Trash Talker

Collecting trash from the street is no longer the lone province of garbage men and the homeless. Alex L. Pasternack’s obsession with trash has helped him acquire two fully functional fax machines (“Because, hey, you can always use an extra fax machine”), a collection of journals written in Japanese that may or may not have been from the Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in New York and a large red shopping cart. He’s also gotten a thesis out of it.

“I’ve always had some attachment to trash and to junk, and I started to think about garbage as an interesting way into questions about how people see material objects, and how material objects reflect progress in society,” Pasternack says over lunch.

His interest in garbage, the environment and material objects spurred him to create and preside over the “Garbage Collector’s Club” during his high school years at Milton Academy. However, he was the sole member because, as Pasternack explains, “No one really knew about it except for my girlfriend,” he says. A far cry from his Harvard organizations, which are known across campus in part because of their off-beat natures.

He is a founding member of the band Information Wrecknology, whose theme song contains their motto: “We’ve come back from the future to destroy your computer.” He is also a founding member of Audry DeSmith and the Elegant Touch, which opened for what Pasternack calls “this queer Palestinian Hawaiian hip-hop duo troupe in the basement of Cabot” during his sophomore year. Pasternack is a key player in the Environmental Action Committee and the Resource Efficiency Program, the group that waged this month’s campaign to bring renewable energy to Harvard.

Pasternack’s most sustained project has been Present!, a publication he created last year.

“We wanted to create a new space for writing and artwork at Harvard outside of the formalized boundaries which are policed by The Advocate and The Signet and other groups on campus,” says Pasternack.

Present!’s “extra-textual” projects have included a sleepover in Lamont last year that left all participants ad-boarded, a “silent dance party” and a letter-writing forum outside the Science Center, where Pasternack and company encouraged passersby to write letters to their friends—and then mailed the products to appropriate recipients.

Future plans for Present! events include setting up tire swings throughout campus during reading period to “encourage people to chill out” and staging a “Godzilla versus a robot battle in the Yard when it’s snowing.”

Pasternack’s sense of humor has made living with him constantly interesting, says Ronen Mukamel ’05, Pasternack’s roommate, bandmate and friend since freshman year. “He’s really funny, he’s goofy, he does amazingly cool things,” Mukamel says. “And he’s also always bringing broken TV’s into our room. That too.”

From here, the trick will be translating Pasternack’s eccentricity into a viable career.

“Ideally,” says Pasternack, “I’d find something that would allow me to unite all of my interests, and the only way I see that happening is if I become an experimental musician-slash-recycling collector, slash documentarian, slash also working for an international humanitarian organization.”