This might be one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard. I don't get it. Even if it's for people on the go... it's not saving you any time! Okay, so you don't have to walk that 15 extra feet to the counter... the person getting your food still does, so now you're at the mercy of their slow asses.

I don't know... maybe Mickey D's is having trouble competing with the new trends in fast food - how can you really top the Whopper Bar or the KFC Double Down, after all. A walk-through window seems like such an odd choice though. What's the purpose? To save you 15 extra steps? I mean, I used to live right near there, so I can say for a fact that this is not the cleanest McDonald's establishment, but still... it's not so bad that you need to stand outside at a window to get your food.

And apparently, people have actually been lining up outside for this thing. The counter is like... 15 steps away! GO INSIDE!

In my opinion, however, there's a big difference between contributing to an existing piece, adding to it creatively, or even covering it (creatively) to make way for a new thought or idea, and obnoxiously spraying a bland tag over the entire thing.

People hate Shepard Fairey. They think he's a sell out, they think he's a plagarist, they think he's a hack. Whatever they think, they hate him for it and they're downright giddy when his stuff gets bombed. Sometime in the early morning hours of Sunday, May 15th, Fairey's These Parties Disgust Me mural, which was pasted up over a faux wall on Houston Street at the end of last month, was tagged.

It's not the first time someone has taken aim at the piece - before the pasting was even complete,  it had been tagged. A brick was tossed through it and a portion of it was kicked in before the artist's Mayday show opened on May 1st. With Fairey hoping to keep the mural relatively in tact until the show opening, the mural was repaired and cleaned soon after each incident, however, with the month almost over and the show's run coming to an end, the wall is now fair game to taggers and Shep haters alike.

I know why people don't like Shepard Fairey, but I don't really understand it, or the need to purposefully destroy his work. He's a commercial artist now, yes. Absolutely. He makes money, he sells work, and yes, his work is, more often than not, derivative of other people's or a reinterpreation of a photograph. I don't really see it as plagiarism, though. Plagiary, to me, would be him taking someone else's work outright, unaltered, pasting it up and calling it his own - that's really not what this guy does.

Fairey's work has a very definitive style to it. It's a combination of formats and looks and often speaks to an idea that the original work was not intended for. He's not tearing pages out of books and throwing them up on walls, he's creating something new from something existing. All art comes from somewhere or something else. How we see it is, of course, extremely subjective. For example: To me, all tags look generally the same. Bubble letters or graffiti scrawl. Thousands of tags and maybe.... 3-4 styles of actual tag. One could really make the argument that taggers are just copying each other over and over again and just swapping out names. It's not very artistic. It's nothing new or interesting. It doesn't take much thought.

The Mayday mural was a nice piece. Fairey himself said that he hoped it would remain there for some time and become a collaborative work, which could have been really cool. Throwing a huge, nasty looking tag over it, though... I just don't see the point, the artistry, or the statement in that. I could ramble about this for a long time, and I won't even get into what happened to the four NYC Banksy's, but my main point is mostly that it sucks to see something destroyed out of spite. Let it go, people.

If you're into it, you've probably already heard, but anonymous and notorious street artist, Banksy, has finally landed in New York City. At least four new pieces have gone up in the past day or two, (3 in Manhattan and at least one in DUMBO). The one seen above is on Cedar St. at Trinity Place down in the Financial District. By the time I reached it, someone had already stickered a piece of it. Apparently it's been further vandalized over night, with someone scribbling white all over the figure. (Bastards.)

I haven't heard anything about the piece in DUMBO being hit, which is nice to know as it's pretty awesome. (See below.)

Other sightings have been reported in Chinatown and Soho. Happy hunting, fans!

*Update*: Spoke too soon re: the DUMBO Banksy. They've all been bombed. More on that soon.

ERICK ARC ELLIOTT- PLANE

One of my students happened to release a new video last night.

The video is great!! Awesome camera work ( Shot with no budget on a Cannon 7D ), great beat, even better rhymes .

Check it out.

In our first post for the new year, I'd like to bring to your attention a little thing that Duane Reade is doing to NYers. If you're not familiar with Duane Reade, it is a local pharmacy chain here in NYC in the same vain as CVS, Walgreens or Rite Aid. First of all let me say this, because I haven't said it before on Word Vomit, but Duane Reade sucks balls for their new hideous designs. They're logo is wretched and the new color palettes they've introduced makes me want to urinate on the Pantone color book that was given to their graphic designer(s).

With that being said, not only have they introduced pastels of doom, they had the nerve to re-do their Spending Rewards Program. This was the only shining thing about the store. In these uncertain economic times, us NYers have come to rely on DR's rewards system. For every dollar you spend, 1 point is given. For every 100 points you get a, $5 coupon is issued. This was good. Those things came in handy, because you could get about $10 every month or so from DR, if you spent enough and sometimes you could. We've come to rely on them. It was a nice gift. Clearly, they saw this and decided to ruin it. So to pay for their expesnive and sucky store remodeling and to pay those awful graphic designers who changed their look, they had to go say fuck you NY and then proceeded to rape us in the face.

They had a mandatory change to the new RewardsFlex program. So this is how it goes now:

For every dollar you spend, 2 points are given. Pretty cool.

For every 500 points you get, $5 coupon is given out to you. Wait what the fuck?!

I roughly had to spend $100 to get $5 back. Now I have to spend $500 to get $5 back? Are you fucking kidding me? I have to spend $500 in Duane Reade? Best Buy doesn't even have the balls to do that and they sell fucking tvs and other shit!

For once I am utterly appalled by this and I wanted to channel my Jewish brethren and write a stern letter of disapproval and vow never to shop in their store again, but then I said to myself, where the hell will I shop at 1:OOAM when I need something? Fuck. Trapped like mice in a cage. Sneaky bastards. They've cornered me with this horrible points system. Do you know how long you could go before you'd spend $500 in Duane Reade? You could go months before you saw a $5 coupon. I'd rather not use it now.

Thanks very, much Duane Reade. I've never willing gotten raped in the face before until now and I've got to tell you -- if you're gonna be raping people in the face like this was Ozwald Penitentiary at least have the decency to have Christopher Meloni around. Fuckers.

VendrTV had a little video reviewing a French food cart (Spencer On The Go) that is located in San Francisco. Why hasn't anybody in New York thought of this. We all love Halal Food, why not make it French.

I want my escargot and pate to go.

Spotted on 1st Ave. this morning.

What kind of rush must this person have been in, that they couldn't even wait to get inside before tearing off the packaging?

...by the way, I just love how it says 8" with balls.

After taking this pic, I immediately texted it to The Black Boy Wonder, and fyi, his reply was better than all 101 minutes of Where the Wild Things Are.

You know, I always think (and say) that Times Square is my least favorite part of Manhattan - the constant, often disgusting, mash of tourists, rubbing up against you in overcrowded shops, stopping dead in front of you on the sidewalk so that they can take their 8 millionth photo of the smoking coffee sign (is that thing even there anymore)... even writing it, I'm recalling how much I absolutely dread any occasion which will bring me close to that area. In fact, I will often go around my ass to get to my elbow in an effort to avoid that area.

All of that said, I was reminded yesterday that no matter how awful Times Square is, it is absolutely NOTHING compared to the hideousness that is Canal Street.

I never really remember it until I get there - and, though I go to SoHo every so often, I usually never venture down that far... probably because my subconscious knows that it would be better to just through myself into a put of ghetto and get it over with. It's hard to explain it to someone who a) isn't a tourist or b) has never been to Manhattan or to that area, but if you have, then you must know what I mean. It's horrible. It's impossible. It's dirty. You can barely cross the street and it takes about 15 minutes to go 5 steps down a sidewalk. You get hit in the face with bubbles and smoke. You get offered every kind of designer bag under the sun. What should be a 10 minute stop into Pearl Paint turns into an ordeal of just making it to the entrance and getting back out again.

If you're smart (like me), you'll use the back exit out of Pearl and be rewarded with some awesome street art on Lispenard Street. The one I saw yesterday was arranged kind of like a tree, but if you click on it to view the larger picture, it looks like a blurred image of some street lights at night. I really loved the way they pasted it up, and the location works out nicely, too. The result is that of a tree on fire - at least that's how I see it. No idea who the artist is, but it's one to check out.

I spotted a few other gems on West Broadway - the first being the guys who set up their vending table to sell copies of "How to Roll a Blunt for Dummies." I'm sure it's a great read. They were really putting in a good effort in selling it, too - everyone's got their niche, I guess.

On my way back up from Canal, I spotted one of those wannabe hot clothing stores with this mannequin out in front that a bunch of old tourists kept stopping to gawk at... mostly because it was really obvious that this particular dummy was originally built for a sex shop. I can't even count how many men were telling their wives (all over 60, btw) how they'd buy that outfit for them if they'd promise to look like the mannequin when they put it on. Good luck, fellas.

Oh, how I love a good typo.

Outside a sandwich and "smootie" shop on 9th Avenue. I kind of wonder how long it's been there and if the owners have noticed it.

Working nights has its benefits. Especially when you're riding the Long Island Railroad.

I often dread coming into the city during rush hour on Fridays (let alone coming to work period).  It seems that as my ticket price goes up, the seats on the train become less available. Thus, The T is stuck standing against the wall for the whole 45 minute trek into the city.

Us train commuters often find clever ways to take up our time while riding this boring, over-priced, transportation system. One way of keeping ourselves amused is by writing obnoxious things on the LIRR Posters.  (If they are still intact and not used as tape to repair the seat cushions.)

Which bring us to here... ( sorry for the long introduction but you know I love a great rant against the MTA.

You might have seen those posters plastered all over the place for the new Titanic exhibition in NYC. Well, while standing today on the train, I happened to peer over at one of the Titanic ads and this clever little caption was found:

"Look at the iceberg" (hahahaha)

Cynical yes.....

Yet, very funny. Bully to those clever minded railroad riders.