raiyi kma saft

Reflecting upon habits that have helped me survive the act of bicycling many hundreds of miles through various cities, I have settled upon three basic rules, which are provided below (next to their corresponding acronyms):

raiyi (ride as if you’re invisible) Motor vehicle operators - especially ones who are in a hurry or looking at their mobile devices whilst driving - are not looking out for and don’t give a fuck about cyclists. Persons who move themselves across the phaltscape balanced atop a few tubes of metal, skin-to-sky, would do well to ride in the center of the lane, stay out of blind-spots, and always wear brightly flashing lights - day and night.

kma (keep moving, always) Bicyclists who stop within a lane to check a map or ask a passerby for directions are liable to get struck by a passing car. When you’re riding a bicycle, keep moving, always. If you come across a traffic jam, don’t sit there waiting for it to unfuck itself - mount the curb or seek out a side route, even if this adds distance to your journey. Bicycles were invented to let people move themselves around swiftly, not as a wheeled seat upon which to wait around for others to get their shit together.

saft (stay away from traffic) Prefer side routes, alleys, bicycle paths, empty lots, sidewalks &c. to roads frequented by cars. If motor vehicle operators in your city tend to cut in just behind you, missing your rear tire by inches as they slot into your lane, avoid them like the plague. Even slight contact can send a velocipedist sprawling onto the road - and under the wheels of the tailgating two-ton slave’s chariot.

This is not an exhaustive list; it covers the most fundamental rules for surviving whilst bicycling in an urban environment, only. Always wear a helmet, especially around moving cars. Unless you have no soul, yield to pedestrians. And slow down, for the love of love - death awaits us all.

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ] ​

on anti-graffiti

Cities go to great lengths to try and thwart the application of street art. They send out minions to paint over graffiti and scrape it away, apply materials that keep stickers from sticking, raise street signs and utility boxes higher to make them harder to reach, and cake on a cottage-cheese-like layer that diminishes a pole's available surface area. Not one of these measures keeps the graffito from pursuing his trade; rather, they force the SDUBS (self directed urban beautification specialist) to seek out new surfaces upon which to make his art, higher and less accessible areas to cover with paper or paint, new and craftier ways to make a name for himself in the riotous and anarchic meritocracy that is graffiti. We hope that someday the leadership councils of these cities will choose to promote and support the dazzling and intricate arrays of free artwork that the graffito spends his time and money creating and risks his life and liberty applying rather than them wasting limited resources on destroying beauty and making the asphalt landscape visually uniform. A barren phaltscape compels people to go home, draw a picture on a piece of paper, and tape or glue their creation to a neighborhood tree, pole, post, box, booth, or sign. Graffiti is among the oldest forms of human artistic expression we know of; for tens of thousands of years, mankind has been free to alter his surroundings, and there is indication he will be stopping anytime soon. Street art is here to stay and it will not be forced away so gather pen and pad and brush and get you outside – hurry, rush!

mentiri factorem fecit – 場黑麥

on street art's blooming goddess

For all of their differences in style, method, appearance, gait, and habit, street artists share one thing in common: A life-long love for dandelions (or, more specifically, for kicking off their white, fluffy, puff-ball-like heads). As individuals who spend their time defacing and destroying things that everyone else seems to be ignoring, graffiti-writers will – should the opportunity present itself – run wildly into a field of dandelions solely to decapitate as many of them as they can in as short an amount of time as possible. The dandelion requires just this sort of action to spread her seeds upon the Shifting Winds of Fortune, and because she gains benefit of the graffito's destructive tendencies, she is his goddess, his flower-patroness.

Beyond the symbiotic interdependency of dandelion with street artist, the two also share other traits, albeit ones perhaps less obvious to the casual observer. Both are loathed by the population in general, the flower for its tendency to grow nearly anywhere regardless of efforts to keep it out, the art for its tendency to appear on most any imaginable surface regardless of perimeter fencing, guards, closed-circuit television cameras, or watchdogs. Both are loved by a shrinking, silent minority that keeps its opinions to itself in an effort to enjoy beauty wherever beauty should arise. Dandelions grow in neglected, contaminated, and otherwise ignored places (gutters, trash heaps, empty lots) where little else can gain foothold; street art appears in neglected, contaminated, and otherwise ignored places (alleyways, abandoned buildings, concrete highway embankments) where few persons would normally venture. Cities hire squads of individuals, outfitting them with brushes and buckets and sending them out to paint over great patches of well-executed works of art, thus providing the graffito with fresh canvas upon which to erect his new works, and encouraging him to pursue his Happiness in places hard or dangerous to reach; similarly, the dandelion – which is sprayed with poison, dug out of the soil, dug into the soil, weeded, treated, and burned, all to little avail – itself being a cheerful little blossom, is more than likely to re-appear during the next growing season in greater numbers than before and with deeper and more tenacious roots. It is just as hard to catch a vandal in the act of applying his craft as it is to catch a dandelion in the act of colonizing new terrain, whereas street art and dandelions improve the human condition freely and without ado, laying beauty at mankind's feet without seeking thanks or asking so much as a by-your-leave. And, perhaps finally, street art appears as if by magic, covering and enlivening large surfaces that just the day before had been blank, imposing concrete walls; and dandelions appear if by magic, their shining yellow faces covering and enlivening lawns that just the day before had been mono-cultured, sterile swaths of grass denuded of any traces of natural abundance.

We, the SDUBS* of America, would like to remind the inhabitants of this land to search for beauty in places it is rarely thought to inhabit, to pioneer ways to improve the urban and the natural environments (especially by blanketing each with bright and vibrant colors), to rejoice in the sudden – almost magical – appearance of beauty in places forgotten and forlorn, and to remember to honor Goddess Dandelion by kicking as many of her puffy balls as you possible can. Stay on your toes out there, dear friends, and may you be filled, always, with divine breath.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

(* self-directed urban beautification specialists)

on the SDUBS codex

Street artists have a method, yet they have no known method; they follow a code, yet they follow no known code. There is a rule and a measure to the business of graffiti, a codex of unwritten, non-binding, and unspoken rules that are themselves constantly in flux, and always changing. As it would be foolish to attempt to capture these rules or to try to fix them in ink and in time, and as few who dare write about them live to tell the tale (let alone receive any sort of respect from their peers), let us examine a few of the more apparent entries in the SDUBS codex, or the Self Directed Urban Beautification Specialist's rulebook.

To celebrate the glories of socialism, the SDUBS applies her artwork primarily to public property such as street signs, USPS mail boxes, pavement, asphalt, utility poles, subway and light-rail cars, city buses, and to any otherwise unadorned surface located in or on local, state, or federal government buildings. (Graffiti will find its way onto privately-owned property, but if it does, it more than likely belongs on whatever boring and otherwise unadorned surface the vandal decided to deface.) Since she cannot hope to please all persons who might cast eyes upon her labors, the SDUBS works to satisfy her own artistic sensitivities and not those of anyone else. As her work is constantly exposed to external and internal criticism, she allows her natural abilities to flourish ceaselessly, and strives to make her artwork more vibrant, more colorful, less oppressive, more daring, less confusing, and more dastardly than all the rest; it is her goal to criticize those things as she sees wrong with the society in which she lives. Driven by a righteous purity that even she cannot quite explain, she is always on the move seeking out virgin surfaces upon which to display her talents. A creature of deep serenity and pervasive inner calm, she goes about the business of graffiti accompanied only by her own steadfast conviction, never hesitating in the application of her work, never fearful of the potential consequences of her actions, never glancing about to see who might be looking at her; she is a seasoned operator who cares about little but the task at hand. She does not linger near the applied work, nor does she deviate from her course any longer than it might take to stick up her dearly departed piece. And, finally, she experiments with any and every conceivable style of artwork creation and application until she has found the mixture that suits her best: Hereby, she avoids frustration, plays to her greatest strengths, and stagnates neither in style nor in daring.

The author hopes that this brief but poorly-worded and insufficiently-researched list might help the uninitiated to gain a better understanding of street art, of the street artist, and of the goals and aspirations of these strange and wonderful persons. To the night-crawling, alley-lurking, pride-swallowing, risk-taking SDUBS of the world: May your pens not leak, your nozzles never clog, and your hearts stay free of pride and malice. Mahalo, friends, mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

on the magical nature of street art | encyclopediamericanifesto

  There is mysterious work afoot in major cities across America – the work of street artists! Search modern urban architecture's unadorned spaces, and you will find gallery upon gallery of cunningly executed and deftly placed works of art. Look in the forgotten and the underutilized areas so common to today's city, and you will discover a riot of forever changing and seemingly self-rejuvenating works all crammed and pasted and plastered over each other. And if you watch over a few weeks time the canvas of urban art shift and change you will begin to wonder who are the persons who put up these strange and colorful pictures, and how ponderous are their cojones.

  It shall remain a mystery what exactly drives the individual to risk his life simply to showcase his artistic abilities; the street artist keeps from sight – only twice in the last two months have I seen street artists at work, and both times were at night. We may never explain why a person starts suddenly to affix his artwork to previously unadorned public surfaces, just as we may never explain why state and local governments hate street art as much as they do, or why they work so hard to cover it up and remove it. (I suspect that governments make street art illegal so that they can incarcerate gang members for spray painting, although these official bodies have in effect criminalized all public artwork other than that found on billboards or on other tax-revenue-generating places, which makes little sense from an artistic standpoint but complete sense from a capitalistic standpoint.)

  The self-directed urban beautification specialist, or SDUBS, works for neither fame nor money – she operates because she knows it is more important for her to pursue her Happiness freely and without restriction than for all the buildings to look the same. She executes her craft with the sole intention of making the urban environment more beautiful, and she can hardly stand to see a blank space go unfilled. Her city and state will punish her for her efforts, not rewared her. They look upon her as if she were vile and incorrigible scum, yet she has already forgiven them both, because her heart is pure, and devoid of malice.

  場黑麥ioanni elymucampus fecit

p.s. go to urbanartuploads.blogspot.com or to urbanartuploads.tumblr.com to see pictures of street art

encylopediamericanifesto: panem et circenses

  Beyond its propensity for outright hostility against citizens loyal to the rightfully elected government of the United States, the military-industrial complex and its cohorts in the rapacious plutocracy has done injustice to the fed and to the American people alike in that instead of clever or devious tactics it prefers as the tool to craft for the ages a new order an ancient Roman method called panem et circenses.

  A ruling body exercises panem et circenses, or bread and circuses, by attempting to control the rage of an urban population using compelling, addictive entertainment and delicious, cheap food. The typical city dweller in ancient Rome resembled the modern homeless person in appearance and in morals both – by all accounts, he was as likely to be sexually promiscuous as he was to binge drink, and if he could drink and fuck while watching gladiators fight to the death, he was contented. But the modern urbanite is rich, and so he pays good money to watch the circuses on TV at his home, where he will eat from paper bags a meal of fast food suffused with fat and sugar that was prepared for him by silently desperate wage-slaves. The urbanite does these things because he is a good boy, and because good boys follow the rules – he watches the commercials and he buys all the useless and superfluous crap, and he does not mind that his conspicuous and incessant consumption (and that of his semi-affluent cohorts) makes only 0.05% of the US population wealthy beyond imagining. The richest of the rich, this group is comprised of those individuals who own television companies and fast food chains: it stacks chips like a boss while the remainder of the population, the 99.5%, descends into orca-fat obesity and chronic laziness.

  But it is not enough for the Point Oh Five to control the messages you hear and see or to dictate which foods you eat – these Rapacious Plutocrats have wrested the shaping of a new order for the ages from the federal government of the United States of America (which is the agent selected by Destiny to be the perpetrator of the whole Shaping a New Order for the Ages business). The people who own the TV stations and the fast food shacks become rich beyond reckoning upon the backs of the wretched citizens who fork over their meager wages to keep themselves sated of food and to spend their time staring at images dancing on a magic box.

  While the fed has at times acted foolishly, I place more of my trust in it than in a cadre of individuals whose minds are so twisted with the pulsing whorish thrust of money that their balance-sheets matter more than the vitality and diversity of the American people.

  Spes Mea In Ratio Est - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp

encylopediamericanifesto - phaltworthiness

  The street art vagabond has sworn to preserve for Posterity the diversity of graffiti – it is her duty to capture, isolate, and upload photographs of any urban artwork she locates by bicycling or walking or skating around a city. Looking, however, does not always slake her thirst: in order to perpetuate the phenomenon of artwork that seems to appear suddenly on previously unadorned urban surfaces, and to prove her passage through the area, she leaves her unique mark, a hand-drawn image that serves as her Glyph of Personal Identification, her own meager tribute to the maddeningly prolific beautification campaign known as street art (or, alternately, as vandalism).

  The urban artist spends resources such as time and money on his efforts to fill the urban environment's many empty spaces with colorful and bizarre pictures; for his troubles he is hounded by police and harassed by them likewise. In addition to such acts of state-mandated repression, he suffers from repeated and chronic bouts of a newly classified condition known as phaltweariness (the individual suffering from this condition will commit frequent acts of frugality and self-sacrifice; his actions will reek of virtuous behavior, which he will act not out of a desire to prove himself to another person, or to claim for himself glory, but because the majesty of the human spirit has rewarded his sacrifice of time and self by filling him with a transcendent vigor not seen since the dawn of humankind).

  No grasp as fleeting as that of Big Brother might contain, however, the inexorable and all-nullifying tempest that is Virtuous Action. The street art vagabond therefore who hurls without ado the bounty of her artistic labor upon the phaltscape's expectant canvasses while showcasing freely upon w³  her fellow street artists' work (where it shall be judged and ignored until all servers crash at once), she who does these things simply because they need doing, she who refuses to claim ownership over any part of the process, that street artist is phaltworthy – she acts for the good of the world by leaving well enough alone.

  Spes Mea In Ratio Est - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp