Oh, Poo!

While I’m off deciding on seven questions to ask my first willing interview victims Bev and Deloney, I thought you might be entertained by this malodorous little news item. I don’t suppose any of you have Dr. Freud on speed dial, do you?

Seems American artist Paul McCarthy,

considered one of the more influential contemporary artists, had

an installation at the Paul Klee Centre in Berne, Switzerland, called Complex Shit. It was an inflatable dog turd the size of a house, and it was installed in the museum’s front garden, the Art Playground.

The night of July 31 was especially windy, and alas, the turd escaped its moorings and was carried 200 yards, bringing down a power line and smashing into a greenhouse and breaking some windows before falling back to earth at a children’s home.

Museum director Juri Steiner said the installation has a safety system which normally makes it deflate when there is a storm, but this time it didn’t work, for some reason.

This isn’t the first that McCarthy has dabbled in crap, as it were. He was part of an interesting 1997 exhibition of scatalogical art, according to an article in Art in America. By turns witty, irreverent, and disgusting, in this show “formal comparison was beside the point; it was the transgressive approach that counted.”

Since 1982 McCarthy has taught performance, video, installation, and performance art history at UCLA. In his early works, McCarthy sought to break the limitations of painting by using the body as a paintbrush or even canvas; his work evolved from painting to performance art and psychosexual events intended to fly in the face of social convention, testing the emotional limits of both artist and viewer.

I’ll spare you the details, but the art critic at The Village Voice, as avant-garde as that journal can be, wrote in a review that he “was shocked—not only at how abject and totally sicko his art can be, but at how few people seemed offended by it, and how many appeared mesmerized” by McCarthy’s 1991 show at the New Museum. He called his work a “blitzkrieging blend of sculpture, performance, photography, and Freudian regression.”

No word yet on when—or if—Complex Shit will be put back on display.

Seven Questions

When I went on the Big Trip back in ’91 (and yes, I will be continuing that saga shortly, I promise), I had the notion of setting up a table in the town diner of every new town I landed in, putting up a little sign that said, “Tell me a true story, I’ll pay you a dollar.” And I’d sit there with pen, paper, and tape recorder, ready to interview anyone brave enough to sit down opposite me.

I never did it, of course. But I think I will next time I take a long road trip.

In 2006 a blogger I admire, in an attempt to get lurkers to come out of lurk mode, offered to interview readers if they would post the interview in their own blogs. A year and a half later, a more highfalutin’ version of the project (apparently unrelated to my acquaintance’s offer) appeared on another blogger’s site:

Did you ever notice that whenever some expert is being interviewed on Oprah or the Today show, the person just happens to have a book coming out the following week? It’s as it wasn’t important to tell us the cure for cancer until the guy’s book comes out, and then they don’t even tell you the cure so you have to buy the book. I’ve seen some bloggers being interviewed by other bloggers. It’s usually the same as it is on TV. Those interviewed are persons deemed “worthy” of being asked important questions about the world. They have a popular blog, a project coming out, or a specific expertise. We instantly find these people even MORE interesting because someone took the time to interview them. It’s like Obama’s campaign didn’t even start until Oprah sat down to talk with him. All of a sudden, everyone went, “Wow, she finds him interesting. He MUST be interesting.” I know most of you won’t agree with me, but I think anyone who decides to write about their life online is interesting, even those who may not do the best job yet of conveying that on paper. We all should be interviewed, at least once.

Ever the copycat, I’m going to take a slightly different approach from each of the aforementioned bloggers, but I think you’ll find it enjoyable. Here’s how it will work:

1. Let me know, in the comments section of this post, if you would like to be interviewed. (Make sure your email address is included in the comments form. I’ll see it, but no one else will, and I won’t share your email address with anyone else.) Also include a link to your blog.

2. I will read your blog, and come up with seven questions—some serious, some silly, whatever I think might be interesting—based on the blog’s contents. Scary, eh?

3. Take time to come up with thoughtful answers, but don’t dilly-dally. Answer as openly and honestly as you are able. Try to get your answers back to me within a week.

4. There might be some back-and-forth correspondence if I’d like to explore a topic a little further.

5. I’ll write it up and send it to you. We both publish the same interview in each of our blogs, with a link to the other’s blog for that all-important cross-linking effect that search engines love so much.

6. If you think this experiment is fun, you might offer to interview people on your blog, and keep propagating the interview project.

So whatcha think? Anyone want to be interviewed?

Haute-but-Fast Cuisine

A friend writes:

I hadn’t been to a Burger King for months if not a year. So I was flabbergasted today when I saw that they actually now have little soda pop recommendations posted at their soft drink dispensers, as though it were a fine restaurant recommending the perfect wine to accompany your entree (i.e. fish, chicken or beef). Has anyone else noticed this? According to BK, Diet Coke goes perfect with the Veggie Burger (which was not even on the menu board), as well as their salads. Sprite is the choice if you have ordered the Chicken Fries. And if you order a Whopper, then of course Coke is the one. But Dr. Pepper is what you should drink if you are having the BBQ burger thing (whatever they call it, it has onion rings on top too). WTF? Aren’t their creepy TV ads bad enough? Some advertisement agency actually thought this up.

My friend continued:

So I didn’t get the Sprite with my chicken sandwich, I got a Coke. Did I do myself a disservice? Did I compromise my enjoyment of their “cuisine” by not following their soft drink recommendation?

Oh, dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. No only did my friend do himself a disservice, he completely compromised then entire dining experience. Shame on you, old friend. Shame!

I mean, would you drink a young white wine with Coq au Vin? Unthinkable! Or a fine old Cabernet with tacos? No!

I recently visited an online forum for professional chefs, and the topic of food pairings came up. “Instead of pouring a glass of Pinot Noir with grilled salmon,” one chef wrote, “pour a glass of Saison Dupont. People will see fireworks! If the salmon has a crack of black pepper on it, it will be an even better match because it will pick up on the pepper of the beer.”

I have never seen or even heard of Saison Dupont, but maybe it would be worth it for the fireworks.

Another said, “In the top 1 or 2 percent of perfect pairings for me would be a classic like Bresse chicken with mushroom sauce and truffles, paired with Burgundy. One taste of that, and you immediately think, ‘This wine was made for this dish!'” Some day I hope to taste a truffle, but I don’t think I’ll be serving one anytime soon.

A third said, “With biryani, I’d want Pinot Noir—particularly a fruity one with more oak to it, like a Russian River style.” OK, I don’t even know what biryani is, or where a Russsian River-style Pinot might be found in Florida, so I’m completely sunk.

Burger King is clearly more my speed. And as I told my correspondent, people put years of study into food-and-drink pairings, and if they say you should drink a Dr. Pepper with a BK Rodeo Cheeseburger, by god, you had better drink a Dr. Pepper, or there will be hell to pay!