#Welsh license plate
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Foul Play
Foul Play, a movie thread
I have not seen this since I was less then ten, I believe.
it's from 1978, Goldie Hawn, Chevy Chase, opens with the murder of a church official.
Burgess Meredith, Dudley Moore, and Brian Dennehy in supporting roles.
Chevy Chase is very Bruce Wayne as played by Michael Keaton in his first scene
There will be numerous themes that were contemporary to the 70s, but I want to see if it was as slick an homage to Hitchcock as I remember it being touted as.
Oh, yeah, there's the open-your-sexuality theme for the divorcee
"I don't pick up strange men."
"That's your problem."
"So, why don't you try it?"
Ahh, Barry Manilow, who was part of my childhood soundtrack.
Dialogue is vaguely stilted.
Convertible yellow VW Bug! And wow Marlboro Reds have not changed the box design THAT much in all these years.
Okay. The dialogue thing is part of the Hitchcock thing, given how THAT conversation went.
EEEEE! BURGESS MEREDITH!
I love him so much.
Red herrings. I love the red herrings in this.
Snake warning, btw.
Oh I love Burgess in this.
+blinks+ This came out in the year of Three Popes. The plot is centered on an attempt to murder the Pope. I am… amused?
"Rape's not an act of sex. It's act of violence." --Well that's a message.
Very easy to see how Dudley's character jumped to the idea of sex. Poor guy.
And I know I missed the reference of "beaver trap" as a kid. I had not encountered that euphemism that early.
CW: "spanish fly"
bee gees ftw
(Side note: music rights for film back then were far more permissive, but on the same hand, the artists got paid far less, and that's why there are rights' disputes in later works, when it is time to license to DVD)
I feel like Goldie's character is a little neurodivergent
"plop plop fizz fizz, oh what a relief it is"
She stabbed him with knitting needles. We had a shower scene moment. The cuckoo clock was cuckoo-ing.
Rear Window moment too.
Hello Brian Dennehy.
You look young but still manage to look very mature.
This is such a a silly movie, and YET.
Also, the casual affirmation of masculine security, because now Chevy has hit on Brian playfully.
I think that little old lady just played "fuck" on the scrabble board
And her opponent added "er"
yes, yes. Because original tried to play 'mutherfucker'
"I always had a yearning for the criminal life"
"But you're a cop"
"Same difference"
Twice now, men have told her that they believed she believed what she said.
And further 'she may be ND', she remembered a licence plate in the dark and rain while trying to avoid being killed
And the pieces come together…
Chevy has them and is putting it all together.
Mistaken Identity in progress.
Billy Barty is GREAT, by the way. I love him.
That was a great Rube Goldberg sequence.
Reference to Panty Hose wearing quarterback! LOL
I lol at Chevy's character. He's playing this with humor, but subdued in a way that makes it charming.
Free Love themes running freely through this.
deliberate view of birds flying over water
The dog's name is Chaucer. Amused.
Aww, Burgess is so sweet to her.
And the plot device was just destroyed but that's okay
Burgess and Chevy acting together to rescue Goldie is adorable.
Rex Harrison's ex-wife is the mastermind here. Rachel Roberts, Welsh actress.
Who is now having a kung-faux match with Burgess Meredith.
This movie manages to combine humor, action, and a half-decent plot very nicely.
I am just absolutely amused at the mix of humor into this movie.
She just calmed a pair of immigrants in the taxi Chevy commandeered by comparing him to Kojak, and they're big fans.
I miss movies being ludicrously fun like this car chase.
We are having a shootout backstage during an opera
There's an analogy in the Pope leading a cheering applause when there's two people visibly dead on stage now…
Overall impression: a fun once in a while re-watch movie. Dudley Moore was over the top which is best Dudley Moore. Chevy Chase was a delight as he often was in his earlier films. Goldie Hawn is not an airhead and helps substantially in her own fate. Burgess Meredith is HEARTS. Brian Dennehy was great support. All of this movie entertained, but I am certain the pacing, as well as how the humor meshes with the action, would be a no-go for many modern viewers. I did not catch all the Hitchcock references, I think, but enough were his more known films for me to pick up on them.
#foul play (1978)#goldie hawn#chevy chase#burgess meredith#brian dennehy#dudley moore#film watching#70s pop culture#alfred hitchcock
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Saw someone whose license plate frame reads “My Welsh corgi ate your honor student.” Um??
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On this day in Wikipedia: Friday, 22nd September
Welcome, Välkommen, Willkommen, Benvenuta 🤗
What does @Wikipedia say about 22nd September through the years 🏛️📜🗓️?
22nd September 2022 🗓️ : Death - Hilary Mantel
Hilary Mantel, British author (b. 1952)
"Dame Hilary Mary Mantel ( man-TEL; born Thompson; 6 July 1952 – 22 September 2022) was a British writer whose work includes historical fiction, personal memoirs and short stories. Her first published novel, Every Day Is Mother's Day, was released in 1985. She went on to write 12 novels, two..."
22nd September 2018 🗓️ : Death - Mike Labinjo
Mike Labinjo, Canadian football player (b. 1980)
"Michael Labinjo (July 8, 1980 – September 21, 2018) was a Canadian professional gridiron football player who played as a defensive end. He was a member of the Calgary Stampeders, Philadelphia Eagles, Indianapolis Colts and Miami Dolphins...."
22nd September 2013 🗓️ : Event - Insurgency in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
Insurgency in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa: All Saints Church in Peshawar, Pakistan, was attacked by two suicide bombers who killed 127 people.
"The insurgency in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, also known as the War in North-West Pakistan or Pakistan's war on terror, is an ongoing armed conflict involving Pakistan and Islamist militant groups such as the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Jundallah, Lashkar-e-Islam (LeI), TNSM, al-Qaeda, and their..."
Image licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0? by Pahari Sahib
22nd September 1973 🗓️ : Birth - Stéfan Louw
Stéfan Louw, South African tenor and producer
"Stéfan Louw is a South African operatic tenor, regarded as one of South Africa's leading tenors. He has been performing opera since 1995. ..."
Image licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0? by Emlo SA
22nd September 1923 🗓️ : Birth - Dannie Abse
Dannie Abse, Welsh physician, poet, and author (d. 2014)
"Daniel Abse CBE FRSL (22 September 1923 – 28 September 2014) was a Welsh poet and physician. His poetry won him many awards. As a medic, he worked in a chest clinic for over 30 years...."
22nd September 1823 🗓️ : Event - Joseph Smith
Joseph Smith claims to have found the golden plates after being directed by God through the Angel Moroni to the place where they were buried.
"Joseph Smith Jr. (December 23, 1805 – June 27, 1844) was an American religious leader and the founder of Mormonism and the Latter Day Saint movement. Publishing the Book of Mormon at the age of 24, Smith attracted tens of thousands of followers by the time of his death fourteen years later. The..."
Image by Likely William Warner Major see http://silverepicent.com/photofound/photofound/Photograph_Found/Appendix_C.html
22nd September 🗓️ : Holiday - Christian feast days: Digna and Emerita
"Saints Digna and Emerita (died 259 AD) are venerated as saints by the Catholic Church. They were Roman maidens seized and put to the torture as Christians in the persecution of Valerian (A.D. 254-A.D. 259) at Rome.Their feast day is celebrated on September 22. Their relics are said to lie at the..."
Image licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0? by Alekjds
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Chapter 12, Page 23, plus my reference for the first panel; particularly 11:23.
#The Vale of Wales#Page 23#Linette Rhys#car crash mention#car accidents#Wales#Welsh license plate#Welsh#Cymru#Cymraeg#Chapter 12
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life rn is not being able to remember my license plate for the RAC without getting out of my car and looking but being able to tell them all about the life and times of legendary welsh hero Owain Glyndŵr and personally to me that is a fair trade
#spot the L plates babe the only thing I know about my car is that it’s black!!#hope everyone else is having a better Sunday afternoon than me and my mate xx#(ridi's) bigmouth strikes again
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I work at a grooming and spa place for pets and we groomed this cute lil' corgi named Baxter today and I looked out our front window and this is his moms car.
#extra#dog#dog mom#pupper#doggo#pets#dog grooming#cat grooming#grooming#spa#in love#baxter#corgi#pembroke welsh corgi#cardigan corgi#license plate#cars#car#mom#dog owner#dog lover#haircut#bath#clean#puppy#puppies#dogs#animal ears#dog ears#paws
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Hey so how about things you said after you kissed me? Jassandra is my fave 💛💛
Hey thanks for the prompt! I haven’t written on here in forever! I had to write this twice because I lost it the first time but here we go
“Jacob?” Cassandra muttered.
She was the first one to speak the entire car ride home. They’d been at a charity banquet in Washington to recover an artifact, and with Baird and Flynn on a dangerous case that needed the door ready for them to jump home at any moment, Stone and Cassandra had been tasked with a 3 hour drive.
The drive up was actually fun. They’d played the license plate game, and filled themselves up on candy and junk at the roadside shop when they stopped for gas, and Cassandra had prepared a playlist on Spotify that allowed for prime car karaoke. It was an easy case and a fun day, and everything was going great.
The drive back home though, was different. It had been an hour, and they hadn’t so much as switched on the radio. So, when Cassandra spoke, it was the first of any noise that had occurred for the entire time.
Jake looked over at her briefly before turning his eyes to the road.
“What is it Cassie?” he asked.She said nothing, but twisted her hands in her lap, and he sighed.
“Cassie I told ya. We don’t have to talk about what happened back there. It was a case. We did what we had to–”
“Jacob you said you loved me.”
She didn’t mean to blurt it out as quickly as she did, but there it was. It was like the words came flying off her tongue before she meant them to, but now that they were out in the open, she knew she wouldn’t have said anything if it hadn’t happened that way.
Jake’s grip on the steering wheel tightened and he swallowed hard.
“We were undercover Cassandra.” he said quietly. “We did what we had to do.”
“We kissed, and then you said you loved me.”
“And a man can’t say he loves his wife?” Jake yelled. “I was trying to make it believable! We were about to get caught.”
“Yes, which is why I kissed you!”
“And I said I loved you. So they’d think we were married.”
“Jacob you whispered it. No one else could hear it. It wasn’t for their benefit.”
“Cause I screwed up Cassie!” Jake yelled.
She leaned back, staring at him as he breathed heavily. After a moment he pulled over to the side of the road and leaned forward on the steering wheel. He must’ve sensed the nervousness in her silence, because he didn’t wait for her to say something before he spoke again
“I didn’t mean to say it,” he said quietly, still not looking at her. “It just came out. I couldn’t help it.”
“Jacob…” Cassandra started, but he cut her off.
“Look, Cassie…” he stuttered. “I….nothing has to change between us. I’m fine. But if you want me to keep my distance I get it. It’s whatever you want.”
“How could you say that?” she said at half a whisper, looking right at him though his eyes were still on the dashboard.
“I told you Cassie it just happened!” he insisted. “I can’t help what I feel.”
“That’s not what I meant!” she insisted. “How could you think that I wouldn’t want to spend time with you anymore?! You should know me better than that. You do know me better than that.”
Jake finally looked up at her, and as their gazes met her eyes grew teary.
“I just figured,” he said. “I might’ve made you uncomfortable and…”
“And you never considered that I might feel the same way?”
Cassandra was crying, and Jake leaned back in his seat as he looked at her.
“You…” he stuttered.
“I don’t know,” she cried. “I’ve thought about it. It makes sense doesn’t it? I just always….I thought we missed our chance.”
“You could never miss your chance with me,” Jake said, shaking his head. “It was always gonna be you.”
Quickly, he undid his seatbelt and leaned forward and kissed her hard. She was shocked at first, but quickly melted as their lips continued to meet, undoing her own seatbelt and moving forward in her seat so that she could grab him.
It was just like when they’d kissed in the banquet hall, how she immediately knew that she just wanted to stay there forever, how she noticed that it was lasting longer than it should have, that his hands were tightening around her waist and her hands were finding their way to his hair. Only this time, there was no wondering why it felt like more than a kiss. There was no shame and confusion and fear that he wouldn’t feel the same way.
Finally they parted, and, just like it had happened at the banquet, their foreheads were touching as they both caught their breath. When they leaned back and looked at each other again, smiles found their way onto both of their faces and they laughed as they reveled in their newfound connection.
“So uh…” Jake said. “Odd question but….I know we ate at the banquet but maybe we could stop at a diner or something after we drop off the artifact with Jenkins?”
“I think that I wouldn’t miss it for the world.” Cassandra said.
Jake smiled hugely before putting his seatbelt back on and putting the car into drive. As he found his way back onto the road, Cassandra looked over at him and bit her lip as she smiled.
They may have recovered the Welsh Adder Stone, but she was the one who came out of that banquet with the most valuable prize.
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#The Vale of Wales#Pardon the small hiatus#Had some family business to take care of#Now it's back to business#afancs#Welsh monsters#Welsh folklore#Chapter 12#page 15#VOW#Welsh faeries#If 88 SHW ever shows up as an actual license plate#I can update this page#afanc#Welsh mythology#Wales
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✰╯ꉓꌩꌗ꓄ꍟꈤꈤꀤꈤ ꉓꍏ꒒꒒ꀎꎭ ꌃꋪꍏꈤꅏꍟꈤ╰✰
Technician/Vocals
Theme Song
𝕚𝕟𝕥𝕣𝕠𝕕𝕦𝕔𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟
﹄☆✮Full Name: Cystennin Callum Branwen
﹄☆✮Pronunciation: KihSTEHN-ahN Cay(Kal)-lum (Alternatively Caelum) BRAHN-wen
﹄☆✮Nickname/Alias: Bran (Brahn)
﹄☆✮Meaning: Cystennin means: Constant. Callum means: Dove. Branwen means: Beautiful Raven.
﹄☆✮Pet Name:
﹄☆✮Signature:
﹄☆✮Gender: Male
﹄☆✮Orientation: Undecided
﹄☆✮Real Age: Nineteen
﹄☆✮Age Appearance:
﹄☆✮Birthday: February 20, 1998
﹄☆✮Deathday: July 2nd, 20XX
﹄☆✮Birthplace: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, Wales
﹄☆✮Faceclaim: Dylan O'Brien
﹄☆✮Zodiac Sign(Western/Eastern): Pisces - Aquarius Cusp, (Earth) Tiger
𝕒𝕓𝕠𝕦𝕥
﹄☆✮Biography:
﹄☆✮Parenting: His parents were great, they loved him to pieces. He was always well-taken care off and often times babied as a child. His father always made sure to spend time with him at least once a day and wasn't shy about telling Callum he had loved him. The same with his mother, Cystennin always took their main priority over all.
﹄☆✮Upbringing: Christian Ideals and Morals, but not strict. Paganistic morals and ideals.
﹄☆✮Infancy: Callum was good baby, his mother and father didn't drop him or anything. He was very well behaved and intelligent. It didn't seem to take him much time to pick up on things and learn quickly.
﹄☆✮Childhood: Callum was quite reserved as a child. He liked to be by himself and just explore the world around him at times. He was endlessly fascinated by anything he could see.
﹄☆✮Adolescence: In his early teens Callum had started getting more interested in other things, these interests lead him to work on things with his hands. Taking apart stuff, or building something from nothing, almost. He really got into all sorts of sciences and such. His classwork often times would suffer because he was just never interested in it. He'd rather learn things on his own, of his own want, rather than that of a teacher's. He also began to get into writing at this time and started working on his first book.
﹄☆✮Adulthood: Callum is only 19 and has just started his adult life, but he has accomplished plenty in this short time. He has sold a relatively successful book of a series he's still working on today. Though between writing sessions he helps bands touring with their technical work. Which he also enjoys doing.
﹄☆✮Coming of Age: Callum has always had a very responsible attitude about certain things, growing up. But the moment he 'grew up' is when he moved out and started living away from his parents.
﹄☆✮Evolution: Callum hasn't really changed much at all growing up, he has kept his innocent, reserved, curiousness throughout the years. For the most part he has become more childish and playful the more the years go by.
﹄☆✮Current Residence: Sunnyvale, California
﹄☆✮Funds: He has $50 on him, $3569.48 At home, $2400 at the bank
﹄☆✮Home: His apartment is relatively neat, but does have some mess here and there, like clothing and books, and such.
﹄☆✮Neighborhood: Callum thinks they are friendly, but he's never really talked much with his neighbors. Though the entire place is very well kept since it's a very decent place to live.
﹄☆✮Transportation: Kawasaki Ninja
﹄☆✮License Plate Number:
﹄☆✮Occupation: Author/ Technician/ Back up Vocals
﹄☆✮Work Ethnic: Callum works enthusiastically, he loves what he's doing. Though of course some days can be a complete drag.
﹄☆✮Rank: He is mostly self-employed, so he is the highest rank.
﹄☆✮Income:
﹄☆✮Wealth Status: Middle-Upperclass
﹄☆✮Experience: Assistant Engineer, Engineering, Art Model
﹄☆✮Organizations/Affiliations:
﹄☆✮IQ: 127
﹄☆✮Education: His parents didn't trust schools to give him a proper education. Though they had sent him to one they viewed as 'fair' while also having him doing extra work at home every so often, outside of his regular school work.
﹄☆✮School: Callum's school was a private school so it could be seen as better than at the very least most public schools.
﹄☆✮Grades: Callum got the highest grades just as much as he did the lowest, he didn't care much for school at all.
﹄☆✮Special Education: Early in life Callum skipped two grades.
﹄☆✮Social Stereotype: He never really had one.
﹄☆✮Degrees: Highschool
﹄☆✮Intelligence: Interpersonal
﹄☆✮Extracurricular Activities: Art, Music, Home Ec
﹄☆✮Religion: Peganism
﹄☆✮Morals:
﹄☆✮Crime Record: Has not been caught breaking any laws.
﹄☆✮Motivation: Reputation
﹄☆✮Priorities: Family, Writing, friends
﹄☆✮Philosophy: Individualism
﹄☆✮Political Party:
﹄☆✮Etiquette: Callum has relatively decent manners, there are some areas where he might be lacking though.
﹄☆✮Culture: American, Welsh, Scottish, and Pegan
﹄☆✮Influences:
﹄☆✮Relates to:
﹄☆✮Traditions: Welsh and Pegan mostly
﹄☆✮Superstitions:
﹄☆✮Main Goal: Becoming a popular author.
﹄☆✮Minor Goals/Ambitions:
﹄☆✮Career: Being an Author
﹄☆✮Desires:
﹄☆✮Wishlist:
﹄☆✮Accomplishments: Became an author.
﹄☆✮Greatest Achievement:
﹄☆✮Biggest Failure: Not paying being interested enough in school to fulfill his full potential.
﹄☆✮Secrets:
﹄☆✮Regrets: Not getting more interested in school.
﹄☆✮Worries:
﹄☆✮Best Dream:
﹄☆✮Worst Nightmare:
﹄☆✮Best Memories:
﹄☆✮Worst Memories:
﹄☆✮Languages: English, Cymraeg, Gaelic
﹄☆✮Accent: Thick blend of British, Welsh and Scottish, accents. Untainted, despite the years he has been in america.
﹄☆✮Voice: Medium pitched, soft yet penatrating and elegant.
﹄☆✮Speech Impediments: Bad stutter
﹄☆✮Greetings and Farewells:
﹄☆✮State of Mind:
﹄☆✮Compliment:
﹄☆✮Insult:
﹄☆✮Expletive: Shiiit!
﹄☆✮Laughter:
﹄☆✮Tag Line: "Um."
﹄☆✮Signature Quote:
﹄☆✮Reputation: Many people know of him as a New Author
﹄☆✮First Impressions: Shy and quiet, but also friendly.
﹄☆✮Stranger Impressions:
﹄☆✮Friendly Impressions:
﹄☆✮Enemy Impressions:
﹄☆✮Familiar Impressions:
﹄☆✮Compliments:
﹄☆✮Insults:
﹄☆✮Self-Impression:
🅟🅔🅡🅢🅞🅝🅐🅛🅘🅣🅨
﹄☆✮Strengths:
+++ IMAGINATIVE: having or showing creativity or inventiveness
+++ THOUGHTFUL: showing careful consideration or attention.
+++ METICULOUS: showing great attention to detail; very careful and precise.
+++ SAGE: having, showing, or indicating profound wisdom
+++ BALANCED: keeping or showing a balance; arranged in good proportions.
+++ HELPFUL: giving or ready to give help.
+++ PERSUIASIVE: good at persuading someone to do or believe something through reasoning or the use of temptation.
+++ BENEVOLENT: well meaning and kindly.
+++ DEBONAIR: confident, stylish, and charming.
+++ AMBITIOUS: having or showing a strong desire and determination to succeed.
﹄☆✮Flaws:
--- UNPREDICTABLE: not able to be predicted.
--- CHILDISH: silly and immature.
--- MANIPULATIVE: characterized by unscrupulous control of a situation or person.
--- ODD: different from what is usual or expected; strange.
--- CONFIDENTIAL: intended to be kept secret.
--- UNDEMANDING: not demanding
--- HYPNOTIC: exerting a compelling, fascinating, or soporific effect
--- SHY: being reserved or having or showing nervousness or timidity in the company of other people.
--- CLUMSY: awkward in movement or in handling things.
--- EXPERIMENTAL: involving a radically new and innovative style.
﹄☆✮Perception:
﹄☆✮Conflicts:
﹄☆✮Instincts:
﹄☆✮Lures: Sweets, Animals, Libraries, The Woods
﹄☆✮Soft Spot: The injured/upset
﹄☆✮Cruel Streak: Jerks
﹄☆✮Mood: Quiet and content
﹄☆✮Attitude: Shy but friendly
﹄☆✮Stability: Quite emotionally stable
﹄☆✮Expressiveness: Sometimes they are extremely expressive, other times they aren't.
﹄☆✮When Happy:
﹄☆✮When Depressed:
﹄☆✮When Angry:
𝕣𝕖𝕝𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟𝕤𝕙𝕚𝕡𝕤
﹄☆✮Immediate Family: Andras Branwen ( Father ), Nathaira Branwen (Mother)
﹄☆✮Distant Family:
﹄☆✮Community:
﹄☆✮Family:
﹄☆✮Friends: Addison ( Best Friend!)
﹄☆✮Enemies:
﹄☆✮Bosses:
﹄☆✮Followers:
﹄☆✮Heroes:
﹄☆✮Rivals:
﹄☆✮Relates to:
﹄☆✮Pets/Familiars:
﹄☆✮Lovers:
﹄☆✮Marital Status:
𝕡𝕙𝕪𝕤𝕚𝕔𝕒𝕝
﹄☆✮Species: Human
﹄☆✮Ethnicity: European
﹄☆✮Blood Type: O
﹄☆✮Preferred Hand: Ambidextrous, but Left preferent.
﹄☆✮Eye Color: Amber
﹄☆✮Hair Color: Dark brown
﹄☆✮Hairstyle: Hair
﹄☆✮Skin Tone:
﹄☆✮Complexion:
﹄☆✮Build: Lean, Average
﹄☆✮Height: 5'11"
﹄☆✮Weight: 123
﹄☆✮Facial Hair:
﹄☆✮Birthmarks/scars: Moles/birthmarks all over body. Scar on his right temple from a childhood accident.
﹄☆✮Distinguishing Features:
﹄☆✮Health: Quite healthy
﹄☆✮Energy: Can be seen as very energetic.
﹄☆✮Memory: Callum can remember things pretty well, mostly when it's about a subject he's really interested in.
﹄☆✮Senses: Callum has somewhat bad eyesight, but he can hear things extremely well.
﹄☆✮Allergies:
﹄☆✮Handicaps:
﹄☆✮Medication: antidepressants, antipsychotics,
﹄☆✮Phobias: Spheksophobia ( Fear of Wasps), Sciophobia (Fear of Shadows), Hemophobia (Fear of Blood), Coimetrophobia ( Fear of Cemetaries), Aphenphosmphobia ( Fear of being touched), Cynophobia ( Fear of dogs/Rabies), Merinthophobia ( Fear of being bound or tied up), Pupaphobia (Fear of Puppets), Psellismophobia ( Fear of Stuttering), Poinephobia ( Fear of Punishment), Pediophobia ( Fear of Dolls), Nyctophobia ( Fear of the dark, or of night.), Gelotophobia ( Fear of being laughed at), Emetophobia ( Fear of Vomiting), Dystychiphobia ( Fear of Accidents), Dishabiliophobia ( Fear of undressing in front of someone), Cleithrophobia (Fear of being locked in an enclosed space)
﹄☆✮Addictions:
﹄☆✮Mental Disorders: Schizophreniform disorder, Panic Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder
﹄☆✮Style: Casual, professional, loose fitting clothing.
﹄☆✮Mode of Dress: Often times somewhere between well kept to messy, except on off days, where it could be one extreme or the other.
﹄☆✮Grooming: Also often times somewhere between well kept to messy, except on off days, where it could be one extreme or the other.
﹄☆✮Posture: Stands mostly straight and proper
﹄☆✮Gait:
﹄☆✮Coordination: He has great reflex's but bad exicutions of movement at times, which makes him seem quite clumsy.
﹄☆✮Scent: Earthy rose and rain smell
𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕖𝕩𝕥𝕣𝕒 𝕓𝕚𝕥𝕤
﹄☆✮Habits and Mannerisms: (Any nervous ticks or unconscious habits your character might have. Ex: Nail biting, crosses arms, or twirls hair)
﹄☆✮Wardrobe: (Describe your character's closet. What is their formal, casual, or other kind of wear?)
﹄☆✮Accessories: (Tattoos, piercing, jewelry, glasses, ect.)
﹄☆✮Trinkets: (Applies to but not limited to good luck charms, purses, watches, or any other items they carry with them almost all the time.)
﹄☆✮Collections: (Does your character like to hoard or collect anything?)
﹄☆✮Most valuable possession: (In money)
﹄☆✮Prized Possession: (What object does your character value above all else?)
﹄☆✮Sex Life: (Pretty self explanatory)
﹄☆✮Turn-Ons: (What does your character want to see in their ideal mate?)
﹄☆✮Turn Offs: (What tends to make them back off)
﹄☆✮Position: (Dom/Sub)
﹄☆✮Plays: (Bondage, roleplay, ect.)
﹄☆✮Fetishes: (Self Explanatory)
﹄☆✮Virginity: (How many times have they "done it"?)
﹄☆✮Element: (Fire/Water/Air/Earth)
﹄☆✮Hobbies/Interests: (What does your character like to do for fun?)
﹄☆✮Skills/Talents: (Similar to hobbies, but refers to the level of skill a character has. For example, a character could like playing violin but isn't very good at it or vice versa.)
﹄☆✮Likes: (What does your character like?)
﹄☆✮Dislikes: (What can't they stand?)
﹄☆✮Sense of Humor: (Dark/dry/witty/sarcastic/dirty/childish/sophisticated/ironic)
﹄☆✮Pet Peeves: (Similar to dislikes, only more relating to human behavior than specific objects. Ex: When people tap on things or when people say "You're not fat!" when you really are)
﹄☆✮Superstitions/Beliefs: (Does your character believe in conspiracy theories or aliens? Do they throw salt over their shoulder or knock on wood?)
﹄☆✮Dreams/Nightmares: (What do they dream about? [at night])
﹄☆✮Quirks: (The strange little things that your character does to make them unique. Ex: Sleeps with their feet on the pillow or runs their hand along a pole as they walk beside it.)
﹄☆✮Savvy: (What is your character particularly well-informed of? [Ex: Politically, nature)
﹄☆✮Can't understand: (Something they just can't get into, such as English literate or obsession with sports)
﹄☆✮Closet Hobby: (Something that your character likes but isn't too obvious.)
﹄☆✮Guilty Pleasure: (You know...)
﹄☆✮Favorite Colors:
﹄☆✮Favorite Animals:
﹄☆✮Favorite Mythological Creatures:
﹄☆✮Favorite Places: (Ex: Fav City, State, or Country)
﹄☆✮Favorite Landmarks: (Ex: Eiffel Tower, Mt. Rushmore)
﹄☆✮Favorite Flavors: (Ex: Vanilla, Sour, Strawberry)
﹄☆✮Favorite Foods:
﹄☆✮Favorite Drinks:
﹄☆✮Favorite Characters: (Not one of yours)
﹄☆✮Favorite Genre:
﹄☆✮Favorite Books:
﹄☆✮Favorite Movies:
﹄☆✮Favorite Games:
﹄☆✮Favorite Shows:
﹄☆✮Favorite Music:
﹄☆✮Favorite Bands:
﹄☆✮Favorite Songs:
﹄☆✮Favorite Sports:
﹄☆✮Favorite Stores:
﹄☆✮Favorite Subjects:
﹄☆✮Favorite Numbers:
﹄☆✮Favorite Websites:
﹄☆✮Favorite Words:
﹄☆✮Favorite Quotations: (Can be lengthy and philosophical or just simple clichés such as "Every dog has his day)
﹄☆✮Least Favorite Colors:
﹄☆✮Least Favorite Animals:
﹄☆✮Least Favorite Mythological Creatures:
﹄☆✮Least Favorite Places:
﹄☆✮Favorite Landmarks:
﹄☆✮Least Favorite Flavors:
﹄☆✮Least Favorite Foods:
﹄☆✮Least Favorite Drinks:
﹄☆✮Least Favorite Characters:
﹄☆✮Least Favorite Genre:
﹄☆✮Least Favorite Books:
﹄☆✮Least Favorite Movies:
﹄☆✮Least Favorite Games:
﹄☆✮Least Favorite Shows:
﹄☆✮Least Favorite Music:
﹄☆✮Least Favorite Bands:
﹄☆✮Least Favorite Songs:
﹄☆✮Least Favorite Sports:
﹄☆✮Least Favorite Stores:
﹄☆✮Least Favorite Subjects:
﹄☆✮Least Favorite Numbers:
﹄☆✮Least Favorite Websites:
﹄☆✮Least Favorite Words:
﹄☆✮Least Favorite Quotations: (Can be lengthy and philosophical or just simple clichés such as "Every dog has his day)
﹄☆✮MBTI Personality Type: [Ex: ENTP, ISTJ]
﹄☆✮Temperament: (Chloric/Sanguine/Melancholic/Phlegmatic) May also be called color types, such as yellow, red, blue, or green)
﹄☆✮Enneagram: (The Reformer/The Helper/The Achiever/The Individualist/The Investigator/The Loyalist/The Enthusiast/The Challenger/The Peacemaker)
﹄☆✮Ego/Superego/Id: (Superego is aims for perfection, society, and the idea of right and wrong. Id is unconscious desires and instincts - Which of these are they most driven by?
﹄☆✮The Self: (The center/core of your character)
﹄☆✮The Shadow: (The opposite qualities your character themselves does not believe they possess, but do subconsciously)
﹄☆✮Persona/Mask: (What they present to the world, or the side they use to protect themselves)
﹄☆✮Role: (What purpose does your character serve? [mentor, leader])
﹄☆✮Fulfillment: (How well do they serve that role?)
﹄☆✮Significance: (Why does your character matter?)
﹄☆✮Alignment: (Good/Evil/Neutral/Lawful/Chaotic)
﹄☆✮Comparison: (Compare your character to some kind of animal, object, or anything else you can think of.)
﹄☆✮Symbol: (Does your character have any kind of recurring symbol that represents them? [Ex: a rose, a black cat, a sunset] Could be blatant or subtle.)
﹄☆✮Song: (A song you think best suits your character)
﹄☆✮Vice: (Pride/Greed/Gluttony/Lust/Envy/Sloth/Wrath)
﹄☆✮Virtue: (Patience/Diligence/Chastity/Temperance/Charity/Kindness/Humility)
﹄☆✮Defining Moment: (This is it. The single greatest moment of your character, when they truly become alive.)
﹄☆✮Tropes: (What about your character is stereotypical or cliched? [You can't say nothing. Every character has some kind of cliche in them])
﹄☆✮One Word: (Use a single adjective to sum up your character in a nutshell)
#CCBStuff#CCBBio#JaxAU#JaxBandAU#BandAU#CourtneyAU#CourtneyBandAU#AU#Created for a now dead RP on another site#JaxBio#JaxAUBio#AUBio
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I work at a grooming and spa place for pets and we groomed this cute lil' corgi named Baxter today and I looked out our front window and this is his moms car.
#extra#dog#dog mom#pupper#doggo#pets#dog grooming#cat grooming#grooming#spa#in love#baxter#corgi#pembroke welsh corgi#cardigan corgi#license plate#cars#car#mom#dog owner#dog lover#haircut#bath#clean#puppy#puppies#dogs#animal ears#dog ears#paws
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DGM Week || Day 7
Walking Out
“If I was going to need all these things when I get to France...why did you leave them in Britain?”
“I’ll have more time to disappear this way.”
Allen Walker, age sixteen, deliberately slowed his huff into a sigh while glaring balefully at Cross Marian, who was as sensitive about his age as stereotype claimed women were. They were an unlikely pair and if anyone asked, they’d call each other uncle and nephew. The lie was barely tolerable on both sides. They had...a relationship which wasn’t toxic, but ‘familial’ was not a word either would use to describe it.
Cross pulled into Indira Gandhi International Airport and headed for a drop-off point. He’d held onto Allen for longer than he’d actually needed (or even wanted) to, but air travel for unaccompanied minors under sixteen was too much a pain to work out. And there were complications Allen wouldn’t have a clue about until he reached Britain. He didn’t want to deal with the inevitable explosion once the kid found out about those.
Allen straightened in his seat as Cross guided the rented car to the front doors of the airport. He began side-eyeing his guardian and waited.
“What?”
“You really are despicable, Teacher,” Allen started.
“I rescued your ass and took care of it, too,” Cross retorted, sounding aggrieved. “You don’t get to call me things like ‘despicable’.”
“When were you going to tell me I don’t exist on paper?”
Komui Lee stumbled into the living room on route the kitchen. Habit dictated his attention being drawn to the oversized clock which took up the entirety of one wall. It was a very unusual clock - one he had built personally after seeing it in a movie. It still told time properly, but there were extra needles pointing to various words which had nothing to do with time. Each of those needles was different color. There was a chart of names which the colors represented for visitors hanging nearby.
A lavender needle represented his little sister and it was currently pointed at the wrought iron icon of a house.
Komui grinned delightedly and with a sudden burst of energy, continued on into the kitchen. The coffee pot was already filled thanks to its programmable nature (how the universe once functioned without them was an unsolvable mystery) and Komui poured himself a cup to sip on while he pulled out the fixings for a massive breakfast.
Lenalee was limping slightly when she came into the kitchen, looking exhausted. Komui did not bring it up. Instead, he slid a large plate filled with every breakfast food item imaginable along with a glass of orange juice in front of her when she sat, leaning over as he did so to give her a warm hug.
“Welcome home, Lenalee.”
Lenalee twisted to hug him in return, her arms nearly tight enough to bruise. Her ‘trips’ away from home never went well, but things must have gone extraordinarily bad this time. Komui tightened his own hold.
“Good morning, Brother.”
“Were you dropped off?” Komui asked, returning to the oven to shovel his own portions onto a second plate. “I heard a car last night.”
Lenalee shot him a puzzled looked, but shook her head. “No, I came home the usual way.”
“Huh...maybe I was dreaming,” he mused. He moved the various pans to the sink to let them soak while he and his precious sister ate. He had to have been dreaming. They had no neighbors - unless one counted the constantly absent Cross Marian as a neighbor. All the other houses stood empty. There was no reason to have heard a car going down the street at all.
Unless....
Komui dropped his fork and stood to retrieve his tablet. Lenalee glanced at him curiously, but continued to eat. From the tablet, he accessed the security cameras along the street and played the footage from last night, expecting to see nothing.
Instead, he saw a car.
To be accurate, he saw a black Pontiac Firebird Trans Am.
Komui checked another camera and zoomed in on the license plate. It matched the number of Cross’ black Pontiac Firebird Trans Am. Meaning he had heard Cross driving down the street.
He pulled up the feed of the front of Cross’ Victorian Gothic mansion and watched the Firebird pull into the drive, pause to wait for the gates to open, and then drive around back where Komui knew a detached garage was hidden from view.
Komui fast-forwards the rest of the night, fully expecting to see the car leave again. Except it didn’t. The car never reappeared and the feed caught up to real time.
“Lena. Be a dear and help me make a few calls,” he said. “Cross Marian came back last night and miraculously, he’s still home.”
“Why am I here again?” said a sour-faced Japanese young man. Like Lenalee, he’d just gotten home a few hours ago. He was holding a katana in crossed arms and sulking.
“Because we need the backup,” Lenalee said, walking on air well above the heads of her peers thanks to her boots and testing the windows alongside Gwen Flail (who was balancing on the crossguard of her extended chain-whip longsword), which was what Yu Kanda and Suman Dark were doing on the ground level. Despite the fact Klaud Nyne had agreed to serve as bait, Cross was not answering the front door. Lenalee had knocked on the windows of Cross’ bedroom and wasn’t responded to either.
“Hey! I found an unlocked window!” Gwen called, jumping through and reaching back to grab her weapon and deactivate it.
Lenalee skipped through the air and followed her inside, looking down at the two men, “We’ll try to sneak down to let everyone in, go tell Brother and Miss Nyne.“
Suman stared uncertainly after the women as they vanished into the house and then turned his gaze on Kanda. “This guy has a reputation with womanizing, doesn’t he? Shouldn’t we go with them?”
“Only if you want to be shot,” Kanda replied tersely. He whistled sharply and two large dogs came bounding to heel. The grumpy teenager went stalking off to the front door and Suman trailed after him, still uncertain.
Allen wasn’t able to get to Cross’ mansion until very late in the evening. Even with a GPS, he had gotten lost more than once. It’d taken some doing on the British politician’s part to wrangle him a license at his age, but that was how big the favor the politician owed Cross. Allen had liked Graham - they’d bonded over a shared irritation about the man while Allen had waited to get proper legal documents.
He’d been surprised Cross was letting him drive his personal car (which had been parked at the Paris Orly Airport for eight years), rather than forcing him to get a taxi or something. Granted, Cross had attached to the note to the keys threatening him within an inch of his life if anything happened to the vehicle.
After reaching his destination , Allen stopped by a 24-hour store to do shopping for his most immediate needs. A more thorough trip would have to be conducted tomorrow - he was exhausted.
Cross’ personal golem, Timcanpy (which Allen may or may not have kidnapped before getting out of the car back in India) woke him up bright and early with an extremely bite on the ear. Allen didn’t bat him away for it, since he’d asked for the golem to make sure he was awake in spite of the late arrival, but it was a shame Timcanpy didn’t have some alarm feature based on noise.
He hadn’t explored Cross’ mansion much last night beyond locating the kitchen to stuff his groceries into. He had been planning to do his exercises in the yard, but Timcanpy had led him into an oversized basement (and that explained, probably, why Cross had such a big property) which was set up as a gym. It was tailored for Cross’ personal regimen clearly and included a gun range on the south end.
Allen eyed the display of various guns and wondered if one of the keys on the key ring he’d gotten from the box Mother had given him went to any of those locks. Cross had taught him how to shoot. Innocence for Akuma, the mundane for humans - Allen had never had the tragic problem of accidentally confusing humans for Akuma, but he was alone in that ability. He should practice, though.
Resolving to figure it out later, Allen ran through his exercises, making a mental list of things he need to alter for himself (a bigger area for tumbling practice, for starters). The gym turned out to have a shower in it too, which Allen used.
When he got out, he found Timcanpy had vacated the gym, but didn’t think much of it. He was focusing more and more on his hunger. He was so hungry he was practically hallucinating the smells of breakfast. Hopefully, he had time to make everything he’d purchased last night.
He didn’t realize he wasn’t hallucinating until he turned into the dining room and found that Cross’ home had been invaded by half a dozen people and found them eating his food in. Allen stopped and stared. They all stopped and stared too. Both sides were silent.
Timcanpy, he noted, was being held prisoner by a monkey sitting on the shoulder of a blond woman with an impressive set of facial scars.
Allen, dressed in only a pair of sweats, hair damp, with a towel over his bare shoulders to absorb the wet, could not find the words to break the silence. He pushed his hair out of his face and tried anyways. “Uhhh....”
“What the fuck is wrong with your face?”
Allen stared at the speaker - Japanese, male, with long hair and two giant dogs laying at his feet. Allen still felt completely wordless, but he saw the moment everyone in the room spotted the star over his left eye.
Everything then dissolved into chaos.
The Chinese man was tackled by a German man and the Japanese man and a Welsh woman were crossing the room fast as lightning. There was suddenly a giant monkey looming over him. Two swords were coming at him and Allen barely managed to activate his arm in time to block the blows, though he wasn’t able to do anything to stop the giant primate from pinning him to the ground.
Allen gasped at the pain, intense and unexpected, but did not scream. He could not think of a time his arm had ever been injured. The pain was new and that made it hurt worse.
“Wait, wait, wait!” someone was shouting. “Is that Innocence?”
Allen was still breathless, but he sensed pressure from a touch near the glass cross in the back of his hand and a woman spoke, “Yes...it is.”
“He has an Akuma star on his head!” another woman declared.
“I’m cursed,” Allen managed to wheeze and deactivated his arm. “It’s a curse.”
The Chinese man (looking a little ruffled) was allowed to approach, though the German fellow and Chinese woman seemed reluctant to allow it. The monkey was still pinning him down. Timcanpy was suddenly in his face, bobbing in a worried manner.
"Who are you?” the Chinese man asked.
“Allen Walker. I’m Cross Marian’s student.”
The scarred woman made a soft noise of disbelief, “The last time someone suggested Cross take a student, he vanished for three years.”
“He said he was sending a letter of introduction to someone named Komui Lee,” Allen said through gritted teeth, voice rough.
Everyone turned on the Chinese man, who was sipping coffee from a mug. Allen stared at him too, suspicious. “...Are you Komui Lee?”
“Brother...,” the Chinese girl muttered.
“I have a call to make!” Komui announced, and...proceeded to flutter out of the room.
The pressure on his torso vanished and Allen found a tiny monkey in his hair and went cross-eyed when the little creature leaned down into his face to chatter at him. With his human hand, he reached up to give the animal a scratch.
A hand was stuck into his face and when he looked up, he saw the scarred woman offering to help him stand. He took it, holding his Innocence limb close to his chest. He was growing increasingly aware he wasn’t wearing anything to conceal the wrinkled red flesh of his Innocence and tried to be discrete in covering at least his shoulder with his towel.
“Sorry,” the Welsh woman said, eyeing the bright white tears on his left arm. The sword-wielding male made an annoyed sound, but didn’t apologize.
“I’ll go get some medicine from the medical wing at school,” the Lee sister said and left as well.
“I said the fridge looked packed for a parasite-type,” the German man said suddenly.
“So you did,” the scarred woman remarked, holding out her hand to the monkey.
Allen winced a little from the tug on his hair as the monkey transferred perches with a jump. “And...you all are?”
“Klaud Nyne - I’m one of Cross’ peers,” the scarred woman said. She pointed to the others. “Gwen Flail, Yu Kanda, and Suman Dark. Komui’s little sister who just left is named Lenalee.”
“And you all decided to invade my house because...?”
“We thought you were Cross,” Klaud answered.
And that explained everything.
#dgraymanweek#allen walker#cross marian#timcanpy#others#many others#my writings#modern!Holy War#so the dgm wiki suggests the EU HQ might be in France?#i did very cursory research as i was writing#a full on story would need much much much much more research done#and help from someone who knows what life is like in france
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Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance Medium
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
Points of Contact: Performance, Food and Cookery, a conference organized by the Centre for Performance Research in Cardiff (13-16 January 1994) was a food event in its own right. We heard papers on everything from "Banquets as Gesamtkunstwerk" and the "The Archeology of the Trifle" to "How the French Played with Their Food: Care^me and the Pièce Montée." We had sampled durian, a large tropical fruit with a horny peel and creamy lobes of flesh--it exudes a penetrating aroma of vanilla, rotten eggs, almonds, turpentine, and old shoes. We saw the East Coast Artists' Faust/Gastronome, directed by Richard Schechner, violate the boundaries of the body when performers passed chewed food from mouth to mouth. Bobby Baker performed "Drawing on a Mother's Experience," in which she recited the painful story of her life, while flinging onto a white sheet the contents of her shopping bags--cold roast beef, tomato chutney, sponge fingers, brandy, black treacle, sugar, eggs, Guinness, flour, skimmed milk, tinned black currants, frozen fish pie, and Greek strained sheep's milk yogurt--finally rolling herself up in the sheet. We feasted at Happy Gathering, a nearby Chinese restaurant, sampled Welsh cheeses, and alternated roasted meats and rounds of polyphony at a Georgian banquet in a local church. We watched an instructional video on how to slaughter and butcher a pig and another of street vendor in Thailand tossing morning glory (water convulvus) in a glorious arc from his fiery wok to a plate held by a waiter across the street. We cooked our own Welsh breakfasts of sausage, laverbread (seaweed), and eggs in iron skillets on stoves brought into the conference space for the purpose--preceded by a lecture-demonstration, of course. We "harvested" our lunch in the edible greenhouse, entitled A Temperate Menu, created by Alicia Rios.
Attentive to what is performative about food, we looked at the most ordinary and the most extraordinary food events and not only at domestic and professional cooks, but also artists who work with food. Since cooking techniques, culinary codes, eating protocols, and gastronomic discourses are already so highly elaborated, what is there left for professional artists who chose to work with food as subject or medium to do? Food, and all that is associated with it, is already larger than life. It is already highly charged with meaning and affect. It is already performative and theatrical. An art of the concrete, food, like performance, is alive, fugitive, and sensory.
Food and performance converge conceptually at three junctures. First, to perform is to do, to execute, to carry out to completion, to discharge a duty--in other words, all that governs the production, presentation, and disposal of food and their staging. To perform in this sense is to make food, to serve food. It is about materials, tools, techniques, procedures, actions. It is about getting something done. It is in this sense, first and foremost, that we can speak of the performing kitchen.
Second, to perform is to behave. This is what Erving Goffman calls the performance of self in everyday life. Whether a matter of habit, custom, or law, the divine etiquette of ritual, codifications of social grace, the laws governing cabarets and liquor licenses, or the health and sanitation codes, performance encompasses the social practices that are part and parcel of what Pierre Bourdieu calls habitus. To perform in this sense is to behave appropriately in relation to food at any point in its production or consumption or disposal, each of which may be subject to precise protocols or taboos. Jewish and Hindu laws of ritual purity and formal etiquette stipulate the requirements in exquisite detail. They involve the performance of precepts, as well as precepts of performance.
Third, to perform is to show. When doing and behaving are displayed, when they are shown, when participants are invited to exercise discernment, evaluation, and appreciation, food events move towards the theatrical and, more specifically, towards the spectacular. It is here that taste as a sensory experience and taste as an aesthetic faculty converge. The conflation of the two meanings of taste can be found both in Enlightenment aesthetics and the Hindu concept of rasa alike.
During the Enlightenment, aesthetics was realigned from "a science of sensory knowledge" to a philosophy of beauty in relation to sensory experience. The sensory roots of aesthetic response were, however, preserved. While taste as an aesthetic faculty lacks a dedicated organ, Enlightenment aesthetics thought of it as "le sens interne du beau" or the "sixth sense within us, whose organs we cannot see." Moreover, gastronomic metaphors for aesthetic response inflected the visual with the gustatory (Voltaire compared the taste for beauty in all the arts with the ability of the tongue and palate to discern food) and the tactile (Voltaire wrote that "Taste is not content with seeing, with knowing the beauty of a work; it has to feel it, to be touched by it."). Touch in this context both concretizes emotional response, and speaks to what el-Khoury calls the "tactility of taste." Given that gastronomy and eroticism share not only touch but also appetite and oral pleasure, Enlightenment thought associated the two, particularly in the figure of the libertine and the orgy.
As a sensory experience, taste operates in multiple modalities�not only by way of the mouth and nose, but also the eye, ear, and skin. How does food perform to the sensory modalities unique to it? A key to this question is a series of dissociations. While we eat to satisfy hunger and nourish our bodies, some of the most radical effects occur precisely when food is dissociated from eating and eating from nourishment. Such dissociations produce eating disorders, religious experiences, culinary feats, sensory epiphanies, and art.
Sensory Dissociations
"The distinction of the senses is arbitrary." �Marinetti
Food that is dissociated from eating bypasses the nose and mouth. Such food may well be subject to extreme visual, and for that matter tactile and verbal, elaboration. The showpieces in culinary olympics and exhibitions of pastry and confectionary are exhibited, but they are not generally eaten (with the exception of hot entries). Eat them at their freshest and there would be nothing to exhibit. Wait till after the exhibition and they are not worth eating. They are literally a feast for the eye and they are called showpieces. Food stylists produce a toxic cuisine that may well look more edible and delicious than real food, particularly under hot studio lights. Featured in images that sell food, magazines, and cookbooks, dishes fashioned from substances never destined for the mouth "look good enough to eat." They are a case of inedible spectacle.
The task of the stylist is to "show" sensory experiences that are invisible, or more accurately, to provide visual cues that we associate with particular tastes and smells, even in the absence of gustatory and olfactory stimuli. In this regard, the art of studio food is at once mimetic (the dish prepared for the camera must look like it could grace the table) and indexical (the visual details must index qualities that we can only know from other sensory modalities). From color, steam rising, gloss, color, and texture, we infer taste, smell, and feel, as well as whether the food in question is supposed to have been fried, roasted, baked, steamed, and grilled, and whether it is hot or cold. Taste is something we anticipate and infer from how things look, feel to the hand, smell (outside the mouth), and sound. We use these sensory experiences to tell, before putting something into the mouth, if it is fresh, ripe, or rotten, if it is raw or cooked, if it is properly prepared. Our survival, both biological and social, depends on such cues. So does our pleasure.
Our eyes let us "taste" food at a distance by activating the sense memories of taste and smell. Even a feast for the eyes only will engage the other senses imaginatively, for to see is not only to taste, but also to eat. The chef's maxim, "A dish well presented is already half eaten," recognizes that eating begins (and may even end) before food enters the body. Television cooking shows�there are now entire channels devoted entirely to food�are a way of eating with the eyes by watching others prepare, present, and consume food, without either cooking or eating oneself. Cookbooks, now more than ever, are a way of eating by reading recipes and looking at photographs. Those books may never see the kitchen. Indeed, experienced readers can sight-read a recipe the way a musician sight-reads a score. They can "play" the recipe in their mind's eye.
While not unique to the experience of food, visual aspects of food are no less essential to it. First, the eyes play a critical role in stimulating appetite. Visual appeal literally makes the mouth water, gets the juices going, starts the stomach rumbling�in other words, sets the autonomic reflexes associated with digestion in motion. These responses�salivation, secretion of gastric juices, hunger pangs�are involuntary, spontaneous, instinctive, though the cues are ones that we learn. Second, the eyes are bigger than the stomach. This is a not only a reason not to shop for food when hungry, but also an incentive to feast with the eyes. Visual interest can be sustained long after the desire to taste and smell has abated and appetite has been sated. Perhaps for this reason, the most spectacular displays are likely to come at the end of the meal.
The wondrous confectionary presented at the conclusion of Renaissance banquets, while technically edible, might never be eaten, though it (together with the other courses) might be enthusiastically applauded. Barbara Wheaton reports that, at the appropriate moment, the table might be abandoned to pillage and the guests invited to demolish the exquisite conceits that had been set before them. These "edible monuments," to use Marcia Reed's apt term, are performing objects of a special kind. Memorable examples are the pie with four and twenty blackbirds (the birds would have been placed inside the crust after the pie was baked and then released when the crust was opened) and the macchina della coccagna, an edible festival sculpture. The macchina della coccagna represented paradise on earth, imagined as the Land of Cockaigne, itself an edible world where sausages, cheese, and pastries grow on trees. Such conceits, whether sotelties, surtouts, trionfi, or machines--literally perform. According to Reed, eighteenth-century Italian edible masterpieces of the macchina della coccagna might feature fireworks spewing forth from a ram's head or pig's mouth, fountains flowing not only with water, but also wine, and pools of water with live ducks and fish. Large, free-standing, and edible, such festival architecture and sculpture enacted its own ephemerality. When the king gave the signal, the gathered crowd scaled, attacked, and destroyed a Neapolitan cuccagna in the form of a temporary fortress adorned with food.
Food that does not enter the mouth offers artists such as Alicia Rios the opportunity to focus specifically on tactile aspects of food. According to the program notes for Organoleptic Deconstruction in Three Movements, which she performed at the 1993 Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, Rios explored "the texture, sound, and appearance of various substances out of their usual context"�first and foremost, out of the mouth. Rios made chewing into a full body process. She externalized the mouth, extended the mouth's lining to the rest of her skin, and displaced the mouth's functions onto the rest of the body. Her whole body became a masticating mouth. While etiquette books insist that one chew with the mouth closed, never speak with a full mouth or spit, and dispose of anything removed from the mouth discretely, Rios spokes with her "mouth" full. Paul Levy describes the event:
Ms. Rios was arrayed in white�daringly, as it turned out. In the first movement, Ms. Rios placed bowls of 10 or so foods, which had in common only that they were coloured pink and white, on the lecture table�. She proceeded to "chew" each of these foods, but with her fingers, not her teeth. Thus, the strawberries were reduced to squishy pulp, and the moderator of the session sprayed her fingers with cream from the can�. Ms. Rios had taken the act of masticating food out of its context, by using the larger, external sensory organs, the fingers, instead of the smaller internal ones, teeth, tongue, and palate. She had thus made public an act which is essentially private�.
In the third act, Rios lay on a transparent mattress filled with potato chips, which she "chewed" by rolling around on it. By externalizing actions internal to the mouth, Rios isolated mastication, made her fingers and even her entire body into a mouth, and disassociated chewing from tasting and swallowing.
The substance of food and corporeality of the body inform "Gnaw" (1992), a three-part installation by Janine Antoni . She presents a 600 lb. block of gnawed chocolate, another of gnawed lard, and the candies and lipsticks she has made from the bits of each block that she has spit out. She has molded heart-shaped candies from the chocolate and 300 lipsticks from the lard. While the teeth marks are clearly evident on the massive cubes of chocolate and lard, there is no sign of the rest of the body, except perhaps by inference from the sweetheart candy (made from the chocolate she spit out) and cosmetic lipstick (destined to adorn the mouth). Antoni's teeth have "sculpted" material that under other circumstances would be processed using hands and tools and cooked, before being placed in the mouth, chewed, and swallowed. "Gnaw" also suggests the teeth of an animal, who knows no other tools, rather than a human, who can exteriorize the action of teeth to a knife. The actions are mechanical and repetitive, even obsessive. The mouth, painted red with lipstick, its teeth barred, becomes an instrument of violence, self-inflicted, an independent organ with a life of its own. The tongue is used to similar effect in Antoni's piece "Lick and Lather" (1993), for which she licked seven self-portrait busts made of chocolate (they were paired with seven busts made of soap, hence "lather"). Lard, an icon of fat and, by extension, fatness, is a recurrent material in Antoni's work. She has immersed her body in lard and washed herself with soap made with the lard that her body displaced. Touch in her work extends from the teeth to the body's largest organ, the skin, all of it.
With corporeality at the fore and the line between skin and flesh ambiguous, Jana Sterbak's flesh dress disassociates food from eating by violence. The food that is present is food that is withheld from the body. For "Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic," Sterbak clothed a silver mannequin in a dress made of 50 pounds of raw flank steak that she had salted lightly�"The dress starts out red and moist, then gradually dries out into a tough leathery substance." The meat was left to desiccate as the piece traveled from one exhibition venue to the next, arriving at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa in 1991. The flank steak is meant neither to be eaten nor to look like something one might want to eat. Rather, it concretizes the self-consuming anorexic body, the body that refuses food. This is a body without a mouth. The portal is closed. The skin of such a body becomes literally a flesh dress draped upon a hard frame, an emblem of the anorectic body as corpse. Sterbak, who was born in Prague and works out of Montreal and Paris, has also made furniture out of food: "Apollinaire" is an armchair upholstered with meat, while the thin mattress resting on the spindly wire frame of "Bread bed" (1997) is, as the name suggests, made of bread. Furniture intended to accommodate the body has become flesh and bread in its own right. The religious overtones are appropriate, for such uses of food verge on, if they do not cross the line of, sacrilige, if only because such food is being "wasted," a term with particular resonance in the context of anorexia. These objects materialize "the body in pain," to use Elaine Scarry's phrase.
Eleanor Antin gets under the skin in her piece "Carving: A Traditional Sculpture." She presents a series of photographs of herself, nude, to mark stages in her loss of weight between July 15 and August 21, 1972. Subjecting herself to a strict diet, Antin allowed the body to become its own food. The refusal to ingest food can be inferred from images of the starving body. This living sculpture is "traditional," not only because the female nude is a classic subject of European art, but also because, as Antin explains in her commentary, the form emerges from inside the flesh, just as a sculpture emerges from inside the marble, in a continuous layer across the entire surface. In the context of living flesh, however, the term "carved" also suggests meat. The body that dines on itself changes its shape and gets smaller, incrementally, just as a meat roast gets gradually smaller as it is carved a slice at a time.
Food that is not eaten can still be seen and, depending on the circumstances, smelled, touched, and heard, but it cannot be tasted unless it enters the mouth. However, tasting does not require swallowing. Winetasters spit out the wine they have tasted, though they will suck it in with air and swirl it around the mouth to bring out its full range. So precise are the conditions for focussing on the sensations of taste, that Professor Claus Joseph Riedel of Riedel Glassworks, in Austria, has created wine glasses whose shapes are designed to bring out the distinctive qualities of particular wine varieties:
Different areas of the tongue are sensitive to different tastes. Riedel glasses are designed to direct the wine to the zone that highlights its best qualities. For example, the Riedel Bordeaux/Cabernet glass creates a harmony of fruit, tannin and acidity by directing the wine flow to the center of the tongue, whereas the Burgundy/Pinot Noir glass directs the wine to the tip of the tongue, highlighting the fruit while balancing the naturally high acidity.
This model of the tongue (and an entire wine glass business based on it) has no scientific basis--according to Linda Bartoshuk, all four tastes can be perceived wherever there are taste receptors. In addition to taste, there is look (color and clarity) and mouthfeel (viscosity or texture, irritation, including astringency and bite, and temperature). Above all, judging by wine descriptions, it is olfaction that defines much that we think of as taste. Volatiles enter the nose from outside the body (orthonasal olfaction) as well as from inside the mouth (retronasal olfaction).
While taste is an analytic sense�we can clearly distinguish sweet, salt, sour, and bitter--smell is widely held to be a holistic sense. To discriminate its many components (the olfactory system can sense thousands of different molecules), it seems to be necessary to encode the olfactory verbally in memory. This is what the language of wine tasting is about. Michael Broadbent's account of a 1981 red bordeaux (Chateau Pétrus) reads like a description of a musical performance in a delicatessan:
Five notes: Black; dumbness, concealing depth of fruit; full, fleshy, rich complete�sort of puppy fat a year after the vintage. Next, in magnum, at Fredrick's Pétrus tasting in 1986; medium-deep, plummy, spicy bouquet developing, meaty, calf's foot jelly. At the "Stockholm' Group blind vertical tasting in 1990, one of the few vintages I got right. Maturing; a bit hard at first but opened up. crisp fruit; rather leathery texture, acidity noticeable. Most recently decanted in the office, taste, then taken to the Penning-Rowsells'. Four hours later, opulent, mulberry-like fruit; seemed sweeter, full of fruit flavour though blunt.
Broadbent last tasted this wine in 1990, a year before he published this account, and no doubt will keep tasting it to the year 2005, the last year he recommends for it.
Wine is alive. It matures over the years and changes in even a few hours. It is an event. Even a single taste can be like an act in a play that is as long as the life of the vintage. The succession and duration of sensations in that single mouthful is what Roland Barthes calls tiering in his commentary on Brillat-Savarin's Physiology of Taste. After noting the movement from excitement to stupefaction that Brilllat-Savarin attributes to champagne and Barthes to whisky, Barthes describes taste as the sense that "experiences and practices multiple and successive apprehensions�beginnings, recurrences, overlappings, a whole counterpoint of sensation: to the arrayed arrangement of the sense of sight (in great panoramic delights) corresponds the tiering of taste." Indeed, he says of the gustatory sensation that when submitted to time it can "develop somewhat in the manner of a narrative, or of a language." It could be said that a particular wine is inferred from these sensations, which themselves tell the story of the climate, the soil, the grape, the cultivation, the processing, the pre-phylloxera years, the barrel�by a process of learned associations and inferences, aided by language.
A key to this process is olfaction, which stands in a special relationship to memory. While difficult to recall, once an aroma registers and the next time it is experienced, it can call up vivid memories of its previous contexts. Indeed, its ability to do so is involuntary and it through disciplined attention and verbal description that winetasters develop the ability to remember and identify tastes. Smell is the "most interior" and "least informative" of the sense, according to Kant. This is one reason why winetasters use language to exteriorize the information they derive from sensory experience. As Han Ruins notes in his essay on the phenomenology of smell:
The paradoxical objectivity of smell is that it is more intruding, more immediate, than any other sensation, and at the same time essentially fleeting and elusive. Its presence is never permanent. Not even when that which emits it is present in its materiality is it possible to remain attentive to the smell�. Smell does not permit the continuous examination and enrichment of the first impression which we take for granted, when it comes to the other senses�. The nose must continue to act incessantly, without being able to store the impression. The impression does not become more dense, it is not solidified as when we concentrate on a tone or a color. It is always evaporating.
To explore precisely these aspects of olfaction, the Futurists dissociated it from other sensations and made it a star of their culinary performances.
They did this in two ways. First, they liberated the sensory experience of eating from appetite and nourishment. Deliver nutrition by vitamin pills or radio. Save food for art. "Woe betide those who cannot distinguish between things which serve to please the stomach and those destined to delight the eyes, " the Futurist Cookbook declared. Since even food saved for art would need to be consumed, they found ways to stave off satiety and extend the gastronomic experience. They advocated light food and small units (mouthfuls). They externalized functions of the mouth (tearing, chewing, masticating) and delegated them to the hands for "prelabial tactile pleasure." They eliminated or delayed swallowing. A Futurist body free of the demands of nourishment was subject to its own anatomy. Accounts of Futurist meals spoke of exciting the enamel on the teeth, filling the nostril with heaven, choking the esophagus with admiration. An empty stomach was needed for "White and Black," Farfa's recipe for "a one-man show on the internal walls of the Stomach consisting of free-form arabesques of whipped cream sprinkled with lime-tree charcoal." In this recipe, the stomach is a surface to paint, not a vessel to fill. In this way, the Futurists extended the physiology of aesthetic response to the deep interior recesses of the body.
Second, the Futurists made good on the declaration in their 1921 Manifesto on Tactilism that "the distinction of the senses is arbitrary." In that spirit, they proceeded to disarticulate the taste, sight, sound, and feel of food. They then elaborated each in its own right and recombined them in surprising ways. In the recipe for "Raw Meat Torn by Trumpet Blasts," mouthfuls of electrified beef alternated with "vehement blasts on the trumpet blown by the eater himself." The "Extremist Banquet" was a two-day orgy of olfaction. At the "Tactile Dinner Party" diners were to wear pajamas, sit in a darkened room, and bury their faces in salad to activate the skin on the outer cheeks and lips. They might fondle a tactile device while eating "polyrhythmic salad," listening to music, and smelling lavender perfume. Or, since tasting did not require swallowing, they were prepared to put things into their mouths that could not be swallowed. For the "Steel Chicken," "the body of the chicken [was] mechanized by aluminium�coloured bonbons," while "The Excited Pig" was a "salami immersed in a sauce of coffee and eau-de-Cologne." They staged their culinary events at such places as their Holy Palate Restaurant in Turin and the Colonial Exhibition in Paris in 1931.
The jaw and the gut play a central role in Dali's gastronomics--"All my experiences are visceral." "I hold visceral impulses to be the supreme indicators." "My enlightenment is born and propogated through my guts." Les Diners de Gala, the opulent cookbook that he conceived and illustrated, sets out a surrealist gastro-aesthetics that is at once visceral and acetic, Dionysian and Catholic. Appropriately, Dali is inspired by what he calls the "positivist matérialism" of Brillat-Savarin's Physiology of Taste. As Barthes has noted, the body posited by Brillat-Savarin is also visceral: "Food provokes an internal pleasure: inside the body, enclosed in it, not just beneath the skin, but in that deep, central zone, all the more primordial because it is soft, tangled, permeable, and called, in a very general sense, the intestines." The internal pleasure should, in Barthes's view, be considered a sixth sense: "gustatory delight is pervasive, spread over the entire secret lining of the mucous membranes; it arises from what should be our sixth sense�if BS had not reserved precisely this place for the genesic sense�coenaesthesis, the overall sensation of our internal body," a diffuse sense of well-being. If the Futurist stomach is the anatomical equivalent of the white cube, for Farfa's black and white arabesques, the gourmand's body that emerges from the Physiology of Taste is seen "as a softly radiant painting, illuminated from within." It gives off a glow, evidence of "the voluptuous effects of food."
In contrast with the Futurist body, which is posited as empty of substance and ready for sensation, Dali's body is insistently alimentary�"I am exhalted by all that is edible." "Everything begins in the mouth before going elsewhere; with the nerves." It is also substantial, if not transubstantial. The physical and existential void is to be filled through Dali's "gastronomical theology," which he explicitly links to the Eucharist ("to swallow the living God") and to the sacramental anatomy of his own genius: "The sensual intelligence housed in the tabernacle of my palate beckons me to pay the greatest attention to food�In my daily life my every move becomes ritual, the anchovy I chew participates in a small way to the shining light of my genius." Les Diners de Gala, a collection of Dali precepts and illlustrations, showcases Dali's ornamentation of menus from such legendary restaurants as Maxim's and La Tour d'Argent and features the recipes of their chefs. Dali stages himself within the sumptuous culinary mise-en-scène. Consistent with his penchant for contradiction, dissociation, and the condensation of incompatibilites, Dali admonishes the reader: "Do not forget that, a woodcock 'flambé' in strong alcohol, served in its own excrement, as is the custom in the best of Parisian restaurants, will always remain for me in that serious art that is gastronomy, the most delicate symbol of true civilization." Les Diners de Dali moves between "sado-masochistic pleasure," "acute sybaritism," Rabelaisian scatology, religious ecstacy, and anaesthetic asceticism.
Along the Alimentary Canal
"All my experiences are visceral." --Dali
There is another body of work that takes as its site the alimentary canal proper, from the mouth into the viscera and out the anus. While experiences associated with the inside of the mouth, the throat, where there are also taste receptors, and nasal cavity have been aestheticized through cuisine, wine, and gastronomy, experiences of food inside the body cavity have been understood largely in terms of science, medicine, and religion, and specific practices associated with them�dissection, surgery, spiritual discipline, and moral order. When artists enter the alimentary canal, what do they do? They visualize the inside of the body, they externalize it by presenting substances suggestive of it, and they project photographs and videos of the body's interior. Some artists literally make the insides perform by activating the entire alimentary canal through the process of eating or by violently disrupting the normal operation of the digestive tract by inducing vomiting, pissing, or shitting.
Ann Hamilton's Untitled (mouth/stones) (1993) consists of a very small television monitor projecting the moving image of a mouth (much larger than life, despite the tiny screen). The mouth, partially open, is filled with rolling stones. Decontextualized from the rest of the body, the mouth becomes an autonomous organ�most anything can conceivably be put into it�including the stones that move around inside it incessantly. Isolated in this way, the lips resemble a sphincter muscle that tightens and releases, with the stones precariously lodged temporarily in an ambiguous pocket of flesh. The tongue is the focus of Antoni Miralda's project, at his Big Fish restaurant in Miami, to invite patrons to have their tongues photographed and to mount enlargements of the images to give this organ the proper attention.
As already mentioned, the teeth are explicitly addressed by several artists, as well as gastronomer Brillat-Savarin. They become a sense organ in their own right in Marinetti's Futurist Cookbook. They become a percussion instrument in the Captain Crunch routine of Blue Man Group. They are part of the body as eating machine in the appropriately titled Physiology of Taste. Even a dietary regime such as the Schick Method, which focusses on chewing, took on the quality of performance art for Barbara Smith: the Schick Method "suggests that you eat everything with a fork and put the fork down while you chew, take a swallow of water and then the next bite. They say you are supposed to fall in love with your food, because you have slowed down and are concentrating on the explicit experience of that one action."
Chewing, spitting, and the externalizing of "digestion" are deployed by John Latham (with Barry Flanagan) in Still and Chew(1966-1967). Taking Francis Bacon's adage that "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to chewed and digested" literally, guests at a party in his home were instructed them to chew pages from Clement Greenberg's Art and Culture and "If necessary, spit out the product into a flask provided." The actual copy used in the event belonged to the library of St. Martin's School of Art in London, where he was teaching. Based on Latham's own account, Kristine Stiles reports that:
Those assembled complied, expectorating about a third of the volume in a heap of masticated pulp. Latham then immersed the wad in a solution containing thirty-percent sulfuric acid, left it until the solution converted to sugar, neutralized the remains with sodium bicarbonate and introduced a yeast�an "Alien Culture"�into the substance to create a "brew." Latham allowed his cultured brew to "bubble gently" for nearly a year until the end of May, 1967, when he received a postcard labeled: "Art and Culture wanted urgently by a student." Latham distilled the mass into a suitable glass container, labeled the jar "Art and Culture," and returned it. "After the few minutes required to persuade the librarian that this was indeed the book which was asked for on the postcard," Latham left the object and returned home.
Needless to say, his teaching career at St. Martin's ended immediately. Art and Culture may have been hard to swallow, but it was digested, outside the body, to produce a distillation of its substance, literally. Examples abound of edible texts, from alphabet soup and birthday cakes to Ro Malone's cooked books.
Some of the most powerful and disturbing work focuses on the viscera. Here, the digestive system is neither the empty stomach of the Futurists, nor the site of diffuse postprandial pleasure that Brillat-Savarin celebrates. According to Stiles, "In 1972, Stelerac (b. Stelios Arcadiou) made color videos of the inside of his stomach, bowels, and lungs. To make such images, he swallowed a telemetering capsule containing a camera. The procedure required an injection to prevent the stomach from rejecting the foreign object and then the spraying of his throat with local anesthetic to numb the feeling."
Several years earlier, in 1969, Barbara Smith's "Ritual Meal" was a harrowing ordeal for the sixteen guests who subjected themselves to it. Jennie Klein offers a vivid description of this extraordinary event, which provides the basis for the selective account of the visceral highlights of the event that follows. After waiting outside for more than hour to the incessant sound of "a taped voice asking them to 'please wait, please wait,'" they entered the house of Stanley and Elyse Grinstein. The very loud sound of a beating heart filled the house and resonated right through their bodies, which, according to Smith, created "the most amazed feeling of anxiety." Films of open heart surgery and charts showing the anatomy of the digestive and circulatory systems were projected on the walls and ceiling:
Eight waiters (four men wearing surgical scrubs and masks and four women wearing masks, black tights, and leotards) led them to a table. Prior to entering the house, the guests had to put on surgical scrubs�. The guests were then served a meal like they had never seen before. In keeping with the surgical "theme," the eating utensils were surgical instruments. Meat had to be cut with scalpels. Wine, served in test tubes, resembled blood or urine. In this charged atmosphere, ordinary food took on extraordinary connotations, an effect that Smith enhanced by the preparation and presentation of the food. Puréed fruit was served in plasma bottles. Raw food, such as eggs and chicken livers, that had to be cooked at the table were included in the dinner along with plates of cottage cheese embedded with a small pepper resembling an organ. Although the food was actually quite good, the dining experience was intensely uncomfortable for the guests, who couldn't put down their wine/test tubes and were sometimes forced to eat with their hands.
Commenting on this piece in an interview published in the early 1980s, Smith said, "It was about ingesting the art work and being affected internally by it." Her comments on this piece, which hold for many of her numerous other food based performances since then, captures the specificity of food as a performance medium. What made "Ritual Meal" so disturbing in Smith's view, was its violation of "the rules governing the way the art object is viewed. Most art happens outside the body of the viewer, which remains separate from the object that is being viewed." In contrast, as Klein notes, "Ritual Meal" "introduc[ed] the body of the art (and perhaps the artist) into the bodies of the guests." The analogues with communion and anthropophagy are clear.
If Michael Fried was concerned that minimalist art (and, in particular, sculpture), by activating the space between the object and viewer, approached the condition of theatre, then this kind of art most definitely took things several steps further. This is not simply a matter of watching actors on stage eat. Rather, eating is integral to the work. Nor is it simply that eating is a mode of reception, for that would suggest that the work is complete and in tact before it is "received." The very act of eating, the substances and the conditions are integral to the event that is the work. The model of object to be viewed and viewer does not apply. These events are not even an adaptation of the model. They are of a different order, right from the outset, though clearly they are reacting against the model of object/viewer.
Among the artists who perform to the body's limits are those who violently disrupt the autonomic nervous system, which regulates involuntary activity of the vital organs, including the intestines. In both "Self Destruction" (1966) by Raphael Montan~ez Ortiz and
"Drinking Water" (1974) by Ras`a Todosijevic', the artists drank vast amounts of liquid, disrupted their breathing, and induced vomiting. Bare-chested, Todosijevic' "repeatedly drank water from a fish tank from which the fish had been emptied out on the floor before the audience. Trying to 'harmonize with the rhythm of the fish breathing,' the artist drank twenty-six glasses of water at the same time as breathing, eventually vomiting out the intolerable quantities of water he had forced himself to drink in imitation of the environment of a creature that he was not." Ortiz infantilized himself and in his words:
"I sat down and I guzzled the milk and I can hardly breathe. I grab another bottle. I guzzle it and pout it all over me: there is Mommy's presence right there in all the milk. I real hysterical again and I throw up. I reject Mommy. I throw up, first spontaneously, then deliberately sticking my finger down my throat, vomiting up about two pints of milk. I then slap the puddle of vomit angrily over and over calling, "Mommy, Mommy." Accepting the puddle of milk as symbolic of Mommy, I calm down. I crawl off. "Mommy, ma, ma�"
While not the minimalist actions at the heart of Allan Kaprow's work, these works, different as they are from each other, force the viscera to "act," the body's involuntary responses to "perform," and one would might well imagine also to induce a reflex vomit response in those present.
While Artaud celebrated shit�"Where there is a stink of shit, there is a smell of being."�in his essay "The Pursuit of Fecality," histories of performance art are not rich in examples. However, the identification of food with shit by treating actual food as if it were shit (but not the reverse) is not only an established traditional practice, but also the basis for Karen Finley's legendary performances, in which chocolate is smeared on her face and dress as if it were shit and the way that other foods are handled reduces them to the same condition, without their ever having passed through the body�on the contrary, she may even talk about or try to "ingest" them through the wrong orifice.
This is Baktinian performance of the lower body and its secretions confounded with food. The performance of the lower body has a rich history in popular culture. To this day the scatalogical ritual involving La ro^tie (a chamber pot containing champagne and chocolate, and, some cases, bananas, toilet paper, tampons colored with red food tomato sauce or food coloring) is still practiced in the mountains of Auvergne. Deborah Reed-Danahay, an anthropologist who has studied the practice over the last fifteen years, describes it as follows: "In the early morning hours after a wedding, a group of unnmarried youths bursts into the room to which the bride and groom have retired for the night and present them with a chamber pot containing champagne and chocolate. This mixture is then shared and consumed by all present." Disgusting, but delicious, the mixture's reference to urine and shit is obvious to all, and its symbolism very rich. The practice was also described by Van Gennep, who noted "the use of wetness to symbolize fecundity" and explicated its role in such rites of passage.
Such acts confound the boundaries of the body and the limits on what can go into and come out of it. Blue Man Group (three men, heads shaved and painted cobalt blue, who act in concert as Blue Man) does a send-up of art making and the art world by making a mess that becomes a painting. If you sit in the first few rows, it will be under a sheet of plastic to protect you from the mess that flies in all directions. Blue Man offers its audiences "an opportunity to regress," an "all-out sensory assault," and "an element of untrammeled infantile sensuality." To do this they "perform a symphony for teeth and Captain Crunch cereal, squirt snakes of banana from their chests and catch paint-filled gum balls in their mouths, among other stunts."
Appropriately named, "Tubes" is extravenous performance. Using tubes from industrial food processing, gardening hoses and their fittings, and insecticide spraycans , Blue Man flings, splatters, splashes, spritzes, and extrudes paint and food �some sixty pounds of bananas, almost as much Jell-O, and innumerable marshmallows and Twinkies-- with the force and trajectory of projectile vomit. This body's mouth is directly connected to the anus, with neither stomach nor guts in between. Indeed, the two orifices are interchangeable, for the anus is displaced to the mouth, which both ingests and excretes, as well as to other parts of the body and clothing, which exude surprising substances. This is visceral performance without viscera. This is dirt as defined by Mary Douglas as "matter out of place," in her appropriately titled essay "Secular Defilement."
Art/Life
"�nonart is more art than Art art." �Allan Kaprow
The materiality of food, its dynamic and unstable character, its precarious position between sustenance and garbage, its relationship to the mouth and the rest of the body, particularly the female body, and its importance to community, make food a powerful performance medium. Indeed, it could be said that food and the processes associated it are performance art avant la lettre. This presents an obstacle and an opportunity to artists. Food's already artfulness is an obstacle to those working in the gap and across the boundary between art and life, for the life they value is precisely that which is not (or not yet) art until their intervention makes it so. Through extreme attentiveness, contextualization, framing, arbitrary rules, and chance operations, these artists are attracted to the phenomenal, towards raw experience, or towards the social as the basis for a participatory art practice, or towards process, rather than a permanent work that can enter the art market. They gravitate towards materials not usually associated with a fine art practice and attend to the particularity of those materials. They are likely to produce actions (which may or may not be events) and to leave documents, relics, souvenirs, detritus, and other evidence of those actions.
In contrast, those for whom food's already artfulness is an opportunity look to the arts of everyday life for a resource that they work on right where it is, taking the life world itself as their site of operation, or divert it into the art world, or make the two converge. Recognizing what is already artful in life, they may curate it or they may collaborate with ordinary people. In either case, this is an aesthetics other than that of Hegel. It takes its cue from the already total performance of the life world.
It is precisely in opposition to the notion of art as an autonomous object, in prescribed media and spaces, that the historical avant-garde and postwar experimental performance proceed. Food offers them a performance medium on the boundaries and at the intersections of the life world and the art world. While considerable attention has been accorded food as image, theme, or symbol, less is understood about food as a performance medium and the particular ways in which food and the settings and events associated with it engage the senses. While I have considered historical examples of table and stage inspiring each other, experimental performance during the twentieth century, especially after World War II, offers a particularly rich array of possibilities.
Reviewing the role of food in performance art, Linda Montano classified what she had found prior to 1981 as follows:
Artists have used food as political statement (Martha Rosler, the Waitresses, Nancy Buchanan, Suzanne Lacy), as a conceptual device (Eleanor Antin, Howard Fried, Bonnie Sherk, Vito Acconci), as life principle (Tom Marioni, Les Levine), as sculptural material (Paul McCarthy, Joseph Beuys, Kipper Kids, Terry Fox, Carolee Schneemann, Motion, Bob & Bob), for nurturance and ritual (Barbara Smith), for props and irony (Allan Kaprow), as a scare tactic (Hermann Nitsch), in autobiography (Rachel Rosenthal), as feminist statement (Suzanne Lacy, Judy Chicago, Womanhouse), in humor (Susan Mogul), for survival (Leslie Labowitz).
While useful, these categories are not commensurate with one another, however accurately they differentiate the work. Consider instead how these and other artists insert themselves into the food system, work with and against it, or produce work about or outside of the food system.
All three senses of performance�to do, to behave, to show--operate all through the food system, including production, provisioning, preparation, presentation, consumption, and disposal, but vary according to which sense of performance is focal, elaborated, or suppressed. For the purposes of this analysis, the food system may be segmented into five processes (the order may vary and one process may and generally does occur more than once): procuring and producing (hunting, gathering, cultivation), storage, distribution and exchange, processing and preparation, consumption, and disposal. These processes have been elaborated (or simplified) in historically and culturally specific ways so that they are at once repetitive tasks and customary practices. Ritual protects the hunter, increases the crop, governs tithes, and surrounds the eating of first fruits. Balinese temple festivals are like a systemic clock in the way that they time and regulate the flow of water into rice paddies along terraces. Work songs synchronize the movements of grinding or pounding and make repetitive tasks less boring. Rules of reciprocity and laws of ritual purity govern who may accept food from whom, while etiquette stipulates how those who eat together must behave. The tools and techniques for brewing and baking, roasting and steaming, cutting and mashing may be staged as performances in their own right. On a small scale, patrons can see into restaurant kitchens. On a large scale, entire events are organized around the boiling and baking of a 900 pound bagel or the frying of a gigantic omelet�70,000 eggs and 200 pounds of truffles. Highly staged feasts are overtly theatrical. Depending on who touched them, leftovers are sacred or polluting. They are discarded or recirculated or recycled.
Performing the Food Cycle
"When the durian come down, the sarongs go up." �Malay proverb
Production
Two archetypes, the Garden of Eden and the Last Supper, inform the work of several performance artists working with food, whether explicitly or implicitly. Gardens, with their long histories, are prime examples of multi-sensory environments and an art form in their own right, whether formally designed by professional landscape architects or vernacular expressions of local knowledge. Adam Purple's Garden of Eden, created from the detritus of abandoned buildings on the Lower East Side during the economic downturn in New York City during the 1970s, was an indictment of a city government that had allowed the urban fabric to disintegrate. Laid out in relation to a cosmic plan visible from outer space and cultivated using the gardener's own nightsoil, the Garden of Eden was first and foremost a life work, though many considered it an art work. During an economic upturn, the city destroyed the garden and built public housing on the plot.
Farming dictated by values other than maximizing profit has many of the qualities valued by performance artists. Intentional societies as the Amish eschew what they deem to be unnecessary technologies. Alternative communities such as the biodynamic followers of Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), whose anthroposophy offered a new science of cosmic influences, work from a kind of cookbook of "biodynamic preparations": "Naturally occurring plant and animal materials are combined in specific recipes in certain seasons of the year and then placed in compost piles. These preparations bear concentrated forces within them and are used to organize the chaotic elements within the compost piles. When the process is complete, the resulting Preparations are medicines for the Earth which draw new forces from the cosmos."
While advocates of biodynamic farming cite scientific verification of the efficacy of their methods, they are guided in the first instance by spiritual values. They envision the farm as a self-sufficient entity in harmony with the Earth, consistent with the principles enunciated by Steiner in a series of lectures that he delivered in 1924, toward the end of his life. In
"Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture," he imagines the farm in corporeal terms�the soil is a diaphragm and "planetary forces [are] active in the 'head' (below ground) and in the 'belly' (above ground)." He accords smell importance in developing a personal relationship to farming, and in particular to manure and composting. Cowshorns filled with manure to collect forces beneficial to crops are ritually inserted into the ground. Inspired by Christian and Eastern mysticism, Steiner was a prodigious lecturer and author and produced, in addition to his farming manual and series of lectures on bees, books on works on performance dealing with such topics as eurhythm as visible speech and song , creative speech, and the art of acting. Steiner spawned a movement, complete with schools, a philosophy of art, and farms.
In contrast with these idiosyncratic and programmatic projects, but certainly in keeping with their spirit, local communities use local knowledge to sustain a culturally based biodiversity. In the Big Coal River region of West Virginia during the early spring, people gather ramps (allium tricoccum), or wild leeks, and eat them at ramp suppers and festivals that double as fundraisers for local causes. As Mary Hufford notes in her evocative account, these practices and the knowledge associated with them (and with other wild greens, and morels), "interweave biodiversity and community life." This is a deeply rooted and committed set of relations among people tied by kinship and friendship.
Ramps are what artists would understand as a material with strong presence, particularly because of its smell, which has prompted the Menominee Indians to call it "the skunk." The stink of ramps is integral to their character as a restorative that operates on both the body and the spirit: "Some have seen in this practice of restoring the body while emitting a sulphurous odor a rite of death and resurrection, serendipitously coinciding with Easter," though as Mary Hufford notes in her evocative account of ramps, "Actually, with ramps the motif appears to breath and insurrection." So much so, that children who had eaten ramps were sent home from school because of the overpowering odor that emanated from them. One ramp supper announced itself by its smell in the West Virginia Hillbilly--ramp juice had been added to the printer's ink. The Postmaster General reprimanded the publisher.
Ramps, the places they grow, and the larger named and known landscape of which they are part, are activated through collaborative knowledge, practices, and memory. In this way, a community sustains itself and its way of life�"Stories of plying the seasonal round, of gathering ramps, molly moochers [morels], fishing bait, and ginsing, are like beacons lighting up Hazy's coves, benches, walk paths, historic ruins, and camp rocks," as ramp gathers make their way to and from the "de facto commons" in the hills. This their way of laying claim to a place under pressure to yield to "progress" and in particular to a form of mining that involves mountaintop removal and reclamation. This is also a prime case of performance art avant la lettre, though it is not likely to be written in the history of performance. The envy of many an artist, such complexes do not have to work across the gap between art and life because there is no gap. Moreover, what we have here is not a one-time action or project of limited duration but a seasonal ritual that is part of a sustained way of life and committed set of attachments to people and places. Foraging for wild greens, traditionally a woman's role, is part of "alternative, rural economy that enables survival outside the mainstream" and that includes gardening, bartering, and other tactics for making do.
Early performance artists, consistent with the spirit of the Whole Earth Catalogue and back-to-the-earth movements of the 1960s, turned to food cultivation. Bonnie Sherk's "The Farm" and Leslie Labowitz's "Sproutime Series" are notable examples. Sherk founded and directed "The Farm," in San Francisco, as an extension of her interest in "the inner workings of animals." Prior to "The Farm," which operated between 1974 and 1980, her first major work to use food was "Public Lunch." She ate her lunch (catered by Vanessi's Restaurant) in the lion house at the San Francisco zoo, during feeding time. The lions, who had become acclimated to her presence, ate their "lunch" in their cages. She subsequently lived with animals in her studio. "The Farm" satisfied her desire to create what she calls a total experience in the service of people, plants, and animals seen as equal and connected. She explicitly links the growth of a plant to "the art experience." A key to "The Farm" was its operation as both garden and art space, its explicit goal of bringing together a diversity of people, and its location: "The Farm presented a 'strong, visual contrast to the technological monolith of the freeway' graphically framing life," which included working with city agencies to gain access to parcels of land.
Leslie Labowitz's "Sproutime" series (1980, 1981) is an early example of an indoor hydroponic project as performance art. It is also an affirming response to a recurrent theme in the performance art of women, namely, an ambivalent if not phobic relation to food. Labowitz recalls not liking to eat as a child, in part because her mother, a Holocaust survivor, was worried that Labowitz would get fat and watched what she ate. Desperate for money, she took up the invitation of a woman at the coop to become a partner in her sprout business and eventually took the business over. "It naturally evolved that the sprout business became an art activity," Labowitz explained in an interview with Linda Montano. Asked how she made the connection between growing sprouts and art, Labowitz said:
Sprout growers in general operate operate like artists, for example, the other sprout grower in the canyon has a greenhouse which is very sculptural. Their businesses are not your typical technological, food processing centers either, but seem more personally designed. The growing methods seem unique to each grower.
The process takes a lot of quiet, attention, color awareness, playing with seeds, and mixing seeds. I designed my greenhouse that I work in to be a functional, sculptural space.
But, above all, Labowitz relates Sproutime to health and spirituality and says of sprouts that they "radiate consciousness" and are the "alivest forms that are."
In an artist's statement written collaboratively with Linda Jacobson, Labowitz defines "Sproutime" as "an on-going performance that coexists within both the art network and the 'real world'," in a way that links aesthetics (the beauty of the sprouts and the greenhouse) and politics (the larger system of food production and distribution, itself linked to war and global survival). Though "Sproutime" was primarily a business located in the life world�and specifically in a garage behind her house in Venice, California--Labowitz also did gallery performances in New York and Los Angeles. She offered "Sproutime," and specifically the aliveness of the sprouts, as an anti-war demonstration and indication of the limitations of the gallery structure. By eating the sprouts that she has prepared, audiences at these events "take the performance home with them; assimilating it into their being," not unlike taking communion. "Sproutime Farmer's Market" took the form of a stand in the Wednesday farmers' market in Santa Monica, where Labowitz "actively engaged with society in general�.It is here that her art has real social impact."
Haha, a Chicago-based collaborative, responded to the call for projects for "Culture in Action," curated by Mary Jane Jacob in Chicago in 1992, with a proposal for a hydroponic garden in a storefront in Rogers Park, a racially and ethnically mixed lower and middle-income neighborhood in Chicago, where Haha members live. Their challenge was to find a "compelling conceptual framework that could metaphorically extend this community action into the realm of art." Haha had sought out real-life contexts and ways to work with local communities in the past. This time, "Flood: A Volunteer Network for Active Participation in Heathcare," offered the advantages of an indoor garden they could sustain year round and sterile conditions for growing food for people with AIDS. Putting the metaphors of caring and cultivating into action, Haha made the garden a catalyst for education about AIDS and for strengthening HIV/AIDS support networks, as well as a clearing house and meeting place: "The garden is a covenant, a tangible tie, emblematic of the complex and manifold links of care between a community and an individual, and if it is given sufficient care, it will grow and survive." Haha is committed to a kind of usefulness "that goes beyond the practical level of production" to include caretaking, growth, recreation, and contemplation. "Flood" was part of a two-year project (1992-1993) sponsored by Sculpture Chicago to encourage experimental forms of community-based public art. The activism of these projects stands in sharp contrast to the profligate food fights of the Kipper Kids or painting performances of Blue Man Group, who in the course of more than 800 performances have "wasted" over two tons of bananas.
A Temperate Menu, which Alicia Rios created specifically for the Wales conference, makes the distinction between food event and theatre event moot, so completely do the two merge. Indeed, A Temperate Menu, which was a conference luncheon in the form of a hothouse garden, an opera offered to the senses. Consistent with her work more generally, A Temperate Menu went beyond sight and sound to engage touch, taste, and smell, as well as propiocepsis. This installation not only engaged these senses but also confused them. It confounded the natural in what was a cooked garden, reminiscent of the Land of Cocaigne. We ate with toy trowels and hoes in keeping with its playful spirit.
Gardens are not the only life world forms involving living entities to become the basis for performance art. Started in 1976, the Mark Thompson's "Live-In Hive" was to be an environment where Thompson and the bees would coexist. He designed a glass-walled beehive to surround his head and allow him to live in hive and observe the bees move in and out of the hive, build the comb, and make honey. According to Stiles, in her eloquent account of this piece, Thompson started to make a film, Immersed, which was intended to capture the spatial experience and movement of swarming bees. However, as she underscores, his primary concern was to live with the bees, not to produce "a public performance or 'body art'." Lee Mingwei, one of Thompson's students at California College of Arts and Crafts in the early 1990s, "recalls helping Thompson install a piece for an exhibition that included a functioning beehive set in the rib cage of an ox skeleton. The bees were sealed in a chamber that had a tube opening onto a field of flowers; they flew out to pollinate by day and returned to the hive at night throughout the duration of the exhibition." As a sculptor, Thompson works with space and the body's orientation in space. While the bees do their part by virtue of their kinetic presence, architectural activity, cycles of pollination, and honey production, Thompson's structures establish a particular spatial (and phenomenological) relation between himself and the beehive.
Provisioning
The market has historically been a crossroads and vibrant site of food, conviviality, and performance, from the street cries and banter designed to sell goods to the formal Punch and Judy shows and myriad street performers. Above all, in city markets like the Mercado de Antón Martín in Madrid, Makhane Yehuda in Jerusalem, the Fulton Fish Market in Manhattan, the former Les Halles in Paris, the food emporia in department store basements in Tokyo, and other markets in cities and towns around the world, the star is the food, its presentation, and transactions they engender.
From November 1995 until November 1997, Annie Lanzillotto undertook "The Arthur Avenue Retail Market Project" in a once vibrant Italian neighborhood in the Bronx. Like the "Garden of Eden," "The Farm," and "Flood," this project was sited in a location that was vulnerable and therefore more accessible (though not necessarily receptive at first) to artistic intervention. In part, such projects insert themselves into existing communities, and in part, they create communities around themselves. Unlike these projects, however, Lanzillotto gave herself the same challenge she says she gives all artists: "'Go home.' Challenge yourself to go home and do your work. Work with the mentalities that you fled in your development." For her this raised such questions as "Can I work with the close-minded Eurocentric anti-intellectual working-class Bronx Italian-Americans I grew up with?" She had no patience for "middle-class white artists who worked in the most marginalized communities they could imagine, easy prey for all their projections." Rather than "dabble in prison work," they should make a video of the communitiess they come from and can gain access to, like the women on Park Avenue�"I'd like to see that," she quips. In choosing to work at the Arthur Avenue market, Lanzillotto was "rebelling against the value system of the downtown artist communities. The glorification of sexy urban detritus as a stage set. The values that discourage 'working' with family," the commercialism of the art world and the "anesthetized audience."
Basically, Lanzillotto set up shop in the market for two years with the following intention: "to make an opera in the market, and highlight the opera that is already there, daily." Unlike the jaded art world that she rejects, "At the market, the butchers pound their cleavers when the tenor misses a note. The patrons shout like a sports audience." "I like that," she says, and adds that "The fourth wall is not even a remote possibility. A performer must communicate, for these merchants are the best performers and storytellers in the world. And their countertops�the best stages." Through a series of "over-the-countertop interviews," Lanzillotto gradually gained the trust of the eighteen butchers, fishmongers, cheese purveyors, and fruit and vegetable merchants. Lanzillotto and her team entered into the life of the market, attending merchant meetings, going with the merchants early in the morning to Hunts Point Terminal Market for produce, and talking with them about the problems they face. The project reached out beyond the market to the community park, senior citizen center, and outlying neighborhood.
Particularly attuned to what I would call an aesthetics of everyday life, her intervention as an artist was part curator, part community festival organizer, and part "interaction practitioner," as she refers to herself. From her artist/curator's perspective, the market had the quality of living museum: "The merchants and patrons here keep alive the Italy of the eighteenth century. The dialects spoken in these stalls you won't hear even in their native ravines. The foods sold here are soon to be extinct. Mario is not teaching anyone how to wrap a pancreas in parsley and intestine. The knowledge of his hands is not being passed on. This recipe is not on the Internet. Maybe that's not such a bad idea." She invokes a gustatory metaphor: "Americanization is a four-letter word that means to be swallowed up in the main stomach," which the merchants and patrons at Arthur Avenue Market have staunchly resisted.
Lanzillotto's intervention involved recognizing, valuing, and bringing out the everyday life performances, the spontaneous arias, the disquisitions and demonstrations, the stories and the banter, the mentalités distinctive to this scene. In this spirit, Lanzillotto, and the artists she invited to join her, engaged the mechants in discussions about "the merchant as performer, the countertop as stage, and the identity of the business-place as theater: a gathering place of culture and art." Recognizing that the defining performer/audience interaction in the market is a commercial transaction, she created coupons that provided information about the merchants, techniques for moving the crowds moving through the aisles, and performances in which artists, shoppers, and merchants collaborated. They included the Opera Stand, which was set up amid the various food stalls, as well as weekly concerts, Saturday afternoon salons, and seasonal festivities. On Valentine's Day, "How to Cook a Heart" featured "market butcher Mario Ribaudo in his first of many signature performances of the chopping and frying of a veal heart while singing tenor arias." On several occasions, special buses brought visitors from other parts of the city. The market also went to Manhattan. To recreate the market at the Guggenheim Museum, Lanzillotto worked with a community cast of twenty people to create "a procession of shoppers in evening gowns pushing stained-glass luminous carts, peddlars carrying trays of huge fresh bread and racks of salami, all led by the butcher sharpening his knive percussively." This procession calls to mind such historical examples as "a procession of the food given by the gofalonieri of Bologna to the Swiss guards," which was commemorated in prints by G.M. Mitelli in 1699. Eventually the merchants called upon the artists to help them produce a theatre piece about the market for a summer neighborhood festival and to "heighten the theatricality of the 'No fast food' protest'" they organized when McDonalds leased land nearby. The project culminated in an ambitious final production at three outdoor sites and inside the market itself, including its garbage room, which had been transformed into a "velveted performance and photograph gallery." This work is in what Lanzillotto characterizes as "centuries of tradition of market-riot theater."
The attention that her interventions brought to the market were welcomed by the merchants, who shared her hope that this project would "breathe new life into an old market that had long ago outlived its original function of housing immigrant street peddlers and providing low cost food distribution to Bronx citizenry. The market, like its oldest shopper, had outlived the host of its contemporaries. Of the scores of city markets opened in the thirties and forties, only three remain." Lanzillotto describes herself as a writer, performance artist, and interaction practitioner who produces works in communities that are intended to express local histories.
Preparation
Culture is a kitchen, if we are to take Lévi-Strauss's culinary triangle to heart: "Adapting itself to the exigencies of the body, and determined in its modes by the way man's insertion in nature operates in different parts of the world, placed then between nature and culture, cooking represents their necessary articulation. It partakes of both domains, and projects this duality on each of its manifestations." The Chinese word shu means both knowledge and ripe, mature, or cooked. The raw and the cooked are conceptual categories. Thus, in the case of sashimi, the knife, not the fire, has "cooked" what the "raw" fish by transforming it from nature to culture within a culinary system. One man's culture (sashimi) is another man's culture (raw fish). A Japanese delicacy that I experienced during a local festival in Himeji in 1983 is odori or dancing shrimp. Quivering little blue shrimp are downed more or less whole and intact so that their movement can be felt "dancing" in the stomach. Reversing the terms, the cooked can be treated as raw in recipes that call for prepared packaged foods: the Pink Champagne Cake calls for white cake mix, instant pistachio pudding, club soda, a jar of red cherries, a tin of crushed pineapple, margarine, and cream cheese, and, for added color, bottled red and green cherries.
Substance
At the heart of preparation is the notion of substance with strong presence, to use Stile's felicitous phrase. Meat, as already suggested in Jana Sterbak's flesh dress, has particularly strong presence and figures in the work of various performance artists, often in relation to death, sex, and affinities between animal and human flesh. Meat, the flesh of sentient beings, is central to the history of sacrifice. Antoine's use of an actual carcasse on the stage of "The Butchers" was a sensation (literally) not only because it was "the real thing," but also because it was real meat.
Luxury foods have strong presence (truffles, caviar), as do foods with a penetrating odor, such as fermented fish and aged cheese. One of the most vivid examples is durian, a fruit about the size of a basketball and covered with a thick and spiky rind. It is popular in Malaysia and other parts of Southeast Asia. Notorioius for its relentless smell, appetizing to some and disgusting to others, durian is not allowed in public enclosed spaces like hotel rooms or airplanes. In durian season, lovers of durian will drive out to the orchards at night, when it is cool and the aroma suffuses the air, and eat them at a roadside stand. They are freshly gathered by men who know how to dodge the ripe ones, attached by only a thin stem, as they fall from a height of 30-120 feet. Durian is considered yang and an aphrodisiac, no doubt because of its funky smell. According to a Malay proverb, "When the durians come down, sarongs go up." According to a guide to Singapore food, "Animals esteem the durian equally as much as humans--tapirs, tigers, pigs, flying foxes, rhinos and monkeys are known to eat them voraciously, and elephants often swallow them whole. Protected by their horny shell, they emerge from the elephant's digestive tract intact. Indeed, this specially 'processed' variety is coveted above all others by the natives of northern Malaya." But also the staples of life--rice and bread, among others--are among the foods with the strongest presence, as evidenced in their role as sacramental food, the consecrated host being a prime example.
Instructions
From his early environmental work, which started in the 1957, food has figured prominently in the events, activities, happenings, and environments of Allan Kaprow, whose theory and practice blur life and art. From his apple shrines in New York (1990) and Milan (1991) to his Eat environments in the Bronx (1964), Milan (1991), and Naples (1992), Kaprow has found in food a medium well suited to his work. Log Recipe is the title of Linda Cassens documentation of "Performing Life," a workshop that Kaprow gave for the Kunsthalle Palazzo in Liestaal on June 15-16, 1996. Cassens finds affinities between the dictionary definitions of the terms (a log is "any of various records of performance," a recipe is "a procedure for doing or attaining something") and early pieces that Kaprow set up as "'instructions' which could be carried out without his presence." This account "is to be read as a Log or descriptive narrative of [her] own recent experience as a workshop participant, but it can also be read as a Recipe for conducting an Allan Kaprow 'work'-shop without Allan Kaprow." Reflecting on the limitations of a conventional genres of criticism and description to capture this kind of work, Cassens offers the log recipe towards "a kind of archeology in the field of performance art," which like a cookbook (and for that matter a score or script or transcription) could not only serve as record of what had been done but also as instructions for how to do it again. Not incidentally, the workshop included, among other activities, the organization, provisioning, and preparation of "picnic food for at least one meal "including plenty of beer and wine."
The workshop was devoted to the mode of performance that Kaprow conceptualized in the period 1954-1957 as "a non-theatrical kind where poets and visual artists became involved in 'doing' rather than 'making,' shifting their focus from product to process, and also giving attention to everyday aspects of life, where both everything and nothing were important�. The[se] performances were intended to be done to affect the performer, not to be observed." Rather than a theatrical event authored and performed by artists for spectators, such events were a social occasion, in Kaprow's terms, and they involved everyone present. Moreover, both Kaprow and Cage, with whom he studied, found more of interest in the random sounds and movements of everyday life than in composed music and choreographed dance-- Cage listened to the sound of eating in a luncheonette and Kaprow attended to the movements of shoppers in a supermarket.
Instructions for doing something are subject to their own poetics. According André Viard, however eloquent poets and prose writers might wax on the subject of food, "what can they say that is worth the precise rules followed by an adept, and which are the true poetics of culinary arts." Paul Schmidt, a scholar and translator of Russian literature, takes up this theme in his appropriately titled essay "'As if a cookbook had anything to do with writing,' �Alice B. Toklas," which appeared in 1974. In this astute discussion of four American women (Julia Child, Adelle Davis, Alice B. Toklas, and M.F.K. Fisher) distinguishes two traditions of culinary writing and traces them to Brillat-Savarin's La Physiologie du Gout (1825) and August Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire (190?) respectively. Whereas Brillat-Savarin wrote that "I soon saw, as I considered every aspect of the pleasures of the table, that something better than a cookbook should be written about them," it is precisely the definitive cookbook that Escoffier set out to create. Yet, as Schmidt notes, "that textbook, unwittingly provides possibilities for the imagination to run riot�.Simply to list and describe 114 recipes for sole unleashes the mind, and what is intended as a most precise kind of inventory becomes glittering caprice. The names slide from the pages�Sole au Chambertin, Sole Montgolfer, Sole Muenière à l'orange, Filets de Sole Chauchat, Filets de sole Mary Stuart, Filets de sole "Otéro"�names, colors, balloons, queens, and courtesans�and a wave of fantasy overwhelms us." Consistent with the principles that Kaprow espouses, Schmidt notes that "Any speculation upon the art of cooking�upon an esthetics of eating�must cope very soon with a non-esthetic dimension. To speak primarily of art where food is concerned is somehow to ignore life; but when we consider food at any length at all, life bursts incredible and awfully upon our speculation." Finally, there are dirty dishes and kitchen garbage and the toilet bowl�"Ici tombent en ruines toutes les merveilles de la cuisine."
In his 1983 Good Writing about Good Food at the Manhattan Theatre Club, Schmidt, dressed in toque and chef's whites, retrieved books from under the cloche of a serving platter, assisted by Bob Mellon as waiter. He proceeded to read Escoffier's instructions for how to butcher a live turtle for soup, passages about food and eating from works of literature and literary theory, and Emily Post's directions for a formal dinner party�"As Schmidt gave instructions, down to the number of candy dishes and vases of flowers, Mellon officiously furnished a perfectly set table for a formal dinner for one. And, this was the setting for the second half of the show." Schmidt, in formal dinner attire, returned to the stage, and "gave the impression that every spectator was seated with him at an intimate table." They were subjected to erudite dinner talk, including reflections by literary figures on restaurants and taste and passages from A Christmas Carol (Cratchits' goose dinner) and Alice in Wonderland (The Mad Hatter's Tea Party).
Miralda, a Barcelona-based artist who has worked with food for over thirty years, has made "Grandma's Recipes" a component of Nutrition Pavilion he is designing for the Hanover Expo 2000 and of the web site that anticipates some of its concepts:
Our "grandmothers" are the women and men, old and young, who keep the home fires burning on the heart�the nurturers. Their recipes may come from brittle, yellowing notebooks with careful entries in their own grandmothers' spidery hands or hasty scrawls on a paper napkin. They may or may not imitate the style of professional food writers. No matter what the externals, these gifts from the grandmothers are coded messages, keys to unlock the inner life of someone's kitchen.
To submit a recipe or photo of kitchens or markets click here to contribute.
Using not only the web site, but also paper invitations distributed at Big Fish, his Miami restaurant, and at his gallery exhibitions, Miralda is building the project collaboratively will all those who submit material.
From Memory's Kitchen presents the recipes from a little handwritten notebook, recorded by women who were starving to death in Terezín, the ghetto/concentration camp, also known as Theresienstadt, near Prague. The recipes themselves nourished the hungry women who wrote them down for the recipes were all they had. In the face of death, they hoped for the time when they might once again work their alchemy in the fire of their home kitchens. That day never came. What did survive are the recipes, witness of the struggle of those who wrote them down to stay alive and testimony to the world that perished with them. In the absence of food, speaking the recipes was a way of cooking and eating the dishes they once made. Mina Pachter, who perished in the camp in 1944, ensured that the notebook would one day find its way to her daughter Annie Stern, which it finally did in 1969.
The books themselves are literally cooked in Ro Malone's "Autolocomotion�What Bread Does When Left Alone" (1981). Malone described the two books as follows:
The homemade cooked book reads RoCo COOKED BOK on the left page and the right contains the recipe for the book baked on in dough letters dyed in food coloring. The disk shaped pages were bound with a dough loop.
The store-bought was a loaf of dark rye from a local bakery, sliced lengthwiise, and lettered with food coloring�RoCo READYMADE on the left page and SLICE AND READ on the right. It was crust-bound and reinforced with tape.
During the five weeks of the exhibition, March 21 through May 2, 1981, a kinetic disintegration took place.
The pages of the homemade book cracked and moved away from each other. The readymade burst from the center and pieces crawled across the display case, scattering words and parts of words. There was no mold.
This is substance with strong presence, first conflated with the written recipe for making the book and with the book itself and then allowed to follow its own organic course of "kinetic disintegration," in real time.
The principles governing the nature of the recipe in these examples�a set of instructions for action (Kaprow), a gift in the form of a coded message that holds the keys to the inner life of someone's kitchen (Miralda), a substitute for substance, in the fullest sense of the word (the women of Terezín), and as the very substance for which it provides the instructions�also govern the actions (preparing food) and events (eating food) that emanate from them. Some of these actions and events are formal exercises in doing, others are intensely social and symbolic, sometimes moving toward the theatrical, while still others focus on substance, its materiality and sensory qualities.
Actions
If a recipe can be thought about as a composition in the form of instructions, then those instructions could be said to be performed even as enunciations (written, spoken) and, of course, as actions on substance to produce a culinary result or performance in its own right. Those actions are themselves the basis for demonstration�television cooking shows are watched in and of themselves, quite apart from their instructional value�as well as performance in the sense that one realizes the recipe, just as one performs a musical composition (transforms written notations into sounds).
The theatrical nature of the cooking demonstration, not unlike the poetics of even a highly technical recipe, inspired "Bon Appétit!", a musical monologue starring Jean Stapleton as Julia Child. Performed in 1989 at the Terrace Theater at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., the one-woman show also travelled to Long Beach, California, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Based on Julia Child's 1961 television cooking shows, Stapleton mimes Child's actions, which are legendary for their robust gestural style, and sings the recipes--"It was Mrs. Child's theatricality" that sparked the idea for the production."
Kaprow and artists inspired by the kind of work he represents focus on the action and try to avoid the theatrical, even in the presence of an audience. Some projects are documentary in their conception and execution, while others are live actions in real time which may or may not leave some material trace or record. From 1970 to 1980, Nancy Barber made "videos of twenty or twenty-five people cooking in their homes. They put them on Channel C Cable TV." What interested Barber was the chance to talk with people in their homes, "not for aesthetic reasons but for the bigger experience." More recently, The Starving Artists' Cookbook (1991) by Paul and Melissa Eidia is a verité video and book project consisting of short segments documenting many artists cooking in their everyday contexts. What emerges from their work is the intensely social nature of what is at one level a set of actions applied to substance.
During the 1960s, Fluxus artist Allison Knowles performed "Making a Salad" in Denmark for 300 people. The context was "a concert funded by the music conservatory" and the audience was not pleased. As she explained in an interview with Linda Montano,
it has been done many times since then in turned over kettle drums, with acoustic mikes at musical concerts. Personally, I prefer it straight, just getting out there and making a salad for people. Participation is guaranteed.
That's what's unique about the event form in performance art, once it starts, everyone essentially knows what will happen, and it just follows through until it is done, maybe minimally maybe not.
The form of food events lends itself to performance because, not only are those forms well known but also they are easily staged�or perhaps it would be more accurate to say restaged. As Knowles explains, "I made those early performances as real experiences which weren't disguised as anything else. I wasn't making salad to glorify a concept or eating a sandwich in the IDENTICAL LUNCH to make music. It was merely the experience itself that interested me although I did it to happen in the context of a concert hall." Making a salad in a concert hall for many people and making it at home in her kitchen is the same, she explains, because "food preparation has always been a meditation for me." Knowles never loses sight of food as "a substance which nourishes. When we see it being used as art we examine it more intensely. We enrich our lives because we encounter this food again in life. The nonverbal energy that happens when I perform with food interests me." Knowles has also done pieces with beans and eggs. Since then other artists have done their own salad making pieces, among them Susan Mogel's "Design for Living" (1980), a frantic performance of an out-of-control salad.
Consumption
Events
The world made edible makes for unusual meals. Those who came to see the gallery installation of Allan Kaprow's "Persian Rug" were invited to "eat your way through the designs, right across the room, making new ones behind you as you went along." When visitors less fully than he had hoped, Kaprow surmised that gallery spaces could not provide the right atmosphere for his kind of interactive work.
In contrast, guests attending the 1971 wedding of Alica Rios and Francisco Garcia de Paredes, in an act of vegetarian anthropophagy: "We designed a savory man to scale, a portrait of Paco [the groom], and a sweet woman, whose breasts were pies; her belt, a rectangular tart; and the skirt, flowers, fruits, sweets of all types; and around the whole thing an aura of flowers. Then cane the act of cannibalism. Paco disappeared first, and then Alicia. The left-over sweets were carried away fore the people who didn't come." In the absence of plates and containers, guests ate directly from the table. There to witness and celebrate the union of two people, they commingled the two into one within themselves. This was fully in the spirit of the role of feasts in rites of passage. In Arnold van Gennep's classic book on the subject, rites of passage move through three stages�separation, transition, incorporation. Feasts are prominent in rites of incorporation, where commensality, the act of eating together, is an archetype of union.
The challenges to commensality include first, today's fractured and blended families, which have produced the most complex genealogies and kinship arrangements, and second, the proliferation of individualized dietary regimens: even if it were possible to gather everyone to eat together in the same place at the same time, it might well be just as difficult to get them to eat the same food. The solution is either to prepare several different meals (lowfat, vegetarian, kosher, allergenic, etc.) or to offer the most restrictive diet, which is finally the most inclusive. As people cease to be guided by traditional proscriptions and prescriptions, they are guided by other rules and regulations, which they individualize such that even if they are at the same table, they are not eating the same food. The restaurant menu (or eating a la carte all the time) becomes the norm.
In this context, the dinner party takes on special significance and has attracted artists who find rich possibilities in its event structure and in particular in its commensal nature. In contrast with Barbara Smith's dark "Ritual Dinner" and Bonnie Sherk's "Public Lunch" at the zoo are Judy Chicago's massive set table, which celebrates individual women, Suzanne Lacy's many dinner projects to honor women, and most recently The Foundry Theatre's "A Conversation on Hope" (1998), which was held in part over a carefully staged dinner in Lower Manhattan. Feminist artists in the dinner party, an arena for the women's creativity, the possibility of creating new forms of commensality and of resignifying what it means to eat together. The dinner party is a particularly charged event, not only because the women responsible for preparing food on a daily basis often feel undervalued, but also because the artists attracted to food have struggled with serious food anxieties.
Suzanne Lacy played an important role in organizing dinner parties on the occasion of Judy Chicago's installation "The Dinner Party," which featured individual place settings but no food. The invitation to "An International Dinner Party to Celebrate Women's Culture" d Judy Chicago--"Women have never had a Last Supper, but they have had dinner parties�lots and lots of dinner parties where they facilitated and nourished people."�and asked "women in many countries to host dinner parties honoring women important to their culture." The idea was for all the dinner parties to occur on the same evening, March 14, 1979, to "form a continuous 24 hour celebration around the world (because of the time differences)." Those making dinner parties were asked to send a telegram or mailgram with details about their event to arrive at the San Francisco Museum of Art during the day of March 14 and to be posted in "The Dinner Party" exhibition. It was hoped that visitors to the exhibition would be prompted to hold dinner parties in their homes and to add their messages to the installation. Photographs and letters describing the event were also solicited, with the intention of collecting the documentation and eventually publishing it. In its totality, this was to be a "living art work." Sharing food, for Lacy, is a way to raise consciousness.
Whereas Lacy's events are formally structured. Lacy's organized a private dinner at Chicago's Hull-House on September 30, 1993, as part of "Full Circle." This project was part of Sculpture Chicago's "Culture in Action" initiative. Lacy's tribute to the work and service of particular women included a monument made of boulders that represented particular women and were sited at various places in Chicago and an exclusive dinner for "fourteen women leaders from around the world whose stature lent the event a profound resonance." The "Full Circle" dinner, as Mary Jane Jacob explained, "was composed in the manner of a site installation; framing daily reality, it was a performance." In her account, Lacy explains that "The impact of the dinner lies as much in the fact that the meeting actually occurred and who the women were as in any single exchange that took place. This gathering was a symbolic act; it operates best in the realm of the visual and mythological." Neither the text nor the photographs feature (or even provide information about) the food. In her massive potlucks, however, Lacy has taken the opposite approach, issuing invitation in chain letter style, leaving the "menu" to chance, and allowing the interactions to just happen.
A new generation of artists, prominent among them Rirkrit Tiravanija and Mingwei Lee, work with the meal, but in very different ways. Lee's "The Dinner Project" (1997) is organized around a series of private one-on-one dinners that he prepares (more than thirty such dinners in all) in his studio or in the gallery, after hours. Tiravanija creates environments and events, some of them in galleries and museums, others on the road, in which he cooks Thai curry and gives it away. These events are convivial, informal, and the remains are left as an indication of what has happened. While he creates installations, some of them more elaborate than others, none of them complete without people inhabiting them. He represents the most recent in what is now a tradition of blurring the line (if it still exists) between art and life, setting up situations so that they may unfold and take on a life of their own, according primary importance to process and experience, and using these techniques to oppose the commercialism of art. For artists such as Tiravanija, as for those who have come before him, food as a medium and commensality as a mode of sociability are ideally suited to his project.
What would theatre history look like were it written backwards from the Futurist banquets and Dali dinners and performance art? Canonical histories of theatre take as their point of departure that which counts as theatre in the modern period�namely, theatre as an autonomous art form�and search for its "origins" in fused art forms of the past. Thus, Oscar G. Brockett's History of the Theatre is a history of drama and its performance: it does not view courtly banquets, tournaments, royal entries, and street pageants as performance genres in their own right but as occasions for plays and playlets. Such histories attend not to the fusion of opera gastronomica, the Renaissance musical banquet, conceived from the outset to play to all the senses, but to the seeds of what would become an independent art form. A history of the theatre in relation to the senses�and specifically the interplay of table and stage, the staging of food as theatre, and the theatrical uses of food�remains to be written.
Suffice it to say that it has taken considerable cultural work to isolate the senses, create genres of art specific to each, insist on their autonomy, and cultivate modes of attentiveness that give some senses priority over others. To produce the separate and independent arts that we know today, it was necessary to break fused forms like the banquet apart and to disarticulate the sensory modalities associated with them. Not until the various components of such events (music, dance, drama, food, sculpture, painting) were separated and specialized did they become sense-specific art forms in dedicated spaces (theatre, auditorium, museum, gallery), with distinct protocols for structuring attention and perception. It was at this point that food disappeared from musical and theatrical performances. No food or drink is allowed in the theatre, concert hall, museum, or library. In the process, new kinds of sociality supported sensory discernment specific to gustation, the literary practice of gastronomy, and increasing culinary refinement. Food became a sense-specific art form in its own right, as Marinetti's Futurist Cookbook so vividly demonstrates.
Performance artists working on the line between art and life�denying the line, crossing it, bringing art into life and life into art�are particularly attentive to the phenomenal, one might even say phenomenological, nature of food and the processes associated with it. For those interested in raw experience, it is a particular kind of attention that "cooks" the raw, making it both edible as food and recognizable as art, without ceasing to be life.
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38 Dogs Removed From Calif. Home of Suspected Puppy Dumper
Warning: These images may be disturbing to some viewers.
Thirty-eight dogs were confiscated Monday evening from a suspected puppy dumper's home in Riverside County, animal services said.
Alleged Puppy Dumper Caught on Camera Arrested
The discovery of dozens of dogs living in a "state of disrepair" comes after 54-year-old Deborah Sue Culwell was arrested Monday on animal abuse charges after allegedly leaving seven puppies in a dumpster in the Southern California heat.
Culwell stayed silent as officers led her away from her Coachella home in handcuffs. She faces seven counts of felony animal abuse.
Police Seek Woman Who Tossed Bag of Puppies Into Dumpster
Deputies say she's the suspect seen in surveillance video shoving seven newborn puppies that were only days old into a dumpster behind an auto-parts store on April 18 in Coachella in 90-degree heat. Investigators said they identified her through a license plate number on her white Jeep also seen in the surveillance video.
Fortunately, good Samaritans came to the rescue after a homeless man heard the puppies crying.
The puppies, so young they have to be bottle fed, are being cared for at a foster home.
"You can clearly see the bag of puppies being dumped into the dumpster," said John Welsh, the chief of the Riverside County Department of Animal Services. "There's clearly not a level of intelligence that's going to be used if you're going to toss animals."
Animal control officers worked until past 8 p.m. on Monday because Culwell's "house was overrun with other dogs," according to animal services officials. Thirty-eight dogs were confiscated from the home and taken to the Coachella Valley Animal Campus in Thousand Palms.
"Most of the dogs appeared to be in somewhat healthy condition, but some were aggressive or fearful," animal services said in a news release.
The dogs are not available for adoption at this time. Animal services is looking into whether a reunion can be coordinated because the mother dog of the dumped puppies may be among the dogs impounded.
Animal services is planning to submit a felony case to the Riverside County district attorney's office.
Photo Credit: Riverside County Sheriff's Department
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38 Dogs Removed From Calif. Home of Suspected Puppy Dumper published first on Miami News
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Historic Hill-Climbing Hot Rod From 1954 Lives to Race Today
If you’re old enough, you may have seen this car before, perhaps when it was featured in the July 1958 issue of HOT ROD. Since then, the hot rod hill climber originally built by Bob Davis of Boone, North Carolina, has been a few places. Now it’s back, completely restored and updated to modern specs for hot rodding, hill climbing, and vintage road racing.
Bob Davis built this car during the winter of 1953-1954, after serving in the Army in Europe and going to a few hill climbs, which are far more popular there than here. He got a Second, a Third, and a Fourth with it in the first season, and blossomed in 1955 with a win at Pilot Mountain. Davis passed the car around to other drivers, dominated the Grandfather Mountain Hillclimb three years in a row, and won four times in a row at Chimney Rock, North Carolina, with drivers Ed Welsh and Phil Styles. Styles, who bought the car in 1957 for $600, road raced it at tracks in Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia.
Shown in front of a replica of Ford Motor Company’s first headquarters building, the Davis Special, as restored by Garrett and Maggie Van Camp and their talented friends over 17 years, carries Van Camp’s road racing number. It’s on a ’41 Ford frame shortened 14 inches, with the X-member removed and the rails boxed, and the engine is set back 22 inches from its stock location. Van Camp races this car and a Lynx Formula Vee regularly in the Midwest and wins, in spite of the fact that he’s well past 70 years of age. (Photo location courtesy of the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, Dearborn, Michigan)
After that, though, the car spent more than 25 years in a junkyard in Waynesville, North Carolina, rusting away until vintage sports car enthusiast Jimmy Dobbs of Memphis rescued it from obscurity in 1992. The cost of restoration was so high that Dobbs sold the car to Chuck Rahn, a talented fabricator based in Phoenix. Rahn attempted to sell it to Jim Herlinger, who owned a similar car, the Baldwin Special, in northern California. Herlinger passed, but called a friend of his in Michigan to tell him about the car.
Enter Garrett Van Camp, of Bingham Farms, Michigan, who bought the car from Rahn in 1995 as a complete wreck. Van Camp, his wife Maggie, and their talented friends spent nights and weekends over 17 years until the car was not only completed, but updated for vintage racing rules with a master electric shutoff, an onboard fire system, four-point seatbelts, and a fuel cell, all well hidden to preserve as much of the original car’s looks as possible.
This vintage photo shows the original builder/driver, Bob Davis, testing the Davis Special in the hills of North Carolina in the early 1950s. Although the original side exhausts are gone, the rest of the restoration is very faithful to Davis’ original design, which in turn was borrowed from a California homebuilt sports car. Davis spent two years building the car and two more years racing it before he got his first win, at Pilot Mountain, North Carolina, in November 1955.
On May 18, 2013, Garrett and Maggie Van Camp trailered the car back to the town where it was born, Boone, North Carolina, to show it to Bob Davis’ widow and family. Maggie Van Camp says, “Joyce Davis, her daughter Kathy, and about a hundred of their friends gathered at the Chevy dealership where Bob Davis used to work. It was a magical weekend to have the car back in the town where it was built.”
Since then, the Van Camps have been busy showing and racing the car at such venues as Thunderhill Raceway in Northern California, Schenley Park in Pittsburgh, Put-In Bay in Lake Erie, Waterford Hills, Michigan, and at the vintage racing extravaganza over Labor Day weekend in Lime Rock, Connecticut. He swaps the street tires for Dunlop vintage treaded racing tires, and he’s swapped out the 4.11 gearset for a more reasonable 3.78, but other than those changes, the car is raced as-is, in between the Van Camps’ Formula Vee sessions.
In a July 1958 feature story, HOT ROD called the Davis Special a roadster “of mixed and interesting ancestry” and its pieced-together body “a real Mulligan stew.” Citing the Special’s many hill climb victories, freelancer John Corey noted, “Rather interesting what can still be accomplished with the old flathead!”
After visiting three states and sitting in a junkyard for 25 years, this is what the Davis Special looked like on the day it was delivered to the Van Camp home in Bingham Farms, Michigan, north of Detroit. The hood is made from two ’49 Chevy pickup body panels, the scoop is a reversed ’36 Ford hood, and the tailpiece is made from two 1947 Plymouth front fenders.
Every square inch of sheetmetal on the car is new, reconstructed from photos by Van Camp’s late friend Jerry Kiefer and painted ’96 Miata classic red in California by Irv Dixon. Kiefer was responsible for the body, air scoop, grille, instrument panel, radiator ducting, seats, and upholstery during long winter nights in Michigan over the entire 17-year restoration. The grille is made from silver-soldered brass flat stock, half-round, and tubing, using photographs for reference.
The Rich Willim–built engine in the restored Davis Special is a ’47 Ford flathead, its 3 5/16-inch bore by 4-inch stroke making 276 ci. It is topped with Edelbrock heads, an Edelbrock three-carburetor manifold, and three Stromberg 48 carburetors. Power moves through a ’39 Ford three-speed transmission with Zephyr gears to a quick-change rearend with either 4.11 or 3.78 gears. The emergency oil supply on the firewall is there to keep the oil pump pickup covered no matter what. The period distributor contains modern MSD electronics, and the sheetmetal around the carburetors seals against the inside of the hoodscoop to keep fresh, cold air coming in.
The oil pan has been fitted with a custom-made, extra-deep sump fitted with internal baffles and doors to keep the oil around the oil pump pickup. The headers are hooked up to exhaust pipes and mufflers for street use and some race tracks with noise restrictions. Uncorked, this engine is the soul of mellow.
By 1950s flathead V8 standards, this custom-built aluminum radiator is overkill, but that’s the way Van Camp wants it. He worked as a lead brake engineer for Ford Motor Company for 37 years, retired, and was called back for an additional 13 years, making it a nice, round 50 years at Ford.
A professional brake engineer, Van Camp put together Ford leading/trailing brake assemblies, put the whole setup inside a set of 12-inch Buick aluminum brake drums, and added air cooling scoops to the backing plates. Front skinnies are Dunlop 6.00-16s mounted on reproduction steel wheels for authenticity.
Bob Davis’ inspiration for the design of his hill climb car was a car he saw racing in California, the Baldwin Special, built in Santa Barbara by Willis Baldwin. It had a nose and body configuration very similar to this car, and a three-carb Mercury flathead V8. The Baldwin was raced all over California from its debut year in 1949 to 1959, and, after changing hands many times, is still being raced today.
The beautifully hooded and engine-turned instrument panel houses classic gauges and frames the remote shifter and a custom-made Ford V8 steering wheel by Van Camp and a rearview mirror by fabricator Jerry Kiefer. Tony Vogel added the walnut veneer floorboards for a touch of class inside the Davis Special.
The Jerry Kiefer leather bucket seats in the restored Davis accommodate a new three-point roll bar, helmet restraint, and a five-point racing seatbelt setup demanded by Vintage Sports Car Drivers Association (VSCDA) vintage racing rules. The cockpit also contains the master electrical switch and a fire suppression system, with controls hidden in the upper left-hand corner of the instrument panel. A big fuel cell and a Holley electric pump hide under the spare tire. Maggie and Garrett Van Camp race this car and their Lynx Formula Vee as much as possible.
The Van Camps met in 1966 while skiing in Aspen, Colorado, married in 1968, and have been going uphill and downhill ever since in various kinds of race cars, including his first, an E/Production ’58 Porsche Speedster. He built a Lynx Formula Vee in 1969, won the SCCA national championship in 1971, sold the Lynx in 1972, bought it back in 1999, and has raced it ever since, which slowed down the progress of the Davis restoration.
More of Jerry Kiefer’s amazing bodywork can be seen in the spare tire well, the rear bodywork with its gentle, final peak, and the integrated rear bumper and license plate light. Yes, the Van Camps do occasionally run this car on the street, to the delight of all who witness it. They did so recently in Boone, North Carolina, when the car was reunited with Bob Davis’ family.
The post Historic Hill-Climbing Hot Rod From 1954 Lives to Race Today appeared first on Hot Rod Network.
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7 Reasons Your Next Vacation Should Be a Road Trip
This article was created with Chase Auto as part of Road to Better.
When you think about taking a vacation, you probably imagine yourself boarding a plane and jetting off to an exotic location. But who has the vacation days or the cash for that?
Enter the road trip.
“But flying’s faster.” “A train does all the navigating for me.” Maybe, but according to a survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, traveling Americans spend about 44 percent of their vacation budgets on transportation—that means almost half your funds are going to getting you there, around, and back again. If you're dropping that much cash, why waste a single penny on hiked ticket fares, overbooked or delayed flights, and uninvited travel companions?
That’s why we're teaming up with our friends at Chase Auto to talk about all the reasons road trips are the best way to travel and how to do it without breaking the bank. Together we want to help you make the most of your time off—and your money.
1. You have your own space.
Your car is your friend—according to a 2017 Chase Auto survey, one in three Americans actually name their car and 48 percent of millennials in the U.S. say their longest relationship has been with their car (seriously, that's love). It's a safe space where you and your fellow travelers can talk, sing, play games, listen to music, eat, and even sleep. It also means no awkward elbow bumping, no small talk with strangers, and no suffering through freezing (or nonexistent) AC—all invaluable bonuses when traveling with kids. Road trips are arguably the best way to get your family from point A to point B because it's basically like taking your house on the road (minus the bathroom). And for those moments when you need some space, praise the car gods for front-seat privileges. However you do it, make yourself at home and enjoy the ride.
2. You’re in the driver’s seat.
Metaphorically speaking, that is—we totally recommend bringing along a travel buddy or two who can take a turn at the wheel.
With other modes of transportation (planes, trains, boats, buses), you're on their schedule, which translates to ridiculously early departures, unforeseen delays, annoying stopovers, and a ton of anxiety just trying to get your butt in a seat. Not to mention you have zero control if you get carsick, feel tired, or have a mild freak-out at 30,000 feet.
Break out actual paper maps, put those googling skills to work, and ask Alexa to save your ultimate road trip playlist. You might be surprised by how much fun you have before you even leave your driveway. If you're more of a fly-by-your-seat sort of person, make a rough outline of your route and invest in a portable phone charger. We also recommend downloading Waze, which will alert you to pesky traffic issues, and Roadtrippers, which suggests places to sightsee, eat, and stay.
3. You have way more flexibility.
Only have a few days? Drive to a neighboring city or town or find a short scenic drive. Been saving up PTO? Pick a spot on the map and trek across the country. It's completely up to you.
But here's the best part: You're allowed to change your mind en route. If you're having a blast where you are, stay an extra day or two. If you see a sign for the World's Biggest Beagle (real thing), pull off at the next exit.
“Road trips are just so much more low key,” says Chase Auto Executive Tanya Sanders. “When traveling by train or plane, you get too caught up in logistics.”
4. It's doable on a budget.
Money doesn't have to stand in the way of an amazing vacation. If you plan right, road trips can be one of the most cost-effective ways to travel. Here are some tips to make it happen:
Pick a place nearby. “You can find interesting places just two hours away," Sanders says. And since any drive from point A to point B technically counts as a road trip, even day excursions are game.
BYOF, BYOB, and BYOAETWF. That’s bring your own food, books (or booze for when you get to your destination), and anything else that will fit, respectively. Food and alcohol take up roughly a quarter of the average American vacation budget, so one of the easiest ways to cut costs is to pack your own provisions.
Put those rewards to good use. Before hitting the road, make a list of all your rewards programs (credit cards, hotels, drugstores) and plan accordingly, stopping wherever rewards might be cashed or earned. If you have a Chase Freedom card, for example, you could earn cash back on every purchase (plus 5 percent cash back in special categories that change quarterly).
Take advantage of free activities. Walk around downtown or check out free parks, shows, and outdoor spaces. Not sure where to start? Check your destination’s Facebook page, browse the website of its local paper, or download a city guide app such as Foursquare and Like a Local, where you can search for events, nightlife, and food in your price range.
Don't spend all your hard-earned $$ on a place to sleep. Hotels aren't the only option. Take part in a work exchange, where free housing is provided for chores, or try house-sitting. You could also couch surf—visit friends you haven't seen in a while or stay on a local's sofa. You can even turn your car into a tent (this air mattress makes crashing in the back seat much more comfortable)—just be sure to find a safe campground or pull-off spot that allows overnight parking. And if ultimately you'd prefer a comfy hotel bed (we feel ya), HotelTonight lets you book unsold rooms at a discount.
5. You can pack (almost) whatever you want.
Forget cramming 3-ounce bottles of shampoo into a baggie or obsessively weighing your luggage. With road trips, you can bring almost anything you want—snacks for your gluten-free lifestyle, a yoga mat for pit-stop stretching, your favorite pillow, that copy of Infinite Jest you’ve been meaning to read. While we still advocate packing light, you’ve got a lot more wiggle room in a car. So use it!
6. Fido doesn't have to stay behind.
Does the thought of leaving your furry friend at home (or worse, kenneled) break your heart? Then don't! Road tripping means no pet restrictions from third parties, not to mention pets make excellent travel partners. According to a 2016 study, 37 percent of pet owners road-tripped with their animals, and we can see why—they're cute, sweet, and don't criticize your driving.
7. Getting there is half the fun.
If counting license plates isn't your idea of a roaring good time, host your own version of "Carpool Karaoke." Or make a game out of picking up a rock or buying a weird knickknack at every stop. A long road trip is also a good time to listen to a book you've been wanting to read or binge a podcast.
When you've had your fill of diversions, embrace the silence and enjoy the view. Or take it as an opportunity to reconnect and go deep with your travel partner.
"I have some of my best conversations in the car," says Chase Auto Executive Melinda Welsh. "Even hard [conversations] are somehow easier."
Whatever you do and wherever you go, remember that it's the journey, the people, and the stops along the way that make a road trip unforgettable.
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Lord Rhys; Welsh First, Henry's Second
by Jean Gill
We all know something about King Henry II of England and Thomas Becket, but few have heard of another powerful man who sparked off the temper of that fiery king and then, against all odds, gained his trust: Lord Rhys.
When Henry died in 1189, Lord Rhys, the Welsh ruler of the kingdom of Deheubarth, had been the royal Justiciar of South Wales for seventeen years, an alliance arrived at through war, truce and stubbornness on both sides. At the peak of their conflict, frustrated in battle, Henry ordered that twenty-two Welsh hostages, including Rhys' son, should have their eyes gouged out.
Yet the two rulers then became firm allies. How is that possible? How could a father accept such an alliance? The answer might lie in Rhys' own style of leadership and his background. Maybe he accepted such an action in war because it's exactly what he himself would have done.
Certainly, the alliance was politically expedient for both rulers as, although Rhys could never win against Henry's superior manpower, Welsh guerilla warfare could harass and tire the slow, heavy English soldiers, ad infinitum. An alliance gave them both peace and a means to keep in check the greed of the Norman Marcher Lords. However, their truce held strong through later trials, when expediency for Rhys was not in loyalty to Henry, suggesting something deeper between the two men. For his part, there is no doubt that Henry felt respect for Rhys and his countrymen.
'In one part of the island [of Britain] there is a race of people called the Welsh who are so brave and untamed that, though unarmed themselves, they do not hesitate to do battle with fully armed opponents'
King Henry II 1176
Lord Rhys
Who was Rhys? His praise-singer described him as 'golden' and it might be that he was 'fair' like his mother Gwenllian, a princess of North Wales, who eloped with Gruffydd, Prince of Deheubarth to become a legend in her new kingdom. 'Fair' and 'golden' are compliments with many possible meanings: attractive, just, gifted, lucky, or, of course, blonde (no longer the compliment it once was!). The only other clues to his appearance are in a 14th century effigy on a tomb in St David's Cathedral, thought to be of Lord Rhys, in which he sports a moustache worthy of a WW2 RAF pilot.
Nobody would have expected him to rule Deheubarth. Youngest of six brothers, he was four years old when his mother, Gwenllian the Warrior Princess, was betrayed by a Welshman and beheaded by the Norman, Maurice De Londres, on the battlefield now known as Maes Gwenllian. One brother, Morgan, died in the same battle and another, Maelgwyn, disappeared, never to be heard of again. Rhys' father died a year later, of illness or grief.
The eldest surviving brother, Anarawd, then became leader until he was murdered in 1143 by order of his future brother-in-law, Cadwaladr of North Wales. The next brother, Cadell, was so badly injured by Normans from Tenby in 1151, when he was out hunting, that he renounced all worldly matters, retiring to a monastery after going on a pilgrimage.
The coat of arms of Deheubarth
Cadell left his two younger brothers, Maredudd and Rhys as joint rulers in his absence, which turned out to be permanent. Closeness between noble Welsh brothers was rare as they were usually fostered while young and competing for inheritance (with the support of their foster families) as they matured. Gelding and/or blinding were not uncommon ways of showing mercy to the loser while protecting an inheritance. However, Rhys and Maredudd, two years older, had never been fostered and had survived losses that were cruel even by the standard of the day. What little evidence remains suggests that they were close, that they rode together and fought together to win back the lands lost during their father's time.
Wales 1153
1153, the year my fictional troubadours arrive in Gwalia (Wales), was indeed a golden year for Henry, who was named heir to the English throne by its incumbent Stephen, and also for Rhys and Maredudd. They were on a winning streak and continued to regain castles and land; Carmarthen, Llansteffan, Tenby and St Clears – a 21st birthday present for Rhys in his first sortie as Commander. They even regained Ceredigion, which the North Wales allies had helped them to defend, years earlier – and had then kept for their own, at the time Anarawd was murdered. Now there is a story begging to be told!
Both images are Llansteffan Castle © Jean Gill
I have reconstructed the taking of Tenby and St Clears from details of the building structures there in 1153, starting from the terse statement in the Brut y Tywysogion. 'There was not much time afterwards before the sons of Rhys attacked the castle of Tenby, and by a night plot, after breaking the gate, they got possession of the castle, and delivered it into the [custody] of William, son of Gerald. And when that was accomplished, Rhys, son of Gruffudd, with an immense host, laid waste the castle of Ystrad Cyngen.
So, a night plot it was! Unfortunately, 'an immense host' seems to be poetic license, as on-the-spot research from Tenby sent me records showing the 12th century castle to be a small stronghold, little more than a watchtower, and St Clears (Ystrad Cyngen) was an even smaller motte and bailey.
This is why, in my version of events, my hero Dragonetz observes, 'It's smaller than I thought it would be,' before the men lay siege. There is also some disagreement as to whether events took place in 1152 or 1153, a minor matter considering how little information there is on major events!
I can't find any indication of how Maredudd died but it seems that this happened in 1155 and Rhys became sole ruler, Prince of Deheubarth, or 'the Lord Rhys', the title he's known by nowadays. He continued to build his kingdom, and not just figuratively. He built castles in the Norman style, and as solidly expensive as theirs; Cardigan, Cilgerran, Dinefwr and Llandovery, among others.
According to the cleric and writer, Gerald of Wales, a relative who stayed as Rhys' guest on his Journey Through Wales, Rhys was 'kindly' and 'discreet', a perfect host. He was highly cultured and drew poets and musicians to his court. You can imagine the harper playing in Rhys' castle in Cardigan, as at King Henry's court, where a Welsh harper was also employed. Steeped in this musical tradition, Lord Rhys is credited with hosting the first Eisteddfod, at Christmas in 1176.
He also started the codification of Welsh laws, later continued by Hywel Dda. I would argue that, when he did so, he had read The Usatges of Barcelona, laws that influenced law-making throughout Europe.
He founded Cistercian monasteries but hated bad clerics. Rhys was nicknamed 'the Good' and yet he died excommunicate for arguing with a bishop over a horse theft. His body had to be scourged before burial, in penance.
He was reputed to be charming, a man who loved many women, and this proved to be damaging for the succession in Deheubarth. Linked to Henry II in their life-times, Rhys faced the same problem; his children's conflicts, with him and with each other. Rhys had at least nine children by various mothers and as legitimacy was not important in Welsh law, claims to Deheubarth were violently disputed.
Notwithstanding the conflicts, Rhys' children played their own parts in history. Through one daughter named Gwenllian (there were several, just to add to the confusion), Rhys could claim ancestry to the Tudors, and from them to several of the ruling houses in Europe today, including the UK. Henry Tudor flew a Welsh dragon banner at Bosworth field to acknowledge his descent from this remarkable man, Rhys, Prince of Deheubarth.
Further reading/ Acknowledgements
http://www.maryjones.us/ctexts/brut_y_tywysogion.html This is the version of Brut y Tywysogion translated by William ab Ithel in the 19th century.
The Lord Rhys – Roger Turvey
The Journey through Wales and The Description of Wales – Gerald of Wales
Photos
1) Effigy of Rhys ap Gruffydd in St David's Cathedral, Wales scanned from the 1810 engraving by John Conlon
Credit: Rhion Pritchard 2/3/2006. Public Domain Image.
2) The coat of arms of Deheubarth
By AlexD (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Coat_of_arms_of_Deheubarth.svg
3) Map of Wales in 1153
Adapted from Map of Wales 986-99 (Maredudd ab Owain) courtesy of AlexD under the Creative Commons license
4 and 5 Llansteffan Castle © Jean Gill
6 Welsh dragon on plate © Jean Gill
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Song Hereafter is available as a paperback and an e-book.
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Hat Tip To: English Historical Fiction Authors
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