So on Thursday, me and P. went to a chicken slaughter hosted by my cousin RF who organically raises chickens for eggs and for eating.
            The first time I had killed a chicken was a weekend before. RF had informed me that the pens where the meat chickens lived were getting too cramped and that the chickens were eating way too much. It was time to kill some. We would practice on a few before the big slaughter.
            Chickens are very interesting animals. Although they don’t like to be handled or chased, once they are in your arms or hanging by their feet in your hands, they become acquiescent. The method we used was to lay the chicken down in a roosting position facing the same direction as us, take the handle of a rake and put the handle horizontally over the chicken’s neck. Once this is done, the trick is to take a hold of the chicken’s feet and pull up on them while stepping on the rake handle.
            Once the throat is cut, the plucking begins. Usually the chicken is beheaded at this point. One can pluck a chicken “warm” (right after killing) or by scalding the skin first in hot water. Either way, plucking is tedious as there are thousands of feathers and little hairy like things coming out of the skin. After all of the feathers are plucked, the skin is singed with a flame to burn off the fine hair-like feathers.
            The eviscerating is next: first step is to cut off the chickens’ feet at the joints and put them aside for boiling and eating. The second step is to cut out the oil gland, a bright yellow thing found inside the tail. Next is the neckbone, which is removed and saved. The crop, which is a little bag-like stomach that holds food, is removed and tossed into a bowl reserved for offal, or parts of the chicken that can’t be used. Lastly, the body cavity is opened by cutting a  vertical slit between the drumsticks. The intestines, gizzard, heart, lungs, kidneys, liver and gall bladder are all pulled out. Of these, the heart, liver and gizzard are saved.
            After this, the chicken is rinsed off and placed into a constantly running bath of very cold water. It’s wrapped up and put in the fridge to “age” for a day or two before cooking.

Vast Arcade Los Angeles, a project of which Diagram Skull Gourd Beaker Catabolic Alembick is a part, is a multi-tiered, multi-faceted Super Mercado presenting an infinitely changing set of items.

Partly inspired by Walter Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project, Vast Arcade Los Angeles seeks to elaborate on, extrapolate from, anoint and ultimately graft itself to the invisible meta-mythologies of Los Angeles and the rest of urban Southern California. It does this through the virtual and actual creation of a space to house the sundry items presented in the project: plaster figurines, icons, images, snapshots, paintings, drawings, sounds, pamphlets, books, bootleg DVDs and CDs, trinkets, devotional objects, mechanical devices, toys, native and exotic plants, animals, blankets, pottery, legal and illegal merchandise, postcards and medicines.

The intention of the project is not to elevate mundane objects to exalted “art” status, nor is its intention to take part in that pop discourse. Instead, the project seeks to value the un-harnessable energy of interrelations, the concepts that are created between objects not from them. These concepts are the building blocks for the actual form of the project. The subject and object of the project is interrelations.
           
            Diagram Skull Gourd Beaker Catabolic Alembick is a small piece of the much larger Vast Arcade Los Angeles project. It can be seen as a vignette, a small window into a larger space. The objects in the piece all point to each other and create dialog amongst each other. What does a plaster cat, originating in Tijuana, spray-painted in Long Beach, California, say to a littered freeway? What does that conversation have to say about the conversation between an anonymous manifesto on street art and a photograph of a hooded figure?  My hope is that these questions of interrelation begin to build up into a structure of conceptual interrelations that mirrors the immense flash, complexity, beauty and terror of urban Los Angeles.