Rednesday: 3 Thank Yous

Kate, thank you for my handmade washer that was christened by Z in the bath after a day of outdoor play.

Eddy, thank you for my hand-sewn text message that I biked up to the post office to collect.

And thank you Clare, for this bread bin that we are going to sit out on the deck and plant with herbs.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Free Beats

Disruption of Apples

Yesterday morning before we took Z to school, we picked a whole lot of apples from the Poemscape trees next to the library. Afterwards PJ and I trained to Melbourne where he conducted and I filmed a workshop with some third and fourth year RMIT design students.

The workshop was about performing the city and disrupting space. After a brief presentation, PJ gave the students the apples we picked and we went out into the streets.

One group placed the apples on the ground in a busy lunchtime laneway, while we all stood back and watched how people responded.

The last group drew an apple on a brick wall and invited us to throw the remaining fruit at the chalk- drawn target. It felt like such a waste, the point made doubly clear next to the skip full of unwanted goods.

Gift Economy

An article I wrote about the first time I went to Burning Man is on Travel Generation today. In it, I talk about how the festival operates on a gift economy. The gifts I took that year were button badges. There were 18 designs in all, six of which are above.

I have been thinking a lot about gifting. I disagree with Derrida's claim that the gift is impossible since, from the moment you receive it, it becomes weighted with obligation and no longer qualifies as a pure present. But I agree with Marcel Mauss's argument that solidarity is achieved through the social bonds created by gift exchange.

On Monday I left the house on three different occasions and each time I came back someone had left a gift near the front door. 

I mentioned to my friend Jo that I was looking for a recipe for pickling cucumbers as all our plants have fruited at once. She left three cook books with pickling recipes bookmarked, O left a stack of gleaned pears and Chris gave me a betting ticket for a horse called Good Red.

It's like when people ask me what I do for a living, I ask them if they mean for money or not. I operate within a capitalist template – I have a mortgage and bills to pay – but I exist within a gift economy where I care more about the exchange than my change.

T-Shirt Giveaway

In 2005 I took part in the Melbourne Fringe Festival with a project called Display Purposes Only. It involved hundreds of hand printed t-shirts distributed in 13 international cities. Each t-shirt had a card attached asking that the finder register their t-shirt online by uploading a photo of it and answering a series of questions.

Would you like one of these t-shirts?

Please leave as a comment your name and email address or some way of contacting you and in a week's time, I will let you know if my random number generator has singled you out.

The Fine Print:

In the spirit of the original project, I ask that the lucky recipient emails me a photo of their t-shirt (with or without them in it) as well as answers to the questions initially asked of the t-shirt finders, so that I may blog them here.

That Which is Possible

Four years ago our friend Jason and his partner at the time, Esther, handmade a series of beautiful postcards. Each card contained a picture of claimed roadside food, recipes for preserving and a map of where the various plums, pears, apples, blackberries, and quince can be foud and when approximately, the fruit are in season. They sent the postcards to friends and also to random strangers, to encourage a practice of gleaning and self-sufficiency.

They called the project That Which is Possible.

Yesterday PJ and our friend O, maps in hand, went out to see what treasures they could pluck.

These early season cherry plums are proof of their afternoon's success.

Happy happy! 

And a happy birthday to you O! We look forward to another whole year of discovering treasures with you, and discovering the treasures of you.

The Give and the Take

On the way to the train station in Melbourne last night, we passed by some people rummaging through a skip piled high with goods from a nearby church-run op shop. They found some old suitcases they were filling with their loot. The wastefulness was mind blowing; clothes, toys, books, office supplies, food, games – it was all thrown in.

What do charities do with their donations they no longer want? Donate them to landfill? Give them to another charity? Last night that was us. We found a laundry basket to fill and joined the others in their merriment and scavenging and disbelief that such goodies were freely available for the taking, to the takers.

Today we took part in another activity of abundance. For the second month in a row, a local winebar has provided the space for a harvest swap meet where gardeners are encouraged to bring their excess produce to swap. We took parsley and carrots and took home lettuce, chocolate mint and peaches, which we shared just now with friends on the deck in the gloaming.

Barking

The Basket Club

A-tisket, a-tasket, a brown and yellow basket...

Twelve years ago I found this basket at a trash & treasure market and it brought me much much joy. It was simple, practical, could stand up on its own and wouldn't bang against my legs when I hooked it onto the handle bars of my bike.

When I carried my basket I felt happy. And when I carried it, I noticed so many others happy and carrying their baskets. And so I made up 100 of these cards to give out to fellow happy basket carriers.

My mum wanted to be a member so bad that she bought herself a picnic basket so I would give her a card that she then displayed proudly in a frame.

It was a small gesture, but it meant the world to me.

Congratulations goes out to my mum today! As she has just found out that her book, Alzheimer's: A Love Story, has been accepted for publication by Scribe.

You are an inspiring human being, Mamman. Because of your actions and your words.

Public Domestications

From here.

Guerilla Grasses

PJ recently said that growing our own heirloom vegetables feels like one of the most politically potent acts we can do in the face of neoliberal capitalism.

Plant as protest. Plant as poem. Plant as placard.

I have recently discovered the work of Edina Tokodi aka Mosstika, who, in the tradition of political guerilla gardeners is a cultivator of eco-urban sensitivity and a planter of important seeds.

Mosstika says:

I think that our distance from nature is already a cliché. City dwellers often have no relationship with animals or greenery. As a public artist I feel a sense of duty to draw attention to deficiencies in our everyday life... I usually go back to the sites to visit my plants or moss, sometimes to repair them a bit, but nothing more generally as they tend to get enough water from the air, condensation, and rain - especially in certain seasons... I believe that if everyone had a garden of their own to cultivate, we would have a much more balanced relation to our territories. Of course, a garden can be many things.

You

This is my favourite zine. It's called You and has been distributed by Luke You free every week since November 2001.

One of the best things I did when we were in Newcastle was take part in a letter writing marathon. People were invited to handwrite letters that would then be distributed in the zine's hallmark brown paper bag with Y-O-U stamped on the front.

Participants wrote down their addresses and yesterday afternoon my package arrived with two zines inside. 

"Wouldn't it be funny if one of these was my letter?" I asked PJ as we carefully undid the staples from the top. And lo and behold, one was.

"Dear You," it starts. "Do you recognise my handwriting? It hasn't changed since I first learnt to write." Which is true.

My sister E's filing cabinet at work

Good Times

My brother-in-law and I once discussed the idea of a newspaper in which no bad news would be printed. A couple of days ago, The New York Times issued such a paper, a stunt initiated by The Yes Men.

From the media release:

Early this morning, commuters nationwide were delighted to find out that while they were sleeping, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had come to an end.

If, that is, they happened to read a "special edition" of today's New York Times.

In an elaborate operation six months in the planning, 1.2 million papers were printed at six different presses and driven to prearranged pickup locations, where thousands of volunteers stood ready to pass them out on the street.

Articles in the paper announce dozens of new initiatives including the establishment of national health care, the abolition of corporate lobbying, a maximum wage for C.E.O.s, and, of course, the end of the war.

The paper, an exact replica of The New York Times, includes International, National, New York, and Business sections, as well as editorials, corrections, and a number of advertisements, including a recall notice for all cars that run on gasoline. There is also a timeline describing the gains brought about by eight months of progressive support and pressure, culminating in President Obama's "Yes we REALLY can" speech. (The paper is post-dated July 4, 2009.)

"It's all about how at this point, we need to push harder than ever," said Bertha Suttner, one of the newspaper's writers. "We've got to make sure Obama and all the other Democrats do what we elected them to do. After eight, or maybe twenty-eight years of hell, we need to start imagining heaven."

Springing

I had planned to blog about our Riesentraube heirloom tomatoes that seem to be growing before our eyes. But that topic merely needs a couple of sentences, a photo and I'm done.


A much more blogworthy topic is the 6 year-old human seedling with whom I live. I picked him up from school today and we made a deal: I would buy him an ice-cream if he would climb a local wild tree overflowing with lemons. It was as they say, a win-win situation.

On our happy way home, his face white with the sweet treat and my bag overflowing with fruit, he asked me to tell him about Meg's Choice, a story he loves to hear. 

You see, most parents don't get to choose their kids - they make a baby and that baby grows up and that's that. You get what you get. But I had a choice. I could have loved any old dad with any old son, or any old daughter, but I didn't. I had a choice and I chose to love his dad and I chose to love him. Of all the kids in the whole wide world.

MuxMeg

The Compost Co-op

A few months ago we sat, as we like to do, by the fire at our favourite local café having our morning coffees.

And, as we also like to do, we steered the conversation with the lovely café owner around to the rich and glorious topic of compost.

When we left, we headed down the hill to the hardware, where we bought a small bucket that now lives in the café kitchen, for the food scraps and coffee grounds. When it's full, it gets tipped into this black bin that we collect, empty into our compost at home then bring back, in return for vegies.

More Than the Show Itself

Nine years ago, PJ won a competition to create a sculpture that runs alongside our local library.

His Poemscape: A Physical Anthology comprises 18 hand-carved local Eucalyptus plinths, each with a brass plaque on top containing a poem. Beside each plinth, he planted an apple tree.

In summer we water the trees, in winter PJ prunes them and at the end of apple season we take all the fallen fruit home to compost. 

In autumn, I love riding my bike past the trees and picking an apple to munch on. In fact, one of my favourite things to do is to go biking around this hilly town, filling my basket with fruit gleaned from public trees to eat if they're ripe and stew if they're too much so.

Agnes Varda's gorgeous film, The Gleaners and I, is a political, moral, aesthetic and personal enquiry into the age old tradition of gleaning, which these days falls under the banner of freeganism.

I am thinking of PJ's Poemscape, Varda's film and Freeganism, because of a UK game show that I read about that is due to air online this month.

Ready Steady Skip is a game show where "needlessly wasted food is recovered from the bin and turned into delicious dishes before your very eyes!"

The Iron Chef meets Oscar the Grouch?

Like freegans, I'm not interested in being part of the conventional shopping economy, and I am very much interested in becoming a producer, not a consumer. It is this aspect - of self-sufficiency - that interests me about the show, more than the show itself.

What Comes Around

We came home last night after seeing Young Werther play, to find a big bag of limes on our doorstep, delivered by our friends I and V. I went straight out again to buy a bottle of vodka so PJ could make us some caprioskas.

In my attempt to share the love, please allow me to point you in the direction of Green Energy Watch, a site that is offering two free energy saving lightbulbs to Australian residents. It's a privately organised initiative being run by a very switched on (sorry!) 26 year-old guy, whose aim is to "bridge the gap between government awareness campaigns on global warming and the ways in which we can all reduce greenhouse gases in a practical and inexpensive way." 

You'd think the government would be giving away solar panels and compost bins and energy efficient shower heads and lightbulbs. But I guess they don't see the science as urgent. I wonder when they will.