Calling From Prison

Posted on March 31, 2008

A few times a week, I get calls from correctional institutions. Wrong numbers mostly, usually at two or three in the morning. My phone resides in the 213 area code, and as those who’ve lived in Los Angeles know, it’s an urban exchange which includes many places: Downtown, Koreatown, Crenshaw, Skid Row and one of the roughest Latin neighborhoods north of San Salvador. Half of the calls are from little drunk men slurring in Spanish, asking for a cab. Half are the steriley recorded voice of a female civil servant, speaking as though it’s the middle of the afternoon, saying, “This is a call from a Los Angeles County correctional institution. Your caller’s name is Isaak.” And then she explains I’ll be charged $3 should I accept the call.

I hang up, because why would I want to be charged three bucks to talk with some dude who I don’t even know? I realize this might appeal to some, and if the thought of being awakened by a mysterious hombre calling from prison stiffly stirs your inner juices, go forth and do what you like.

But me? I’m not looking for the late-night lowdown on the pokey. I’ve never been intrigued by the pokey. I take the word of those who have visited the pokey. Plus, I don’t want to burn the guy’s one call and leave him smoldering over a weekend. I picture him sitting, repeating my number over and over, wrathfully plotting his revenge like Robert DeNiro in Cape Fear.

So I hang up, but each time I wonder. What’s it like on his end? Does he hear me answer, grasp I’m not Bo’s Bail Bonds, and start busting fist-sized holes through the lime green walls at county? Do the police give him a do-over? Have wrong number regulations been properly codified?

A few years ago, I could have explained things to a desk sergeant. How I long for the days when it was so easy! When I might have just yawned, rubbed the sleep from my eyes, and explained that someone transposed a digit. That some bail guy was losing his shirt. I could tell a man and be done with it, then go back to sleep. But what does one do when the wheels of justice run thru 1-800-Collect? Do I shout into the vacant air, hope that our call is being recorded? And what do I say? Sucks to be you? What is Miss Manners’ advice for handling automated phone calls from criminals one doesn’t know?

My old number got queries for Rheem Valley Bowl. Kids wanted to know the cost of shoes. Different time, different place.

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Sharing: Benazir Bhutto

Posted on March 29, 2008

As I stepped down onto the tarmac at Quaid-e-Azan International Airport in Karachi on October 18, 2007, I was overcome with emotion. Like most women in politics, I am especially sensitive to maintaining my composure, to never show my feelings. A display of emotion by a woman in politics or government can be misconstrued as a manifestation of weakness, reinforcing stereotypes and caricatures. But as my foot touched the ground of my beloved Pakistan for the first time after eight lonely and difficult years of exile, I could not stop the tears from pouring from my eyes and I lifted my hands in reverence, in thanks, and in prayer. I stood on the soil of Pakistan in awe. I felt that a huge burden, a terrible weight, had been lifted from my shoulders. It was a sense of liberation. I was home at long last. I knew why. I knew what I had to do.

Long ago I had made my choice. The people of Pakistan have always come first. The people of Pakistan will always come first. My children understood it and not only accepted it but encouraged me. As we said good-bye, I turned to the group of assembled supporters and press and said what was in my heart: “This is the beginning of a long journey for Pakistan back to democracy, and I hope my going back is a catalyst for change. We must believe that miracles can happen.”

The stakes could not be higher. Within the Muslim world there has been and continues to be an internal rift, an often violent confrontation among sects, ideologies and interpretations of the message of Islam. This destructive tension has set brother against brother, a deadly fratricide that has tortured intra-Islamic relations for 1,300 years. The sectarian conflict stifled the brilliance of the Muslim renaissance that took place during the Dark Ages of Europe, when the great universities, scientists, doctors and artists were all Muslim. Today that intra-Muslim sectarian violence is most visibly manifest in a senseless, self-defeating sectarian civil war that is tearing modern Iraq apart at its fragile seams and exercising its brutality in other parts of the world, especially in parts of Pakistan.

And while the Muslim world—where sectarianism is rampant—simmers internally, extremists have manipulated Islamic dogma to justify and rationalize a so-called jihad against the West. The attacks on September 11, 2001, heralded the vanguard of the caliphate-inspired dream of bloody confrontation; the Crusades in reverse. And as images of the twin towers burning and then imploding were on every television set in the world, the attack was received in two disparate ways in the Muslim world. Much, if not most, of the Muslim world reacted with horror, embarrassment, and shame when it became clear that this greatest attack in history had been carried out by Muslims in the name of Allah and jihad. Yet there was also another reaction, a troubling and disquieting one: Some people danced in the streets of Palestine. Sweets were exchanged by others in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Condemnations were few in the world’s largest Muslim nation, Indonesia. The hijackers of September 11 seemed to touch a nerve of Muslim impotence. The burning and then collapsing towers represented, to some, resurgent Muslim power, a perverse Muslim payback for the domination of the West.

To others it was a religious epiphany. And to still others it combined political, cultural and religious assertiveness. A Pew comparative study of Muslim’s attitudes after the attacks found that people in many Muslim countries “think it is good that Americans now know what it is like to be vulnerable.” Read more

Count Chalk-ula

Posted on March 28, 2008

Julian Beever’s amazing pavement drawings

Artists Collective

Posted on March 25, 2008

It began as a seed. Just an idea. Medical marijuana businesses are required under California law to operate as non-profits. So why not launch a service that lives up to the law’s true spirit? I could provide safe access to truly sick people, and instead of their money going to profiteers I could take those funds and create art grants for writers, painters, musicians, performers and others whose work shows bonafide merit.

Hell, somebody has to do something. If not, our culture is destined to devolve into endless American Idol reruns. And what a perfect storyline for the marijuana movement. Pot dealers making it possible for Republicans to bury the NEA. Not that the National Endowment for the Arts can do much as things stand anyway. This year’s budget is $144 million. Comparable sums are spent every twelve hours in Iraq. Nor is corporate America helping. Suits don’t give a fig about young artists. But in apathy, they’re not alone. As a people, we’ve grown appallingly comfortable with the idea of the starving artist. That creative folk should struggle to do their best work is one thing, but that artists should physically and emotionally suffer, in some cases resort to crime, or have their lives eviscerated in some other sad, heartbreaking way—just because god granted them the grace to play the piano rather than launch an IPO, is a callousness which calls into question the very civility of our society.

A people lacking artistry is a people deserving to be forgotten. But isn’t that where we stand? We’ve become a society where the rich, famous and well-connected are given carte-blanche, while everyone else must drag  through the muck in the face of hardship and looming calamity.

And if the prevailing winds continue, with government half-assing it, businesses lacking heart, and the rich and famous grown so fat they only sit and read their press clippings, then who? I say, if that’s how they’re gonna play the game, why not fund the arts by selling marijuana?

Shocking or not, we’ve come to a crossroads, a moment when conventional plans are no longer working. So why not try something revolutionary? Why not harness the financial power of marijuana to privately bankroll social good? Who says drug money must go to criminals? Who says it must go to pharmaceutical corporations? In marijuana, we have a product with the billion dollar potential of cigarettes and alcohol, and as of now, no corporate allegiances. We’re sitting on a vast fortune, and together we have the power to steer much of that money in highly beneficial charitable directions.

It only requires we be pragmatic. Read more

Early Afternoon Saloon

Posted on March 24, 2008

Virginia City, Nevada

Medical Timeout

Posted on March 21, 2008

There is no greater gift in this world than good health. Once you lose it, life ain’t the same. It’s been five years since I was last fully healthy, and while my condition has improved, I’m still prone to the occasional relapse. A change in medication last week has caused things to take a turn for the worse.

My body doesn’t produce enough testosterone. This causes a host of medical problems, among them extreme exhaustion. Rather than risk a full physical crash, I’ve decided to take a brief timeout and give my body the time it needs to rest and properly recover.

It takes an enormous amount of energy to produce this website and I don’t like to half-ass anything. So sit tight for a few days and have a killer weekend.

Walkabout Jones will return with a major announcement on Tuesday, March 25th.

Get ready. We’re about to do something pretty incredible.

Respect,
Dann

 

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Art Underground

Posted on March 19, 2008

UntitledBy Gabrielle Reed

Walkabout Jones wants to feature artists of all kinds. Submit your paintings, graphic art, photography and drawings to “Art Underground” at walkaboutjones@gmail.com

When the Empire Strikes Back

Posted on March 17, 2008

By Steve Almond

Just how I wound up at the hemp festival is not something I want to get into, at least not without my attorney present. But I do want to make a couple of observations about the general state of the marijuana-smoking community, of which I am a proud (and, if I may add, medically-necessitated) member. But before I get into all that, I’d like to share a few warm memories of my afternoon. Well, let’s see … I did take notes. I must have misplaced them, though. Anyway, here’s (more or less) what I remember: There was a drum circle that included a topless woman with strips of tape over her nipples. I don’t know what these strips of tape said, though I am willing to speculate that they didn’t say Left or Right. There was an energetic band from Waltham whose songs sounded a bit like Cheap Trick, if you can envision the members of Cheap Trick as, perhaps, brain damaged.

The main thing I noticed was that—for all the scratchy hemp sandals and bracelets on sale—there was no actual paraphernalia on sale. Not one single pipe or bong. To be quite honest, I attended the festival, in part, because I wanted to buy myself a cool little bong, because I am tired of self-administering my medically-necessitated marijuana using a hacked up apple. (Or, when I’m out of apples, a jury-rigged Bic pen.) But selling paraphernalia has become more and more dangerous of late. As many of you may be aware, the federal government has launched a heroic campaign to criminalize the sale of instruments used to smoke pot. I am going to leave aside my primary objections because I want emphasize the pointlessness of this particular endeavor. Us stoners may be a bit slow on the uptake, but do you really think that cutting off our supply of blown-glass one-hitters is going to force us to quit smoking up? (And if you do, may I please have some of whatever you’re smoking?)

But I must say that the fact that I couldn’t buy a pipe at the Hemp Festival did underscore one disturbing truth about the larger stoner community: We are not exactly an imposing political force. Indeed, if I had to choose a population least likely to form a coherent lobby, pot smokers would be among my top three, right alongside contented Red Sox fans and mental patients. The problem, as I see it, is that pot smokers are just way too mellow. We are not, by nature, Type A human beings. Or, if we are Type A, pot generally reduces us to Type M people. The last thing we want is to have to go through a whole political hassle over our pot use. (Bummer, man.) Most of the kids at the Hemp Fest, for example, seemed more worked up over how much chicken they got in their burritos than the recent spate of raids on headshops. Read more

“Closure”

Posted on March 16, 2008

I saw Sami in her pickup truck on the 10 East headed toward downtown. She was parked just to the left of me, midday backup at full thrall. LA is a city of small traffic windows, roadways successively open and closing like castle doors on a miniature golf hole. Just five minutes earlier, I would have watched as she hurriedly sped off of my flank, her little Dodge racing as swiftly away as she disappeared out of my life. Maybe I would have gasped, then shivered, shocked at the sight of her after almost a year, but it all would have been just one instant on the interstate, no intimacy of words or discomfort of shared space. There she would go, just as before, briefly by my side and then nowhere to be found, and in true LA fashion, it all would happen while hardly happening at all.

But that’s not how it went. An eight car pile up, so demolition derby-like it was aired that evening on the six o’clock news, reduced the moving lanes to one, and then none, as emergency personnel attended to the injured and crews arrived to clear glass and fenders to the side of the road. I don’t know how long we were sitting there—I guess it was a minute or two—before I absently looked over and saw her in the next lane, dictating into her tape recorder. It was a habit she’d described to me the first time we met; a way to call herself on hubris, though it hadn’t worked for her so far.

My first thought was how difficult it is to hide in the front seat of a car. I raised my arm against the door, leaned my head into my hand, tried to make myself so small that I’d become invisible. But there’s something about hiding which implies a latent surrender or guilt; and the truth was I’d done nothing wrong. Staring at the radio, my mind slipped back almost a year to when Sami made me feel like the smallest man on earth. For months, I struggled with those feelings. First abandonment, then insignificance. The idea that a person could be held to so tightly and then so carelessly let go.

The thought of it blew a fresh wound into me, and I realized what I had to do.

I took a breath, my heart galloping like a racehorse, my hands getting that subtropical feeling. Then I made sure the cars in front weren’t moving, opened the door and set foot into nowhere. Read more

Where in the world?

Posted on March 13, 2008

 

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