"The Baddest Nissans in the Northwest"

First, some context.

FOUND Magazine was birthed by Davy Rothbart after he found a note that someone had mistakenly left on his windshield. It proved momentous: his interest piqued by the lone note, he began collecting, along with co-founder Jason Bitner, abandoned bits of paper, notes, scraps, letters, pictures -- any written word of quirky interest that either tells a story, or hints intriguingly at one.

The first FOUND Magazine was produced several years ago (originally meant to be a zine for shits and giggles amongst friends), but the momentum behind it caught fire, and several volumes later (including a book, a play, and a few volumes of the NC-17 version of the magazine, Dirty FOUND -- a zine repository of drrrty deeds and pix), the magazine's momentum continues to grow.

At the heart of the zine's creation is the idea that a tremendous amount of beauty, stupidity, tenderness, and honesty (and the magazine only proves that all this comes in many forms, stripes, and levels of intelligence) can be found in the very unselfconscious act of communicating, through the written word, to another human being. Those abandoned bits of paper, those misplaced notes, those letters the wind carried away from their intended targets reveal one thing: we're more honest with ourselves, and with others, when we've taken a pen to paper. The result is a level of honesty we can't just shoo away, or turn the volume down on -- the tangibility of the written word is no mere figment of the imagination, and it commands our rapt attention.

Thumbing through one of the magazines is a nice ride through the zany, the moving, and the hysterical, but not more so than attending a stop on this year's "Denim & Diamonds" tour (Davy and Co. have been touring nationwide since 2002), during which Davy encourages steady drinking at the top of the show (two-fisting it is simply practical so as to not have to get up from one's seat halfway through) before he launches into reading old FOUND favorites, and new ones.

Davy also invites musical acts to play jams during the show, and this for me was the highlight of the show. The Watson Twins were the featured band on the San Francisco stop, and while they seem very friendly, and very tall, I was not moved at all except to fight the urge to check Facebook on my Blackberry. The showstopper for me was Davy's brother, Peter Rothbart. Peter, a talented musician (like, *wow*), composes music inspired by FOUND items. He's really our generation's definition of a Gen X troubador. I can only hope that his CDs, 2007's The Sight Of Any Bird, and 2004's Songs For The Long Lonely Drive, catch the same fire that has propelled the magazine into a much deserved spotlight.

Peter is the type of performer who can easily elicit a schizophrenic response: I both laughed up a lung, before nudging it back into place, and was moved to tears (that's life, right?). During his rendition of "The Baddest Nissans in the Northwest" I experienced the low key lightning of chills over and over as I cradled a Corona. This is why (in Peter's words):

"This song is based on a letter found in Oregon City, Oregon, and printed in issue 5 of FOUND Magazine. It's a beautiful, epic, 5-page profession of enduring love written by a man who is learning to tip the balance of his life in his own favor.

I adapted the letter into song using a mix of words and phrases from the original and some of my own material."

The letter was found unopened, returned to sender. After a long struggle with drug addiction the author declares, along with his love, that he has found his true purpose in life: to outfit and race "the baddest Nissans in the northwest" (frankly, I've heard worse goals). There's a quiet nobility to an endeavor, however much it drips with wackiness, dreamt up by someone determined to leave behind a legacy that outweighs the constant reminder of faded needle marks and the ever-present aftershocks of having faced the maw of drug addiction, and emerging from it mostly intact.

The tragedy of this FOUND letter is that one woman never learned of the author's profound and abiding love for her. But, I argue it's a minor one in that it allowed Peter to craft something that leaves us all momentarily vulnerable, allowing us to drop our pretenses for a few minutes, to momentarily shun our cynicism, and to once again cradle a hope for change for the better - along with our beer - despite/in spite of our damaged and flawed selves.



Peter Rothbart's website: http://www.poemadept.com/