dead drops
“one agent “drops” information and another agent retrieves the information after the first has already vacated the area.”
My first attempt at a dead drop was designed to fit exactly in this tin, purchased at one of my favorite stores in Leslieville, Toronto.
I used the buttonhole stitch from Keith Smith’s books of non-adhesive bindings. I love this binding for showing how the interior pages fold along the spine. It plays the obscure/reveal game. In addition, with so many pages, the delicate binding thread looks particularly striking along the wide spine.
I made enough pages to fit 100 entries. I took the book back to Leslieville and went on a psychogeographic walk for an entire day until the book was filled. The book ended up as 99 entries because I was struck by one location that took up two pages. I also recorded the time, direction I was heading, the lat./long., degrees, and the wind force and direction. I borrowed these qualifiers from the typical entries in a ship’s log. Often these categories are necessary for planning trajectories of a sailing ship (which direction to head to most efficiently use sails in the wind), and show weather trends over time.
In the spring, during my residency in Wisconsin, I made a booklet of my noted observations on the typewriter in the residence studio. A friend gave me a few old mint tins for this purpose which I brought to the residency. I was unsure before my rural walks if I would be able to make a substantial psychogeographic log, but was pleased with the result. I combined the idea of the protective metal tin from the first drop with the typed and reproducible format of the second drop booklet to complete this version.
My parents planted pine trees in the back yard each anniversary they spent in Wisconsin. These trees were some of the first one they planted, and now create a sheltered little wooded area with the other trees at their property line. I felt the secluded location was secret but accessible enough for a good drop location.
My next dead drop was also a continuation of a long unfinished project. While I lived in New York I began writing poems during different seasons in Washington Square Park. I also wrote a mini essay on how the park used to be a potter’s field (mass grave for the poor or anonymous) until the 19th century, a graveyard of a German parish before that (workers digging foundations for the famous arch in the 1890s uncovered headstones). Human remains have reappeared in the soil up until at least 2009. Yet the park is a popular location for all kinds of incredible activity, and a mysteriously alluring place in every season. I finally completed the book in December 2019 while taking the Metro North train up to a holiday party in Cold Spring, NY. When I returned to Manhattan the next day I had the books printed, produced the edition at a public chess table in the park, and hid them under a rock in front of the arch.
The final iteration is kind of a combination of every technique. The typewriter notes remain from previous iterations of dead drops. The cassette tape provides a little protection, perhaps not as much as the metal tins, but more than nothing. The cassette is cheap, surprisingly available, and still quite durable. The odd interior shape requires the layout of the dead drop content be incredibly vertical, and limits observations or other information to only the most necessary.
I eventually converted the handwritten notes to typewritten entries so that the book could be more easily reproduced. I then attempted a similar exercise where I took down 25 observations in one coffee shop on College and Gladstone. I enjoyed seeing how many observations I could make from the same perspective in a fixed location.
One fun responsibility during the residency was helping the director start planting the front garden of the homestead. I was put in charge of dotting many little marigold plants around. In digging shallow holes for these little plants, I saw my opportunity to bury the dead drop in its own small hole in the garden. Hopefully they will find it this spring, or next time they begin to dig holes and plant new things in the garden again.
This inspired me to complete a dead drop I had been working on at my parents’ house in Wisconsin for years, and had been thinking about for even longer. It was also partially a time capsule, with some personal effects, and a photo album with some information on their house. In keeping with the other drops, I put all the information in a metal tin. Pictured here are: a U.S. $2 bill, unidentified cards, soldered bits of stained glass from a project in the local synagogue, a scented pouch, and a mini jar of oil mixed with sap from a tree that fell in the backyard after a big storm.
I buried the box (tied up and in a ziploc bag) in a hole in this little wooded area. I saved the lat./long. coordinates with a plan to return in 25 years and share it with whoever lives in the house (if it’s different from my parents, and if the residents have not found it already).
A few copies under a rock, unprotected. A few days later it rained in New York, likely destroying the books if they hadn’t been thrown away or taken by then. I am uncertain of their fate.
The text of this last dead drop, which was never actually dropped. More of an experiment, this dead drop contains a partial story about getting a hand-poked tattoo on a sailing ship, and the playlist of one of Anna Wimble’s alter-egos (8-ball) who planned to set up a 1960s era backalley tattoo parlor in a Toronto alleyway. While giving out hand-poked tattoos for a toonie or trade, 8-ball was known to play psychedelic world music and smoke a pipe.