Secret Mall Apartment

Just another day opening every app on my phone 600 times hoping to find some justice. Still searching. Oh well. Maybe the next click will be The One.

Anyways. I have to tell you about a great documentary, some banger songs, and the Olympics. But first, a quick hospital story.

I got an MRI a couple weeks ago. (Because I’m so healthy, like the president! That’s why you get MRIs, when everything is going great. Everyone knows that.) The lady was super nice, but she hit me with a question I wasn’t ready for: “we have Spotify, would you like to listen to music while you’re in there?” I wanted to argue with her about how evil Spotify is but it didn’t seem like the time or the place. I wanted something chill and mellow, something that felt familiar and comfortable, something I’ve heard a million times. I chose American Football LP1.

As I was adjusting to the sterile brightness of the room and situating myself on the crinkly paper laid over the hard, cold machine, she caught me off guard again. She gave me those little orange earplugs, followed immediately by the jankiest pair of headphones you’ve ever seen. She put them on and all of a sudden I was moving backwards, as if the headphones touching my head told the machine it was time to take me away. A voice came out of nowhere. Or maybe I had died and this was heaven and god herself wanted to make sure I got the music I asked for.

“We found American Football but not seeing LP1…”

“Uhh it has a green house on it.”

“Got it.”

Thank you nice lady. Or god. The music started a few seconds later, but it was faint. Of course. And then the machine started doing its thing. Not to be overly (overly) dramatic but let me tell you, you haven’t truly heard “Never Meant” until you’ve listened to it through busted headphones over earplugs while a hollow metal tube makes all kinds of boom boom bang bang whoosh whoosh noises that mostly drown it out anyway.

“Mike exploded our understanding of what art is and can be.”

The story about the artists who lived in the Providence Place Mall has always been a favorite of mine. Local legend type stuff. New England lore. I swore there was an old This American Life about it, but I can’t find it so I guess I made that up. 99 Percent Invisible did an episode about it in 2018 and now there’s a feature documentary about it streaming on Netflix. It’s a nice escape from The Horrors, as art can be.

This film is about something unexpected and the joy it can bring.

And no, I’m not talking about the secret mall apartment.

I’m talking about art.

I mean, yeah, it’s also about the apartment. Of course it is. But it’s about so much more: a city in flux, class politics, urban development, the impact and impermanence of art. All of that, told along with the story of the apartment, is what elevates the film to something really special.

It sounds crazy but it’s true: in 2003, a group of artists set up and furnished a secret apartment inside the Providence Place Mall beginning in 2003. The mall opened in 1999, and a local artist named Michael Townsend watched as a dirt parking lot near the highway was slowly turned into a 1.4 million square foot behemoth. He noticed during construction that there was one section of the building that just didn’t make any sense to him. It didn’t seem to have a purpose. Michael Townsend is many things but perhaps above all, he is a man with purpose.

The story is told through interviews plus a ton of footage they shot back in the day — inside the apartment and in the rest of the mall, especially the food court — with a small handheld digital camera that in 2003 was probably pretty nice. The story of the apartment is fascinating by itself, but it also unlocks a much larger story. Familiar societal villains like the destructive creep of urban development and capitalism rear their ugly heads, and we see how a big project like a mall can negatively impact the people in the community it claims to be serving. As usual, when capital gets hold of a city with projects like the mall, it continues spreading its tentacles outwards and is soon annexing more and more and more. The only words they care about: number go up. Old mill buildings full of artists and punk bands stand no chance when the deep pockets want parking lots and grocery stores. Every inch must be developed. Well, ironically, every inch except this one small space they just forgot about.

Townsend is a fascinating subject. He pushes the boundaries of what art can be and where art can go. What art “means” and where art “belongs” are subjective questions, and here we get to see how much fuller a life of art can be, and how it can spread person to person. I found it interesting how the apartment was a private project and his Tunnel installation was semi-private, accessible only through a manhole cover. Meanwhile his teaching and his Tape Art were projects that involved directly working with folks. But it doesn’t feel like a ‘one for me, one for them’ type deal, it’s all of a piece.

To Townsend, art was life and life was art. Is the apartment itself art? There a million ways to answer this question, and it all depends on your definition of art. As we learn, this was actually the side project. These artists were always thinking about bringing their art out into the world, and just happened to have a secret hideout to gather and make plans.

This project is human. It’s whimsy. It’s an innate drive. It’s rebellion. It’s sarcasm. It’s defiance. It’s play. It’s joy.

In life, there are so many spaces just out of view. You might have to look a little harder to find them. They could be around any corner. These spaces could be physical, liminal, or digital. You might find them accidentally, or you might find it, like Townsend does, by careful examination and noticing something that’s just a little off. In a world that is more anti-social than ever, where third spaces are disappearing, where culture is flattening, finding a space where you can connect with other humans, find your people, be yourself and express yourself, makes life richer and fuller, and that’s something that can be spread.

Keep your eyes open. Say yes to things. Be kind. Be curious. Try.

Just as capital reaches out to strangle everything in its path, art can push back against it and radiate inspiration and positivity outwards. It might not be enough to fight back against the bigger bullies, but it can change lives along the way.

At one point, Townsend’s brother says: “I’m not sure if [the apartment] moves over to the area of being artistic. I think this is just his creative mind trying to express itself in every possible way.”

A voice off screen asks: “Isn’t that art?”

(Secret Mall Apartment is now streaming on Netflix.)

A personal note

^{If Livejournal was still a thing, this would be my most recent post. Comments off.}

It feels like everything is constantly speeding up. The ride has broken. The attendant has gone home. We’re strapped in. There’s no way out. Like gravity has started pulling us through time itself.

I am not doing the best but I am doing my best. I am trying to help in places I can help. Positivity reserves are running low but holding on. Flowers of hope are silent for the winter but seeds have been planted judiciously and the thrill of possibility is palpable.

I haven’t been very healthy lately and the world is full of terrors and we’re so much further along this dark road than most people realize. [see below!] It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. The flint and steel are scraping. The sparks are flying. My brain feels like it’s always just about to burst into flames. I spend most of my time feeling like a video game final boss blinking red, just one more hit away from total defeat.

But then there’s my daughter. I was so worried I wouldn’t have the capacity for dad life, that it was something I’d just never figure out, that I would lose myself. So much of it has just come naturally and it brings me joy beyond my wildest imagination. Somehow no matter how anxious or exhausted I am at the end of the day, there she is, smiling at me, doing raspberries, clapping, and things are okay. That’s enough to replenish my heart containers, enough for me to go show up the next day and try to be a little better. So that’s what I’ll do. I hope the same is true for you.

Get to the gig (early)

A top tier life experience: when the new-to-you opening band rocks. I saw Wild Pink (the greatest band in the world?) the other night and Dead Gowns opened. Great vibes. Great set. Their record is very good.

Olympic corner

Fun Crit fact: I love the Olympics. The opening ceremonies are must watch for me. The winter games are the best, viewed from a warm couch. Too cold for me out there but nice job everybody. I played a lot of the ‘94 Lillehammer game on Sega growing up, I think that’s what started it. My mom also loves to tell the story of how I always loved speedskating and went up and down the hall pretending I was skating for gold. Bent over, hands behind my back, I had the moves down. Not so much the speed or the skating, which, and this is true, are very important.

My current power rankings of coolest Olympians, subject to change:

1. Amber Glenn, American figure skater. A queer Magic player!

2. Vladyslav Heraskevych, Ukrainian skeleton sledder. He was disqualified over his decision to wear a helmet bearing the portraits of fallen Ukrainian athletes. The helmet violated the Games’ prohibition on political speech, but he planned to race with it anyway until the IOC president spoke to him directly and barred him from competing.

3. Ilia Malinin, American figure skater. Dude landed a backflip twice, once on one foot!

4. Lindsey Vonn, American skier. Just an absolute badass.

5. Tomas-Llorenc Guarino Sabate, Spanish figure skater. It’s the Minions guy!

6. Madison Chock & Evan Bates, American figure skaters. They’re just so good.

7. Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo, cross-country skier. He was upset that the wifi in Italy was too weak for him to play video games, which he uses to regulate and relax between events.

8. Femke Kok, Dutch speedskater. Just a great name.

9. Any and all ski jumpers who injected their penises with hyaluronic acid in order to fly further.

10. This dog that went for a fun run down the slopes. Gold medal for zoomies.
    
    In dead last: Norwegian biathlete Sturla Holm Laegreid who won a bronze medal and immediately confessed on live TV that he cheated on his girlfriend a few months ago. “I had the gold medal in life… I only have eyes for her. I made the choice to tell the world what I did so maybe there’s a chance she will see what she really means to me.” Move on dude. You’re embarrassing yourself.

    
    And in second to last place: French biathlete Julia Simon, who was found guilty of stealing her teammate’s credit card last year. This headline is brutal for noting that the teammate she scammed came in 80th place while Simon took gold.

Okay time to get serious but at the end there’s a fun story about DRUGS!

I’m just so sick of the cruelty and sadism. The incompetence and malevolence. The sycophants and the cheerleaders. The pain and the suffering. You may not believe in class war, but the billionaires do… and they’re winning. If you have more money that you could ever spend in ten lifetimes and you’re only goal is making more, you are sick.

This is what Citizens United did:

Then wouldn’t be spending like that if they didn’t expect to get it all back and more. This paper does a good job outlining plutopopulism.

We need to talk about the imperial boomerang.

The imperial boomerang (or Foucault’s boomerang) is “the thesis that governments that develop repressive techniques to control colonial territories will eventually deploy those same techniques domestically against their own citizens.” The Iraq War. Gaza. MAGA. These struggles are all connected. Our lust for imperialism has hit the homeland. We are occupying ourselves. From Foucault (pdf link, highly recommended reading, shoutout to my English degree) to Arendt to Césaire, this idea persists that what goes around comes around. It’s coming straight at our faces.

We need to talk about concentration camps.

If you only click one link in this post, make it this one. Andrea Pitzer wrote the history of concentration camps in 2014. She is warning that it is critical to understand how much is already in progress and the enormity of what’s coming. The sooner we act to stop it, the more people we’ll save: “We’re in a race now. We need to act before the administration has the personnel and the detention facilities to broaden the scope of its actions. It’s up to us to break the existing momentum on this front.“

But yes, Donald Trump and Stephen Miller are building concentration camps on American soil with American taxpayer money. We are all underreacting.

During an Idaho ICE raid, more than 400 people, including hundreds of citizens, were zip tied and then sorted by race at gun point. This included children as young as 14. This is the second time (that we know of) where humans are rounded up and then sorted by race. That’s where we’re at in this country. And it’s only getting worse.

ICE is on a warehouse buying spree; they have spent over one BILLION dollars across this country to build concentration camps. This should alarm every American. They want to be “Amazon Prime, but with human beings,” as Todd Lyons said. “We need to get better at turning this into a business,” he added. People are not cardboard cubes you can throw around or crush or lose in the mail. Life and death is not a business. Their casual use of such dehumanizing language is revolting.

Whiteness isn’t enough to to save you. Citizenship isn’t enough to save you.

We’ll get to life in Minneapolis in the next section, but the Whipple Building there is one of these places and it clearly illustrates how far these psychos have gone. They’re indiscriminately grabbing people including observers, peaceful protesters, and people who were just alone in the wrong spot at the wrong time, and taking them to Whipple. Most of them don’t even get charged with anything. Then they get dumped outside. It’s catch and release, for sport. They get released at all hours of the day, thrown out into the freezing cold with just the clothes on their backs. Their phones have been stolen. They’ll never get them back. Some get left right outside, others have been dumped in the woods.

Local restaurants have held coat drives to help. A group called Haven Watch have people stationed at the gates and doing sweeps of the woods. They provide these folks with warm clothes, a ride home, and a burner phone to call loved ones. (You can read an interview with their leader here and donate to them here.) Healthcare workers have confirmed that ICE is abandoning half-naked people in the woods. Amputations have been required. One person was treated for a cracked skull. The government is kidnapping and brutalizing whoever they can get their hands on. Lawyers continue to fight for access to their clients inside these camps, describing it like a “game of whack-a-mole” to find them, because many are kidnapped and immediately sent out of state with no notice.

The conditions inside are disgusting and inhumane. Whipple was never mean to be a detention facility. It is not equipped for this. A young Muslim woman, shackled at the ankles, was locked inside a bathroom with three men for 24 hours. They were given no bedding or pillows. The sink didn’t work. Immigrants in one cell had to take turns lying down because there wasn’t enough space. Cells are packed “shoulder to shoulder,” said one man. An attorney told us cells meant for two people housing a dozen or more. Toilets overflow. Trash is everywhere. And it’s virtually impossible for lawyers to access their clients.

DHS is fighting hard to keep lawmakers out, which is not something you do when you have nothing to hide. A Minneapolis city council member talked to detainees who were released, who told him of “a lack of medical attention, the air conditioner being blasted in the middle of the night, clogged bathrooms, and having to sleep on concrete floors with tin foil ‘blankets.’” He is calling for the building to be shut down. More prominent voices should join him.

“They’re basically torturing people into signing off on their own deportation,” a lawyer said about an overcrowded Burlington, MA facility with no windows, no showers, limited airflow, aluminum blankets, poor quality food, and toilets in clear view of the cameras. This facility is designed for administrative processing, not holding people for days on end. These are asylum seekers. The most vulnerable people. And this is how we treat them. There are so many stories of detainees not receiving necessary medical care or medication.

Here’s a harrowing story from Otay Mesa in San Diego. The conditions there are abhorrent and we know this because someone inside tossed a handwritten note wrapped around a lotion bottle over the fences. The note read, in part: “It’s cold here all the time and the food is poor. For 280 days we haven’t eaten a single piece of fruit, banana, apple, orange, or anything fresh. We are all in one big room with no doors or windows. We can’t see any grass or trees. We are all constantly sick.”

A camp in El Paso, TX has two active cases of tuberculosis and 18 cases of COVID. A camp in Arizona had a case of the measles. Dilley, where Liam Ramos was, and where those children’s letters linked above came from, had two measles cases. Even without the measles, it’s a horrible place to be. This article has some awful details: “Lights are left on 24 hours a day, making it difficult to sleep… One 6-year-old boy had leukemia. An 8-year-old girl began wetting the bed. A 14-year-old girl engaged in self-harm. All of these children and their parents were detained despite being eligible for release — and while seeking asylum…None of these children or their parents had a criminal history anywhere in the world. Children and parents consistently report not having access to sufficient potable water, palatable food…they found worms in their meals.” Disgusting. These places are cesspools for disease. Reminder: Anne Frank died from a typhus epidemic that spread through the camp she was imprisoned in.

All of this is to say that these concentration camps, a term that should send shivers down the spine of humanity, have become “the epicenter of the systematic deprivation of fundamental constitutional and legal rights at the hands of the federal government,” as a class action lawsuit alleges of Whipple.

But people do not want this shit and they are speaking up.

Folks in Surprise, Arizona who are pushing back hard against plans for a concentration camp. This is going to continue to be a huge story around the country. Local officials are claiming their hands are tied because it’s a federal project. One local resident nailed it with a brutal truth bomb: “I imagine if this was a homeless shelter or a mental health center, you would find a way to stop it. You would pull out all the stops.”

Port KC is cutting ties with the developer of a 920,000 square foot potential ICE detention center. The sale is still on, unfortunately, but they say they didn’t sign up for detaining people, which does not serve the community. Going after the owners of these properties is smart, when there isn’t much that can actually be done.

Just today I saw this story out of Gainesville, where a city council meeting was packed with people standing up against a warehouse there being turned into an ICE concentration camp. Even in Florida, people do not want this in their backyards. There’s the cruelty and the inhumanity first, but that’s not all. These buildings pay no taxes, make huge demands on local infrastructure, like water and sewage and power and hospitals.

Even John Fetterman is against them in PA and that guy really sucks!

We need to talk about Minneapolis.

There has been no de-escalation in Minneapolis. That was a lie, of course. Swapping out one bozo bitch (Tiny Greg Bovino) for another (Tom Homan) was just shuffling furniture. Here are a few things I think everyone should know about the government’s campaign of terror against Minneapolis.

[Today, February 12, diseased thumb Tom Homan said they were pulling out of the city. Let’s wait and see if that actually happens. I hope it does, but I have real doubts. Just yesterday, there was a dangerous high speed chase through crowded city streets that left cars all smashed up.]

First: these ICE observers — armed just with cameras to highlight the atrocities and whistles to save lives — are incredible and inspiring. We will look back at them as some of the greatest heroes of our time. They inspire me. If not for them, there is so much we wouldn’t know. This is probably why they are being targeted more frequently now.

Life on the ground in an occupied American city sounds like hell.

Kids (as many as 25%) are staying home from school because ICE is often seen circling schools or waiting at bus stops. Pregnant immigrants are skipping prenatal care, requesting home births even when not medically advised, and going without adequate food. Businesses are closed. After Renee Good was murdered, her 6-year-old’s school had to switch to virtual learning due to right wing threats. They were upset because the school has a social justice focus.

ICE grabs people and ships them out of state within hours to avoid accountability from the courts.

This is an excellent site built to “expose the anatomy of the governmental machinery” of this abominable people pipeline from MN to TX.

Two Venezuelan men in St. Paul were ordered to be released by a federal judge. They never made it out of the courthouse. ICE grabbed them shortly after the hearing.

Cars are smashed up and left on the side of the road so frequently after an ICE kidnapping, the city of St. Paul had to announce that towing costs would be waived or reimbursed if you can provide proof of ownership and detainment.

These are their tactics. They are dirty, they are illegal, they are truly evil.

Shoutout to the local punks for fighting back. Punks usually know what’s up.

DHS should be completely abolished and everyone who worked for them at any level should have to spend the rest of their miserable lives with headphones strapped on, like in Andor, but instead of a species being erased, they have to listen to these heart wrenching letters written by the children at the facility in Texas where Liam Ramos was taken to.

A fun story about mushrooms and tiny people

Here’s your reward for getting to the end of that. This story is a fun one. Psychedelic drugs “usually produce idiosyncratic trips that vary not only from person to person but also from one experience to the next within the same individual.” You get high, the possibilities are pretty endless. But there’s this one mushroom found in China, Papua New Guinea, and the Philippines, that across cultures and time, has caused a similar trip for its users: “visions of pint-sized, elf-like figures – marching under doors, crawling up walls and clinging to furniture.” Yes. Tiny people. The mushroom is sold in markets and served both in restaurants and homes. But there’s a catch: you have to cook it thoroughly. Otherwise, it’s tiny people time. Researchers said "they saw [little people] on their clothes when they were dressing and saw them on their dishes when eating,” adding that the visions "were even more vivid when their eyes were closed.” What a nightmare. Researchers are still trying to identify the chemical compound that causes these hallucinations, which can last 1-3 days and have caused hospital stays of up to a week in some cases.

Here are some great songs. Enjoy. Let me know which one is your favorite.

Song of the year?

corook - “Scooby”

I’ve got six unopened boxes from Amazon on my porch
And I open up my windows watch my neighbors get deported
Pull out my thousand dollar iPhone I can’t report it but I’ll record it
Then I’ll upload it to TikTok because it makes me feel important
I vote blue every year look at how far we’ve gotten
Got a twelve dollar hand-delivered latte in my fridge gone rotten
I’ve got ten streaming seasons of air quotes “reality TV”
With Contestants on an island whose only challenge is fidelityyyyyyy

I’m like Scooby-Doo
Looking for clues
Turns out this whole life is a mystery
I can’t even prove
What’s two plus two
Maybe this problem is too big for me
I just put on my big dog pants
Now I’m learning a TikTok dance
I’m like Scooby-Doo
If he wore shoes
And he gave money to the enemy
Money to the enemy
Fuck I am the enemy

To the Fortnite teen that’s hurling slurs from a flyover state
It’s not your fault that your father is a for-profit prison inmate
It’s not your fault your hard working mother can’t afford to pay her rent
It’s not your fault your school’s underfunded and you’re under educated
It’s not your fault that the algorithm whips you into an angry froth
The only thing we see in common is ad space insurance companies bought
Both of us are getting played like we’re the song of the summer
By a billionaire DJ on a mega yacht who just bought another

I’m like Scooby-Doo
Looking for clues
Turns out this whole life is a mystery
I can’t even prove
What’s two plus two
Maybe the problem is too big for me
I just put on my big dog pants
Now I’m learning a TikTok dance
I’m like Scooby-Doo
If he wore shoes
And he gave money to the enemy
Money to the enemy
Fuck I am the enemy

More new bangers worth your time:

Palette Knife - “Sleep Paralysis”

Kerrin Connolly - “BIG AMYGDALA”

Cape Crush - “Calm & Delivered”

Gladie - “Brace Yourself”

Mallcops - “Enough For You”

Leisure Hour - “Not Done Begging (Yet)”

I have a few drafts half or mostly written. One about Pluribus, one about AI music, one about the best songs of 2025. Those will be out soon maybe!