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trippinglynet · 5 years
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The Cacophony Society: Best Pranksters Ever?
 Karma Bennett × April 1, 2015 
  “All-seeing-eye” by Winston Smith, from Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society
Pop quiz: What do Burning Man, Fight Club, flash mobs, urban exploring, art cars and the Billboard Liberation Front have in common? All of them were born of the pranksters known as the Cacophony Society. They started in San Francisco, 1986 and expanded to have chapters in Detroit, Portland, Los Angeles, and dozens of other cities. With April Fool’s Day approaching I knew I’d want to share some stories from this incredible group.
The Cacophony Society combined art and theater in mischievous ways. They outlined bodies on sidewalks and glued toasters to walls. One time they set up a booth offering “Free Casts—arms or legs.” They claimed that a fake injury was all the rage, and they would offer to help passers-by come up with an epic tale to explain their feigned maladies. They paraded the streets as a legion of drunken Santas (today this tradition lives on in Santarchy and SantaCon).  Every year at the Bay to Breakers foot race, people dress in salmon and run in the opposite direction as the racers—another tradition started by the Cacophony Society. They staged a flash mob zombie attack long before zombies or flash mobs were trendy. Are these actions pranks or art? The Cacophony Society didn’t care about labels, only mayhem.
They welcomed transgressive or even illegal events, but discouraged anything overtly religious or political. They held a pigeon roast next to a PETA protest in Union Square and staged a Republican rally in People’s Park (ground zero for hippies in Berkeley). Neither of these acts was meant to be political, they were meant to be participatory works of art that both delight and confound.
I got in touch with the publishers of Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society to share with you some of the antics they’ve pulled off over the years. Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society is a tremendous book, full of photos and stories. Today’s excerpt focuses only on their pranks, but the book also details outrageous parties, urban exploring, explosions, art cars, creative vandalism, the zone trips that led to Burning Man and much more.
As a resident of the Bay Area, it’s hard to express how much the Cacophony Society impacted San Francisco. Organizations that plan urban street games like SF Zero and the plethora of art cars and costume parties show Cacophony’s influence. And Burning Man itself is a huge part of the culture of the city. Reading this book showed me that a prank is never just a prank. A prank is a way to excite the imagination and upset our expectations. Pranks force us out of our routines and expand our notions about what we can and should do with our short lives, to look beyond the rat race and the passive comforts of media. So as you read the excerpt below, remember the Cacophony Society motto: “You might already be a member.”
Epic Pranks of the Cacophony Society
The following excerpt and images are courtesy of the publisher, Last Gasp.
Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society combines narrative recollections with first-hand accounts and actual flyers and zines from the events, which is why the following excerpts change POV.
Decadent Meals for the Homeless
Crumbs anyone? On the morning of Bastille Day, 1994, 31-year-old Peter Doty and a couple of friends went to San Francisco’s City Hall dressed in full 18th century attire and carrying fancy trays with a few crumbs on them. After presenting Deputy Mayor, Frank Jordan with the “Copper Crumb” award for crummy homeless policies, Doty and company joined a crowd gathered to show support for Food Not Bombs activist Keith McHenry. Unfortunately, the members of the San Francisco Police Department present that day had no sense of humor and proceeded to arrest Doty’s co-conspirators for serving food without a permit.
Despite the arrests, Doty remains undaunted. In fact, Doty, also known as Pierre, Le Marquis de Gateau, says the annual roast at Union Square, “Let Them Eat Cake,” has become something of a hit. Every Bastille Day, July 14, Doty and a host of others make decadent desserts and serve them to the resident homeless people. The servers all dress in 18th-century French aristocratic garments, but often homeless people help with the act. “We had one guy last year who sat down at a piano and played Mozart,” Doty recalls.
The SPASM Against Fantasia Hoax
Doty says his pranks are meant as “shame tactics.” And he hasn’t limited himself to care of the homeless. Satires of whiny political correctness and pack journalism, for example, are probably his favorite pranks. When the Castro Theatre decided to show Disney’s Fantasia in July 1991, Doty formed CAFE, the facetious Coalition Against Fantasia’s Exhibition. Calling himself Dwayne Newtron, Doty wrote a statement claiming that his six-year-old daughter’s terror at the Night on Bald Mountain segment had prompted him to form SPASM (Sensitive Parents Against Scary Movies). SPASM anchored the CAFE, which also included Dieters United (who claimed that hippos in tutus were offensive to overweight people) and BADRAP (Bay Area Drought Relief Alliance Party, which felt that “water conservation efforts will be hindered by showing Mickey Mouse’s waste of water in the ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ sequence”).
The San Francisco Chronicle and Examinerand The Washington Post all reported the protest as real; not one reporter bothered to check out Newtron and his nonexistent daughter or call anyone else in SPASM’s constituency. The denouement of the media hoax came a few weeks later when it was mentioned in a Time Magazine cover story. Finally, on April Fools’ Day the following year, Doty came clean and The Wall Street Journal tracked down the reporters who’d been had, including The San Francisco Examiner’s Rob Morse. “I’ve been in San Francisco so long, I tend to believe anything,” Morse told The Wall Street Journal. “You’ve got to go pretty far in San Francisco to make something look like a joke.”
Suicide Note Writing Workshop
An event description from Rough Trade, the Cacophony Society Newsletter:
Consider the many applications of the well-written suicide note. Many a job application, love letter, or similar pathetic plea for mercy could be better served by a simple threat of self-immolation. Then too, even if one has the good sense to avoid this arguably cowardly method of honorable reality exit, it pays to have one’s parting shot ready. Carry it at all times; in the event of intersecting with an inebriated MUNI driver, jealous rival, or falling building cornice, well, you can leave ‘em guessing, can’t you? At this workshop we willl look at a few famous examples, and polish our own epitaphal epistles. Bring: Examples you admire from the genre, famous or obscure. Do not bring: Sharp objects, loaded guns, and so on. Acts of self-inflicted violence willl be sternly discouraged (the landlord, you know).
SF MOMA Tour
We examined and critiqued the utilitarian details of SFMOMA, as if it were the actual art on display. And as a tribute to the “readymade” art pieces presented to the public in the early 20th century by Marcel Duchamp. This was held in the old SFMOMA building on Van Ness, with its intricate humidification measuring devices (looking like a tiny seismograph!), old brass fire extinguishers, cracked plaster walls, shiny doorknobs, plush benches, Stoic guards, light switches, urinals, and more.
With Cacophonists’ minds ready to discover art that abounds, and express adventurous conceptual and cultural insight within this fine modern art establishment, we played the most serious game of art critique, and the pretentious hyperbole flowed forth as we reflected ideas of how the art object (a museum doorknob), with its precious patina, was constructed in such a way as to juxtapose a paradigm shift from a new and old world. This is representing a paradox, of transformed self-realization indicative of a cookie cutter individualism integrated by an isolated industrialized society, subliminally suggesting a radical sensibility within the seemingly mundane. Brilliant!
Passersby in the museum joined in briefly at times, looking at what we were critiquing, as if we were seriously seeing something on museum display that should not go unmissed… then realizing after a few minutes of our exaggerated BS that it was a utilitarian device used by the museum for utilitarian purposes. (They’re looking at and critiquing a light switch?) The passing museum-goer would then move along with a puzzled shrug.
Sketch books were pulled out as the critiquing went on. Challenging to the artist was capturing the intricacies of a high tech humidification device, A device that itself also draws lines, designed for measuring sensitive humidity levels in museums. OR, a benchmark conceptual piece, symbolizing the delicate juxtaposition of a lost barbarism in art, if in fact the artist is still using hands with pencil on paper, hearkening back to medieval sensibilities. This realization made obvious to the viewer indeed does render this piece a great work of art for our tenuous post-neo-avant-modern times. We critiqued a guard, to his amusement. I posed still in an alcove, to be critiqued verbosely. Urinals were signed “R Mutt” in honor of Marcel Duchamp, who was our hero in this game.
 The Bart Lounge
As much as we all liked to entertain each other, we really loved it when we could play to an unsuspecting audience. The BART train between San Francisco and the East Bay was our perfect playground. One Friday evening we all boarded BART and our MC announced to the passengers that this was a pilot project that BART was testing to bring entertainment to riders on Friday evenings. We proceeded to “entertain” the passengers with such acts as “Duane and Dusty” (Peter Doty and Sara Rosenbaum), a dynamic duo straight from Vegas and the amazing “Shirley Bassey “ (Robert Hubbard in the most believable Shirley drag) singing her great Bond hit “Goldfinger.” Along with assorted magic acts, poets, and total silliness, we “entertained” passengers all the way to the end of the line.
I was the cigarette girl with a 1950s night club tray around my neck, offering cigars, cigarettes, chewing gum, and condoms, accompanied by a pet rat courtesy of the rat girls, climbing all over the tray. We even handed out surveys to the passengers asking them to let BART know which were their favorite acts, and would they would like this to be a regular feature of the Friday night commute.
On the return trip two young guys boarded the train in Hayward. They were dressed in nice suits and ties, on their way to meet their dates in the city. I climbed in one of the guy’s lap and started flirting with him. As I played with his hair, the rat climbed off my tray and on to his shoulder, where it let go with a very messy, gooey shit. I was sure the guy was going to start screaming at me but instead he turned out to be a great sport. He laughed, tried to clean off the mess, and said that this was going to be a great story to tell his date. He gave me his card and subsequently came to many parties that my husband and I had at our home over the years. This is how I met Mark Harmond, who is one of the best sports I have ever met. —Rat Girl
Smugglers Chase in SF’s Biggest Tourist Trap
Lotteria Cabal hosted many live-action street games using the urban landscape as a playground. This ‘Smuggler’ game took place in Chinatown and Fisherman’s Wharf during a typical work day.
At high noon, under the cable car turnaround at Fisherman’s Wharf, a group of 25 men and women in business attire and dark sunglasses arrive carrying cell phones and walkie-talkies. They look stern, tight-lipped, ready for action. There are five briefcases and one set of jewels. The object of the game, Smuggler, is for the FBI to capture the jewels before the jewel thieves can get them to home base. Historically—in games played in Chinatown and on the Embarcadero—the FBI has always had the advantage, but there are pitfalls at Fisherman’s Wharf: very heavy car traffic, security guards who don’t like interlopers, and, of course, tourists. We make our way to the finish line, the Fisherman’s Wharf ship wheel on Jefferson and Taylor. We line up, while mobs of tourists stop and snap pictures. We pick teams, and the thieves head off with their loot. Two agents guard the wheel while the rest spread out across two square blocks to guard the perimeter. It’s a nerve-wracking wait. Looking for suits among the throng of colorfully clad sightseers, I nearly tag a real businessman with an innocent briefcase.
Radio contact tells us that the thieves are closing in. FBI agents are chasing thieves through nearby souvenir shops. Frantic searches are taking place in alleyways. The jewels are nowhere to be found. One thief is nearly captured by a casual bystander, but, using an old football maneuver, she escapes both the citizen and the agent in hot pursuit. The jewels are still nowhere to be found. The thieves are on their way. I’m agitated. I can’t get a clear view of our perimeter. There are too many people. The Nicaraguan band behind us has drawn a crowd. They’re in our finish line. Some of them are wearing suits. I’m sweating. I can see two thieves in the parking lot behind us, hiding behind the valet booth. There are two more on the southwest corner, moving fast through the crowd. I want to back up, but the other agents have their hands full with decoy briefcases. There’s no way to tell. Suddenly, it’s a rush. Thieves coming in from all directions. We capture two suspects but it’s hard to expect the unexpected. While searching faux cases, a car pulls up to the stoplight, and a thief jumps out, depositing the briefcase containing the jewels in the safe zone.
An observant little girl who has been watching the game with her father innocently points out that we’re “just playing Cops and Robbers.”  Twenty-nine-year-old FBI agent Trixie Dare camouflages herself by looking through a garbage can before an onlooker tips her off to a nearby villain, 38-yearold Christopher Valentine.
She chases Valentine through a construction site, tagging him just as he is pulling the basement door closed. No jewels. Forty-six-year-old Porky Pig dashes through stopped traffic, carrying a decoy, with an agent in hot pursuit. Acting as a thief, 24-year-old Agent Smith jumps out of the bushes and rushes the finish line with a blocker and three decoys running interference. Smith is tagged but a sloppy FBI search leaves the jewels, taped to the inner rim of the lid of the briefcase, undiscovered. It is the thieves’ day.
“We are a nation, not of men, but of laws. The law must be enforced at all cost,” says Smith through his impassive sunglasses. “But being a thief filled me with fear and unknown exhilaration.”
During the third and final game, secret agent Speedbump apprehends a thief and wrestles the briefcase out of his uncooperative grip in the middle of an intersection. A cable-car load of tourists erupts in violent applause. Something to write home about. Street vendors begin to offer secret-agent discounts. Briefcases are tossed over the heads of people waiting in lines from thief to thief, with agents in hot pursuit. Witnesses ask to join in the game. And eventually that is how the day is won, with the jewels nestled inside a ham sandwich, wrapped in a paper bag, inside a brief case, shoved in a backpack, on the shoulder of a 16-year-old kid who walks up to the finish line and casually sits down on the bench next to the ever-vigilant FBI. The kid gets a $5 payoff, but no doubt he’d have done it for free. The FBI is completely undone.
And the next game? You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.
Text and all images excerpted from Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society edited by Kevin Evans, Carrie Galbraith, and John Law. Factoid Illustrations by Kevin Evans. Painting at the top is “All-seeing-eye” by Winston Smith.
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furilia · 6 years
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Hangzhou, Surrounded By Green Tea Fields, Is Also China's Silicon Valley
New Post has been published on https://www.furilia.com/hangzhou-surrounded-by-green-tea-fields-is-also-chinas-silicon-valley/
Hangzhou, Surrounded By Green Tea Fields, Is Also China's Silicon Valley
Hangzhou, a two-hour drive southwest of Shanghai, is one of the main destinations in the Yangtze River Delta, a historically fertile region. Here, communities have built their entire livelihoods upon the ebb and the flow of the waterway. The city’s crown jewel is the West Lake, a glassy body of water that has been the inspiration of poets and scholars for centuries. It was once surrounded by idyllic family farms, sleepy pagodas, and rickety fishing boats. Bo Juyi, a Tang Dynasty poet and government official, once wrote of the area:
Now spring is here the lake seems a painted picture unruly peaks all round the edge, the water spread out flat Pines in ranks on the face of the hills, a thousand layers of green The moon centred on the heart of the waves, just one pearl. Thread ends of an emerald-green rug, the extruding paddy-shoots Sash of a blue damask skirt, the expanse of new reeds. If I cannot bring myself yet to put Hangzhou behind me, Half of what holds me here is on this lake.
A view of West Lake Photo by Clarissa Wei
Surrounded by fields of green tea, it was once the capital of the former Song Dynasty, a golden age of tea in China, where the beverage was such a cornerstone of society that nobles and scholars would hold tea parties in the hills. In these parties, tea sets would be packed in wooden baskets, brought up to a vantage point, and folks would draw water from the nearby streams and heat it up for their infusions. And then there were tea battles, where people would put powdered tea in a bowl, agitate it with a bamboo whisk until fine froth emerged in the cup, and judge each other on the results. This became a wide source of entertainment and debate. A good cup was one where the color was kept fresh, the foam was white, and the surface was even. This, after all, is where the Japanese got matcha from.
With all this in mind, when I visited Hangzhou, I expected to be greeted by towering pagodas on a quiet lake and rows of green tea bushes, flanked by idyllic tea houses and spring water bursting from the mountains. I expected tea to be on nearly every block. I expected tranquility and poetry, trickling down freely on the streets.
The tea fields of Longjing Photo by Clarissa Wei
Instead, I was met with a bustling cluster of skyscrapers and roaring traffic. There was a brand new subway system and I found myself oddly captivated with the underground vending machine that squeezed out fresh orange juice from real oranges. I also spent many hours perusing and testing out the food delivery apps available in the city. There wasn’t a single tea bush in sight.
Turns out I was just looking at the wrong spots. Tea plantations exist, just tucked away in the hills of the West Lake, and in Longjing, a village on the southeast side of the city, I visited the Hangzhou National Tea Museum, the only museum in the country dedicated to the beverage; it has its own tea plantation and a research center. Longjing is also home to 18 tea trees planted by a Qianlong Emperor who visited the area in the 18th century and fell in love with the tea. These nearly 300-year-old imperial tributes are icons, well-protected by a stone fence and surrounded by a park.
Longjing green tea retails as high as $145. Photo by Clarissa Wei
Today, Longjing produces some of the most expensive green teas in the country. Five hundred grams of tea picked in the early spring, when the leaves are most tender, can retail for as much as $145 USD. Longjing, which translates to “dragon well,” is named after an actual well in the village where, according to legend, lives a subterranean dragon that can access the sea. The water within is said to contain magical properties. You can take a sip or rub it on your face; locals say it can cure nearly any ailment. Green tea from Longjing is made exclusively from young buds harvested in early spring and gently pan-roasted by tea farmers, which gives it its signature nutty aroma.
“Longjing tea has always been a part of my life,” Amy Duan, a Hangzhou native who is behind TheChihuo.com, Los Angeles’ biggest Chinese food blog, says. “I never gave much thought to it when I lived there because it was such a normal part of our day-to-day life and because we always had it at our house.”
“[It] is a microcosm for China, a place that’s growing so quickly it barely has time to acknowledge its history. ”  Share
The truth of the matter: While Hangzhou was historically the stuff of poetry, teeming with gorgeous waterways and wildlife, today, it’s home to new wave of romantics. But instead of writing verse, they’re composing code (hence the spectacular number of delivery apps in the city). It is the Silicon Valley of China. It is the home of Alibaba, China’s answer to eBay, and in recent years, a bevy of startups have opened up around the e-commerce giant, all vying to be the next big concept.
I had met up with an acquaintance there who works in the startup industry. He took me to his co-working space in the city, similar to the ones in the States, where different companies and freelancers can rent out space in a building. The biggest difference was that the lobby had a Chinese tea bar, where a server would pour out drinks for employees in traditional Chinese tea cups. Longjing green tea, of course, was on the menu.
Left: Dong po pork; Right: river shrimp Photos by Clarissa Wei
While energy of the city may lie in modernity, the taste buds of the city are still deeply rooted in tradition. Nearly all the restaurants in Hangzhou offer Longjing green tea, and many feature a dish called longjing xia, which is tiny river shrimp doused in tea water and decorated with bright green tea leaves.
Others have gone so far as to dedicate entire restaurants to the local tea. There’s a restaurant chain called Green Tea that has a massive menu of all things tea. They do a marvelous duck and pork smoked with tea, as well as bread and beer flavored with the tea leaf. Broadly speaking, the cuisine of Hangzhou reflects the seasons and what is available in the land. In the spring, tender bamboo shoots are a mainstay. Lotus, which grows on water, is harvested often for its starchy roots.
Duck and pork smoked with tea Photo by Clarissa Wei
Many dishes come with backstories. Dong po pork, Duan says, is one of her personal favorites. It’s a cubed piece of pork belly slow-cooked in a soy-based sauce until it turns a crimson red. It is named after a Chinese poet and scholar by the name of Dongpo. “Hangzhou has a lot of rivers and creeks and alongside these waterways, they will grow a lot of special vegetables. A lot of our fish comes from these rivers as well, where they are cooked gently in order to let their individual flavors shine,” she says.
The most emblematic dish of the city is a river carp called xi hu cu yu, or West Lake vinegar fish, which is gently steamed with vinegar and ginger. A notable rendition is served at a famous restaurant by the lake called Lou Wai Lou, one of the most celebrated dining spots in Hangzhou, with a history of over 150 years. There, a little girl had approached me and my friend as we were eating. It was towards the end of dinner service, and we were one of the few people left in the restaurant.
West Lake vinegar fish Photo by Clarissa Wei
“Hello. Are you zhongguoren?” she said, verbatim, smiling up at us. Zhongguoren means Chinese person in Mandarin. Her hands were in her pocket, and she stared up at us, wide-eyed. The waitresses, visibly amused, all stopped what they were doing to watch the scene unfold.
“Hi! Yes and no. I’m from America, but I am also from here, kind of,” I responded back in Mandarin.
She told me she had heard my friend and I speaking English and wanted to converse with us with the little English that she knew. We asked her how old she was; she was just 11.
“I love America!” she concluded, at the end of our conversation. “One day I want to visit.”
Inside a chain restaurant called Green Tea Photo by Clarissa Wei
That interaction summed up the polarity of city: It’s entirely Chinese, but with the deep aspiration to become a city with Western characteristics. And as my friend and I left the restaurant to hail a taxi, I couldn’t help but notice a Starbucks on the same street. Hangzhou is but a microcosm for China, a place where growth means more concrete and taller buildings, a place that’s growing so quickly it barely has time to acknowledge its history.
Food and tea are one of the few mediums left where the city’s romantic past is diligently and consistently acknowledged.
Playing a guzheng Photo by Clarissa Wei
One snowy day, I was invited to a private gathering on the top floor of a hotel that overlooked the edges of the West Lake. There, my friends plucked the strings of a guzheng (a Chinese piano) and tried our hands at calligraphy. There was a tea table at the center of the room and as we dabbled in the arts and chatted, the staff taught us how to pour a proper cup of Longjing tea. Every tea, they told me, has its own specific ritual to match it.
The directions for Longjing tea were simple: Add the dried tea leaves into a long, tall glass and pour hot water in.
See the tea leaves dance! Photo by Clarissa Wei
“That’s it?” I asked. I was expecting a more complicated ceremony, like that of oolong tea and pu-erh, which uses small teapots and teacups.
“Yes,” a staff member responded, smiling. “The clear glass allows you to fully appreciate the visuals of the leaves as they unfurl. And this way, they’ll have the space to dance.”
This article originally ran in July. We’re running it again because Hangzhou looks so beautiful in the snow.
Tags: green tea, hangzhou, china
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