panmesa: everyone brings something to the table

eve11 & wire invite you this full moon to Catrina’s Crypt (the launching of Coterie Cafe — see posts below) for a Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebration.

When: Moonday, November 2nd, 10:10 am

Address: 914 St Roch, New Orleans, LA — enter by the side gate, do not go upstairs

“El muerto a la sepultura y el vivo a la travesura”

La Catrina (fancy lady in Spanish) was created in 1913 by Mexican printmaker Jose Guadalupe Posada. Dressed in a feathered, wide brimmed hat, and decorated with jewels. Regardless of her prosperity and elegant outward appearance, her skeletal form revealed her fate — recognized by all as the great equalizer. — text from National Museum of Mexican Art

Rise with the dead at 9:09 am if you care,

Energize with tortillas at 10:10 am for our fare,

Eyes open, hands make art as ephemeral as air,

Dice roll over graves, rumbling fortunes… luring us to share.

ART CREDITS: La Catrina by El Pollo Diablo

Coterie Cafe, a speakeasy/underground coffeehouse + arts Salon + gifting currency experience

coterie: etymology from 1738 French., originally an organization of peasants holding land from a feudal lord

An experiment in art as flow, currency as art.

Serving coffee, tea, simple breakfast fare and scribbleable butcher paper walls, we’ll host an eclectic combustible crowd of people that aren’t “supposed” to go together like the fusion chefs mix ingredients into culinary taste explosions. What happens next is rather unpredictable — movements, improvisations, belle epoques, Renaissances.

Currency accepted will be in the form of play money, play-doh, pumpkin bread, poetry and other forms of connective transactions. [See Burning Man lecture, La Vie Boheme, by founder Larry Harvey: “This is a bonding experience, unlike buying something from someone where the great convenience of it is that we aren’t connected.”]

All coffee, tea, and spontaneous happenings will remain forever and ephemerally free of transactional energy.

Local musicians, poetry readings, and raw unanticipated unalterated cultural flowerings are encouraged within the Coterie space and artists may sell their object d’art in the morning bazaar for “art currency.”  We anticipate that these currents and currencies will leak into the greater New Orleans artist communities, and ripple outwards.

The pop-up cafe will operate within the artist-run New Orleans dwelling of musicians and writers — Wyatt Kildow, formerly of the Vieux Carre Hard Core, and Evelyn Rodriguez, who formerly hosted rotating bimonthly Salons in the Bay Area.

Coterie Cafe will cooperate during the morning hours from 9-11 a.m. every Monday-Friday in New Orleans, LA until such time the winds blow us to new and sparkling parts of the galaxies. For address, please contact Evelyn Rodriguez (quite Googleable) or on twitter, www.twitter.com/eve11

Lewis Hyde, who wrote The Gift, says “When gifts circulate within a group their commerce leaves a series of interconnected relationships in its wake, and a kind of decentralized cohesiveness emerges.”

We kicked off the first coterie gathering on Dias de los Muertos, November 2nd, 2009 at 10:10 am. Thank you to the 13 souls who sparked the kindling.

credits: “Gathering House”, by Katherine Scherer, photograph taken of the St. Anne Revelers prepping the morning of Mardi Gras parades. This particular foot parade congregates in the bohemian neighborhood of Bywater/9th Ward, New Orleans by Katherine Scherer

Try it… Every day is eARTh day….

A new Born World by Fairy Attic’s Helene Deroubaix

Inspiring snippet from DailyOm.com April 16, 2008

Potlatch
Encouraging Generosity

“We can learn much from the Native American tradition of the potlatch. It is a tradition that values generosity above all else, and a potlatch, which is a very grand ceremony, is an exercise in giving away material possessions, food, and money. It is not uncommon for the host of a potlatch to give away so much of his own resources to his guests that he ends up with nothing. However, he can regain his wealth by attending potlatches at which he is a guest. In this way, a potlatch validates generosity and encourages the flow of resources in a community, while at the same time continually reaffirming the importance of community ties.

When we are held in a web of trust and connection, we can give generously, knowing that when it is our turn we will be supported. In this way, our whole sense of ownership becomes less individualistic and more communal. Resources are in an acceptable state of flux, moving within the community through the vehicle of the potlatch, which serves the additional function of strengthening community ties.”

Self Portrait as Root II, by Julie Heffernan

I’ve been gearing up for a meeting of the New Orleans Food Coop, trying to find a way to articulate what I feel. This is a start.

After I ate at Whole Foods, I lost interest in Safeway (and the generic, non-organic supermarket). After I ate from local farmer’s market, I lost interest in Whole Foods. After I ate kale pulled straight from the ground twenty minutes before, and enjoyed mission figs and grapefruit and Asian pears plucked from my neighbor’s yards, I lost interest in farmer’s markets. Where my evolution goes next is still a mystery.

I’ve absolutely no interest in shopping at grocery stores, or eating food prepared by restaurants. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t.

Yet, any vision for a cooperative grocery store —or, any store — isn’t compelling - to me. I’ve been reluctant to share how I feel, thinking somehow speaking my dreams might “harm” the momentum of other’s creations.

We live in an age of completing, not competing. I don’t see any harm to passion flowers growing side by side to night-blooming jasmine. Nature’s all about flowering fertility in fecund proportions.

Right now, living in downtown New Orleans, as I do, the options appear limited, and certainly not complete. So, the more variety and diversity of choices, the better. I will support the New Orleans Food Coop through membership, and where I can.

And, I won’t stay silent about my vision - in order to complete, not compete, the nourishment of this planet.

These are the words that came to me when I thought I needed to encode this feeling and seeing into words: I live in a different future. I live in one where food is free and grows on trees. I love in one where there is no fee to gather wildcrafted teas, and dance in peace.

That future is around the corner - for me. Maybe for you. I don’t know exactly how yet, only that the answer to how is Yes.

And peering a bit further into a multidimensional future, these words penned themselves: I’ll sup upon winged twinkles and sip glittered stellar libations. But now I’m getting ahead of myself.

p.s. I write this to find like-hearted people, not to persuade anyone over to “my side”. If it resonates, fine, if not there are a zillion other blogs out there that might sing your tune.

Passion Flower photo by Laurie Tennent

“Please imagine a brilliantly blue sphere with myriad sparkling pinpoints of light as it recedes into an ever lightening space and joins other celestial bodies. All of these vibrant, glittering orbs are rotating among evanescent pastel ribbons wafting through space in rhythm with the angelic music of the spheres. This is your world in balance and harmony with its neighbors.” - Matthew’s messages 3/23/2008

Everything in the universe is energy vibrating at one frequency or another, and when Earth was in prime health, in times you know but don’t remember, all of her life forms were vibrating harmoniously.  When she was near death more than six decades back, there was no harmony whatsoever, no balance of Nature—there was hardly sufficient light to sustain any kind of life, including Earth’s own. What is happening now, with the help of stabilizing forces, is the transformation of your world—Earth’s rejuvenation and return to balance—reaching completion in 2012. 

Flora by Ian Marke (via Care 2 Witches Helping Witches)