Hello Fall 2020, we vote, breathe deep, assemble our dream team, and donuts of course.
Special thanks to Center Earth CSA for sponsoring Ep 12! We are going to need friends, entertainment, and our kitchens for the coming months so we hope you’ll send us a note, shout out MK, and enjoy. Thank you.
Art Historian, Ned Marto did a deep dive into a few Druecke’s projects from the 1990s and early 2000s, The Picture of Community in Paul Druecke's Early Photographic Works, 1997-2004. Druecke responds, “Quite an honor to have Mr. Marto thoroughly sift through this work. I gleaned new insights, found myself disagreeing with some thematic treatments, and also came away inspired to organize thirty-five years of studio production. If you need me, I’ll be dusting off slide sheets of collating clippings.”
Dear D,
I trip over a gum wrapper entwined with shoelaces and fishing line weighted provenance, tumble and hit my head ruffling Cheetos bag against my face we are one modern trash contrivance bottle caps reseal open
yrs Pd
AP has taken an epistolary turn, equal amounts of writing, picking up, and general composition.
It's 5pm on Friday, 2020. We have our routines, plans for the future, calls to action, and hunger.
It's 5pm on Friday, June 2020. We have our routines, plans for the future, calls to action, and hunger. MILWAUKEE KITCHEN Kitchen Sync episode eleven June 20...
America Pastime tucks nicely into the pages of Elderly Magazine’s End Capitalism Now, a lifetime’s worth of reading for progress.
A couple of cold, rainy, mid-May days gave me time to create a short video of America Pastime’s B Sides. These are the pics posted to Instagram in April in the #2 or #3 spot on any given day. Together with the day’s featured pic they portray a tiny fraction of the litter I’ve picked up, assessed, meditated on, arranged for documentary purposes, and then thrown away. By conservative estimate, I’ve handled over 300lbs of other people’s refuse over the last month.
I know absolutely nothing about the people whose trash I pick up. Oddly enough this allows a sense of proximity, understanding, even acceptance.
Each muddied cellophane wrapper, burst plastic cup, striped straw, corroding technology, cosmetic vial, or glinting snack bag is a momentary intersection of emphatically distinct lives. Stooping down, over and over, I consider divergent goals grappling with a Cheeto’s bag on the fringe of well-worn paths. One neighbor tears into the promise of salty satisfaction and quickly moves on, a shadowy stereotype of carelessness. Another neighbor, me, looks for purpose and viability by proposing that trash is worthy of respect and attention. Neither role is ideal nor sustainable.
At the other end of the tenuous collaboration that is America Pastime are the individuals who validate the undertaking by liking, sharing, commenting on and, most thankfully, purchasing the images that result from trashing. They embody the project’s ambitious, precarious, absurd goals of investing litter with new value. We are all in this together, not the least being the plastic bag blowing across the street coming to rest at the fence line where it becomes the landscape that we accept by ignoring.
Trashing is a utopian bounty of color and texture. Dusty salmon is my favorite color for rubbish, the perfect accent for earth-crusted, translucent plastic as well as all manner of practical utensils or decadent habits. It has been an honor and treat to contribute to Woodland Pattern’s series of Prompts. Woodland Pattern offers so much vital programming, brick and mortar and now virtual, it may be the closest we get to ideal.
Day 16, 4.16.20 Utopian Patterns #2
Earth Day Alchemy: Public Relations
pages of a discarded book still have story
Trashing | Journal notes:
Sensitive displays of other people’s trash documented with an iPhone camera. The compositional ease of bringing together randomly distinct histories, baggie after baggie after baggie each with the lower right corner twisted off. Impossible storylines converge. Shiny inner foil of salty snack bags gently dulled by the elements. The implacable sense, and senselessness, of other people’s trash become pragmatic then precious. A Cheetos bag freshly torn by hands or wind. Bright, cheerful colors that enhance flavor embody a sense of self-determination.
Toward the end of Christopher Alexander’s Timeless Way of building, he writes, “. . . we assume that when we repair something, we are essentially trying to get it back to its original state. This kind of repair is patching, conservative, static. But in this new use of the word repair, we assume, instead, that every entity is changing constantly: and that at every moment we use the defects of the present state as the starting point for the definition of the new state.”
Another quiet day, more or less, in quarantine kitchen. Penita is dishing up tough love. A little help from our friends. We hope you enjoy.
Speaking of help!!! We have a few aprons still available: Classic Blue, Season One with ChefD and Penita. We’d love to see you in one! Shout out to recent MK patron saint S M Somões who immediately checked to see if we had anything for purchase as pandemic purse strings were tightening. Thank you.
America Pastime images are up for low stakes auction on IG @pauldruecke
Items pictured were gathered, documented, and properly disposed of on the date indicated.
Bid in the public comment section. Minimum Bid = $5
Winning bidders receive a certified full resolution digital image, credit as collaborators in this alchemical undertaking, and sincere thanks for their support. More info at America Pastime.
