“Alt.Baldspot”—“Oh, my shiney head, my achin’ baldspot. I’m writing to ask all of you what is the best baldspot shining method. ”
See, one Alt.Baldspot member imagines he can reach “all of us.”
People join groups just for flaming, flaming’s a raging element of apparent endlessness. The term’s telling. Compare it with “Sticks and stones will break your bones, but names will never harm you.” Flaming’s more abstract, even if you think about fire, maybe a play on “reaching out,” which involves the idea of touching but also implies a larger, nonphysical embrace. (NYPD Blue uses it too much lately.) A galaxy of sex discussions/groups—”alt. sex.bestiality.hamster.duct tape” is my fave. Haven’t mentioned the serious conferences, haven’t gotten serious, yet. I did go into a house, “a virtual community,” LambdaMOO, and moved from room to room, trying to talk to somebody, but everyone was asleep, virtually.
So, I’ll go on it, get E-mail, and become involved in a few conferences. Maybe you’re already doing it, like sex, or you’re not, because what is it, anyway, or you’re apathetic. I don’t know. I’m curious, not driven or obsessed, yet. It further marks and divides an already divided world, haves v. have-nots, and being literate or not is evidence of access, obviously, and disposition and more. A thing that seems limitless is all and nothing, what you make of it, like everything else. Massiveness, its volume, if not depth, is attractive and repulsive. I’m living approach/avoid anyway.
Alt.yours.
The Regulation of Pleasure
Thinking about F.T. Marinetti, I’m reminded of an incident in London. Some years ago a play based on Kafka’s diaries was performed there by a fringe theater group. Their space was on the 8th floor of an office building. The elevator operator, noting the floor I wanted, complained, “Everybody talks about Kafka but no one does anything about him.” What does one do with Marinetti? An anarchist, a poet, an innovator, a fascist, an antifeminist, a super patriot, a drum major for war, a “master” of the manifesto, as he was called, the progenitor of the Futurists is no easy figure or influence to gloss in a few words or in many words.
With the first Futurist manifesto, published in 1909 on the front page of Le Monde, Marinetti gave voice to a movement that understood the impact of the machine, that ecstatically embraced technology, war and the idea of progress, a movement that saw itself as the new incarnate. The Futurists cried “Burn the museums.” Marinetti demanded “parole in liberta,” free verse, free words, words freed from syntax. The sculptor Boccioni was “nauseated by old walls and palaces, old motives, reminiscences.” Marinetti claimed the automobile over Samothrace. But in their uncritical belief in progress, the Futurists took off with some 19th-century baggage, brashly landing at the doorstep of a new century, ours.
It’s this aspect of Futurism that may be carrying undue weight for its position at the start of the 20th century when modernity was burdened with trying to become modern. To “make it new,” as Ezra Pound exhorted. In the 30s movie, The Twentieth Century, the train conductor — the name of the train is also the 20th century — keeps repeating, when there’s any problem, “But we’re on the 20th century,” and passengers insist, “But this is the 20th century,” The movie asks ironically, What makes one modern (or for that matter, postmodern)?
Through The Futurist Cookbook, published first in 1932 and just now translated into English, Marinetti and others propose recipes for modernity, manifestoes for the table. They polemicize against traditions of all sorts, particularly those of the bourgeoisie, offering Futurist maps to the entrance of the new. There’s a recipe for “The Excited Pig, formula by Futurist Aeropainter Fillia,” which calls for “a whole salami, skinned, served upright on a dish containing some very hot black coffee mixed with a good deal of eau de Cologne.” And one for “Words-In-Liberty, formula by the Futurist Aeropeot Escadame,” which needs “three sea dates, a half-moon of red watermelon, a thicket of radicchio, a little cube of Parmesan, a little sphere of gorgonzola, 8 tiny balls of caviare, 2 figs, 5 amaretti di Saronno biscuits: all arranged neatly on a large bed of mozzarella, to be eaten, eyes closed letting one’s hands wander here and there, while the great painter and word-in-liberty poet Dopero recited his famous song ‘Jacopson.’” Or there’s “The Steel Chicken”—the flavor of steel is an important ingredient in any machine lover’s diet—“the body of the chicken mechanized by aluminum-colored bonbons.” And my favorite, by Marinetti, “RAW MEAT TORN BY TRUMPET BLASTS; cut a perfect cube of beef. Pass an electric current through it, then marinate it for 24 hours in a mixture of rum, cognac and white vermouth. Remove it from the mixture and serve on a bed of red pepper, black pepper and snow. Each mouthful is to be chewed carefully for one minute, and each mouthful is divided from the next by vehement blasts on the trumpet blown by the eater himself. The soldiers are served plates of ripe persimmons, pomegranates and blood oranges. While these disappear into their mouths, some very sweet perfumes. will be sprayed around the room, the nostalgic and decadent sweetness of which will be roughly ejected by the soldiers who rush like lightning to put their gas masks on.”
Trumpet blasts, soldiers and ripe persimmons, gas masks and perfumes of nostalgia characterize the Futurist menu of the 1930s, a tempting mix of militarism, sensuality, art and nature. The Cookbook aims for a “culinary revolution. changing radically the eating habits of our race.” As in the earlier — or first wave — Futurism, speed, motion, light and liberty are part of any dinner, constant companions. Futurist cooking will be “tuned to high speeds like the motor of a hydroplane.” Marinetti promises eating that is art, “the art of self-nourishment, which “like all arts. eschews plagiarism and demands creative originality.” These are prime ingredients of Modernism, taking into the equation, or recipe, that an “art of self-nourishment” is by any other name reflexivity.
“Since everything in modern civilization tends toward the elimination of weight and increased speed, the cooking of the future must conform to the ends of evolution.” Pasta is banned. Pastasciutta, “however agreeable to the palate, is a passeist food because it makes people heavy, brutish. sceptical, slow, pessimistic. Besides which patriotically it is preferable to substitute rice.” The Futurists are for risotto, or “totalrice.” Rice is light, good for speed and action, and, it’s noted, there’s the Italian rice industry to consider as well.
Marinetti deploys food to construct “the modern man,” the new subject, to build him from the inside out, where food is what one ingests as metaphor and fuel. Futurist Marco Ramperti asserts: “The allegorical Italian has always got his avid mouth wide open over a plate of tagliatelle when he isn’t dangling dripping strands of vermicelli down his greedy gullet. And it’s an offensive image: derisory, grotesque, ugly. Our pasta is like our rhetoric, only good for filling up our mouths.” Since Marinetti’s the poet who advanced the idea of “words-in-liberty,” it makes sense that food might be seen as rhetoric, freed from its traditional position as just food, or that using certain words and dropping others, like dropping pasta and adding rice, might signify departures and surprises, changes in thinking, changes in being.
In the new diet, taste alone certainly isn’t enough. Like art, food must strive to interact with its environment, and the environment itself, like the cuisine, must be shaped to serve higher ends, the evolution of society Marinetti calls for. At a Futurist dinner all the senses must be engaged and taught to renounce the habits that dull pleasure. Between bites one might be squirted with perfume while an airplane motor roars, the music of machines. Under a Futurist regime, where knives and forks are passe, eaters could be asked to touch continuously the leg of the eater next to them or, when having “Fillia’s Aerofood. composed of different fruits and vegetables,” to eat “with the right hand. while the left hand caresses a tactile surface made of sandpaper, velvet and silk. Meanwhile the orchestra plays a noisy, wild Jazz. ”