The FIG team discusses the composition of the shoot, while the Puffer
Morris team discusses another beautiful evening to be in Lancaster.
FIG Lancaster, this city's beautifully designed, high-concept, hyper-local quarterly from the folks at Moxie House, had their camera lenses out the other evening for a photo shoot of the Puffer Morris team.
We caught up with them with our I-pad doing camera duty outside the Lancaster Public Library's central branch on Duke Street, so it seemed only right to do a meta-shoot of the FIG shoot. For the real deal, you'll have to check out the next edition of FIG to see what their camera saw.
FIG at work: (from left) Style Director Marie Kojitani, photographer Mike Miville
and Deborah Brandt, the creative director and maestro of all things FIG.
The action moves to the west side of Duke Street, while Puffer Morris
partner Scott Haverstick contemplates a deep blue twilight sky.
A shot of the shoot.
Team Puffer Morris: (from left) Nelson Keener, Janelle Ellis, Bill Puffer,
Scott Haverstick, Ric Tribble and Mary Tribble.
One of The New Yorker's signature cartoons from its early, Roaring Twenties period was Ralph Barton's "The Sort of Thing That Brings Joy To The Ashman's Black Heart."
There, in the pre-dawn hours of an apartment building courtyard, a bug-eyed, sadistic hell-hound of an ash collector (this, from the day when garbage was incinerated down in the cellar) is hurling the parade of sooty, emptied cans -- bang, clatter and boom -- deep into the courtyard, simply ecstatic to wake up the entire block.
Barton, who was afflicted by depression and later died by suicide, was making a bleak statement concerning one of the enduring realities of big-city life: dealing with garbage is foul business. Not for nothing that Tony Soprano's day job was "waste management consultant."
With the world urbanizing at a rapid pace, one need not be a Manhattanite to know the misery of waking up prematurely to the roar of the collection truck, the spume of its exhaust as it rumbles through the neighborhood, and the banging of tossed emptied cans (now, at least, thankfully no longer metal).
So it's with a small measure of optimism that one reads help is perhaps on the way, in the form of a new generation of waste collection vehicle using quieter and much cleaner hybrid engines fueled by compressed natural gas rather than the diesel beasts currently plying our neighborhoods in the morning.
Miami has been leading the way in the transition, and, while the transition costs are substantial, the operational and maintenance savings make for a reasonably quick payback. And there are immediate environmental benefits of CNG over diesel, not just locally, but in terms of carbon emissions, globally too.
Lancaster leadership take note: we should be pressing our trash haulers to bring the dirty business of collection into the 21st Century.
Of course, it's still up to each of us to consume less, waste less, compost and recycle more, and otherwise clean-up after ourselves. But a cleaner and quieter truck wouldn't hurt either.
