Short Pig (photo by Dan Jurafsky)

Long Pig

“In a pig dilemma. On the one hand, intelligent, sentient creatures. On the other hand, they’re made of bacon.”—Twitter from @rionam.

Lera and Scott roasted a pig for New Year’s Eve. He joined us at the table with a piggy smirk, plump and burnished like a Marbella ex-pat. Roasted birds never look like living chickens or turkeys—they come out of the oven not just faceless and smooth but also upside down, so that those aren’t really legs we’re dislocating. But our guest of honor sat up stoic as a sphinx while Lera, in a spectacular yellow silk dress, carved away his backside. On our plates: pale-pink, juicy pork. On his bed of banana leaves: a young pig with bare hip bones and a chayote in his mouth.

Our piggy reminded me of the spit-roasted guinea pigs with which Ecuadoreans celebrate Easter. In the wealthy parts of Quito the supermarkets sell them wrapped in plastic on polystyrene trays. They crouch on tiny rodent feet, bald and buck-toothed and looking very cold. Cuy, they’re called, a horribly onomatopaeic name for a guinea pig. Kwee! Kwee! I ate one finicky bite at a market stall once, and it tasted like Kentucky Fried Rat.

There was champagne, berries and cherries, and a suckling pig: the right winter feast for our dying empire. (Even Whole Foods doesn’t stock lark’s tongues these days.) I was mournful as the corks popped and popped again. A few months ago I gave up drinking, and what I miss most is champagne. Clarity is a gift, but not at parties, where you want your mind to be as soft as candlelight instead of bitching at you about having to talk to strangers. At midnight I borrowed a few sips of champagne from a handsome artist, but it was warm and flat: a glass half empty, and not enough to get me to fake an interest in following him to see The Titz play at 2AM.

It’s weird to come home from a New Year’s Eve party so undrunk that you floss and meditate—consciousness altered in reverse. In San Francisco, unlike Ireland, no one seems thrown by mineral water in their presence, and my friends aren’t big drinkers anyhow. Nothing outward changes. Even still, learning how to get around without a wine glass makes for a social experience that’s sharper, foreign, and exposed. It takes me back to our school parties at 12 or 13, when we had to figure out how to make things happen before cans of Ritz pushed one moment into the next.

I like Lera’s parties because she collects autotelic people. Scientists, artists, filmmakers, activists, and the odd entrepreneur roam her kitchen. They steer their own lives and look inside to measure how they’re doing, tracking discoveries, not bonuses.  In their company I’m sheepish about my corporate job—about taking, rather than making, assignments, and about the dullness of business thinking and its stumpy language. Their glamour reminds me to be queasy about my part in trying keep this maimed and frightened beast of consumer culture limping along, when it should go to the glue factory like Boxer before it.

So this year I looked to the artists with more interest than usual, trying to figure out what they think about what’s going on in the world. Art is a luxury, so economically they’re even more screwed than the rest of us. But they’re used to living unpadded lives, and compared to us worker bees, the ones I know seem to be relaxed and inspired by the shifts.

Artists scare me, to tell the truth. I’ve worked with designers my whole career and I have a good and pragmatic eye for what they do. Not so with visual arts. Without words or faces, I’m lost, and it’s hard to find the entrances where the questions go in. I’m the one who’s googling the artist’s statement or squinting at the gallery captions. When I come up against an artwork that hasn’t been wrapped in a story, it’s like having to taste something new with my eyes closed. There’s a scramble to classify: What is it? What is it? And it’s mixed with a bit of panic that this thing could bite back.

Here in San Francisco, machine art is big. It’s the spawn of punk rock and the garage engineering of Silicon Valley—both of which have been around for a while, so that you find middle-aged men dismissing “wannabes,” “Boring Man,” and “straights” (the heirs of squares). With undisguised pity, they ask strangers why we have day jobs. It’s kind of funny.  (Not that they’re all above the baubles of our time: “I’m anti-materialism,” said the artist who sat pig-left of me at dinner, “but my phone broke, so I got an iPhone.” He waved it around, excited about the Ocarina program that turns it into an eerie but lovely instrument. It wouldn’t be a San Francisco party without the iPhone app moment.)

Rather than asking about their work, I come at it through the side-door of biography, quizzing them on how they live and what they care about. We don’t even have the dole here in the U.S., so people who survive as full-time artists need hustle and discipline as much or more than they need talent. In a paycheck world, they have to create their own structure.

If you have a pencil and a junk mail envelope, you can write a poem on a bus. All this applicationless engineering, however—street sculptures, big fire, flying machines and head-slapping robots—that takes space. And materials, tools, and fuel. And permit-wrangling. And many hands.

So the tribe of artists becomes the patron. They share couches, burritos, and beer in Vienna, the Mission, and Brooklyn. They trade studio space, scavenged materials, and crew labor. In place of the family that couldn’t figure you out, they offer warmth and love. They throw fund-raising parties to pay the medical bills when you blow your jaw off building a confetti cannon. They see you through addictions, weddings, and creative droughts. You turn to your tribe for inspiration, encouragement, collaboration, and brutal assessments of your work. You promote their shows, and they show up at yours.

The scarcity of money binds artists together like rice farmers. As one writes: “We teeter on a financial apocalypse, what do I care? I have always lived on that edge, I am fine with eating rice ‘n’ beans, and thrilled to eat a piece of salmon.”

I asked that guy whom he was trying to reach with his work. “Everyone,” he said. (Privately, I translated this as “Everyone who already has tattoos.”) “It’s about getting people to wake up, using fear and anxiety to push them to change their lives.” And he told the story of asking the composer John Cage how he knew that whatever he was doing was working. “If just one person thinks about it afterwards, I’ve succeeded,” Cage said.

Their safety and comfort comes from the tribe, and it gives them the freedom to provoke the rest of us to look at how much we give up for our security superstitions and physical comfort. I’ll go on the Coney Island Cyclone, in the belief that someone must have carried out a safety inspection, but I’m terrified at the idea of cuddling a fire-spewing robot that could go rogue. I suppose that’s the point—to make me see how much I want everything in my life to be “up to code.”

Not much has truly changed this year. So far, most of us still live in the same homes and work at the same jobs, surrounded by the same people. But the mental contraptions we’ve devised to pad ourselves from pain and deliver pleasure have broken down.

My pal Tucker Nichols once put on an art show called “Together We Can Prevent Earthquakes.” I never got to see it, but that sly title sums up our illusions. We haven’t let go of our babyhood fantasy that we are omnipotent and all our needs will be met. We’ve believed—lord help us—that we are in control, or at least that some three-letter force who cares about us is in control, whether it’s God, the law, the FDA, the SEC, or the DHS.

We’ve been following hollow safety rituals: shuffling barefoot at the airport, swallowing for years the anti-anxiety drugs that were tested for six weeks, driving SUVs because it feels safer to sit up high. We trusted the bond-rating agencies who were paid by the issuers. We turned our lives over to corporations, and in return we expected a comfortable ambient temperature wherever we go, and enough material comforts to keep death away.

And right now, that all seems to be working about as well as any other propitiation rites. We now know that “they” weren’t taking care of us, and that our sense of safety, comfort, and control was just a collective feeling with no basis in fact. That collective feeling has shifted to fear and anxiety—the way we live just isn’t working.

Like it or not, we’re getting a do-over. We have to figure out once again what we value, how we are going to survive, and how we want act as a community. And though I’m concerned for those who have already been badly affected, and anxious about my own future, I also feel a great sense of possibility. We’re going to come out better for this suffering, and may even look back at the last decade of numb materialism as our most miserable days. And even though I don’t like being mocked as “straight” and “corporate,” I think we straight, corporate types can learn plenty from the tribes our artists have made for themselves. They know a thing or two about living through fear and insecurity.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 11th, 2009 at 3:50 pm and is filed under California, Food, Peace and Love\, People\, San Francisco\. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.