Scavengers, thrifters, dumpster divers unite.... Yesterday brought a new word to our world: mongo. 
This from one Ted Botha, a South African (by way of Bronxville) journalist and inveterate recylcer of found objects. Mongo is "late 20th century slang for retrieved and repurposed garbage" explains Penelope Green in The Times. Botha lives in a found apartment, with found furniture, found art work, and even a found cat. Bravo! Apartment Therapy is pro-Mongo, and not just because it's cheap and enironmentally-sound. When it's not compulsive, mongo -- the lifestyle -- is a higher practice, a way of seeing and being present, a kind of urban archaeology that betrays great sensitivity. Mongo is a political and artistic act, like graffiti, a response to the prevailing culture of disposable newness. And mongo is fun. As Rodgers and Hart said in that song about New York: "The great big city's a wondrous toy, just made for a girl and boy...." OHR
Mongo
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William Gibson would refer to this as gomi.
In which book? I love the idea that Gibson had a word for scavenging. Did he see it as some kind of reaction to modernity?
Rubin, in some way that no one quite understands, is a master, a teacher, what the Japanese call a sensei. What he's a master of, really, is garbage, kipple, refuse, the sea of cast-off goods our century floats on. Gomi no sensei. Master of junk.
I found him, this time, squatting between two vicious-looking drum machines I hadn't seen before, rusty spider arms folded at the hearts of dented constellations of steelcans fished out of Richmond dumpsters. He never calls the place a studio, never refers to himself as an artist. 'Messing around,' he calls what he does there, and seems to view it as some extention of boyhood's perfectly bored backyard afternoons. He wanders through his jammedlittered space, a kind of minihangar cobbled to the water side of the Market, followed by the smarter and more agile of his creations, like some vaguely benign Satan bent on the elaboration of still stranger processes in his ongoing Inferno of Gomi. I've seen Rubin program his constructions to identify and verbally abuse pedestrians wearing garments by a given season's hot designer; others attend to more obscure missions, and a few seem constructed solely to deconstruct themselves with as much attendant noise as possible. He's like a child, Rubin; he's also worth a lot of money in galleries in Tokyo and Paris.
- The Winter Market, from the short story collection "Burning Chrome"