After 8 years of bringing FOUND magic and mayhem to North America and Europe, the FOUND Tour is finally heading Down Under in 2010. We’re looking for leads on cool spots in neat cities to bring our FOUND show. Want us to come to your town? Holla! Willing to help us set a show in your ‘hood? Drop us a line! Write for a newspaper or work for a radio show that might help spread word about our tour? Give us a shout! Got a friend who might be into organizing an event? Let us know! We promise an amazing time for all… we just need your help getting the tour together. All ideas and suggestions welcome! Please email us at info@foundmagazine.com

Longtime friend of FOUND Jim Carroll passed away last Friday, September 11th, in New York; we’re all deeply saddened here at FOUND HQ.

Jim has been a longtime inspiration and a generous supporter of our work and contributed many finds over the years, plucked up from New York City streets. He wrote a great essay about one of his all-time favorite finds for our new book, Requiem for a Paper Bag; we shared this story with audiences all around the country as we toured this spring and summer. Check it out below.

Our thoughts are with his family and his wide community of friends. Thanks for your words and music and spirit, Jim! If they got hoops in heaven, we know you dunkin’ on some fools.

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INSIDE OUT
by Jim Carroll

Back in the day when I was playing rock n’ roll and touring a lot, we had this roadie from the Bay Area named Dennis. Dennis had a girlfriend in the Bay and she had a friend who I used to get together with when I was in town. One time, me and Dennis took his girlfriend and her friend to a spa. They kept saying they wanted to go to one, so we finally went and they did their thing while me and Dennis sat around looking at the clouds.

Then we happened to notice that one of the things they offered at this spa was colonics. This is the service where they pump water up your ass and you shit all this stuff out; the idea is that it’s cleansing for the body and the soul. It was expensive, maybe a hundred bucks, and I knew Dennis was short on cash, but we were there, and it seemed like the thing to do, so I threw down the money for both of us.

Once they’ve pumped the water into you, you let it all out over a fine mesh screen, a net of sorts, so all the liquid goes through and what’s left on the screen is whatever was inside you. The colonics experts don rubber gloves and sift through the debris and analyze it all — this is stuff from your lower bowel, which you usually wouldn’t be shitting out; it’s the shit that collects in you over time.

It was disgusting. The guy held up a piece of pork that he guessed had been in my system for three years. I couldn’t have been more grossed out or more fucking fascinated. Me and Dennis kept marveling at the whole notion that things could stay in your body for so long.

But here’s the real killer of the thing: You know those little green plastic soldiers you can get a bag of for ninety-nine cents at the general store? Every kid has them. They come in different positions — one guy is a sniper on the ground, another is kneeling;  there’s also the officer with a pistol, the guy with binoculars, one guy with a machine gun, one with a bazooka. I used to play with them endlessly when I was a kid, whether I was outdoors or inside, creating little battlefields. All the kids I knew had a similar collection of Army guys. And invariably, someone would bite the head off of one of them by accident, and start chewing on it like they were chewing on anything, so every once in a while, naturally, you’d hear that so-and-so had swallowed one of the heads.

Well, at some point in his childhood, Dennis must have swallowed an Army guy whole, because that day at the spa while he was getting his colonic treatment, an entire U.S. soldier came out of his ass. We found it caught in his screen after he’d cleared out his insides. We couldn’t even tell what it was at first, but once they’d washed it off, we saw that it was a full-on plastic soldier — one of my favorites, actually — the sniper shimmying along on his belly.  It must have been inside him for over twenty years.

The most amazing thing about the whole scene, it seemed to me, was the way it redefined the phrase You are what you eat. Dennis was always a nice, quiet guy, but he got real fucking rowdy when he drank. He got up in people’s faces; he got in fights. Now it made sense — he’d had a soldier inside of him since the age of six.

The colonics guys at the spa were flabbergasted — they said they’d never seen anything like this before. They’d found talons, bones, and marbles, but never a plastic soldier. And the weird things is, Dennis seemed to grow mellower once that soldier was out of him. I’ve always loved picking up interesting stuff — letters, pictures, old books in an alley —  but that soldier, sopped with goop, caught in the mesh screen, and trying to wriggle away while keeping his rifle steady, was one of the best things I’ve ever found.

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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.