So this trend of Shit (Blank) Say is pretty, um. Well, it’s a thing. Anywhoozle! My friends Ilana Glazer, Eliot Glazer and Matt Mayer made this one so it’s great and they are great and we love them so don’t hate, appreciate. Jesse Jackson?

*I was googling the IFC films website, if you must know.

This song is great.

“The beauty of the procedural quality and character of a work of art is that very often you set out to do something like X, but during the course of the action something else happens and takes the idea in a previously unheard of or surprising direction. It is not only a matter of ideas bouncing off and against one another, it is also about the material realities, about how the chosen material guides and directs the process. Sometimes the end result is in fact much more than even you yourself thought at the beginning, and you recognize some of its main connotations only afterwards. And this, of course, is the hardest part of the process, how to keep it open and alive – and to let those surprises really lead and guide you.”

–Mika Hannula

It’s 10:37pm on a Sunday night.  I’m looking at a clean cut young woman, all of 20.  She’s got a cute short boy hair cut, like a pixie, and is kneeling beside  a young man in his early 20′s, Asian, very fey, and well put together, in a matching cream scarf and rain coat.  What is striking about them?

They are digging in the trash.

They haven’t lost a term paper.  There isn’t a love letter that someone accidentally threw out.  When I walked by, what struck me about her, is that she was eating cupcakes out of the garbage.  This isn’t ironic or kitsch.  Also they aren’t (seemingly) crazy.  No, what I witnessed is Freeganism in action.

For those unfamiliar with Freeganism, wikipedia defines it as: “an anti-consumerist lifestyle whereby people employ alternative living strategies based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources.”

Which basically boils down to people who refuse to pay for stuff.

In the past few months I’ve become obsessed with freegans, squats and alternative lifestyles.  There is something very pure about the idea of creating an idealistic world to exist in.  To imagine a perfect place and strive towards it.  Plus on a purely aesthetic level, it has a certain Lost Boy charm to it.  Why should I work for Peter to pay Paul?  In what planet does it make sense to take a shitty job in order to pay for a shitty apartment?  In that respect, am I not just a middle man to commerce? A simple interlocker who’s only purpose is to facilitate the worst part of capitalism, a system that creates more waste than product?  What if I could just exist off the proverbial fat of the land?  Wouldn’t that be something?

I spoke with this lady, the dumpster diver, and her clean cut cohort for about 20 minutes, and in that time I learned a few amazing facts:

1) There is an etiquette to freeganism.  Some places, like the supermarket Gristedes actually arrange their trash so that it’s easy to go through, leaving produce and edible items on top, or even better, in clean stackable boxes.  But the catch is that those places, nay, any place that leaves garbage in bags expects you to retie up the bags after you open them.  Well, they don’t expect you to tie them up.  They probably don’t expect people to dig through their trash.  But they will get fined by sanitation workers if the bags are open and spill all over the place.  So real conscientious of freegans do the polite thing and re-tie.

2) Other places, namely Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods frown on, or worse, explicitly prohibit dumpster diving.  It’s considered theft.  Which is hilarious when you really think about it.  I’m stealing something you clearly don’t want. It’s the big business equivalent of a kindergardener who refuses to share their toys.

3) Lastly, she spends approximately 7 dollars a week on food.  That’s right $7 American dollars.  If I was on the fence about freeganism before, this is the tipping point.

It takes me about week, but on a crisp Monday evening I come across two people, a distinguished older black woman, and a young strapping white guy digging in the trash by my local overpriced health food store.  They have found the mother load.  Boxes of crisp lettuce, bok choi, ripe peaches, conchord grapes, thyme!  It’s a cornucopia!  Granted, some of said produce is slightly bruised, broken off the stalk, or ripe to the point where in a day or two it will be rotten, but clearly all of this stuff is edible.  I ask if I can join them, and very quickly am greeted to true hospitality:

Her: “Would you care for this peach?”

Him: “Can I offer you some of these delicious pears?”

Both: “Oh, I have some extra bags, help yourself!”

It’s as if I’ve been invited to a regale dinner party with the classiest of urban elite.  And make no mistake, these folks are clean, educated, civilized and very gracious.  In between foraging, tips are shared, how to keep greens crisp, jokes are had, puns made.  ”Here’s the BOX choi (yuck yuck!)” “These apPEAR to be quite delicious!”

Overall the spirit is of true comraderie.  We are all together in prevention of waste, protectors of the environment, benefactors of abundance.  The only sign of territoriality I see happens when an older, stuffy white woman walks up and instantly grabs at the bag the black lady has curated.  She snaps suddenly “Those are mine!”, breaking the reverie of the moment.  It’s around this point I decide my harvesting is done, and take off on my bike, riding away, turning back to see a small group now surrounding the bevy of free goods.

When I get home later, and cook dinner, made partially of free food I notice instantly how much better it tastes.  Have you ever stolen a fry off of someone’s plate?  Doesn’t it taste better than the fries you’ve paid for? Now imagine that feeling but but multiply it by a factor of five.  It’s really a wonder everyone isn’t a freegan.

But then I remember that the meal I just ate came out of the trash and wonder how this would play out in a first date scenario.  ”This kale?  Yeah it is great, isn’t it?  The dumpster was really plentiful today!  What?  Hello?  Where are you going?”

But as long as I’m single, I think I’ve found a winner.  Who knows, maybe I’ll meet my wife while diving in the trash.

Now that would be something.

So this trailer does not in any way shape or form do this movie justice, but just trust me, High School Record is pretty great and really funny and raw and good. And just because I potentially was drunk when I first saw it, that MAKES NO DIFFERENCE! I’ve watched it sober and want to keep watching it all the time it’s good and no, I’m not drunk right now, and even if I was YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME!

Ahem.

Yeah, so. Um, yeah. Also, the company that put it out, Factory 25, is doing some great stuff so show some love, y’all.

This is pretty great, and had me laughing all over the place. Thanks to Vashtie for putting me on to this. Good looking, kid!

I’m posting this video for two reasons.  One, I like it, which is reason enough, GET OFF MY BACK!  Also, it’s a good indicator of where I’m at right now with how I’m thinking about this movie I’m about to make and stories in general.  I was once told that story is a routine interrupted.  Which is such a great quote, I wish I knew who said it.

Also, with one of my main characters there is a newness involved with being in the city and a dialogue that’s happening with a character at a point in his life that’s further along, but a bit whistful.  I didn’t realize it when I watched this video, but there are some overlaps in terms of where my mindset is and apparently, where the musician Eleanor Friedberger’s was too.

From the Village Voice article:

…Friedberger says, she reset herself in time and place to get motivated. The album, she says, is “me putting myself in the mind-frame of when I first moved to New York. I had to not think about everything in between—with the band, basically. I was trying to go back to that place where I was really excited about music and being totally naïve and coming home from working at a temp job and drinking a bottle of wine and making four-track recordings. I want it to sound very naïve, very girlie.”

A way to achieve that effect is to enlist the recorded past. The video for “My Mistakes” contrasts footage of Eleanor at 19, while attending the University of Texas in Austin, with her doing the same things—talking on the phone, putting on a record, doing sit-ups—then and now. Musician and performance artist Sara Magenheimer shot the footage for an art class at UT; she unearthed it around the same time as Eleanor was making the album. “We were just about peeing in our pants laughing,” she says of the film, which also features her awkwardly making out with classmate Britt Daniel; it was shot around the time he formed Spoon.

Daniel not only signed off on allowing a new generation of fans to see him sloppily neck in the video, he suggested Friedberger add more contemporary elements to the clip. Which means that, unfortunately for fans of indie-rock romance, the present-day mirror images only go so far. Instead of Eleanor and Britt going at it again, she goes out on a stoop full of the sort of odd neighborhood characters she likes to sing about. “It’s such a happy accident,” she says of the way she was able to bring together the past and the present. “I had the same dress, which was crazy. I had some of the same posters in both of my kitchens.”

Congratulations on fitting into the same dress you wore 15 years ago, I tell her.

“That’s from doing all those sit-ups,” she says.

Thanks to Channel 101 for making a space where this can get major (and totally deserved) props. And big ups to Brett Weiner and his awesome mom!