I ruined the inside of my nose. It keeps scabbing and blocking up and bleeding. It hurts and itches, and I try to leave it alone, but its so satisfying to clear. The meditation of the moment of breath is completed with pain. It’s a reminder, like a urinary tract infection, of what I have done to myself, for better or worse.
I’m not down with OPP.
When I was a sophomore in college in New Orleans, my friend and I got picked up by the Orleans Parish police. I asked my friend Rob to try to recollect what happened, and I did the same. Here are our two different versions.
(FYI: my nickname was Kitty and our other friend’s nickname was Squeezil.)
Rob:
We had just taken Squeezil home from our madhouse smoke session and smoked a couple bowls there. As always I had paraphernalia and a few roaches in the car. Leaving Squeezil”s house I stopped at the stop sign at the end of her street. (I’m sure I stopped{but maybe not}). I made a right and we went a couple blocks in the Marley mobile. Blue Lights. Shit. Then the coppers got on the loud speaker and told us to put our hands out of the window and open the doors from the outside, walk slowly to the car facing them and put our hands on their hood. Odd I thought. Guess we looked dangerous. They patted us down and searched the car. Bingo. Pipes and roaches. Cuffs. Back of the cruiser. It’s hard to remember all this because it’s happened several times for me. This was the first. Riding to the pokey….still laughing and joking. We get to processing. I realize that I’m wearing bright orange and yellow shoes, red polar bear pajama pants, and a threadbare Jimi Hendrix shirt, but I’m not a stoner or anything. I wonder what my reception will be like. Kind of an adventure. Picture time. Smiled for the camera. Waiting waiting waiting waiting waiting. Lobby sucks. Kitty says “I think my weeds wearing off man” in perfect Jim Brewer. We have a laugh…..for a minute (because it was). Separated. Uh oh. Now I really wonder whats going to happen. Orange(or perhaps green) jumpsuits for all. Late night, so directly into general population. Remember it’s a prison not a jail. Weirdo Louisianians with their parishes and what not. Overcrowded. Two bunks and my mat on the floor. Do not remember a single thing about my cell mates. First come first serve and all that. Bars shut and lock (no other time I was locked up were there actual bars) Slept like a baby bear. Morning and food. Pass. Saw some young toughs sharing a smoke. Asked if I could bum one. “No, Cracker”. I really wanted a cigarette. Lunch red beans and rice, toast. Traded toast. Played chess all afternoon. Resident jail master crushed me over and over. Bail posted. Thank you Tulane. Glad they budget bail into tuition, At least the first time. With the exception of the no smoking rule all in all pretty easy. Picked up by Julio the street kid I met over the summer. Came back home and baked (not a cake) and ate some of the Jailbird cake. Smoked a lot of cigarettes. I do not remember when Kitty got home, but I’m pretty sure it was after me. I was basically unaffected. Kitty was shaken. Eventually I think we all went and rescued the Marley Mobile. I think some cds were missing. Who knows,…..very foggy.
Me:
The lights spun into our car, and I tried to light a cigarette and get Robert to puff harder to cover the smell. Pointless, I was dragged out of the car with little less than a glance and next thing I knew I was bent over the white hood. I glanced over at Robert and we laughed. Fuck. The man booking us was funny. He said, “Weed? That ain’t no crime!” I couldn’t stop laughing when they took the mugshot, even when the angry woman told me not to smile. I have loose joints and fingerprints would have been easier the old school way with ink, mine kept coming up on the screen as “Quality: Poor”. Robert was wearing pajama bottoms with polar bears on them, they illicit-ed a laugh from the people at the station, but Robert’s face was covered in shame. I was wearing his shower shoes, held together with duct tape. It was cold and my fleece was worn thin and my pants were just held up by a drawstring.
Time to split us, Rob walked away with a group of men, one of whom had the red wrist band for homicide. We thankfully had orange ones, and the pudgy white girl who was in the office crying loudly apart from us was wearing yellow; she had a misdemeanor for flashing her tits. A woman banged hard on the glass and yelled at the guards who told her to shut up. She was drunk and we all thought she was annoying. Daybreak in the van to OPP, not the song, Orleans Parish Prison, we were all chained together and bent forward because of the ceiling. We could hear the driver get out of the van to have breakfast and when he got back we heard him laughing and talking to his friends. Things were really bright, and I wasn’t ready for the day.
Processing I was paired with a crack-head, who silently went along with everything. She knew the motions. If I got to do it again, I would be a bigger asshole. What you don’t realize from TV is that being polite doesn’t really do anything. My wrists had bruises and my answers were not listened to. By the time it was time to sign the line at release, I quickly signed that they had treated me fairly. I didn’t get an orange jumpsuit, rather blue pants and a sweater that had been washed so many times at 100 degrees, that there wasn’t even an illusion of softness. They had sprayed OPP on with a stencil. I was so thin at the time. The cells were slices of pie circling the center guard booth, around 30 women to a room. They keep the prison really cold, to keep germs from spreading, so the women had gathered the mattresses together on the floor. I just sat at the picnic table at the middle of the room, glanced at the three toilets and stared into space. Rose took pity on me and set my bed up, gave me a cigarette and so so so carefully let myself go to sleep. I woke up and was given another cigarette. The ladies asked me what happened and did their best to scare me. I had gotten picked up on a Sunday and Monday was a holiday, so forget about being released before Tuesday. I didn’t eat and I wouldn’t have either if I had stayed that long.
It took just as long to get out as in. After they told me I was released there were hours and hours, more pink holding cells and another van ride with a girl who was getting out after a 6 month stay. She asked me if I had lotion, and I looked at her like she was crazy. She told me things that had happeded that made me happy I hadn’t stayed till Tuesday. Robert had gotten along just fine, they had played chess and smoked the shit out of some cigarettes. I guess women are kind of horrible to each other. I walked out, almost past my friends who picked me up and walked straight to the car. I was so hungry and so cold, I got in the bath and they made chicken I didn’t want to eat, because I didn’t think it had been cooked through. We smoked and celebrated. I found out later the car that had picked me up had been stolen.
But lots of people get arrested in college right? Weed?! Who cares?! The officer didn’t even think it was that big a deal. I kept about how this was really interesting, a sociology experiment, I mean I was in criminal sociology right? This totally just confirms my feelings about drug laws. And then I would think… it doesn’t get worse than this. It literally doesn’t get worse than this. This is so fucking wrong and sick and horrible and depressing and just these people are having their lives ruined for a gram of crack, because they can’t get bailed out and they will lose their job, and they can’t pick up their kids and they are exposed to this bullshit and violence again and again and again.
I spent 3 months with drug counseling, drug tests, and 12 AA meetings, which in New Orleans were both very entertaining and truly horrible. A real life soap opera complete with someone who “shared” through a voice-box device.
I understand a parents desire to shield their children from this kind of experience, because they don’t want them to have to see how horrible things are, but that is perversely kind of perpetrating ignorance. I don’t think the world would be worse off if everyone got thrown in once, but there is no way to regulate experience.
Personality Chart:
Conflation is defined as “the process or result of fusing items into one entity; fusion, amalgamation”.
By writing two versions of the same story, a conflated truth is revealed to the reader. When using disparate things to contextualize meaning, the conflation may reveal something, or render them meaningless.
Here are some examples of things that I have attempted to merge:
-My feelings about eating Foie Gras and seeing someone pay for it with a Bank of America card.
-A picture of someone fondling a piece of gum under the table, something both appealing and abhorent.
-pictures of my friends fighting are both violent and funny, beautiful and strange
The space I create in these dichotomies is where I want the viewer to land and consider.
Problem piece: An assignment where we try to illuminate what we are interested in in a different way, at the same time illustrating the problems we come across in our work. For this piece I chose to follow through on a something I had been thinking about once. What makes me like a person? What are the best things about a person?
Best: Funny, Brave, Kind, Intelligent
Worst: Not Funny, Coward, Mean, Stupid
I asked my friend (Stefan Karpinski) to come up with all the possibilities of the combinations of these traits. There are 16 possibilities. He also made a chart where each personality combination is next to four that only differ by a single trait. Best of the best is in the upper left corner, worst of the worst is in the middle lower right. Note the continuity wraps around the edges on the 4 x 4 grid as well. I made a second chart where the viewer and I can plug in people for each combination.
The result: Using a system a la Sol Lewitt, I have created a logical yet completely ridiculous notion of how to categorize people. By conflating a system with something as completely unquantifiable as personality, I am questioning the ability of systems in art, my work, ect to reveal anything besides themselves.
In the discussion about this piece, we talked about teen magazine personality tests, eugenics, sperm donation, job prediction.. It lead to many anecdotes and questioning of how to define people as funny or not, possibilities for other options. Erica was told that a clown would be a great career choice for her once. I shared my knowledge of Ireland’s import of Danish sperm as the Danish requirements were much stricter than those that existed in Ireland. We related the chart to markets and politics. We talked about the difference of having the personality types first and thinking of a person, versus plugging a person into one of the combinations, and where we ourselves would fit.
My brother says I am definitely not funny.
I partially made the piece because I find many of the discussions at art school a bit arbitrary. In what context are the things we talk about important? Are they? Just because I follow an idea through to its end, does not justify its existence and I believe there is a responsibility in making things where we demand attention from people.
I listened to a senate hearing on retirement fund reform, and it serves as a good example. There were two experts who base their research on a system, like mine, that was logical, but has no basis in reality since the markets are not logical, especially with so much of the current manipulation. James Rickards was the third of the experts who testified. He agreed that the reforms the other two experts suggested were good, but it did not matter unless the major system of financial markets was reformed. I want to highlight the failures of logic, and how systems can be a pernicious trap that eliminate all proportions of what we are actually looking at.
While I worked on this piece, I serendipitously (John Cusack) heard this on a podcast, “God and Satan were walking down the street and God saw a bit of truth on the sidewalk. He picked it up and Satan said, ‘Give it to me, and I will organize it.’”
Watched the MF Global hearing on C-Span today with the excitement of an 8 year old at Christmas, a Giants fan at the Superbowl this year and the anticipation of a young boy about to get laid for the first time (it’s different for girls). My brother and I sent 19 emails back and forth while we were watching. Here is some of that exchange.
-SHE’S GONNA CRY!!!!
-Obrien is just pleading the fifth… they just let Obrien leave.. she had a shit eating grin.. / How convenient. They should at least make her sit through it.
- aww shit!!! this guy asking questions now just said “this reminds me an awful lot of Enron, and if I were you, I wouldn’t worry about me, I would worry about the people sitting next to you, because one of you is going to start talking.”
-“I appreciate your consistency in not providing us with any information.”
-“it’s very complex”
-THIS IS SO AWESOME / I know. IT IS GREAT.
-AHAHAHAHAHA ” whats your grade point average?”??
-“To the best of my memory, I was born this morning”
I wonder how much they were sweating. I mean, what does this do to the body? A hearing like this? Can you imagine getting dressed in the morning? There must be nervous farting all around.
The guys asking questions were the BEST… “If I gave a bank money for safe keeping, and when I wanted it back, they didn’t give it to me, would you consider that stealing?” One guy even had a bottle of water and a glass and a black marker to illustrate customer funds. I didn’t get it, but man was he pleased with himself.
Anyone walking by my door could here me yelling things like “Oh Yeah” and “Suck it Steenkamp!” with the low mumbling of C-Span in the background.
I know… not a lot is happening as far as accountability in this whole debacle, but man do I get satisfaction when I know at least a few people will be throwing away their shirts, if not underwear when they get home tonight.
The Appeal of Abuse
If someone I was into took me with force, I would probably only say no one in ten times.
I know my limits very well at this point, and exactly when I want to break them. Throwing up is not a deal breaker as a friend once pointed out.
I stopped smoking. I can weigh damage and benefit.
Sometimes it leads to laying in a bathtub, nothing pressing down evenly and hard, and all I can do is submit, but sitting and watching a sunset, holding hands in deck chairs has little appeal. Fraught with potential failure, the joy is hard to take.
I do seek validation. I want to argue and argue and argue and win. I want the other side to just move me into other ways of thinking: an endless intense argument that gets better and better. The argument stops getting better when my pride or the superiority of my opponent gets in the way. Then I take on the role of subordinate, and while the dominance is liberating on me, it has the need to flip. The opponent needs to know how capable I am of choking them. Not for my pleasure, but for their acknowledgment of my power. Someone too dumb is easily used, but someone who I grant the power to validate me with cannot fail, because that would be my failure.
