Men Are Good for One Thing, and It's Not Taking Out the Trash

Basura. The Movie!

Musica de Sakamoto. Magnifico! ¿Pero dónde es el Ladrón de Basura?

So Much Junk, So Few Gigabytes

Make no mistake about it. We live in the most junk obsessed society on the face of the planet.

Take the "news" and blogger buzz last week. I mean, what incident of significance happened? Correct, it was all about an overweight, drunk 25-year-old stumbling around on a stage in Las Vegas? Search on YouTube, and you'll find 2,160 clips referencing the Britney Spears VMA fiasco. Just so you know that United States Americans (to borrow a phrase from Miss South Carolina) have their priorities straight, you'll find only 76 references to General Petraeus' report to Congress. (Huh, what's that about? Who's Petraeus? What's a Congress?) Amazingly, you'll actually find a total of five references to the bombings in Kathmandu, needless to say none of them in English. (Hey, those folks don't matter, they only make clothes to sell at H&M, they can't actually shop there.)

Nobody cares that people are getting killed by bombs in Nepal and Iraq, right? We want to see Britney bomb.

What's really spooky about this is that there will actually be plenty of people buying the crap she has to sell. We all need another chance to listen to that great message she has to share in her lyric that goes something like "Gimme, gimme, gimme more." However, I'm not clear what she is pleading for in excess -- more dollars for her CDs or just more plain old Chicken McNuggets. All that matters is gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme...

All of this got me to thinking about all the junk that's out there and the very name and intent of this site. I mean, for cryin' out load, there is just so much useless product that we toil away our waking hours in order to waste dollars on and ascribe meaning to. But why are we buying it when there are so many treasures waiting for us to nab for free?

Why do so many of us feel that it's really important that we've bought something with a Kenneth Cole label even though he never saw the garment that was dreamed up by some junior assistant who spent 10 minutes designing and some woman in Nepal wove together and got 50 cents for her 10 hours of labor.

That was one of the reasons I decided to start a blog in the first place, to reclaim the junk that gets ignored or thrown in the trash heap. There is a lot of junk out there and a lot of stories behind each piece. So over the past few days, I've been encouraged to come across others who feel the same.

Eva Deadbeat, has a great new vlog about Found magazine. I came across the 'zine in a bookstore over the weekend, and it was heartening to see another like-minded group roaming the U.S. in their van to collect and ascribe meeting to junk they find. The whole concept of being a Junk Thief is not original, and more than a year ago when I predicted the coming Junk Thief revolution, I knew that I was neither the originator nor alone in my quest to promote finding and ascribing meaning to all the trashy treasures out there. The question is, will all the junk thieves ever manage to connect? I'm curious if the creators of the play Lost and Found in the Mission that made an entire musical production centered around trash lingering in the streets of our fair city and staged at the now sadly departed Jon Sims Center and Junk Pirate magazine know about each other as well as Junk Thief and Found magazine. The best thing about Found magazine is that it has nothing mined form Google searches, just plain old-fashioned, physical gleaning. I think we all should make a convoy of funky old vans and tour the country. And as hungry junk thieves, we'll probably look a lot more appealing as we dance in our skivvies belting out "Gimme, gimme, gimme more (junk)."

Junk Thief Is in Terminal Condition

For those of you that just dropped in to see what condition my condition is in, I thought I'd let you know that in this morning's mail came a great package: Airport Terminal Pack. As if it weren't enough to regularly check Pennsylvanian blogger buddy There's No One Driving the Plane Mark's reference to the second in the Airport series, I am in near ecstasy to have this amazing quartet of low culture masterpieces. The Airplane series was mildly amusing, but nothing beats the source material of the various Airports for true belly laughs. I've only seen the first two, and I shiver with anticipation to see the finale The Concorde: Airport '79. There are bizarre, all star casts (1973's Lost Horizon with Liv Ullmann and Peter Finch lip synching Bacharach being a great example) and then there is this puppy.

The horror and glory of this list boggles the mind: Alain Delon, Susan Blakely, Robert Wagner, Sylvia Kristel (as a flight attendant!), Eddie Albert, Bibi Anderson (@#$%????), Charo, Sybil Danning, John Davidson, Monica Lewis, Andrea Marcovicci, Mercedes McCambridge (as a wheel chair bound Russian gym coach!!!), Martha Raye, Avery Schreiber, Cicely Tyson, Jimmie "JJ/Dyn-o-mite!" Walker, David Warner and -- but of course, the eternal connecting thread -- Kennedy as "Patroni".

Should I hold a screening and hand out tiny bottles of scotch and gin? Should I save it for the pond crossing Barcelona trip to freak out my seat mates? Should I just ditch work this afternoon and consume it now?

Oh, when it comes to trash, JunkThief is the ultimate snob. And Proust and Chekov scholar or not, I cannot wait to consume this puppy soon. Oh, the humanity, the humanity of it all!

UPDATE: Oh, I just couldn't resist. I took a peek. Sample dialogue:

Sylvia Crystal (after all the pilots tell her that they take their coffee black): Oh yoo pilots are all such real men.

George Kennedy: Why do you think they call it the cockpit, baby?

Feathers for the Queen

Just as Junk Thief must have door knobs, Shelley's character in Wild in the Streets must have feathers in order to be presented to the Court of St. James. Why? If you must ask, you have no understanding of the powerful pop poetry of this movie. Why it has never received the homages bestowed on Valley of the Dolls and its ilk is beyond me. This film is a Junk Thief favorite. If you'd like to join me for a midnight screening at the Junkplex, just let me know. (Perhaps a double header with Bloody Mama would be in order.)

Junk Thieves Be Not Proud

Ah, the familiar sounds of Monday night. To quote Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, "Clink, clink." The familiar weekly routine of the gleaners, recyclers and scavengers sorting through the debris of the past week. I have absolutely no problem with them except the sloppy ones who sort through our bins and throw what they don't want on the ground or throw black bin trash into the blue recycling bin. True scavengers know that is messing with fate, karma and the ghost of Anna Nicole.

The only time I came close to an altercation was when a gleaner pulled out several empty bottles of Charles Shaw from my neighbor's trash and remarked, "Man, even I don't drink that cheap shit!" (For those not in the Trader Joe's zone, Charles Shaw sells at $1.99 a bottle and is even called "two buck Chuck" by that retailer.)

Do Your Duty: Join the One Less Child Movement

Maybe last week's condom commercial was not an isolated incident. It seems that the childless revolution is gaining momentum, something that same sex couples learned about years ago. I've never felt the remotest need for a child, perhaps because my biological clock is digital not of the ticking kind. Besides not wanting to subject a new life to the realities of the current world, I also feel the responsibility of not bringing another white child on this planet. Research has consistently proven that pound for pound, a baby is Ghana consumes something on the order of 10% the resources of kiddos in the U.S. With that in mind, I may feel less guilty bringing in my petroleum based shopping bags from big box store purchases just outside of the 415 area code. After all, it's not very easy to clean out the litter box with a canvas bag. In the meantime, instead of all those little white babies, let's promote more of these little babes.