Fundamental Texts.

From The Escoffier Cook Book:

"362- Melon with Port, Marsala, or Sherry

Select a cantaloup or other melon and let it be just ripe. Make a round incision about the stem end, three inches in diameter; withdraw the plug cut, and through the hole remove all the pips with a silver spoon.

Now pour one-half pint of best Port, Marsala, or Sherry into the melon, replace the plug and keep the melon iced for two or three hours. Do not cut the melon in slices when serving it. It should be taken to the table, whole, and then the plug is withdrawn and the fruit is cut into shell-like slices with a silver spoon, and served with a little of the accompanying wine upon iced plates."

I ran across this a month or so ago and it has stuck in my head. There is something so French in this recipe. Firstly, Escoffier is the ultimate compiler and ultimate aesthete for what we think of now as classic French food. All culinary students nowadays know his name (even if they don't know much about him) and equate it with rightness, as law. His recipes are quite exact, but also (and maybe this is translation and difference in what our foodstuffs are now and our knowledge of our own produce), somehow vague.

There is something in this description that approaches scripts for modern performance art pieces. Everything must be just so (according to the aesthetic of the actor/artist/gourmand) and it is expected that the audience be appreciative of the meaning and carefully planned intention of the action. If nothing else, one appreciates the style, the conviction, the grace or the passion with which the action is acted out. Or should. Instructions are just precise to sound assured, but vague enough to feel as though that the reader needs a guide, someone more qualified to initiate and lead the ritual that should not really be meddled with.

Note that one cannot use anything but a silver spoon to remove the pips from the melon and that it must be just ripe, but not overly so. The plates must be iced. Presumably one would know what shell-like slices cut and removed through a three inch incision would be quite precisely, but to the modern reader it sounds like some mysterious and illicit surgery, but for a fruit. One that you enjoy upon an iced plate, with the accompanying wine. (How does one deal with the remaining highest quality wine upon the iced plate, use a tiny silver spoon? pick it up and lap at it like a kitten? My guess is no and no. But where did and should it go?? I find this to be serious suspense in the text. There are many questions like this in the recipe that [seriously] add a level of high, anxious drama for me.)


Another passage, just above:

"361--ENGLISH MELONS

Their shape is round, their peel is greenish yellow, thin and smooth, and their flesh, which is light green and sweet and delicate, more nearly resembles the transparency of the water-melon flesh than that of the cantloup in flavor."

I love this because it shows language's real limitations in pure description. There is only akin to. There is only comparison, spaces between words to conjecture at what a thing is and still one can only guess at the described object. The object is foreign and will always remain so in the eye and mind of the reader (modern and not modern). It only exists in the imagination. The pipe is not a pipe.

The World Sent Me 3 Things to Make Me Feel At Ease. (Don't Let Me Die At All.)

There must be something ordering these things this way.

Hi, Joachim

I am writing to you this letter to say that I want very much to meet
you in real life and to get acquinted with you.
But it is impossible at present day that is why let's start from romantic
letters to each other.
I do this first step because i don't want to miss a chance to loose
acquintance with such man like you.
Tell me, please, what is this life without love? it is dull, unbearable and
useless. You live, but you don't know why; you work, but don't know the
sense of it; you come at home, but you don't feel comfort and cold bed
makes you feel disgust... do you have the same unpleasant feelings and
need love in your life as I need?
The whole life is wating for me and you in future. But it is died if you are
alone and you can't share a new day with beloved person. Do you agree
with me?
If I don't give love, if I can't share passion and romantic feelings with
beloved, I feel that I am dying every moment, every hour, every day.

Don't let me die at all, write me, please, and just say 'hello, a stranger
beauty from Ukraine! yes, i want to get acquinted with you too!" and after
it, let me do the next step and you will see that I will change your life
and wave you in the cradle of my love.
I close this letter now, but i am waiting for your reply, Dear Stranger whom
I liked and I hope that you will like me too

Kisses
July P

I can't be the only one finding these clues to joy and hope and wonder . . .right? right?

PRSHS

So, soon Bambi Party VI will be in effect. Early November. I apologize for the delay.

"A Bambi's Long Journey into Night"

Think: The Odyssey, The Warriors, Up all Nite, Zombie Attack, Epic Vision Quest, Beastmaster, Fall of Jericho, Battle Royale, Marathon, through the water on a burning raft, Trucker's Bible, Woman melting a block of ice while sitting on it, eat a kilo of honey, drink a litre of wine, Xiu Xiu and Anna Oxygen (as always), Grace Jones and Andy Warhol (as always), also early Roman Polanski, disappearing doors, the appearance of an urn on the grounds

Earlier themes include (for newcomers): Do the Bambi, Re-do the Bambi (a juicyfruit monochrome ball), Bambi vs. Barbie, Bambi Factory, Bambi are Forever (forever until U die)

As always, cocktail attire is required, cab fare is encouraged.

More to come.

I am the DJ I am what I play / Last nite the DJ saved my life

Maybe you knew and maybe not (who is this you out there anyway? my 'loyal' readers or myself?) but I am designing the music at my new work place, Poppy.

The other night I was out at the bar and 'Underwear' (by Pulp) was playing on the sound system. One of the bartenders came up to me and told me that two gals screamed when it came on and proclaimed it to be their favorite song (Pulp fans tend to be ferociously loyal). This pleased me to no end. Then 'Underwear' came on (by the Magnetic Fields) and I remembered that I was listening to the Poppy playlist in reverse alphabetical order which is one of my favored ways of organizing a playlist. I like the imperiousness of chance rubbing up against a systematized organization method. It appeals to my chaotic tendencies and the aesthetics of violence or the potential in violence, the unexpected thing and the fallout around it, the reactions.

In essence, here I was, living the dream-- or my dream anyways-- of broadcasting a set of songs to an audience. And particularly in a restaurant where the music has a power to manipulate and shape an experience, much like the lighting, design of the room, service and food do. The sonic landscape helps create the architecture of the space. This speaks to the reasons that I love the songs in the title of this post so much. It is the DJ and somehow there is something unnameable that is being transmitted-- that needs to be transmitted. There is something in that message that has the power to potenitaly transform the listener. If the listener is open to it. I suppose I could add 'Musique Automatique' by Stereo Total to the mix.



* * *

I had always intended to post about this woman who I discovered online during the long, cold Spanish winter. She has a channel on YouTube called artemisbell (search for it). I became fascinated with her and this channel which I started reading as new art. She is the object being transformed through music. Who knows what she is like in life (I love her real enthusiasm, genuine good spirit and optimism in the comments) but she appears through her work, the constant videos (same format each time, different, but repeating outfits, variations on dance moves) as almost crazed, compelled. Her performance mesmerizes. She often appears very close to the camera at the beginning of the video, dripping with sweat, before moving back to ease into the beginning of the song, picking up speed as the song does, often smiling, often mouthing the lyrics. These songs and words mean something to her that has brought her through pain, or loneliness (she is always alone in the videos-- it is as though no one in the world exists and only this room exists and there are these songs playing over a radio that she remembers from before, or is hearing for the first time, but somehow the DJ knows that she should hear them) and into health and joy. The amazing response that she gets in the comments is pretty impressive for a site like youtube, which are usually spiteful, mean, or trying to drum up a OMFGROFLMAO!! or whatever. It's sort of like the ultimate positive scene that disco or techno or whatever dance club genre can generate. But here it is in a serial form, self-contained and generated. Exhibitionistic, but driven, like much perfomance art or video art.



* * *

Maybe you all are like my listeners and this is my radio program, tinny and infrequent, in between two ticks on the AM dial. I have been thinking recently about Lynne Thigpen's role in "The Warriors" (You may know her as the chief on the kid gameshow "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?") and how the viewer saw nothing of her ever except her lips but how the listeners held on to her every word. I always thought it was mysterious how she knew exactly where the Warriors were and how every person (or more exactly gang member) in NYC listened to her and how they did what she said. It gave the impression that she was really pulling the strings, like a god. (Now I am reminded of the gods in "Clash of the Titans," another movie that I loved as a child, and the pieces they pushed around their playing board and how similar the psychic roles each of these characters play in each movie ultimately). Or the concept of asking for a dedication and waiting and waiting to get through to the DJ and then waiting and waiting to hear the song on the radio and how that gives you a little stake in it.

Prying

I like Vito Acconci. This video is really unsettling. It feels like something that you shouldn't be watching, though nothing much happens except the attempt and re-attempt of him trying to literally open her eyes. The use of force on another human-- UBUWEB does a good job at summing up the video. The tension doesn't get resolved. You want to intervene, but the video just cuts off and you don't know, you don't know what happens to her or to him.

This reminds me of another video by Acconci where he is burning off all of his chest hair with a single white candle. He is determined to burn it all the way down to the skin, but obviously the flame against his skin-- especially sensitive on his chest--cannot be sustained for long. There is this tension between trying to get a task done, the determination to do a thing, and the weakness or limitations of the body that is fascinating to watch. With the addition of the camera/spectator's eye, there is an urgency to that determination, the desire not to fail in front of an audience. This need to complete something, even something insignificant, to feel of worth.

Three Objects

I saw you (and Him) walking in the Rain. You were holding hands and I will never be the same.

Things my mother told me

I have this idea for a memoir. I hesitate to use the word memoir, because I generally find those to be shuddery-no-good. I am afraid that I won't be able to write it until my mother dies, but I am not sure.

When I was small, I believed generally everything that my mother would tell me. As anyone who knows or has met my mother, she is full of stories. Exaggeration is a family trait.

For example, when we were kids, my mother would tell us that a giant was searching for us and he only ate children. She would only tell us this when we would board a Metro bus. She would tell us that the giant had terrible eyesight and not much of a sense of smell, but he had very keen hearing. Any peep out of us and he would lunge down and rip open the accordion section of the bus like a sleeve of Ritz crackers (she would also tell us not to touch the heavy canvas of the accordion section of the bus where we favored sitting because we might lose our fingers which I solemnly believed. I was a somewhat solemn child.) and eat us, picking past the other people on the bus until his hands found us previously, quietly talking, then screaming children. I never asked her about other children on the bus. I somehow accepted that myself and my sisters were the only ones this particular giant desired. She would often tell us that we were "special" after all. We sometimes "played" this if my mother had a migraine, often after a bus ride. She would close all the venetian blinds or re-tack the multicolored 7-up "It's the uncola" sheet with huge orange flowers and electric lime zeppelins on it up over the windows. This would invariably, in my head now, be in the summer because it always made the room seem much, much hotter. But maybe it was only the way the blinds or the sheet glowed with the bright sun, the winter or autumn sun.

I don't think that my mother realized that this filled me with a certain sense of terror, a resolved and controlled terror. Although I was also competitive, even when I was 4 or 6 and so I enjoyed spiting the giant as I sat stonily willing my heart not to make any noise, glaring at my older sister if she tried talking to me, glaring at my little sister when she began to fuss with the heat.

My mother also sometimes told us to pretend that we were blind. We would put blindfolds on and I always peeped through or under the chink showing between nose and cheek. I started to just close my eyes, shutting them very tightly at first so my body wouldn't let me cheat which I very much didn't want, but then trusting myself. My eyelids would smooth out. I saw sunlight through them as I identified different items of clothing by touch, or memorized the positions of the living room's furniture. Sometimes we might have an afternoon snack this way, blinded. This is why I did a report on Louis Braille when I was in third grade. I was shocked to learn that he put out both eyes with an awl (this was when I learned what an awl was). I didn't understand how he could have put out both eyes, but the book told me that he did and so I knew that he must have done it. He went on to invent a way for the blind to read so I knew he could accomplish things when he wanted to. I was convinced that my blind "training" would help me just in case I accidentally put out my eyes with an awl or the scissors that my mother was always cautioning me about or a Tinker-Toy, like the one my brother punched through his soft palate when he was running around with it in his mouth. My mother referenced this often. She would always say, "I told him to take that thing out of his mouth," and that was all she said and like Greek myth it happened to him and I knew it could happen to me.

The difference between me and Harry as demonstrated on a train tray-table.

Illegal action for Facebook #3.

Create a new Facebook profile. Write down a list of names that might be a potential spouse or lover or one night stand. These may not be people that you know personally, they must be an image of a name. Let the name. Be daring and dangerous in your choices, also be conservative in others. Imagine how you could couple with any of these names, the long and short terms effects these names would have on who and where you are now with your life. Ask these names that you search for to be your friends. Examine the differences between your hope for the way that person looked and how he or she appears in his or her profile. Imagine that person having some of the qualities that you bestowed upon their name. If you think it, perhaps it is so.

An example: I searched for Bruno.

Tiny thoughts for garments.

To put on a shirt, a jacket, or dress. How it allows one to become something else, maybe better. Make clothing items for the potential other you. Realize what a prom dress can make one do, how a tuxedo can transform one. Make clothing for specific (dreamed of) situations.

Suit for drowning oneself. Modify a three piece suit. Add quilting over every surface of the suit. Instead of down or cotton or fluff, fill the quilting with birdshot.

T-shirt for disguising bleeding.

A wedding dress for Miss Havisham.

Girl Phone

I got my new cell phone today. I liked this model mostly because it was artificial grape purple. Or Grimace McDonald Purple. As a kid I always dreamed that when I hit the age of 16 I would find a VW beetle from the 60s and it would be purple and I would drive it everywhere and it as an object would be synonymous with me as an object. As a child I was obsessed by the Joker from Batman (fashion) and Prince (I thought 'Erotic City' was so scandalous. I couldn't believe it got radio play. And you know, he was awesome.). When everyone was dyeing their hair with Manic Panic and listening to 'Cannonball' over and over I halfheartedly thought that some day I might dye my hair Purple Haze (tm). I didn't because, you know, everyone else was doing it and I hate that. (xtian calls this the 'baby bird syndrome.' I may be a sufferer.)

I like my phone apart from an annoying swirl design under the front window which made me think at first that the adhesive was coming off. They just have a terrible graphic designer. Harry's phone is plain. A metallic black without any swirliness under the window.

Harry pointed out that my phone was marketed for the womenz. I just thought, oh, right. Then, ugh, how stupid.

Things I miss in Seattle (ongoing).

1. the possibility of seeing the grandes dames of Pho Bang: Ursula Android and/or Jackie Hell
2. Pho
3. walking down the sidewalk with coffee
4. my Grace Jones poster(s)
5. listening to music through a stereo rather than bad computer speakers or headphones
6. Presse/Baguette Box
7. talking to Miss Kiana
8. karaoke
9. Bambi Parties
10. Happy Toast
11. receiving disturbing films through the mail and watching them when I get home from work
12. the fact that the entire city of Seattle does not shut down on Sundays
    

Illegal actions for Facebook #1 and 2.

• Make a false Facebook profile with your real name. Find people who share your name and invite them all to be your friend. See how many multiples of you you can collect. Share your successes and failures. Accept all the application requests they send you. They may know better than you do.

• Make a false Facebook profile. Invite people who share names with your 'real' friends on Facebook to be your friends. In this way, create an alternate, potential you. Post comments about your potential life with your potential friends.
  

I saw birds in Paris.

representation of crow . illegally installed art


conceptual and real vulture eating entrails of golden silk


in a tiny, fresh restaurant . large scale photograph


conceptual obscenity high on a building


actual dead bird . body mostly missing


actual small birds in actual wax . concepts of freedom versus stillness

Ask Me

about my conceptual trip to Paris. It went swimmingly. I even have pictures.

A tiny photoessay on British loneliness in the Malaga airport (feeding/lost balloon)

Confidential for M. ______. #2.

'I haven't seen you since I was a kid . . .

Basically! Jennifer Louise, you don't know me and we're not friends . . . I was just w-w-w-w-w-w-wonderin' 'bout you, wonderin' if you ever think-think-thinka-think about me . . .'

So I have been listening to some playlists (#19-25 On-the-Go out of 147 in total) lately, most of which were composed in transit to work, walking to the bus stop while drinking coffee, reading and spinning the conceptual 'wheel' on my most presh-us Butter Moon and pushing down my thumb to add a highlighted song to my list, swerving to avoid someone else walking then looking down and spinning the wheel again. While passing the Crescent (a bartender invariably cleaning the floor mats, invariably one to two older queens having their first beers [one presumes] and squinting at the bright or dim light filtering into their not currently smoky but smelling like it cave), pausing to pick up an orange or tangerine juice at the corner market, reapplying the earcovering headphones all while adding, adding song to the playlist. I would put the finishing touches on as I waited for the bus, but was generally finished when I mounted the bus and would go (preferably) to the seat just behind the back door and listen to my newly amalgamated list of 'singles of the week' as I called them when I got to the restaurant and pumped it through the 'CD Cruiser', a silver and red Corvette-ish mini boom box which slowly turned the color of grease. 'This is my new favorite song!' I would proclaim every ten minutes.

Listening to these playlists, 3ish years old or maybe more?? I was ever-so-pleased to run up against one of Of Montreal's hidden gems off of what was probably their worst album, or their most forgettable (a feat for Mr. Barnes, to be forgettable, the worst dream of a dandy). The song is called "Jennifer Louise" and it runs a very to-the-point 2 minutes, 1 second. The song is about a cousin that the singer is wondering after, whom he hasn't seen in a long, long time. He can't even imagine what she was like, but hears about her 'good' standing in life from his mother. He remembers good things that her father did for him when he was a child. He admits that he will probably never make the effort to contact her, via a letter or phone, let alone actually speak to her in person. But he wonders about her and wonders if she wonders about him.

I remember being so enthralled with how this song cut to the chase and the range of complex thought and emotion expressed-- no time for bullshit in a song that is about as long as most Ramones' songs. It's a difficult thing to create something minimal and connect emotionally at the same time. The sentiment in this song is so delicate, yet very succintly put together and sad and all. I wonder if Kevin Barnes is on Facebook and if so if he sent a friend request to Jennifer Louise, assuming she exists and if she accepted.

It made me think about what Facebook is becoming and is. How it allows you to spy, sort of, on those people that helped make you you. To recognize that they were part of your daily life at the very least. I am still unsure if those old meanings can be rekindled and put into use again, but you don't have to wonder the same way anymore. It's easy to search for people nowadays. I wonder how this will change the fascination, repulsion and ultimate dynamic of high school reunions?

In time for my birthday

New Of Montreal! Called 'Skeletal Lamping.' Bated breath, eyes lifted. Yum Yum. This is good news as their last album was probably the album of the year for me. It neatly contained my obsessions for several months and has mass classics. I heart Kevin Barnes.

On every occasion, I'm waiting for a funeral.

On the event of my 30th birthday, or 29th.

Put to death, or put to rest: the pegged blue jeans; David Hockney swimming pool colored pegged jeans; and ancient polyster pin-striped pants that I use as my 'nice' pants. I no longer fit into these. (goodbye 28 waist.)

(Do not hope to 'lose' the weight. Do not ignore who you are and who you have become. Idea that your body is essentially you.)

Put to death by live burial, death by shooting, burning, drowning.

Put to rest, set sail in the sound Valhalla bound; bury in a casket; cremate and throw burned fragments into a river for turtles to eat. Consume (probably not possible). Document everything.
Take out large ad in the obituaries for jeans. Do this un-ironically.

Imagine that the shed parts of you are no longer you. The wolf that gnaws off its paw to escape a trap does not consider the part its anymore. Is hindered by.

Public humiliation. Subsuming humiliation.

Document everything.