Now if you are Reader who is also Owner, remember that cooking equipment in rentals is shared between inhabitants and that the social and political are created … sometimes fed between people living together. Through meals and scent, any feeling (affection on through to rage) is incorporated into one another’s bodies and the objects they live amongst. Here skillet, spatula, fork, and plate were deconsecrated. It is uncertain whether soap and scalding water are able to reconsecrate. After the punk dude and his punk lover escalate domestic tensions by preparing and eating his sperm by fumigating a playwright, a future community conflict resolution advocate, maybe a queer pole dancer (did he ever move in?)
Maybe you are a stunt eater, too, stimulated by the possibility of culinary extremes. And maybe another reader is a stunt-fucker who wonders if what they thought of as totalizing sex should also include the GI like this? Yet another reader claims they want no stunts that don’t result in action. But N is no stunt eater. N is accomplice. N provides a punk tender front for making aggression atmospheric. Will this lite gassing work better than law or blood—housing court or brawl? When I have been wronged, I have never been personally vindicated by the heads of the systems—a governor, a judge, a trustee, a principal … but I never deployed the jizz omelette …
One high-end food blog, “Salad for President,” sometimes features conceptual artists making salads, like sound artist Alison Knowles. But the collection, despite the title, does not feature a dish like Watergate Salad in material or concept.
Last week, I was looking at a photo of a marauder in Kyiv, shrinkwrapped to a pole, pants around his ankles and a potato crammed in his mouth. Watching people, naked in war, trying to stay alive in a compressed zone, I have trouble figuring out where my own identifications lie: do I elide with looter or watchman, be they soldier or citizen? Me, I am the potato. The old root placed in the first ready orifice. I am thick, inert, and culpable. A flesh tater? A Mr. Potato Head.
Choosing instead to wash, decorate, and eat my voids (first to soap up my innie with a bar of goat’s milk soap shaped like a plucked and roasted chicken and scented with lemon and pepper, or to lather my armpits with a bar formed like dog feces (the copy reads: “smells like cut grass”).
https://gourmetgrubb.com/faq/
Hall and Ellis, in an 1897 study of dolls, catalog girls’ feelings about the death of their dolls. Some are broken and some are murdered, some have souls and some don’t. One participant, a twelve-year-old black girl, states: “Dolls did not go to heaven for it was bright; they were put in the dark earth, hence went to hell.” Here, supernatural forces, volcanic eruption, take a naked baby doll to what another participant, a white girl, calls the bad place. So “what constitutes the death of a doll? When lost or crushed do children assume a future life for a doll and does this assuage their grief?” ask Hall and Ellis. However, how would this psychic act—the burial of white dolls at the turn of the twentieth century—play out for Paulette and Jeanne Nardal, one sister being one of the few female founding members of La Dépêche africaine, the official bimonthly newspaper of the Comité de défense des intérêts de la race noire (Committee for the Defense of the Interests of the Black Race)? Loaded dolls, black ones and white ones, as diagnostic tool, were central to Dr. Kenneth Clark's Doll Test, administered in the 1940s to black children. Clark, the first black head of the American Psychoanalytic organization, conducted the studies in a number of US states, including Arkansas and South Carolina. Clark stated: the results repeatedly confirmed that American society in the segregated South was telling blacks that they were “inferior to other groups of human beings in the society.” One wants to imagine that Clark’s Doll Tests would have different results in the Nardal and Roussi households. That the white head tumbling in the sand wasn’t theirs.
I am aware that I want the shrink to shrink my personal and ancestral trauma. At first, this process feels like the archeological dig I used to work at: where we referenced an old map of every season’s outhouse hole before we sunk the new one. I ask her to do this with me without delivering me back to the larger hole: normative America. My psychoanalyst reminds me that she still has the cotton boll I gave to her twelve years ago, picked by my mother in honor of our cotton picking, sharecropping forebears: my grandmother, my great aunts, my great grandmother, my great-great grandmother, and so on … I am uncomfortable: the cotton boll feels not just cornball in 2022 (as if I might be the sort who enshrines it, placing it under a glass bell arranged on a rustic board that is white with fresh milk paint; a white signboard hanging above the shelf displays large, gold, cursive script reading “Tits + Grits + Celtic Shit.”). I evoke the Etsy white-devious: the mode or zone where folks are dowsing white class origin to evade a racial reckoning. This sort of messaging befuddles a drowsy white (“near-woke”) who might have started to think about how to defund capitalism. Remembering a coffee shop in Dallas, Texas: The barista, a white guy who grew up there, says: “Just outside of the city, pay attention to the roads; they were built to accommodate cotton plantation equipment; they have these specific pull-offs for the vehicles to turn around. This whole area, before oil, was cotton and people like to forget that the money around here started with slavery. But you just got to understand the roads and it is obvious.” Whites, on a country drive, dust up the grid, making visible for miles the infrastructure that has supported them alone.
I cannot locate documentation of the caking online. The effect might resemble tactical camo clinging to her skin, but I am also remembering how white suburban tweens at Waldorf-inspired nature schools claim camouflage is their intention when spreading mud on their faces and how the end result is something that clearly lands in their desire to still participate in blackface without retribution. I crave the glouped Duras reproduction, not blackface. However, I imagine there is a missed lesson for me here—in how one holds one’s face when some public humiliation is a second skin.
A brief conversation on pieng women in the United States (70’s era) can be found here: https://www.fluentcollab.org/might-be-good/mbg-issue-194-tacks-tape-and-a-level/. It touches upon the pieing of anti-gay activist Anita Bryant and of pornographic actress Linda Lovelace.
Ben Turpin in MR. FLIP (1909). (3:37).
I want to reference both Tierra Whack’s Unemployed video and the Irish Hunger. The blighted spuds connect to colonial plunder and rule, fungus and famine and the state-backed merchant companies’ development of the plantation, in occupied Ireland and colonized America, as a frontier settlement scheme. Tierra Whack’s Unemployed video (dir. Cat Solen) includes the singer as laboring intermediary between a verklempt potato sliced and fed to gigantic, sentient potatoes. But both references require a secondary cascade of footnotes flowing from this footnote.
Hannah Segal quoted in Claudine and Pierre Geissmann, “Melanie Klein: early object relationships,” A History of Child Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2005), 107.
Sometime after a youthful investigation of the reproductive parts of dead eels, Sigmund Freud seeks a living encounter with the porcupine. Freud smells the porcupine before he sees it. When he beholds the porcupine, it is in a state of decomposition. In 1909, he begins to keep a bronze porcupine on his desk. When the metal quills are stroked, it tines melodic. Scent and sound keep reshaping the human-porcupine encounter. The Freud Museum claims that “Freud incorporated Schopenhauer's use of the porcupine as a metaphor in describing the difficulties of group relationships.” But according to biologists, groups of porcupines share dens without much conflict and do not bloody one another in desperate attempts to warm themselves. Philosophers and analysts fantasize about animal discord as a way to cloak the human energy to violate without reason.
Contaminated by pop culture, I simultaneously imagine a porcupette delivered to pop-icon Patti Smith—her one long black gloved hand rehab roughhousing her spiny adolescent friend.