Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

The Intersection of Ingenuity and Desperation

Customs authorities in Vancouver, B. C. made a grave discovery this week when they found nearly 57 kilograms of opium inside a hollow tombstone being shipped from Iran. The find is being called the province's biggest opium seizure ever. This type of criminal activity might be considered the intersection of ingenuity and desperation or perhaps optimism and immorality. In either case, these people and objects could tell an interesting tale.

Best known for his work as an award-winning writer for young adults, Jack Gantos tells the harrowing story of being drawn into a drug smuggling scheme and his ensuing arrest in Hole in My Life. As a teen living in the Virgin Islands fearing that his life was going nowhere with no chance getting away, Gantos was approached with an offer to transport a large quantity of hashish to New York City in return for free transport and money to start a new life. Hole in My Life documents the entanglements that slowly surround him as he realizes this adventure. Using a stark and direct style that eschews moralizing, Gantos captures an image of himself as a teen hungry for internal catharsis. Desperately looking outside himself for forces of change, Gantos ultimately finds an internal motivation  that drives him from wanting to write to actually writing during his incarceration. Our author finds that nurturing the creative impulse requires a self-discipline and self-care also essential to successfully surviving the harsh realities of life in prison.

Evidence of creativity out of desperation abounds in Home-Made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts. Collected here by Vladimir Arkhipov are ingenious examples of craft that put a hollow Iranian tombstone to shame. Leather cap made from an old punching bag? Check. Old Fanta cans turned into artful maracas? Check. Poet's flashlight for recording mid-slumber muse visits, built-from-scratch? Check. Home-Made is a testimony to the material expression of self-actualization that occurs when resources become bitterly scarce. Better yet, this is no simple picture book. Each example is grouped with insightful, and often entertainingly off-topic, comments from its creator. We learn that a hand fabricated motor scooter windshield was obtained by bartering medical alcohol and that the windshield's owner then attached a plastic visor himself, bending it to fit over an open fire. Our proud owner, Grigory Samorin, goes on to explain that the stickers of girls on the windshield are courtesy of his son who brought them back from Germany and that a similar trend has filled every kiosk in his town with porn.

Visceral yet hallucinatory, the images collected by Danzig Baldaev in the three volumes of the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia are by turns inspiring and disturbing. Baldaev was the warden of "Kresty" an infamous prison in Leningrad. During his fifty-two years there (and in other reformatory settlements) he recorded hundreds of tattoos as they appeared on both men and women. Most of the tattoos here are presented as illustrations making Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia a flash book of sorts. Though translations are provided, only the most cursory explanation of the tattoos' meaning within the deep, complex subculture of Russian prisons is included. Still, the shocking power of these drawings speaks to a type of creative expression born out of a criminal subculture's tragic and autocatalytic need to define and enforce an articulated power structure. Plus, the drawings are cool looking.