A Theory of Space/Downtown/Mon Feb 5/1 pm: Today, a man violated a trespass admonishment that was issued against him on October 31, 2000, and, as a consequence, he was thrown into jail. Now, jail is a form of punishment that confines the offender to a very limited space, and trespass admonishment space is one that gives offenders the whole world, but denies them access to one limited space (a home, the invisible radius around a person, an area under a viaduct). Therefore, we may conclude that the nature of jail space is to lock you in, whereas the nature of trespass admonishment space is to lock you out.
The Liberation of Things/Aurora/Sun Feb 11/2 am: After staring at the corpse on the bed with the needle in her arm, Officer T. Weibke made an inventory of the hotel room. He wrote: "There was a small bottle of VCR head-cleaner sitting on the night stand next to the box containing steel wool. [The dead drug addict's] purse was sitting on a chair next to the night stand. Her wallet was sitting on top of the purse and there was $5 sitting in plain view of the wallet. There were several small trash bags containing empty beer bottles and an empty wine bottle. There were three or four used needles inside one of the empty beer bottles. Four unopened Budweiser beers sat in a box on the floor, and a full bottle of Boone's Farm wine sat on the dresser." The point of this report? Only in death do objects (beer bottles, wine bottles, needles, wallets) come alive with such fire! Indeed we may argue that life, human life, smothers objects out of existence, while our deaths liberate them--give them an opportunity to burn brightly.
A Moral Cop Poem/Seattle/Fri May 4/10 pm-1 am: Tonight, the vice squad performed several sting operations on strip joints around the city. Nothing new happened, just the usual: Cops got free dances and wrote reports about illegal touching, caressing, and fondling. What is of interest to us this time is the section of the reports where the vice agents described the attire of the dancers. Police Beat has decided to string these descriptions together so as to form an erotic poem inspired by the image of a pearl necklace. We call this poem "The Indecent Necklace," and hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed assembling it:
Night by night, song by song, they slid down the silver thread of indecency. Bluish-green translucent one-piece, with white top, and plaid skirt; black two-piece G-string bikini with sharp high heels and pony tails; white with dark-flowered negligée top and matching G-string; white two-piece G-string bikini pink swimsuit. Yes, night by night, song by song, they slid down the silver thread of indecency.
The Confessions of a Pleasant Dope Addict/Capitol Hill/Mon Aug 27/6 pm: This crime was related directly to Police Beat in a new wine bar that just opened on Pike. "I was in my apartment when I received a phone call from a friend who offered to sell me marijuana. I agreed to buy it. Approximately two hours later, the friend came into my apartment and gave me a bag of marijuana worth $25. We then sampled the drug; it was marijuana of a marvelous variety. But then I realized I did not have the $25 I owed him, so we walked to a cash machine. I withdrew the $25, gave it to him, and we proceeded to a bar, where I bought him a glass of red wine."
