed to deface and to destroy this city's street art; how they are paid to thoroughly scratch up previously untouched metal telephone poles; how they are sent out, in broad fucking daylight, to unceremoniously paint over some of the finest graffiti the world has ever seen; these things I do not understand.” The seventeen were released with a severe warning, but Judge Geisternand docked the graffiti removal teams' organizer, a company owned by the company formerly known as Halliburton, a surliberty of ten whorphans, and sentenced its executive officers to life without joy.

場黑麥 ioanni elymucampus fecit

encylopediamericanifesto: phaltweariness - dehydration

  Among the many serious dangers the smog rider faces daily is the risk of dehydration. A condition easy to overlook but deadly if ignored, the body's dehydration distress call resembles closely the distress call it makes to signal hunger; additional telltale signs of dehydration are crankiness and fatigue. A few reports say that within smog rider packs it is common for the incessantly whining and inexplicably binge-eating member to be forced to hydrate by the IPM (the Instant & Perpetual Militia, i.e. the smog-packs' ubiquitous, fully meritocratic agents of enforcement), however our trust in the source for these reports is shaken.

  Multiple trustworthy sources report that when cycling in desert climates the smog rider adjusts his body to the local variances for temperature and humidity, a somewhat risky process in which he trains his body to need less water than it needs in more northern-lying areas. The first step he takes in this process is to eat of the local soil, and to pledge his fealty to the spirits of the land, and to praise the things growing in it, and to celebrate the things scampering across its face (a curious custom akin to the practices of First People tribes). Once he has ingested of the local earth, he cuts back on water gradually until he needs only a liter of it a day, and perhaps a few ounces more if he should exercise vigorously.

  An active person and avid reader alike, the smog rider learned some of the eternal lessons of the desert by reading tales about Rommel and Lawrence of Arabia, tales of Westerners surviving in the desert on minimal amounts of water using methods they learned from the Bedouin people. (In fact, he considers himself deep down an adjunct member of the hard-scrabble group of desert dwelling bad-asses know as the Fremen, from in Frank Herbert's book Dune.)

  But he is not Fremen, and he is not Bedouin – he is a smog-riding street-art vagabond, a man free of scorn and haste whose heart is pure, and in whom there is no room for death.

  Spes Mea In Ratio Est - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp