LA/OC/Cool Hand Luke

Signs placed in Los Angeles and Orange County Sept. 27th and 28th. Quotes from the film Cool Hand Luke

"Sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand."



"You know, them chains ain't medals. You get 'em for makin' mistakes."

"Callin' it your job don't make it right."

"I know I got no call to ask for much... but even so, You've got to admit You ain't dealt me no cards in a long time. It's beginning to look like You got things fixed so I can't never win out. Inside, outside, all of them... rules and regulations and bosses. You made me like I am. Now just where am I supposed to fit in?"

"I tried. I mean, to live always free and above board like you. And, I don't know. I just can't seem to find no elbow room."

"I never planned anything in my life."

"What we've got here is a failure to communicate..."

More from the Peace Tour

Just cleaning up the desktop a bit before the final stretch of the tour. These signs appeared variously along the coast over the last couple of weeks. As I suspected, the relatively innocuous messages of "Peace" and "Peace on Earth" have a lot more staying power than more provokative texts and on the way back down I've seen at least two dozen or so signs still standing from the start of the trip. Estimated viewership: Millions. Just... millions.

Eventually, I hope, the people who want peace in this world will take a cue from the people who simply want to sell crap: advertising pays. Especially when the founding fathers have given you carte blanche to do it for free.


“Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.” -Fredrick Douglass

"The greatest tyrannies are always perpetrated in the name of the noblest causes." ~ Thomas Paine

“If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other... No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." ~ James Madison


"I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." - Thomas Jefferson

"A man with no enemies is a man with no character." -Paul Newman

Paul Newman

"I don't think there's anything exceptional or noble in being philanthropic. It's the other attitude that confuses me."

"The concept that a person who has a lot holds his hand out to someone who has less, or someone who isn't hurting holds his hand out to someone who is, is simply a human trait that has nothing to do with celebrity. I am confounded at the stinginess of some institutions and some people. I'm bewildered by it. You can only put away so much stuff in your closet. In 1987, the average CEO against someone who was working in his factory was 70 times. It's now 410 times."

"Building weapons that we don’t need, don’t work, and aren’t necessary, and have no mission — that’s not bad politics, that’s robbery."

"I'd like to be remembered as a guy who tried — tried to be part of his times, tried to help people communicate with one another, tried to find some decency in his own life, tried to extend himself as a human being. Someone who isn't complacent, who doesn't cop out."

Marin/Sonoma

"To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true." -Bertrand Russell

"If men, through fear, fraud, or mistake, should in terms renounce or give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the grand end of society would absolutely vacate such renunciation. The right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave." ~ Samuel Adams




"If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote." -David Foster Wallace

"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." ~ Stephen Roberts


"We have more possibilities available in each moment than we realize." -Thich Nhat Hanh

Bay Area/Mailbag

I put up a lot of signs in the Bay Area yesterday, and took a lot of pictures. These are some of the better ones.

(Signs made with used billboard vinyl or cardboard and paint and lettered with an overhead projector. They're placed next to freeways under the assumed protection of first amendment freedom of speech and the very real protection of the fact that if you want to put a sign up somewhere there's not a hell of a lot anyone can do to stop you.)

I know that the destruction of the planet seems petty compared to the current collapse of capitalism, but let's face it, $700 Billion is chump change when it comes to buying new planets. I think people will start caring more about the great outdoors as more and more find themselves living there.

(Some of about 20 signs placed on the 101, 80, 280 and 580 around the SF Bay)


I've been getting a lot of mail and search engine traffic regarding the legality of putting signs up on freeways lately and, having done it well over 5,000 times now all I can say is go for it. When it comes to speaking out politically the founding fathers were pretty clear that it should be full and unfettered. If you're not selling something or threatening somebody, your right to political speech is not only protected, it's practically the most protected right you have.

In other words, when it comes to free speech, the constitution is on your side. If the police or the courts want to stop you, it's their job to figure out how, not yours.

So far this month I've put up over 140 signs between San Diego and Seattle, and will finish the trip back down over the next couple of days. When I got home yesterday I found this in the mailbox, over the Pasadena Freeway in downtown LA:

Keep 'em coming folks..

Some From Yesterday

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."~ Edmund Burke

"Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself..." -Mark Twain

Signs made with cardboard, paint and billboard vinyl, lettered with an overhead projector. They were placed on Sept. 23rd on the 80, 580 and 101 in Davis, Vacaville, Berkeley, Richmond, Novato, Larkspur and San Rafael.

"When you give food to the poor, they call you a saint. When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist."~ Archbishop Helder Camara

"Necessity never made a good bargain."~ Ben Franklin

"Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion."~ Oscar Wilde

"The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting."~ Sun Tzu

"Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them."~ Albert Einstein

"Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do."~ Voltaire

McCain + Quotes

"Only a fool or a fraud talks tough or romantically about war."

"I am prepared. I need no on-the-job training. I wasn't a mayor for a short period of time. I wasn't a governor for a short period of time."

"I hated the gooks, and will continue to hate them as long as I live." -to reporters, aboard the Straight Talk Express

"Only an asshole would put together a budget like this. I wouldn't call you an asshole unless you really were an asshole." - to fellow Republican Senator Pete Domenici

"Do you know why Chelsea Clinton is so ugly? Because Janet Reno is her father."

"Let me say that no one has supported President Bush on Iraq more than I have."


"At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt." - to his wife, Cindy

"Did you hear the one about the woman who is attacked on the street by a gorilla, beaten senseless, raped repeatedly and left to die? When she finally regains consciousness and tries to speak, her doctor leans over to hear her sigh contently and to feebly ask, Where is that marvelous ape?"

Washington, Oregon, Alaska

Heading back south now. Would've liked to hang around Seattle longer, but my truck (298,000 miles) has been overheating so I'm nursing her back home. Saw at least half the signs I put in Portland were still up and most all of them I put along the 5.

Juneau

Sign Hacking

h/t to Hoffy

Freewayblogging Seattle

The fence above between I-5 and Kobe Terrace Park is the best place to hang a sign in Seattle. It's quiet, secluded, highly visible and utterly unreachable to traffic.

A lot of traffic.


This is another great spot. Park at Lake Washington Bvld. South and South Irving.


Fencing around cel tower at Park and Ride lot, 5th Ave. NE just north of the Roosevelt Way exit off I-5


Fencing bordering Bellevue Place. Park at lot at the intersection of Lakeview Bvld E. and Belmont Ave. E.

Wall bordering I-90. Park at 21st Ave. South and South Judkins, walk across park to wall.

How to attach vinyl banner to wall: with rocks. (Available on site.) This also works with large cardboard boxes if you keep the flaps attached. ONLY use walls set way back from the freeway: NEVER over traffic (obviously.)

Parking lot at the end of 106th St. by Northgate. The easiest, most elegant way of signposting is between fences and bushes.

Pedestrian walkway by Rainier Ave. exit, I-90

How to make signs.

Freewayblogger.com

Portland/David Foster Wallace

This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it. (all quotes by) -David Foster Wallace


(Signs placed in Portland, Sept. 18th)

"What TV is extremely good at - and realize that this is "all it does" - is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it."


" I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose the Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests."



It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.

"You'll worry less about what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do."

Texting Portland

The basic rule of freewayblogging is this: when you put a sign up next to a freeway people will read it until someone takes it down.

If you want to reach out to people in Portland, the best place to start is here, the pedestrian undercrossing next to the 405 at the end of Caruthers (off Sheridan.)



The quickest and easiest way to attach signs to fencing is with bungee cords.



All signs made with cardboard and paint, lettered by overhead projector and placed on the 5, 405, 84 and 99 during rush hour. As political, non-commercial speech placed safely (on the inside of the fencing, not the outside) they are fully protected by the First Amendment.

Freewayblogging utilizes basic semiotics with freeway traffic to allow just about anyone to speak out politically to tens of thousands of their fellow citizens. Given that free political speech is the cornerstone of our democracy, if anyone tries to tell you this is illegal, they'd better have a damn good reason for it.

Seeing that I've personally put up over 5,000 signs on freeways now without any problem, I wouldn't worry about it too much.

How To Make Signs.

How to Post Them.

http://freewayblogger.com

Arsenal of Democracy: Fences And Bushes

While driving on the freeway, look for parking lots bordered by bushes and fences. Take the next exit, find your way back to the parking lot and place sign between bushes and fence.


Get back in your car, drive away and do it again.

America Speaks Out

Sacramento/Mark Twain

"The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them." (all quotes by) Mark Twain

"Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform."

"The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane."

"Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world — and never will."

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts."



"I remember when I was a boy and I heard repeated time and time again the phrase, 'My country, right or wrong, my country!' How absolutely absurd is such an idea. How absolutely absurd to teach this idea to the youth of the country."

"None but the dead have free speech."

These are the signs I put up today.

I put these up on the 880, 280, 580, 80 and 101 in Hayward, Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, San Francisco, San Rafael and Novato in pretty much the order they appear here. It was a beautiful day for driving around listening to music, hanging up signs and taking pictures.

Scroll down and imagine what it would be like if there were more of us.

send pictures to freewayblogger -at- yahoo


http://www.freewayblogger.com

Steinbeck Country

Signs made with cardboard, paint and lettered by overhead projector. These signs were placed next to highways in and around Paso Robles, Salinas and the Monterey Bay September 13th.

"A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us." (All quotes by) John Steinbeck

"I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts."

"It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth."

"Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power."

"The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business."

" If you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones."

"In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage."

Los Angeles

"I love LA... Such bon vivance in the face of inevitable doom..." -Bette Midler

(All signs made with cardboard and paint and placed on public property in accordance with First Amendment rights regarding free political speech. Locations here.)


"Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you find the real tinsel underneath." - Oscar Levant

"The freeway experience… is the only secular communion Los Angeles has. Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over." - Joan Didion

"... a city where the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light." - Woody Allen

"Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles. " -Frank Lloyd Wright

"The final story, the final chapter of western man, I believe, lies in Los Angeles." - Phil Ochs

Phoenix!

"Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran"

(John McCain channeling Weird Al Yankovich... not so funny when you consider that, unlike you and me, he's actually spent time bombing people. Sometimes humor is a cry for help.




In the Revolutionary era, farmers, artisans, and small shopkeepers read and wrote pamphlets, distributed broadsheets, gave speeches at town assemblies, and ripped essays from the presses to debate with one another the points they made. They didn’t subcontract out the patriot’s task of speaking up to a professional pundit class. They saw their own voices as being vitally necessary to the crafting of the Constitution and, even more important, to the life of the new nation.

We have to abandon the passive role we have accepted as mere consumers of media; we must see ourselves in a new light – or rather, see ourselves once again in a revolutionary light – as citizen leaders with responsibilities to speak the truth. - Naomi Wolf , The End of America


Photos Courtesy of a guy in Phoenix with an overhead projector, some paint and a car.

Peace Tour OC/Sept. 11th

September 11th Memorial


"I just don't spend that much time on it, to be honest. " George W. Bush, regarding Osama Bin Laden



"I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you... Now, watch this drive!" -George W. Bush, golfing



"I think we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that. " -Britney Spears

Peace in San Diego

I love this overpass... look at how long it is. (click for full size)

The best way to hang cardboard on a spiked fence is to duct tape a coathangar to the top. In general, coathangar wire makes it easy to attach cardboard signs to pretty much anything.




Here's how it looks from I-5 heading north. Even though it's just a few feet away, you'd have to drive about twenty miles if you wanted to take it down.

I-5 South in Oceanside by Camp Pendleton


I-5 North and South by Lindbergh Field



Trellis behind dumpster area of TGIFridays next to Hwy 163

Interstate 15 North and South.

These signs were made with cardboard and scrap vinyl and lettered with an overhead projector.
They were placed between noon and 2:00 pm and all still up for rush hour. They were easy to make, fun to put up and seen by a couple of hundred thousand people.

West Coast Peace Tour!

Over the next two weeks I'll be touring the west coast and placing large "Peace" and "Peace on Earth." signs alongside the freeways.

Like the flags that went up on overpasses after September 11th, political banners are entirely legal and constitutionally protected speech. So long as they're non-commercial, safely posted political messages, it's not just your right to put up signs, it's your right to put up as many of them as you want, as big as you want, and your right to use public property to do it. At least that's my theory.

Granted, there are some officials who may take issue with this, but I've put up over 5,000 signs so far and nobody's done much to stop me. My take on the first amendment is that when it comes to limiting a citizen's right to political Free Speech, you'd better have a damn good reason for it.
When it comes to civil liberties it's our job as citizens to assume each and every right we can, and to fight tooth and nail for anything anyone tries to take away. Especially when it comes to Free Speech.



How To Make Signs


Freewayblogger.com

Coming Soon...

Here are some of the hundred-plus peace signs I've been making for my upcoming tour. Signs were made using large cardboard boxes and used billboard vinyl and lettered with an overhead projector. They will be appearing by freeways up and down the west coast over the next two weeks.

Peace Island, St. Paul

When in doubt, hold a picnic!

John Lennon Quotes

"Henry Ford sold his cars with advertising. I'm selling peace. Yoko and I are just a big advertising campaign. That might make people laugh, but it also might make them think."

"Possession isn't nine-tenths of the law. It's nine-tenths of the problem."

"If someone thinks that love and peace is a cliche that must have been left behind in the Sixties, that's his problem. Love and peace are eternal."

"Time you enjoy wasting was not wasted. "

"Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it."

"I don't believe in killing whatever the reason."

"You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die."

Labor Day Postings

"The reward of a thing well done is to have done it." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Signs placed along the 5/405 corridor, Orange County CA, Sept. 1st.)

"The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few born to ride them." —Thomas Jefferson

"Never forget, people died for the eight hour workday." —Rebecca Gordon

"Work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed." -Vaclav Havel


"Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all." -Dale Carnegie

Some From Labor Day Weekend

"What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it." -Mark Twain

(Signs placed on the 80, 580, 880 and 101, August 29th.)
"No one who works for a living should live in poverty." —Edward Kennedy

"When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?'" -Don Marquis

"Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom." -Albert Einstein

"Without labor nothing prospers." —Sophocles

"Don't mourn for me--ORGANIZE!" —Joe Hill


"Don't organize. Do Something!" -Scarlet P.