The first time I met a man I will call M, I was traveling across the country in a 1971 VW minibus with a girl who had broken up with me after our first week on the road, and performing plays in people’s bedrooms, and he was going to cooking school. Sometimes it takes a really destructive love affair to realize this’s no way to spend your life. Writing code for hours and hours and hours and then? What do I get at the end of the day? A headache. The evening ended with us performing an anarchist musical in his living room.
That was years ago now. I have moved on from amateur theatricals and he has gone on to become a food hacker, his own term.
You hack food in the same way you hack a computer, not in the sense of illegal entry inside an encrypted system but in the in the sense of “dangerous innovation” or as in, to make new. Think life hacks but for chefs who want to do unholy things to your palate.
M is part of a world of hackers and post-hackers, people who dabbled in both hackery and performance art back in the 90’s. He’s friends with guys and girls who lived in places like Messiah Village, with its missing staircase to the second floor (we used a ladder instead) and New Hack City in the basement and its Cult of the Dead Cow. The sorts of people I used to see at Hardcore (named as such because the phone number 427-3267 spelled out har-dcor, a number that was “stolen” from Messiah Village actually when one of the roommates moved out)[1] during one of their monthly Performance Art Nights, who would fall through the drop ceiling, spit fireballs at the audience, or feed a baby bird q-tip-ful by q-tip-ful of Gerber’s while adorned in a maroon bathrobe and ensconced in nothing but condiments. (That last one was me.)
Of course, the term “food hacker” has since become popularized and bastardized but originally it was deeply associated with the world of computer hacking, and when I met M, he was still using it in that original form. He and his cohorts were hacking into some existing type or kind of food and recreating it from the inside out is how he saw it—taking something that was formerly inedible and somehow turning it into an edible thing for example.
This is only the most recent among a long list of projects to have come through and come out of a house I will call Marsupial House. Located in San Francisco, notorious for its evocative creatural fare and founded in 1999, “home to family of anarchist artist musician spiritualist freak hacker chefs”. It started out as a hacker studio, then evolved into a recording facility, recording the likes of Threesome at the Gas Station, an easy-listening hip hop underground classic, produced by the Reverend Al and featuring the vocal stylings of K the I among others.
Marsupial House has also served as a gallery of sorts, having on-going shows of local artists displayed on their walls, like “Pills” by Ellen Kraft, in which a place is set on the wall, the plate in the center of the place setting full of pills, but as far back as 2002, they were already becoming interested in food as a force for change. Below is the copy from their event, Ice Cream Armageddon:
“within a year we’ll all be in the army or in jail, we can either pay all of our bills *OR* spend all of our cash on SWEET DELICIOUS ICE CREAM for all of our friends! liquor + Mitchell’s ice cream cake + music + friends = one of many peak experiences we can all enjoy before the world breaks in two and we’re all forced to vote the machine line by robotic smallpox vaccine delivery agents.”
*
My own involvement with Marsupial House was fleeting. A single show, during which one painfully shy participant in particular kept stealing parts from the other persons, jumping from the couch to sing Miss Peachy’s Soliloquy for example and hopping around the room as if he were a frog, one arm in the air and his eyes glued to the page. His painful shyness only lasted until the show started.
But Marsupial House was a world I knew well, because I had come of age in similar houses and lofts back Boston way.
I mentioned Messiah Village. A house I would hide out in for days at a time. The only reason why I didn’t move in is because one of the roommates voted me down due to my youth. (Everyone who lived there was a year older than me and so had just graduated from Brookline High, which is where I knew them from, and the Strategic Games Club specifically.)
Their motto was, ‘We Don’t Live With Our Moms Anymore’, and the floor was often littered with dirty plates. Jeremy, perhaps the most notorious inhabitant of the bunch, I believe once claimed that he’d rather throw out a dish than wash it? They had basement shows there quite often, and once an omnisexual post-grad from MIT who was currently designing a robot fish made out with literally everyone, myself included.
We were all addicted to something, and we believed our cynicism would lead us inextricably to the truth. It was a time of the despised who despise everything. It was the birthplace of PC culture, and DIY culture, and all we ever saw was that it wasn’t the 60’s and how much better the 60’s had been. And how much better the apocalypse was going to be. But we were stuck here at the tail end of a century waiting for the next big thing—for our Picasso and our Duchamp—but what we didn’t realize was the apocalypse would be this drawn out nothing of an affair and there would come a time when the youth would look back on the 90’s as we had once looked back on the 60’s—because there was an innocence to it.
We lived in lofts, in spaces we had carved out ourselves, our rent was pennies, and nobody was drowning in student debt. There was more room to breathe. So we started bands, did performance art, and created hacker groups in the basements of our dilapidated (and largely stairless) mansions at the topside of the ghetto.
Mostly, though, what people reminisce about when they reminisce about Messiah Village is the “bad party”. At the time my eighteen-year-old self was dating a 33 year-old pervert who said things like, That was so good, I want to f**k you up the ass to thank you, who once slept over my house, and my mom popped in, she slid her head up from the covers and announced, I’m proving to Gabe that he’s not gay. And when she and I pulled up, the street was full of smoke.
My friend Jason Sanford (of Neptune fame) was on the street and staring at a pair of kids from my high school who were each lugging a piece of very expensive stereo equipment. I chatted amicably with the three of them while he eyed them angrily. After they walked off, he explained to me that these friends of mine had just stolen that stereo equipment from the house. (As in Messiah Village.)
It was earlier that day that har-dcor had officially been stolen. Or rather, for several weeks the phone had rung both at Messiah Village and the loft that would come to be known as “Hardcore”, but that morning it had suddenly stopped ringing at Messiah Village—which had apparently led to some confusion over alcohol and bands and things not arriving, and regardless of what the initial reason for the party was, it came to be known as the “F**k Jeremy” party.
My girlfriend at the time found Sam Anthony, who apparently had held up his pointer finger like a prophet in his rage when he saw Jeremy earlier that day, and now he was sitting on his couch and repeating the phrase, It’s so f**ked up. It’s so f**ked up. It’s so f**ked up. His mantra for the evening. And moments after we had arrived, Luke—a massive man with the friendliest grin but a very imposing physique who I mostly remember for his Mister T bust—storming back and forth in the hall while wielding a very large axe and proclaiming, Kill de wabbit. Kill de wabbit, because the skinhead skaters from out front were trying to break down the front door.
*
But now I live in Vietnam. Now I live in a little two-story on the outskirts of a tiny city in Northern Vietnam, and Mutable Sound (that was once Mutable Press) has become just Mutable, and the world is changing once again.
We just released another album, Malcolm and I.
When we first started making music, the world I have been describing above still existed. It was a new century then, and the twin towers hadn’t fallen yet when we recorded A Journey to Happiness Island, our first record, in a loft in Greenpoint. What has happened to that world that was?
The answer is that nothing has happened to the world that was and everything. The apocalypse has come and nothing has changed. And we continue to make our magic even when it seems pointless in the face of odds like these. As in, Why record pop music just before the end times?
My balcony overlooks a swath of garden plots extending off into the distance with a single road cutting through it halfway between here and the horizon, and I feel like Bruce Banner gone into hiding to learn how to control his rage, because the stakes are much higher now than they were. I am older, and the world is that much closer to falling off the edge of the precipice, and we only have so much time to come up with an exit plan.
We need to think beyond the end of the world, and these houses from before may show us a way in, because each of these houses was a culture unto itself. When you have been locked out of a culture industry in its death throes, the only other option is to build local cultures from scratch.
Let’s put it another way. Has the beast reared its ugly head? Is the age of Roko’s Basilisk upon us? Is the AI coming to feast on your brains? Is she feasting on it even as we speak?
We can create a new universe, but we need to do it on our own and for ourselves. Yes, our world’s moving unnervingly. Yes, capitalism is dying its cancer death. But what solutions can we offer?
I think Mutable has something to say on this front. Because Mutable is an organization that has never made any money, never had any success, but continues to exist and in some ways even thrive—if the ongoing creation of content over a twelve year period could be seen as thriving—it’s purpose has become simply to be, and nothing else. Yes, we are uncategorizable, obscure, and will always be so, but we are a storehouse of the sorts of thoughts and ideas would exist in a world without capitalism, of the sort of bohemians existed before counterculture took their place.
And my friends at Messiah Village and Marsupial House continue to exist in their utopias out beyond the walls of the Internet and all this hyperobject, and its many glittery surfaces, implies.
*
It seemed fitting to meet M for a tasting of some Bombay Ice Creamery in The Mission, so he could tell me what he’d been up to, other possible delicious ice cream eateries, lead me through the bizarre options. (Such as Falooda, which I did indeed try: rose-flavored with rice noodles and basil seeds if you must know.) There were two kinds of coconut ice cream, regular and young, as well as Chiku, Taro, Cardamom and Rose, and Black Sesame Seed. Amazing stuff, but never to be outdone, M informed me that there was yet another mind-blowing ice cream emporium a few blocks away, Polynesian this time. Their avocado ice cream makes the most amazing absinthe smoothie.[2]
So how did he get involved in food hackery?
It began as the Food Hacking Supper Club, which was attempting to create an “anarchist food aesthetic”, or as M says, Chefs are a lot like hardware hackers. Both geek out, absorbing the specs of (vegetables|technology) for the purpose of creating something that nobody else has: (innovative food|new machines). So what happens when the kitchen becomes a hack lab? Something delicious. Something geeky. And he went on:
What happens when the world’s leading hacker chefs skill up on organic chemistry and buy centrifuges for their kitchens? Is your palate ready for ‘meat glue’, ‘cooking’ with liquid nitrogen, and ‘liquid noodles’? Molecular gastronomy is a culinary aesthetic of a growing number of chefs worldwide who wish to cross-pollinate their culinary skills with the trade secrets of chemists, physicists, researchers, perfumers and industrial food manufacturers. Typically, only the most high end restaurants have the budgets to stock their kitchens with steam baths, centrifuges, and microscopes. Spurred on by the friendly competition rife in the food industry, these restaurants work to develop new culinary techniques, improve (and disprove) accepted kitchen wisdom, and deploy their food to the customer in crazy new futuristic ways. Can we bring food into the future without seriously freaking out the fickle palate of the public? Are you ready for liquid nitrogen-cooled food, steak-flavored cellophane and bacon & egg ice cream?
M apprenticed in the research kitchen of Heston Blumenthal’s Michelin starred restaurant The Fat Duck, aka the bleeding edge of the molecular gastronomy movement, and so perhaps we should chalk this up as the birthplace of food-hacking. Like a black ops chef, trained by the best, to take down everything you thought you knew about food, the processing of food, and what goes on inside your mouth.
In 2006, he decided to take his understanding on the road, going from San Francisco to Maine, down to Florida and back—16 dinner parties in 32 days and 10,000 miles, the idea being that they would arrive at the prospective dinner party host’s house at 4 or earlier to shop and begin preparations for the evening, first course at 8 and winding down by 11, and for a while, he gave lectures on setting up kitchen hack labs, set up a web site entitled, delicious corpse, in which a menu is randomly generated, and continued to open up his kitchen to friends and strangers every Thursday for his food hacking supper club. M has always fully believed that sharing knowledge through experimentation and cooking truly is revolutionary social networking.
But what sort of recipe’s have come out of all of this food-hackery? Duck fat okonomiyaki with mugwort soba for one, as well as celery root cake with sassafras Icing. Others include, crab butter, quinoa and hummus collard tacos, and Spanish skin syrup. They have also performed some very daring experiments, such as toe cheese, in which a toenail is used as cheese rind and flavoring, or ant venom gumdrops.
*
These sorts of experiments pave the way forward.
We need to take social networking off the web and put it back in the living room. We need to entertain each other, as I used to say back when I was putting on plays in my bedroom every week. We need to go analog.
Of course, Mutable is very much an island glistening on the larger sea of content we all find so mesmerizing, but we exist as the fly in the ointment.
And M’s mind, itself always existing in this murky world between cuisine and code, creates a unique way of looking at the word that is both personal/practical and dogmatic/idiosyncratic. A perfect example of this duality on the one hand would be his “open source food genome project” paired with his tendency to bring molecular gastronomy to the houses of friends using largely scavenged and/or dumpstered food.
This thinking is tied to a certain time and place—when every city seemed to have its own iconic loft space and its hacker haven—but they also show us a way forward.
At the very tail end of the 90’s, I lived at a loft called Exile in Queensborough, NY, where we would make a movie in a day—where I recorded several albums—a former club with the sign, Exile, still out front, that had once been home to a bunch of hackers who had gotten hooked on crack and allowed their cats to s**t literally everywhere. (We found feces in a nest of architectural drawings in the air duct, and these were not cat feces.) It had a thirty foot long mahogany bar, red blue and clear mirrored pillars, and I slept in the coat room along with a cement-lined safe I once tried to extricate from my room bare naked because of the heat only to have to request the help of my fashion designer roommate to get it over the lip of the terrazzo doorstep.
These were dank times that far exceeded even the dankest memes being manufactured today. And the principles involved were simple. Find the abandoned lots of the world and take them over. Turn them into Temporary Autonomous Zones that function as distinct islands of culture with their own self-sufficient economies. Link up with similar distinct movements around the world to create a shadow society that can function independently of the mainstream world.
This is what we believed then—that through these underground communities a new society would naturally sprout within the decaying folds of the old. There was a belief that we could change the world simply by doing little things like holding dinner parties and watching movies in the backyard as the soundtrack was occasionally disrupted by a passing jet. And I am arguing that we still can.
That having been said, like the mythical world of Barbara Millicent Roberts, aka Barbie and her famed Dreamhouse, this world conceals a deeper universe. Not unlike the dark logic of Burning Man, and its cult of hedonism. Burning Man is a kind of cautionary tale.
Always remember. For your indie universe to become successful, it must morph to meet the consumption model, and this will destroy it. But, on the other hand, Temporary Autonomous Zones will always be temporary. Whether that means they become commodified or they vanish, like Fort Thunder did.
I am reminded of what everyone agrees was the final days of Messiah Village. A roommate who was notorious for sleeping in a coffin OD’d. The cops were in everything. No one was arrested, but it was clearly the end of an era.
Several years ago, I attended a reunion of Messiah Village with my wife in the function room at the Mount Vernon Restaurant & Pub by Sullivan Station in picturesque Somerville, MA. It was delightful to once again see Jeremy—who also happened to be the one who fell through the drop ceiling at Performance Art Night, btw—and some had driven down from New Hampshire while the kids were at summer camp and others had flown from London where they have turned hacktivism into a career in computer programming, but one or two got too drunk, went on about how they were “white hat hackers” and ogled a person’s wife at the bar to the point of becoming nonplussed when the husband makes his presence known. Not nice characters—of the sort who only give their hacker names, when here this is a reunion, fella.
That double underground of performance and hacking that was so prominent in the 90’s, that evolved into Burning Man and the online tech culture with its online salons and reactionary tendencies, well, the point is, it never ended. We are still out there.
Every amateur chef is also a potential chemist of the mouth, and every town drunk is an auteur in training. We can continue to exist in a parallax universe where the bohemians and revolutionaries and farmers continue to thrive outside the hyperobject.
*
Hardcore continues to exist, with the number intact, but it’s settled into its middle years. I was there not that long ago. We had dinner, and everyone laughed, but that house has retreated from the world, like everyone else.
The screen-printing trays lay untouched, and the dark room has become just a very miserable guest room. (It was never such a great idea to have a darkroom next to the kitchen.) The jukebox still sits in the front room, and the same art and artifacts hang on the wall, the same broken optigan—that’s been broken since back when I had an optigan band that only played at Hardcore and only twice.
We believed our cynicism would lead us to the truth, that if only we stared at the world with the most unsparing of eyes, that its inner secrets would reveal themselves, but the world was not revealed. It was demolished. Piece by piece. A little 9/11 (and accompanying Patriot Act) here, a little 2008 (and corporate bailout) there, and the artists did nothing. The hackers did a little bit more.
I am also a bit reminded of the famed artist, Marina Abramovic, and her infamous 1979 performance, Rhythm 0, in which she said the audience could do whatever they wanted to her and she would not react. As reported in Lone Wolf Magazine:
“They took scissors and took off all her clothes. One man tried to rape her, another loaded the pistol with the bullet and pointed it at her head, another still cut the skin on her neck and drank her blood. Beneath the beauty, there is always horror.”
Or. Another way to look at it. The first item that was ever sold on eBay was a broken laser pointer and now online shopping has become a way of life. In our ‘gig economy’ the employee is under increasing pressure (both financial and social) to work longer, harder, and for less real pay but still, we enjoy ourselves. And maybe we could even create a vast network of independent gig economies working irrespective of the larger society.
Over the years Marsupial House has meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people. For me, it will always stand as a lighthouse between the world that was and the one that’s coming.
—GBoyer
Vinh Yen, Vietnam, 2021
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[1] I say “stolen” but the phone number was in the roommate’s name, who then spent two months of social engineering to have New England Telephone to move it to a new switch—claiming to be a point person for a group of students on a summer abroad and needing the phone number to remain the same in case of emergency—because apparently it would have cost something like $7000 to do it legitimately. After all was said and done the manager at New England Telephone apparently said they had never done anything like that for anyone before.
[2] In case the reader was wondering, this exchange took place years ago.
Gabriel Boyer has been making up stories about himself for as long as he can remember. There was never a time he was not fully seated in his various delusions. He continues to delude himself daily. His latest release can be found below. You can read more about him here.
