Painting in a Japanese Prison

------ Forwarded Message
From: davidchoe.com
Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2004 13:32:36 -0700 (PDT)
To: gavin
Subject: japanese prison art article
i wrote this last night at 3 .a..m
affter coming home from the horse races
it probably doesn't make any sense
If you want to get creative in American prison‚s, you take one color of each m & m and put each one in a spoon with a few drops of water,
and the color starts to wash off so that you have little puddles of ,green,blue, yellow, red, etc., you take the guitar string and dip it
into the color you want and start on your homemade jail tattoo. But I was in an iron fortress called Kosuge, this last winter in Tokyo Japan
in solitary confinement for almost three months and , the Japanese didn‚t have, spoons, m&m‚s or guitar strings. And thank god for that, can
you imagine the fucking retarded ass tattoo‚s I‚d be covered with?
One of the worst things you can be in a Japanese prison ,is Korean. But having the skills to draw flattering portraits of other inmates and
prison guards (and also unflattering ones, some of these guys like it when you draw them even more fucked up) like p-diddy in the movie
monsters ball, upped my stock quite a bit ,to one of the favorites. When placed in this hopeless void, my mind that‚s usually cluttered and
distracted, opens up, and I have to find creative solutions to pass the time.
When you shower only once every 9 days you got no choice but to get dandruff.
Remember in breakfast club, when ally sheedy spends her time in detention drawing a super elaborate landscape with ballpoint on her desktop
and then makes it look like it‚s snowing all over it by shaking her dry scalp flakes all over it? That was me in jail every night. On rare
occaisions you get a three-year-old magazine and there‚s a scene of buildings or a landscape I spend 30 minutes shaking my dandruff all over
it,OOH OHH LOOK! IT‚S SNOWING, IT‚S A BLIZZARD OF OZZ!! after I‚m done, I cut lines with my dandruff and snort it or eat it for a tasty
snack. It tastes like crusty butter. I also eat my boogers and sniff my earwax but that was all before jail, I didn‚t snort dandruff until
after. When I turn the page of the magazine and If I see a half page or full page portrait of a woman‚s face,I‚ll punch a hole out their
mouth and make them suck my dick, beating off in jail is boring because it‚s the highlight of the day and it barely lasts 10 minutes and
then it‚s all down hill from there, so I like to hold off till night time as a reward to myself, or if I do go off on a beat off binge, I
prolong cuming for at least 3 to 4 days. Using cum in art is stupid and played out, it has no color , and all it does is wrinkle the paper.
In the outside world ,I draw these super fast sophisticated line drawings that look awesome, but in here, I have nothing but time and a
mountain of hopelessness, so all my simple drawings get crosshatched to death like a poor man‚s Robert crumb, and everyone in my drawings
ends up looking like they have horrible tan lines, pillow scars, or Sudanese. The floors in prison cells are Japanese tatami mats, so I can
see how much of my hair falls out everyday, I collect every single one and braid them. I‚m not really a depressing Goth bitch, but I must‚ve
contemplated suicide at least once a day while I was in there, to escape that fucking fucked up impossible situation, I was gonna braid
thousands of my fallen and pulled out hairs into a human hair noose, and hang my bitch ass self, but I got bored, and instead made a human
hair brush using 732 human hairs, and a piece of sticky red tape that they forgot to take off my pen, I used the red tape to fasten the
hairs around the end of my chopstick, which I also used as my ear cleaner, the earwax helped keep the hairs in place. At this point This is
where I learn that human hair paintbrushes, make terrible paint brushes. That‚s why there aren‚t t any, and we need to kill endangered
animals like sable‚s to make the dope brushes to bust the dope fluid strokes. Any ways there is this horrible Japanese food they feed you in
prison called, nato, it is sticky slimy beans that smells and tastes like shit. It is served with soy sauce and seaweed; I eat the seaweed,
and keep the soy sauce in my water cup to paint later. I use my shity human hair brush , the rolled up tip of my socks or toilet paper for a
brush, when I do soy sauce paintings. When I need a deeper richer brown I use, no you sick faggot ,not my feces, I made a promise the first
time I used urine for art in prison, that I would wait until I got sentenced 6 months or longer before I would use poo poo in my art. In
Japanese prisons, they fill up a thermos with tea three times a day, I never wash my cup , thermos, or kettle, because I‚m always drinking
out of it, but after a week or two the tea residue builds up, and I can use toilet paper to wipe the tea resin off my cup and kettle and
use it too make deep shades of brown, and this usually ends up with me painting tan nude women. Getting back to the piss. Since you have
really no choice for a brush for the piss except your ugly fat penis , unless you want to piss into your drinking water cup and dip from
there. Penis control is key here. You Can‚t can‚t can‚t use piss in your art during the day or night, there is not enough waste pigment and
it‚s watered down. Instead piss paintings must be executed first thing in the morning with your first morning piss which has had a chance
to ferment over the night and pick up some color, spray that deep rich amber all over the page, and leave them next to the window to dry. if
the stain dries and it looks like Jesus crying, bow down and pray, but it probably won‚t it‚ll look more like a Rorschach test, stare at it
for awhile, find what you can, and use that as the groundwork, for your pen works. In prison you can buy one black ballpoint pen, one red
ball point pen(I was so happy the day I got this pen, I drew so many girls with red pubic hair and freckles and I don‚t even like firebush
), one mechanical pencil, and one black felt tip pen. For the black ball point pen, you can have up to 5 pen refills, each refill (my own
estimate) will provide enough ink for 967 small writing, front and back, jail issued stationary, letters and journal entries, or 382
crosshatched dirty drawings of chicks, monsters, and everything in between. By my second month in prison I had collaged magazine and
newspaper clippings into Francis bacon monster faces, I used nuggets of rice as glue like cheap chinks use in the outside world. I had all
my blacks to grey covered in my pens and also every time you get anything in your cell ,you have to sign for it with a finger print, so I‚d
always push extra hard and get lots of black ink and then when the guard leaves I‚d do two thumb prints right next to each other like a pair
of tits or an ass, and I Œd draw a body around it, fingerbanger art, I‚m crafty , I had my browns covered with tea stains , and soy sauce,
and all cuts, scabs, and bloody noses would turn brown after they dried, but for red I had my red pen which I used mostly for pubic hair and
lasers from my crystalline aliens, for yellow, I had urine, boogers, earwax, and pus. I had snorted an avalanche of dandruff. black ,red,
brown, yellow. Surrounded by white and nothingness,‰ I need color! I NEED MORE COLOR IN MY LIFE!!‰ can you imagine my faggot ass screaming
this to myself in a little box like an interior decorating queer from hell? I wanted green! Blue ! orange!
Oh I know for ,green I could skid on my knees on the grass and then use the grass stains later, oh yeah, there‚s no fucking grass!! Only
astro turf, the two times they let you on the roof, to run around like a hamster or cut your nails in a concrete box, I was trying to cut
and shave the hard bump down on my middle finger from drawing and writing so much with the finger nail clippers, and also trying to clip
pieces of Astroturf, to smuggle back to my room, so I can rub shavings of it against a piece of paper to get any little bit of green
pigment. I was losing my mind and suffering weekly mental breakdowns. I‚d be reading a book like,‰ hunt for the red October „and get totally
lost in it, and forget where I was, and then lose my mind and start getting super claustrophobic, I‚m in a fucking Japanese prison, a
fucking Japanese prison!!!and start punching and climbing the walls. I had been wearing the same pant‚s I‚d been arrested in for 2 and a
half months, they were new blue jeans and they smelled of the streets, blood and piss, and one day I decided to wash them in the sink, it
was a messy glorious affair, and they were dripping everywhere, but the water that was dripping off wasn‚t just clear, it was tinted blue,
„BLUE I tell you
!! LADIES AND GENTLEMAN WE HAVE THE COLOR BLUE, the audience goes wild, BLUE I TEL YOU, WE HAVE BLUE, I SWEAR TO YOU HE‚S REALLY HERE
TONIGHT!!!AND WHEN I OPEN THIS DOOR YOUR GONNA SEE HIM HERE WITH YOUR VERY OWN EYES!‰ I tore all this paper out of my stationary and started
catching all these puddles and drips all over the room. On e of the first things I painted using BLUE, was a beautiful out of shape woman
swimming underwater with a dolphin. It is drawn at an angle as if I‚m sitting on the ocean floor looking up at them with the sunlight
shining down. Not too much later, I accepted Jesus Christ and we left that place.
n