It was a real armpit jungle on the subway this morning, people jammed up in there scalp-to-nostrils like a bunch of soft and complicated Tetris blocks. Everyone flexed their brains real real hard to create a personal force-field, either by staring at a piece of reading material or cranking the iPod and doing the sort of vague-dance-lip-synch that says “hey fuck you, world, I’m so not a part of this that I am astrally projecting myself into a nightclub and at that nightclub on the astral plane I just don’t care about NOTHIN’.”

Then somebody’s weapons-grade anal vapors wafted through the car like a grey-green angel of death. Most people completely ignored it, though the dancing lip syncher did seem to stop opening her mouth quite so wide. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do, just sit there and suck it up in the most literal sense.

One guy just stood there ignoring the fragrance and just eating his breakfast like everything was cool. He methodically worked his way through a baguette, pressing a flattened palm against the tail end and shoving it into his steadily chewing mouth like a log into a wood chipper.

On a good day, eating on the subway is a narrow cut above eating in the bathroom. And we all know that any food that is taken into the bathroom is automatically garbage. There’s molecules flying around in there, man, and they settle on everything. This was far from a good day to eat on the subway. This was bringing food into a funky molecule hurricane.

The human mind naturally tries to draw patterns, to find relationships and pull a thin skin of order over a chaotic world. I was certain that this baguette-chipper was the train farter, immune to his own poison. Then he got off the train and whoever it was crop-dusted the car again.

The train finally stopped and disgorged a couple people, let some fresh air in. For a moment, the deadly anal death-angel aroma traded places with its musical equivalent: the lilting sounds of an Amazonian pan-flute band. For just a second there it was all farts and flute music and faces too close — then some folks got off, the A/C kicked in, and the train doors clipped off the music before we pulled away.

It could’ve been worse, though.

My sister was in a pretty horrible auto accident this week. She was driving on 64 in Norfolk during rush hour and some guy plowed into her from behind. Twice. We still have no idea how that happened. The car is pretty much totalled. The rear of it crumpled all up and busted her back windshield in, and her body’s pretty rattled.

The guy who did it got out of his truck and said “Wow. Hell of a way to start a Monday, huh?”

It was Tuesday.

It’s going to be a long and painful process for Jess, getting money from the insurance company, renting a car, either fixing or replacing her car. But it’s just money and time. She can still talk and walk, and she can still express her love with cuss words and laughter, and for that I’m really, really grateful.

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The cops arrested an actual genie on the subway this morning. They knocked him right out his Adidas, face-down on pavement wet with rain from a million dirty feet. His skin was dark, black like an event horizon with bulging swirly yellow eyes like two eggs from another planet. He roared, rhyming:

Let me go, let me go!
Why SHOULD you?
‘Cause I said it was so!
I can grant you three wishes,
or I can eat your soul!

Everyone just sort of walked around him to get on the train, only staring a little bit. I stepped over him, wishing the train would stop being all slow on the way to Manhattan all the time.

Really, if you were undercaffeinated and a little late to work, what would you wish for if you were on the spot like that?

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The previously mentioned lord and master of 21st-century New York subway graffiti is at it again. He’s started a Flickr page under the name “Poster Boy NYC” with a lot more images, but these are the ones I liked the best out of the current crop of new releases.

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I just want to roll this week around in my mouth for a while like a snooty wine snob in a white suit and an ascot to match who is swishing something something rich and complex between his teeth.

Like many wine snobs, I imagine, I am frantic to figure out what to write about the week because on the one hand there is so much to say, but on the other, it’s all so much that it could slip away into nothing but a bunch of tired old cliches.

My week has been oaky, with hints of chocolate and raspberry.

I did get possibly the most flattering e-mail ever this week. Here it is:

Hi,

I am presenting information about various nyc subway related blogs and websites for a graduate course on community. I am talking about your blog for a minute or so and wanted to tell the audience how you envision the purpose of your blog. I am specifically showing a screenshot from your photo of the marilyn monroe underground art.

If there is anything you would like the audience to know about your blog please let me know.

Well I’ll be damned. Here’s my answer, mulled over and blasted out before I think too much about it and get all self-conscious:

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Last week, I posted about the giant mashed-up colorform graffiti on the New York Subway system. The post got picked up by Gawker, Art Fag City, Neatorama and some others, garnering a little attention.

A few days later, I got a comment that said:

i know the guy who does this stuff. i can get you more info and pictures of the originals if you’re interested. these pics don’t do the originals justice. you have pics of them after they’ve been tampered with …

I got a bunch more photos out of him, and he’s right … these are way, way more fun, especially this Iron Man remix:

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Those great big billboard ads you see on the subway are nothing but giant peel-and-stick Coloforms, really. I love the accidental collages you see when people randomly pick and peel those thing like they’re great big scabs, and I just knew it was a matter of time before someone started making art out of them.

Then I saw this ad for Star Wars that had been chopped and remixed with bits from a beer ad and a poster for a Takashi Murakami exhibit and I heard a horde of angels singing a song titled “Shit Yeah!”:

You can see the whole billboard and a gold-bikini Princess Leia mixed with Iron Man after the jump …

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The stranger’s skull was an inverted teardrop set with a tarsier’s oblong, expressive eyes, eyes blast-shielded by chunky, industrial glasses. A chiseled obsidian bowl-cut accentuated an already fashion-forward skull shape fairly dramatically, with a twist: the bangs on the left half of the forehead were cut at least three inches shorter than the bangs on the right half.

His features were delicate, feminine, sculpted by master craftsmen under bright lights and powerful magnifying glasses. A slender slip of a John Waters moustache sat atop his light longbow of an upper lip, its partner shielding a slight soul patch in the same dusty fox-toned hue. An everlasting job-stopper curled down his long, delicate neck into the comfort of a lime-green sweater neck-sheath, subdued neatly under a boxy brown jacket.

What really brought all home, though, was his makeup — faux-flesh-toned pancake makeup, accentuated with blush. But instead of using blush-colored blush … he used a metallic silver.

Sort of like this drawing:

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Shepard Fairey’s cool and all, and Wooster Collective rounds up some of the best graffiti on the streets. But me, I love the dashed-off graffiti in New York the best — the hastily scrawled line or two that completely cracks me up. Simply scribbling a dirty word doesn’t cut ice. There’s got to be wit, vision, or some kind of instant art. I saw a poster for Cats once where people had sculpted little genitalia out of chewing gum and stuck it on all the leaping cat-dancer crotches in a sort of wordless 3-D sculpture.

I don’t know why this adulterated poster in the 8th Avenue A/C/E/L station cracks me up so much, but it sure enough does:

Here’s a closeup:

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So I told him that I had cheated on him while he was out of town. And you know what? He turned around and tried to use it against me!

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I got on the wrong subway last night and it turned out so right — while navigating through the Times Square catacombs I heard this incredible clanking funk like a groovy factory or Tom Waits in the late ’90s. Turns out it was a spectacular pots-and-buckets drummer, the godfather of all buskers knocking out rhythms simultaneously organic and industrial.

I broke out my camera to take some video and the drumemr stopped the beat to point at me with a stick and shout “Five dollars for the video!” at the top of his lungs. I didn’t get it at first, and he had to shout a number of times, to the terrific enjoyment of the crowd. Then I got it and gave the guy ten bucks. He was that good by himself, but his dancer was amazing.

You can see the drummer and dancer in my video, below. The dancer is cold stole by the rhythm at first and it is giving him a sickness that is gonna turn real good. Like how a flu shot wears you out a little but toughens you right up — this man goes from a twitching rhythmic allergy into an incredible, fluid poet.

Again, I can only shoot 30 seconds at a time, so this is cut together from a number of smaller pieces.

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