Sound of Number, Taste of...

amore... Amari

Amari (bitter) is a digestif popular in Italy; it's drunk after the long Italian meal (apertifs are drunk before the meal). They're little known outside of Italian communities in larger cities. Some bars in San Francisco and New York are beginning to offer large selections. Amari's are made from proprietary, secret and local recipes of herbs, flowers, roots and other ingrediants; they're macerated in alcohol and then distilled. The origin of the drink supposedly can be traced back to the  time when spices were being brought from the Near and Far East and then used by herbalists and monks in Europe. The drink was first commercialized in the 19th century. It should be had chilled but keeping it in the freezer can stiffen the liquid and deadan the herbal taste. Amari are sometimes used in cocktails and can also be used as a base in which to create a cocktail. Other countries that produce amari include Serbia, Germany, the Czech Repuclic and Russia. Gorki List (bitter leaf) from Russia may be available shortly in the United States. This drink contains wormwood which was an ingrediant in old-style amari.

Sexual Division - Ted Hughes

                                        A Childish Prank          Man's and woman's bodies lay without souls, dully gaping, foolishly staring, inert on the flowers of Eden. God Pondered. The problem was so great, it dragged him asleep.  Crow laughed. He bit the Worm, God's only son, into two writhing halves. He stuffed into man the tail half with the wounded end hanging out. He stuffed the head-half headfirst into woman and it crept in deeper and up to peer out through her eyes. Calling its tail-half to join up quickly, quickly because O it was painful. Man awoke being dragged across the grass. Woman awoke to see him coming. Neither knew what had happened. God went on sleeping. Crow went on laughing.                                                                                                                                       

Army of Shadows/Gurdjieff in Paris

Jean-Pierre Melville's film about the French Resistance made in 1969 was finally released in the United States in 2006. The film is adapted from Joseph Kessel's book of the same name and is an account of the author's experience in the French resistance; it was published in London in 1943 as a fictionalized work of reportage. Melville himself was supposedly connected with the French resistance but there is no doubt he fought with the Free French in North Africa. When the film initialy came out it was ignored during the heyday of the French New Wave. Characters and storys in the film were based on real people and incidents that actually took place in the French resistance.

                                                                                                What was Gurdjieff doing during the German occupation of Paris? For a detailed description see William Patrick Patterson's book Voices in the Dark. It includes transcripts of meetings between Gurdjieff and his students, the influence of the pseudo-occult on the German order and the voices speaking of citizens, soldiers, political figures and intellectuals. Gurdjieff had stayed with his pupils in France instead of going to America during the occupation. What would it be like to live in the uncertainty of not knowing if your friends were informers, of not knowing if you would have food to eat and realizing that France, the country with the largest standing army at the time, had been easily overun by the Germans?