Swipe Your Heals Three Times…

Check out these inspired, trashy costumes from the NYC Halloween Parade. Here’s a note on the artist from Dorothy:

The artist, Andy Padre, creates Metrocard art for a variety of events each year. Last year’s Halloween parade was a Metrocard wedding party (search flickr for those tags and pictures come up), we were sea creatures in the Mermaid Parade, and he also creates Metrocard Easter bonnets for the Easter Parade. Andy’s work has been featured in Metro newspaper and yesterday on Good Day NY. This year he used over 5000 Metrocards and over 20,000 staples!

longest night

Friday was the longest night of the year, a holiday observed by the watered down decedents of the Persian Empire by staying up late reading poetry with our families. We didn’t celebrate this year, but today some Iranians I had never met before came to my mother’s apartment. They admired the bulbous brass lamp hanging above the dining room table (now housing a light bulb instead of an oil dish), the old tile on display, a samovar. We drank tea from small glass cups rested in silver holders and discussed the ill-preserved Empire from which they had emigrated and the cherished objects imported and restored in the years since.

It was a valuable lesson in zero waste and recycling.

If the fragile inlay of a mosaic picture frame buckles in the humidity of this non-desert land, wet it down to mold it back into place. Worn antique embroidery should be protected behind glass and mounted on walls. Draw the shades when leaving the house to keep the sun from bleaching silk-woven carpets. Miniatures of kings holding court, couples reclining and horses charging can be displayed in shadow boxes built from small shelves covered in black velvet and fitted to a large antique frame. Simple Persian bedspreads can be cut and sewn around cheap pieces of foam to create a luxurious Bedouin effect in any living room, much cheaper than purchasing furniture when one first arrives in a new country.

I looked around at the things that covered the floors and shelves and walls of the rooms I grew up in and saw them for the first time as symbols of a nomadic culture, started long ago on another continent, but carried on by me and my sister as we dutifully cart our carpets and picture frames from one New York apartment to the next. These things were built to weather skirmishes and sand storms. They were designed to be portable. And to last.

garbage man scam

  Some asshole in Florida beat the real trash collectors to the tipping punch by leaving fake holiday notes on people’s doorsteps informing them of an address to which to mail holiday tips.  Shame, shame. 

[Tangent Alert]

I have to say though, it was a cleaver scam.  Back in the day, before I got (unjustly and unceremoniously) fired from my very first job delivering newspapers, my wise mother suggested I deliver holiday cards with the papers one morning to introduce myself (and inspire giving).  So I drafted a little note explaining that I was thirteen and saving up to buy my very own oboe.  It worked like magic.  In the space of the next week I made my annual salary in tips. 

Soon after, my grandparents happened to meet a famous oboist after a concert and happened to tell him all about their granddaughter’s quest to buy an oboe.  He let them in on another scam: oboists often pay for trips to France by buying a few oboes in Paris and reselling them in the states for a mark up.  He hooked them up with an oboist on his way to France, they recounted my sweet story and an at-cost oboe was promised to me.  My holiday tips covered one third, my parents came up with another third and my now-very-invested-in-the-quest grandparents covered the rest.  And shipping insurance. 

I have to say, though I haven’t played since college and the prized instrument now wastes away in a closet in my mother’s apartment, that oboe is to date the best appreciating investment I have ever made.

And it all started with a little holiday tip note scam.

further holiday trash…

The good blogger of The Goode Life has thrown a green list on the pile, also by category. My favorite is the frenemy, that middle ground aquaintance.

AND

Fabulously Green adds some fabulous pampering items.

more holiday trash

  Oooh, Treehugger has broken out their green gift guide by category…For the Foodie, For the Bookworm, etc.  See also their shout out to goodgifts.org.

give more, waste less

  While I’m usually the first to trash DSNY initiatives, I have to admit their waste-reducing gift ideas are excellent.  I especially like the notion of giving entertainment, we don’t take advantage enough of the arts around us.

Speaking of art, I’m not sure it’s entirely necessary to spend tax dollars creating clip art to demonstrate waste-reduction principles.

pleasure butters

A late runner in the eco-friendly holiday gift suggestions: pleasure butters from Good Clean Love.

And on the subject of eco-friendly erotica, check out the company blog, Making Love Sustainable.

Holiday Trash

In what should no longer be a shockingly quick transition, it is now officially holiday (read: Christmas) season. Construction paper turkeys and all things harvest have been stripped from store windows to be replaced with snowmen, candy canes and token symbols of non-Chirstian festivals. My family has been emailing around such specific wish lists that shopping for each other has become more choreographed inventory filling than thoughtful selection. Of course, wish lists guarantee that what we get is what we wanted, thus reducing holiday-related waste and, worse, regifting. [I've been trying hard to see wedding and baby registries as well as brand-specific Christmas wish lists as environmentally friendly and efficient and not just tacky and materialistic.]

Green-themed gift ideas fall into a similarly questionable category. On the one hand, the products recommended are recycled, Earth-friendly and what-have-you. On the other hand, suggested gift lists play into our stuff-driven culture and I, for one, am often tempted to treat myself to a slew of new purchases at this time every year.

Here are a few of the seductive links I’ve come across so far this season…

• Fabulously Green shares ideas for the modern home;
• Green Loop compiles sustainable fashion and organic creams;
• Cool Hunting starts what is sure to be a long season of helpful gift suggestions with a roundup of stylish wrapping papers (some green);
• Great Green Baby continues its year-round mandate of green gift suggestions, while Great Green Goods includes seasonal items such as menorahs made from recylced glass and pipe;
• The Grist holiday list takes an intellectual approach to the quest; and
• The Groovy Green Blog argues the virtues of a living Christmas Tree.

More roundups of roundups are sure to come as the holiday lists come drifting in.

Feeling like a dirty Capitalist? Purge on this buy nothing Christmas link or check out the recycled trees rounded up by The Temas Blog.

This is a blog about trash.

This 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.