Researchers at Princeton University found that we judge wealth levels through individuals’ clothing in as little as 130 milliseconds, proving Coco Chanel’s maxim “If you wish to do business, the first thing is to look prosperous.” Early-twentieth-century European women used camellias as a symbol to communicate their desire to be seduced. Suitors had to know the code to read this flower as an invitation. In the past, only expensive tailored suit jackets came with working buttons on the sleeves, and so rich men would leave a button undone “Accidentally” to show off this detail. Tom Wolfe explains, “There are just two classes of men in the world, men with suits whose buttons are just sewn onto the sleeve, just some kind of cheapie decoration, or—yes!—men who can unbutton the sleeve at the wrist because they have real buttonholes and the sleeve really buttons up.” Well-to-do men who were familiar with this convention could read the signal of open cuff buttons and appraise the wearer as having high status. The “Kantian aesthetic,” as anthropologist Daniel Miller writes, is “one of refusal, a foregoing of the immediate pleasure of the sensual and the evident in favour of a cultivated and abstracted appropriation through an achieved understanding.” There is also an anti-Kantian aesthetic, which we could label “immediate”; no special knowledge of conventions is required to enjoy the thrills of roller coasters, catchy Tp 40 songs, and ice cream sundaes. Originality is much easier with granular knowledge and expertise, because knowing what is distinctive requires knowing what is common. Those looking to improve their taste can always learn more about the full range of choices, each choice’s meaning, and their former and current status value. This provides individuals with the confidence to go beyond the well-known and into exciting new directions, perhaps even unearthing unforeseen pleasures in commonplace items. personas appear more authentic when they include a few “mistakes”—i.e., sloppy behaviors, low-status habits. Perfect taste suggests an overexertion of effort. Great taste should appear natural. In men’s fashion the ultimate style move is sprezzatura, embracing intentional errors such as undone buttons and misaligned neckties. Gianni Agnelli, the head of Fiat, wore watches over his shirtsleeves. The courtier Baldessare Castiglione best explicated the idea of sprezzatura, believing it an important counterbalance to times when “achieved grace and charm” becomes a “frivolity and a vanity, even an unmanliness.” Intentional amateurism can be attractive for those who already have high status. The hip Misshapes parties in the early-twenty-first-century New York prohibited beat matching, the professional DJ skill of seamlessly moving from one song to the another. Clunkier transitions were more authentic and, therefore, cooler. The most powerful form of authenticity thus remains authenticity by origin: the principle that groups who formulate a convention are the best at replicating it. Scotch must be made in Scotland, and bourbon whiskey must be made in Kentucky. Globalization, however, has made this standard more difficult to enforce. In 2010 a Taiwanese whiskey, Kavalan, bested three homegrown scotches at the Burns Night competition in Leith, Scotland. Within contemporary pop culture, conventions change to frequently over time that their origin points are unclear. Pizza may be from Italy but rose to prominence in the United States. Our standards are shifting toward authenticity by context: the principle that the best things are those made by the original methods (i.e., “It ain’t where you’re from; it’s where you’re at”). Blue jeans may be an “American” garment, but Japanese textile mills have better preserved earlier American production techniques, such as natural indigo-dyed, slubby fabric woven on narrow looms. The independent American denim brand Prps, which proclaims “Authenticity is our first priority,” gained its global prestige through a pioneering embrace of Japanese denim. the novelist Gustave Flaubert “was smarter than us. . . . He had the wit to come into the world with money.” Charles Taylor writes that we “tend to think that we have selves the way we have hearts and livers,” with “our thoughts, ideas, or feelings as being ‘within’ us.” Yet we now understand that these desires, at least in part, derive from community conventions so internalized they become indistinguishable from instinct. The demands of the self usually conform so closely to societal norms that we feel no tension in acting upon our desires. The self emerges most clearly at times when our passions clash with social protocol. Their very inconvenience makes them feel “true.” Over the last 150 years, however, psychologists and neuroscientists have warned us against attributing too much authenticity to our thoughts. Our brains are always engaged in rationalization: framing raw remands from our subconscious as well-grounded, logical requests. Psychologist Bruce Hood elaborates, “Even if you deliberate over an idea, turning it over in your conscious mind, you are simply delaying the final decision that has, to all intents and purposes, already been made.” Later, “having been presented with a decision, we then make sense of it as if it were our own.” The overwhelming number of truth-cloaking mechanisms in our brains has convinced Hood that the self is an “illusion.” Whether or not this is the best framing, we should certainly abandon the idea that the self is a “real me” cordoned off from any social influence. In hoping to deny the influence of status, however, our brains rationalize the attraction to status value using palatable alibis, such as the pursuit of high quality and beauty. In doing so we interpret inauthentic external desires as authentic demands from our heart. We then voice these alibis with pride as our deepest thoughts. As everyone obscures their status desire, it results in a lack of public discussion around status seeking, which in turn further propagates the status taboo and makes us ashamed of wanting status. we should temper our severe self-expectations regarding the achievement of pure originality. Even the most unique individuals will have a lot in common with others. The best we can hope for is a relative originality created in the margins of our persona. At the same time, not everyone needs to be different for difference’s sake. For those at the top, the pursuit of distinctiveness is important for receiving higher status. But to foist the requirement of uniqueness on everyone is unnecessary, unnatural, and often cruel. If we allow everyone to be themselves, this should also provide the freedom to be identical to others. New Money status symbols thus have very low symbolic complexity: they make sense as signals to everyone, including members of a parvenu’s low-status community of birth. The thirteenth century Italian nobleman Giacomo da Sant’Andrea once burned down his own villa just to thrill guests. The menswear writer G. Bruce Boyer once asked a Philadelphia patriarch where he purchased his tuxedo and was scolded, “I don’t buy evening clothes. I have evening clothes.” The Earl of Winchester, who at one point was the world’s richest man, avoided any clothes that appeared to be recently purchased. At Yale in the 1950s the word “shoe” became slang for the upper crust, in reference to their white suede shoes worn to the state of dilapidation. Scholarship students could buy white bucks pre-dirtied in New York “to save [them] the embarrassment of looking as though you hadn’t had them all your life.” Compared with New Money’s love of fashion, Old Money seeks items of permanent value and rejects novelties. In the United States, Old Money flocked to stable “traditional styles” in the finest natural materials—such as wool, cotton, and linen—rather than synthetic polyester. Funny what an odor can do. This afternoon in the produce section of the supermarket I bent over between the oranges and the nectarines and unexpectedly caught a brief whiff of what was exactly the scent of the Nago incense David used to bring back from New York four years ago. I wouldn’t exactly call what I went into a swoon, but it did carry me back to the night he and I sat up late drinking port and listening to the album of Tunisian music he’d brought over. Anyway, the guy did at last finish, at which point three people back toward the budget classical section applauded. Lambert stared at them a moment, then began by saying that all the talk of being “more centered” was just that, talk, and had long ago become too easy to throw around anymore. He then asked what, or where, was this “center” and how would anyone know it if it were there. He went on, tilting his chair back on its hind legs, folding his arms across his chest and saying that he wasn’t sure anyone had anything more than the mere word “center,” that it didn’t simply name something one doesn’t have and thus disguises a swarm of untested assumptions about. Then he shifted his argument a bit, saying that if our music does have a center, as he could argue it indeed does, how would someone who admits being “somewhat uninformed” recognize it, that maybe the fellow from the radio station wasn’t saying anything more than that our music churns out of a center other than his, one he’s unfamiliar with. He pointed out that, as he puts it, “you don’t know any center you don’t go to” and finished the matter off by rising from his chair, wagging a very preacherly right index finger and admonishing, “But if, ‘somewhat uninformed,’ you refuse to make the journey to that center and instead pontificate on its need to be ‘more centered,’ then you’re asking for nothing if not an easier job, that your work be done by someone else, that our music abandon its center and shuffle over to yours.” With that he sat down to cheers and stamping of feet from the folk imports section. But that reminds me: You maybe be wondering what Penguin had to say during the press conference. I forgot to tell you he wasn’t there. Yesterday, as you know, was John Coltrane’s birthday. Penguin, by way of homage and celebration, insisted on eating three sweet-potato pies, just as Trane did one afternoon in Georgia in the late forties when he was in the Cleanhead Vinson band. We all warned him but he wouldn’t listen, so he ended up sick and had to have his stomach pumped. Won’t get out of the hospital till tomorrow, perhaps even later. I’ll be in touch. The odd thing is that my brother in fact came home a year ago, yet I’ve continued to have these dreams of his return. It’s as though the gap between fact and idea filled the heart to the point of flooding, as though grief were a liningless womb turning inside out. Words don’t go to where this sadness welled up from, a deepening throb I felt as a sorrow set free of all cause, a sorrow previous to situation. I wept not for Richard nor myself nor anyone else but for the notion of kin, as though the very idea were an occasion for tears, a pitiful claim to connection, a bleeding socket whose eye’d been plucked out. The dark of that hollow brought me to my knees. As though I knelt before blood, I knew my pulse to be an influx of losses, a bottomless hurt or an echoing thump come out of the cave I call the Heartbreak Church. I tried telling Richard how much I’d missed him, how glad I was to see him, that there were no bad feelings. He put his arm around my shoulders. I woke up crying. You’ll also notice that we’ve added a singer to the group. She’s from Mauritania and her name’s Djamilaa. I think I mentioned her in a letter some time ago. (I referred to her as “smoky-voiced,” if I recall correctly.) I finally got up enough nerve—or at least I thought I had—to call her up a month or so ago, I say “thought” because, as it turned out, after I’d dialed her number and she’d answered the phone I was too tense to speak up. It was like in a dream. I moved my mouth but no sound came out. The weird thing, though, was that after she’d said hello about three or four times and gotten no answer she paused fo a while, assumed a more intimate voice and whispered, “It must be you then, N. I knew you’d eventually call.” She went on to say a number of other things, the upshot of which was that I got my voice back. Anyways, one thing, as they say, led to another, so we’ve been getting pretty cozy of late. I think you’ll hear what it is I like about her voice, the throaty direness I love. “As though it etched itself in ashes,” Penguin says. Socioethnic rub or cosmicomic ruse? A cloak of powders one might almost call it, but for the nagging question of whether his handkerchiefs contained cocaine as some have said they did. Stardust indeed . . . “I don’t know you but I know your father. I don’t know your father but I know your father’s father. I don’t know your father’s father but I know your father’s grandfather. I don’t know your father’s grandfather but I know your grandfather’s grandfather. I don’t know your grandfather’s grandfather but I know your great-great-grandfather’s father. I don’t know your great-great-grandfather’s father but I know your great-great-grandfather’s grandfather. I don’t know your great-great-grandfather’s grandfather but I know your great-grandfather’s great-great-grandfather. I don’t know your great-grandfather’s great-great-grandfather but I know your great-great-grandfather’s great-great-grandfather . . .” And so on. He added that if anything the words were a summons, a call-to-arms as it were, an invitation into an area of uncommon sense, and that the dislocations they visited upon so-called proper English were manifestly of an invasive, mediumistic order. I may not have mentioned it before, but everyone in the band sometimes work out a solo situation. The money thing, being what it is, makes it easier to get gigs the fewer people there are to be paid. Anyway, Lambert jumped at the chance when the people over at Rhino Records asked if he’d do a solo concert as part of their Sunday night series. He almost immediately went into what ended up being a two-week period of seclusion, a sort of retreat. The night before he slipped off to wherever it was he went he got a spacey look in his eyes at one point an announced, “It’s not about being here anymore. I’ve gotta tighten up my concept, give it a few turns I’ve gotta go elsewhere to get.” (He had a strange way of inflecting the word “turns.”) we ended up not seeing him again until last night after the concert. I’ll get to why I say after the concert later, but first you should know that the gig took place where the Rhino concerts usually do, at a little place called the Century City Playhouse over on Pico near the 20th Century Fox complex. (Lambert, alluding to this I think had himself billed as “The Twenty-Third Century Man of Feeling.”) He talked about something he termed a “bouquet of burned powder,” calling it “the obsessive perfume of a shotgun bride serenaded by echoes of an inaugural blast,” belaboring (or so it seemed to me at least) the metaphorical potential of the Big Bang theory.     As Lambert spoke Polhymnia began a series of stiff, rectilinear gestures (sort of like that dance called “The Robot” which was popular a while back), the first of which coincided with Lambert’s mouthing of the phrase “a heuristic rigor overwhelming all recourse to anecdotal appeal.” Turning to her right and taking a set of very small screwdrivers from her pocket, she picked up Lambert’s horn and proceeded to take it apart—not just undoing the mouthpiece, the reed and so forth, but using the tiny screwdrivers to detach the pads and the keys as well. Her movements were very slow and painstakingly deliverate, which gave Lambert plenty of time to talk. What he did was keep a monologue going throughout the time she worked on the horn. I can’t give you a word-by-word account of what he had to say, but among the things that struck me most was his repeated quoting of a statement whose source he neglected to cite: “Whether we deal with music or some other human event, spirit is at our mercy and we are, in reality, accountable for it.” I was also impressed by the self-inquisitive tactic he resorted to at times, posing pairs of like-sounding words against one another as indecisive “notes” of an indeterminate “scale.” I recall him asking at one point, “Eventual or eventful? Basis or bias? Composite or compost? Concept or conceit?” Another thing he did which sticks in my mind was give a brief sketch of the life of Antoine Joseph Sax, the inventor of the saxophone, arguing that Sax has yet to be given the credit he deserves for his other inventions (most likely, he noted, because Coleman Hawkins never played any of them), the saxtromba and saxtuba in particular. Once Polhymnia had gotten the tenor completely disassembled she proceeded to put it back together again. Maybe the most impressive thing about the whole performance was the seemingly telepathic way in which her completion of the reassembly of the horn coincided, to the very second, with the final words of Lambert’s monologue, a statement he said had been made by an ex-slave on one of the Georgia Sea Islands to a white folklorist in 1894: “Notes is good enough for you people, but us like a mixtery.” The very last turn Polhymnia put on the very last screw, in other words, coincided exactly with the words “mixtery” (or was it “mystery”?), at which point the lights in theater went down. It took the audience a while to realize that the concert, which had lasted about two and a half hours, was in fact over, but after a minute or so of sitting silently in the dark we all gave a long, intense round of applause. The lights never came up again, however, so we had to grope our way back to the door, outside of which Lambert stood shaking hands with the exiting audience as in a receiving line. The five of us ended up going over to Onaje’s, an after-hours juice bar just off Pico a block away from La Brea. We sat around rapping till something like five or six o’clock. “There seems to be an innate opportunism to the fact of having been born, at this point in our evolution at least, with opposable thumbs. This accounts, I think, for the overtones of manipulation (the Latin word for hand, you’ll remember, is manus) which content with and otherwise complicate the ‘innocence’ of touch.” But this exists for me as nothing other than an open possibility, a navigable breach to be unceasingly addressed by way of an effort wholly distinct from concessions to closure. In deciding to compose a piece which would carry thru on the dream I wanted to somehow subvert or erase the triteness of any such ending, to in so ding deflect what arrest had set in with Opposable Thumb’s assassination. (It was somehow obvious to me in the dream that Opposable Thumb had been a victim of foul play—this in spite of the fact that the authorities had labeled his death a suicide, referring to him as having died, as they so smirkingly put it, “by his own hand.”) The cramped insistence of a nasality which bordered on regret slowly elicited a sort of rain—a rain, however, which was more like a dessicated spray or a suspended rush of infinitesimal powder. It felt to me like a miraculous, immaculate ash in fact, an aromatic dust (like what’s left behind by the burning of incense). “An ashen finesse,” Lambert whispered in my ear, but I stuck to my own understanding of it as the drift or debris of an echoed eruption, the dry-minded rain of all eternity, the very ash of time. I intuitively knew that somewhere and somehow someone had scorched an “ever after” root. The last thing I remember is my hands falling away from the saxello, my arms going limp at my sides and me leaning forward like on of those guardian women carved on the prows of ships. I must have leaned as if to anticipate a blessing, I think, letting the dry, telepathic rain wash my brow like cigar smoke from a Mother of the Gods. I’d put on a record by Al Green. I’ve long marveled at how all his going on about love succeeds in alchemizing a legacy of lynchings—as though singing were a rope he comes eternally close to being strangled by. In this he seems to me to be Rhythm & Blues’s equivalent of Jean Toomer (“braided chestnuts,/coiled like a lyncher’s rope”). you’ll have to follow up this excellent essay of yours with a treatment of the familial ties between the falsetto, the moan and the shout. There’s a book by a fellow named Heilbut called The Gospel Sound you might look into. At one point, for example, he writes: “The essence of the gospel style is a wordless moan. Always these sounds render the indescribable, implying, ‘Words can’t begin to tell you, but maybe moaning will.’” If you let “word” take the place of “world” in what I said above the bearing this has on your essay should become pretty apparent. (During his concert a few weeks back Lambert quoted an ex-slave in Louisiana as having said, “The Lawd done said you gotta shout if you want to be saved.” Take particular note of the end of “Love and Happiness,” where Green keeps repeating, “Moan for love.”) Like the moan or the shout, I’m suggesting, the falsetto explores a redemptive, unworded realm—a meta-word, if you will—where the implied critique or the momentary eclipse of the word curiously rescues, restores and renews it: new word, new world. For the past few weeks I’ve done little more than a lot of sleeping, feeling brought down if not exactly done in by the contradictions (to loosely paraphrase Lambert) between the world one carries around in one’s head and the world one carries one’s head around in. The afternoon in Venice turned out to be not all that bad. I haven’t seen so many bodies on display in one place in I can’t remember how long. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the likes of it before. I saw even more flesh than the last time I was there. It even got me thinking along lines which have put me to work on a new composition. For some time now I’ve noticed an increasingly widespread tendency, on the part of men and women alike, to wear shorts or cut-off jeans which are cut short enough to expose at least an inch of the rounded base of each buttock—a tendency to publicize, one might say, the liminal crease where the upper back on the leg mets or joins or turns into the lowest part of the hip. Still, I was nowhere near prepared for the quantum increase in public access to “private” parts. Some of the outfits people turned out to go skating in I found hard to believe. We saw one couple dressed in what appeared to be cellophane jumpsuits—bizarre, rose-tinted, blatantly transparent affairs which clung to their bodies like a sort of Saran Wrap. There it all was for everyone to see—body hair, balls, asses, breasts, labia, the whole works. What struck me about this couple, though, was that each of them wore headphones and cradled a large radio/cassette player to which he or she listened while disco-skating down the walk. They both seemed to be utterly oblivious to every outside presence (one another’s included), thoroughly and absolutely absorbed in their respective maneuvers. What more telling sign of our present predicament, I thought. So observable a contiguity of publicized private parts with privatized public space spoke to me deeply of a miscegenous exchange between the public and the private. I instinctively recognized the crossfire, so to speak, of a precipitous volley back and forth between two mutually disdainful, mutually infiltrating domains. It both withheld and held forth on a war of which I knew we were all, in one way or another, casualties. While we were out for a walk yesterday I heard a barefoot girl in somewhat ragged jeans say to her boyfriend as they passed us, “I didn’t let it bother me though. Whether she wanted it or not, I knew I was spreading love.” We walked not so much on eggshells as on a skim of oddly uterine water, each note evoking a thinned, auto-suggestive liquidity which by way of an inverse, evasive equation known only to itself possessed us of a newly arrived-at notion or understanding: band-as-manyfooted-beast. It had the feel of being walked in or walked away with I often get from certain salsa bands. It was the most ingenious appeal ever shaped by human lungs and lips I was pretty much convinced, an offhand, obliquely yawning elasticity whose corralled insistences made for a remote, pathetically extrapolative dirge. Subject: “Not Another Season’s Greeting” They Said From Seth Siegelaub & Marja Bloem, 25 December 2010 Dear Friends: Please accept, with no obligation, implied or implicit, our best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. We also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2011, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make our country great, which is not to imply that it is necessarily greater than any other country. These greetings are sent without regards to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wisher. By accepting these greetings you are accepting these terms. This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal at any time at our discretion. It is freely transferable with no alteration to the original greeting. It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for herself or himself or others, and is void where prohibited by law and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher. These greetings are warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for current period or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, which ever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher. Until then, Seth & Marja “No decision can be made too slowly” “Too many clicks spoil the browse.” The evening news is where they begin with ‘Good evening’, and then proceeds to tell you why it isn’t. A bank is a place that will lend you money, if you can prove that you don’t need it. I didn’t say it was your fault, I said I was blaming you. Why do Americans choose from just two people to run for president and 50 for Miss America? Excellent Political Evaluation For Today’s World DEMOCRAT You have two cows. Your neighbor has none. You feel guilty for being successful. REPUBLICAN You have two cows. Your neighbor has none. So? SOCIALIST You have two cows. The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor. You form a cooperative to tell him how to manage his cow. COMMUNIST You have two cows. The government seizes both and provides you with milk. You wait in line for hours to get it. It is expensive and sour. CAPITALISM, AMERICAN STYLE You have two cows. You sell one, buy a bull, and build a herd of cows. BUREAUCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE You have two cows. Under the new farm program the government pays you to shoot one, milk the other, and then pours the milk down the drain. AMERICAN CORPORATION You have two cows. You sell one, lease it back to yourself and do an IPO on the 2nd one. You force the two cows to produce the milk of four cows. You are surprised when one cow drops dead. You spin an announcement to the analysts stating you have down sized and are reducing expenses. Your stock goes up. FRENCH CORPORATION You have two cows. You go on strike because you want three cows. You go to lunch and drink wine. Life is good. JAPANESE CORPORATION You have two cows. You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. They learn to travel on unbelievably crowded trains. Most are at the top of their class at cow school. GERMAN CORPORATION You have two cows. You engineer them so they are all blonde, drink lots of beer, give excellent quality milk, and run a hundred miles an hour. Unfortunately they also demand 13 weeks of vacation per year. ITALIAN CORPORATION You have two cows but you don’t know where they are. While ambling around, you see a beautiful woman. You break for lunch. Life is good. RUSSIAN CORPORATION You have two cows. You have some vodka. You count them and learn you have five cows. You have some more vodka. You count them again and learn you have 42 cows. The Mafia shows up and takes over however many cows you really have. KNITTING A highway patrolman pulled alongside a speeding car on the freeway. Glancing at the car, he was astounded to see that the blonde behind the wheel was knitting! Realizing that she was oblivious to his flashing lights and siren, the trooper cranked down his window, turned on his bullhorn and yelled, “PULL OVER!” “NO!” the blonde yelled back, “IT’S A SCARF!” IN A VACUUM A blonde was playing Trivial Pursuit one night. It was her turn. She rolled the dice and she landed on Science & Nature. Her question was, “you are in a vacuum and someone calls your name, can you hear it?” She thought for a time and then asked, “Is it on or off?” Understanding Engineers Take One Two engineering students were biking across a university campus when one asked, “Where did you get such a great bike?” The second engineer replied, “Well, I was walking along yesterday, minding my own business, when a beautiful woman rode up on this bike, threw it on the ground, took off her clothes and said, “Take what you want.” The second engineer nodded approvingly and said, “Good choice. The clothes probably wouldn’t have fit you anyway.” Take Three A priest, a doctor and an engineer were waiting one morning for a particularly slow group of golfers. The engineer fumed, “What’s with those guys? We’ve been waiting 15 minutes!” The doctor chimed in, “I don’t know, but I’ve never seen such inept golfers!” The priest said, “Here comes the greens keeper, let’s ask him.” He said,” Hello, George! What’s wrong with the group ahead of us? They’re rather slow aren’t they?” The greens keeper replied, “Oh, yes. That’s a group of blind fire fighters. They lost their sight saving our clubhouse from a fire last year, so we always let them play for free anytime.” The group fell silent for a moment. The priest said, “That’s so sad. I think I will say a special prayer for them tonight.” The doctor said, “Good idea. I’m going to contact my ophthalmologist colleague and see if there’s anything he can do for them.” The engineer asked, “Why can’t they play at night?” Take Four What is the difference between mechanical engineers and civil engineers? Mechanical engineers build weapons and civil engineers build targets. CONSENTING COCKTAILS The mythology of supply and demand is something we've all grown up with. We all know how valuable something is it its hard to get: truffles, for example, or sex. The flip side of high demand is restricted access. If vou want to raise the price, make it hard to get, a gourmet treat. Morality is one method of repressing access to such readily available goods as sex and alcohol. But each form of repression creates a cultural construct: alcohol becomes cocktails, sex steps into high-heeled shoes. We wanted a drink that would pop the corks from these cultural fetishes. a drink that would go to everyone’s head wile leaving their bodies unimpaired. We wanted a drink you would drink all the time if you could. At the Colour Bar Lounge we've released a new cocktail with just those effects. We call it the Champagne Experience. We wanted an ingredient that wasn’t too easy to get, a bit expensive with a mythology to match. We looked for a sense of altered consciousness blended with infantile repression. Above all it had to be associated with money and sex. Yes, champagne was the perfect vehicle for our experiment. At the Colour Bar Lounge we have a method of erasing childhood repressions, a 100% effective immersion in the champagne experience. Indulge yourself! Make up for lost time! Get into the spirit! It's the CHAMPAGNE EXPERIENCE REVOLUTIONARY PARTY When we throw a party at the Colour Bar Lounge we try to create a different revolutionary party. But who can we invite to achieve this effect? There is such a broad spectrum of interesting people involved in intresting things. Occasionally we consider a theme party, where we would invite guests of a particular persuasion, career group, or ideology. But unfortunately experience tells but that theme parties easily end in inverting chit-chat . . . dull! We know that to create a truly revolutionary party, it’s essential to begin with a potent, highly distilled ingredient. But today’s discriminating party people are also discovering the important of the visually appetizing, and they know this doesn’t have to adulterate or water down that essential ingredient. Not everyone wants a Molotov cocktail! That’s why we think there must be something for every palette at the Colour Bar Lounge. We start with freezing cold Russian vodka. We splash it into a spectrum of chilled aluminums cups. We slap them onto mirrored magic serving palettes with a full spectrum of coloured opinions. We serve the revolutionary party right. Be responsible! Cleanse your jaded palette! Let it go to your head . . . and still be aware of the total spectrum. At the Colour Bar Lounge, we're not afraid to consume PARTY POLITICS PROBLEM DRINKERS If a load is too heavy then put it down, or drop it. No-one intentionally drops a precious load. You might even hold onto a load, which could be ruined by spilling, until muscle fatigue ends in a paralytic form of cramps. Our bartenders are often asked to comment on personal problems at the Colour Bar Lounge. They’ve taken this as their cue to develop a new kind of drink, and this is their recipe for problem drinkers: Consider your problems mental loads. Weigh the object of the load carefully. Is the load really worth carrying? Is the best remedy perhaps simply to eliminate it? Or is it really best to hold your own? If you can't keep it to yourself any longer and want to give someone an earful, you can always spill it at the Colour Bar Lounge. Don't retain your problems! Pass them on! At the Colour Bar Lounge our bartenders are all ears and ready to lap it up. Pour out vour problems! And at the end of the Colour Bar, waiting to be filled, you’ll always find a POT O' GOLD WEAR A MOUSTACHE When we think of fascism — and all of us do — what do we imagine? You may picture the swastika-strewn covers of pulp novels, or you may mention your local police force. You may visualize the grainy nazi newsreels of the past, or see the latest colour, quadraphonic state-of-the-art cinema of modern marketing. Whatever your vision or your political awareness, you know that fascism is a bottomless cup, and you’re familiar with the unquenchable thirst for this intoxicating brew. Like everyone else, we can be forgetful. We can forget the ready availability of this intoxicating drink and its addictive effects. At the Colour Bar Lounge we’ve introduced a new cocktail to help us remember. We call it Nazi Milk. We started with a basic ingredient, nothing exotic, something that could be found in most homes. We looked for a slight oedipal undertaste blended with mythical purity. Above all it had to be white. Yes, milk was the perfect vehicle for our message. Our bartenders have milked a whole new meaning out of this common nourishing substance. Discover the memorable, familial flavour of NAZI MILK. COLOUR BAR LAB A lot of words have been written and a lot of words have been spoken about what makes effective art. Everyone agrees it should be effective, many feel it could be effective, some even think it is effective. But what effect does it have? Is it productive? Can it be measured? Is it retained? We conducted an experiment at the Colour Bar Lounge. Isolating members of the art scene as our control group, we asked each of them to create an effective cocktail of their choice from the contents and contexts of our well-stocked bar. These are the results of our test, the five predominating desired effects the art scene chose: Inspirational (variation: makes you see double) Aids digestion (variation: cleanses the palette) Enhances your image (variation: suitable prop at parties) Sells well (variation: makes you come back for more) Solves your drinking problem (variation: builds residual effects) Using the data from this experiment as their guide our bartenders have devised five new lines of effective cocktails, suitable for every desired effect. Bored with your own idea of what makes a drink effective? Why not try on someone else's opinion for size, with such drinks as Nazi Milk, the Champagne Experience, or the Pot O' Gold? Remember at the Colour Bar Lounge we only serve you EFFECTIVE COCKTAILS YOUTH The young artist struggles with a choice of an artistic direction. Not only is youth a time of internal and external struggle, of awakening passions, fermenting opinions, but also, venturing into the art scene for the first time, he is surrounded by new impressions. How can he accommodate these exotic sensibilities and rarified sexualities, these demanding parties and openings, the buying and selling of objects and reputations? To meet this onslaught and direct his desire, the young artist needs a potent and illuminating ideal. He needs to elevate his mind while focussing his wavering productivity. At the Colour Bar Lounge we've introduced a new drink for just this purpose. We call it ‘the Spirit of Miss General idea Cocktail’. We started by ignoring ingredients. It’s not what’s in this drink that counts. but how you drink it. We looked for a drink that’s always on the top of your tongue. a drink that will not detract the artist from his work. but will focus issues, expectations, attitudes with proper veneration. It's easy to be infused with the Spirit, once you know how. Let our hostess amuse you with a get-acquainted cocktail at the Colour Bar Lounge. The first one is always free. To receive your orders, just ask for THE SPIRIT OF MISS GENERAL IDEA