Trash! I Love Trash! Gimme More Trash!!!!

"Oh, I love trash! Anything dirty or dingy or dusty! Anything ragged or rotten or rusty! Yes, I love trash!" -- Oscar the Grouch, Sesame Street

Oh, Oscar, you so crazy.

Perhaps it's fitting that NYC produced both Oscar the Grouch and Donald Trump, America's trashiest president ever. There's a symbiosis, a yin and yang, between NYC and trash. We're a city of 8.5 million people so we produce a lot it (our trash even makes it to the White House!). But there's something else, a deeper bond, between the world's greatest city and the world's grossest substance.

Trash, after all ... is us! 

We create it! Trash wouldn't exist but for us. It's the de trop of existence, the layer of our lives that we're forever producing and peeling away. To be human is to generate refuse and effluvia, to discharge those things that are no longer useful or wanted -- and how quickly things that are so precious and close to us become something to be shunned. That's what trash essentially is -- that which is shunned.

And I'm not just talking about the literal objects that we toss into cans. Trash is something more. We call stuff we just don't like or find offensive and gross "trash" or "trashy." How interesting, too, that things we so often compare to trash has to do with, you know, sex.

Is sex trashy? Dirty -- like trash? (As Woody Allen said, only if you're doing it right!) But what it comes down to is that sex is something society feels should be, for the most part, shunned. Not to be seen. Not to be talked about. Not to be promoted or encouraged. To be handled with care -- like a very full garbage can. "Behind closed doors," etc. -- another sort of garbage can.

That's why, back in 1974, when pornographer Al Goldstein premiered his cable show "Midnight Blue", he did something revolutionary. He put a show -- one that reveled in sex and everything tasteless -- onto the TV screens of the greatest city in the world. He said, loudly and unashamedly, "Look at it! Look at the trash! You'll love it!"

And love it New Yorkers did -- "Midnight Blue" stayed on the air until 2002, nearly 30 years, airing on Channel 35 (Channel J) every Friday night. It was weekly trash, brilliantly produced, and people couldn't stop watching. There was nothing like it before and, in this Internet age, nothing like it now. (Trash was so much smarter then.)

How did Goldstein do it? How did this man take the trashy underbelly of NYC, televise it, and make it (gulp) nearly respectable? This podcast from the Rialto Report tells the whole exhaustive story of Al Goldstein, his life and career, and the saga of "Midnight Blue." It's a fascinating, only in NYC, only of its time, story. (If you want to know more about the life of Goldstein, check out my short blog post from 2013 shortly after his death.) 

Trash takes talent. Goldstein's show wouldn't have lasted as long as it did if he didn't produce it well.

And handling the literal trash of NYC takes talent too. In fact, no less a person than Alec Baldwin (the more sane and sympathetic version of Donald Trump) is interested in the trash of NYC -- he devotes an entire podcast episode of his show Here's the Thing to the subject of how NYC's trash is produced and handled. We all know NYC has lots of trash but how it churns through our city is something almost none of us know about -- until now. Again, this podcast takes the subject of trash and forces us to look (or, in this case, listen to) it, because trash is, as always, part of who we are. 

Look at trash. Understand trash. Respect trash. Love trash. Love that which is shunned and discarded -- because trash is all of us.