Anooj Gets Away with Counterfeit

Part I: “State Sponsored”    

[VOICE MODULATED]: It was a National Geographic documentary… if you gave me some time I could probably find the right one online but I can’t remember if it was its own thing or a part of a series. But anyways there was this scene where this Banksy-esque set up was there with this guy with a big visor and shadow over his face to blur his features, and his voice was modulated. And he was talking about the art of replicating a dollar. He was a counterfeit artist, and there were these intricate zoom ins of a note with immaculate lighting. I suddenly was like holy smokes this human is speaking poetry to the wind… a kind of poetry that I only really hear come out of people who believe there’s some kind of mutualism to what they’re doing… an energy that’s like… clearly beyond the self. The same energy that makes me believe in art, at all. I was hooked. And that’s when I started ruining my search history.  

[ABBA’s Money, Money, Money, karaoke track plays. Underscoring Anooj for the rest of part I] 

Decisions within decisions, there are two key questions to think about here: How are you going to replicate it? And where will it begin?      

In 2005, when I was likely spending a fair amount of time sitting in the back seat of my parents’ car in Cleveland listening to ABBA Gold, the FBI was domestically seizing upwards of 15 million dollars in counterfeit bills, a small amount compared to the over 56 million that was estimated to pass through circulation. I imagine in that statement alone there may be a good-guy bad-guy binary developing in the mind of some listeners, and I want to make it clear that I’m interested in a sound, poetic case for the 56 million that made it through, or rather, a sound case for at least a small handful of their creators. The FBI has five common classifications of counterfeit artists- State Sponsored, Professional Criminal, Petty Criminal, Opportunist, and Primitive Counterfeiter. Each of these has their own most-common bills of replication, points of entry into the economic system, and tools of creation.

There are over 750 variations of figs, all of which except for the Common Fig (also known as the Brown or Brown Turkey Fig) participate in mutualism with wasps, also over 750 variations of which exist, each belonging to their own fig species. There’s a fair amount of google-able information that I could share with you all on this matter, but what I want to center on is that each of these female wasps exists in our ecosystem with the primary purpose of pollinating a fig flower. And when they do, they die in their place of pollination, allowing the flower to use its ficin to transpose its body into protein and nutrients that then are embedded into the structure of a fig fruit. This is one of the longest running dependencies that you can come across in nature.   

Decisions within decisions, there are two key questions to think here: How are you going to replicate it? And where will it begin? And where does the body of a blossoming wasp end and the sweet flower of a fig begin?    

My Dad moved here in 1984, he tells the tale as such, arriving to JFK with 27 dollars in his pocket after having left India for the first time, getting picked up in a car and driven into Jersey where he stopped and ate a slice of pizza. I’m inspired by my father in the way that his pleasures have always been simple: Pizza, Patrick Swayze films, corn on the cob, my brothers’ new dog, figs, and how are you going to replicate it? And where will it begin? 

Part II: A Professional Criminal  

[Sound byte of Anooj’s Conversation with his Dad… these will happen at different points throughout the episode, a conversation crafted by the following questions:
-You’ve always been a person of simple pleasures. How do you think that came to be? 

-What are some of the simple pleasures you have right now? What do they mean to you?

-Dad, how do you feel about counterfeit? Or the idea of counterfeiting money? 

-Can you buy happiness? (If not, what do you see money as being for?) 

I remember sitting at my kitchen table a few years ago and I was casually just working on something, maybe like, a drawing or the sudoku or something like that and my dad takes out this bag of dried figs, and starts eating them. And not really thinking about it, I was like, “Oh, Dad, did you know that a wasp dies so that a fig can blossom?” 

And he was like, “What?” 

And still not reading the room I was like, “Yeah it’s body pollinates the fig flower, and then its body kinda just dissolves into the fig.” 

And then there was some silence, and after that I looked up and saw the color in my dad’s face just disappear as he was staring unbelievably at the figs in front of him, and before you knew it, he was pacing around our kitchen trying to find all of the figs that he could and he put them in a plastic bag and hands them to me saying, “You have to take these out of here.” 

Now, if you were to search “Are figs vegan?” online, you would find a whole lot of discourse. My dad, however, was clear on the answer to this. For some brief context, I grew up in a spiritual philosophy, which is deeply rooted in karmic relationships and doing no harm; With this being said, I also grew up, and still am, a pretty strict vegetarian. But not as strict as my father. 

And a part of me was really laughing about this, while also being like, “Anooj you are sooooo stupid why would you tell him this,” but in my trying to convince him that it wasn’t that big of a deal I started to find myself getting sadder and sadder and sadder. And I was sitting there just being like, “Oh God, what have I done,” and then my brain just started going down this rabbit hole of like… this is a man who has such a small and simple lists of things he enjoys and how many, through your carelessness have you just, like, crossed off of it for him? 

And I took that plastic bag of figs on the plane back to New York City, and I put them in my cupboard to stare at me, and that’s when I started thinking, okay, well, how do I reverse this? What potential is there to reverse these things I’ve done? What happens if I can’t stop accidentally crossing thing after thing after thing after thing off of these beautiful lists. What then will I have on my hands? 

[Another audio byte from my conversation with Anooj’s Dad] 

If I was a wasp, I’d create the sweetest, biggest, juiciest fig, and leave it for the world to enjoy . A body, predestined towards its very end, I think at the very least, at the end of my life, it would be nice to turn into a small, intricate joy, my body untraceable within it to the naked eye. Don’t keep my name here.  

How are you going to replicate it? And where will it begin?

Part III: The Petty Counterfeiter 

There’s a sign outside the Boiler Room in the East Village that says in large, black, all-caps sharpie: ANYONE PASSING COUNTERFEIT BILLS- WILL BE PROSECUTED. And then in blue sharpie in smaller letters next to it, CLICK CLICK YOUR PIC ON TAPE. 

[Another audio byte from my conversation with my Dad] 

How are you going to replicate it? 

This is a short, take-as-you-listen survey on the most common tools for digital note reproduction, in descending order of professionalism: 

Intaglio Printing Press: Currently have zero access, and zero knowledge of use, but I do know my way around a laser etcher, so perhaps I have less learning to do that I thought?  

Offset Printing Press: Again– zero access, though I have some limited knowledge from my childhood visit to see how Cleveland makes its primary newspaper, The Plane Dealer  

Electrophotography: Access to low quality equipment, and enough knowledge to utilize it 

within its most basic functions. Origins being the amount of times I’ve stuck my face in a Xerox machine.  

Ink-Jet Printing: Check and Check. 

Now, there’s also a fair amount of home-made, home-done methods, and what those are? I’ll keep to myself for now. 

[Sound byte from inside of a store ordering paper]

The sign outside the Boiler Room brings up an essential question… what if the carrier of a fake bill doesn’t know it’s a fake? 

Where will it begin? 

This is the question that really propelled my fascination with counterfeit artistry. There’s a discipline behind the duplication of money that probably won’t yield results unless also met with some intense passion that can drive a sense of meticulousness. If you don’t plan on putting it into circulation, it can truly be whatever you want: It can be a bill. Or an art piece. Or a hobby. Or a lie you tell yourself about being able to reverse the damage, or a lie you tell yourself about being able to gain power, or…nothing at all. It gets to be as precious or as meaningful as you want it to be, and as an artist who sometimes has a tough time finding their footing within the landscape of discipline, I do believe that this is an art form through which discipline breeds agency. The power in creating a passable note is that there is a timeline you at least have some control over. 

There’s a beauty, I think, in the microcosm that gets to build around a fake bill through the life of its circulation. The second it gets put into circulation, there’s a new timeline of possibility that opens up… a timeline that closes the second it gets caught. In this way, counterfeit artists are creating mini make-believe timelines across space, each bill having a world of interaction around it that only gets as much life as it gets credibility. It has a unique timeline, a series of people and places it gets to impact, and a record of things that it gets to interact with. Regular money doesn’t always get to do that… it sustains… it goes out there and gets used and manipulated and travels across seas and maybe turns into another currency and can cause inflation and drive war, and it sustains, and it sustains, and it sustains. 

There is a deep, committed process to the re-creation of money, clearly. A discipline of artistic practice, and how are you going to replicate it? Will it look and feel like the real thing? When others see it, will they imagine possibility? 

Part IV: The Opportunist 

As each wasp belongs to its own fig, each counterfeit artist has a most-frequently-replicated dollar, a space that meets them at the intersection of propose and ability, though in the artists case, mutualism must be made by ones self in a system that rarely asks us to practice it with each other. The professional criminal domestically focuses on fifties at home and hundreds abroad, the opportunist, the 20, as its the most commonly used and can be replicated by them on an as-needed basis.  

If you saw a bill on the sidewalk, would you pick it up? Would it matter if it was a 5 or a 10 or a 20? Would you look around to see if its source of departure was still lingering in the distance, or would it swiftly move to a pocket, to a bodega, to a text about it being a lucky day? 

An opportunist sits in his bedroom with an inkjet printer and yet another free trial of adobe illustrator, sits on the phone with an artistic mentor who says something around the lines of any material one chooses to work with being a relationship, and how will you open up the possibilities of this one? 

If my incentive for making better art is knowing that my only way through this mess is to dig deeper and deeper into the fibers of my own humanity, then my incentive for learning how to make a passable twenty on a laser-jet printer is to make it easier for the homies to access theirs, and an opportunist walks down the street in Brooklyn sliding twenties left and right to the people he knows, and through the smile, through the smile, does the risk ever leave, and there are an infinite number of ways begin. 

The reality of this entire microcosm of consideration is that my family would laugh at the idea that I’m actually killing off their lists of things that they love, just as they would laugh, or rather, stare in confusion, at the idea that becoming a counterfeit artist is a viable alternative to a loss of happiness. And I think a part of the privilege of questioning viability in this moment is understanding that whether or not its named, I think they dream of a world of mutualism, too. But hey… it’s hard to pass up a perfectly connected moment to weave together a mostly true story. 

5. The Primitive Artist, or, The Blossoming Wasp   

[Soundbyte from a printer/ printing process]

NEW TEXT PIECE HAPPENS HERE with the same voice modulation at the start: NEW LIST

[Soundbyte from a printer/ printing process, AGAIN]

There’s this thing I’ve watched take place as I get more and more grounded in some fundamental truths about who I am… that the multitude of ways outside of that truth of how to exist is a composite of bits that I now get to decide as to whether or not I keep up with. My body’s aging towards death is no different than the wasp moving towards the flower. 

What the FBI names as the primitive counterfeit artist is the one who replicates so poorly to the point of parody; they often take what already is and try to pass it as something else. If a 10 dollar bill magically has another “0” attached to it then it suddenly becomes a 100, a pair of glasses with a big nose and mustache attached to them. Brother, child, mentor, artist, queer, lover, make-believer… some of the names of my most continuous bits, the things that switch up the frame stuck to the nose and the trim of the stash below, and these are some of my favorite bits. The primitive counterfeit artist typically prays on reluctance, the space where their make-believe won’t be met with enough confidence to be pointed out as a fake. I don’t desire to move this way in the world… this reluctance is where I’ve found a dangerous line between manipulation and accountability, and I guess I just think that if I have to be subjected to a world of make believe, then I both want to choose my disguise, and approach my point of entry with reciprocity, a winged beauty making its way towards it end, taught that that’s all that matters. If I’m going to continue to find the laws that make little enough sense to me to break, I might as well break for those beyond my body. 

My stomach has been hurting more and more and the thought of money. If I could gift you all with the greatest rationale I have for doing groceries and only making food at home, its that getting to nourish one’s body without the pressure of financial transaction before, during, and after has been revolutionary and its been crucial to not spoiling my appetite. And in my dream of dreams, I want that for all the people I love. 

The process of a wasp pollinating a fig belongs to a timeline much older than both that of my immigrated family, and the history of printed money.  As the primitive artist’s currency is typically obvious to the point of parody, as is my irreverence as I look at the dollar. 

After all, there is a discipline rooted in committing to a bit enough to seem as though one is authentically “not faking it”. But then again, who is to say what is real or not. 

[ABBA’s Money, Money, Money, track plays]

[Finally, audio from the inside of a Bodega]