The New Bindle

 

I like looking for things along the roads. I like finding toilets, bumpers, rundown houses, and recently, discarded shopping carts. Shopping carts are interesting to me because they’re ubiquitous and multi-functional. They can be easily turned into something else without much work. They’re sturdy and easy to steal. They’re like post-industrial cars that haven’t received their motors. They’re trailers. They’re big trashcans. Most importantly, they’re somewhat expendable, tossed aside whenever their function has been exhausted.

They’re like “the new bindle,” and who doesn’t like hobo evocation?

Peter’s Creek Parkway, the road that crosses Silas Creek Parkway in Winston-Salem NC, is lousy with these. For the past few years, folks have set up residences in the woods up and down Peter’s Creek and Silas Creek Parkways, right beside Interstate 40. To move their “treasures” around, many of these people take shopping carts and pile as much as they can inside of them. I imagine it’s things they collect from the road or from dumpster diving the many shops in the area. I once saw a cart filled with shoes and a hand painted sign advertising a “sale” on the lot. Twenty dollars, not a bad deal. Sometimes these carts have five or six feet of stuff in them. Ride down either of these roads, and you’ll see carts off to the side of the road or just sitting in the green-space in the middle of the road. I don’t know where the collectors go. I don’t know why they take so much time to collect the items just to abandon them.

It’s an activity that draws attention to itself. In recent months, I’ve noticed that the piled high carts have started to mostly disappear, leaving only the modestly filled ones to languish by the major thoroughfares. Always looking for another thing to look for, find, and then document in some ridiculous way, I started taking pictures of these carts whenever I was driving around. Any creative use of a shopping cart I snapped a picture of, mostly looking for carts filled with weird stuff, or in an odd location. I pull up and snap a picture, most of the time I don’t have to get out of my car.

I had a few minutes to waste when I went on a shopping cart hunt. The sweet spot for shopping carts is off Silas Creek Parkway. From Compare Foods until Taco Bell, you see at least one of them daily. Since I like to get some variety in my pictures, from many different places as possible, I only go by there occasionally. It had been a while, so I thought I was due to treat myself to the wealth of carts lined up in that area, three of them.

I took pictures of the first two, nothing out of the ordinary, but then I came to the third cart which was right by IHOP. When I put my head out the window and extended my phone, I noticed paper inside the cart. Lots of paper. Most of my waking life is spent looking for paper so seeing it sitting out for me, in broad daylight, was a dream come true. An oasis in the middle of a Chinese Restaurant buffet made possible by roving hobos. What grabbed my attention is that I saw that infamous Avery logo that goes with printable labels. It was enough to get me out of the car to check it out. Clearly, someone did some dumpster diving at the Office Max in that shopping center. I’m sure they tried to sell what they picked up. I ended up taking a few unopened packs of printable labels, blank greeting cards, and something you attach to windows. Later in the day, I thought about going back and taking the rest of the stuff, spreading the wealth around.

Stealing From A Child

 

I covet Miles’ magnatiles.

If you don’t know, magnatiles are little pieces of colored plastic. Each one has magnets inside their see through shell. You use these magnets to build things rather easily. They simply click together. A collection of these has a variety of shapes so what you can build out of them is quite extensive. Think of them as today’s Lincoln logs without that horrible smell.

I don’t care for most of Miles’ toys; they’re just not for me. The trucks and all that, I have no interest in playing with those. Who wants to get on the ground to push a truck around? Don’t get me started on the Hot Wheels cars, and the cliched response every parent has to them. Yes, you step on them often and yes, doing that hurts like hell. Sometimes I scream, sometimes I yell. More than once I have tossed those things the whole length of the house. I’m a little cooler with the stuffed animals, I get those, either as a thing to clutch while laying in bed, or something that just looks nice. He has more than a few Simpson’s stuffed animals. When he gets to action figures, like he really gets to them, I think our interests will dovetail. I will force him to take them out the packaging though, I’m not starting that bullshit.

The magnatiles are something else. To me they represent potential making supplies. In recent years, I’ve done a lot with magnets. I have mailed them all over the world for folks to drop in random places, as well as leaving tons of them around my area. All you have to do is stick them to a surface that…accepts magnets (I have no idea the science language here) and then walk away. It’s an easy public art show without all the needless damage to public or private property.

So, when I see Miles’ magnatiles littering the house, I want them. I’ve told him this. I’ve even told his mother this, who has warned me against them disappearing from his collections. Some might even call her warnings, “mean,” or “threatening.” No matter, as soon as he loses interest, I’m going to take every single one of them and glue stuff to them. I’ve thought about buying my own, but I don’t want to have to sneak them through the house. Could you imagine getting caught with magnatiles not intended for the boy? No way am I going to cover them up and walk them inside like someone taking illicit “reading” material out of a magazine shop in the 1990’s.

To work through some of these issues, I forced Miles to star in a forty-five second movie about this very subject. If I were making underground movies in the 1920’s, this would have been an achievement, instead it was something I could put together on my phone in less than ten minutes. I think about this sort of thing all the time. Anyway, whenever we do things like this, mostly photo shoots, he’s been a good sport. He does like to use the camera which brings mixed results. At some point I’m going to let him shoot something and then stick it together as his first movie. If Ben Affleck can do it, so can Miles.

Pictures + Collages = Picture/Collages

I’ve been taking a lot of pictures recently. Pictures that exist to stay pictures, mostly. I’ve done this for years and years, but they always end up as something else. I draft them into a collage or a re-captioned image, but nothing for someone to solely focus on. Never “here it is” and the thing be the picture. I’ve taken a lot of these, mostly for “documenting squalor” or something like that. I enjoy things that are falling in, things that have been cruelly subjected to time, or simply disregarded.  I enjoy things with dust on them. New and squeaky and fresh rarely has a story, no personality.

The process for taking these pictures happens between thrift stores runs. Mainly around small towns near Winston-Salem. Places with a lot of dust that won’t come off. Thomasville is great for finding scenes of marvelous decay. When I have the time, I dive the streets looking for anything that pops out. Old houses are great. Factories falling in on themselves are even better, and Thomasville has that, all of Davidson County has that. If the location looks “safe enough,” I’ll get out and compose something. Forcing a picture from a sitting car is difficult, getting one from a moving car is impossible. No one has ever taken a good picture from a moving car! If a junkyard dog is milling about in the background, or a gaggle of sketchy dudes are looking my way, I take the picture and get out of there. I’ve been shot at before, but not for taking pictures. I could hear the bullets going over my head. That sound has stuck with me, and I don’t wish to hear it again. 

On the left is the print. On the right is the picture. 

 

Only once has someone accosted me for taking pictures in this fashion. I was in Myrtle Beach South Carolina, walking up and down a stretch of old beachfront hotels. These were the good ones, the ones with nice signs out front. Small motels built in the 1950’s or 60’s, ones displaced by the giant high rises around them. I’m on the sidewalk. Not on private property. I’m not Robert Frank, I’m just some asshole with a camera enjoying my morning. This woman in a truck rolls up on me and asks what I was doing, then mumbles something about pictures…the message wasn’t clear, but her anger was. It was a quick minute and then she was gone. Five minutes later, as I’ve moved down to another motel, she reappears. Her tone had miraculously changed. She apologized, “Hey, we’re happy for what you guys do” and pretty much drove off. No idea if she owned a motel or was just driving around accosting tourists. I need to find those pictures. I’m sure many of those motels have disappeared by now. A Wings probably replaced them.

For this project, the one where I’m driving around looking for anything that pops up, I have a system. I take pictures and then play around with them digitally. All are taken with my I-phone which is generally more quality consistent than my nicer camera. It’s also always on me. When I edit them, I make them as brittle as a leaf, almost two dimensional. The look I go for is a little more industrial waste than sad Americana. For comparison, I’d prefer if these appear on the front of a nihilistic metal bands record cover than on a twangy Southern singer-songwriter emoting about mama. 

On the left is the print. On the the right is the photo / collage / photo-collage.

 

For a few of these, I dropped a collage on top of the image to give it a little random color, maybe a ghostly body in there. Can you see the yellow pants of a bike rider in the one image? Much of this is made somewhat haphazardly. Randomness is always something I strive for; nothing is ever meticulously placed or composed. I’m no robot. Look at the mistakes. The mistakes, or better yet, “The happy accidents” always make for a better composition. Do you think free jazz maestros go back and fix bum notes? No! They leave them in. I don’t fine-cut my collages, and I don’t perfectly match the digital monsters that come from them. Doing things this way often means you end up with shit, but so does the other process, and the payoff is never as high.

Always with any new path, you start here, and you end up over there. I took a picture, I heavily edited that picture, and then I printed it out. The last part makes it a lot more real to me.  So much of what I do is mix analog with digital. Often, the creation that comes from that marriage languishes as a digital file after you’re done. That’s all well and good, but it feels like a creation stuck in purgatory. Something that you encounter in the real world, see with your eyes, or touch with your hands, makes it real. Ones and zeroes are only waiting to exist. So, I made them real by getting cheap prints of them. I don’t know where you get nice prints, and I’m not sure if nice is for me. I like cheap tools. I like broken ones. I printed these off at Walgreens using a 40% off coupon. Three prints, at 16x20, which was essentially just a large, printed picture like any 4x6, ended up being about $38.00. Not an exorbitant amount of money, but enough to make me think about the purchase.

Wanting to continue seeing how these will turn out, by getting more of them printed, I thought about trying to sale some online. This is never good. I hate having to do this. Whenever you ask for money, people flee as quickly as they can. They’ll take free shit from you for years and years, though. When you come graveling, people won’t even click “like” on what you’ve created. It’s like seeing a homeless person sucking on their socks at the bus stop. Don’t look. Keep moving and he won’t notice us and ask us to join him in the intergalactic senate. As I imagined, no one took the bait. No matter, I’ll keep making these, but I’ll have to be pickier about which ones I print and then lay on a giant pile of shit no one is interested in.

A quick side-note, Miles took pictures of me holding up the prints. I’ve drafted him to take pictures more than once. Although he’s not great at taking just what is needed, he takes enough to get the job done, which coincidentally is my approach to photography. While he was snapping away, Misty got him in the middle of his photo shoot. He’s easy to work with, professional…not bad. I know I’ll end up using him many more times in the future. 

Miles needs something to stand on, but not much.