Waste Not

When I saw this show, "Waste Not," by Song Dong at the Museum of Modern Art in early September, I was overwhelmed by the obvious love that went into its creation: the love of a son who wanted to help his mother, whose dilapidated home was going to be bulldozed by the Chinese government; the love of the two together to sort and save the objects; the love of the volunteers around the world who carefully laid out each plastic bottle and old toothpaste tube as an object to be as worthy of contemplation and regard as any priceless work of art. The rows of tattered shoes, the tower of brown-gray soap dried in the sun and saved from the 1960s, the pieces of Styrofoam from electronic equipment, the bundles of chopsticks and old crayons, the paper shopping bags--it was seemingly endless. This was a woman's life, as well as her security against another period of want, and, perhaps most movingly, her physical scrapbook of a family's life.

The exhibition, which has been shown in Asia and Europe, was received well. Song Dong's mother, Zhao Ziangyuan, was happy to be a part of the show, taking visitors on tours through the space, explaining different objects. But she died in early 2009, after finally relocating to an apartment complex. Always a lover of living creatures, she saw a wounded bird in a tree and climbed up in a step ladder to free it--and then fell. In the New York Times review of the show, critic Holland Cotter intimated that perhaps, released of her worldly possessions and of her past, Zhao Ziangyuan was able to release herself as well.

The whole experience of making my way through the show was like a walking meditation, a kind of waking remembrance of my own family's habits and valuation of objects. The everyday item--the stub of a pencil, the chopstick without a mate--somehow is a potent symbol of potential and salvation. Lost in a flood? That chopstick could be the crucial item in lashing together a raft to safety. A flint of soap, a length of satin ribbon, a plastic lidded container once filled with yogurt--these were things you had for free that could save your life on a really bad day. Car break down? Roof leaking? Pipe burst? Toaster oven explode? You could have in your possession already the very thing that could put everything all right again.

There are special words for this kind of activity now. "Re-purposing" is probably my favorite. It may just be a nice way of saying that is one is choosing to re-use old crap. In our sudden awareness of our environment and the dim effects of climate change, it's suddenly trendy to practice this type of thrift, embraced with the thrill of extreme sports. But the reverence with which Song Dong chose to honor his mother's lifelong personal practice of conservation--a survivalist's response to deprivation--is more poignant and resonant.

The ambulance chaser

A week ago, Conde Nast announced that it is closing Gourmet magazine.

I am really, really not ok with this. Granted, in the last year, I have been a poor reader of the magazine, which arrived each month in its plastic wrap, a single luscious object on its cover, beautifully photographed: a green quince, a toasted cheese sandwich, a candied apple. I don't even like candied applies, but on the cover of Gourmet, the glistening red-lacquered sphere was spectacle of desire. Still, feeling overcommitted and overwhelmed, sometimes it felt like too much to boil a packet of ramen, let alone singe poblano peppers over a gas flame and peel. Reading Gourmet was no longer a refuge of culinary dreams but a reinforcing hammer blow to the skull: You are just too damned tired to do anything but watch another episode of Clean House on HGTV. At least at the end of that, someone's house is clean. After reading Gourmet, I was just hungry.

So now Gourmet is dead, and I have all these pristine issues in neat stacks all over the apartment, along with glossy shelter magazines [another mental oasis where the carpets are always white, there's never any dirty laundry, and the gardens are lushly immaculate], and my favorite Cheetos of all monthly periodicals--women's fashion magazines, which are purely and sublimely junk food for the brain. [I never worry how many pythons died so those clutch purses could live.] After I'm done with all the other magazines, I put stacks of them down in the laundry room, hoping someone else will read them. But I have all my Gourmets. When I lived in Williamsburg, I kept all ten years of them in cardboard folios and only under the panicked ruthlessness of moving was able to pitch them into the freight elevator and take them to the curb for recycling. Suddenly, the Gourmets are like museum objects, precious in their scarcity. I can go back and read the last two years, cycling through the seasons and pretending a new issue is arriving each month because I never read any of these to begin with.

Foodies everywhere mourned the end of an indulgent, often elitist practice. Julia Child had showed America how to love its food and take pleasure in the length and strenuousness of its preparation. We remembered how to value the raw ingredient; we wanted to read not only about how the flour was milled but also how the wheat was grown. Gourmet celebrated that love each month. It was the discipline and joy of performing a daily mundane act [cooking and eating] and discovering how it could be both art and worship.

***

The death of Gourmet only reinforces that a certain kind of journalistic craft and life is over as well. It's shocking to realize that moment when one has actually become the peevish whiner in the room: "Well, I remember when . . . "

Only now do I realize how privileged I was to have studied journalism when it was still considered an honorable profession. Each day, we labored over ethical decisions. When I was just starting out in the '80s, the newsroom still was populated by men and women in their sixties and even seventies--people who had worked on newspapers during World War II and who had started out as copy boys. The back composing room of the Akron Beacon Journal was staffed almost entirely by men who were deaf; it was the kind of work that a man with a handicap could get in those days with no impact on their ability to do a proper job, unaided. When I'd walk back there, you could see them bent over the composing table, smoothing down waxed sheets of type with little rollers and then signing to one another.

When, as a college student, I got my first tour of the press room running at full speed, it was a thrill I have to this day: the adrenaline rush of watching the miles of newsprint--fragile in your hands--flying through the rollers at incredible speeds. Even at that velocity, the print would be crisp and each photo had to be a perfect register. If you were lucky, you'd happen to pass by when they replaced one giant roll of paper with another, all without stopping the press at all, a feat of levers and sheer wonder.

I love the newsroom and that way of doing journalism, even though I left it. I know I will miss it as a fixture, like a beloved city building torn down in the name of progress or field of wheat that is paved over for a subdivision. It becomes part of a historical past that we can never quite believe is not with us anymore.