Recharge
It seems predictable that I should catch a cold just as I was coming home. Today had been spent recuperating. I loved what I managed to see of New York, but my skin protested by sprouting ugly things, and it took several shampoos to wash New York dirt out of my hair. I have kept the morning papers going whilst away, and you will find snapshots of the New York Times and other papers I came across.
One of the unexpected things that I noticed in NY, is that a fair number of the manhole covers appear to have been made in India. (Warning: hold your breath as you are bending down to look.) The amount of garbage the city generates is staggering — piles and piles of rubbish are heaped on the sidewalks by the end of the day.
Monday morning came around, and I was beginning to tire from three full days of walking. Every day, a different place for breakfast; we decided to venture a little further on our last day. He spotted them first — I was probably too busy looking down at manhole covers. It's not every day that you see slides thrown out in a bin, and we are the curious kind. Perhaps these were rejects from a photography studio?
There were three big bins — he looked into the first and I looked into the one in the middle. To my right, a man was debating with his wife who picked up a folder, "What do you want them for?" "Thought the folders might be worth saving," she said, but she threw them back, and they both ambled down the street.
"It's Keith Richards!" he suddenly exclaimed, and I peered over his elbow (being too short to do so over his shoulder). There were prints, but there were also negatives and folders and folders of slides. The folder that the woman threw back was full of photo slides: Blur, Spice Girls, Ben Harper, Tina Turner, Sam Philips, Traffic, David Bowie, Smashing Pumpkins, Lenny Kravitz. There were letters, memos, legally binding documents, tapes, vinyls ...
I was too shocked to be angry. Large companies like Capitol Records (from which all these have been excreted) fight hard to keep their copyright, only to flush out original work which has not been consumed. How much does the artist get? How much does the photographer get? Photographs of the artist merely end up in the trash. There is no value to fame, no value to being on top of sales. The day will come that you just end up in the bin.
When I looked up from the third or fourth folder I was flipping through, I noticed that many people have joined us, poking about in the bins for anything useful or interesting. An elderly woman asked me what was going on, and I explained. "Hah," she croaked. "Only because it costs them too much to shred and destroy everything."
She complained about having done dirty jobs like shredding, and I bid her good day and thought of my friends who might be happy to have some of these slides. A man was desperate to cling onto his unexpected treasures, and wailed and complained when the folder he had assembled had disappeared. The consumerist society brings out the ugliness in people, I thought.
At some point, the garbage collector arrived and asked, "You've got enough?" and he told us that he picks up these things every day. Every day, you are likely to find photographs, slides, prints and papers about those who have risen to stardom which are thrown out the backend of a recording company. If you're in New York, have a browse at the southwest corner of East 23rd Street (towards 22nd Street) and Park Avenue, and see what treasures you might find.
Posted by sniffles at April 22, 2003 09:51 PM