It takes Jonathan Gitelson less than a minute to blanket his car with the sort of square glossy flyers that are to cars parked near nightclubs what bird shit is to those beneath certain trees. Last summer, shortly after he moved across the street from the Funky Buddha Lounge, Gitelson began finding his Honda Civic bombed by as many as ten flyers daily, often the same ads over and over. (Green Dolphin Street and a strip club on 144th Street are repeat offenders, he says.) The nearby sidewalks were littered with hundreds more that had been removed from other cars or abandoned in stacks by derelict distributors. “I had the idea that I wanted to do something with them, but I wasn’t sure exactly what,” says Gitelson, who is, among other things, a photographer. “Over time I got the idea of making it look like my car was buried under a mountain of them.”
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The project’s made him much more aware of where all the clubs are in town, he says, but he’s never patronized any of them and doesn’t have any plans to. I ask him if he’s ever bought anything or gone anywhere because of a flyer left on his car. “I would have to say no,” he says.
