Clark found himself a new hat! He’s supposed to be making my documentary. He’s really not as mean as he looks.

The rain is a powerful thing. It gathers in a place and becomes water. The water washes things clean. As it did the silkscreened logo on the hood. Almost clean. The brown smeared around, and the orange stayed put. Now it looks sun faded and road weary, just like the rest of the vehicle. Sean called and left a message on his way back north.

“The rain started”, he said, “you’d better put a tarp over the hood.” That message didn’t reach me in time.

I pulled over on some LA freeway to try and wipe the paint off, since it was flinging up onto the windshield. A cop pulled over and told me to get off the road at the next exit.

No respect for the arts.

Dinner with Sakae

Sakae (pronounced like psychiatry, without the “tree”).
Owen
Bronson

Here was a sense of suburban community. The neighbor across the fence stands on his porch and hollers over about the good smell of dinner, Sakae in front of her stove hollers back a thanks and an invitation to come over and try it. The dog barks out front. The kids are doing homework.

A lonely RV, no bigger than a covered wagon, rolls up to the three bedroom home, and property values immediately dip. It only goes downhill, as the 100 foot extension cord is strung across the lawn in its safety orange glory, to give the travelers “shore power”. On the morning of day two, concerned neighbors are on the telephone, “One of them is sleeping on the lawn.” By the afternoon of the second day, the last offense has occurred, as wet towels are hung over the fence to dry. The white trash road show must be run out of town.

But seriously folks, it was a great time with this family. The only reason I slept on the lawn was because we sprung a gas leak, and the camper filled up with fumes. If I had known coyotes roamed the neighborhood after dark, I may have taken my chances with asphyxiation.

How did we get here? It was an email that started it.

“Marc, it is 6:25 a.m. My son won’t get into the shower. 7th grader (likes to sleep) my youngest son is still rolling around. My husband is trying to get to work, and the dog is outside barking. Even though she knows she isn’t supposed to… AND

I read about you with the Crate and Barrel catalogue, it is because of people like you I have a renewed hope in mankind. Both of my sons march to a different beat, aren’t afraid to express themselves, and are really funny. I hope they can learn to appreciate life and laugh the way you do.

Thank you for being a breath of fresh air.

Kind regards,

Sakae”

It is definitely a risk meeting strangers. Why do it? Why do people invite me into their homes
Sakae said, “I emailed my friends to invite them to a pot luck for you, and they all wanted to know why I was doing it. Then my son asked me, ‘Why do these guys want to leave home and meet strangers?’

There is risk on both sides, and that is part of the adventure.

She told me, “I hope someday, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not the day after, but when they’re 18, 19 years old, and they want to take a chance on something, they’ll remember this.”

It’s nice to get to the age when you realize you can be an influence on someone. It also means you have to start paying attention to your actions. I haven’t been around young people much until this Dinner Tour. While in San Juan Bautista I said “F@%$” very loud in front of a little boy, about seven years old. I looked down and he had his palms together about heart level, like he was praying, and a giant grin on his face. “I meant to say, ‘Farrr….’” I said, looking down at him. He looked so happy to have caught me doing something he is not supposed to do. What a grin. Let’s hope this isn’t the only influence I have on the trip.

Sakae arranged a diverse group for her potluck. Many of them were strangers to each other, only linked through Sakae. She emailed them all the CNN.Com clip, then invited them to meet me.

“Does he know I’m Black?” One friend asked her.

“No. I didn’t fill out a form, he just wants to meet people.” Sakae said.

Sakae is half Japanese, half native American, and her husband is Black. Her neighbor is gay, and the shades of color at the pot luck were like a Benetton commercial. Is this important? Yes and no. In fact, not everyone present that night was comfortable with everyone else. But they were willing to give it a chance, step outside their boundaries.

“My friends have kids, and if as parents they give a stranger a chance, or someone of a different sexual orientation a chance, then that lesson is passed on to their kids.”

Renee, a happily married woman who brought her 13 year old son along whispered to me that it was probably boring to be there.
“We’re middle class. Middle class people are kind of all the same, even if they are Black or White. They have stressful jobs, kids, car payments. That’s all they can talk about.”

In a way that is true. But unfortunately, I know plenty of middle class people who still have plenty of hate for other races, genders, and sexualities. That is part of why it was nice to have dinner there. People were very normal, they do want similar things: smart kids, good friends, a job they like, a loving spouse. Sakae was presenting me with a great example of how much people do have in common, how a complete community can be built.

One woman told me she was glad she came, although she wasn’t sure what was going to happen when she arrived. She ended up having a great time.

“Most people would rather watch t.v. than meet new people,” Tammy, Sakae’s best friend, said.

That took some thought to understand. Why would someone rather be alone than out being social? Maybe they’re tired from work, and just want to decompress. Could it be possible our work ethic and the lack of fulfilling work drives us to be couch potatoes? Coming home and eating in front of the t.v. is easier than joining a book club, or a Victrola society. If, instead, people had jobs they loved, wouldn’t they want to come home and share their energy, share their discoveries? The way it works now, people are forced to try and recharge their batteries with chocolate ice cream and Desperate Housewives. It leads to a total lack of culture. Larry Harvey’s first dinner is echoing in my ears. There is no new culture being built by the common people. They are only taking what advertisers are selling as culture.

The ones who have responded to my offer for dinner are ones who are looking behind the scenes. They are looking for a bit of reality behind all the false advertising. When they saw a real phone number in a furniture catalogue they called it. The fact that we have an imaginary area code for television, movies, and advertising is strange. 555 When did that number come to represent the make believe exchange? People noticed a bit of reality in a completely make believe world of commercial photography. I say it’s imaginary because I work in the field. The walls aren’t real, the floors aren’t real. Most people outside of the industry probably don’t know this, or even think about it.

I have helped lay down wood planks on cement to create an old barn floor look, pictures are hung from fishing line, lights have silk sheets shading it to diffuse the light and create a sense of calm. But it is a warehouse, not the bedroom we make it look to be.

The next afternoon Sean MacDonald arrived in his minivan, having driven five hours down from the Bay Area in order to silk screen the National Dinner Tour logo onto the hood of the car. It looked like a professional’s work. Thank’s buddy!

LOS LOMAS
Rebecca Thistlethwaite
Age 30
Occupation program manager for the non-profit organic farm ALBA
Agriculture and Land-based Training Association
“We provide marketing and technical assistance to minority farmers. We’ve helped over 500 in the last twenty years.”

Jim Dunlop
Age 36
Organic chicken Farmer
Ex marine
Winner of 1998 Turkey Testicle Festival “Biggest Pair” division in Turlock California.
Hero is Joel Salatin, author of Pastured Poultry Profits
“This guy is an amazing public speaker, he tied world politics, abortion, and chicken farming all together”

We drove up a muddy dirt road, and I had no idea what to do when I met a car coming down. There was no place to go, the RV really should only go in one direction, and that is of course straight ahead. The little gold Saturn put it in reverse and backed up the hill about twenty yards and pulled into a turnout. Mighty neighborly of him. We passed a stand of Douglas fir, a tree farm that was never harvested, and now thirty foot tall trees are lined up, like a mathematical forest, Christmas trees gone wild. The directions read, “Turn left at the mailbox on 79 Los Lomas road, head up the gravel past a horse ranch. Stay straight through an oak grove. (they assume I can identify an oak grove. Country people!) The driveway is the paved one on the right.” Parts of it were paved, and parts had run back down hill in chunks last winter when the rains came. But we found it just fine.

Rebecca was moseying in the yard, and told us her husband Jim was “doing the chicken chores.” The funny thing about leaving the city, everything people say in the country is astonishing. She could have told us Jim ran down to the store for cigarettes and it would have felt like we were in Arkansas, on a moonshine farm, and no one around here had heard of microwave ovens yet. The reality was both Jim and Rebecca had college degrees. Of course the internet connection was dial up, operating at a peak of 47 kps. They hitched two head of oxen to a combine to generate bandwidth. So the country is still a little slower than the financial district of S.F.

I will admit right here the documentation of this project is totally covered. I have a cameraman, a soundman, and a writer, and each one captures a different perspective. That is what makes this an art project, not a walkabout. A few photos and a page in a journal is the normal amount of documentation. I have to take this thing out of the realm of ordinary. How else can I bring the education back? I need to have a different perspective and by combing all three of my friends, along with my own, it becomes very rich.

“To be a farmer today requires a high level of education, I have my Master’s from UC Davis. It requires innovation and entrepreneurialism to make it work nowadays. Maybe in the past you could be stupid, but not anymore.”
Organic farming requires a lot of troubleshooting, since you can’t just spray poison on a problem, then dump fertilizer chemicals back down so something can grow again. During the rainy season fava beans are being grown on one field just to hold the soil in place, and in springtime, it will be turned under to feed the soil. Giant rolls of black plastic are not rolled out for weed/erosion control.

By being disconnected from your market, you don’t mind selling food or milk you wouldn’t personally consume to someone else. “Jim and I have read lots of stories about people afraid to eat the crops in their fields, and a dairy farmer said he had his own private stash of milk cows that he allowed to range on grass pasture and didn’t feed them the growth hormone RBGH. “

Spending time with organic farmers means a lot of talk about the personal relationship of food. These are people who don’t shop for an organic label; they buy food from a source they know. They are so involved in the food production end, they have seen personally “cage free” chicken farmers who just keep thousands of birds in a warehouse and cut the beaks off the birds so they don’t fight each other. The conditions are both heartbreaking and dangerous to the consumer. Jim has no problem killing chickens; it just means a paycheck to him. But he does worry about what he sells to the public. He hand guts the bird, instead of running it through a processor that will spread the intestines and feces all over the meat. This means he doesn’t have to dip his chickens in a chlorine bath to disinfect it. It means when you buy chicken from Jim, it doesn’t have that little absorbent towel underneath it to sop up the excess water from the chlorine bath. So now I have to look at supermarket chicken as bleached meat with dead feces bacteria totally covering it.

A lot of news comes from the AP wire. It is a subscription service most news outlets pay for. A story is written up by their journalists, and then sold to who ever wants it. Small towns and big cities have put it in their papers.

You wouldn’t believe what happens when your phone number is placed on the AP wire. Imagine if your home phone number was on CNN.com. You would have a lot of people calling. Here is a breakdown of the call frequency on my cell phone on Monday FEB 14th, 2005.

1:17
1:05
1:05
12:40
12:35
12:16
12:14
12:11

That’s the power of the AP. I love to hear my cell phone ring, everyone likes to be called, but this is crazy.

I have a feature on my cell that tells me where the call is coming from, and there were calls from Washington State and Washington DC, Texas, Canada, Maryland, Ohio, just all over the country. It really is something to have the whole country know about my little idea.

Short mail

Hi! My name is alex a. I think you are doing a great thing and I was wondering if you would have lunch with me in Iowa.

Good evening Mr. Horowitz. I read an article stating what you are doing, and would like to commend you for your services to humanity.

E-Mails:
+++ “u can stay here, I have an extra couch, and I can probably help you w/ a hundred bucks or so.” J. R. Dayton Florida
+++ “I’m not lonely or insane.” V.F. Vancouver B.C. Canada
+++ “We have a big house and can accommodate you if you would like to sleep in something other than the RV.”
A.L. Newark NY
+++ “With a house/mortgage and especially 2 little girls, that dream (of traveling) is on hold indefinitely, needless to say. But hey! What if one of these people were to come here?” P.H. Frederick MD

WHAT WE LEARNED

Brown eggs come from North American breeds

White eggs come from European breeds

Green eggs do exist, (I saw two of them) and they come from South American breeds like the Auracana

jim in the marines:

Clark goes to great lengths to capture the sound and the look of the dinners. This microphone is taped to the ceiling over the dinner table with special tape that won’t peel paint off. People have been very accomodating, letting Clark run around with a video camera. It takes about ten minutes for people to forget he is there. Then they say something wild, and they turn to Clark and say, “Erase that!” He won’t speak back to them. He justs smiles, then looks back through his camera. That is why you forget he is there, he doesn’t seem to speak English.

San Juan Bautista

Grace The one in charge! Works at the Mission Bakery
Jeremiah 22 wandering musician
John 24 engaged to a photographer, expert rapper
Cody 19 living in Oregon
Dorothy 26 put us up for the whole time, and she has three great kids:
Adrian 11
Anaise 6
Atlixcatzin 4 aka Ali
Anna 27 roommate of Dorothy
And her three kids, whose names are lost on a piece of paper somewhere! There are also a lot more people involved in this dinner, and my notes are somewhere I can’t place. Grace has 13 brothers and sisters! I can only remember Paula, who worked at the bakery, and gave us delicious apricot tarts.

The whole three days spent with the Serna family has been educational. I suppose every dinner has and will be. But this was cultural education. I had an amazing time.

The life I live in the city makes me skinny as a pencil. I squeeze down streets full of traffic, foot traffic, bicycles, cars and trucks. We have so many things going by us it shaves us down to the size of messenger bicycle tires. We are constantly threading ourselves through doorways, the apartment is small and the sidewalk where the children play is four feet wide.

Arriving in San Juan Bautista, the land opened up, the hills were soft and green, there weren’t houses on the crest, and the people themselves began to soften. The skinny rails of San Francisco weren’t to be found. I suppose when you stop focusing on yourself and begin to look at your family, your whole body changes. It was a fantastic thing to walk into this home on San Antonio Street. The living room was huge, and the kitchen had three long tables with red tablecloths, balloons floated along the ceiling with curled ribbon dangling from below. I thought it was someone’s birthday, but was told it was for me. There were a lot of woman here. Woman and children. This is a culture shock to an only child who lives with twenty somethings in San Francisco. It was going to be a very comforting three day stay. It was supposed to be one day, but the kids were so cute and Dorothy and Grace kept feeding us, and we didn’t want to ever leave. It was a land of fertility. I understand why men carve sculptures of hips and breasts, thighs, and all that makes a woman, and all that a woman creates. They deserve lots of praise.

The family structure was ruptured, in a way, with the two women, Dorothy and Anna, raising children without their husbands. But there was so much support with Dorothy’s extended family: Grace, the grandmother, and two uncles, Jeremiah and John, were around. A few great aunts, and friends. Cousins. There was so much food, tortillas with everything. Salsa verde and pork in a giant pot roasting, chicken and onion and celery in a pan, on the burner, two types of rice, handmade tortilla shells, hand crafted taco shells made by dipping store bought corn tortilla’s in hot corn oil on the stove top. These are things I’ve never done. The hand made tortillas were a learning experience. After you roll the dough out you set it down on the skillet, but it must be done in such a way that it lays completely flat, yet it must be done quickly, in one smooth drop. I left my finger prints on a few, which is taboo. It happens when you drop it out of your hand after holding it in your palm with your fingers spread. It creates a convex outline that heats quicker since it has come in contact first with the hot surface. So check your tortillas for finger prints burned in.

Is San Juan Bautista a small town? Here’s a relative by marriage to Grace. I was standing under a porch of what looked like an abandoned building on a side street downtown, when a door opened, and this man walked out. His name was James, and he had a wonderful brogue. He is Irish by way of Scotland. It was a wonderful moment when he invited me in for a tour of his historic home. Made of inch thick redwood boards set on end and battened, it looked like a one story old time row house.

Here’s a picture of his living room. He totally amazed me with stories and the whole vibe of the place was intense and beautiful.

Here is Caleb, a soundman who came down from the Bay Area to help Clark on the documentary. He is 19 and just moved from Texas to California. You can see him here looking out across the San Andreas Fault, which is where two plates are hitting and cause a lot of earthquakes. It is completely flat, which is strange.

Here is what a modern day documentary crew looks like.

Dinner with the Fastest Dogsled Team in San Francisco
Including

Patricia “Patti” LaCava: stylist, bobsled runner, dog lover. “Dogs pick up fear on your breath. The lump in your throat emits pheromones. So if you are afraid of dogs, just eat a breath mint.”

Chris Akuna: carpenter. Enjoys Dungeons & Dragons. “It keeps your Fridays and Saturdays free, because no one will date you.”

Nathaniel Galipeau: high school student. “When Nathaniel is older and I need money for college tuition, I’ll sell off the punk rock”, his Mom says, looking at the wall of record albums.

August Fey: works at Virgin Mega-Store. Recommends Foamy the Squirrel. “Go to illwillpress or Google it.”

Dinner was Jiffy cornbread and really good chili, just like home. There was green salad, rice, sparkling water and soda. For dessert August had brought home cupcakes from Citizen Cupcake, monster chocolate rocky road affairs, huge summits of marshmallow on top.

Dogs are Patti’s passion. She works as a foster mother for them, as she finds appropriate homes. She also is involved in dog sled racing in the Sierra Nevada’s. Her wooden sled stood in the living room, so she gave me a demonstration. “This is your snow hook, it’s the most dangerous thing on your sled.” It is basically a big hook you throw in the snow to slow yourself down.

Chris took me through the loft space, explaining the many additions and improvements he has made. Being able to go into a strangers home and getting “the Grand Tour”, (people always call it that) makes it very easy to get to know them. That is one reason why this project works so much better than my first attempt, when I took people out to dinner at a restaurant. When you are asked about your life, it opens you up. When you have your things around you, it gives you very personal stories to tell. The point of this trip is for me to get to know strangers. Its something that takes trust. I really enjoyed this family. There was a lot of life in the house, with the animals and the people. You would never expect it, all of them living in an industrial loft space down an alley tagged up with graffiti, on the edge of the Spanish speaking part of San Francisco.

But why would a woman who has five Huskies and a bobsled in the living room of her Mission District loft in San Francisco be traditional? And Chris, her partner, he was an ex-rocket scientist with Lockheed-Martin turned carpenter. His past life showed through in his handyman projects, such as the staircase that operated on a pulley system, like a castle drawbridge. Why,you ask? Because if the staircase could raise eight feet up in the air it made it easier to get to the record collection.

This is what happens when rocket scientists fix something around the house.

They were a lot of fun. Patricia was the matriarch. Her son Nathaniel was 15, and in a private school. August was a 22 year old friend of the family who was going to City College. She had moved in a few weeks earlier. I never got all the dogs and cats names down, but they were all healthy, friendly, and beautiful. Probably because she fed them raw meat from the butcher.

The best thing about this group was how spontaneous they were. I was originally scheduled to go eat with Mal Sharpe, an old time comedian, this evening. but he got the flu. So five hours before dinner time, I called Patti. She was fine with me stopping by with Clark and his video camera, Jon and his funny hat, and our NEW INTERN with just a few hours notice. I’m glad it worked out.

Patti is a stylist who works with Mervyn’s a lot. She saw my phone number in the catalogue while on a shoot and had to call the number, since she recognized it was an Oakland area code. After dinner, Patti got out her “book” which is photo-industry speak for portfolio. She is a seamstress. The world of photography is full of specialized fields. There are people who make a living styling beds. That’s it. Fluffing up the blankets and pulling them back just right. Patti showed us a magazine ad clipping where a woman and a man are half in-and-out of water.

Patti told me, “I weighted the cloth so it would move underwater. They did some other shots completely underwater, and had a different model than this one. The underwater model wasn’t that pretty, but underwater, she looked incredible. And it was just the opposite for this woman.” She said, pointing to the white-smiling blonde exploding from the tropical pool, who apparently becomes misshapen underwater. The underwater model was also able to hold her breath for a very long time. A natural born underwater model. Very rare.

We all have such amazing quirks. Really. I love it.

I have heard some strange things on this trip. Here are a few.

Skiing in New Zealand.

My lips got tired of kissing, and I ended up pregnant.

NBC is owned by GE, and you know what they make? Weapons.

Ah

He’s the guy with the scuzzy mustache.

I want people to know about the cheese that grills, it friggin’ delicious, people should eat it. Ahlloumi.