on-line open-love wearing google glasses

a meal about making choices- each eater had to
decide how to liven up their colorless plates. 

My goal with the pst meal is to have the menu in some way reflect the talk, or at least the personality of the speaker. This manifests different ways-- sometimes the connection is literal, like for a talk about ecstatic Dervishes we ate Persian rice and kebobs. Other times the foods materiality illustrates the talk. One month the speaker explored how we make choices, so I made a meal with a base of blandly cooked colorless foods (poached cod fillets, white rice, vanilla ice cream, etc.)but I surrounded the platters with a platoon of unlabeled squeeze bottles filled with colorful sauces. Everyone had to figure out what might go with what and how they wanted to liven up their plates. 

Often it seems if I served umami laden mushrooms and chocolate instead of working to come up with a clever unique menu, I'd hit the nail on the head. So many of the talks delve into the earthy, savory and oft times consciousness bending quests we pursue here on Earth. So too was this true for this months pst when Lex Pelger gave a talk called The Future of Fornication: Open Love in the Drop-out Generation. Lex is a writer, a scientist and an active member of NYC’s Open Love Tribe. In his talk he outlined how the internet had opened possibilities for connecting with all sorts of fetishistic and alternative sexual communities and then he went on to imagine what new possibilities will open with google glasses. In his dream the glasses will work to connect us with like-minded sexual partners whom we chance upon in the crowded hustle-n-bustle of daily life. The more the merrier! 

Lex and I batted around the idea of oysters and chocolate- alleged aphrodisiacs, but in the end we chuckled over an image of people alone in front of their screens eating straight from take-out containers as they carried on cyber-trysts across the globe. I marched off to Chinatown and bought a bale of pre-folded take-out containers and a gross of chopsticks, then home-cooked dishes most of us call our local "Chinese" to deliver: fried rice, garlic eggplant, stir-fried beef with ginger and scallions, stir-fried bok choy...  and for dessert: orange slices and a giant Valentine full of chocolates.