Trash-ures

I love finding treasures in the trash. Sometimes I find one of those awesome Tibor Kalman MoMA umbrellas and other times, I find an unopened box of aluminum foil! A part of why I like to "shop" in the trash is because I am cheap. Mostly, however, I enjoy found, scrounged, and thrifted objects because I can have cool, unique objects without actually having to pay much (or any) money. There is nothing worse than going to a cafe halfway across the world to find they are using the same Ikea cushions that you have on your couch at home. Okay, actually, there are literally several billion things worse than that, but you get the general idea.

My main inspirations for snatching up things I find in the trash are my parents. My dad, Mort might own several tuxedos and live in Houston's weirdest mansion, but many of his favorite art pieces have been literally pulled out of dumpsters. I am using the term "art piece" very generously here, but when you take a child-sized, filthy Barbie doll with a shaved head from the garbage and then accessorize her with a pith helmet and purse with a baby alligator sewn upon it, you have made a piece of art. Oh, he also found a Barbie a "husband" in the trash in the form of a particle board cutout of a CGI-ed teenager wearing sunglasses.

My mother used to flip houses and would often have to go to the dump. When she would go to the dump, she would often bring stuff back with her. Once she brought back a ceramic sink and installed it into one of her houses, so if you bought a formerly foreclosed house in Sugarland, Texas in the late 1990s, it might have a dump sink in it. She once brought me back a lime green 1970s shag carpet. Then she realized what she had just done and promptly took it back to the dump. I love my mom for that. She can try to find potential in a discarded shag carpet.

When I was 18, I left home to attend Reed College in Portland, Oregon and there, I was exposed to many new things like tempeh,  alternative strippers, and dumpster diving. One evening during my first semester, I was lying belly down on our dorm couch reading Herodotus or something, when my friend Punk Justin threw a loaf of bread at my head. I was like, "Dude!" And he was like, "Hey! I'm trying to share! It's from a dumpster!" He was always trying to shock me because somehow I was the most conservative person he knew at the time. He was the first person (but strangely not the last) to call me a speciesist and he was always running around naked.

I met many colorful characters during my time at Reed. There was an abundance of hippies there always declaring things "commie" or "communal," which was their way of saying, "You have to let me eat that leftover hummus." There is even a whole area of the dining hall at Reed reserved for the Scroungers, called the Scrounge. The Scroungers are a group of students who didn't buy a meal plan and would eat everyone's left overs. The Scrounge even had their own column in Reed's always disappointing newspaper, The Quest. I think that someone even made Scrounger Trading Cards one year. Most of the Scroungers were grateful and polite. They would always get excited when I brought them my half-eaten taco salad shell. Some were bitchy and rude if you brought something not to their liking and you sort of wanted to retort, "Dude. You are literally eating garbage. Shut your mouth." If there was a lot of an item left at the Scrounge uneaten you knew to avoid it because it was gross. Also, the Scrounge were the main cause of the spreading of colds.

Anyway, enough of this preamble, want to see some stuff I have that came from the trash? Yeah you do!

The Trash: The World's Cheapest and Least Exclusive Gallery! 

I like the idea of living in a place decorated with original art work, but at this point in my life my main source for these pieces is the garbage. Luckily, I have lived and continue to live with people who are cool with displaying trash paintings. 

These two paintings were found around our neighborhood in Brooklyn. I found the one on the right walking back from yoga once day. I wasn't sure if I really wanted it when a 50-something man with a ponytail sporting a beret, walked by me with his thumbs up, wisely nodded and said, "Take it!" I took that as a sign. The one on the right, my old roomie Mike found somewhere. We put it up upside down because it looked less stupid that way. 

 

This painting is actually really well done. Sorry the photo I took of it sucks. It is on top of the closet door and I couldn't reach it. Mike found it on a seat of a bicycle. How nauseatingly twee is that?

This next painting I found in the trash area in our building. Catherine, one of my roommates, said it looked like a girl trying to look like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. I think it looks like an emo kid so into Yokio Mishima or anime or whatever that s/he decided to commit suicide by getting engulfed by a The Great Wave off Kanagawa.

You might notice, as I did, that many of these trash paintings feature the same terrible shade of midnight blue. My theory that that is the blue that just comes out of the tube. Using the blue straight out of the tube is the best way to tell if a painter really knows his or her craft. 


Okay, I want you to prepare yourselves and mentally ready yourselves to be exposed to the world's very best trash painting!

Are you ready????

Here it is!

This lovely damsel was given to me for my 24th birthday when I was still living in Portland. My dear friend Sam found it in a pile of really pathetic landscapes in someone's yard. This is one of my all time favorite gifts I have ever received in my entire life. Look at those demure, yet large nipples! The amorphous blobs for hands! The weird train/tail thingy! And the stars! Oh the stars! We were nervous bringing it into the house initially since the cats were obsessed with it and that is rarely a good sign.
 
The Trash: Sometimes You Find Shoes Your Size in It! 


Sometimes people are weird about thrift-store clothes. My Iranian grandmother used to literally pray to Allah that I wouldn't get some weird disease from my thrift-store clothes. I should probably not tell her about the couple pairs of shoes I swiped from someone's trash while I was drunkenly staggering home from karaoke one night.

Everyone should own red cowboy boots at some part of his or her life. It's one of life's less talked about pleasures. And the following shoes are just so joyful and juvenile and I love them despite never actually having worn them.

Taking shoes from a stoop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn is not as bad as thing my friend Liz does on a regular basis. I once complimented her shirt. She told me that the week prior she was biking home and saw some pink thing in the gutter. She stopped to pick it up, decided it was her size, washed it and now wears it. So, yeah, some of her clothes are literally from the gutter.



The Trash: Your Stop For Affordable Home Furnishings!

Furniture is expensive and there is only so much CB2 you can persuade your parents to buy for you. So why not just start grabbing things from the garbage? I found my super cute night stand getting rained on by someone's recycling. I took it home and now it holds all my unread issues of Harpers and the Believer.

I found this pot in the garbage, where I should put that dying Christmas cactus. Yes. I somehow killed a cactus. Those other cacti look fine, though, right? I should not be allowed to have plants.

The following lamp is one of my prized possessions. When Eric left New York to go "find himself" or "take pictures of lichen" or whatever he was doing in Montana, he gave away most of his belongings. He told me to take this lamp because I like ugly things. It is one of the most lovely ugly things I have ever had the pleasure to look upon.

Tim's Lentil Mix Tape

Apparently, about a year ago, I got drunk and started babbling. One of my favorite topics of conversation, both sober and intoxicated, is lentils. I fucking love lentils. They are by far my favorite legume. They are easy and quick to prepare, and nutrient rich! They also have a nice shape, not all awkward and oblong like, say, navy beans. Anyway, while I was babbling incoherently about lentils, I promised one of my top five friends, Tim, that I would make him a "lentil mix tape." And since Tim is obsessed with beans, I had no choice but to make good on my promise.

Here you go, Tim. Here is your lentil mix tape.

Track One: Lentil Soup 

The best kind of soup is the kind you just make out of whatever. I love making soup because it is more about intuition and less about following a plan. That's my favorite kind of cooking.

The Minimum of What You'll Need:

• a couple of cups of lentils
• neutral oil or butter
• 6-8 cups of water (You could use stock, but the only stock I like (that doesn't feel all, for lack of a better word, plastic-y or like a chicken who is made out of aluminum) is stock I've made myself and that is rarely worth the effort)).
• some garlic
• like three carrots
• some celery
• a can of chopped tomatoes
• a bayleaf
• paprika
• salt and pepper

Nice Things to Add If You Have It:

• parsnips, turnips, etc
• fresh parsley
• kale
• spinach
• turmeric/cumin/etc if you want to make it more Middle Eastern-y
• basil/oregano/dill if you want to make it more European-y

How To Make It

1. Chop up the onion and garlic and cook these guys up in the bottom of a large soup pot
2. When the onion and garlic starts getting aromatic, add chopped celery, carrots, salt and pepper and whatever powered spices you plan on using.
3. When the celery and carrots start to soften, add the lentils, bay leaf, dried or fresh herbs, and enough water to cover the mixture and more depending on how "brothy" you want it to be.
4. Now you just wait until until the lentils get soft. You inevitably will get impatient and take about 15 sporadic sips of soup during this period. This is when you will realize you didn't add enough salt in the beginning. So add some more salt.
5. When the lentils are almost perfectly soft, add the can of tomatoes (with the juice) and the softer veggies, like spinach.
6. When your spinach wilts, eat your goddammed soup! With a grilled cheese sandwich! 

Track Two: Lentils with Rice and Caramelized Onions

I would like to claim that I made this up, but it is totally from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. I make this so often that one of my roommates starts groaning when she sees me making it.  It is a great dish to make when you are running out of money!

The Ingredients

• two cups of lentils
• one cup of long-grain basmati white rice
• two onions
• one tablespoon of cumin
• half a head of garlic
• salt and pepper

How To Make It

1. Chop up one of the onions and the garlic and cook them up in a medium sauce pan with a sturdy lid. When the veggies are aromatic, mix in the cumin and salt and pepper.
2. Mix in the lentils and add enough water to cover the lentils by an inch or so. Cover and let cook for about 45 minutes, until the lentils are soft.
3. When the lentils are soft, add the rice and pour in enough water to cover the mixture by an inch or so. Cover, reduce the heat to simmer, and wait for the rice to soften (about 20-30 minutes). If the rice is soft, but there is still a lot of liquid, that is okay. Just uncover and increase the heat and let the excess water evaporate.
4. While the rice and lentils are cooking, it is time to caramelize the onions. Caramelizing onions is magical! You take this harsh, tear inducing vegetable and with a little butter and heat, it becomes sweet like candy, but better! I wish there was onion-flavored candy …  Anyway, put the elegantly sliced onions with butter or oil on medium heat and stir it enough that your fire alarm doesn't go off. When the onions are all brown (but not burned up!), put them on some paper towels to soak up the extra oil. You don't want to get heart disease!
5. I like to eat this with plain yogurt and the following salad: cucumber, onion, mint, tomatoes, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and olive oil all tossed together. Make this while the rice is cooking, so it has time to marinate. it is the sort of thing that tastes better over time. 

Track Three: Vegetarian Shepherd's Pie 

My mom, who is also obsessed with beans, made up this recipe on one of those Dutch winter days, when there is like three hours of sunlight and your feet are cold and you can't imagine a life where you could go outside while wearing shorts.

What You'll Need

• a cup or two of lentils
• butter
• a handful of shallots
• garlic
• a couple of potatoes
• one or two sweet potatoes
• milk
• sour cream
• Gruyere cheese
• salt and pepper

How To Make It

1. Preheat your oven to 350 and start boiling some lentils and the potatoes. You can just stab and microwave the sweet potatoes. It is a strangely satisfying to stab a sweet potato, so I suggest that route.
2. In a skillet or what-have-you, start cooking those shallots in butter until they are soft.
3. When the lentils are soft, throw them in with the shallots, stir it around, and salt and pepper it.
4. When the potatoes and sweet potatoes are cooked, mash them up together with sour cream, milk, salt, pepper and whatever you like to put in mashed potatoes.
5. Take a casserole dish and layer it with the lentil/shallot mixture at the bottom, the potato mixture in the middle, and top it off with a generous layer of shredded Gruyere.
6. Bake it until the cheese is golden and crispy and eat it with a green salad or vegetable so you can digest this thing properly.

Appealing Things.

Things that People Seem to Enjoy that I Do Not Understand the Appeal of

Video Games
Sports
Burning Man
Camping
Family Guy
Cormac McCarthy
Tempeh
Paul Thomas Anderson
Grizzly Bear
Channing Tatum

Things That I Used To Not Understand the Appeal of and Then I Came Around Later in Life

Dogs and Cats
Yoga
Poetry
Vegetarianism 
Clogs
New York City

What M Was Doing Instead Of Working

M works for a fancy-ass branding firm and her boss just quit, so you think she'd have more actual work to do. Nope. This is what she's been doing. I don't know what she does on a day-to-day basis (other than talk to me on G-Chat about cute European boys), but I think this is a good use of her time.

Famous Guys Playing Pop Songs With Guitars

John Darnielle Playing Ace of Base



Because he is singing this song with the same style and vigor as, like, this one, you might mistake lyrics like, "Life is demanding without understanding" as deep and meaningful. You might feel the urge to put it on your record player and wallow, staring at the ceiling, teenager style and writing the words over and over on the outside of your pre-calculus notebook.

Jeff Tweedy Playing the Black-eyed Peas

I love this video for many reasons, one being that he looks like he is going to crack up at any point. He is unpacking the ridiculousness of the song by just stating what the lyrics are.  מזל טוב

Ted Leo Playing Kelly Clarkson 

This is an oldie and I don't know if people care about Ted Leo anymore. You just need at least three things to make a list.

Why Texas Is the Best!

It often surprises new friends and acquaintances to learn that I grew up in Texas. I don't have an accent because I intentionally lost it when I was twelve and my Seattle-based aunt made fun of me for saying "y'all." Despite growing up in Houston the most car heavy place in the entire galaxy, I never got my driver's license because I don't trust myself not to crash into shit and kill myself, or worse, someone else. Now that none of my immediate family lives in Texas anymore, I go down very rarely. I doubt I'll ever live there again and I am okay with that.



But you know what? I still think that Texas is the best fucking state in all of the United States and Canada. I don't care that Alaska and Ontario are bigger or that California has more people or that Oregon is actually the the most lovely and pleasant place I've ever lived, in my deepest lizard brain I believe Texas is the best.

Here are my reasons:

• Best BBQ
• Armadillos
• The shape is the best in the US.
• Every single person in the world has heard of Texas.
• It has lots of money and a fantastic economy and an entrepreneurial spirit without being cut throat.
• It used to be its own country and has so many flags.
• It has the best flag currently! So good, that Chile copied it poorly.
• It is very populous and diverse (and obese, so if you do not agree Texas is the best, we will sit on you until you suffocate).
• When you are in space, you literally address Houston, TX. When you have a problem, you don't say "Pittsburg, we have a problem."
• It has fire ants, which are the most bad-ass ants and water moccasins and alligators who will eat you because they are Texan and bad-ass.
• Tex-Mex is a thing. Have you heard of an American regional cuisine that is this famous? No, you have not.
• You can be deep in the heart of Texas, you can't be deep in the heart of like, Ohio. That would be lame.
• You could wear cowboy boots there everyday and not look crazy. That is the sort of thing I value.

Yes, I know that nothing in my crazy list makes any sense or provides proof that Texas is the best. But why you love things and people has nothing to do with logic. Your mom is the best mom in the world because she is your mom, your friends are the best friends ever because they belong to you. You can use circular logic when you are talking about things and people you love. It's totally within your rights.

Bonus! Something Embarrassing!

Up until a few months ago, I believed that Texas was the size of the moon. When I mentioned this in a conversation about how Texas is the best state in the United States, my friends pointed out that this made no sense and asked where I got this information. I had and still have no idea. It was just something I believed to be true. Eric tried to find something pertaining to this on the internet and this was the closest thing he could find. He also made this animated gif.



If you are curious, the moon, in terms of surface area, is about the size of Africa. I asked someone who had recently completed her PhD in Geology from Oxford because this is the sort of shit I bring up when I am talking about smart people.

EXTREME! EXTREME! EXTREME!

Hurricane Irene is scheduled to hit New York City sometime tomorrow. I have been freaking out about it like the anxious dork that I am. I have a flashlight, radio, extra batteries, two gallons of water, rubber boots, a vintage raincoat with whales on it, a bucket, a box of Cheez-Itz and like 10,000 Kashi granola bars. I should be fine. But it got me thinking about extreme weather and that got me thinking of extreme things.

EXTREME BALLADS!!!



I remember hearing this song as a small child and thinking that their name must be ironic.

EXTREME POODLES!!!



Yes, that poodle is supposed to be a peacock. There are so much more EXTREMELY depressing poodle follicle abuse here.

EXTREME EXISTENTIAL CRISIS DEEP IN THE EXTREMES OF THE AMAZON, THE MOST EXTREME PLACE ON EARTH!!! EXTREME!



I love how EXTREMELY German this man is.

EXTREME WEB DESIGN

This is so horrible that it is almost beautiful. I wonder what their site map looks like.

EXTREME CUTENESS


AWK. LOOKING AT THIS MAKES ME WANT TO DIE. In a good way!

MOUNTAIN DEW!!!



Using the qualifier, EXTREME, with Mountain Dew would be EXTREMELY redundant.