October 7, 2009

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We intend to sing 

the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.

Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.

Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep.

We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia

the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.

We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty:

the beauty of speed.

A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.

The poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.

Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.

We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!… Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday.

We already live in the absolutebecause we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.

We will glorify war

the world’s only hygiene

militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.

We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism,

feminism

every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.

We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives

adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.

Photos by Charles Villyard, squash and Don Hicks

OPENfuture

After storing it at Avedano’s , we spit-roasted, a 650 lb grassfed Dexter steer from Green String Farm for 20 hours at Alemany Farm . The cooked steer was then loaded on a trailer pulled by a tricycle, for the 6.7 miles distance and delivered to SFMOMA by bike messengers.

The evening started with Luciano Chessa declaiming a futurist piece from a megaphone until a couple bikers circled the museum’s atrium, the tricycle, then, pulled in and the main course was laid on the custom made butcher-block style table made with wood reclaimed from a 1927 granary in Moscow, Idaho. A blanket woven with aluminum strips for the occasion covering the steer on it’s trip was hung from the balcony. More layers of aluminum foil  protecting the steer during spit-roasting were removed as well as a large bunch of fragrant wild fennel filling the cavity of the the carcass.

A group of women carved the animal and the meat was distributed to the different food stations by a conveyor belt. Some of the meat was ground  and scooped on top of corn tortilla cones, a reference to the role of corn in the beef industry; the rest of the meat was served as a main course with a topping of mole and bean foam representing oil and methane, two product associated with industrial meat production. We also served a tomato filled with halibut tartar, a nod to the genetic manipulations of tomatoes. This central part of the meal was a reflection on the effect of modernity of our food system. The meal also included  toasts with porcinis foraged in San Francisco, a vegetarian stew with produce from urban farms and a red beet terrine molded in the shape of a heart; plus wine from Scribe Winery, custom cocktails and a grappa which distillation involved the roasted tongue, heart and tail of the steer.

At the end of the carving a model of a Piper Pawnee, the plane used by industrial agriculture to spray chemicals, flew over the room and dusted the air with orange flower water that had been infused with orange peels from the orchard of the inventor of Agent Orange. The event ended with the sound of a siren and parachutes holding dessert in the form of paneforte dropped from the rotunda.

The whole event was framed by two large video projections on opposite walls of the atrium, plus a video projection of the steer roasting at night in the adjacent room and an original sound piece.

Special thanks to Avedano’s Holly Park Market, St Georges Spirits, Scribe Winery, Jason /Alemany Farm, Chris Kronner/Bar Tartine, Tartine Bakery, Magnolia Brewery, Ryan Farr, Kelsie Kerr and the carving crew, Howie Correa and the biking crew, Chris Lee and Samin Nosrat, Sasha Wizansky, Leslie Terzian Markoff, Heritage Salvage, Jack Cannard/Green String Farm and the roasting crew, Chris Sollars/video, Matt Volla/sound plus Frank Smigiel, Gina Basso and Jim Weber at SFMOMA and everyone who participated, either cooking, serving, helping out or hanging out.

Read more about OPENfuture at Samin’s blog, EAT ME DAILY, tablehopper, THE EASTSIDE VIEW, SFgate, civil eats.