Dumpster Divers; or, Freegans

This summer I will teach Lars Eighner’s personal essay “On Dumpster Diving.” Eighner, homeless during three years with his dog Lizbeth, recounts his personal experiences and strategies for scavenging a living from the discarded food, clothes, and household items of local residents.

This essay, which turned into the longer memoir Travels with Lizbeth, surprises us with its clear, frank manner of detailing his thought process as he evaluates any variety of leftover raw foods and dry foods for safe consumption. His welcome attitude toward what others have considered garbage makes for a harrowing account of the current state of middle-class values.

Whereas Eighner scavenged dumpsters to survive, a yuppie coalition of dumpster divers has emerged with a solely political agenda. This New York Times article “Not Buying It” tells the story of these “freegans.”

“Freegans are scavengers of the developed world, living off consumer waste in an effort to minimize their support of corporations and their impact on the planet, and to distance themselves from what they see as out-of-control consumerism. They forage through supermarket trash and eat the slightly bruised produce or just-expired canned goods that are routinely thrown out, and negotiate gifts of surplus food from sympathetic stores and restaurants.”

Cartoon Doll Emporium

According to this New York Times article, social interactive web sites ala MySpace are cropping up that are targeted at young girls with their simple communication tools. More specifically, most have in common the real-life obsession girls have with “dress-up.”

Sites like Cartoon Doll Emporium feature a selection of dolls kids can personalize. “Belle of the Ball,” the doll I personalized below, is the only doll which had the selection features we’re used to in Avatar designs, such as Zwinky. But most, oddly, were basically online versions of paperdolls, in which we drag cutouts of clothing onto the body of the model. (Perhaps these dolls are targeted at a younger age set, who might delight in simply dragging and dropping the doll clothes. I think it’s a poor use of technology.)

What surprises me most is how much I loved personalizing my “Belle of the Ball,” as I do all the avatars I create for myself. Am I creating a technological image of the person I perceive myself to be? fantasize myself to be? I never know. And yet there always seems to be “rightness” in each color or style of clothing I select. It’s an amazing power to be able to fashion oneself without limits, without consequences.

Self-Discipline

It feels like forever since I gave up disciplining myself. I think the last time I was really dedicated to my work was fall 2004–a time when I was motivated to forgo all other pleasures in favor of reading and preparing for seminar. I used to have a much longer attention span. Now I’m lucky if I can last an hour.

Last week I experimented in extreme self-discipline, turning down all (but one) invitations to play, and setting aside the entire week to do nothing but work on my dissertation. It went relatively well–I discovered that I could work quite steadily from about 9am to 12:30pm. But that’s where my success began and ended. Regardless of what approach I tried, I found it impossible to be productive in the afternoons. Around 6 or 7pm or I could sometimes pick myself up again. Maybe 9 or 10pm. Sometimes 11 or 12am. Yes, it was completely erratic.

The general problem, I’m finding, is that I defer all decisions to my body. I ask my body how it’s feeling, what it wants to do. I consult my head and check how lucid or alert it is. It’s as though I don’t want to suffer a single muscle strain. I give myself up completely to the mood of the day and the condition of my body, and then wonder why I’m not more self-disciplined…

Smokey Florida

Part of me thought I was just imagining all the smoke in the air…

LARGE WILDFIRES WILL CONTINUE TO PRODUCE LOCALLY DENSE SMOKE AND
ABUNDANT SMOKE AND HAZE ACROSS SOUTHEAST GEORGIA AND NORTHEAST
FLORIDA TODAY. ANOTHER WILDFIRE IN SOUTHERN FLAGLER COUNTY IN
NORTHEAST FLORIDA HAS PRODUCED A LARGE AMOUNT OF SMOKE WHICH WILL
ALSO AFFECT AREAS FROM FLAGLER BEACH TO THE OCALA NATIONAL FOREST.

What is going on?

Virtual Living, Redux

As I was taking a walk around the block in (what has been for days) the smoky and stifling air of North Central Florida, I realized two things about my previous post. (1) In my catalogue of “vital stats” one might wish to know about another person passing in the streets, I thought only of superficial mostly virtual details and nought of what might concern us in encounters of the flesh. On the streets, would we not also be tempted to want to detect in our hand-held monitors anything and everything from the common cold to STDs to genetic diseases, if we could? That is, if technology and society fostered such a practice? I say this as I imagine, my eyes still sore from the stinging atmosphere, that disease will soon consume us.

And so my rose-colored invention darkens.

Even more so in my second realization: (2) Environmental pollution and disease have not yet consumed us, which suggested to me the idea that it will consume us, and therefore this rosy world I live in is an environmental equivalent of the pre-9/11 world. The Floridian atmosphere struck me as so unhealthy as to not want to be out in it. My absence of concerns about disease, pollution, or any other condition of the fleshy world, in addition to my fixation on the rainbow-colored MySpace visions of the virtual world, suggest to me that life remains uncomplicated as far as public health in the U.S. goes. Yet that smoke-laden polluted air dropped a heavy veil over my lungs, rendering my previous post suddenly bittersweet.

Virtual Living

I previously wrote on the idea of my life as a character, i.e. what if I had an author hovering above me, narrating my every thought, sensation, memory, or basically any quality not visibly or audibly expressed. I think of the novel as a technology for reconfiguring the presentation of the individual, and as such, the novel enables me to conceive of additional categories for understanding my life.

Computer technology takes this reconfiguration of life to a new plateau. In our experience of other people on the Internet, we almost always have access to all sorts of vital stats for other people–we can see a name, a photo (or many, representing multiple times and situations), birth date, location, interests, habits, videos, blogs, etc. In other words, I’m provided with a predictable frame for beginning to know someone, without ever having to enter their physical space, or even introduce myself.

Aaahhh, so I think, what if, out on the street, someone could do the equivalent of hovering their mouse over my image to access all this information about me, before even waving at me? More practically, what if I simply had a chip embedded under my skin and as others pass me, they could scan me with their palm-sized computer and retrieve any number of stats–am I single? what’s my occupation? how old am I? where am I from, where do I live? do I have anything in common with you? It would make the introductions between strangers much more efficient, no?

Sound crazy? Not really, it’s simply a more real-time version of what we get on the Internet. The reason I’m thinking of this now is that on today’s Rocketboom I was introduced to project WoW, created by Aram Bartholl of Denmark. His concept for the project stemmed from his experience of gaming technology in Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, such as World of Warcraft, that feature characters’ names hovering above their heads. (I wonder, of course, why names are so significant in this game and whether or not if I click on the character I get access to additional information.) In any case, I am fascinated by Aram Bartholl’s decision to carry out a performance of this concept of names hovering over heads into the streets.

The result, while clumsy at times, is rather startling. As I watch the videos, my impulse is to hover my mouse over the person to find out more information. Which led me to the subject of this post, and my invention for replicating virtual life on the streets… It’ll happen.

I need c-o-f-f-e-e

I am completely “awed” by this video song performed in mummenschanz style:

The Coffee Song with Mr. Sketch-it

The Coffee Song was written by Ralph Covert, former indie bandmember of Bad Examples, and now children’s musician. He wrote and performed the song on the spot after he arrived at a musical event with a cup of coffee and encountered a group of mothers on edge, who were envious of the coffee and requested, at the very least, a “coffee song.” So he made one up, pleased the mothers, and now we have this haunting tune to hum every time we need coffee (kind of relaxes the itch in that space of need and satisfaction).

Awed Job, aka Mr. Sketch-it, takes this simple, innocent song and transforms it with haunting mummenschanz theatrics. With a homemade cardboard mask and three embedded digital video cameras, Awed Job combines child’s craft with technology and likewise transforms a children’s song into an adult masquerade with bulging digital eyes. I love it!

Also take a look at this video of the mummenschanz Swiss theater group in their guest appearance on the Muppet Show–I identify with the poor guy on the left. What I’d give to put my hands in those silly putty faces.