Junk crap shit stuff.
Junk. So much.
I stand in the middle of this blackened city and all I see in every direction is junk.
I weep.
Junk lines the streets, rises into the sky, slides underneath my feet.
Junk piles into trashcans, drains into the gutter, falls from the sky and lands in my backyard.
Junk is on my desk, in my house, in my car. Junk is my house, my car.
Everything, everywhere is junk.
Oh Junk!
I poop my pants.
Junk is dumb. There is too much fucking junk.
Heh, that was my attempt at socially conscious modern poetry. I was going to get naked and stand on one foot while I read it into the camera and make a movie out of it and call it "performance art", but the joke isn't really funny enough to waste that much time. Artists need to be made fun of, often, but for the moment I am going to concentrate on Junk and leave art-bashing for another date.
There really is an enormous amount of worthless trash piling up everywhere. "Of course there is", you say, "that is life in the Land of Plenty! Man has too much time on his hands. With nothing else to do, he builds a lot of useless shit. He trades it back and forth, and finally he throws it away. It is no longer worth even the raw materials it was made from. Slowly, the junk piles up. But who cares? That is what being an intelligent human is all about." Hey, you have been paying attention. Thanks.
It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but what does? Junk is a natural result of Man's big brain and it is just gonna keep on coming, so you might as well try and make the best of it. It is free and it is new (even if it was expensive and now is old), so there is surely a good time to be had. We recently took a field trip to Westside Metal Recycling, a cool junkyard in Glendale, California. Taking recycling to a higher level, these guys collect the finest military, medical, and general industrial Junk they can find. They store it up in huge warehouses, to be rummaged through and rented by movie studios for sets and props. Good stuff.
This place is insanity. I couldn't begin to list all the crap they had there, but here are some highlights:
about 100 old rifles a $400,000 satellite Air-to-Ground missile casings giant IBM supercomputer hard drives a big tank of plastic eyeballs amusement park ride seats Most of the stuff is unidentifiable metal nonsense, but looks cool anyway. The guns from the movie Men In Black were lying around, a weird bike thing Shaquille "I can't rap or act for shit but I'm tall" O'Neal rode in some movie was up there, etc. It was a lot to take in. The guy kept telling us, "You will never see it all." I believe him. The mind reels with bad ideas just walking through and looking around. Thousands of tons of expensive metal, all waiting to be used for something it was never intended to be used for. Yay.
Look for material from this place in future LOP/CrashSite/BGP productions and creations. You can't imagine the destruction we can cause with these guys on our side. Much thanks to the guys at Westside Metal Recycling for letting us walk through and check shit out. Give them a call if you need a bunch of totally random big metal things, they will hook you up. And thank them for making something enjoyable out of dumb people's trash.
-- slap maxwell