This song may be from 2010, but boy is it still good. The title track off the Gorillaz third album, this one comes (also predictably) with a trippy video, following the animated Gorillaz crew through sort of a pirate adventure in which they run from villains and slowly realize that all the sea creatures around them are actually robots. Meanwhile, the lyrics are plodding: “It’s a Casio on a plastic beach / It’s a Styrofoam deep sea landfill.” They close out the video driving a mechanical shark, landing on a new, plastic island next to the disintegrating old pirate ship they started on. Metaphor?
Fresh off the Nat Geo Planet or Plastic initiative on how much we’ve screwed ourselves over with plastics, it seems like every other instagram post is about someone making art with trash to make both a point and a small difference. First and best example is probably Mel Chin’s Flint Fit, a line of clothing made from melted down water bottles from Flint, Michigan. (Yes, Flint water is ostensibly ok to drink now, but understandably folks don’t trust the municipality to do it right, and many people are still drinking bottled.) Digging further into the social responsibility, the line is sewn by local women who are victims of domestic violence, and is currently in the Queens Museum, situated among Chin’s other lead-poisoning-themed pieces, like lead pencil portraits of people who died from lead poisoning. Heavy.
Meanwhile an artist named Kim Markel is making a furniture exhibit out of recycled Glossier containers. From the documentation, the project seems less about waste reduction than it is about the color pink, and it’s not clear whether the containers used as building material have actually been used before they’re recycled. But like, if beauty was about being responsible, we’d call it the responsibility industry, right?
Is Michigan the only place doing it right? Genussee, a now-overfunded Kickstarter project, is making glasses frames out of, again, recycled plastic bottles in Flint, and they are also trying to use the company as a vehicle to empower the local community: they pay their workers above-average salaries to help close the city’s stark income gap, and they create manufacturing jobs that anyone can be trained to do. They also buy glasses back when you’re done with them so you don’t have to throw them away, and they donate 1% of profits to the Community Fund of Greater Flint, and specifically toward two funds that address children’s health and education in Flint: Flint Promise & Child Health and Development Fund.
So… Need frames?
