After several failed attempts at trying to have a live virtual global dinner with Gabe Llyod for the Provflux show, we decided it’d be better to provide each other with some good old fashion childish humor at the Provflux closing event. (that’s Gabe with a beer bottle taped to his head).

This was my first time ever using iChat live video feed, and I have to admit, I’m quite impressed. On one end, in Providence, RI were Gabe and a crew of people at the show; on the other was me in someone else’s room stealing wifi and an occasional visit from Julia and her roommates.

Since this event we got really hi-tek. We’re really going to host a virtual multi-national dinner. We’ll invite a representative from each continent to join us for a nice meal. Some poor bastards will be eating dinner at 4 o’clock in the morning – sorry in advance for that.

We’ll be using a software called iVisit. Please let me know if you have any tips or are reading this posting from another continent and would like to join us for this once in a lifetime experience. (Date to be announced.)

We’re having some difficulties finding someone in Antarctica. So if you are one of the no indigenous inhabitants or a permanent or summer-only researcher, please send me an e-mail.

Thanks.

Rode my bike around to get parts. It rained. I got soaked.

Not a big deal, but strange thing about all of this is that the paparazzi sent me this photo in the mail the other day. Guess they just wanted me to know that they know where I am and what I’m up to. They’re very scary people and will stop at nothing.

Looks like I’m going to have to change my name and work on morphing my face to look like other people’s, like that guy did in that one incredible twilight zone episode back in the ‘60s.

This is an excellent site for tips on how to successfully “dry camp” or “boondock” – Phred Tinseth

It is very strange camping in an RV. Every morning is a surprise and seems to bring a new set of challenges; whether it’s waking up next door to a fitness center to 20 treadmillers watching your every move or the rain that snuck into your closet last night – it’s fun times in the Sunrader!

p.s. I washed the RV and somehow lost my belt.

my appearance is postponed until July 20th!

Sort of a bummer, but I’ll be doing something with NPR “Weekend America” the week after next. Keep your ears peeled.

Finally… the key to the city of San Juan Bautista arrives. What am I supposed to do with this? What does one do with the key to a city? Better yet, how many of these can I collect on my tour?

I’m still up in the hills filling my month long obligation to the Djerassi artist-in-residence program.

Every night at 7pm all of us artists sit down to share some words and a nice meal. Our conversation topics tend to be very dynamic. Last night’s discussion revolved around IQ testing. After some time, we reached a consensus that the standardized IQ test is dated and a new formula needs to be instituted.

We propose a two-part examination – 25 consecutive games of the age-old game of Simon followed by 25 games of Dance Dance Revolution (this could also serve as part of the presidential fitness test for high school students). The test taker’s mean score would represent their IQ level. Alternatives will be made for the physically challenged.

If you have some free time today or would like to procrastinate, you should play a few games of Simon. Please visit fetchfido’s site.

And if you have no idea what Dance Dance Revolution is, you can gain some valuable insight at DDR Freak. I have a horrible fear of dancing directly in front of people; I would hope the IQ test would be issued in private or at least in front of a two way mirror so it would appear like nobody is there.

Below is the recently published Reuter’s article – in its entirety. This generated a great many calls as you can imagine. One of the stranger calls came this morning when a senior high school student asked me to be her prom date.

In just scrolling through a few messages I’ve received this afternoon: I’ve been invited to a pig roast in Colorado, a Native American feast on a Nevada reservation, a “real” Indian meal in Bangalore, India, a BBC morning breakfast show (in England), a dinner at the Google cafeteria, a casino meal with a dealer, a side-by-side dinner with an identical Sunrader RV rubber tramp, a dinner with the Manhattan Drunk Club, lunch/ dinner with a class of 4 graders who challenge me to a game of four-square, a quick dinner in Dumaguete City, Philippines, a meal of Jack In the Box Tacos in Dallas, a dinner in the Pentagon, a dinner with the library assistant of the American Institute of Baking, a dinner in a chicken coup, and a dinner at a Florida Penitentiary.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters: Sarah Tippit) – Attention citizens of the world: Would you like to have dinner with a total stranger?

If so please call Marc Horowitz at 1-510-872-7326. The 28-year-old conceptual artist from the San Francisco area not only wants to meet you, he wants you to become part of his newest art project.

Horowitz began his “National Dinner Tour” last year as a way to explore the idea of community among strangers. Since then he has driven a leaky 1984 Toyota RV from the organic chicken farms of southern California to the hallowed halls of Yale University, in search of food and conversation — which he documents on his Web site, www.ineedtostopsoon.com.

He’ll eat anything in the name of art from burned burritos to fine foie gras, although he told Reuters he is allergic to strawberries, and that burned onions and “Hawaiian chili” have recently caused him embarrassing gastric distress.

The project began when Horowitz, a former freelance photographer’s assistant for furniture chain Crate & Barrel, got bored while setting up a shoot for the fall 2004 catalog. A computer armoire with a dry erase board attached to its door just begged to be written on — to make it look as if somebody really used the thing.

In a fateful burst of creativity, Horowitz scribbled a note: “dinner w/marc” and he added his own phone number.

“I wanted to take people away from that commercial experience of looking at something that wasn’t real … and offer them an alternative,” he said.

Horowitz’s dinner invite slipped past company proofreaders and appeared near the back of the catalog which was distributed nationally. Then his phone began ringing.

“The calls started in the Midwest with a guy named Jake from Kansas and fanned east and west from there. It has been such a bizarre thing,” he said.

Two weeks later Horowitz said he had logged about 300 messages. Due to media exposure and word of mouth, the phone still rings and Horowitz has stopped counting the calls that have poured in from around the world. “The phone rings so much it’s ridiculous. For a while it was ringing four times a minute.”

When his mailbox jammed up, he added his e-mail address. He estimates the number of phone and e-mail messages from as far away as Japan and Australia so far to be more than 16,000.

The armoire still appears in the catalog, but the phone number has been etched out and no longer appears on the company’s Web site. A Crate & Barrel spokeswoman declined comment.

HIS CUP OF TEA

University-level art training emboldened Horowitz to embark on a series of conceptual art projects in San Francisco years ago. He has run errands for strangers and shared lunch with strangers at his favorite burrito stand. He also wheeled a coffee cart and a 1,300-foot-long (396-meter-long) extension cord from from his San Francisco apartment down a hill to a public park, where he served cups of coffee to strangers.

Although it happened by accident, the dinner project seemed a natural extension of his earlier artistic work.

Surprisingly so far, nobody has had any objections to meeting him for dinner. There have been no requests for references or criminal background checks. Although he never stipulated that people were required to feed him, all but one (Gino, an injured wrestler in Bangor, Maine, who is down on his luck) have offered to provide a meal.

“People do put an enormous amount of trust in me, a stranger, which is promising in this country I think,” he said.

There have been many interesting meals so far.

A group of Hispanic residents of San Juan Battista, California, not only prepared a homecooked Mexican feast, they put on a show for him afterwards.

He spent the night on an organic chicken farm in Los Lomos, California “The whole meal was organic. The salad was traded for at the farmer’s market that day. The whole thing was created with their own hands. It was just excellent. I felt so healthy.”

A motivational speaker in Santa Rosa, California, sent him on a ropes course 60 feet in the air before serving him a meal of linguine with scallops and shrimp. Horowitz said he was able to conquer his fear of heights.

The conversations have been eclectic. In a Michigan bar, a man of few words told Horowitz: “One man’s landscaping is another man’s crime scene. I paused and said, ‘Hey, that’s great’ … and then we had to go.”

In San Diego, Horowitz, temporarily joined in his travels by two male friends, was confronted by skinheads who accused the group of being gay and proceeded to beat them up.

Horowitz, who escaped harm, ended up spending the night in the hospital, making sure his friends would recover. Afterwards the two men returned home, leaving him to travel mostly alone.

Through phone, e-mail and his Web site, dinner invitations continue pouring in from thousands of people, including: nurses on late-night shifts, a retired clam digger, lonely old women, people recovering from grave illnesses, a minister who wants to introduce Horowitz to Jesus Christ, a group of women who call themselves “wenches,” and a woman who, after much soul searching decided to scoop dog excrement for a living.

“I asked her if it was making her any money and she said no, not really. To me, it seems like contemporary art in a way but who knows,” he said.

As the board part of my room & board at Yale, I was given a fist full of pink dining cards entitling me to free meals at any of the dining halls. Considering my financial situation and excitement for the novel experience of dining hall hoping at an Ivy League School, I felt obligated to use them.

Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner, I joined the legions of dining hallies. Not much went down at these dining halls – no food fights, Heimlich maneuvers, or turkey carving stations manned by grizzly men in toques. Most of them were just glorified institutional banquet halls with the occasional bit of excitement when some poor soul drops their tray. The other 99.9% of the time the hall was filled with sounds of clanking dishes, silverware hitting plastic trays and that slow hum of fifty or so people talking at once. Then there is that smell. Thirty completely different food scents competing in your sniffer at once. And after all that pushing and shoving, none win and it all ends up smelling the same, like every cafeteria and buffet across America – from Ponderosa to Caesar’s Palace Grand Buffet. I wonder if you could chemically reproduce that smell and make a cafeteria flavored Jello. How would Bill Cosby sell that?

I remember my dining hall experiences at Indiana University. Every night after dinner, I would make myself a cone of frozen yogurt and I would carry it back to the dorm’s common room without eating any of it. Then I would throw it in the drawer of the computer desk. At just about the two-month mark, millions of fruit flies swarmed the area. It was absolutely horrific and I couldn’t even stand it. Most of them took a liking to the computer monitors in the dorm and you had to brush them off the monitor as you typed. Someone ratted me out I was moved to another dorm complex.

I wanted action! So I took it upon myself to interview some of the Yalies about their eating habits. While at the main dining hall, which is almost identical to the one featured in Harry Potter (minus the special effects), I stumbled across a fella who ate only salad for every meal. Another young man found the self-serve hyper-colored drinks irresistible and loaded his tray with a blue sports drink that had the color of plutonium under a black light, a VERY yellow version of lemonade, and a safety-orange beverage made of “carrots, mangos, and oranges.” I asked him why he was so attracted to this particular combination of drinks, but he had no reply.

Still not finding the level of amusement I expected, I developed my own sort-of idiosyncratic taste for adventure. Every morning I made a Yale signature waffle. Most the time I didn’t even eat it, I just knew it was there… like a good friend who doesn’t talk.

After delivering my Master’s Tea (fancy for “lecture held at a College Master’s home”), Master Keil presented me with a Morse College tie. I was honored and gave him a thrift store tie that I bought that day; it was Morse’s colors – red and grey. Part of me hopes he’ll tie it around his head and goes running through campus during Spring Fling, Yale’s private Spring Break.

Following our clothing swap, a few students, the Master, his family and I walked to the fabled Mory’s where we dined. You had to be a member or be invited by one to dine here. The floors and stairs creaked as they would in any 150-year-old establishment and it was very brown. Old tabletops sporting over a hundred years or Yale graffiti hung on the walls. We were seated upstairs around a large wooden rectangular table that was surrounded by old pictures of sporty young Yale football players. The rest of this fine establishment was mostly filled with men in blazers ceremoniously passing gigantic cups of brightly colored liquor.

Our veteran waiter was a hearty middle-aged man that you may have seen in Animal House doing a keg stand. He wore an apron and carried a small dark cloud with him that every so often lifted when he cracked a crafty little joke. I didn’t quite understand his humor, but one thing was for sure, that man knew his salad dressings!

Apparently, and I was warned, Mory’s is not known for its quality food. You come here to experience the weathered wait staff, the place’s history, Yale traditions, and to hear the Wiffenpoofs, a group of acapellas, who had the night off. What a name? I think they should look into using an anagram of their name and tour the country. When you’re as famous as they, you have to have a band pseudonym you play under; how about The Info off Pews. They could do some Christian Rock to make some quick cash while touring. That’s a huge market you know.

Dinner was served. Rubbermaid sponsored my steak and my jaw got a serious run for it money. But the Baker’s soup made up for it. I didn’t really care about the food though; this was a once in a lifetime experience. We all swapped stories, kept our glasses full, and became friends. I was sitting in a room with the future leaders of America – architects, politicians, scientists, filmmakers, economists, sociologists, and artists. It’d be interesting to see what happens to them all.

After dinner, I strolled down to the corner and found myself in an Ivy-League Twilight Zone. There was a guy in a scream mask, a blindfolded young girl, a man handed out Xerox copies of his ass, and another fella who was wearing Speedos trying to hump my leg. This must be none other than the infamous TAP NIGHT, where select juniors are “tapped” into secret societies. The most notable being Skull & Bones, which supposedly has the Scalp of Geronimo inside. Other secret societies have their claim to fame too; Wolf’s Head supposedly has the largest taxidermy animal head collection in North America, Scroll & Key has the highest amount of reported assets weighing in at just over $6,000,000 (what the hell do they have in that tomb – Fort Knox’s annex), and Book & Snake supposedly hosts huge orgiastic parties.

Most of the secret societies have their headquarters on campus in dark tomb-like structures with little or no windows, no signage, and big unwelcoming gates. Others meet in off campus apartments – that doesn’t sound so secretive though. And one, The Pundits, just pulls elaborate pranks all over campus.

For a while, I patiently waited outside of Skull & Bones for the right moment to pull an Indiana Jones Stunt – seize the front door, rush in, take Geronimo’s Scalp, and return it to its rightful owners. I had no luck, and I was told if I did, I’d probably be tracked down and shot.

So I headed to Old Campus with my host April. April is a very sweet young woman who took good care of me; there needs to be more people like her out there. Aside from being a great host, April studies monkeys and lemurs.

Old campus was a booze-soaked battlefield with several questionable “tapping happenings.” One group of guys dressed like Tarzan was kicking around a mini-keg bouncing it off their heads. Other groups were just running around in costume tackling each other and drinking boxed wine. In the middle of it all, a girl was making out with a hug plastic mold of a vodka bottle. Performance art?

I found my way to a group of blindfolded girls who were being hazed by a smaller group of very drunk girls. I convinced them that I worked for the Yale Daily News and had them form a huge pyramid for me – promising them the front cover.

I capped the evening by breaking into an unnamed secret society meeting place with the help of a couple insiders. To my disappointment nobody was there, so we left them a little surprise.

I think I’ll try running around San Francisco drunk in a black cloak and a scream mask trying to blindfold people; and when I get arrested, I’ll tell em it’s part of an initiation ceremony into my secret society Crabs & Eagles.