CETACEAN FETISH CRUISE
by Christopher Stetson
by Christopher Stetson
*
artandwit.com
Tuesday
Sunday
BREAKFAST IN BED
by Joe Fiorito
by Joe Fiorito
The Inuit greet face to face, but they don't rub noses, exactly, and you shouldn't call it kissing. It is a form of greeting every bit as intimate as a kiss, but it goes deeper than that; it's a way for friends to take in each other's smell. It's how friends fill the empty places caused by absence.
Smell is fundamental to happiness. I know a man who travels with a piece of his wife's clothing sealed in a plastic bag. When the separation is too much to bear, he opens the bag and breathes.
Traces of this signature mark our sheets and pillows; this is what makes crawling into bed on a cold night such a comfort.
Smell is one of the many nameless things you miss when love goes wrong. That smell will linger, it will haunt you and exhaust you long after your lover has gone.
Think I'm exaggerating? Wake up early one Sunday and smell the person sleeping next to you. Do it. Lean over. The side of the neck will do, just below the ear. Take a deep breath. The knowledge of this scent is lodged in the deepest part of your brain.
Breathe deeply, if only to remind yourself of why you are where you are, doing what you're doing.
Now go into the kitchen. Throw two eggs into a bowl with a cup of milk and a cup of flour. Add a quarter teaspoon of salt and a tablespoon of melted butter. Mix until smooth, but don't overdo it.
Pour the batter into buttered muffin tins, filling the cups no more than half-full. Put the tins in a cold oven. Turn the heat to 450 F. After fifteen minutes, turn the oven down to 350 F. Wait for fifteen minutes more.
This recipe comes from the Fannie Farmer Baking Book by Marion Cunningham. It's an important book, with clear recipes and much new thinking. For example, prior to Marion, popovers were always started in a hot oven. This is a small thing, but one which changed my life.
While you're changing yours, make some coffee and squeeze a couple of oranges. Do what you want with a pear or a pineapple. Get a tray ready to take back to bed.
Now open the oven. It will make you smile. They don't call these things popovers for nothing. They look like little domes, golden brown and slightly crisp on the outside. The texture inside is as soft as your partner's neck. The smell is just as warm and every bit as earthy.
Take them out of the muffin tins and put them in a basket. They'll steam as you break them open. Eat them with a little butter and the best jam or honey in the cupboard. A soft camembert isn't out of place if you have it.
Breakfast together is the second or third most intimate thing you can share. If someone new is sleeping over and you want to make an impression, make these. If you're worried about what to talk about while you're eating, remember what Oscar Wilde said. Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
If you haven't got a partner, make popovers anyway. It's easy enough to cut this recipe in half. It's good practise. It's its own reward. The butter melts into the jam and the sun pours onto your breakfast bed. And you have another way to fill the emptiness caused by absence.
Smell is fundamental to happiness. I know a man who travels with a piece of his wife's clothing sealed in a plastic bag. When the separation is too much to bear, he opens the bag and breathes.
Traces of this signature mark our sheets and pillows; this is what makes crawling into bed on a cold night such a comfort.
Smell is one of the many nameless things you miss when love goes wrong. That smell will linger, it will haunt you and exhaust you long after your lover has gone.
Think I'm exaggerating? Wake up early one Sunday and smell the person sleeping next to you. Do it. Lean over. The side of the neck will do, just below the ear. Take a deep breath. The knowledge of this scent is lodged in the deepest part of your brain.
Breathe deeply, if only to remind yourself of why you are where you are, doing what you're doing.
Now go into the kitchen. Throw two eggs into a bowl with a cup of milk and a cup of flour. Add a quarter teaspoon of salt and a tablespoon of melted butter. Mix until smooth, but don't overdo it.
Pour the batter into buttered muffin tins, filling the cups no more than half-full. Put the tins in a cold oven. Turn the heat to 450 F. After fifteen minutes, turn the oven down to 350 F. Wait for fifteen minutes more.
This recipe comes from the Fannie Farmer Baking Book by Marion Cunningham. It's an important book, with clear recipes and much new thinking. For example, prior to Marion, popovers were always started in a hot oven. This is a small thing, but one which changed my life.
While you're changing yours, make some coffee and squeeze a couple of oranges. Do what you want with a pear or a pineapple. Get a tray ready to take back to bed.
Now open the oven. It will make you smile. They don't call these things popovers for nothing. They look like little domes, golden brown and slightly crisp on the outside. The texture inside is as soft as your partner's neck. The smell is just as warm and every bit as earthy.
Take them out of the muffin tins and put them in a basket. They'll steam as you break them open. Eat them with a little butter and the best jam or honey in the cupboard. A soft camembert isn't out of place if you have it.
Breakfast together is the second or third most intimate thing you can share. If someone new is sleeping over and you want to make an impression, make these. If you're worried about what to talk about while you're eating, remember what Oscar Wilde said. Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
If you haven't got a partner, make popovers anyway. It's easy enough to cut this recipe in half. It's good practise. It's its own reward. The butter melts into the jam and the sun pours onto your breakfast bed. And you have another way to fill the emptiness caused by absence.
*
From Comfort Me With Apples: Considering the Pleasures of the Table (Nuage Editions, 1994), a delectable collection of Joe Fiorito's vintage Hour food columns. Amazon that to your doorstep.
I WAS A 50-ft WOMAN!
struck by a radioactive cloud!
grown from 5'9'' to 50' tall in 2 hours!
a miracle of modern science or an accident of nature?
struck by a radioactive cloud!
grown from 5'9'' to 50' tall in 2 hours!
a miracle of modern science or an accident of nature?
temerious photographer! tim lagacé!
giant caught on camera! chantel ness on location getting a taste of expo 67 (once the USA pavilion)! propping on le palais des congrès! peering into montréal's casino (formerly the French pavilion)!
DISPATCHES FROM THE OTHER SIDE
by Aaron Kreuter
by Aaron Kreuter
Editors’ Note:
Local hikers found the following typewritten pages in an enormous crater next to what appears to be an ostrich cemetery. We have never heard of the author, nor do any of the events he refers to correlate to reality. Nonetheless, we have put together three excerpts from the vast amount of text extant, to showcase the workings of what must have been a very unique mind.
-eds, North American Anthropology Quarterly
Local hikers found the following typewritten pages in an enormous crater next to what appears to be an ostrich cemetery. We have never heard of the author, nor do any of the events he refers to correlate to reality. Nonetheless, we have put together three excerpts from the vast amount of text extant, to showcase the workings of what must have been a very unique mind.
-eds, North American Anthropology Quarterly
strange times
September 2nd, 2008
Fellow Americans,
The news out of Washington this week is bleak. I just got off the phone with my good friend Bill Hackensack who has been working thirty-six hours straight, balls to nuts, trying to get to the bottom of this vice-presidential shitbomb. Bill says he has a credible source in Flatback, Montana who has old B grade porno featuring the Alaskan governor herself. According to Hackensack it was an all out fuckfest complete with eighties soundtrack – the governess and four, five men, poolside, stilettos and (this will at least keep her evangelical friends happy) no contraceptives.
I knew from the moment she was brought onstage something was amiss. The tight teacher bun, the glasses, the pouty lips. It all makes sense now. And McCain weasel smiling away, bloated from the condensed fat of young school children.
In saner times this would spell the end for the Republican push for the white house, and the framed picture of Obama I keep on my mantelpiece next to my hunting rifles would have paid off, but the country appears to be one gas pump away from a pure clusterfuck, these apes in suits itching to send us back into the early mediaeval period, where any sign of straying from the status quo was met with a terminal visit to the rack and insubordination was treated with boiling oil.
I am ready to flee at any moment. I have a suitcase packed with passport, pistol, and my bust of Richard Nixon by the door. I put a down payment on forty acres of tundra a hundred miles north of Yellowknife. And if I don’t get out in time, when the militia come knocking at the door me and Jack Nicholson have enough dynamite to blow those bible-fuckers back to Jupiter.
We won’t know how serious the situation is until November, which leaves us at least two months of the NFL, though with Favre playing for the Jets and the Gillette stadium buried under a mile-high mountain of ice, it is strange times indeed to be a betting man.
AK
Fellow Americans,
The news out of Washington this week is bleak. I just got off the phone with my good friend Bill Hackensack who has been working thirty-six hours straight, balls to nuts, trying to get to the bottom of this vice-presidential shitbomb. Bill says he has a credible source in Flatback, Montana who has old B grade porno featuring the Alaskan governor herself. According to Hackensack it was an all out fuckfest complete with eighties soundtrack – the governess and four, five men, poolside, stilettos and (this will at least keep her evangelical friends happy) no contraceptives.
I knew from the moment she was brought onstage something was amiss. The tight teacher bun, the glasses, the pouty lips. It all makes sense now. And McCain weasel smiling away, bloated from the condensed fat of young school children.
In saner times this would spell the end for the Republican push for the white house, and the framed picture of Obama I keep on my mantelpiece next to my hunting rifles would have paid off, but the country appears to be one gas pump away from a pure clusterfuck, these apes in suits itching to send us back into the early mediaeval period, where any sign of straying from the status quo was met with a terminal visit to the rack and insubordination was treated with boiling oil.
I am ready to flee at any moment. I have a suitcase packed with passport, pistol, and my bust of Richard Nixon by the door. I put a down payment on forty acres of tundra a hundred miles north of Yellowknife. And if I don’t get out in time, when the militia come knocking at the door me and Jack Nicholson have enough dynamite to blow those bible-fuckers back to Jupiter.
We won’t know how serious the situation is until November, which leaves us at least two months of the NFL, though with Favre playing for the Jets and the Gillette stadium buried under a mile-high mountain of ice, it is strange times indeed to be a betting man.
AK
dispatch from four thousand feet
September 25th, 2008
Fellow Americans,
I am writing this from a small wooden shelter high atop the Canadian Rockies. On clear mornings the smoke from America’s eastern seaboard is as visible as grey weasely laughter. Me and my new neighbour Calvin spent all weekend installing triple-fortified barbed wire around my compound with air-raid sirens every five feet. If anyone comes for me they’ll have thirteen feet of 300 watt fury to get through.
Not even the most apocalyptic fundamentalist nut-jar could have foretold that the downfall of the American empire would come so swiftly, so severely, so historically beautifully. But if we’ve learned anything in this epoch of fear and ignorance and animal stupidity it is that history is one toothy-grinned motherfucker. And now while the world picks apart the corpse of a three-hundred year experiment that somewhere back during the early eighteen-hundreds veered off course and never had the balls to do anything about it I eat roasted venison for every meal, play a hick version of checkers Calvin has taught me, go on long walks with my pitbull Bernanke, and experiment with the local flora.
Is it too soon to elegize? America, you fucker, you really had us going. Oh well. So it goes. Besides, nothing will really change: whomever rises to global dominance now, whether China or Russia or Europe, the inherent production of goods and spending of capital will still reign supreme. The unprecedented clustershitfuck that is high capitalism won’t be happy until human kind is dead and bloody in the bathtub, covered in the piss of fanatics and the reeking shit of powermongering strongmen.
Canada probably won’t be safe for long. Who in their right mind would leave such a wide land of trees and snow and mushrooms to fend for itself? But I can see the mountain road that would take me deep into the arctic and I know a thing or two about survival. One thing’s for sure – Calvin, Bernanke and I will persevere.
Saying Goodnight To The American Dream That Turned Into A Nightmare And Bit Our Collective Cock Off While Giving Us A Blow Job,
AK
Fellow Americans,
I am writing this from a small wooden shelter high atop the Canadian Rockies. On clear mornings the smoke from America’s eastern seaboard is as visible as grey weasely laughter. Me and my new neighbour Calvin spent all weekend installing triple-fortified barbed wire around my compound with air-raid sirens every five feet. If anyone comes for me they’ll have thirteen feet of 300 watt fury to get through.
Not even the most apocalyptic fundamentalist nut-jar could have foretold that the downfall of the American empire would come so swiftly, so severely, so historically beautifully. But if we’ve learned anything in this epoch of fear and ignorance and animal stupidity it is that history is one toothy-grinned motherfucker. And now while the world picks apart the corpse of a three-hundred year experiment that somewhere back during the early eighteen-hundreds veered off course and never had the balls to do anything about it I eat roasted venison for every meal, play a hick version of checkers Calvin has taught me, go on long walks with my pitbull Bernanke, and experiment with the local flora.
Is it too soon to elegize? America, you fucker, you really had us going. Oh well. So it goes. Besides, nothing will really change: whomever rises to global dominance now, whether China or Russia or Europe, the inherent production of goods and spending of capital will still reign supreme. The unprecedented clustershitfuck that is high capitalism won’t be happy until human kind is dead and bloody in the bathtub, covered in the piss of fanatics and the reeking shit of powermongering strongmen.
Canada probably won’t be safe for long. Who in their right mind would leave such a wide land of trees and snow and mushrooms to fend for itself? But I can see the mountain road that would take me deep into the arctic and I know a thing or two about survival. One thing’s for sure – Calvin, Bernanke and I will persevere.
Saying Goodnight To The American Dream That Turned Into A Nightmare And Bit Our Collective Cock Off While Giving Us A Blow Job,
AK
dispatch from the other side
November 5th, 2008
Fellow Americans,
Since the polls on the west coast closed last night I have been busy. I powered down the electric fence, uncoiled the barbed wire, took down the buckets of boiling cooking oil that were prepped to fall on intruders with a tug of any number of ropes. The remote-detonated mines I will leave, for now: I’ve heard rumour that there’s bands of disenfranchised voters roaming the mountains looking for revenge. Like the jazz great Bloody Wallace used to say, the best way to stop a lynching is dynamite.
But those are exceptions of the time, fringes of the zeitgeist. Most of America will fall into line – it’s what they do, at least until the fang-toothed monarchists are able to regroup, be seen together in daylight once more. Being a humanist I can’t help feeling sorry for them: they were so close to reinstating the feudal system in the new world, they were four to eight years away from complete and utter dominance, and now, in one sweeping day, they’ve been shown for what they are: power drunk mutants with too many hands on the steering wheel. A few still remain unscathed, clinging to their positions, waiting for the return of their lost wet dream.
Sadly (on that note), even a half-drunk student of history knows that the good times rarely last. And because of that I’ve got a lot to do. For starters, the largest organism in the world is apparently a miles-long fungus growing under Montana, and I am, lest we forget, a doctor. Ah, the hallucinogenic thrill of the open road. I’ll miss this place though. Tonight with the help of my cyclopsed neighbour Calvin we’re going to dig an enormous pit in my backyard, have a bonfire of all my correspondence, clothing, books and various drug-related paraphernalia. To my editors, please take this as my formal resignation from my weekly column. To all the gun store owners of this great nation, don’t be surprised to see me in the near future, a crazed look in my eyes and self-defence my only concern.
Enjoying The Good Times Because There’s Much More Shit Than Candy And The Kids Keep Getting Fatter,
AK
See. That's what I just said.
Fellow Americans,
Since the polls on the west coast closed last night I have been busy. I powered down the electric fence, uncoiled the barbed wire, took down the buckets of boiling cooking oil that were prepped to fall on intruders with a tug of any number of ropes. The remote-detonated mines I will leave, for now: I’ve heard rumour that there’s bands of disenfranchised voters roaming the mountains looking for revenge. Like the jazz great Bloody Wallace used to say, the best way to stop a lynching is dynamite.
But those are exceptions of the time, fringes of the zeitgeist. Most of America will fall into line – it’s what they do, at least until the fang-toothed monarchists are able to regroup, be seen together in daylight once more. Being a humanist I can’t help feeling sorry for them: they were so close to reinstating the feudal system in the new world, they were four to eight years away from complete and utter dominance, and now, in one sweeping day, they’ve been shown for what they are: power drunk mutants with too many hands on the steering wheel. A few still remain unscathed, clinging to their positions, waiting for the return of their lost wet dream.
Sadly (on that note), even a half-drunk student of history knows that the good times rarely last. And because of that I’ve got a lot to do. For starters, the largest organism in the world is apparently a miles-long fungus growing under Montana, and I am, lest we forget, a doctor. Ah, the hallucinogenic thrill of the open road. I’ll miss this place though. Tonight with the help of my cyclopsed neighbour Calvin we’re going to dig an enormous pit in my backyard, have a bonfire of all my correspondence, clothing, books and various drug-related paraphernalia. To my editors, please take this as my formal resignation from my weekly column. To all the gun store owners of this great nation, don’t be surprised to see me in the near future, a crazed look in my eyes and self-defence my only concern.
Enjoying The Good Times Because There’s Much More Shit Than Candy And The Kids Keep Getting Fatter,
AK
*
See. That's what I just said.
Friday
OVERRIDE
OVERRIDE
OVERRIDE
OVERRIDE
OVERRIDE
OVERRIDE
OVERRIDE
OVERRIDE
OVERRIDE
To prevail or have dominance over;
have final authority or say over;
overrule.
To disregard, set aside, or nullify; countermand
to take precedence over; preempt or supersede
to extend beyond or spread over; overlap
to modify or suspend the ordinary functioning of;
alter the normal operation of
to ride over or across
to ride past or beyond
to trample or crush;
to ride (a horse) too much
to ride too closely behind (the hounds).
*
Jessica Howarth stumbled across this poem on dictionary.com. She uses her paper dictionary to keep the living room door shut. It's a drafty house.
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