Alex, Natalie, Sonja, and Holly dine at the Denver Science Museum, July 2000

[Editor: As I continue to migrate content from the php site to the blog, dinners are being migrated.] Between 1990 and 1997, I made a long series of audio recordings of dinners with the people I met as I traveled. The project never really began as a project, but simply as a form of remembrance of various dinners with friends and family during my continuous travels across Europe and North America. The archive includes about one-hundred-twenty 90-minute tapes, all of which are, for the first time since 1995, labelled and in racks at a temporary residence in Prescott, Arizona. I very occasionally make new ones on the current travels which are now form an unbroken nomadic streak since March of 1995 (see the Travelog), although I more often make short video clips of different meals. I also have an extensive archive of dinner images (35mm stills), a few of which I offer you here in order to whet your appetite for more.

Hakim Bey is spot-on when he invokes "Fourier and his concept of the senses as the basis of social becoming -- 'touch-rut' and 'gastrosophy,' and his paean to the neglected implications of smell and taste" as a basis or even root source for radical action. "The essence of the party: face-to-face, a group of humans synergize their efforts to realize mutual desires, whether for good food and cheer, dance, conversation, the arts of life; perhaps even for erotic pleasure, or to create a communal artwork, or to attain the very transport of bliss-- in short, a "union of egoists" (as Stirner put it) in its simplest form--or else, in Kropotkin's terms, a basic biological drive to "mutual aid." (Here we should also mention Bataille's "economy of excess" and his theory of potlatch culture.)." All of this is the core of a very humane and a very radical practice of living.

Dinners, lunches, breakfasts, whatever, breaking-bread with new and old, family and friends, strangers. The ritual is open and although it has been suggested rather often in the case of my pseudo-documentary activities that the tape recorder should be started only after the second bottle of wine has been uncorked, most consciousness of the microphone is lost in the fray to fill bellies with grub. Bon appétite! and stay tuned...

From a material point of view, sound and audio recording has always been an interest. I began a more serious exploration of the medium in 1991 when I came to own a decent portable Marantz analog cassette deck. One day I hope to produce a CD with excerpts from the dinners. In 1997, friends Mathias and Sylvia have curated a significant audio site soundcalendar which includes eight dinner fragments with accompanying texts and images from the period of 1995-97.

This work took an additional turn in 1996 when I was invited to make a proposal for the blast5drama vehicle, a performative event centered at the Sandra Gering Gallery in SoHo and curated by Jordan Crandall and the board of X-Art Editors including Adrianne Wortzel, Ricardo Dominguez, and others. I decided, with Adrianne's support to make a very simple proposal that would keep open any intent -- the proposal was that during a one week period in November 1996 in New York City, I would meet each one of the seven editors individually for a dinner (or lunch). You can read more about that project by visiting the blast 5 drama site, and my travelog from November 1996.

The most current manifestation of the dinner archive is in the live audio/video re-mix performances that I've been doing in different venues (for example the "What Are We Eating" project at the Overgaden Sount Art Festival in 2004.

While I was in Boulder during the summer of 1995 visiting with Jim Johnson, he brilliantly suggested that this project should be called Please Pass the Salt. So, there it is!

except for the aftermath, belches, breaking wind, along with cordials, cocktails, roaches scuttling behind the fridge and roaches making the rounds to settle the stretched stomach, the ablutions, excretions, the flossings (as Andrea always held, "Friends who de-plaque together, get back together!"), brushings, tooth-picking, groans, loosened belts, and, finally, groggy sleep with rich forever dreams of filled sexual appetites, the next morning, like the French Cavalry did field manouvers in yer mouth, el mondo mundo, and we get ready for more... food as sustenance. and the site of imbibing is the richest mine for life-changing dialogue.