THE QUEEN OF HAIGHT STREET

One of our very first shows in San Francisco was at a bar on Haight Street. Jason and I had just moved to California, and even though we knew the club kind of sucked, we were still excited.

When it was time for us to play, Jason was nowhere to be found — I looked for him in the basement, in the boys’ room, but it was like he’d been beamed into space. Finally, he appeared, and we played our show for three people: the bartender and the two friends we’d invited. It was a deflating end to weeks of excitement about the gig.

After the show I asked Jason where he’d been beforehand, as though his disappearing act was responsible for the disappearance of our audience as well. Jason told me he’d been out on Haight Street, chatting it up with a crowd of friendly bums and bag ladies

A while later I went outside to get some air and an old woman pushing a grocery cart filled with junk approached me.  She had tears in her eyes. She explained that she’d been hanging out in front of that club for years, listening to different bands play. “Usually it’s terrible and I go about my business,” she said. “But tonight, the music was so beautiful that I cried.” She said she would’ve paid to get in if she’d had the money, and I told her I would’ve made sure she’d gotten in, had I known she was standing outside listening.

“I want to give you something,” she said. She dug through her cart for a few minutes, tossing things over her shoulder like a mad scientist. At last, she produced a tiny purple crystal the size of a dime. “I found this years ago,” she said. “It’s very important to me — it’s my most prized possession — and I want you to have it and keep it with you wherever you play.”

I felt tears spring to life in my own eyes. The notion that our music had connected so powerfully with this woman stirred me deeply. I took the crystal, and thanked her again and again.

I still have it, of course. It’s the most valuable treasure I own.

I WAS ELEVEN YEARS OLD. Sure, I’d seen a Playboy before, and even Playboy had blown my mind. But I’d never seen anything hardcore — to any degree — before this particular day.

For some strange reason, my mom had signed me up to do a play in Chinatown, and I’d arrived early to the rehearsal. While I was waiting, I decided to take a little stroll around the Yun Sat-sen Gardens, which is this amazing Asian garden in Vancouver — it’s actually in a pretty dangerous neighborhood, but I didn’t know that at eleven.  So I was walking around, killing time, when I noticed a magazine lying mashed and crumpled on the ground. I moved closer and saw body parts — naked body parts. Holy shit! Even from one tiny glimpse, I could tell it was more explicit than anything I’d ever seen in my life.

I kept walking — literally, I didn’t even slow my pace. But when I reached the end of the block, something drew me back. I turned and walked by the magazine again, just to get one more glance. And then again. I began circling the thing like a shark — stealing little peeks at the pages on the ground. It had been raining all week so the magazine wasn’t just crumpled, it was soaking wet, too. I walked by it a fourth time and then, trying to act casual, bent down and snatched it up. It was just a big wet sopping mess; I shoved the whole thing in my jacket pocket. I didn’t look at it, just shoved it in there and went to my play rehearsal. Every ten or twenty minutes throughout the rehearsal, I sneaked over to my jacket to make sure that the hot, wet clump was still inside.

That night I went home and spread the magazine carefully on a towel to dry out. Then I stared. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. It all seemed much more surgical than I’d ever imagined it would be. I mean, I saw the insides of body parts I had never even seen the outside of before. I was shocked at how explicit it was. “They’re just showing people having sex!” At that age sex is such an unattainable Holy Grail. To see it nonchalantly plastered all over this magazine was unbelievable to me. I used to look at these pages constantly. I don’t even think I jacked off at that point — I would go to my room and just stare.

You may not believe this, but I still look at porno from time to time. As you know, they have ads towards the back of porno magazines for phone-sex lines and shit like that. That original porno mag was so waterlogged, the ad pages in the back were, for the most part, the only ones undamaged enough to see. Well, I held onto that magazine for a very long time. Even after I got real porno — movies and whatnot — I still held onto that original find. I’m sure at some point my mom found the thing and threw it away. But believe me when I tell you this: there are literally the same exact ads in the back of magazines today as the ones in that soggy porno magazine I found fifteen years ago. Trust me, I’m an expert.

A reader weighs in on a note that never reached her …

“I was looking through the Found archives today trying to kill time before picking my daughter up from school, when I came across this one. When I saw it, my heart skipped because the handwriting looked so familiar, as well as the content and then I saw it was from Arizona and I’m almost sure I was the intended recipient of this.

I had left my ex shortly after our daughter was born because of a lot of physical and emotional abuse. He tried repeatedly to convince me that we should “work it out,” but I knew better because I had forgiven him before and he always did better for a month or two, then went right back to how he was. With a baby involved now, I couldn’t risk it any longer and refused.

He sent an e-mail, in an attempt to scare me or hurt me I guess, to Children’s Services telling them I was neglecting our child. They investigated and did nothing because there was no basis for the claims. I assumed it was him, but had no proof until he called me drunk in the middle of the night to brag about it and I hung up on him. It was the last time we ever spoke.

I allowed him to forfeit his parental rights and give up child support so he would no longer be in mine or my daughter’s lives because I feel he would only do more harm here than good.”

Thanks to FOUND superstar Karin Knape, FOUND Magazine is now available in several locations in Gothenburg, Sweden. Gothenburg friends - hurry over now to grab a copy before they’re gone! Also, FOUND’s Europe Tour will sweep through town in late October - stay tuned to the Events page for details.

Find FOUND at these spots in Gothenburg:

WHERKA
Street address: Nordenskiöldsgatan 7, 41309 Göteborg

VÄNDER SIG OM
Andra Långgatan 22
413 28 Göteborg

CD-CENTRALEN
Gothenburg Central Station

Join Found Magazine and our dear friend Frank Warren at PostSecret in supporting Hopeline, a national suicide prevention hotline (1-800-SUICIDE). Hopeline is a fantastic organization doing important work, so please check out the video and lend whatever support you can!

Do YOU have any FOUND bits of audio sitting around collecting dust? Maybe an old answering machine tape, voicemail, or band demo that you’d like to share with the rest of the world? Well … we might have just the place for it!

We’re working with our friends from RapHappy to have a great place to share the random audio bits online.  Basically, you can either mail your tape to us (at PO Box 491, New York, NY, 10012-9998 ) or submit a digitized audio version to us (check the EZ Uploading window and digitizing tips here.

The project hasn’t officially launched just yet (if you’re in NYC, don’t forget to drop by the release party!), but why not go and check out the teasers we’ve got up so far?

We’ve just received an update about a November ‘06 find. We’d all been concerned for Tilney’s well-being, and we’re glad to hear that she’s alive and well. Read on…

The contract part where it lists rules for a Tinley…is me. last year I was doing some stupid things and my parents, four months after I moved out, were trying to convince me to move back in. I havent and still wont. Im doing much better though, without any group therapy or anything. :] Who found it? Thats so funny…I think I threw it in one of my folders and havent really given it a second thought for a very long time.

Llegó el momento: cartas de amor, listas de mercado, postales, dibujos, fotos, declaraciones de amor, cuentas por pagar… esos  objetos encontrados que de alguna manera nos cuentan algo acerca de alguien, ya tienen un lugar en el mundo. Ha llegado la Revista FOUND.

The following comes from Eric Karjala, writer (Cracked.com, McSweeney’s) and the man behind the seriously awesome website eKarjala. He’s also the man behind the popular find “Paper Never Wins.” In his own words:

“This is a story about the moronic, arbitrary manner in which things become popular on the internet.

Commenter Ueli asked if an old pre-9/11 eKarjala entry about rock/paper/scissors was the “first instance of this quote that’s passed around so much.” The entry in question is an analysis of the old hand gesture game, written in the traditional style of “internet rant,” which is where you assume a tone of contrived rage as a means for creating jocularity. It’s as if you’re saying, “I would like to make some observations about a well-known topic. These observations make me angry! LOL!” You might recognize this tone from 90% of eKarjala.

I hadn’t heard of any such quotation being passed around, so I Googled the exact phrase “I thought paper would protect you.” There were 12,000 instances, each more retarded than the last. From what I could tell, all of them were from a curious rewording of my original idiotic post. Included in the search results was a Digg link to the following image, which was Dugg an ass-boggling 8,343 times:

This image was from the website run by Found Magazine, which is an excellent publication that archives all the mysterious notes and pictures one occasionally finds randomly dispersed amongst civilization. So to recap: Apparently somebody printed out an edited version of a 2001 eKarjala entry and left the document lying around in a public location, where it was then recovered by a subscriber to Found Magazine and added to the Found database, from where it was then linked to by Digg and in consequence became parroted on thousands of message boards and MySpace pages. If that’s accurate, this would easily be the dumbest series of events that’s ever happened.

For the purposes of comparison, here’s the original eKarjala entry:

I understand that Scissors can beat Paper and I get how Rock can beat Scissors, but there’s no fucking way Paper could beat Rock. Apparently, Paper is supposed to magically “wrap around” Rock, leaving it immobile. Why the hell can’t Paper do this to Scissors? No, never mind Scissors, why can’t Paper do this to people? Why aren’t sheets of college-ruled notebook paper constantly smothering students as they attempt to take notes in class? I’ll tell you why: because Paper can’t beat anybody. A rock would tear that shit up in about a minute.

Whenever I play Rock/Paper/Scissors, I always choose Rock. When somebody claims to have beaten me with their Paper, I punch them in the face with my already-clenched fist. I’ll say, “Oh, shit, man, I’m sorry, I thought Paper would protect you. Asshole.”

As you can see, it wasn’t the most imaginative observation ever written—probably every hacky stand-up has written something similar. What’s fascinating is that certain instances of the circulating quotation are not just posted anonymously, but instead attributed to Dane Cook or Mitch Hedberg. This is nothing new. The ambiguous origins of anonymous quotations are commonly transposed onto popular figures, even if the quotation is manifestly beneath their actual work, as in this case (even with regards to Dane Cook). People don’t trust anonymous sources, and all it takes is one jackass to implicate a specific individual. If this rock/paper/scissors bit is somehow still circulating in a few more years, people will start attributing it to Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde. Eventually everyone will agree that it was originally pontificated by Thomas Jefferson just after he signed the Declaration of Independence, when he updated the “Rants” section of his GeoCities webpage, “Thomas Jefferson’s little corner of the internet.”

Although this rock/paper/scissors text was circulated on a very small scale, the manner of its distribution is emblematic of the internet as a whole, which insists that certain things be popular, and it doesn’t necessarily matter what: a hideous dancing baby, the senseless engrish from an obscure video game, a random 1980s pop hit by Rick Astley. We are so desperate for commonality that any random cultural artifact can become a shared experience, and this is especially true on the internet, which is viral not just in nature but in consequence, making us nauseated from the absurdity. This observation makes me so angry! LOL!”