An appeals court has overturned Seattle's ban on street-postering, on First Amendment grounds. I love street-postering; when I was a kid, I used to go downtown and peel off (expired) street-posters and save them in a scrap-book as a record of all the events and shows happening in my city.
When I was fundraising for the sustainable development project I did in Costa Rica, I put up about 10,000 posters for my various benefit events, cycling around the city on my lunch breaks and after work with a tape-gun, a big yogurt container, a bag of flour and a sponge, hitting every construction overpass, light-pole and trash-can I could find.
Postering is a great way to get to know your neighbors, a great way to find out about all the fringe, funny and undermonied goings-on in your town, an expression of the underground poster-maker's art.
Reg Hartt, a whacky film archivist in Toronto (kind of a home-grown Prelinger, but with a prediliction for redacted Warner Brothers' "race" cartoons), commands a mighty team of hardened street-posterers who rule Toronto's poster-spaces — woe to the posterer who covers an unexpired poster for a Hartt event. When I worked at an academic bookstore, we'd hire Reg to blanket the city with posters for our twice-annual sale — overnight, he could have a poster on every corner.
I remember two crazy bums on Queen Street who'd wander up and down, tearing down every poster they could lay hands on, muttering angrily; I once followed a block behind one of them, postering over all the fresh turf he cleared before me.
As billboards and monied messages creep into every corner of our world (damn, even the urinal liners have ads on 'em, so you pee on the message!), it's great to see indie messages growing up through the cracks.
(Thanks, Alex!)
