Eric Smillie | Writer

Unidentified driving artwork

I landed an article on this giant UFO in the pages of MAKE magazine. Gail Simpson and Aristotle Georgiades of Actual Size Artworks built it in Wisconsin with wood from an old dairy barn they transformed into their house. Then they drove all 500 pounds of it to Philadelphia and put it in a tree. It sounds like this was half the fun for them, especially because they got to interact directly with people seeing their work.

Aristotle: It was a beautiful form in sections. When we shipped this thing across the country there were these two half-UFOs on the trailer. Every time we stopped, someone would ask, “Hey what’s that?” Gail usually said, “It’s a flying saucer,” and they’d say, “Oh, obviously.”

Gail: As though that was a perfectly legitimate explanation.

Aristotle: During the installation, the same thing happened. We enjoy that spectacle that the public gets from looking at the artwork and responding to it. And that was particularly evident in the process of moving the thing out there.

Here it is on the trailer:

Another favorite of mine is the Trojan Piggy Bank they installed in Chicago. Unfortunately, it’s not there anymore. I think a tree fell on it.

What is a fact checker?

Last week I guest-taught a lesson on fact checking to a group of journalism students at SF State. I was nervous and overly prepared. But the class was great, mostly because the students and the professor had a lot of questions they wanted answered right away. And partly because we got to watch this video again:

I can’t get tired of it. Not quite ready to build a shrine to Alex Trebek, though.

Why do teachers quit public schools?

One of the secrets of journalism is that other people do your work for you. All the raw material that gets crunched up into an article comes from somewhere else—it’s the good characters, dynamite quotes, and unreal stories that make the final piece good. Oh sure, putting sentences together with style is an art, and identifying and drawing out the key details of a subject is not easy, but the writer doesn’t create anything out of nothing. He just lays out the readymade pieces.

That’s how I feel about my latest story in GOOD magazine, about why public school teachers are quitting in such high numbers. The short answer is that their jobs are a pain in the ass and subject to heartbreaking, soul-crushing conditions. But there’s no way any collection of adjectives on my part can illustrate the situation as well as the words of the seven teachers in the article. Examples: One Oakland, CA biology teacher wonders how she’d even keep a pet while holding down her job. And, after budget cuts squeeze out a Ukiah, CA teacher of the year, he doesn’t bother to push back because his paycheck barely supports his family anyways.

Kitchen saw mates with watermellon + Full-size tools soldered from pennies

Why shouldn’t art be funny? If you like this still photo of In Natura (Coitus Bizzarus) by Krištof Kintera, see the odd coupling caught on video.

Kintera’s a real do-it-yourselfer’s artist; he builds sculptures out of appliances, bicycles, electricity-producing potatoes, and other stuff found out in the land of instructables and science projects. He’s also the kind of artist who doesn’t like to explain his work outright and give away the punchline. Scroll through Kintera’s website, and the jokes pile up like the sacks of cement he used to build a 23-foot leaning tower.

While Kintera would rather make a dirty joke with the master’s tools than try to tear the master’s house down, jeweler and sculptor Stacey Lee Miller, tears down the tools themselves and rebuilds them out of pennies:

It takes a lot of concentration and patience to cut all those coins and solder them together, which is part of the point — Webber’s tool pieces are a heartfelt homage to work, so investing hours in their creation makes conceptual cents. (Whoooooie. Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

Here’s a closeup. Look at the detail!

But her work isn’t all serious, either. On Webber’s website there are images of altered quarters and nickles with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson sporting crowns. And Webber’s working on some screwball projects. Literally.

Click these links for stories I have out now on Webber and Kintera in volume 15 of Make magazine.

Pickling umeboshi

Umeboshi taste super delicious. They’re salty, pickled, Japanese plums and I’ve been hoping to make some. So when I came across a wild plum tree on a hike in Redwood Regional Park, I saw my chance. (Tons of blackberries out there right now, too, by the way.) All I had to do, I figured, was go home, slap them in some salt, weigh them down (see the photo on the right), and then wait a while, right? Wrong.

It turns out that making umeboshi is a little more complicated. You need to start with unripe, acidic plums that grow in Japan. Then you need to soak them in water overnight, pack them in salt, and press them with a weight. Two months later you dry them in the sun. Then they age for five, ten, or more years. Easy.

There are very detailed directions here on Kuro5hin and a more straightforward recipe in this thread on tribe.net.

The plums I picked were already ripe and are way too soft to undergo two months of fermentation. I might as well stuff some shiso (also called perilla) leaves in the jar and see if I can do a ‘quick’ fermentation. But what fruit from California should I use to make some real umeboshi?

Find romance in a polluted pit + Toxic tourism resources

Photo of the Berkeley Pit by Don Ankney

Some people have been asking me how I could call a lake so polluted it kills swans a romantic getaway. And am I serious about visiting these ecodisaster sites, or was the article a joke?

Yes and no. The story was a satire on the style of ecotourism destination roundups, but all of these places are totally worth visiting. Each one is like a historical monument that tells us how we came to be the country we are — the miners of Butte, for example, dug that big hole in the ground so we could make copper electrical wires and light our cities.

Each one is also a great place to go and ‘be with nature’. We tend to think of nature as some other place away from the cities and away from civilization, but, as Jenny Price pointed out in her great Believer piece about finding nature in LA, by doing that we ignore the natural world around us and, crucially, our role in shaping it.

So! My prescription for a romantic Superfund encounter: Stand at the edge of the Berkeley Pit, under the ridge of the continental divide and at the edge of the Deer Lodge National Forest, and look for yourself in its red waters. You might just have one of those ‘the world is so big and I’m so small’ moments that we usually associate with mountain peaks and Niagara Falls and that make us reach for our loved ones.

Speaking of Jenny Price, tours of environmentally damaged areas that are cropping up all over the place and she’s right in the thick of it with trips to the LA River and disputed Malibu beaches over at the LA Urban Rangers. Another travel idea is the Futurefarmers’ Silicon Valley Superfund tour, which you could take on your own with the help of their interactive map (follow the Superfund map link). There are also Global Exchange’s Reality Tours and there’s a Toxic Tourism book about using site visits as an environmental advocacy tool. For more self-guided experiences of our impact on the environment, the database at the Center for Land Use Interpretation is a great resource. In August, they’re doing a bus trip to the Puente Hills Landfill in LA, which was the nation’s largest landfill in 2005! Too bad it’s all booked.

There’s more, too. You can find some gathered at the Temporary Travel Office and advice on visiting Chernobyl, plus links to the dirtiest spots in the world at the pollution tourism blog.

This is no disaster

Welcome to the Internet, a convenient place to find my new blog and news about the articles I’ve written. I was on NPR talking about my latest story today — a guide to the hottest ecodisaster travel destinations in the United States, published by GOOD magazine. It’s a roundup of five super fascinating spots like the Berkeley Pit in Montana, the country’s largest body of toxic water, and Centralia, Pennsylvania, a ghost town on top of an underground coal fire that’s been burning for over 40 years. Sounds like a joke, but it’s not. They charge admission to the viewing platform at the Pit, and another of the sites — the Salton Sea in southern California — used to attract more visitors than Yosemite!