Author Archives: Corinne Gaston

Coop Foot

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 20
Occupation: Waitress
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/9/2012
Primary Language: English
Language: Mandarin

Coop foot is what happens when you live in a house with twenty-two people, three cats, three chickens, and occasionally a dog that we bring home. And you never fucking wear shoes and you walk in the dirt and walk around outside and you jump on the trampoline and then your feet are just black – blacker than the lungs of the people who sit on the porch all the time smoking cigarettes. And you track that shit everywhere and the floor never gets cleaned, so it just builds and builds and builds and it’s beautiful.

 

Coop Foot, also know as Co-op Foot, is a term my informant told me is used by the people who live in her house; she learned it from multiple people, not just one. She told me about this term on her front porch while she at the time had ‘a mild case of coop foot.’ It falls under a collective running joke among the house members concerning how filthy their house is. If someone takes a shower and then walks around downstairs for even just ten minutes, she says their feet get impossibly dirty. However, she used the term affectionately and had a poetic description for it. It sounded as though she had a sense of pride about it, probably because it’s something she and her housemates have bonded over.

Baba Ghanouj (my daddy is spoiled)

Nationality: Arab-American, mixed, biracial
Age: 22
Occupation: Waitress, activist, journalist
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/25/2012
Primary Language: English
Language: Arabic, some French and Spanish

Baba Ghanouj is an Arabic dish that means “my daddy is spoiled.” It’s also known as Mutabbal in different regions, which means “it’s mixed up.” She said that it’s common for kids to make food for their parents after a certain age in her culture, and baba ghanouj was such a delicious and straightforward meal, kids would make it and say something like, “look, see how spoiled my dad is?” My informant ate it a lot growing up; she learned all of her recipes from her mom, because recipes were passed down in her family and her mother also inherited recipes from her stepdad’s mother, because he is Palestinian-Jordanian, so compared so Saudi food, theirs is a little bit lighter and distinct in her mother’s recipe knowledge.

This recipe, as well as many others, is significant to my informant, because since her family was poor growing up, her mother cooked cheap recipes like lentils stews (which are also used as a folk remedy for colds) hummus (which literally means “chickpea” in Arabic), and baba ghanouj with pita for her and her siblings all the time.

She also listed the cooking directions for me:

Directions:
Burn eggplant skins on stove until eggplant juice is bubbling out, this is when they’re fully cooked
Let them cool & remove skin
Toss eggplants in bowl
Mash with fork
Place mashed eggplant in strainer over other bowl to remove excess water (save and use in soup or other recipe)
Return pulp to mixing bowl
Add smashed garlic (smash in wooden mortar)
Add salt and lemon juice
Mash together
Add tahini 1 tablespoon at a time
Mash together
Add Salt, Sumac & Olive Oil to taste
Mash together
Top with sprinkled sumac, chopped parsley, tomatoes and olive oil
*Do your best to get all of the skin off. Don’t use any hard parts of the eggplant (usually the little bump at the bottom)

Gloria III

Nationality: Hispanic (product of Spanish rule in the Americas)
Age: 21
Occupation: student, front desk worker/ website translator
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/25/2012
Primary Language: Spanish
Language: English

It began when we had our party I really don’t remember the beginning – it was the Genderfuck party, yeah –  because I was on this thing called DOC. And I was tripping and kind of like in my own little world. I do know that around 2am, people started taking off their clothes and were showing their boobies everywhere and they were just dancing and I was like, “What!? What’s going on, this is amazing.”

So we kicked everyone out and we all went to the back yard and we were lying on this really old twin mattress and I don’t know how people fit, but like you had like 18 people up in there and I was like uh-uh, I am not getting up in all of that. And so from there, the bonfire was really nice, then we went to Rachel’s room and there it was kind of like…I don’t know…we were all kind of like on top of each other and I was still kinda tripping, so I was just like, “everybody just touch hands!”(laughs). And we were all touching hands and then like I would make jokes like, you know let’s play a game called who’s in my mouth. (laughs) So then like, we were all touching each other and we took it to my room and then we were on G’s bed and S came in with ice cream and we started passing the ice cream to each other via mouth, and then I took off my pants and I was in my Andrew Christian underwear and you know how that makes my package look – humongous! And so then we decided to watch a video and then me and G got on the couch on the two couches or whatever and were dancing naked – oh no, we weren’t naked, we had underwear.

And R was like, “we should all take a shower,” and nobody said anything, so I was like, “yeah, let’s do it.” And so then like, nobody moved, so I got up and people started finally moving, at least that’s how I remember it. And so then we decided to go take a shower up in the cave bathroom, which is huge. And we put on Lady Gaga, The Fame album, and we all just took a shower with each other – I kept my underwear on, mostly because I was like, “I’m tripping, I don’t know what could happen, if I drop the soap, I’ll be like, ‘oops.’” (laughs) – You know what I’m saying? It was great times. That’s a pretty quick run-through for Gloria III.

 

At this point, ‘Gloria’ is a tradition, or at least a practice within this group. I heard variations on this story as well. My informant as well as others, described the requirements for ‘Gloria’ to basically be some kind of group bonding where people felt comfortable with their bodies and the bodies of others and comfortable with sharing space. Basically, it was intimate, but not necessarily sexual. ‘Gloria’ was also supposed to be fun. Also, they tended to define events as ‘Glorias’ after the fact, not during. These events explore human intimacy, for which we all yearn deeply, but fear at the same time, namely because we are afraid of how others may perceive us, we feel uncomfortable with ourselves, and we feel vulnerable when we share too much. As non-serious as this event was, it is an example of a group of people beginning to overcoming hesitation, fear of intimacy, etc.

 

Gloria I

Nationality: Half Hawaiian Japanese, half Polish-Jewish
Age: 28
Occupation: Traveler
Residence: West Coast
Performance Date: 4/16/2012
Primary Language: English

You can talk to G about this, and M.I. and M. So, first or second year of the co-op, so like 2007, 2008, N lived at the co-op and we were at the old house on orchard street back then. And um, there were a lot…well, there were a lot of people sleeping with each other in the house. (laughs) Not like that’s strange or anything, but umm, there was constantly this joke about how given that so many people are sleeping with each other in the house, why don’t we just have an orgy? Since that’s an experience we all seem to want to have. And N coined the name ‘Gloria’ as like the name of the orgy. So in her mind she was thinking like we’re gonna have this orgy and it’s gonna be epic and all these people from the house are gonna be in it and it’s gonna go down in history and we’re going to call it Gloria. So that was like 2008. Now it’s 2012. And there have been two…people refer to them as Gloria I and Gloria II. Neither of them were like what people think of when they think of an orgy- a sexual orgy. Yeah, I wasn’t really part of Gloria II, but Gloria I is alternatively called The Acid Orgy. Um, and yeah, that was the one where like 15 to 20 people ate acid and we ended up in that one room just like lying on top of each other listening to Air… for like twenty hours. We weren’t actually in that room for twenty hours, but we all tripped for a really long time. But yeah, it’s interesting the way people use the word orgy, because usually you think of orgy as like four plus people having sex. And I think what we realized that night – cause we realized it was Gloria I, at the time it was just Gloria – that night, and called it that that night. We realized that instead of four plus people having sex and bonding in a sexual way, it was a whole bunch of people bonding in the way that people bond with each other when they feel comfortable tripping on acid together, which is like it’s own little bonding thing. So that’s why we called it Gloria. (laughs) But yeah, you should ask G about it too.

 

This is a piece of group lore that the members of that group reflect on fondly and I’ve heard variations on the story from numerous people who have told it to people outside of the group. Without intending to, the experience redefined a term that usually has taboo connotations that make people uncomfortable. Instead, it was a deep bonding experience within a community. Also, I shortened names to the first letter or first two letters for the sake of privacy.

 

Redefining Conception

Nationality: Half Hawaiian Japanese, half Polish-Jewish
Age: 28
Occupation: Traveler
Residence: West Coast
Performance Date: 4/16/2012
Primary Language: English

Yeah, I don’t remember like all the things she talked about but, just the one point I remember was how she redefined the behavior and the egg – conception. Because we’re always taught in school that like – the common knowledge or whatever is that the egg is passively waiting, doing nothing and the sperm like actively compete to enter the egg. I mean, it follows gender stereotypes of women being passive and men being active and men competing to get the girl or whatever, you know. It’s stupid. So she redefined it that by saying that actually the egg opens, which is an action. The egg opens for the sperm it wants to contribute it genes. (laughs) Well, I think that’s pretty cool. And the she used that as like an analogy for our relationships and choice in relationships. It makes it really clear, that story among many, how well-ingrained those beliefs about what women are like and what men are like. It’s so unconscious. Everyone’s just like, ‘oh yeah, well the sperm compete to enter the egg. I mean, everyone knows that.’ People don’t even think about how that’s conforming to gender stereotypes. And also, people think that the idea that sperm are competing to enter the egg – people think of that as biological fact. It’s like accepted as science. Which makes it unequivocal. Whereas actually, it’s an interpretation and it’s a gendered interpretation. She was drawing our attention to that. I learned this at a full moon ritual put on by Mujeres de Maize in Los Angeles.

My informant is pretty explanatory on the significance of this conception story. I found it particularly meaningful because it does challenge what we are typically taught about the most quintessence examples of how biological femaleness and maleness interact. This retelling dismisses the concept of women naturally being submissive or being supposed to act submissive. It’s surprising how concepts like that become so ingrained within us without us even being consciously aware of them, which was why I, and other women as well, found the story so eye-opening and empowering at the same time.