Posts Tagged ‘El Segundo’

Street flotsam collage pages

June 18, 2008

Pages from a mess-around journal, made entirely from “street flotsam” found yesterday afternoon in El Segundo.  The edges are cut off, but you get the idea.  All I added were adhesives, a little white paint, three staples, and the underlying journal (an old calendar which I already had, and which has other pages waiting to be arted up).

If you made pages like this for each town you frequent, would they reflect anything about the place, or the day you visited?

Street Flotsam, El Segundo CA

June 18, 2008

Street Flotsam, El Segundo CA, originally uploaded by pennylrichardsca.

An online friend is visiting Southern California from the midwest (hi Elizabeth!), and commented that there’s not much litter in LA (which, to an ephemera hound like herself, is actually a disappointment). I had to prove that we do, in fact, have “useful litter” hereabouts. This (pictured above) is only part of the stuff I collected on today’s hour-long walk around El Segundo. My rules were that I would only pick up stuff that was actually litter on the ground, that wasn’t plastic, nor a food container, nor an item of personal hygiene, and that it had to be something I could plausibly use in a collage.

The dry-cleaning tags were found in three different places–none of them near a dry cleaner’s shop, either. The math cards and a few of the other bits are from near the elementary school, and it’s the last week of classes, so there was a lot there. The scrap of a Zig Zag label is from near the library–hmmmm…

The yellow handwritten note is some kind of schoolkid drama involving Antonio and Tessa–somebody shouldn’t go to somebody else’s party because they’re going to see a third somebody, that kind of thing. It could well have been written months ago, and only recently found its way to the pavement with end-of-year desk clearing. I hope they worked it all out somehow.