You just never know what you might find. It’s like trying to guess the name of a gnome who weaves straw into gold just for you. Guess from here to kingdom come, you’ll never guess ‘Rumpelstiltskin.’ Only by sneaking up in the dead of night will you know the correct answer is, ‘three wool sweaters and a portable pet cage.’ Dumpster diving is outrageously unpredictable. You have to do it to believe it.
-John Hoffman, The Art and Science of Dumpster Diving

I started dumpster diving for food in college. And I became addicted. To the rush. To the material benefits. Dumpster diving involves sneaking, climbing, running, and exploring. It can be exhilarating, so different than the docile student’s life I led during the day from behind a computer or a desk. The city started to feel like a playground, my life a game in which I could play at being a pirate, on the search for buried treasure. And there was treasure everywhere.

It is what the Situationalists would have called inverting the everyday, and what I call dumpster magic. The act of taking something out of the trash transforms the object’s meaning. Every product passes through a cycle of meaning before reaching its end in the trash. Produce starts out as a pile of seeds and passes through various stages (which humans assign various stages of meaning and monetary value)—seedling, plant, crops, and finally, vegetables. Once in the grocery store vegetables become products with ISBNs and a price tag to tell us it’s worth. Taken home this object may then become part of a regular lunch, or perhaps even a special birthday feast or gift. Unsold vegetables are thrown away, rendering them trash, rendering them worthless.

Through this whole process, we remain open to the fluidity of meaning and worth (seeds being economically worth less than plants, plants and harvested vegetables being worth less than value added products like jam or wine), but the “trash” stage is the point at which this fluctuation of meaning halts, despite the fact that items in the dumpster may be physically identical to items previously labeled as groceries and assigned a dollar value. Once trash, things pass into the material dead, so to say, and may never return. This is, at least, what we are taught.

When we break this taboo by dumpster diving we call these objects back from the dead, giving them a new life and assigning new meaning and emotional value. Trash becomes food, energy, and life. Baguettes are revived as food, and then, in the perverse excesses we often dumpstered them when I was in college, swords for play fights, food for pets, and fodder for the compost.

Trying to understand how it was that a $25 sweater in a high-end resale shop could be had for twenty-five cents at the Goodwill store across town, how it was that last year’s $40 pair of jeans could sell six months later in the thrift store for $1.40, I began to realize something: price tags aside, these sweaters and jeans carried no inherent value. Their value was a shifting process, as much a matter of their context as their content–and even more interesting, the process didn’t move in a straight line. The object was originally of great monetary and emotional worth might later be discarded or given away as “worthless,” only to reappear in a charity store with a small fraction of its worth restored–and discovered there, might well find all its lost grandeur restored, and more, if now reimagined by someone as a ‘collectible’ or ‘antique.’ Sweaters, tea sets, toasters–they seem solid enough, but their meaning remains malleable.
-Jeff Ferrell, Empire of Scrounge

Objects thrown away, rendered useless, dead, might become a valued treasure in the hands of a collector, or a scavenger who has just chanced upon the exact thing that she needs for a project or her basic survival. A trashed sweater may be revived in its original name and purpose or it might be revived as a bed for a dog or cat, re-sewn into a skirt or a curtain or a pillow, unraveled and re-knit or used to tie things together, or wipe up a spill. You wouldn’t buy a sweater and use it for anything but a sweater. But, really, why the hell not? Because of the monetary values assigned to various objects by the economy. It’s kind of strange and stilted when you get to thinking about it.

The trashing of an object, in this way, seems to free us of its pre-assigned intention because it frees the object from its monetary value and economic meaning. If you buy a desk at the store you are not only buying a construction of wood and screws and drawers, but buying the concept “desk”—an object that you will place in your workspace and write letters on—and buying into its assigned worth. These assigned values create boundaries that limit our imaginations. You would pay 100 dollars for a desk, but would not pay 100 dollars for a desk-sized portion of firewood, so you do not dare to re-imagine the desk as firewood because this does not make sense within the order of the economy. If a door costs 100 dollars and wood for your wall costs 30 dollars, you’re going to buy the wood for your wall. But freed of a monetary meaning, found on a pile of trash and taken home, you might use the door as part of a shed wall, a roof, or as firewood.

This concept follows us everywhere—into a whole cultural tendency to label and categorize and refuse to accept alternative definitions for commonly accepted items. A couch is for sitting on. It is not for dirty shoes, or dogs, and it is certainly not for drawing on. Yet the garden of the squatted house where I live is filled with couches that we have pulled out of the trash. Dogs and feet are welcome on them. People draw on them. People break them apart and build them into other things, fasten them onto bikes. The trash, having freed these objects of monetary worth (I worked hard to buy that couch (and that concept of couch) so get your dirty feet on the floor where they belong…) leave us freed of these categorizations, free to re-imagine objects and redefine them, limited only by our own imaginations and ambitions.

In this disposable culture, among these abitrary concepts of value most everything is rendered worthless. Everything is worthless, and we are surrounded by endless piles of worthless objects. The others publish books with advice about de-cluttering our homes and living “simply:” more objects that will ultimately be stripped of all value and meaning. A certain brand name tag on a shirt or a pair of pants might translate to a higher acceptable monetary value, but out of the store, as seasons, in the fashion sense, come and go, it quickly loses this monetary value until it finally is laid to rest among the dead, the trash. Tragically this culturally acceptable monetary value tends to have little to do with the objects real value—what is the value of the tree cut down to make the paper for a book? What is the value of clean air, whose pollution we pay for by paying for things made in smoke spewing factories? What is the value of the hair shorn from the sheep and spun into the wool that made that sweater? An objects monetary value has little to do with these questions. Especially in the case of government-subsidized industries.

I have my own ritual for assigning objects worth and it has nothing to do with where the object came from (though I admit I tend to value items I got out of a good trash picking adventure most of all). The sterility of store bought items bores me, so I take the time to alter most everything that comes through my hands, thus instilling each object with a highly personal value. Besides, seeing a shirt re-imagined as a curtain or a couch re-invented as a bike-seat gives me a thrill, as if I’m looking through a window at the apocalypse.

This is sort of weird and personal, but it gives me a rush to see commercial bric-a-brac in a down and dirty survival context. For example, when I see cardboard shacks in the Mexican colonias, I always feel a little rush when I see the words ‘Pringles,’ or ‘THIS SIDE UP,’ or ‘IBM.’ It’s so…post-apocalyptic. So that shelving unit in the chicken coop always gave me a small charge, and I get a rush from burning wood crates with produce trademarks stamped on the ends.

You see, commercial products are constantly hyped, creating little ‘recognition centers’ in our heads. So, when you walk down a busy street or store aisle familiar products seem to leap at you screaming, ‘Buy me!’ But seeing the product in a compost-splattered ‘no bull’ context is like mental anti-toxin. You see the product leap out at you and think, ‘Our hogs like that!’ You begin to feel layer upon layer of artificiality stripped away as you peer in dumpsters and use what you find.
-John Hoffman, The Art and Science of Dumpster Diving

Tuesday December 08th 2009, 7:36 am 4 Comments
Filed under: apocalypse now,conspiracies,dumpster diving,freegan

It happens often. I’m sitting on my bike or eating a sandwich and a feeling of complete awe falls over me like a god damn seizure. “How the hell did I end up here?” I look around at the wagon, at the dumpstered carrot in my hand, the couch from the trash across the street, and the drafts of my book taped to the walls. Then I grin. And I write things like this.

Punk rock did not save my life.  Maybe it saved yours, maybe it didn’t, but it seems like it’s been pretty key for the authors of the books and zines that I’ve been reading lately.  Whereas most of the activists in my current community came to activism through punk rock, I came to activism through books, and from there eventually arrived at punk rock.  Some people might say this makes me a geek, but as long as we’re throwing around useless labels, let’s say it makes me a book punk and celebrate.

There are a lot of ways to tell the story, and this version is paved with books. So far I’d say it’s been like a good run at Chutes and Ladders, with the end of civilization as the end goal.  (Note to self: get an old copy of that game and re-invent it as an endgame scenario.  Rejoice; play all winter while hiding inside from the cold.) 

It probably started with The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin.  I’d read and loved her Earthsea Trilogy when I was 10 or 11, which lead me to more of her books (she does a lot of interesting social critique type science fiction/fantasy, I’d recommend checking out The Left Hand of Darkness as well, if you like that sort of thing), which led me to The Dispossessed. It is a story about anarchists who have taken up residence on the moon that revolves around a physicist who gets the chance to visit earth (the anarchists and the earthlings have little to no contact) and talks a lot about capitalism and anarchism and the pros and cons of how each is run in these two fictional societies.  I haven’t read it since, but at the time it was fascinating, eye-opening, and had passages that left me with that warm magical feeling of having discovered something in black and white on paper that I had felt budding inside of me for years, but had never articulated.  That feeling that the author had managed to perfectly articulate my very own thoughts, and that I was not alone.  Nikki, meet anarchism; anarchism, Nikki.

From there I jumped into The Alexander Berkman Reader (which was alright) and Living My Life by Emma Goldman (which was fantastic and inspirational).  Again and again I discovered thoughts and feelings on paper that felt as if they’d been bubbling inside of me for years, unspoken, unsown.  Now here were others thinking them, describing them, praising them, analyzing them, and reading their words helped me to clarify my own thoughts, and slowly I began to speak, the seed that had long lain dormant sprouting up and up, toward the bright light of the sun.
 
Then I got a copy of Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael and my fucking head just exploded.  There are probably still pieces of it on the wall behind my bed.  I was excited and read Quinn’s Story of B (for many a book more digestible as it’s narrator is not a talking gorilla, as in Ishmael) in a storm.

It was the same year that I read Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser whose last chapter so poignantly declared, hey, if what you read here bothers you, then do something, stop buying this shit, we have to start somewhere and individuals can make a difference.  The day I finished that book I stopped eating meat.  That was important.  Not the fact that I sworn off meat, but the fact that despite having spent most of my life feeling too small and helpless to change the world’s big bad problems, this book had convinced me in a few paragraphs that I too had leverage power.  That was all in one year, round about 2003.

That’s how I came to anarchism, to food activism, and to the tip of the anti-civ iceberg.  When I started reading Quinn I couldn’t believe that friends of mine had actually read it without freaking out and/or drastically changing their lives.  (Actually, I still sometimes wonder how this is possible.)  But despite the fires Quinn had lit in my brain, after that year I still landed myself a “chute” instead of a “ladder” and signed myself up for a corporate desk job.  There were college loans to be paid off, and I could start two weeks after graduation.  What I really wanted to do was travel, but in the end I took the safe route, paid off the loans, and let corporate life gradually destroy all the bits of my creativity and spontaneity that college hadn’t already gotten.

I was still reading about anarchism and activism, but besides working that was pretty much all I was doing.  Corporate Desk Work Steals Human Soul (I’d like to see that in the headlines), ho hum, everybody knows the story and mine isn’t any different, except that after a year I ran screaming, brashly decided to move to Germany after being offered a job taking care of some rich people’s children, and a whole new era began.

My reading had left so many questions, and I tried to work them out.  So civilization was crap, but what now?  I sure as hell didn’t have a clue.  Even Quinn’s Beyond Civilization didn’t really clear this up.  What about the pacifism versus violence issue?  At the time I actually wrote an essay about why pacifism was a decent idea and that violent things like guns were kind of stupid.  How embarrassing to look back at, like an awkward pubescent yearbook photo.  Lucky for me I never ended up publishing the zine I had written it for.

I also started to get interested in spreading ideas through alternative mediums like graffiti and urban art.  I read Days of War, Nights of Love and Evasion, and my head exploded again in ecstasy/intellectual harmony/inspiration once again.  Every day I was changing little things about my life.  The seed I had found in my reading that last year of college had sprouted into an enormous vine, still climbing. 

I slobbered over books by Howard Zinn and the Situationalists.  I participated in Food Not Bombs.  The little things in my life that I was changing started to become big things.  I took six months off work to work on some writing projects and never really managed to convince myself to come back.  I moved into a little dwelling in a squatted community and left my job for good.  I became a scavenger and more or less stopped buying things, stopped buying into them.  Fuck the job I didn’t really like, fuck the health insurance salesperson making money at my expense while denying coverage for things I needed, fuck pretending like money really meant anything and could be traded for things as precious as food, water and shelter.  I started dedicating my life to things that felt important deep in my gut, instead of those things I’d been socialized to understand as important.

When my cousin got her hands on As the World Burns by Derrick Jensen and excitedly sent it on to me, its message totally blew everything we’d read up until then out of the water and articulated so many points we’d still been a bit tongue-tied about up to that point  in a clear, logical way that helped us both to further untangle our own complicated thoughts.

I read Endgame in my first wagon home by candlelight (no grid electricity or running water there) and since then the progression of my gorilla thought has become less and less track-able as my influences have swung away from (mainly) life-changing books (though I was recently quite inspired by The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved by Sandor Katz) to life-changing people (and the songs and zines they write and distribute themselves) and experiences that have kept the ball rolling since as I try to create media that will inspire others myself.

And that brings us right up to today, to you and me sitting on opposite sides of two computer screens. You knowing so much about my life, and me wondering so much about yours.

For his birthday I showed up at his apartment and told him I had a surprise. We hadn’t been broken up long, and it was probably too soon for friendship, but what the hell. We’d made enough mistakes already and what did one more matter?

We biked over the river and up the steep hill on the ass end of Sachsenhausen. Past a Vietnamese restaurant and almost to the top of the steep incline stood the old Henninger Brewery, empty now, on its way to being torn down, surrounded by a fence with a wide-open gate. It was 2006.

I wish I had gone back to take pictures of the facade. I remember a large empty square wreathed with red-brick, black-shuddered two story buildings: the offices. Nothing moved, nothing except the two people quiety creeping across the square and toward the brick buildings and a handful of crows whose presence solidified the feeling that we were about to enter the mad lair of a brilliant eccentric like Willy Wonka.

The back end of the square opened out into bigger buildings, and off to the left somewhere stood the infamous Henninger Tower, built in 1960 to store grain and topped with a rotating restaurant that travel websites still refer to as a city emblem.

We entered the offices through an open door. The second floor appeared to have been someone’s apartment. Old wallpaper peeled from walls where a calendar from another decade still hung. We held our breath as drunk voices floated up from the street, but they passed on. The bathroom was still intact; he laughed and decided to give it a try. “I wonder if it still works,” he said, pulling the metal chain. It did, and it felt louder than Niagra in that empty silence. But the drunks were gone, and only the crows remained to caw their derision from black-shudder perches.

There wasn’t a lot to see, so we crossed the square and entered the bigger buildings. It was dark, and we had one head lamp, one candle, and the flash of the camera. Stalactites covered the low ceilings of underground tunnels that led us under the street and then up, up, up a long, steep stair and to a locked grate on the other side of the road. We fantasized about the underground parties that would never happen, about how the guests would be told to arrive in small groups and slip quietly through that door and follow the tunnel into the brewing rooms where they’d dance for days without realizing that above them, the world plodded on.

What we assumed were once brewing rooms were rotting underground cathedrals: not ornate, but with huge arching ceilings two or three stories high. A metal stairwell led down and down, two cathedrals deep, then three, then four. I lost count at (I foggily think) six, and we didn’t go any further. My imagination filled each cavernous space with the elephantine vats that probably once filled them. So this is where they brew industrial quantities of beer…

There are things you will find in almost every abandoned industrial building: rubble, single shoes, and ancient pictures taped to the walls by long-gone squatters. Usually you find porn. This row of Bravo celebrity stickers lined a short dead-end passageway near the brewing rooms.

Further on in the other direction was a small room covered in celebrity posters. I took home a dusty picture of a freight train that I later lost in a move. Usually it is bad form to take anything from the abandoned buildings you explore. For the building’s future urban explorers and for the case that you happen to be found out by the police. But in the case of buildings in the process of being demolished, I feel a small souvenir is a nice way to let the building’s ghosts live on.

The small room had probably been squatted by several people sometime in the eighties, given the bands and celebrities featured on the posters. What had they done there? How long had they stayed? What was their story? My skin prickled, imagining the lives that had taken place in this damp, dark room beneath the earth. It felt as if they’d just left, but they must have been gone for at least a decade. Places unfrequented by tourists retain an imprint of everything that has happened there long after the last echo has faded away.

Lungs tired of the stale, damp air, we went up. The Henninger Tower was locked up tight, but the factory attic was not, and the empty A-framed room was littered with more debris than we had found anywhere else in the building.

I love abandoned buildings because they are filled with stories, and with ghosts. They have absorbed pieces of the hundreds of lives that have touched them, and their walls are full of whispers. But the whispers are only half-stories, beginnings and middles and ends, pieces, ruins. Never enough to complete the story and always enough to keep you coming back again and again and again.

In the attic I found Josef Schäfer’s 2nd grade report card from 1948, about the year that the factory was just getting back in full swing for the first time since the damage done during an air raid during October of 1943.

How the hell does a 2nd grader’s report card end up in the attic of an abandoned beer factory 58 years after it was printed? The question fills me with the good kind of chill. I don’t know if you noticed, but I like stories, and an object like that is like a portal into thousands of stories. Rabid though my imagination might be, I’d bet you that I still haven’t managed to imagine the truth, so beautifully improbably as it always is.

The factory has since been completely demolished. But did they fill in every story of the brewing cathedrals? Or do they lie sleeping and sighing beneath the earth, waiting for the next explorer whose ear they can fill with whispered secrets.

This report card—as well as many, many other finds from both abandoned buildings and the trash—is featured in issue one of my zine Gefunden. You can purchase copies from me at 2 euros a piece (plus postage) if abandoned places and objects tickle your fancy as they do mine. Until next time.

I read Empire of Scrounge by Jeff Ferrell on an eight-hour train ride north. Across the aisle a woman was reading a magazine article titled, “What to buy for the man who has everything.” There were pictures of products accompanied by bite-sized blurbs praising them.

Empire of Scrounge is about trash picking, scrounging, recycling, living off what others waste, selling scrap metal, collecting cans. It is a fascinating, articulate book, both narrative and academic in scope.

I let the book fall open at random and read a passage that I had underlined: “It’s long been my sense that, more than any other engine, corporate hyperconsumerism drives contemporary U.S. society, along the way constructing a seductive if sad sort of store-bought commonality among many of its members. As disturbing, the profligate waste produced by this endless hyperconsumptive panic seems less an unfortunate by-product than a component essential to its continuation. (5)”

Outside of the window bright yellow fields of canola slid past us as they had been for hours. It was the first time I had ever seen canola plants, though I recognized them from the picture on the bottles of oil at the supermarket.

I glanced back across the aisle at the magazine reader. Her eyes were still fixed upon the page, studying each item suggested for the ominous Man With It All. (Does he really exist, I wonder?) The article, directly juxtaposed with the thesis of the book on my lap, becomes a direct example of Ferrell’s point, presuming as it does that though there are people whose lives and homes are completely saturated with material goods, these people still need to have more. “Having everything” must be redefined as “still not enough,” else sales plummet, marring the economy.

The article also insinuates in its unspoken premises that gifts have nothing to do with need. Which is another way of saying that consumption, buying things, is an important and meaningful activity in and of itself. Even if your budget is a bit stretched (there are articles about this too), even if you already “have everything,” you must continue to consume, else all, else YOU, will be lost.

So companies invent new products to ensure that there is always something new to buy, and magazines print articles advising consumers on acceptable consumer practices. The only acceptable practice being to never stop or slow down. There are even shirts and buttons available to this tune, emblazoned with sayings like “Shop ’til you drop” and on sale now at your local retail outlet for 9.99.

There are encyclopedias worth of “literature” on this subject, though they are rarely described as such by their readers. Stores filled with magazines whose main “articles”—that is, advertisements thinly veiled as articles—win people marketing awards.

What is fashion but a clever way to convince people that their clothing, though still perfectly wearable, must be discarded and replaced with the new season’s trends? (Arguably there is some fashion that could fall into the category “art,” but this is generally not the subject of Cosmo’s fashion spreads.) What are fashion magazines but propaganda machines for this myth? People study these magazines like religious fanatics pour over their bibles. As a teenager, I did it myself. Each month’s issue the new Word, the scriptures to be interpreted and lived in an attempt to be socially acceptable, to have words like “hip” and “fashionable” fastened onto one’s identity moniker.

The products for the Man With It All will inevitably be purchased and will, just as inevitably, be thrown away again. After all, it was never the product itself that was important, not in a case like this. It was the act of buying it that mattered. What happens afterward is irrelevant.

If I “have nothing” (as defined by magazine articles) then maybe in a healthier parallel universe, I am the one with everything. Because I will be able to decide for myself what having “everything” means. And everything will have to do with life, with food and shelter and joyful relationships. Every stilled shopper is a stilled economic cog. Let’s get lost.