MPLSzine - Anonymous

MPLSzine

A N O N Y M O U S

I S S U E

Anonymous Issue - June 26, 2013

CONTENTS

7 ARTWORK BY LAURA WENNSTROM 9 IN THE HOME JAMIE THOMAS’ MIXED-MEDIA PIECE SHOWS THE EMOTIONS AND SHARES THE STORIES OF DOMESTIC

COVER BY JESSE DRAXLER LAYOUT BY BETHANY HALL BACKGROUND PHOTO BY ANDREW CASEY

VIOLENCE VICTIMS.

24 THE ANTI-SOCIAL NETWORK HENRY MEYER DOESN’T USE ANY KIND OF SOCIAL MEDIA. NO, HE’S NOT THE UNABOMBER.

28 PHOTO BY JIMMY R. OSTGARD 30 NOT GOOD ENOUGH (FOR MYSELF) ARTWORK BY REBECA SOLARES

38 IMAGE BY ANONYMOUS 39 PHOTO BY PAUL DURHAM 40 A SEXAHOLICS GIRLFRIEND

BY ANONYMOUS

44 WONDERTONIC COMIC BY WHITTNEY STREETER

46 ANONYMOUS BUILDINGS PHOTOS BY TOM REYNEN

48 OUR MANY MASKS PHOTO BY NATASHA VAN ZANDT

49 WHEN CAN I SEE YOU AGAIN? AN ANONYMOUS WRITER REFLECTS ON HER YOUNG HEARTBREAK.

LETTER FROM THE EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Of the many stupid and naive things I’ve done in my time, keeping a blog in high school in which I identified my classmates by their real names might have been the worst. I spewed pretty much whatever thought came to mind--crushes, fantasies, petty grievances--into a Blogger account, assuming no one knew about it or knew it was mine, and learned over a matter of years afterward just how many people I’d known since elementary school had secretly stumbled on my trove of musings.

I know, I know--that’s what a blog IS. It’s on the Internet. But for a long time I believed I had free reign to work out the thoughts I couldn’t share in public, couldn’t even articulate directly to my closest friends. There’s power in anonymity, even in false or partial anonymity. If what you’re saying isn’t linked to who you are publicly, you can admit things that are painful, shameful, difficult to face. (Or hateful and derogatory, as any online comments section will tell you.)

Using the cloak of anonymity to tell a story has power far beyond a self-centered teenage blog. In this issue, Jamie Thomas shares handwritten stories from victims of domestic violence as part of her mixed media piece project “In the Home.” With their identities protected, the writers are able to be honest about what may be the most painful experiences of their lives. In another piece, submitted anonymously, a writer remembers how an Al-Anon-style support group helped her talk about discovering that her boyfriend was a sex addict. While telling others about it had been difficult and embarrassing, she found comfort in the private group of people who had gone through the same thing.

In choosing Anonymous as a theme for this issue, we hoped the people of Minneapolis would share writing and artwork with us that they might otherwise be afraid to claim. But we also hope that every issue will provide that opportunity. We want our open submissions process and variety of pieces to prompt you to send us creations you’ve been nervous about showing to other people, to make art and tell stories that you’ve been pushing aside or that you never thought anyone would care about. We want to enable your creativity and to celebrate it--whether you send us your work anonymously or with your name attached.

We’re waiting: submit@mplszine.com.

Sincerely, Colleen colleen@mplszine.com

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CONTRIBUTORS Publication Director Chris Cloud

Layout Director Bethany Hall

Illustration Director Kyle Coughlin

Editorial Intern Ashley Wolfgang

Editorial Director Colleen Powers

Visual Director Andrew Casey

Social Outreach Director Matthew Jacobs

Layout Intern Amanda Reeder

Jesse Draxler is an artist who is living and working.

He was born somewhere and he will die somewhere else.

Paul Durham has been doing creative work since he was old enough to hold a pencil. In addition to being an untrained designer/photographer/artist, he has been an occasional dealer and lifetime collector of interesting objects and antiques. He often attempt to juxtapose old artifacts or antiques and images in unique and unsettling ways.

Henry Meyer is a painter and student living in Min neapolis.

Jimmy R. Ostgard is a photographer living in Apple Valley whose work has been shown at ArtSpace in South Minneapolis and AZ Gallery in Lowertown of Saint Paul and has been published in the Saint Paul Almanac. See more at www.jimmy-ostgard.artistwebsites.com Tom Reynen is a photographer from Shoreview, MN and a member of the AZ Gallery in Lowertown, an artists’ cooperative. He likes to explore forgotten ar eas of the city and is intrigued by windows, doors and abandoned spaces. See more of his work at http:// www.redbubble.com/people/tommyrey Rebeca Solares is a Dallas native who works as a lifestyle and portrait photographer in the Twin Cities. Her work is largely inspired by people, color and geometric scenes, flaws and imperfections, and the world around her. See more at http://cargocollec-

tive.com/rebecasolares and see her senior project Tumblr at http://solares-seniorproject.tumblr.com.

Born and raised in Minneapolis,Whittney Streeter has been working as an illustrator and craft person for only a few years now, making posters for bands and theater companies, album artwork, web design, comics, book illustrations, as well as working on, showing, and selling her own work. See more at http://whittneyastreeter.com Jamie Thomas is a student at the Minneapolis Col lege of Art and Design. She is primarily a photogra pher, but also a mixed media artist. Her work deals with troubling human experiences and emotions. See more at http://cargocollective.com/jamiethomas Natasha Van Zandt is a Minneapolis-based multimedia artist and photographer. Her personal work has been juried into galleries around the United States and locally in Minneapolis. Since the young age of six years old, she has traveled to over 20 countries and has lived abroad several times. Her photographs from those journeys have helped her to reflect on one of the most important things she has learned: that the true wonders of this earth are the people.

See more at www.natashavanzandt.com Laura Wennstrom is an artist from Minneapolis cur rently pursuing an MFA at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is interested in the familiarity and anonymity of urban spaces, community devel opment and repurposed materials. See more at lau rawennstrom.com

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Be part of MPLSzine!

Our themes for the next issues are SOCIAL & PERFORMANCE Submissions due July 11 Publishing in July & August If you can’t contribute right away but want to learn more, email us anyway.

We’d love to have you join us. hey@mplszine.com

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Block City

By Laura Wennstrom

Untitled

By Laura Wennstrom

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In the Home

by Jamie Thomas In the Home is a mixed media piece that explores domestic violence. It focuses on the actual destruction of abuse, as well as the healing process. The visual outcome demonstrates the violence, while at the same time protecting the identity of the victims, most of whom wish to keep their identities hidden. This project pays special attention to the victims and their stories.

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The Anti-Social Network Written and Illustrated by Henry Meyer Recently I was talking to my girlfriend and she mentioned that she was excited at the prospect of attending my brother’s 26th birthday party, to which she had just been invited. This was peculiar, because I hadn’t received an invitation, or even heard that a party was taking place. It wasn’t because my brother hates me, and finds my girlfriend charming and affable in comparison. It was because I don’t use Facebook, and that was how the invitations were disseminated among his friends.

I am not currently a user of any form of social media. There is no horror story in my past about being harassed or bullied online. I didn’t renounce social media after spending a year in India, learning about what “really matters.” I have never had a Facebook, Twitter, or Myspace account. The first and last time I dipped my toe in the waters of social media was a doomed and uneventful foray into the world of Xanga in the seventh grade.

When I tell people that I am not on social media, their reactions are usually the same: polite confusion mixed with disbelief. They’re the kind of reactions you might get if you casually mentioned that you keep pet snakes, or don’t know who the president is. I have more than once been asked this follow-up question, “Do you have a cell phone?” Yes, yes I do. I am not some Luddite who spends their time lecturing people about why canoeing is better than television. Those people are awful.

I actually love the Internet. Like most normal people, the Internet is how I keep abreast of current events, watch TV, and peruse footage of strangers fucking.

Yet people act as though not using social media puts me on a slippery slope, which begins with using landlines, and ends with me moving into a shack in the wilderness of Montana to write manifestos by candlelight.

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But the more I am reminded of how few people share in my social media abstention, the more I wonder why I have avoided it. I suppose it started as a casual lack of interest. While most of my peers graduated from AIM to Myspace, I naïvely assumed they were just fads, like those cretinous little Tamagotchi toys that girls always seemed to like.

Once I had managed to make deep into my teen years without social media, it started to feel almost like a badge of honor. “I made it this far,” I thought. “Why turn back now?” To paraphrase Aaron Sorkin’s muttering hobgoblin version of Mark Zuckerberg, if I were going to be on Facebook, I would’ve been on Facebook. Perhaps now I’ve fooled myself into thinking it makes me seem pleasantly eccentric or enigmatic.

Or I think I am part of some ragtag fraternity of brave and stubborn outsiders, refusing to be swept up in the fleeting trends of a shallow, disconnected culture. Unfortunately, I don’t really know anyone else who isn’t on social media, so I’m afraid than my real compatriots may be a more dubious group of infirmed nonagenarians, homeless people, and unmedicated schizophrenics.

As much as I would like to believe that I don’t use social media because of some uncompromising philosophical stance, I’m worried that it has more to do with what’s wrong with me, than what’s wrong with social media. I do have friends, and I like them very much, but that doesn’t mean I don’t harbor deep-seated anti-social tendencies. I’m not shy or socially awkward. Actually, the shy and socially awkward have probably been waiting since the dawn of civilization for a means to interact with the world in a highly managed and impersonal fashion from the safety of their basement apartments and pillow forts. The real problem is not that I don’t know how to interact with people, it’s that I don’t like them once I

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do. Against my better judgment, there are a few people I am attached to and feel genuine affection for, but they are the only ones I care to ever interact with. I don’t want to see an old classmate’s vacation pictures. In fact, I don’t really want to see anyone’s vacation pictures.

I’m also probably too neurotic for social media. I would only second guess and hate every single post, profile, tweet, message, picture, or thought I ever dared to allow to escape onto the internet. What if my online presence turns out to be as stupid and vacuous as I assume other people’s to be? Then I would be an asshole and a hypocrite.

Unlike the rest of society, I’m only comfortable inflicting my inane thoughts on people in person, the way god intended. When I offer this as an explanation, my friends insist that I can maintain a spare, innocuous presence online. “Don’t worry,” they say, “you only have to use it to interact occasionally with people you really like.” But then what’s the point? Don’t I see you people enough? Can’t I get a moment’s peace? The effort of not seeming like an unlikeable prick is already causing me to grind my molars into smooth little nubs. My mask of sociability is flimsy enough as it is, and moving part of my social life online is just another way for it to slip off entirely.

I feel as though the last several years have been a blur and I’ve come to, prematurely an old fogey, in a culture whose social norms and nomenclature I don’t understand. Hashtags, Vines, Facebook groups, reblogging, Instagram, and something called Pinterest. I’m like a latterday Rip Van Winkle awaking to the disorienting and alienating world of steamships and telegraph lines. Perhaps eventually I will be browbeaten into accepting what may be inevitable, but until then, I will continue to embrace the warm cocoon of my digital solitude and go back to sleep.

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Sitting on the Dock, Lake Nokomis Photograph ByJimmy R. Ostgard // ANONYMOUS 28 MPLSzine

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NOT GOOD ENOUGH (for myself)

By Rebeca Solares ANONYMOUS // MPLSzine

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By Anonymous

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In a lot of my recent photographic work, including this photo, I often attempt to juxtapose old artifacts or antiques and images in unique and unsettling ways. The photo is an antique ceramic doll’s head that has been hollowed out, through which I took the picture of the antique erotic photograph.

By Paul Durham

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A Sexaholic’s Girlfriend

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It is March 2011.

I am wearing the same black spandex pants I have worn nearly every day for two weeks with a white oversized tank top and an even larger red cardigan over the top. My hair is piled in a ratty bun on top of my head. Although I’ve forced myself to at least rinse off my body under the hot water of a shower for a few minutes each day I really can’t tell you the last time I’ve used shampoo.

I am sitting in my office at my desk staring blankly at my computer screen and praying my phone does not ring. I have a fairly important job that involves a level of shmoozy negotiation work that I don’t have the energy for. When possible I’ve been responding to phone calls and offers via e-mail. When absolutely necessary I return the calls. Instead of being greeted with a minute or two of the standard bullshitting followed by a formulaic numbers debate I accept whatever offer they’ve thrown on the table without complaint. If my opponent asks what’s wrong I tell them I am sick. I can tell they don’t believe me. Thank God they don’t know the truth. I feel like enough of a freak show already.

My personal life is in shambles due to a traumatic break up with my ex-boyfriend, X. We were together for three years, living together for nearly two of them. He is undeniably handsome, charming, and until just a week earlier, the best friend I had ever had.

He also had a big secret, a double life as a sex addict.

Whenever I tell people X is a sex addict, I’ve always followed up with ‘the real kind’. I am not sure why. Perhaps in an attempt to make his addiction—and my pain more legitimate. It is a strange and perhaps unthinkable thing to most people, knowing a sex addict. It is met with skepticism and judgment and doubt, but in X’s case it is the truth. Believe me, I wish it was something else, something less taboo.

Sadly, if X had been a crack addict it would have been much easier for me to talk about, it would have been much easier to pick up on, and it would be much more understandable.

Like most addicts, for the years we were together he was manipulative, cunning and an unflinching liar all in the means of feeding said addiction. For a long time I had no idea. In the later years, there were times I suspected him of cheating but his silver tongued speeches were so convincing I actually began believing that I was the crazy ANONYMOUS // MPLSzine

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paranoid one instead. This is how it went until one fateful Friday night in March 2011, when I had just enough gin and tonic in my system to make me brave enough to ask the right questions—those nagging questions I had worked so long and so hard to suppress. And, for the first time in a long time he was honest. Yes, he had been cheating, but he was also a sex addict.

I was in shock.

Nobody wants to be branded as sex addict…and if they do, they are probably not one. Nobody wants to admit dating, having a relationship with, or God forbid—marrying a sex addict but that happens too. It is something that goes un-discussed or even un-thought of in most circles.

So, when the truth came out about X and me it spread like wildfire. Messages from long lost friends come in the dozens all supportive but most reeking with undertones of morbid curiosity. And, as I’ve said, it made me feel like a freak show.

Even with all of the support, I had never been so alone.

I wanted to understand what—who I had been living with.

I wanted to understand the addiction. I wanted to make sense of my life and the years we spent together. But most of all, I wanted to know how much of it was actually real.

How can he say he loves me and live like this? How did I not know? Did he ever love me? Does he still? But more importantly, who can I talk to—really talk to about this?

It is Sunday night.

I am making my way into the side door of the church. Up the stairs, through the swinging stained-glass doors and into the library. I take a seat in the circle of mismatched couches and chairs. The room slowly begins to fill with women. I am by far the youngest one here, and the only one without a wedding ring. I sit nervously staring at my hands, trying not to cry.

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Will they take me seriously as because I chose to leave him? Do I even belong here if we were never married?

The meeting begins with an opening verse followed by the weekly check-in. We go around the circle and finally it is my turn. I am scared but know if I can’t say it here, I can’t say it anywhere so I follow suit.

“Hi, my name is Y….and I am here…because…I am also… codependent to a sex addict.”

I explain about my story, and they listen intently. They take turns telling me theirs and suddenly I feel less alone than I have in weeks. Finally. I have found my people.

My people. It is surreal to think as I look around this room that these women get me in a way that really at this point, no one else can. No judgment, no questions, just support.

As the weeks go on, I realize how brave and strong these women are. What they go through with their spouses, their children, their families and this addiction is unthinkable. Outside these walls I have nothing in common with this group but in this room, during these meetings they are my saviors. They make me feel like less of a freak and more of a casualty. They help me accept that this is not, and was not my fault. They show me that it does get better, and it can get better and it will get better even if right now I can’t see it.

Each week I grow stronger, and life gets easier.

Even now, two years later, not everyone knows my story, and when, or if they find out, the familiar feeling of freak show sometimes seeps into my stomach, cold and hollow.

When it does, I think back to those Sunday nights in that rag-tag circle, and those women who saved me from myself and I know that in time, everything will be okay.

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Comic By Whittney Streeter

Anonymous Buildings

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sgnidliuB suomynonA

Photographs by Tom Reynen ANONYMOUS // MPLSzine

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// ANONYMOUS 48 MPLSzine Our Many Masks

By Natasha Van Zandt

By Anonymous The first and only time I’ve ever told a boy I loved him was when I was a 17-year-old high school senior. It was by the cafeteria kitchen.

Part of me felt horrible guilt for my feelings; I thought, “What kind of senior falls for a freshman?” I remember it like it was yesterday.

I even remember what I was wearing that day and how I hadn’t premeditated this confession in the slightest, but felt that I had to say it or risk insanity.

In that moment, it didn’t occur to me that one of two scenarios might occur. One, he could very easily turn me down regardless of what advantages a three-year age gap could offer.

And two, neither of us knew what love really meant and were far too young to grasp that concept or give it the appreciation it deserved.

Both of these possibilities became concrete facts soon after I opened my mouth. Not only that, but the poor boy looked at me as though he was going to vomit. I never would’ve guessed in a million years that he would turn me down and that the act of him turning me down would launch me into a downward spiral of youthful obsession and denial.

I met him three days after I started my senior year of high school. I remember thinking when I went to register for classes a few days prior that my last year of high school was going to be the best ever. I thought it was going to be simple-my classes were easy and I had my eye on a part in one of many school musicals. This year was going to be a breeze … and then I saw him.

I’m not sure what it was about him that first caught my attention. Maybe it was his voice-that was the first thing I heard before I saw him.

Maybe something in his voice sounded familiar (though I currently can’t remember what it sounded like). After spinning around to actually see what I was hearing, I realized immediately that he was much younger than me--and I didn’t care. When we met face to face, he introduced himself and somehow I was so flustered that I forgot to tell him my name. I don’t even know how that slipped my mind. We spent the day talking and hugging and being flirty and then we parted ways, and I left thinking that I had met my one true destiny. All my wonderful plans for that year’s self-improvement went soaring out the window along with my dignity.

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Fast forward to the moments after my declaration of love. I thought about him constantly and played a gut-wrenching iPod playlist that I dedicated to the experience. This feeling was more intense than any I had ever had for a boy in my whole life--it was utterly painful. When I couldn’t see him during school hours, I would sometimes get up and leave whatever class I was in to wander the hallways searching for classes he might be in, like some lurking lovesick phantom roaming the world of the living, forever in unrest.

Throughout this experience, I embarrassed myself endlessly, gravitating toward inappropriate behavior. It was like my mind and my heart were at war over the rest of my body and I couldn’t get either to agree on what was best for me. I wish I could say it stopped there, but it didn’t. I expended a lot of energy on this go-nowhere endeavor. I would ask him many times why it would never work between us, why we couldn’t at least give it a try. He would look down at his feet with a gleam of discomfort, remind me of our grade difference, and tell me that I was making a bigger deal out of it than was necessary before walking away. I wasn’t confused about his answer as it made perfect sense and was completely straightforward, but what confused me was why this answer didn’t seem to matter to me and why I couldn’t just respect it and move on.

My entire senior year of high school was anguishing in this manner, and my misguided feelings for this boy didn’t just end after my graduation. No, they lingered on for a while past the assumed high school expiration date. Those days were wrought with Google searches, Facebook stalking and daily Twitter feed browsing. It was like a horrible addiction that I didn’t understand, so I didn’t know how to properly and permanently rid my life of it. There could be crippling reminders of it at any time. It was terribly pathetic and I knew it, but I couldn’t stop. I just felt like I could truly convince him that we were meant to be together regardless of age, and that being together was the best thing for both of us.

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At the time I wouldn’t have classified myself as a stalker mainly because I wasn’t full time. I only ever pursued him during school hours from 7:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., and I never followed him around after school or on the weekends. I didn’t know where he lived and never contacted him by email or phone because I didn’t have access to that information, but I probably would have if I did. Regardless, my behavior was still awful and I feel really guilty about it to this day; I’ve been stalked and harassed before and I should’ve known better than to treat someone like that.

I still don’t know what I hoped to gain from this boy or what a relationship would’ve entailed or if I even wanted a relationship to begin with.

To tell the truth, I didn’t really like the idea of relationships at that time; I liked crushing and flirting and I really enjoyed the mystery of wondering if my crush liked me back. That was the fun part, the easy part, and though it’s never really been the easiest thing in the world for me to master, it was still better than trying to figure out what to do after that. What to do when you start wanting more. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t love me back, but that I couldn’t stop loving him after I realized he didn’t love me. I had no control over my feelings and no one to catch me as I fell into them. It wasn’t his fault

that I took one look at him and absolutely lost my mind, and it wasn’t his fault that losing my mind caused me to make some bad choices. I couldn’t really help it, but I desperately wished I could.

About a month ago, I saw this boy again for the first time since high school. He is a young man in his early twenties and I am a young woman still three years his senior; we are not kids anymore. He grew up to be very handsome, as I suspected. He didn’t know I was there and I didn’t know where he was going, even though I was curious.

Such a scenario is very symbolic of my continuous relation to him because, at the very least, I will always be curious about who he really is. It took me a long time to realize that what I was feeling wasn’t love but an extremely immature infatuation that allowed me to disrespect him and myself. It kept me from appreciating his boundaries and enabled me to build this childish yet elaborate fantasy of who I thought he should be based on what I wanted. I had a lot of dreams for us which involved situations only displayed in the cheesy romantic comedies that, to my chagrin, saturate the modern film industry. These are things that

a great deal of people want with one perfect person--as if in a world of 7 billion people, there is only one person molded to the precise specifications of only one other person. As if fate is somehow kind enough to toss you both together in a whirlwind of romantic splendor.

Unconditional love is a lot to ask of someone and we have no right to expect it from anyone, especially if we just stumble upon them with random expectations. Even though this situation no longer consumes my every waking moment, it has been taking up unknown space in my emotional hard drive because I never really confronted it. Now, it’s time to let it go.

If you want me to be completely honest, I don’t know what real romantic love feels like. It hasn’t happened yet, but I have no doubt that it will in its own time. What is most important is that I know what it means to love my family, my friends, my career, my dogs and myself. I know what love is and I know that when I become close with someone, loving them will mean that I feel safe and comfortable enough to add them to the love that I already have, and to share it with them for as long as they are a part of my life.

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MPLSzine summer social Save The Date: July 11th, 2013