"If art like this is a crime let god forgive me!" - LEE

"You have no idea what a blow graffiti was to us," - Mayor Lindsey of New York City

Graffiti is illegal just about everywhere that you can shake a spray
can. In New York Shitty a writer can be fined
up to $350 per piece and even jailed for repeat offenses, yet the CEOs
of major marketing companies repeatedly and blatantly break the
anti-vandalism/graffiti law(s) to promote their high-priced clients and
never spend a second (thought) on Rikers island. A couple of years ago
a $50 fine was given to Microsoft Corp. for putting butterfly stickers
on New York City sidewalks, and last year NYC branches of Chase Bank
were merely threatened with a $50 fine per violation for two dozen
projections of the Chase logo on the sidewalk, but meanwhile these
corporations (and others) make tens of thousands of dollars utilizing
this kind of illegal "street promotion". Advertising Age magazine
estimates that illegal ads can bring in "$40,000 to $50,000 dollars a
month."

A single billboard on the streets of Manhattan can run you up to
$100,000 a month, and one wall of a bus stop will cost you $1,000 -
$5,000 per month to (legally) place your advertisement/poster on it.
Meanwhile, the mega-Corp called Clear Channel has (outdoor) advertising
space in 25 different countries and also owns Yellow Checker Star Cab
Displays, Taxi Tops, Donrey Media, and Ackerley Media, as well as
ownership of an outdoor advertising company in Switzerland and Poland
and a major outdoor advertising firm in Chile.

in New York City there is a group of firms called outdoor Advertising
Companies who broker outdoor ad space. OACs basically serve as real
estate agencies for outdoor ad space, bringing brands and landlords
together to make deals to put up ads on walls/scaffolding/etc. A
company called NPA Wildposting that is affiliated with the OAC (and is
said to be responsible for 90 percent of the posters that you see on NY
streets) specializes in the "faux-guerilla advertising" technique known
as "sniping", which is a tactic of advertising/promotion usually used
by Punk bands (and culture jammers), where poster-advertisements and
billboards of major corporations are "hijacked" thru the use of
stickers or other DIY posters placed on top of them. In 2003 when the
(formally) outlaw(ed) Napster sold itself to the German media giant
Bertelsmann for eight million dollars, it used a tactic of fake
sniping/advertising to announce it's relaunching as a "legal" music
service by posting real stickers (that they made) with their Napster
logo on it over parody-posters (that they ALSO made themselves) for non
existing businesses or products . In the past few years Microsoft,
Nissan and other major corporations have also employed this form of
pseudo "street" advertising to get their message to the masses. Even
the major corporate rock band, Radio Head, effected this technique a
few years ago when they made a "DIY" photocopied (looking) flier that
had tear off tabs at the bottom with a phone number that actually
played recorded songs from their latest (at the time) release/CD that
was put out on the mega-music label/corp, EMI Group.

The corporations have also begun to use the new "peoples technologies"
to force feed their mass-marketing on the massive. On Myspace, for
instance, corporations can pay to create personal pages for their
products, making their brands part of the myspace "community". Toyota
actually introduced their Yaris subcompact model vehicle on myspace and
it became "friends" with more than 74,000 MySpacers. The big
corporations have also tapped into youtube, which often features films
made by youtube members to promote products to the on-line video
viewer-ship. Pepsi, Heinz and Chrysler have also launched contests on
youtube encouraging user-generated advertising of their products.
Corporations also use "stealth emails" and chat room 'bots'
masquerading as personal real buddies to distribute computer messages
out to the masses to promote their products 24 hours a day, day after
day.

Meanwhile, in Chicago the mayor would like to start fining parents for
their children's pieces, in Peoria, Ariz., surveillance cameras have
been placed on poles in high-graffiti areas and many communities have
passed local laws limiting minors' access to spray paint and
wide-tipped markers. In NYC arrest for vandalism rose 14 percent last
year and are up as much as 44 percent so far this year according to
police and their "Vandal Squad" has an intelligence database of more
than 2,000 names/tags that allows them to spot graffiti "hot spots."
The unit also doles out reward dollars for graffiti information
provided by city citizens. .

And while billion dollar corporations rule and run wild in the streets,
real guerrilla writers such as KET (see www.supportket.org) are chased
down, raided, arrested, fined and/or jailed for sharing their art on
walls (and trains) for FREE(!), and graffiti writers have even been
shot and/or killed by police simply for tryna get free....

welcome to the war of art,

N4P


and.... in a (somewhat) related (bronx) tale, X-Vandals' debut
release, The War of Art, will be coming to a ghetto (not so) near you
in December 2007, and we could use any/all press/promotion we can get.
Our music is being put out by i and i (and not EMI), so if any
X-Spacers out there have connections (or knows anyone who does) to any
magazines/news papers/zines/i-zines/blogs and would like to write an
article or do an interview with X-Vandals, or if you (or anyone you
know) books shows at their school/university (or forward thinking
venues) and would like to see the vicious X-Vandals grace your stage,
please contact us here:

informant@X-Vandals.com

We also have X-Vandals stickers available if there are any snipers out
there in the cyber-hood who wanna get up with the X......