"I am a lousy criminal."

jdg at a Detroit public school:

The bathrooms still have their marble stalls. The copper has been ripped from the walls behind each fixture, sledgehammered fissures in the brickwork. The scrappers have left notes to each other on the walls, gloating over what's already been taken. "$5,000 strong copper bitch." Just a few weeks before this trespass, a principal at an operating school in this same district sent home a letter with her students pleading for their parents to send toilet paper and light bulbs to school with their children. The school I'm in was closed so recently that only now are the smoke detectors running low on batteries. The devices are chirping birds in the hallways and classrooms, with songs like cooling embers.

I have read a stolen book to my daughter every night for the past few weeks. Last night, I pulled out the charging card from the first page of a book called The Boy and the Forest, and scanned through the names of the children who'd checked it out all the way back to 1964. Steven. Suzy. Kelvin. Natinia. Here was the history of a school, of a neighborhood, of a city.

(Sweet Juniper)

Her name was Ida, and he loved her

but that was a while ago, of course.

Frillless - Day One

Bienvenue and Aloha.

The internet has a lovely way of allowing every hayseed to put their ideas into action immediately, and in that spirit, here's a blog version of a magazine I wanted to start last night. Magazines are beautiful, tactile, collectible things, and this might not translate so well to the minutia-oriented world of internet humor and info, but what the shit, it's free, and I don't start work for two weeks, so all aboard.



The idea: posts that are interesting, written and produced by people who care about them, without filler or frills. Topics can range all over the place from photo essays, recipes, opinion pieces, celebrity gossip, PSAs, and so on.

So let it out. Say what you have to say, and keep in touch.