Of Performance

All the vinyl is put in its place, behind closed cooling closet doors, tapes stacked up and down the crevices, CDs where they fit in cupboards. Actual audio material was thrown up on the kitchen floor and, since there is a bubble in the center all the vomit went to each corner.

I recognized tonight, while beginning my first recording from the kitchen, that my thoughts need some concision, some order. This whole thing is still too abstract and centered at the depths of my brain. Resonating somewhere within this maddening concept is a strength, but, through the recordings sussing it out is abstract enough to confuse me. Telling stories might be the epilogue of each recorded journal. A vision that includes both unoccupied and readily present sound waves, and the final quickly concluded prose.

For some reason, I had hoped the kitchen would provide its own sounds within the subtexts, written in the genetic code of this interwebular DNA, but I wasn’t ready to calculate that damage, furthermore, I didn’t know how to. Instead, I figure only that I can use the sounds of boiling water, running water, cupboards opening and shutting, perhaps the dropping of ice cubes in a glass. Thing is, though, we’re talking about a kitchen that has been converted from a kitchen to the madness of a musical passion. So, should these audio waves be endorsed? Or should it be dropped since this kitchen no longer has use for such trifles? The meaning is lost, it’s a mere memory in my kitchen’s burning devilish eye.

On any and all other notes, however, tomorrow should be the grand teton of my currently virginal podcast, which is located at: http://kitchenkillingfloor.podomatic.com/. Instead of instigating all this grand audio fabrication, it might be a more subtle project, one that prolongs details and beckons the listener back for that certain something that can’t be placed anywhere else, not in these days.

Also, before the thought is bypassed, it is noteworthy to mention that I was in a talent show sixteen years ago, when I was eight years old, without knowing it, I did an interpretive dance to a Janet Jackson song on Rhythm Nation. As luck would have it, at the time I had already taken four years of dance classes in ballet, jazz, tap, and a splash of gymnastics. I was most eloquent, through those years, in ballet. What I remember of the interpretation was that it was reactionary, emotional and a bizarre showing of my nurtured emotional well-being at the time. I also recall puzzling my fellow Catholic grade schoolers to the point where clapping proceeded after a pregnant pause, and the clapping itself was more to sustain a habit and a tide of normalcy than to actually reflect the awe-envoking powers of my act. I hadn’t a clue what that feedback meant at the time except that it was not what everyone else was receiving from their beloved audience.

That said, something in me has always been compelled towards performance art, though I have yet to discover what venue this winds its way towards. Afterall, I am that girl with the Yoko Ono Christmas card from 1996.

John Oivind Eggesbo, Performance Artist.

Editing My Kitchen

My kitchen is becoming another writing project. Piled around the studio, in the closet, and spilling into the bedroom in hushed heaps upon the floorboards were all the bits and pieces of musical equipment. Mind you, I am no musician. Over the years, however, I’ve somehow gained a staggering number of musical objects that now, as luck would have it, I must designate a room entirely to them.

Since we have two kitchens, my beau and myself, between our two apartments that line up neatly next to one another, we have decided to sacrifice one and keep one for business as usual. Unbeknownst to Jonathan, I had brow raising designs for our secondary culinary center. Now, in the middle of the anciness that is winter, I’ve stacked records, tapes, and my lugubrious equipment all throughout the kitchen. Records are in the fridge. Tapes are on the door of fridge. CDs are stacked hazardously throughout cupboards.

Fortunately for the room itself, the stove will remain a stove so I can appropriately make tea and coffee. The sink has been problematic due to my desires to begin pirate radio from this very area. Yet a sink is imperative to the structure of the kitchen, and a home in general. Anyhow, my plan is to set up pirate radio next to the sink since it will centralize the station. Within my family structure rests a retired oak dining room table. This has a place in my new project.

Kitchens are the center of the home. Without a sense of meaning within the kitchen the rest of the abode loses its ultimate oneness. Through many drafts this kitchen will find its finished copy and thusly achieve gold star literati success. It is the center of my home, the center of much of my world. In some far off ways, I consider myself akin to that of John Peel. My weakness and strength are one in the same: I listen too often.