Ads in New York Show State Animals Trying to Resign
1010WINS
March 10, 2010

Albany, N.Y. (AP/ 1010 WINS) — A coalition of environmental groups has a new ad campaign urging lawmakers to restore money to the state’s Environmental Protection Fund.

The ad features the state’s “official” animals — bluebird, snapping turtle, beaver and brook trout — submitting their resignations.

Click here to learn more about the campaign

It’s sponsored by a broad coalition of groups including the Adirondack Council, Audubon New York, Environmental Advocates, Scenic Hudson and others.

The Environmental Protection Fund was established in 1993 to provide a reliable source of money for projects such as landfill closure, recycling facilities, and open space protection.

Citing an $8 billion looming budget deficit, Governor Paterson proposes cutting the Environmental Protection fund by about one-third to $143 million.

Update January 30, 2010: High Jinks to Handcuffs for Landrieu Provocateur, The New York Times

ACORN foe: Phone scheme meant to embarrass senator
by Michael Kunzelman and Brett J. Blackledge
1010WINS
January 29, 2009

New Orleans (AP) — A conservative activist accused of trying to tamper with Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu’s phones said he and three others charged in the incident wanted to investigate complaints that constituents calling her office couldn’t get through.

“On reflection, I could have used a different approach to this investigation, particularly given the sensitivities that people understandably have about security in a federal building,” James O’Keefe wrote Friday on the Web site biggovernment.com.

Landrieu’s spokesman called his explanation “feeble.” (more…)

Submitted by W.J. Elvin III as seen on Posterchild’s Blade Diary and Jason Epping’s flickr page:

Astoria Scum River Bridge:

For several years, a leaky pipe on 33rd Street beneath the Hell Gate Bridge viaduct approach has submerged more than a hundred square feet of heavily-trafficked sidewalk under a festering cesspool of standing water. Astoria Scum River, as it’s called, stretches the entire width of the sidewalk, and as winter approaches, the river ices over and becomes particularly hazardous to cross.

Astoria Scum River Bridge was constructed to offer Astorians an opportunity to safetly cross this hazard. The unauthorized bridge is a gift to the pedestrians of Astoria in the absence of successful municipal efforts to ameliorate the problem.

(more…)

Jordan Seiler’s interview with Danny Valdes on his first radio broadcast of Radio Provocateur on WVRB radio resulted in this article for The Indypendent:

Artists Reclaim Public Space: A Conversation with Public Ad Campaign Founder Jordan Seiler
by Danny Valdes
The Indypendent
January 8, 2010

Everywhere you turn in New York City, there are advertisements— posters featuring attractive models schilling perfume, pop bands promoting their latest albums and celebrities endorsing soft drinks. The Public Ad Campaign, a collective of street artists, sees the prevalence of these advertisements as an intrusion into public space. Founded by Jordan Seiler in 2000, this group is dedicated to reclaiming the city’s sidewalks, subways and street corners by creating unauthorized public art installations. The group’s latest undertaking, an ongoing project called National Bestseller, incorporates bestselling or popular books that are taken apart and then wheat-pasted into a single sheet and installed over advertisements in phone booths.

Seiler, 31, a native New Yorker born in the Chelsea Hotel, started the Public Ad Campaign shortly after returning to New York City as a graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design. What started as a personal art project soon grew into much more of an activist-oriented effort against public advertising. As Seiler explains, the group’s mission is not to wreak havoc, but to defend the first amendment. “Public spaces are really our last democratic spaces. They are the only spaces that we have left as a society in which we all have an equal voice and can have open dialogue.”

The Indypendent’s Danny Valdes spoke with Seiler about the different ways people interact with public space and corporate advertising’s threat to the urban environment in New York City and beyond.

Danny Valdes: Is there a difference between the way art and advertising affect us in public space? (more…)

Submitted by W.J. Elvin III as seen on The Slatest, January 5, 2009:

In Spain and Iran, Hackers Target Leaders’ Web Sites

Hackers targeted the Web sites of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahamdinejad and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero in unrelated—and equally entertaining—Internet attacks Tuesday. According to tech blogger Austin Heap, Iranian hackers “had their way with Ahmadinejad’s web servers” this morning, and posted a text file on the president’s official site imploring God to get rid of Ahmadinejad this year since he’s already taken care of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett. “Please, please, don’t forget my favorite politician— Ahmadinejad and my favorite dictator—Khamenei in the year 2010. Thank you.” The site went down under mysterious circumstances several hours later. Also Tuesday, hackers attacked the official European Union Web site of Spanish Prime Minister and temporary EU President Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, posting an image of Rowan Atkinson’s character Mr. Bean. According to Reuters, “the supposed resemblance of the bumbling slapstick character … to Spain’s Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has been a running joke in Spain for years.” Zapatero’s site has since been restored.

Read the original stories in AustinHeap and Foreign Policy

image: AustinHeap

Too Cold for Nude Protest, NY Bikers Switch Gears
1010WINS
December 19, 2009

New York (AP) — Bicyclists who planned to go topless to protest the removal of a Brooklyn bike lane have switched gears. Some pinned plastic breasts over their jackets as they rolled into a snowstorm.

Dozens of protestors biked through an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of the Williamsburg section on Saturday.

Bike messenger Heather Loop organized the event. She says the lane was removed because the neighborhood’s Hasidic Jews “can’t handle scantily clad women.”

Some Hasids say the issue is not showing leg, but safety for children being dropped off by school buses.

The protestors had said it would ride through the streets without their tops, but wintry weather forced them to stay dressed.

The bikers’ plastic tactics did not amuse faithful Hasids leaving synagogue services with their families on the Sabbath.

photo: BackPorchShots

A half-century homage to France’s master-prankster
by Alison Hird
Radio France Internationale
December 7, 2009

Boris Vian [1920 – 1959], the provocative writer, singer, poet, inventor and jazz trumpeter, was underestimated during his short, fast lifetime. Yet he had – and still has – a huge impact on French cultural and intellectual life. Fifty years after his death, Boris has come of age.

Listen to Alison Hird’s “Culture in France: Boris Vian” radio broadcast and read the whole article here.

In the preface to his perhaps finest and most famous novel L’Ecume des jours (Froth on the Daydream) Vian wrote: “There are only two things: love, all sorts of love, with pretty girls, and the music…of Duke Ellington. Everything else ought to go, because everything else is ugly”.

Wilfully provocative maybe, but there was more than a hint of truth in those words: Vian loved jazz and everything frivolous.

He refused to take himself seriously… Read more here.

Bruce High Quality Foundation at Susan Inglett Gallery
New York
Dec. 8 – Jan. 23, 2010

The members of the artist collective Bruce High Quality Foundation carry out some very entertaining pranks, from following Robert Smithson’s posthumous Floating Island around New York Harbor in a dinghy to hurling themselves, clad in football gear, at public sculptures in Manhattan. Their performances, though witty and weird, are serious critiques of institutions. Carrying this to the next level, in September the five anonymous Bruces, all graduates of Cooper Union’s art program, with the art-commissioning agency Creative Time, launched the Bruce High Quality Foundation University on West Broadway, in New York, whose first course is Bring Your Own University (B.Y.O.U.). The collective is also mounting its second solo show, to run from December 4 through January 23, at the Susan Inglett Gallery. It comprises work responding to the university’s curriculum, which includes lecture topics like “Occult Shenanigans in 20th/21st Century Art,” “What’s a Metaphor? The B.H.Q.F.U. Detective Agency,” and “Edifying.” Together, the show and the university undermine the commercialized and market-driven platform that art schools today rest upon.

Read more about the Bruce High Quality Foundation:

Submitted by W.J. Elvin III”

Prostitutes protest with free sex
The Copenhagen Post Online
04 December 2009

As a response to the city council’s efforts to curb prostitution during COP15, sex workers offer free service

A group of prostitutes has decided to offer free sex to delegates taking part in UN Climate Change Conference (COP15) in protest against the city’s attempt to dissuade conference participants from visiting brothels.

The city council has contacted 160 hotels asking them not to arrange prostitutes for guests, reports Avisen.dk.

In collaboration with The Nest International – an anti-trafficking organisation – and tourist organisation Wonderful Copenhagen, postcards with the slogan ‘Be sustainable – don’t buy sex’ have been distributed to hotels as part of the campaign.

‘As mayor I have a duty over which image of Copenhagen will be shown during the summit and I think it’s deplorable that you can buy a woman for sex,’ said Copenhagen Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard, who is hosting her own climate conference for mayors.

But sex workers interest organisation SIO is outraged by the unfounded claims that sex tourism increases during high-level summits, and a group of prostitutes are offering free sex to counteract the council’s efforts. (more…)

Fixing a Broken City
by Nate Berg
MetropolisMag.com
November 24, 2009

Just across the river from Detroit sits a city forgotten. Battered by the fall of the auto industry and struggling to keep its economy running, Windsor, Ontario, has seen some tough times in recent years, and things aren’t likely to improve any time soon. It has the highest unemployment rate in Canada, a plummeting population, and the empty storefronts and foreclosed homes that have come to define this generation’s Great Recession.

Though geographically south, Windsor’s been called the Detroit of the North. For some locals, it’s simply a broken city. But there’s a growing movement that believes Windsor is a city that can be fixed.

Read the rest of this article about the work of the Broken City Lab here.

Related:

Welcome to Detroit
by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson
MetropolisMag.com
September 3, 2009

Within hours of arriving in Detroit, nearly $14,000 worth of computers, iPods, cameras, and art supplies went missing from the backseat of a car. The robbery was surprisingly quick, executed in the few minutes the vehicle was left unguarded on the street. The two victims knew better than to leave valuables in plain site, yet they hadn’t quite expected the crime. Neither had they backed up their hard drives properly, so the loss was more than just monetary.

Welcome to Detroit. (more…)

Nude on ice
New York Post, Page Six
November 23, 2009

There will be no sequined costume for champion figure skater Tai Babilonia tomorrow — in fact, there will be no costume at all. As part of PETA’s iconic “Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur” campaign, the two-time Olympian will skate on the ice rink at Rockefeller Center wearing just a tiny flesh-colored thong, and carrying a sign across her chest. The champion skater is stripping off to encourage shoppers to cross fur off their Black Friday shopping lists.

Veiled Threat: The guerrilla graffiti of Princess Hijab
Bitch Magazine
by Arwa Aburawa
November 19, 2009

Since 2006, the elusive guerrilla artist known as Princess Hijab has been subverting Parisian billboards, to a mixed reception. Her anonymity irritates her critics, many of whom denounce her as extremist and antifeminist; when she recently conceded, in the pages of a German newspaper, that she wasn’t a Muslim, it opened the floodgates to avid speculation in the blogosphere. If her claim of being a 21-year-old Muslim girl was only partially true, some wondered what the real message was behind her self-described “artistic jihad.” (more…)

The Monkey-Wrench Prank: An Interview With Tim DeChristopher
by Bryan Farrell
Mother Jones
November 13, 2009

How the Yes Men inspired a climate activist to impersonate an oil speculator—and derail a multimillion-dollar federal land giveaway.

During the final days of the Bush administration, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) scheduled a controversial auction of oil and gas leases on federal lands, including areas bordering national parks and monuments in Utah. While environmental organizations launched a round of protests and lawsuits, Tim DeChristopher, a 27-year-old econ major at the University of Utah, decided he had to try to stop the sale by himself. Not knowing exactly how he’d do it, DeChristopher walked into the auction in Salt Lake City on December 19, 2008, and had a sneaky idea handed to him in the form of a bidder’s paddle. Simply by raising it again and again and pretending to bid on the leases, he proceeded to drive up their prices and outbid the real speculators on 13 parcels covering more than 22,000 acres and worth $1.7 million dollars.

When it became clear that bidder No. 70 was an impostor with no intention of paying for his purchases, federal agents removed him from the auction. But the damage was done. DeChristopher’s monkey-wrenching tainted the sale, forcing BLM to offer the other buyers the option of withdrawing their bids. That effectively postponed any final decision on the leases until February 2009, when the Obama administration would be in office. Soon after taking office, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar canceled the results of the chaotic auction and criticized the previous administration for allowing it in the first place. (more…)

Lui Bolin, a 36-year-old artist from Shandong, China, paints himself and disappears into his own paintings. His work underscores how people are affected by their surroundings. This series, ‘Hiding in the city,’ is a form of protest inspired by China’s persecution of artists. Read and see more at Telegraph.co.uk.

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Giant dominoes form tribute to Berlin Wall’s fall
by David Rising
1010WINS
November 7, 2009

Berlin (AP) — Massive colorful dominoes painted by German students were placed Saturday along the former path of the Berlin Wall to mark the 20th anniversary of the opening of the barrier that divided the city for nearly three decades.

Many of the upright 7.5-foot-high (2.3-meter-high) plastic foam dominoes carried messages, including “We are one people.” The approximately 1,000 dominoes stretching for 1.5 kilometers (1 mile) will be toppled Monday as part of wider celebrations of the wall’s fall.

One labeled “bleeding heart” showed a sword cutting through the city of Berlin, starting a crimson flow of blood speckled with crosses.

“Everyone has walls in their heads to a certain extent,” said Berlin resident Stefan Schueler as he perused the domino display. “It’s always a good thing if one can break them down, and I think this is a good symbol.” (more…)