And I Am Not Lying » Street Art & Graffiti

Geologic Paint Formations On the Subway at 4th & 9th

Jeff Simmermon — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 20:30:38 +0000

I saw these doorways on the subway at the 4th and 9th streets in Brooklyn – with layers and layers of paint chipped away so that workmen could get to the padlocks holding them shut. I thought they were just breathtaking, like a micro-geologic event in slow-motion action. The paint looks like steppes or a canyon slowly eroded by wind and time, doesn’t it? Kinda like another planet where people have to hike down those paint layer steppes into this treacherous valley with a gigantic ceremonial padlock in the center, like some sort of ancient alien ship.

And like, every million years a giant hand yanks the ship away and rips the planet apart, shaking everyone off to drift into their deaths in the cold wilds of the outer atmosphere.

In case you were wondering, I was, in fact, late to my destination. And yes, I do find psychedelic drugs to be redundant. Enjoy the pics:

Rogue Copy Editor Corrects the C Train

Jeff Simmermon — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 22:46:38 +0000

My grammar isn’t always perfect, but I do okay. When something’s misspelled or written incorrectly, it feels like a string out of tune. Or like hearing bagpipes – in tune or not.

It seems like copy-editors are getting laid off left, right, and center – as though nobody cares anymore. Sure, typos happen when you’re writing and posting fast. And everyone knows what you meant to say. But it’s like giving a big presentation with your fly all the way down. Sure, people know that you meant to put pants on. And your wang is probably still covered. But it still makes a distinct impression.

It looks like a rogue copyeditor took the red Sharpie to this Uniqlo ad on the C train. They just couldn’t take it anymore.

Good for them. It works better now, doesn’t it?

The Spirit Of Rock Is Alive And Well And Parked in Brooklyn

Jeff Simmermon — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 03:40:02 +0000

Well today was a day. It was right up there, man — about as dumb as a day can get without generating anything worth repeating publicly. Actually, come to think of it, pretty much everything dumb that happened today is highly confidential. Now that I really focus on it, a participant in every single conversation I had today said “this is highly confidential.” For the last few, I was that person.

Let me tell you something: it ain’t fun.

Now I am sitting here at my desk with the top button of my jeans unbuttoned, practicing the lost art of the perfect smoke ring while writing this in one window and downloading Led Zeppelin tunes in another.

Things are looking up. And really, they could be a lot worse. A really good old friend of mine is in jail right now, and he just sent me a pretty bleak letter. I had to have a confidential conversation about its contents.

I could have written that letter.

But do you ever have those days where you’re just like “my GOD, what has happened to the spirit of ROCK?” Where you just look back at the stuff that you liked from your twenties and forget all the scraping for respect from the world in between the good moments and say to yourself, ‘hey man, I used to ROCK. I used to feel the Spirit of Rock and now it has shambled away forever.”

On the worst days you are standing behind a tall fence in the back of your own mind and listening to the Spirit of Rock play beach volleyball on the other side.

I might be having one of those days. They’re listening to Led Zeppelin on the other side of the fence, and apparently someone’s just shown up with a fresh pitcher of margaritas but I will never be invited to taste those drinks again.

So here’s my antidote to feeling like that – I just keep this picture on my iPhone and look at it whenever I need it:

I saw this while I was out walking around about a month ago, parked right on Marcy Ave. Just look at it. It looks like things in there smell bad but feel great, like the thing is crouching on its back wheels to leap on the highway to hell. I took it on my iPhone and then fiddled with it in a few apps and on Photoshop to make it look like an old movie. This photo may not be exactly what it looks like to look at that van, but it’s a pretty good representation of what it feels like.

The Spirit of Rock is alive and well and parked on Marcy Avenue. He may not be a roommate, but I’m still in his neighborhood. And overall, I think I like that dude a lot better now that we’re not living together anymore.

Setting a Plane on Fire and Landing It: Last Night’s Show Was Spectacular

Jeff Simmermon — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 01:47:54 +0000

I was all squirrelly last week leading up to last night’s show — wrangling machines, sending e-mails (so many e-mails) and in between the cracks, getting my own stories ready.

And it tickles me to no end that the show was a success. It was Tauntaun weather out last night, the first seriously cold night we’d had in New York this year. Anyone in their right mind would have been home under a blanket watching TV, but we had a full house. And they weren’t ALL our friends, either!

A bunch of people — total strangers — saw the flyer on BoingBoing and came on out to check it out, too. That’s so exciting to me, and that’s the Internet at its best: connecting people who never would have known about each other otherwise.

Everyone else’s performances were tight (say what you will about mine, I’m hardly objective) and the thing ran perfectly.

Here’s Brad Lawrence, hosting:

And here’s Cyndi, Magdalena Fox and Maggie (my girlfriend and a patient, helpful lady) waiting backstage:

Brad managed to forget his story midway through last night, embodying every shy person’s worst nightmare. He stood there in the lights and flopped around his own brain looking for it for a minute. I tried asking him questions to jog his memory. Then the audience tried yelling questions to jog his memory. He said “listen, people, interviewing me as a group is just not going to work.”

Then he managed to pull a story out of nowhere and COMPLETELY save himself in a way that was even better than if he’d gotten the story right in the first place. It was a verbal tightrope act over a pit of slobbering lions. When he was finished, the whole crowd just screamed and screamed and clapped and laughed. If you could grind up the feeling right then into a powder, Mexico would be out of business permanently.

Or, like D.Billy said: “He set the plane on fire and then landed it.”

I feel so lucky to have such great, talented friends to have helped put this thing together, come and sat in the audience and helped spread it around the Internet. For example, Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing has been a tremendous help to me, posting my videos and promoting this show. Tracy Rowland and her patient boyfriend Mike Goodwin taped the whole thing, and we’re hoping to release the show on Vimeo once Tracy gets some time to work for free and edit it all together. Maggie helped wrangle lavalier mikes and D.Billy did A/V and Kelly Ferraro and Julia Marden did some other video and overall it was just a well-oiled team machine.

I’m looking forward to having it out there in the world for all the folks who couldn’t make it to the show in person. Don’t worry — I’ll let you know when it’s ready.

FLAP FLAP FLAP

D.Billy — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 18:03:30 +0000

It had been a looong day of walking around Brooklyn with a bag full of colored tape, looking for something to touch off an idea for another site intervention. That’s how it works for me. I’ve gotta lug the materials around and just sort of wait for the lightning to strike. I can target an area that’s likely to have some interesting detritus to do my wandering in, but that’s about it. The rest is out of my hands.

Late in the afternoon when I was pretty well sick of walking, and the sun was hitting a beautiful angle that I knew wouldn’t last for long, I turned down a dead-end industrial street in western Greenpoint. I can usually count on the side streets and factory lots near the East River waterfront to give me something to work with, and it seemed like this spot would be no exception. Among the mostly empty parking spaces of this factory lot, between cracks in the pavement that were filling in with tall, unruly grass, there was a wood-paneled TV with its screen smashed in; a metal folding chair missing its seat; a scattering of food wrappers and discarded shoes; a stack of plywood and shipping pallets; and the requisite nasty mattress, old tires, and busted auto glass. I stared at all of that bizness for a while, mentally rearranging things and visualizing appropriate sound effects for the possible vignettes… but nothing was switching me on. Not really.

I turned around ready to leave, and saw that I had been joined on the ground by a group of pigeons that had been watching from the factory roof. They were slowly head-bobbing in the direction of a rock-hard partial loaf of bread that someone must have been using to feed them at some point. It hit me like (insert your favorite metaphor for inspiration here): with a combination of crusty old bread to draw them in, and a good stomp on a stack of plywood to make them scatter, I might be able to choreograph these dirty little bastards.

So I laid down my tape, bloodied my fingertips a little bit breaking up the hardest loaf of bread known to man, arranged the bread near the tape-writing, and then repeated the picture-taking cycle: I waited for the pigeons to get up on the bread, stomped like hell on the nearby plywood, and snapped a picture of them scattering. Wait. Stomp. Snap. Wait. Stomp. Snap. Now let me tell you – it is damned hard to properly frame a shot without a tripod or remote shutter release, while repeatedly thwomping your leg down like a jackass. But I managed to get a few decent photos in the end. Here’s my favorite:

Mini-promo time: This shot, along with documentation of other recent interventions “WAAHHH” and “ZZZAP”, and a handful of my recent collages, will be on display (and for sale) from December 11th, 2010 through February 13th, 2011, as part of the group exhibition “PARTY CRASHERS” in Arlington, Virginia. Check it out if you’re down that way!

And I Am Not Lying, Live: Hopefully, Not Average At All

Jeff Simmermon — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 06:18:38 +0000

I have climbed a mountain of my own bullshit and started yodeling. The avalanche is picking up steam and it’s gonna get real on December the 5th.

Some time ago, I whipped up a bunch of big talk about turning this blog into a live show. I got D.Billy and Brad and Cyndi all excited about it, and then we went and made it happen. For real.

And I’m a little antsy about the whole enterprise.

Here’s a flyer for the show:

Here’s the text, just to game Google a bit:

And I Am Not Lying – Live

Sunday, December 5th, 2010, 7PM

At Under Saint Marks’ Theater
94 Saint Marks Place (btwn Ave A and 1st Ave)
NY, NY, 10009

Featuring burlesque by Magdalena Fox and Cyndi Freeman, stories by me (Jeff Simmermon), Brad Lawrence and Cyndi Freeman, magic by Nelson Lugo and short films curated by D.Billy.

It’s $8 at the door – cheaper than a movie, better than TV.

The theater can be a little tricky to find, as it is literally Under Saint Marks’ Place. Here’s a map on Google, and a photo of the entrance. It’s right next to a tattoo shop and espresso parlor:

I don’t know why I’m stressing about this. You can think of me what you will, but everyone else involved is a top-notch performer. I’d pay five bucks to see any one of ‘em all tell a story all by themselves, and you get two dancing naked ladies on top of that. If that’s not true entertainment value, I don’t know what is.

I think I suffer from the same delusion that a lot of high-strung artsy types suffer from: that if you don’t worry enough about something, you’re not taking it seriously. The unspoken code here is that you have to sacrifice your emotional stability on a fire stoked with nervous energy for at least a week before any big deal, or else it’s going to totally suck.

Or worse: it’ll just be average. Nothing special.

That’s my real fear, actually — the one that keeps me up at night — the fear that anything I do might just be okay. So I’ve packed this lineup with some really spectacular folks, creative, innovative and consistently awesome people that are totally going to make this thing worth your while. I hope we see you there on Sunday.

More Tapeography : WAAHHH! in Red Hook

D.Billy — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 18:13:47 +0000

I don’t know about you all, but I spent MY last Saturday biking around Red Hook, getting selectively sunburnt and looking for weird scenes that I could make a little weirder. Mid-afternoon (after a stop for some amazing pulled pork and root beer on tap at Brooklyn Ice House), I happened upon an abandoned baby stroller between a couple of warehouses and went to work with the colored tape. Here is the result:

More photos at the end of this Flickr set.

Meta-Graffiti

D.Billy — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 14:46:45 +0000

A truck graffitied with an image of a graffitied truck. I heart this.

Spotted in Brooklyn & tweeted by Museum Nerd.

Well, At Least Things Can’t Get Any Worse

Jeff Simmermon — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 13:13:51 +0000

I saw this on the streets of Philadelphia in the Fall of 2008. I think. It’s pretty much a lot of my favorite things in one place: bright pink, comic book imagery, a worn and weathered texture.

The rest really needs no commentary.

The Art of the Ad-Hoc Consumer Review

D.Billy — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 15:36:06 +0000

Look – when we go into a place of business, sometimes things just happen, that’s all. Whether it’s a coffee shop or a fried chicken joint, events have conspired to provide us with some experiences that we have been moved to share with you, our lovely readers. Experiences that many of you have then chosen to share with others in turn. The internet is a bigger, crazier, more tricked-out vehicle for sharing consumer feedback than Al Gore could ever have imagined back when he invented it, and the right (or wrong) kind review on the web can conceivably launch a place or shut it right down.

But while some of us run to Yelp to post a review and tell all of the other consumerist nerds to check this place out or stay the hell away from that place, some folks still like to keep it analog. And I respect that. Here are a few ad-hoc, word-on-the-street* “reviews” that I’ve personally stumbled across:

*Clearly, the word is not the only thing on the street. This was one block away from the Dallas BBQ… and if that substance on the paper is what I think it is… well, that had to be some mighty fast Sharpie work to draft part A of the review before part B asserted itself. To me, this is almost like a quick & dirty sort of voodoo ceremony.

Okay, I’ll admit it – this one was me. But there was no ketchup or mustard on the table, so I couldn’t get quite this raw about it.

But hey, it’s not ALL bad…

See? If you ducked into this restroom in New Haven, Connecticut to take care of your bizness and happened to be in the market for some cheap particle board furniture but didn’t know where to go, POW! There it is.

And, in a more generalized sort of public evalution, while IKEA may rule that bathroom stall…