This totally visually-lacking article doesn’t deserve its own post without a shot of the main subjects, but what can you do? Our flowerpowered friends in California are painting trash cans and I just had to share the news.
Archive for August, 2006
left coast
Thursday, August 31, 2006sculpting cash from trash
Thursday, August 31, 2006
An industrious young man with an eye for trash has set up a website from which he sells small sculptures, or plastic boxes filled with Metropolis’ solid waste.
Via The Art Newspaper.
The most interesting part of the whole story, however, isn’t the art itself, but the fact that this 25-year old art school grad is known in Tehran.
Because when you think about it, Hawaii is just a big fleet of cruise ships…
Thursday, August 31, 2006
City officials in Honolulu are exchanging tips with European cruise ships on how to dump sewage without contaminating the beautiful waters of Hawaii. Apparently islands and luxery liners have many of the same questions when it comes to trash.
Katrina
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
One year later, much of New Orleans resembles a rubbish heap.
WM
Monday, August 28, 2006
Waste Management is EVERYWHERE. I just got back from a trip to Canada and what do I see plastered all over every dumpster I pass? That big green and yellow W and M. It’s scary. And then the other night I was catching up on my Project Runway and where do the designers go? To a Waste Management recycling facility to scavange for materials for a retrofit challenge. Jeffrey’s newsprint-treated piece totally should have won, even if he is a dick.
Trash on stage
Monday, August 28, 2006
The Times reviewed August Wilson’s play Seven Guitars this weekend, which reminded me that my introduction to Wilson’s epic project of writing one play for every decade of the African American experience was sort of trash-related. Fences—which I first read at 18 and which solidified my love for the series—is Wilson’s 1950’s installment. The action revolves around Troy, a garbage collector who asks why black men are allowed to collect the trash, but not drive the trucks. He becomes the first black dump truck driver in Pittsburg and maybe even America, an ironic promotion since he doesn’t have a driver’s license.
And while fundamentally, Fences is a play about fatherhood, marriage, family and baseball, it’s yet another reminder that this world is divided into two distinct categories: those who throw things away and never have to think about them again and those who pick up after them.
“Toxic Tansport”
Sunday, August 27, 2006
This story from the PBS show NOW takes a look at the moving target of toxic waste and the links between trash, politics and terror.
Beads
Sunday, August 27, 2006
I have discovered what I believe to be the most politically correct items on the face of the Earth: jewelry from the Bead for Life project. Bead for Life is a community development program that allows women from Northern Uganda to earn a living for themselves by making beads out of old magazines and stringing those beads into shiny strands to be sold to yuppie Westerners. Nothern Uganda, in case you haven’t heard, has been plagued by civil unrest for years now. Also, the HIV rate is very high, in no small part because of the violence and instability, including rape, domestic abuse and all the other side effects of war. So, this little project of recycling old paper into profit benefits women who are either refugees, living with HIV or raising AIDS orphans or some combination of the three. You, too can feel good about yourself by buying beads.
Condom couture
Sunday, August 27, 2006
While the world’s AIDS advocates gathered in Toronto last week to discuss new research, technologies and strategies for tackling the epidemic, artist Adriana Bertini of Brazil filled the conference center with some much needed color, humor and fantastical imagination via a spectacular fashion/sculpture series of dresses made from condoms.
This is a blog about trash.
Sunday, August 27, 2006This is a blog about Oscar the Grouch. It’s about the smoke of burning trash piles wafting through every developing country in the world. It’s about the billions of dollars a year spent exporting garbage from one state to another. It’s about diving into a dumpster and coming up with a still-warm burger and three packets of mustard. It’s about detonating landmines with old truck tires and building bookshelves out of milk crates. It’s about barges. It’s about battery acid. It’s about paying sixty bucks for a change purse made of soda can tabs because the label says a women’s group in Latin America glued them together. It’s about sorting plastics. It’s about beaches built on landfills and landfills built on beaches. It’s about the “away” in throw away and the “out” in toss out and the “rid” in get rid of it. This is a blog about the art, money, power, politics, people and literature of garbage. It’s a subject that shocks and amuses me nearly every day, which is about how often I imagine I’ll be posting. I hope you’ll share in the fascination.
everydaytrash 