dear club,

First thing, for our NYC readership please put Thursday August 6th in your calendar for a special meeting - a talk and discussion from the brilliant Rachana Shah entitled Complex Systems for Changemakers and Optimists. Come to the Sunview (257 Nassau in Greenpoint) as early as 6:30 with talk starting at about 7pm. I met Rachana last year through waste auditing work, and truly I would follow her anywhere. If you haven't read about it here before, a waste audit entails meeting up with the team at night at some enormous midtown corporate office or another and winding through the building's maintenence arteries, mechanical rooms, and elevators to a loading dock or a stuffy concrete room with tarped floors, where we fling and rip open bags and bags and bags of disposed material from the day. These gigs are fascinating and surprising, icky and mundane, and sometimes demoralizing.. Rachana said something that particularly stuck with me on one train ride homewards (pardon my paraphrasing.!) about how to keep pushing along in continuous adverse conditions; The struggle is the whole point! You have to enjoy the struggle! The joy of the collective movement towards a better-than-now, or even just a better-than-worse keeps us going. As maddening as it may be, you yourself may never even SEE the result of the struggle; this fracture is where rage and apathy can creep in for me. Yearning to see the result of my work sillouetted on the horizon before I've even lifted a finger towards the effort. But the answer to that particular pain from all kinds of contexts is simple - enjoy the process, and make the collective effort joyous.
Big shout out to all my fellow waste auditors out there, the most smart, fun, nutty crew imaginable. What makes trash people so excellent? The work and general area of interest really seems to draw on a particular type of individual. Curious, observant, skeptical of authority, durable, a little optimistic, a little insane. When I sink into despair, when I see certain tech giants' carting companies dump the entiriety of the sorted recycling and trash into the same landfill truck, I am bolstered by the imaculate camaraderie in collective efforts like the waste audits, master composter, newtown creek alliance, trash club... You guys got me gooey today!

we see you, googoo..

one of many beautiful mechanical rooms we pass through

dear club,

blessings to all from the midst of pride weekend in nyc. optimistically, I think queer people make up for all the glitter currently washing into the waterways by simultaneously putting so much energy into environmental remediation, civil rights, and general public service work. what is life on earth if not a constant compromise. boldly into terror and beauty we go...

Vulgar Domestic Waste Organs in review

thanks to all who came to our plastic waste seance last month. Some call these objects Plastorgans. I like "plastorgans" for its suggestion of the once-living quality of this material we use daily, inescapably part of our lives, our clothes, our food, our bodies, our wars, our 'prosperity.' We opened each vessel respectfully with a knife. Death again, or, an opening for speech. We attended quietly, waited for them to sing, shriek, hum. Some stayed silent as we watched, or listened, felt the air.
it was surprising every time. a faint howl... a hum a drone. we found ourselves instinctively holding waste aloft, dowsing for sound. plastic is made of oil cracked open; oil condensed by eons and environmental circumstance from the bodies of many living things -mass extinction of planktons, plants, microorganisms, perhaps mollusks. I'm thinking a lot about the soul of objects. These ubiquitous plastic forms created expressly for the briefest life before disposal, whose molecular material is far far older than we can imagine... they deserve an audible acknowledgement of soul.

dear club,

The vernal pools are drying and summer is an almost visible wave of heat on the horizon. We come to you today with words and events, featuring a gathering to make Aeolian Harps aka Vulgar Domestic Waste Organs on Sunday may 31st at 12 noon in Marsha P Johnson park. If you can’t attend on account of time and/or space, we invite you to make and install your own wherever and whenever you can using the resources that follow. If this action is a success, we will likely make and install more! I will now hand it over to bianca:

vulgar domestic waste organs

~ the sound of the wind through slits in fossil fuel plastic bottles ~ it’s almost time to set up the plastorgans (wind instruments made out of plastic bottles) - i can’t remember when exactly. If you know, please tell me. i've gathered a few links and guides to get us started. we usually have good luck with wind in gp, but open to doing this anywhere, even indoors where there is zero wind

dear trash club,

been a minute hasn't it... the newsletter had to thaw out to return to your inbox ❄︎ ❄︎ ❄︎

Is it spring we're smelling in the aftermath of these dramatic NYC snowfalls? Or is it the odor of cryogenically youthful street detritus beginning to ferment in a brine of chemical melting agents? Everything is relative, and 36 degrees feels like picnic weather after 5 degrees plus windchill. Either way, something is happening, and crocuses are beginning to push up from between the chip bags and juul pods.

or, the power of Not Doing

dearest trash club,

You may notice some changes in the email this week! I am moving the Dispatch operation to a much more fun newsletter service. i have high hopes! Please lmk what you think.