Read Online Room Service by Frank Moorhouse - Free Book Online Page A

Whitney, Agnes Denes has An Exhibition of Human Dust , photographic and mixed media. It includes bones, sperm and other human mong. That’s called mixed media. In the same exhibition there was a space with the words ‘withdrawn in protest’. The artisthad entered a painting and withdrawn it because he was opposed to galleries. Another exhibit is about a hundred photographs of people cleaning and working in an office building (the building, in fact, where the exhibition was) called, I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day. The artist, Merle Laderman Ukeles, wrote to the people who cleaned the building and asked them to consider one hour of their day of regular work to be ‘art’. The artist photographed them during one of these hours. Agnes Denes was lucky that her exhibit wasn’t cleaned away during Merle Laderman Ukeles’s project.
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    What’s happening among the radicals: There are Demon Dances against the nuclear war. I call them demon dances because they often seem to involve coffins and death and skeletons.
    There was a memorial service for the American socialist Eugene Victor Debs who ran for the presidency five times from 1912. He polled at best a million votes – about one-sixth of the votes cast then. He campaigned from jail once where he spent three years for opposing American participation in World War I. I have always liked his remark that people had to make socialism them selves. ‘If ‘I could lead you to socialism someone else could lead you out.’ Three hundred old socialists attended the service.
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    What are the intellectuals talking about at parties: They talk about how great the 1960s were politically, howcommitted and alive politics was then. I suggested that they campaign to bring back the Vietnam War.
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    What is the newest current expression: ‘When we come down to the wire.’ No one knew where it came from. Maybe the wire is the barbed wire that troops had to face in trench warfare. There is a lot of talk about ‘energy’. On my last trip energy meant fuel and the world energy crisis. Now the word has jumped across to mean ‘creativity’, as if the trauma of Americans losing their fuel power, their automobiles, has continued as an anxiety about their personal drive. So everyone wants to mix with energised people, people are frightened about losing their energy – vitamin taking began during the fuel crisis. People are looking for ‘energy foods’. People talk about places where the energy is or isn’t. Australia is where the energy is. The Australian film industry is where the energy is. New viruses are feared because they take away your energy. They talk of aerobic energy (from food input) and anaerobic energy (from the body’s reserve).
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    What is the latest food fad: energy foods. Even chewing gum is being advertised as giving ‘a lift’ i.e. in energy. I still use neat Jack Daniel’s or a Stinger.
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    A New York Jewish story: One late-middle-age Jewish woman to another, ‘In Israel, tell me, how much to have your mouth rehabilitated?’ Before the other woman could answer, the New York woman went onto say that in New York to have a ‘mouth survey’, new teeth and ‘general reconstructions’ cost $5,000.
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    But New York is still a very conservative city: I couldn’t get into Regines, the discotheque, because I wasn’t wearing a ‘regular jacket and tie’.
    The obligatory piece on New York should also include a Warm-hearted American people story , and a Pithy New York bartender remark and A piece on the Chrysler Building.

Blase and Deep-Tissue Massage and Other Fulfilment Therapies
    Hi Chief. As you might have guessed, I’m hanging out in Sausalito with some lapsed radicals from the 1960s – the hometown of the California Hot-tub world, Sausalito in Marin County overlooks foggy San Francisco bay. Marin has every sort of