Yoko Ono's Garbage Volcano

 

According to Wikipedia, the popular term “dumpster fire” refers to “a catastrophically bad situation. It has appeared in metaphorical form as early as 2003, and picked up traction in 2010 in the world of sports. The term was heavily used in 2016 to describe the United States presidential election that year.” [1] “The earliest known [non-literal] use of the term dates back to a 2003 review of a remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, in which The Arizona Republic’s Bill Muller said that the film was ‘the cinematic equivalent of a dumpster fire – stinky but insignificant’,” the entry relates [2] – although the impetus for the term’s leap from the literal into the figurative remains open to speculation.

Recent years had witnessed more than one spate of such fires in Arizona cities, which plausibly inspired Muller’s usage. In March of 1997, a Flagstaff resident, James Newbury, was arrested in connection with a series of arson incidents. “Police believe Newbury is responsible for 31 Dumpster fires started around Flagstaff this year,” the Arizona Daily Sun reported [3]. The following year, in Chandler, Arizona, “Five more dumpsters were set on fire Wednesday morning [April Fool’s Day, 1998], confirming fears that an arsonist is on the loose,” Jim Walsh reported in The Arizona Republic:

However, authorities are unsure whether there is a serial arsonist or several arsonists. Dumpster fires were also reported Wednesday morning in Mesa and Gilbert, near the Chandler line.

The spree includes 15 dumpster fires and a tree fire, all on March 22, and a house fire on March 23 that endangered a couple’s lives. [4]

Tucson dumpster fires made the news in January of 2000. “A rash of 19 arsons in the past week has residents of a near East Side neighborhood and Tucson firefighters concerned that if the culprits aren’t caught, the results could be tragic,” Michael Lafleur wrote in the Tucson Citizen:

In all, there have been five brush fires, 16 dumpster fires, two car fires and one house fire. […]

Residents blamed the fires on a group of teens who hang around East 26th Street. While some investigators looked at the fires, which have been mainly in trash bins, as teenage pranks, they are worried that the blazes could quickly rage out of control and engulf homes. [5]

A few years previously, “Dumpster fire” approached but did not quite achieve metaphor status in a column by Mark Kimble for the Tucson Citizen. Upset over the judicial harshness and cost to taxpayers of incarcerating a mentally ill Tucson arsonist, Richard B. Nichols, Kimble wrote:

As ridiculous as it sounds, a Pima County Superior Court judge has sentenced a local man to spend 15 years in prison for setting fire to five Dumpsters during a drunken binge one night. […]

Both an apartment building and a Dumpster are “structures”, the court ruled.

It’s a ruling that could cost Arizona taxpayers more than $200,000. […]

In the appeals court ruling, Chief Judge William Druke cited an earlier court ruling that a Salvation Army box, used to collect donated items, was a “structure”. Druke said a Dumpster and a Salvation Army collection box are the same.

He also said that there was something stored in the Dumpster – trash. “Whether items stored in a structure have value is irrelevant. … Moreover, we do not agree that all items stored in a Dumpster are necessarily worthless; as is sometimes said, ‘one man’s trash is another man’s treasure,’ Druke wrote. […]

The cost of this entire case is impossible to calculate. The court file contains 65 separate items, some of them dozens of pages long. The entire 3-inch-thick file weighs a couple of pounds and probably represents thousands of dollars worth of time by police, psychiatrists, prosecutors, defenders and judges – all of them paid by you. […]

All over five Dumpster fires. [6]

Whether or not one or more of these Arizona episodes influenced Bill Muller’s use of “dumpster fire” in his review of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I would like to propose an altogether different mythic point of origin, even if wholly apocryphal, as the source of “dumpster fire”. Appropriately, the story occurred in New York, a city much more closely associated with garbage in the popular consciousness – literally, in terms of volumes of rubbish, as well as through poetic and demographical associations with trashy people and cultural contributions. Manhattan, for example, served as the redolent base of operations for A.J. Weberman’s infamous National Institute of Garbology during the seventies. The following anecdote, however, involves a much more notorious character with a New York City history and is recounted by Fluxus-associated collage artist and happenings organizer Al Hansen:  

Yoko Ono works around the clock for more than a week preparing her [1961] Carnegie Hall Concert. She is very poor and has her apartment by being a building supervisor – cleaning halls and steps, attending to garbage cans, shoveling snow.

She ignores these tasks while working on her performance night preparations.

The performance night goes well.

She returns to the building focused on catching up with her [custodial] work. It is about the time of Thanksgiving and Christmas. It is a big building. In the center is a garbage drop. People from all the apartments on each floor go to the little room and put their bags of garbage down the chute. In the cellar is a big furnace which burns it all to ash. But today it has gone out. One of her jobs was to keep it lit.

Now, back on the job, she lights it, not realizing the chute is packed solid with garbage. To the top floor solid. The fire in the furnace is fuel oil fed. The furnace itself is totally packed with garbage. The fire builds. The flames roar up through the garbage chute burning out the center of the building. Plumbing pipes melt. Water spurts and freezes. Electric wires fuse. Everyone is homeless including Yoko, her man Tony [Cox] and their little daughter Kuriko [i.e., Kyoko]. Where did more Fluxus happen? At Carnegie Recital Hall on 57th Street uptown? Or down on the cold streets with the guts of an apartment house burning out like an Icelandic volcano? People naked, wrapped in blankets, half dressed, half awake – half stoned, hopefully. Early sixties Fluxus? Happening? [7]

Hansen may have been confused in relating a few of the details decades later. The Thanksgiving setting suggests that he is referring to Ono’s Carnegie Hall performance of November 24th, 1961. Her daughter Kyoko was not born until 1963, however, meaning that she would not have been among those rendered homeless by her mother’s blunder. A January 1972 New Yorker piece refers to the incident having taken place “ten years ago”. Unsurprisingly, Ono minimized the destructiveness of her absentee superintendent gig in relating the anecdote to The New Yorker’s readers:

“I was fired,” Yoko said, and she laughed. “One night, I was having a concert at Carnegie Recital Hall, and I forgot to turn the incinerator on. All the garbage was stuck, and two days later I burned it, and the smoke was everywhere, and the Fire Department came, and I was fired. [8]

One of Urban Dictionary’s definitions for “dumpster fire” is a “colossal mess, often created by incompetence” [9]. The related term “garbage fire”, meanwhile, as worded in the most popular definition on the same site, refers to a “human being who is worthless and repulsive in every way. The next step beyond merely being garbage.” [10]

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.

Endnotes

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumpster_fire

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumpster_fire#History

[3] Ramsdell, Becky. “Dumpster Arson Suspects Nabbed”. Arizona Daily Sun (March 14, 1997), p. 1.

[4] Walsh, Jim. “New Blazes Likely Work of 1 Arsonist”. The Arizona Republic [Gilbert Community Edition] (April 2, 1998), p. EV1.

[5] Lafluer, Michael. “Arsonists Plaguing East Side”. Tucson Citizen (January 21, 2000), p. 1.

[6] Kimble, Mark. “Five Dumpster Fires Carry a Big Bill for Us to Pay”. Tucson Citizen (August 4, 1994), p. 11A.

[7] Hansen, Al. “Al Hansen on Fluxus” in Baerwaldt, Wayne, et al. Beck and Al Hansen: Playing with Matches. Santa Monica, CA: Smart Art Press, 1998, pp. 81-82.

[8] Hertzberg, Hendrik. “John and Yoko Take Manhattan”. The New Yorker (January 8, 1972): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/29/john-and-yoko-take-manhattan

[9] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Dumpster%20Fire

[10] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Garbage%20Fire