The first episode of the Blightsites’ Trashcast is here!
“Hello, is it me you’re looking for?” is inspired by a Polaroid photo found in Palmdale, CA. The image, still intact albeit a bit crusty, shows a woman, circa 1983, talking on a corded phone in a wood paneled room. Each of the first episode guests share stories about looking for trash – perhaps inspiring change in our own relationship with waste through reuse, cleanups and reflection on our environment.
The podcast features low-fi and earthy audio:
• The opening music is the entirety of a found piece of dirty 1/4″ reel to reel tape. Interstitial music is from a filthy, dumped reel of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 in A Major, spliced every other 14 inches. Both of these gems are recaptured from playback on a discarded TEAC A-4010.
• Despite the desert wind and chimes, I recorded artist Cathy Allen reading An Ode to a Dump, at the Glass Outhouse Gallery in Twenty-nine Palms, CA.
• I called Daisy Martinez to talk trash and how her organization, TrashFreeEarth.org cleans up our environment through community efforts on trails, in parks and on Skid Row. We are partnering on the first Blightsites cleanup at Giant Rock in Landers, CA. Our conversation preceded TFE’s one-year anniversary in at the end of May.
• Jeff Griffin is an artist and poet who collected desert cast-offs and curated the book, Lost And, published by the University of Iowa Press in 2013. We had a Memorial Day phone conversation about his process and his poignant found poems, letters and photographs. Uncensored.