Dave Maass

A little something I shot with London Wilder, son of Daddy Needs a Drink columnist Rob Wilder and genius in his own right.

Resources used: Flip cam, iMovie, Myspace Video

No shit, the president of Liberia sat down with John Stewart:

Who knew I could ever be jealous of a dead man?

OK, that’s not fair. John “Ash” Amador was the last man I interviewed on  Texas death row. He  spent 12 years in a cell before his appeals ran out and the state administered lethal injection. And yet, Amador–or at least his spirit–made it to Manchester before me. His head topped a float during the city’s art car parade.

Many months ago, a punk-rock documentary team from Britain asked me for permission to use photos I shot of Amador and posted to flickr. That’s punk rock as a style, not a subject matter; the doc, 402, is about his execution and their subsequent efforts to cast his favce in a death mask. I didn’t really know what to expect from the group, but couple weeks ago, I received a package par avion with the DVD,

This image is from the casting of Ash’s head within hours of his execution. As sad as it is, as awkward as it is to view the man’s expressionless face, I couldn’t help but grin during this scene. The rest of the film is a lot of smack talk by Brits in mohawks, and, a bit randomly, an interview with Gerry Conlon (a Guildford Four exoneree who was played by Daniel Day-Lewis in In the Name of the Father)…but the most compelling thread is Amador’s row bride’s struggle through the system of institutionalized murder: from buying a body bag to his last call to retrieving the body.

This is what I wrote to the filmmakers, when, just absolutely overwhelmed, I had to pause at that casting scene:

Your doc is making me think a lot about how I met Ash. A reporter can have only two hours with inmates at Livingston on Wednesdays and you can only interview a single inmate for 50 minutes at a time. I was there to see Kenneth Foster, whose execution date was coming up. Foster, you might’ve heard, was never convicted of killing anyone; he was sentenced to death for being the driver of the car the killer was in under Texas’ “law of parties.” [currently up for revision in the Texas legislature]

Since I had another 50 minutes, I asked Ash–who also had an upcoming date–if he’d like to give me an interview. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to write a story about him. His execution was too soon, and my editor would only let me write so much on death row. I was up front with Ash, told him the best I could do–as a member of the press–was record our interview and upload it to Archive.org and the post pictures to Flickr for posterity.

I never saw Ash’s case file. The district clerk in charge of court records was perpetually in violation of the rules for releasing cases to the public for inspection. I never saw Kenneth’s either; in the weeks before his execution date, staff couldn’t locate his records.

Ash was executed August 29. Foster received a commutation from the governor on August 30. That was the day I was driving out of Texas hauling a trailer of my stuff to Santa Fe.

I always thought that Kenneth was lucky, Ash just wasn’t. Now I see that I was wrong. John Amador is still one lucky motherfucker. I’m watching with bulging eyes and a big smile muttering to myself “whatthefuckwhatthefuck.” You’ve given the man one wicked afterlife.

Here’s the trailer:

This was the Krisan Refugee Camp as Semantics King Jr. and I found it in late November 2005. The UNHCR had abandoned it. The Ghanaian police had been beating down doors and busting heads for three weeks. The camp manager’s office was burned out. The remote, 1700-refugee camp would’ve been pretty hard to find if not for the overturned truck next to the bus stop.

I’ll try to summarize what happened as concisely as I can, but for more detail I wrote about it here for Diplo (a defunct international policy rag).

Three weeks earlier, frustrated with the conditions at the camp in remote, western region of Ghana,  several hundred refugees from Togo and Liberia staged a political exodus. They walked and hitched lifts to the Cote d’Ivoire border claiming that they’d rather leave Ghana then put up with the camp another day. That created an international incident and a week-long standoff with Ghanaian police that ended in mass police brutality and riot.

King and I collected evidence of the injuries sustained by the refugees that were previously denied by the UNCHR via press release. Back in Accra, the front page of the Ghanaian Chronicle read, “Cover-up at Krisan.” Then,  we secretly interviewed David Vanyan, a Liberian camp leader from the camp, who was then wanted by the Ghanaian police; he was escaping to Nigeria with a Christian missionary group, where he hoped to talk to political leaders about accepting some of the camp’s population.

A few days before I was leaving, we heard that because of our reporting, US Embassy staff were heading to the camp…. and that’s another long story, which I wrote about on the Maassive livejournal at the time (props to Russ Rizzo and Mary Beth Hall). Over the next six months or so, I’d occasionally hear updates. The US Committee for Refugees included our investigation in its annual report. But I also started receiving e-mails from a Rwandese refugee at the camp, a poet who would send me scans of his hand written poetry–in French. I found a professor to help translate and they turned out to be long, raging spoken word pieces against the Ghanaian police.

Krisan Refugee Camp, 2007. Photo by Doug Murray, Border Films.

As the months passed , the Rwandese would message me in broken English about the transformation at the camp as the UNHCR worked towards closing it down and resettling the population. Finally, in March of this year, he too was resettled…in Indianapolis.

I spoke to him on Easter. He’s so happy–alone, but ecstatic. Me too.

Here are two of his poems for you francophones. I think I’m in one of them somewhere.

Doublez Les Efforts Part 1

Doublez Les Efforts Part 2

Pourquoi Tu Les Maltraites Part 1

Pourquoi Tu Les Maltraites Part 2

I’m not often given gifts. I’m just not on mutual gift-giving terms with many people. The people who do want to give me a gift usually give me gift cards instead. They say I’m hard to shop for.

I don’t think I’m really that hard to shop for. My sister asked me the other day what I wanted for under $20. I said as many G2 gel pens as $20 minus postage will buy. Easy. You can get ‘em at Walgreens.

This year, I was given a total of $70 in Amazon.com cash from my Aunt Sharon and my friend Nouf. I’m pretty amazed at what that was able to buy. So many goodies on the way. (Thank you so much, the both of you!!)

1) Hitler’s Degenerate Art - The Exhibition Catalogue - First published in 1937 as “Entartete Kunst Austellungsührer’

This is pretty much the only book on my list. I’ve had to leave so many books behind after each of my intercontinental moves, that I’ve stopped feeling sentimental about owning books. I’m fine with the library. Fine with giving away good books that I don’t plan to read again. Instead, I have a small collection that I’ll carry everywhere, forever.

This book goes in that stack.

I’ve wanted this catalog ever since it was released in December. I would’ve asked for it for Hanukkah, but, for obvious reasons it just seemed inappropriate.

Jonny, the figure in my banner, is a derivation by Art Spiegelman from the Entartete Musik poster, the companion show to Hitler’s Entartete Kunst exhibition. I’m not much of a historian, but this one episode of history is really close to my heart (about 13 inches). That’s why I’m so excited; this is the other half of the degenerate story: the visual arts.

2) Liberia Flag - Polyester, 3 ft. x 5 ft.

Amazon.com hasn’t been just about books for a long time. I know I need wall art, especially now that I have a new roommate.  All I’ve got is framed photos, my map of Arizona’s lost mines and ghost towns, and a brutal political I bought outside the DNC. It’s supposedly from Shephard Fairey’s printhouse.

I love the wealth of meaning in this Liberian flag, its history, pain, promise. It’ll remind me everyday of my commitment to return to West Africa. I’m looking forward to the reaction of friends first entering the room, that double take when they notice the single star.

But, the $2.99 will be officially well spent the day Semantics comes to visit and we get drunk in my room and sing All Hail Liberia. (Too bad the Lone Stars didn’t qualify for the 2010 Cup).

3) My Name is Nobody - Movie Poster - 27 x 40

Read into the poster whatever you like. Is it perfect for wallowing in self-pity? Absolutely!

Is it an existential reminder that life is a what you can laugh at? Yup!

Does it serve as justification for embracing my slobhood? Damn right!

And it’s just one of my favorite films of all time.

(Plus, it’s just pretentious enough to be endearing, right?)

4) Private Stash: A Pinup-Girl Portfolio by 20 Cartoonists

OK, this was a suggestion from my friend Ashley, who’d bought it for one of our mutual friends. It’s a whole lot of sexy ladies drawn by a whole lot of dorky cartoonists I like. It folds out and it will be going along the wall, perhaps in the living room.

I kinda wish I’d bought two of them so I could hang both sides on the wall.

5) Outward Hound Pet-a-Roo Carrier

This is a replacement for the one my parents bought a few years ago, which is on its last threads. That one is blue, but my new one will be green.

Shuddup. I don’t want to hear about it. I love my terrier and I love having her on my scooter. Pbbbbth.

It strikes me that there’s the word organ right in the middle of reorganize. The image I have in mind is of liver, heart, small intestine, kidneys yanked out, reconnected and stuffed back in, squished back in, sewn up.  A few changes in the plumbing and you’re crapping out the end of your neck.

That’s kinda like reorganizing a web site. As brutal, as gross, as tormented and deranged…

Today I was going through the page I’d created for writing–”Words”–figuring I’d update a bunch of dead links to all the publications that had run my work.

Man….that was humbling. Not only were links broken, some had disappeared altogether. There’s a feature I wrote when I was 23 about a r&B artist named Nexxis that won me my first first-place award. That’s disappeared, along with the longer version of my story on how the Arizona Court of Appeals’ came to rule on pornographic facials. Both of those represent some of the proudest moments from when I was just starting out.

I was upset for a moment when I visited the Tucson Weekly’s new web site and couldn’t find the author archive page. So alarmed I was that I wrote Jimmy, the editor, to find out what my writer’s agreement from five years ago looked like so I could republish some of it here at Maassive. He talked me down a few minutes later with the link…Relief. It was there all along.

Then I went looking for music reviews I’d written for the Manchester Evening News’ web site back in 2005 and 2006. As it turns out, MEN migrated all those reviews over to Citylife, the culture magazine’s web page…except for the comments. The comments are still on the old site, or some sort of in-between site. I hadn’t seen some of them before. I’d completely missed one guy kept coming back to tell me how much I sucked. Even though the comment was nearly four years old and the page just digital wastage in the expanse of half-dead links…I had to respond. I’ll not link it here.  I’ll save that for another time.

I also realized that it didn’t really make sense to list everything on that page…fiction with essays with investigative journalism with reviews? They really oughta be separated somehow…reorganized…. Should I put all the prison/death penalty stuff on a single page, reportage and video alike? Then maybe the int’l human rights stuff on another page, and the silly creative stuff on another? You know, divide it by theme rather than media? I think so.

Anyway, this is a really rambling way to explain why there aren’t any pages on the banner anymore except for contact. I’ve taken them all down for remodeling. If you have an opinion on the matter, let me know. Always accepting suggestions.