Respect Authority

Just when you were starting to think that maybe graffiti would be a fun endeavor to try, notorious L.A.-based crew, the Metro Transit Assassins, goes and gets themselves arrested. Conveniently, the contraband confiscated in the process only proves once and for all that graffiti really is a fun endeavor to try… until you get thrown in jail. And isn’t that just the case with everything fun these days? And by everything, I mean pretty much just drugs.

The MTA is responsible for L.A.’s single largest tag, a monstrous three-story-high, half-mile long signature on the concrete banks of the Los Angeles River. You know, that festering trickle of runoff and slime, a brook at best, babbling only because of the ferocious bacterial life within, that skateboarders sometimes do really cool tricks over? Regardless, the MTA so kindly graced L.A. with a veritable landmark and how does the city repay them? By putting them in cuffs and confiscating all their guns and weed. Pretty fucking ungrateful if you ask me.

Their work is not your typical crudely drawn ejaculating penis or alien giving the finger scrawled in alleyways and along the subway tracks. One has to be pretty fucking good, and organized, to deface something as huge as the L.A. river bank. And it shows — one of the suspects arrested drives a $60,000 BMW, and another member of the crew, well-known graffiti artist Smear, has recently sold pieces to wealthy collectors. Their operation is, or was anyway, on a scale equivalent to that of their massive acts of public beautification. Indeed, the term “high rollers” works on so many levels here that I think I just popped some of the pun receptors in my brain.

Meanwhile, the cost to clean up the tag is also proportional — the city estimates it will run about $3.7 million to remove the three lumbering block letters, as extra measures must be taken to keep the 400 gallons of paint used to create the tag from running into the river. After all, one wouldn’t want to contaminate all the blood-encrusted syringes and filthy condoms that live there.

Nonetheless, these guys are in some shit now, and it’s considerably deeper than the Los Angeles River.

Fucking finally.

After years of making me look little more than lazy, now the subway is throwing me a bone. According to the Associated Press, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will verify tardy notices for students and employees who are late because of the subway system. Which means I have a new stop to make every fucking morning - somewhere between picking up coffee and the newspapers.

In actuality, passengers request “delay verification letters” over the phone, and NYC Transit verifies them in one to two weeks, by which point any logical employer or teacher has long since forgotten the incident. As though shelling out some 34,000 tardy notices a year makes it okay to operate a festering shithole of public transportation that probably hasn’t gotten me anywhere on time since 2004.

NYC Transit is reportedly working on a system that would allow letter requests and verifications to be pursued online and via e-mail. Maybe after that they can do something actually productive.

A while ago, I overreacted to a snarky MTA ad that I felt infringed on my sensibilities. I don’t mean to beat a dead, debt ridden horse to death but what the fuck:

Et tu Bank of America? Not only is this unnecessarily sarcastic, it also attacks the very philosophy behind “bailouts” and paints them as utterly futile in an inescapably fucked world.

While I agree with the spirit of the ad, I don’t need the biggest bank in America and lead contender for “Last Bank Standing” reminding me that life’s depressing and its little hiccups, insurmountable. So you know what, Bank of America? I will sign up for your transit rebate; I’ll take that $10 back on every $100 I spend on Metrocards and just to fucking spite you, I’ll also ignore everything else that’s wrong with the city.

I won’t make fun of the homeless man who panhandled then attacked the “hypocritical blacks” on the train who didn’t give him money. I won’t write about 12-year-old Lashanta who stormed onto my train last week and announced that she’s “a princess” and that she’s “going to sing for [us] and [we're] going to give her money because [she's] a princess”. No, I won’t complain because ten bucks back actually is great in spite of all the other shitty things around me.

[Get Your Money Here People]

In the morning, I’m in one of three states: hung over, viciously hung over, or sleep deprived. I usually need a seat, but I can manage without one as long as nobody smells too strongly of piss. But what I definitely don’t need is sarcastic advertisement on the behalf of the MTA.

If you can’t make out the text from my super clear camera phone picture, the ad reads:

In 1986, the subway and bus fare was $1. That’s $1.89 in 2008 dollars. Today 30-day Unlimited Ride MetroCard brings the fare down to $1.17. Believe it.

Believe it?! You know what I believe, Mr. H Dale Hemmerdinger (I’m not making that name up, that’s the guy who really runs the MTA), I believe that paying $2 to squeeze onto an overcrowded train full of circus freaks and sideshow rejects is perpetual date rape.

Before you get all high and mighty about how great a deal you’re giving us, remember that we’re still liable to be shot, pushed onto the tracks, molested, or actually raped. So the last thing I need when I just finished enduring five girls scream their way through a shitty step dance routine four inches from my private zone is to transfer to a train full of intensive drumming and panhandling with a friendly and cheeky “New York” reminder that I could be charged more for this privilege.

Fuck you very much.

I apologize in advance to those of you who don’t live in New York, as I understand the following may not make sense, or matter. But bear with me.

The New York Times, and various other news outlets excited to have something good to say about the subway, reported today that the L train, ever the bastion of innovative train technology, will in two months be getting on-platform monitors at its Myrtle-Wyckoff station, ostensibly to prove that sometimes when conductors say there’s “another train right behind this one,” there very well might be. The monitors will show where trains are at any given time and over-eager straphangers can actually watch the trains move along the line, in real time!

I have a couple of issues with this, exacerbated perhaps by the fact that I just spent 55 minutes on decidedly un-technologically-advanced subway lines. For one, it’s not entirely clear to me what this monitor accomplishes except satisfying the whims of impatient commuters (for whom no digital monitor can trump the habit of leaning over the platform’s edge to see if a train’s coming). Knowing where a train is hardly makes the train get there any faster, and unless someone’s use of the subway was entirely contingent on how long they’d have to wait for a train, it doesn’t seem anything will be accomplished by allowing impatient hipsters to get their skinny jeans in a bunch over an L that’s seven stops away. 

Furthermore, it would seem to me, and probably to the other 8 million people living in New York, that money spent on subway improvement might be allocated to things like 25-year-old trains, on-time-performance, or the overwhelming presence of fecal matter in certain stations. How is it that while the rest of us are squeezing onto vastly over-crowded 4 trains, or covering our ears while the J screeches to a 120-decibel halt, that L train patrons are always the first to get not even basic, but futuristic and completely unnecessary improvements?

The L was the first to get the new trains, the first (and currently only) line to have on-platform digital readouts of trains’ estimated time of arrival (yet another reason this monitor is completely fucking ridiculous) and the first line to subscribe to the MTA’s new “Let’s put one person in charge of each line” mantra. You know what MTA, I’ve been on the L. Shit’s chock full of over-accessorized and under-employed New Yorkers, many of whom I doubt are contributing the bulk of the city’s tax dollars. It’s high time you put even a modicum of effort out for the rest of us. 

[NY Times]

I can’t pretend to know how counter-terrorism on a municipal level works. I imagine that it has something to do with randomly checking bags in random stations and treating city employees like dirty airline flyers. So I assume that when the MTA and NYPD thank paranoid riders, they have 1,944 foiled terror plots to thank them for. Or several hundred conspiracy arrests. Maybe at least a couple terror-related conspiracy charges. Actually I can’t find any arrests that have anything to do with a suspicious Arab guy, or backpack, in the subway.

You’re doing it wrong, NYPD. Remember —

Crime Fighting:

Not Crime Fighting: