(Norm Parkinson)
I have had a New York based road-runner email address for 12 years. It was an easy address for people to remember: q6@nyc.rr.etc... I only give it out here in partial form because those useless money-grubbers are canceling it after 12 years simply because I am moving. There were no options for me to have the emails forwarded to another address, even for a time, or to pay to continue the webmail based portion of the service. Nothing. Very soon I will lose that account and all of the years of contacts I have made through it. I guess I've got my work cut out for me. I'm going to email my entire address book an email update.
Those type mass emails are always annoying and useless. I don't know why I feel this way. I just do. I just get annoyed that somebody that I don't like has thought enough of me to try and have me update my contact for them. It's presumptuous.
Ok, enough about those ingrates. They're probably testing spam emails on animals right now. I told the tech support guy that the "road-runner" mascot was quite fitting considering their service options.
I had another pleasant encounter with a Soho street artist yesterday. He screamed at me not to take a picture of the "art" he was trying to do commerce with, which was blocking a doorway. I told him that I was in public and could take a picture of whatever I wanted to. He said that I could at least ask first. I said, "Why? you didn't ask if you could scream at me first. Asking only supports the false assertion that I need to. I don't." He was pretty close to me so I asked him to back away from me, that his behavior was threatening. It's illegal to physically threaten people, I reminded him. I told him to stop pointing at my eyeball or I would have to seek legal intervention, or something even more unpleasant.
Now, I would never call the cops. They are useless and mostly make matters worse in situations where they are not needed, and definitely do where they are needed. But it occurred to me to ask this guy if he had a license to sell any of this stuff. He lost his mind, what little of it he had left to lose anyway. The effect was immediate. His eyes bulged and changed to the color of undercooked steak. He entered a apoplectic state, a sort of Tourette's Syndrome of artistic freedoms and rights. When he calmed down a little bit, but still not quite back to his merely physically threatening state, I asked him if he considered photography an art form too. His mind stabbed me repeatedly in the neck and abdomen with a Rambo knife. I'm pretty certain he would have actually done so if he would have have something handy to do so with. I could see his mind racing towards the idea of nearby weapons. Sharp objects in the employ of artistry that could be used for evil rather than commerce.
I decided to not let this issue rest so easily. I was on my lunch break and trying to relax from the many pressures of my job and this was one way that I was determined to accomplish that meager goal. I asked him if I displayed my images of his artwork here on the street, right next to where he was, but sold mine for much less, would that be okay with him? You see, I had learned to ask first.... I went on to repeat some of his sentence fragments about artistic freedoms and rights, but without the spittle missiles, and invectives.
He gave up, sort of. He walked quickly away, though not directionlessly so. He walked towards his bag of supplies with seeming aim and purpose. I envisioned either the barrel of a gun being the next thing I took a picture of, or myself bleeding to death on Broome St. from repeated knife wounds to the inner eyeballs. He had a mustache so who knows what implement of destruction he might have produced for my undoing. It could have been a scythe, or maybe an antique ceramic dagger, or a rusty caltrop. Who knew what surprise awaited me. The mysterious world of violent mustache crime has long been a subject of academic study. I opted not to participate further in any field research on the matter. It was only my lunch break...
I decided to move on and get a bag of potato chips... to live to art another day, etc.
Below is the piece of art that he was stridently protecting, reprinted here without permission but rather with artistic freedom.
Below that is an out of focus picture of the artist that I took as he was attempting to take a picture of me. I told him that I do only nude action shots.
I believe the "TM" from the image below stands for "Tourette's, Man" but I can not verify this.
(Shotgun House, TM)
(photo by Sean Cusick)
(Coprolaliac)
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