Holly Northrop Blog

The drive down and over to see Jasmine now takes about an hour longer since we've moved upstate. What took six hours now takes around seven, depending upon mood levels, traffic and bladder issues. There is that big stretch through the Pocono Mountains where there is not one thing to stop at, and no cell phone service for that matter, so you best have gas and an empty bladder.

Of those seven hours, Martha let me listen to Zeppelin for roughly three and a half of them. Not too bad at all. For me it went by fast, for her, I'm sure that part of the trip was a drag, although she did appreciate listening to the live version of Moby Dick that I have. It's twenty minutes long, so you can see how three hours can go by without too much notice. Hell, you add in a twenty-five minute version of Dazed and Confused with nothing to look at but the endless leaf stripped Pocono Mountains, and well, there you go. I guess I should consider myself lucky that she didn't just veer off a cliff or something.

Big excitement along the way when we were caught in a rainstorm and an orange leaf the color of my hair became stuck in the windshield wiper on Martha's side. This was right after I had put Zeppelin away.

"Oh why does this leaf torment me so?" she articulated.
"It's either me or an orange colored leaf, right?" I laughed.

On this trip, I brought five cameras with me. I know that sounds like I'm preparing for a massive photo shoot, but what I wanted to do was actually use different cameras for each roll of film. So I brought three different speeds of Polaroid, 600 Polaroid for the One-Shot, 400 black and white for the Lubital, 127 film for the Brownie, and 200 slide film for the Holga. I spent more time packing the camera bag then I did for all the other shit that you are supposed to bring on a trip. I even brought the tripod, both of them, the small one and the big professional one. But I forgot the ball, and a bunch of other little things that we could have thrown in the car.

I'm glad I brought the tripod. The thing is always a drag to lug around and I'm trying to force myself to shoot different things. Martha and I did a little night shooting with some slow speed film. Nothing like standing in front of a church in the middle of nowhere for five minutes, with nothing but the full moon and the light of an giant glowing cross illuminating the frozen ground around you.

Five minutes is a really long time to loiter on God's land and when you factor in that the preacher lived next to the church in a trailer, it was only a matter of time before I saw him in there looking out at me through his hunter motif curtains.

I did have someone in a truck drive up next to me and ask me what I was doing. When I told him that I was taking a picture of the church, he spun out on the gravel road around me. Dick.

I think that I did more shooting then spending time with Jasmine. Thursday was fun, but we didn't get to her apartment until almost three, and by six o'clock we were all dead tired after a big dinner and all that Guitar Hero activity. Jasmine and Martha have started a new band called The KittiLitta. They rock.

Friday, Jasmine had to work, yes that is right, she had to work on Black Friday. She said that when she got to work a 5am there was a line all around her building. When they opened the doors, people came streaming in like sand. All five registers were open and never stopped ringing shit up throughout her nine-hour shift. By 11:00am, the store had made $80,000. More proof that everyone is out of their goddamn minds. In a town of roughly 15,000 people, where the largest employer is the University, (the second being an oil and gas drilling company) that is literally a twelve pack of yellow Stickie™ Notes for every man, woman and child who lives there.

So by the time I saw Jasmine that afternoon she was delirious. Poor thing, she does look cute in her Staples uniform however. We were supposed to have dinner with some friends of hers at 6:30 but she didn't think she could stay awake that long. So we went to Eat'n Park and had dinner with the blue-haired crowd.

As we were eating our dinner Jasmine was telling a few work stories. She said that every Sunday morning at Staples it is like Dawn of the Dead out in the parking lot. People just stand out there and wait for the white logo light to come on, letting them know the store is open. She said she can see them waiting out there, every now and then someone will walk up to the glass door and look in.

As she was telling us this story, I thought about how brainless we all must seem to her generation. I mean really, what is so fucking important in our lives that we need to wait for the Staples store to open on a Sunday morning? Just what the hell are we working on and more importantly, why? Sure I may say that all of her friends are a bunch of 'tards, but upon hearing her talk about people my age acting like PowerPoint idiots, well I think it might be a draw as to who is the most ridiculous.

I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream
To kill time on Friday until Jasmine was off work, Martha and I drove around the backwoods of Pennsyltucky taking photos. Our destination was the Torrance State Mental Hospital outside of Blairsville. Jazz had recommended that it might be an interesting place to shoot because one of the buildings was abandoned. Finally after driving around every little god fearing, meth lab town in the area we found the hospital.

Once on the grounds of Torrance's extremely large campus, no one asked us what we were doing, were we were going or why we had cameras, which after driving around for about 30 minutes, getting out if the car and setting up the small tripod you would think some security would have come around.

Built in 1919, the campus is quite large, almost Ivy League large as it does have a university feel to it. School or nuthouse, it's all the same thing really. Anyway, in the hospitals heyday the buildings housed between 3,000 - 4,000 patients. That's a whole lot of crazy locked up there on that mountain.

At the edge of the campus stood a large building that was in the process of being gutted. The windows had all been pulled out and one could see clearly into the empty rooms with cream-colored wall tiles. Easy, wipe-down walls, Martha called them. The building had fencing around it and was obviously the one Jazz had been talking about. I can see how the kids would sneak up the back and crawl in at night to scare the shit out of each other.

As we drove around the campus, we noticed that the majority of the buildings were abandon. Something Jasmine had not mentioned. It appeared as though the current working part of the hospital is only using about 30% of the buildings. Driving around gave us a bigger sense of just how frightening the whole thing was.

We saw four massive U-shaped buildings that were totally vacant. This is where the general population was probably housed. We could see inside the windows and it appeared to be the standard open psychiatric ward layout. One big warehouse type room on either side with the main door to the building in the lower part of the U.

Around the back is where we found the building where the current residents are housed. About three hundred or so patients currently live behind a razor wired electric fence at Torrance. Out of their windows, they have a view of the four larger abandon buildings and not much else. This is where you go if you are criminally insane, committed rape or have a major drug problem. As if any of these things are even related or should coexist with each other. Each one of these 'batshit crazy problems' should have their own building. Not all shoved into one space together where they could trade stories. Granted they probably are not in one room together, but I'm sure there is some small group interaction going on.

In the timeline of mental illnesses' there certainly were worse times to be locked up in a nuthouse but given that stuff like what John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner of John Hopkins University were doing with a baby named Albert B in 1920 and a little piece of magic called Behavior Modification, I can only imagine what the hell was going on in the psychiatric wards up at Torrance in 1919.

John and Rosalie (those wacky adulterous scientists) made an 11-month-old child terrified of a pet rat (and all things with fur) by clanging a steel bar behind him every time he saw the animal. Great stuff and a truly fascinating clinical read. But the John Hopkins 2000 magazine article is even better.

XM Radio has a new channel called XM LED. It's an all Led Zeppelin station. Seeing how I only go into work one day a week now, the odds of me knowing about this station were pretty slim. I'm hardly ever in the car and it's not like Martha listens to things like guitar-driven heavy metal sludge, unless of course, I'm forcing her to.

So last Thursday, while waiting on Martha, who was in CVS buying a battery for her business calculator, I was in the car stumbling along through the XM radio offerings when I hit upon a channel that said XM LED on the top. They were playing Good Times Bad Times. 'I wonder if this is a Zeppelin channel?' I said aloud to no one but the Prius.

Another Zeppelin song came on and I clapped my hands together like the true idiotic fourteen-year-old girl that I am. Now I had to figure out how to convince Martha to let me play the station for a little while on the way home. She likes to listen to tinny talk radio so this might be a rough sell.

She comes out of CVS and opens the car door as I am blasting The Crunge.

"So check this out! It's an all Led Zeppelin station!" I had obviously decided to just go for it.
Martha turned the volume down just a tad and said nothing as she fidgeted with her coat, the seat and her knee pillow.

"How about we just listen to it for a little while and if they play Stairway we're out." I negotiated.
She smiled and said, "What ever you want, poo."
Translated means, I'm not happy but this makes you happy, however do not make me any unhappier. If I develop into unhappier, you're out.

Despite pulling straight out into gridlock traffic on the highway, once we got moving we ended up listening to it the whole way home. They never played Stairway to Heaven, (nor any bootleg stuff either, but that is my issue) and as I pointed out to Martha, Zeppelin is great driving music, especially on a cold and clear star filled night.

The next day at work, Martha and I were IM'ing each other when Martha wrote that she could go another twenty-years without hearing Zeppelin again. Well, I guess twenty-years is really only a nine-hour work day long because that night on the ride home, she called me from the road just to let me hear that she is blasting Celebration Day.

Whatever Gives You Hope
Martha and I will be making the seven-hour drive to Jasmine's hippy den for Thanksgiving. Hmm, I wonder if we can listen to a little Zeppelin along the way?

Anyway, Jasmine doesn't like turkey or ham so I have to make filet mignon. She's been this way for years and I blame her step-mom. It has to be that woman's dried out birds that made Jasmine revolt. The child always hoovered my turkey, stuffing, gravy, biscuits and beans but that all changed once she got a few holidays in her with the other family. I never made ham so the ham thing is totally coming from them. An odd note here is that she will eat ham sandwiches. At any rate, now she won't eat anything resembling holiday food so we usually have a nice filet, spinach soufflé, salad and homemade pumpkin pie. Pumpkin pie seems to have made it though the emotional wreckage of it all.

Another great email from Jasmine follows. They are pretty priceless, and I would go so far to say that they are her generations version of the pretty picture drawing. Totally refrigerator material. While this one is not as good as the "Can I have a $1,000 for my birthday?", that one is pure gold but the one below is still fun.

You know the drill, this is a cut and paste job here, so spelling, lack of punctuation and general sentence structure are all signature Jazz.

From: jasmine northrop
Date: Nov 15, 2007 2:25 AM
Subject: hi there
To: martha

so i was going over my check book and my account and things dont add up. i am going to need you to help me when you come. i think i figured it out, but i would still like to sit down with you and see what i am doing wrong.

second, i had to get gas today because i was sucking fumes. i had to dip into the reserve money, so i was wondering with this weekend trip to pgh, if you could put in $150 for me. i am getting paid this friday, but i have a hair appointment and with all of the bs with my bank account, all of the money i saved was eanten up. plus i had to get birth control and it was $35, which i didnt expect. with all of that, i am going to have no money for pgh or the up coming week. I wouldnt go to pgh, but weber's family invited me down to celebrate weber's bday with them. i wouldnt get my hair fixed, but it is in desperate need for something to happen to it. it would be greatly appreciated. i havent gotten that many more hours at work, but since it is the holidays, they are going to bump me up because everyone is going on vacation. so things will be better in a week or two.

i am in class from 1230 to 2pm, so if you want to yell at me, dont call then.

thank you soooooo much.
love you, jasmine

Yep. Well at least she's on birth control.

Right out of the gate, actually it was well before our gate at Albany airport and deep in the bowels of TSA Checkpoint Charlie land, I was yet again, made to stand off to the side, away from the herd and forced to do weird things. The folks over at Homeland Security are as friendly as a bag of rattlesnakes. So I was all the more delighted when a guy wearing the standard issued white shirt with the big Helvetica Bold lettering TSA on the back, grabbed me by the elbow and pulled me off line. He broke my number one rule —do not fucking touch me. He told me to leave my shoes on and to come with him.

'I'm going to put you in the puffer." He said.
"The what? A puffer? No." I pulled away.
"Yes. You're going in 'The Puffer'." He demanded. Honestly, he could have been just a tad nicer.

I looked at him and he had the classic 'do not give me any shit bitch' look and I threw my hands up in the air and laughed, because for whatever reason I always seem to warrant a second look and I obviously give the impression of being someone who knows how to handle explosives.

So there I was standing in a clear plastic phone booth type box, wearing a Rolling Stones t-shirt and a bad attitude. Three or four puffs of air blew my hair straight up, like an allover fluff and then there was total silence as the explosives trace detection portal analyzed my particles. Super Sexy.

Once we were actually on the airplane things moved along rather seamlessly. The planes were on time, the rental car was there waiting for us and did not stink to high hell. Things were good.

You Know Martha, It's a Dangerous World Out There
Driving over to Winston-Salem from Greensboro I noticed that while it is technically fall, the overall color of the leaves were dull and brittle. The woods were so dense with dead underbrush that it looked as though they could burn for years, much like an underground Kentucky coal fire.

When we got to the hotel I pulled my suitcase out of the back of the gas guzzling SUV that we had rented (having forgotten that I had been digging around in my suitcase earlier looking for gum and not zipped it back up), I then proceeded to spew the contents of my travel life all over the parking lot. Along with my underwear, socks and a Jesus Loves Me shirt, my digital camera, the holga and my 1940's Brownie Reflex camera hit the ground hard.

After a quick survey of possible breakage, Martha helped me shoved all my shit back into my suitcase and onward we went.

Later on that evening and after a speedy visit with Gen we went to scary downtown Winston-Salem to a little café for some tea. Walking back to the car, I was holding my digital camera in my left hand when it became tangled up with my purse strap. I was attempting to untangle it all when my lens cap sprung off, rolled down the sidewalk and straight into the sewer grate. Had Martha not seen it with her own eyes she would have never believed me. Go ahead ask her.

"How does this shit happen to you!?" she yelled.
"What do you mean, this IS my life!" I laughed.
"Oh Jesus Christ Holly," she said as we both stood over the sewer looking down at my lens cap resting nicely on the comics page of the local paper.
"Okay, all we need is a big stick and some gum. Do you have any gum?" she asked.
"Yep I got a bunch of gum and why don't you pull that big stick out of your ass and we'll be all set."
"Only if you kiss it first."

We started walking back to the car to drop off our teas and purses, all the while looking for something stick like to use. First we walked towards a garage door that looked as though there might be plastic tubing on the ground in front of it but upon a closer look we noticed that the plastic tubing was coming from the garage door like for some kind of ventilation, like you might find in say, a meth lab. So we moved away from the garage door. Across from the meth lab was pile of broken up wooden pallets. Perfect, now I just needed to chew a bunch of gum. We get back to the car and I stick one piece in my mouth and start chewing. I wait a few minutes and then put another one in there, chew for a few more minutes and I put the third in when Martha looked at me and in a snarky tone said, "I think two is enough." I opened my mouth to say something snarky back and half of the third stick of un-chewed gum fell out of my mouth and landed on the sidewalk.

"Okay, well two and a half should be good" she laughed.

I frantically chewed gum while we walked back to the sewer grate. The gum couldn't be too sugary otherwise it wouldn't be that sticky. After a few more minutes, I stuck the gum on the end of the stick and Martha proceeded to poke at the lens cap. She was able to get the thing stuck to it but when I would try to grab it, it would fall back to the paper. After a few attempts, a passerby asked if we dropped our keys.

"No, the lens cap to my camera", I replied, and within seconds this guy was on the ground, in the gutter, helping Martha navigate the stick over to the side that had more space. In the blink of an eye, I was holding my sticky dirt cover cap.

The guy started to walk away and I asked him if he wanted some hand sanitizer. Sure, he said as I squirted a big dollop into his palms. "Thank you so much, I hope you have a wonderful life." I called out as he walked away.

I never know if I'm blessing someone or cursing them when I say that.

Weird Sushi Drug Breath
The next day at the Assisted Living place from 10:30 until 3:00 was Glamour Shots Day. For $50 bucks you could have your photo taken against a lovely Seasonal backdrop. A stylist could do your makeup or if you chose, you could do your own. It is understood that there are no Glamour Shots of Gen. You know that, right?

This was the day that we took Gen to the mall to get her a pair of shoes. I'm not sure I can accurately describe the whole rotten ordeal other than that she's got a bunion on one foot and the other one is half a size larger. She wanted laces but she can't tie her shoes anymore but was hell bent on ignoring that fact. All she did was bitch and by noon, I already had a whole Xanax in me and was periodically licking another one just to take the edges off the edges. By mid-afternoon once we were safely back in the comforts of Assisted Living, I ended up taking a two-hour nap on Frank's bed.

I think this was the night that Martha and I decided to try the Japanese place that we had driven by about a zillion times over the past year. Actually, there are two, but the big one looked to be the better choice, until we got in there and realized it was more like a Benihana then anything we might be interested in. The last thing I want to ever do in my life is sit in a room full of southern Christians under florescent lights, unless there is some kind of old-time revival snake handling thing going on and I have a camera. I most certainly don't want to be stuffed around a large round table with a Japanese 'chef' cooking the shit out of my food while juggling knifes and pepper shakers in front of me.

So we drove down the street to the other Japanese place and what do you know they had a sushi bar and by first glance it appeared to be normal. But in a matter of minutes, good feeling gone. A totally out of control Wake Forest drunken college jackasses were over in the corner. There must have been ten of them and then another eight or so came in to join in. They did this sake!, sake!, sake!, scream and then slammed the table when they were done chugging shots of...sake. It was beyond loud.

"What are you thinking about?" I asked Martha when there was a break in the screaming.
"I weep for our future." She said.

For Christians, They Sure Do Raise Hell with Each Other
Our last day in Winston-Salem my spirits were high but my back gave me the finger. It was done. It now hated me and was going to punish me anyway it could. The last day was difficult mostly because I couldn't wait to get the fuck out of there. I was so impatient with just about everything. I kept zipping and unzipping my drug pouch and at one point, while looking inside it I said to Martha, "I'm just going to eat everything in here and spend the day at the hospital."

"You're sick", Martha said laughing as she hovered Pecan Sandies at quite the velocity. I lifted my head, smiled and rotorted, "It's either that or vodka, right?" She shrugged her shoulders agreed and shoved another cookie in her mouth.

At one point Martha and I went to Tanglewood's Festival of Lights. I can't seem to remember what night that was but it was fun in that creepy the earth is doomed kind of way. Of course, only I see it that way because I'm such a cynic, but whatever, it was disturbing and after a few days of listening to Gen spout out things like, "I used to know this area but since I've been incarcerated I've lost all that knowledge." I was a little drained in the warm fuzzy sector of my brain. Good feeling gone.

The opening of the Black and White show at Time Space Limited was fun in that family and friends way. The pressure was low and it was great to see everyone. It is a show that I am very proud to be in; all of our work looks fantastic and the space is ideal. Many thanks to Karen Keats, Linda Mussmann and Claudia Bruce for providing me an opportunity to show my work.

Miss Simon made the trip on down from her Vermont woodland to see the show, get a massage and eat sushi two nights in a row. She brought with her sugarless homemade ice-cream that Martha's sweet tooth did not approve of. I thought it was fantastic.

Friday night the three of us watched Planet Terror from Robert Rodriguez on our insanely large Sharp 42 inch LCD TV. The TV is ridiculous and we love it. We want to have a million of its babies. Actually both things are ridiculous, the TV and the movie.

After the opening on Saturday, we then watched Death Proof by Tarentino, (who is starting to look a little weirder), the second part of the whole Grindhouse double feature. I know I should like Death Proof more then Planet Terror just based on my gender, sexual preference and 'what time of the month it is' but up until the last fifteen minutes of Death Proof, I thought the whole thing was tremendously tiresome. Or maybe I was still irritated at Tarentino from the night before when he was in a small scene from Planet Terror. The way he said, "I'm going to go get my dick wet." Really, seriously bothered me, and I usually have a pretty high tolerance for that kind of stuff. Or maybe I find Zombies more realistic than gear head girl power.

When I was reading Tom McCarthy's Remainder I hated, and I mean hated, the main character. I was supposed to and I did. The book was fantastic and I never once hated the writer. It's a really fast read, which I like. I can't stand laboring over difficult work. I suppose I found Death Proof difficult work in regards to how long it fucking took him to work the story into something enjoyable.

Okay, I'm done. Cool soundtrack however. Might be fun to get the vinyl.

Hopefully this week life will slow down for a few days before Martha and I go down to North Carolina. We leave Thursday morning, and after several hours of what I am sure will be total bullshit, we will arrive in the drought-infested land of the south. When we were there two months ago, it already looked like the beginning of the end, so now everything should be good and dead. It's super creepy down there even outside of the Assisted Living home.

This is weird and I'm not really sure why it exists. Each one cost $180! $180 bucks for a camera that usually costs anywhere from $9.00 to $40.00. Ok, it is a limited edition but seriously, if I see someone walking around New York City with one of these around their neck I am going to laugh and point. Resisting the urge to rip it from their necks and sell it on eBay for $225.00.