May 15, 2006
Washington, D.C. Is About to Get Punked
Not by Ashton Kutcher, but by Yellow Arrow, an arts and technology project initiated by the New York based mixed-reality and entertainment company, Counts Media. The May issue of Spin magazine reports that in June, Yellow Arrow and its M.A.A.P. (Massively Authored Artistic Publication) makers will be documenting the District's punk-rock scene by placing their signature yellow arrow stickers on various well known sites around the city. Which hardcore sites could you visit to find one of these stickers?
The tour will likely include famed venues like the old 9:30 Club, Black Cat, Fort Reno, Sacred Heart Church, as well as the Wilson Center and several houses in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood, which many young punks called home.
Each sticker contains a unique number which you can use in a text message sent from your cell phone to receive information on the location's history and significance as part of a virtual underground tour of the city. Yellow Arrow's website invites anyone interested in participating to sign up and recieve a tagname to join any of the current projects or start one of their own. All of the submissions are contained in an online gallery for others to view and discuss.
What other lesser known aspects of D.C. would you want to share through one of these interactive sticker tours? Maybe point out some hot spots in the city's Jazz roots around U Street? Or a history of the city's political scandals?
Sign up, go out and paint this town yellow.
Photo from Yellow Arrow
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DCist!
"The May issue of Spin magazine reports that in June, Yellow Arrow and it's M.A.A.P. (Massively Authored Artistic Publication) makers..."
Note the large error! Come on, y'all! Knock it off with that shit!
I also read about this in Spin and found it confusing. Who is doing the labeling? According to the Yellow Arrow website, the labeling arrows are by purchase only and anyone can place them. So, all these punk houses in Mt. Pleasant are collectively being labeled by the folks that live there, who are paying for the opportunity to do so? That just doesn't make much sense to me. Or, is one anthropologist/historian in the D.C. area planning to just label all the punk landmarks? With permission? Andy Beta (the author of the article in Spin) is a good writer and I liked his work at PitchforkMedia.com, but something about this just seems off-base.
Let's hope they don't forget such old punk sites at the Citadel building (17th & Kalorama and soon to be the much maligned Harris Teeter) as well as the old Columbia Theatre at 17th and Columbia Rd. (now a bodega of interesting scale).
Don't forget the new 9:30 Club, formerly the WUST Music Hall. I remember seeing Black Flag, Minutement, DKs, and Youth Brigade there. The former DC Space downtown deserves one as well.
that's pretty neat. it's like a real life Wikipedia.
DC artist Andrew Wodzianski has been using Yellow Arrows to gather comments about his work for quite a while now...
He's gathered hundreds of comments from all over...
Good call, Monkeyerotica. Throw in the old Hung Jury Pub where G.I. and Sevenseconds frequently played. Anyone remember BBQ Iguana? What a s**thole.
If there is an arrow around Waldorf for Good Charlotte (fake manufactured pop punk) I will fucking slit my throat.
Adams Morgan - I think you mean the Ontario Theatre (I HATE CVS I HATE CVS I HATE CVS)
Massively Annoying Artistic Pollution