Music, Food and Art
MFA - Master of Fine Arts? No!
Music - Food - Art
by Cork Marcheschi
An Introduction to MFA
I get up at 6:30 in the morning on weekdays and I have 30 minutes of quiet before my 10-year-old daughter strolls into the kitchen. I am always in the same chair with a cup of tea and the morning paper. Usually Lily walks over to the couch and tosses herself down and lets out a woe is me sigh, but this morning she didn't make it to the couch. I look up and see Lily glancing directly at me over the top of the paper. "Good Morning Lily, how're ya doin' love?" Lily says "Popa, what are your favorite things beside me and Mama?"
Wow, what a question to start the day. Anyone who has kids knows the moments when the youthful honesty of their children embarrasses and humiliates them – but this was different. Lily has always been treated as an equal part of the family and never talked down to because she is a kid. We have always talked to and with her, never at her.
"GOOD QUESTION," I say. I give her a three-word answer and she is happy with that. She knows her father and the answer made sense to her, but I was left thinking about her question and my immediate, confident response.
My three favorite things are MUSIC – FOOD – ART. For all of the life I can remember, these have been my three constant traveling companions. How do these three things interact? How do they influence each other? What puts them near the core of my life? Over the course of the day the questions and their answers were on a simmer.
By the time I was driving back from my studio, the general answer started to take shape as individual pieces of art were coming into focus and then a food would follow and then a tune. I was playing a game with no rules and starting to have fun with it.
About my three choices
FOOD
I don't eat to fill an empty hole in me. I will go without eating rather than shove something in my face simply because I am hungry. I'm Italian and the heart of the family grows from the kitchen. All-important decisions in my youthful life were made around the kitchen table. If a house is a living thing, the kitchen is the heart. I passively learned about food from being at the sides of my grandmother and mom. Both of these women were natural cooks who feared nothing in any kitchen. I didn't see a recipe until I was in Cub Scouts and wanted to make chocolate chip cookies for my troop.
When my grandmother passed away I wanted her cast-iron frying pan. For 27 years I had watched miracles appear from this pan: chicken under stones (pollo al matonne), pineapple upside down cake, and amazing sauces. This frying pan was a magic tool that produced only good things. Over the years the cast iron had developed a texture similar to the exposed iron of turn-of-the-century bridges. There were two other things I wanted from the kitchen. One was a glass pitcher that my grandfather got as a premium from a gas station in the 1940s. It is cheap with a big seam and painted flowers but it was on the table for every Christmas, Thanksgiving and other all-family dinners. Today it graces my table, and my wife uses it to decant wine. The final kitchen talisman was from my grandfather. He had owned a grocery store in the 1930s, and the Pet milk salesman had given him a simple device to puncture evaporated milk cans with. It is simply a wooden handle that says Pet Irradiated Milk and on one end is a one-inch spike.
My grandfather loved evaporated milk in his coffee, and about once a week he would finish a can and need to open another. I loved this procedure. He would place the can on the table, tap the spike to the place he wanted to pierce and then with one swift and assured gesture the table would shake and the sound of metal being pierced would enter the kitchen. The violent and precise act would produce a clean small hole for the thick-sweet milk to flow and create clouds in a large glass cup. I think of the kitchen on Humboldt Avenue every time I see any of these objects.
MUSIC
Music gets to me in ways that people rarely do. I am sure there is $200,000 in therapy tied up in that statement, but there is no denying it is true.
I was a musician professionally for ten years. I put myself through school playing the North Beach night clubs of San Francisco and later it was the Fillmore, Avalon and all of the little hippy venues that sprouted all over the city. The music I played with my nightclub band was Rhythm and Blues and I loved it. I didn’t play because I loved my instrument; I played because I loved the music. I wasn’t interested in being creative. I just wanted to get into these songs and then have them fill me with transformative energy. God I loved it! I had more moments on stage where I felt the energy potential of the human spirit than during any other activity I have ever participated in.
I was a bass player and loved to find a deep groove and go with it. It didn't matter if the song belonged to Ray Charles or James Brown – we played them all as if they were the last song we would ever play. Sometimes you would be ON and connect with everyone dancing. These moments lifted the entire room and all of its occupants off the floor and for ten minutes, we were all together and we drank from the same cup. When this would happen, it was pure magic.
ART
Art is very mysterious to me. European art of the early 20th century showed me something I understood intuitively and led me to places I never knew existed. I am not a gifted draftsman or even a mediocre graphic artist. I can't draw to save my life. As a child these facts led me to believe I could never be an artist. BUT in 1964 I had the fortunate experience of being introduced to DADA in an art history survey class at the College of San Mateo. This class was being taught by an alcoholic art historian who really should have been at a university instead of a community college. Mr. Steed was covering DADA and he described Kurt Schwitters' 1924 "W" poem. Schwitters had the letter W printed on a board. He mounted a table in the Cabaret Voltaire and then proceeded to repeat the W, 250 times in different tonalities. When he was through, he proclaimed this to be the greatest poem ever written. I had a Eureka moment; intuitively I understood this and I was going there. The actions and works of the original DADAists hit an internal place of recognition that my mind and body understood. Even though it had been years earlier that these events had transpired, it was where I was going.
The MFA Game
It's the new revolution and it's not the British that we are fighting, rather it is complacency. It is time to remember that at one point in American history our flag was a coiled rattlesnake with the words "Don't Tread On Me" written on it. This game doesn't sound very revolutionary, but in the context of a culture that has managed to reduce its intellectual level to that of a high school junior, this translates to a populace that is easily led. Gathering people to participate in an open forum of ideas that are off-center has always threatened those who are afraid of unformed ideas.
Music-Food-Art, Art-Music-Food, Food-Art-Music
Music Food Art. Sounds so much more interesting than Master of Fine Arts. From the perspective of an artist and musician who has spent over 40 years in the service of art, I would like to do my part to initiate other avenues for the appreciation, enjoyment, respect and celebration of MUSIC, FOOD and ART. I would like to offer you an opportunity to dig deep into the things you love and to do it on your own terms. Let the museum catalogs, critics, and experts talk to themselves. This is an invitation to take back art, music, and food, to gather with friends and not talk about your kids, schools, sports, politics or, God forbid, Wii. I want 2009 to be the year people invest in their own passions and use that as a starting point of a culture reclaiming its individual power. For the past 20 years people have been very compliant and asked permission for everything. I am foolish enough to believe ART is a powerful tool that needs to find its way back into the culture at the users' level and not the museum level. Art will set you free!!!
LET THE GAME BEGIN
Every other week, I will write something that includes the three basic elements of Music, Food and Art, and I will take you on my trip from one to the next and the connections in between. Occasionally I’ll only include two of the three and invite you, the reader, to participate by supplying the final piece. Where would you take it? Some of the music, art or food I reference may not be familiar – GOOD! Things that have value are worth working for. Anything that will eventually supply you with food for your soul is worth some work. So make it part of the game to find the music and participate in someone else’s passion. This is a great way to discover and share your personal favorites and to hear what others feel.
As it's a game, it may need a few rules:
Rule 1 – Simply because you like it doesn’t count as a reason for your selections – you need to defend your choices. This is anti-knee jerk.
Rule 2 – You only need one person to play the game – more can play and it could become a dinner party but it is a good exercise just for yourself too.
Rule 3 – Do it! Look at the art, make and eat the food and listen to the music. Then share this with others – BONUS!
So gather your friends and cook food, talk about why you are moved by the words or the sound of a song, share the moment you first discovered a painting or sculpture that stopped you in the tracks of your life. Let's be radical and let's have some fun! Let's let art in! Let's eat, laugh, and share with friends! Let's think out loud about things that are important to us. Let's choose to work so we can see past the media window that is presented as the only view. AND through joy, conscious hedonism, unabashed dilettantism (a good thing) and letting go, we may start to change our world one song, one meal and one sculpture at a time.
-Cork M
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