Rest assured Brooklyn — Nov. 11 will be a scream-free day.
Some Brooklynites got spooked when they saw ominous graffiti scrawled along the side of the Smith-Ninth Street F-train tracks this week, seeming to proclaim, “World Screaming Nov 11.” But instead of hinting at a planned attack this fall, the message is part of a grassroots publicity campaign for grafitti legend Dumar Brown’s new book, “The World Screaming Nov.” (Apparently, Brown was a bit sloppy with his quotation marks, leading to the confusion about Nov. 11.)
Brown’s semi-autobiographical tome is the latest in a series about Nov, a graffiti artist from Brooklyn. The book’s title has been tagged all over the world on walls and buildings by Brown to build anticipation for the book’s launch later this year.
In an e-mail interview with The Brooklyn Paper, Brown said that the scribbles were not graffiti.
“It was just an advertisement,” he wrote. “I didn’t have permission, but then again nobody ever asked me if it was OK that they put billboards up in my sight. I’m not a vandal.”
A spokesman for New York City Transit said the agency had not seen the writing or received complaints about it, though it has been up for a week.
