Practice Theory: Hammer Hammer Chirp Chirp

We watched this film called Manufactured Landscapes and it was all about China and India and how they basically deal with our trash - how all our waste is someone else's life. There are all these images that this man takes of people and their back ground is basically trash. Their whole life is based on our banana peels!! It drove me crazy to think about, basically here is my post about it:

“You know this stuff comes from somewhere, you are just disconnected from where.”

I feel as if this film is the story behind the crusts to the sandwiches we cut off. I do not know what this “stuff” is, nor do I know where “where” is, nor do I understand that I am blindly balancing on the very extent of being “disconnected.”

It is threshold anxiety come to life via film.

I did feel guilty looking at the images and thinking they were beautiful. However, I felt even more guilty when I looked at the images and all I could see was:
Trash = corpses
Rust = blood
Color = flowers
It is as if I was painting this holocaust version of the trash images – so that I could feel better about finding it intriguing.

I am also in absolute awe of the people. In the opening scene where the screen moves from worker to worker – I couldn’t help but think: Ants! Ants! Yellow Ants of the Homo Sapien Family! I never knew such a species existed.
Hats = brains
Masks = faces
Gloves = hands
It is as if I was making these people into robots – so once again, I could feel less guilty about finding it awesome to watch.

The idea that there is so much unknown on the ground that we stand that it is understatedly mind-boggling. It also has me wondering about what these people in the film consider to be the backdrop of their life:
Children pose in front of trash. Smiling bigger than I have in a while.
Women sit cross-legged in cranes. As I sit cross-legged in a materials lab watching them through a screen.
Old women pose with e-waste. I never even knew the word “waste” had siblings.
Hammering sounds like birds chirping.

Everything that I take out of my day becomes someone else’s day. I guess I always had this fantasy-like notion that all the trash in the world was “trash.” And everyone would take trash to the same place – until we as a planet made an Everest out of Waste – and would the have the biggest bonfire the world has yet to see!

But, once again those are just my words disguising themselves from reality. I enjoyed this movie and am glad that I got to see past my peripheral vision – even though I morphed metal into bones. It made me think of Dirt and how I never even acknowledged the fact that the Earth had a skin.

Well, now I have acknowledged that trash has an after life and the Earth has a skin, for Logan says: “We spend our lives hurrying away from the real, as though it were the deadly to us. It must be somewhere up there on the horizon, we think. And all the time it is in the soil right beneath our feet.”

William Bryant Logan talked about digging a hole to China. He talked about how he never understood, “Why was I so positive that when you feel through the Earth feet-first you would come out to the other side head-first?”

Now I know why.