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In April, New York City started getting rid of the blowzy advertising posters that have long adorned the inside of its subway cars. "Brand train oriented" advertising, where the space on each subway car is dedicated to just one client, is being sold by the revenue-starved city to large corporations. The quaint, crudely designed notices for local podiatrists, furniture stores, and cosmetic surgeons that have played such a large role in the subliminal lives of New Yorkers will eventually go the way of the Edsel and David Dinkins. Figures of local mythology, such as the ill-fated "Dr. Tush," the world' s most euphonious proctologist, and the black-and-white cartoon chronicle of Julio and Marisol, an interminable AIDS soap opera, will be lost to history. The costs of progress are high indeed.
Certainly the loss of these promises of consumer bliss and cheap medical miracles will be a considerable deprivation of my already meager fantasy life. Descending into the subway I leave behind a world of mere status anxiety to enter an alternative universe of ubiquitous sexual and physical menace. I'm talking about genital warts, here. Posters also warn me of bunions, herpes, and pickpockets, the deadly allure of drugs, and the metaphysical abomination of an unwanted pregnancy. More prosaically, I am urged to pursue my education, get a new pair of eyeglasses, raise my SAT scores, remove my tattoos, and visit the Transit Museum. In short, I am the object of unending solicitousness and selfless concern.
I will miss all this eccentric exhortation. Rut I will especially miss the efforts of the New York State Health Department to dissuade the young from, as it is so delicately put,...