We're all laying in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.
-Oscar Wilde

VOC,

I have been thinking about the next VOC meeting and would like to propose a subject.
As discussed previously, we decided upon a strategy in which we first choose a general theme, then within that theme, define a modifier through which to explore, analyze, or deconstruct the chosen theme.

The theme I would like to focus on is "The archipelagic condition".
The modulator I would like to use to examine the archipelogical condition is "garbage". Or if you'd like, detritus, chaff, deadwood, dross, dust, junk, litter, refuse, riffraff, rubbish, scrap, trash, waste, offal, sewage, slop, swill, debris, rubble, ruins, odds and ends, flotsam, jetsam, castoff, cull, discards, rejects... ...well you get the idea.

My primary interest in this topic is that, next to vehicles, it is the largest dynamic spatial element in the city. As such it plays a very large role in defining urban place.

The irony is that as important an issue it is, there is an unhealthy relationship with garbage: Instead of embracing our waste we would like to stick it on someone else's backyard, island, state, country, or continent.* It becomes the generator of an "us" vs. "them" point of contention, a psychological inability to accept that which defines what we are. It seems as if we have not yet realized the terms set by the second law of thermodynamics.

When viewed within the archipelagic condition the topic becomes even more interesting. Which island gets the garbage? Which island becomes defined as the cast off to take the garbage? What happens when the cast off space can handle no more cast offs? Is it possible to reuse previously cast off islands?

Within New York City there are many useful examples to examine. The list of cast off space goes on and on: Rikers Island once a landfill is now a penal institution. Ward's Island is home to both a psychological hospital institute and a sewer treatment plant. Upon these islands have been land fills, typhoid quarantines, smallpox hospitals, fish rendering plants, horse rendering plants etc etc. In the past when their presence has impeded human progress too greatly they have even been completely obliterated as was Flood Rock, an East River Island detonated with explosives in 1885, NYC's largest explosion.

As a person who is inspired by the form and content of garbage, I would gladly host this foray into the least accepted, yet arguably, most defining element of our urban human condition... ...our shit.

*As recognized most recently in New York's new Solid Waste Management Plan in which the city has decided to barge and rail garbage to out-of state landfills, as opposed to using trucks.

In the city, ladies look pretty,
Guys tell jokes so they can seem witty,
Tell a funny joke just to get some play,
Then you try to make a move and she says no way.

-Young M.C.-
Queens Resident