2014 Kickstarter: “We Are Culture” T-shirts

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A couple of days ago we launched our Kickstarter campaign to make new t-shirts. They’ll be free for performers like before, and you can also get one for $25 by backing our project!

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The 2014 shirt

BuskNY 2014: “We Are Culture”

by Matthew Christian

Art by Heidi Younger, Chris Wright, Marina Ross, and Ron Richter

Art by Heidi Younger, Chris Wright, Marina Ross, and Ron Richter

We also have made a Facebook event for our art show SHOWTIME: Underground Arts, which so far features art by Chris Wright, David Everitt-Carlson, Ron Richter, Marina Ross, and Heidi Younger and will be opening October 3. We are hoping to get more artists involved before the Sept 19 deadline– if you have any art to submit or would like to perform at the opening, please send me an email at milo@buskny.com.

“SHOWTIME: Underground Arts” OPEN CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

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BuskNY is pleased to announce that we are open for submissions for our upcoming exhibition. Please submit your work or share this information with any artists you know whose work is relevant to our theme!

“SHOWTIME: Underground Arts”

OPEN CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

BUSKNY ART SHOW at Armature Art Space

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BuskNY and Armature Art Space invite you to submit work for “SHOWTIME,” an exhibition of art made in and about the subway and public transit.

BuskNY is an arts advocacy organization that was created in 2013. Our mission is to generate broad awareness of the legality of artistic performance in the New York City subway, in order to end wrongful ejection, ticketing, and arrest of subway performers. While our primary focus is on musicians and performing artists, we also promote the creation, promotion, and sale of art by independent artists in the subway.

Through SHOWTIME, we will support visual artists whose work deals with or is made or sold in public transit and public space, with a particular focus on art made in the subway system itself. SHOWTIME will refocus the subway art dialogue on work made by independent artists, and publicly reemphasize that all New Yorkers can participate in the creative process.

Our partner, Armature Art Space, is a Bushwick gallery that showcases local artists using traditional media. Armature, which describes itself as “the support (or “armature”) on which artists can express themselves and around which artists may build community,” has graciously offered its gallery space free of charge.

The opening reception for SHOWTIME will feature refreshments and live performances by visual artists and prominent subway musicians.

Show dates: October 3-12
Opening: Friday, October 3 7-11 PM
Submission deadline: September 19
Work dropoff times: Minimum 3 days before opening
Work pickup times: Sunday, October 12 1-5 PM
Address: Armature Art Space, 316 Weirfield St, Brooklyn, NY

Submission information appears on the following page. We appreciate your interest, and will respond to all queries in a timely manner. Please feel free to forward this message to other artists, and to connect with us online at buskny.com or armatureartspace.org.

Milo Wissig

BuskNY Co-founder

milo@buskny.com

Submissions

Please send all submissions and inquiries to Milo Wissig, milo@buskny.com, with SHOWTIME SUBMISSION in the subject line. Please include an image of the piece[s] you would like to submit with the file name formatted as: Name_Title_HeightxWidthxDepth_Medium_Year.jpg.

The images should be 72 DPI JPEGs about 1000 pixels wide. Please include the following information:

Name

Title

Dimensions

Medium

Year

Retail price

If you choose to sell your work, you will receive 100% of the retail price. (Armature Art Space takes no commissions).You may submit up to six pieces for consideration; we will likely choose 1 to 3.

Open_Call_SHOWTIME (PDF)

PRESS CONFERENCE SCHEDULED

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Since NYPD Commissioner William Bratton took office in January, BuskNY has observed a marked increase in the harassment of subway performers.

Freelance platform performers, who comply fully with MTA Rules, have experienced a wave of ejections, tickets, and arrests. As was recently reported, even clearly wrongful tickets require a lengthy legal challenge to dismiss. (In one of our cases, a performer required a pro bono appeal to fight a visibly wrongful ticket). Should performers without the time and resources to fight wrongful charges receive a criminal record?

Meanwhile, performers who sing and dance on trains have found themselves under arrest. In hundreds of cases, these dancers have been charged not under MTA Rule 1050.6 (c) (1) (4) (“civil penalties imposed by the transit adjudication bureau in an amount not to exceed one hundred dollars per violation”), but with reckless endangerment (“a Class A misdemeanor carrying up to a year in jail time). Is this a fair penalty?

We invite performers, supporters, and media to discuss these questions, and to comment on the broader effects of Broken Window policing, at our first press conference to be held jointly with New Yorkers Against Bratton:

Tuesday, August 12, 12:00

City Hall Steps

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7th Busker Ball

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This Thursday we attended the 7th quarterly Busker Ball, an event organized by Theo Eastwind, in which some of the best buskers in New York performed at Williamsburg bar and music venue Spike Hill. Theo has been inviting us to speak about busker’s rights, distribute flyers and sell t-shirts for the past few Busker Balls.

The lineup for this season’s show:

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Matthew Christian, back from Dakar, gave a presentation about BuskNY. Matthew outlined what we’ve done in the past year and our current projects, and announced our plans for the 2014 BuskNY T-shirt.

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It turned out Matthew had left a cache of misprints of last year’s shirt in a drawer. We sold a few but gave most of them away to the performers.

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Our design for this summer’s shirt. I’m planning on cleaning it up a bit and printing with four colors on dark colored shirts. I’m using a different technique of printing this time in which each layer will be hand-painted directly onto the screens without the need for photo emulsion or an exposure unit.

Following the success of last year’s Kickstarter campaign, we will be raising the money to make our new shirts free to all performers. We would like to include footage of a variety of buskers in our video, so if you would like to participate you can either send your own brief clips (webcam or phone video is fine) of yourself performing or speaking about busking and police harassment to milo@buskny.com, or contact us so that we can film you ourselves later in the month when we’re putting the video together.

The next Busker Ball is October 30th at 7:30 at Spike Hill!

“They are disbanding my family”: NYPD crackdown continues

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Nick Malinowski, a civil liberties activist who’s been an active opponent of Bill Bratton’s return to ‘Broken Windows’ policing, recently interviewed Heidi Kole, a long-term busker and busking proponent, over at Alternet.

Image: littleny/Shutterstock

It’s an in-depth interview that gives an inside perspective on the crackdown and its effects on the performing community. Good weekend reading, and a required text for folks reporting on the effects of the #WarOnShowtime. Check it out here.

10 Favorite NYPD Quotes on Busking

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Heidi Kole posted this brilliant list today at the Subway Diaries. BuskNY has tacked on a couple at the bottom — anyone care to add further?
1. “Oh those rules, yeah I know all about those rules, we don’t care about the rules.”
2. “What rules?”
3. “Heidi, I thought we had an agreement? You wouldn’t sing & I wouldn’t bother you?”
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4. “Oh that that First Amendment thing again, we’ve heard of that, it doesn’t matter, you’re still getting a ticket.”

5. (Lean in & Whispered) “This platform is actually a terrorist target”

6. “Technically you’re not doing anything illegal, but you still can’t do it.”
7. “I’m gonna give you a ticket ’cause my supervisor wants to see I’m doing something useful, but once I”m gone you can start singing again.”

8. “Have you ever thought of conforming?”
9. “Don’t start getting rulezy with me.”
10. “I AM THE LAW!” (For proper pronunciation, lean on that first ‘a’ for a bit).

 

 

*Case Dismissed*

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Last week I went in to court to finally face off with officer Liu for my puppet show arrest under time square in April:

the video of which was put to delightful narration in a recent interview:

” This is a very emotional biographical film with several key plot points, along with several key emotional performances:  The Promulgation of Rights,The Gentle Handcuffing, The Procession up the Escalator, The Stripping of the Mask, The responsibilty-beleagured role of the Officer in Charge illustrating social rank and functional power as well as governed empathy.  (It’s not the last time this will happen, but I’m thinking of the agonizingly detailed death-march of Jesus described by The Stations of the Cross, also called Via Dolorosa or Way of Sorrows) The police swoop in to reclaim that Priority to the space which Kalan had once claimed as a meer denizen.”

So after staying up all night frantically searching for the receipt they had given me for the time my body spent in their cage (which it turns out you don’t really need at all) and not finding it, I donned my swank brown seventies three-piece and headed into the city amidst swaths of birdsong. In the line at midtown community court for half an hour I played Woodie Guthrie’s All You Fascists Bound To Lose on my mini-speaker, and at long last past the threshold of the halls of justice, only to be told by the clerk at the desk that my case had been dismissed, and “I should get something in the mail.” My heart sank. My temples pounded. My blood curled. Even when they lose, they win, gobbling up another day of my life in bureaucratic feinting. I never got anything in the mail. I probably never will. But now, onwards and upwards, towards the consideration of civil matters. Enough is Enough.

Advice from Court

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Matthew asked for a bit of ‘advice’ for any buskers facing a hearing for either a wrongful ticket or arrest while Busking the NYC Subways.

My advice in a nutshell to any buskers facing a cop in court for wrongful ticket or arrest is be prepared ….I might even go so far as to say, even if for your own sanity, be overly prepared.

  • Know your facts as to exactly what happened; dates, times what exactly you were doing, when & where.
  • Study & know the MTA Rules & Regulations or have a copy with you as those are your rights in that pamphlet.
  • Be prepared to depose the Officer who issued either the ticket or ordered the arrest. Write and rehearse your deposition & if you need it,  get help from someone who has been through this for busking or anything for that matter. Do whatever it takes, but be prepared (as intimidating as this part may seem to read & digest,  trust me, the process will empower you).
  • Dress professionally – especially if you’re being wrongly accused of panhandling as that effort alone not only shows respect for the court, but already visually tosses the charge out the window if you look 100% put together & professional. One other thing dressing professionally accomplishes in my opinion is it allows you, the accused busker to more cleanly represent yourself as you look & hence feel like a ‘different person’ thus putting distance between you, the busker & you representing the busker. Trust me, it makes it a lot easier.
  •  And be respectful of the system even though we all know it’s rigged. The thing is the cops only know one thing ….being a cop. They are, on average not intellectuals. In the system underground their tools are tickets, guns & cuffs. In the courtroom they are without any of these tools. And unless they hire a lawyer to represent them, if you know your stuff and I mean really know your stuff the court can only respect you for that and it makes their job and by association your life a whole lot easier.

Heidi Kole

www.thesubwaydiaries.com

#BuskingRocks

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2014 MUNY Auditions

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Yesterday, Music Under New York held its 27th annual auditions in Grand Central Terminal’s Vanderbilt Hall. About 20 acts out of the 60 contestants will be chosen by a panel of 35 judges to be added to the MUNY roster. The auditions lasted five minutes each over the course of about six hours, and winners will be announced within the next few weeks.

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We asked MUNY manager Lydia Bradshaw to make sure the legality of freelance busking was mentioned during this year’s auditions. Kalan and I attended the first few hours of the auditions to find out if our requests had been honored as well as to see some of the performances, and MUNY turned out to be quite supportive of our cause. We were unexpectedly invited into the press area where we found that MUNY had included a highlighted copy of MTA rule 1050.6 in the press packets for the event.

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Every reporter covering the auditions has one of these.

We stuck around to see the first 20 performers, and I managed to get close enough to get clear shots of most of them:


Based on some of the articles we’ve seen so far, not every member of the press has actually read everything in the packet, since some still conflate MUNY membership with a general busking license. BuskNY has been largely successful, however, when asking the authors of such articles to make corrections. If only informing the NYPD and general public that busking is legal were that easy!

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Megan Gillis rolling her xylophone out after a really excellent performance.

But back to the auditions themselves: we’ll be looking forward to finding out who wins, and hope to run into all sixty of the contestants performing in the subway soon.

Heidi Kole on subway crackdown

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Update: Commissioner Bratton has responded to the public debate, suggesting that performers ‘find another spot.’ No word on whether Bratton is aware of on-going arrests of law-abiding performers on platforms and mezzanines. 

In a new post at the Subway Diaries, Heidi Kole comments on the results of the crackdown:

” The performers have been moved on, arrested, ticketed & charged with the crime of self expression. It’s a very sad, bleak & lonely place underground since the new police chief, Bratton’s entrance. Every day now when I go under I get either questioned or ticketed or worse. […]

Thee is no music, no dance, no laughter, no art. There is only the loud rumble of metal on metal of screeching brakes interspersed with NYPD announcements over the loud speaker of what to be ‘afraid’ of.

Meanwhile, Bill de Blasio insists that there is no subway crackdown. According to the Observer, he claims that the spike in arrests is “the result of case-by-case decisions by local police commanders, not a larger shift in policy.” Never mind that those police commanders have no training on the MTA performance rules, and never mind their well-documented/counterfactual belief that performance is a crime. Particularly, says de Blasio, never mind that since January, far more untrained police have been in the MTA than ever before. Nope — there’s no crackdown to see here.

So. Whose account do you believe?

Subway Heidi

Photo credit: Heidi Kole