It’s never-ending. All the Things that have ever died from start to finish. And still they keep on coming…
Having notched up a century of dead televisions, it seems appropriate to mark this historic milestone by further considering the meaning of laneway life – and death. The dead television was one of the first dead things to be recorded, just over three years ago now. It took about two years for the first 50 […]
This crushed, damp, bedraggled little item lay in the middle of the street for a time, getting routinely squashed by passing cars every day, all the while, remarkably, retaining the faint vestiges of a shimmer and a shine. It is a model of fortitude and stoic resilience. Once upon a time this would have been […]
“… much of the history of basket making has been lost and is simply speculated upon.” Wikipedia Indeed, although it is purely speculation, it is believed that many of these baskets are thousands, if not millions, of years old. They were formed by a process of gradual accumulation of plastic particles which, over time, built […]
There is a sense in which Great Art never dies because its message is eternal and timeless and spans all ages blah blah blah… if you believe such meretricious baloney. The fact is that Art belongs in the laneway. It’s the perfect place for it, propped up against a paling fence, slouched against a wall, […]
The plastic stacking chair is so ubiquitous as to have become almost invisible. Nobody notices a dirty, broken down old plastic chair these days – old here being a relative term as even the most ancient among them are unlikely to have seen more than a few summers. The single-piece injection moulded chair is a […]
Look, I’m not going to say anything here. I think we can all agree there is simply no need. Discarded gym equipment has an eloquence all of its own. Anything I might add would simply be superfluous and trite in comparison. Besides, if I did say something, which I’m not, there’s a good probability that […]
There is one imperative when it comes to the disposal of sofas: they must always be placed at an angle – albeit an angle of varying degrees. Sometimes the placement can be almost vertical with the sofa hoisted onto its arm end; often it is sloping slightly forward as if the last action of the […]
Foam is one of my favourites. There is something just a little unruly about it, as if its foamness can never be fully constrained. Hence the need to truss it up like a turkey, tear it into smaller pieces or squeeze it into boxes or containers in case its foamacity spills out all over the […]
I can feel a figure of speech coming on. It is sweeping through me like a new… oooh I love a good broom and so do other people, judging by these examples which look as if they have been swept to death. The broom is the dry cousin of the mop but whereas the latter […]
This death obviously comes from outside the usual round of dead televisions that are derived, by and large, from the same old streets, day after day, week after week… I sometimes wonder if there will ever come a time when the neighbours have no more to discard – perhaps by then their houses will be […]