PEEL SLOWLY AND SEE

(click to enlarge)

A while ago I walked through a subway station—I forget which one—where every advertisement was down, and all there were were those naked billboards I like,* and the only images and words around were strictly informational, as if public transportation were a service being provided to the people by the government and not a business concerned primarily with profit. Politics entirely aside, it was just æsthetically** very enjoyable.

Side note: while I have no interest in seeing the film advertised on the peeling-away poster above, I do think it's a pretty successfully creepy image. What the fuck is coming out of that kid's mouth? Cloth? Smoke? A friend of mine thought it was wood. And the expression on the kid's face is just right: not overly distressed (which would make the image more about what was happening to him instead of our own experience of freaked-out incomprehension) but also not overly calm (in which case we would probably file the kid himself away under "supernatural phenomenon" and thus wouldn't see the bizarre vomiting-up as incomprehensible in itself, but rather file it away under "random shit that ghosts and monsters do")—this is the kind of thing that, if you actually saw it in real life, would probably turn you into a blubbering mess with fæces in your pants.

* Not to be confused with these naked billboards.

** Why I spell this word this way: (1) it's the only spelling even listed in the OED, and, more importantly, (2) I figured out how to make an æ with a simple keystroke [although I haven't figured out yet how to pronounce the letter Æ, so I'm not sure whether "an æ" is correct—anyone? anyone?]. I remember as a kid I was eager to find uses for the various symbols my word processor could make. Very little has changed. £€¡∞§¶°ª≠œ∑®†¥øπ∆©ƒ∂ßåΩ≈√◊∫ıµ