TV Tipped

Toe Nails
& the Green
Salami

Jessica Stockholder
© 2008 JESSICA S T OC KHOL DE R
TV Tipped Toe Nails
& the Green Salami

T V Tipped Toe Nails and the Green

Salami intercepts this old castle, 19th
century coffee, vanilla, and spice storage
facility. The stuff of fairy tales. And the
Green Salami, the protagonist. Great big, slightly offensive, out of place,
obscene, and also inanimate. The Green Salami is as a dream and as a
metaphor. Of course the Green Salami has no body. It might not taste
good but the words are fine.
This room appointed to hold the theatricality of living, enables us
to make coherent our senses and to order our lives. It allows layers
and layers of story and image, as fluid as our bodies, owned privately
and shared publicly. A parade flowing erratically through and around
meal times.
The building is already full of stories; it is intensely, beautiful, full of
comforting geometry, reason, mathematics, history, order, and the
grid. Gravity is pushing down on these huge columns, pushing all of the
atoms and molecules in the room towards the center of this spinning
earth we are standing on in the quiet stillness of this big little room.
TV Tipped Toe Nails & the Green Salami in the room: a counter point,
a floating island, a dancing geometry, history, a platform on a platform,
with many protagonists — Light, Color, the Wondering Eye and the
Green Salami.
 There is the story of Alice going through the looking glass. And there
are soap operas, General Hospital, or As the World Turns, cataloging
mundane events. A stadium, a carnival, a bullfight.

White Stories: neutral white, cold, snow; cleaned up, cool and white,
bright light and white, analytic medicinal removed and white, anti-
septic, surfaced and white.

Rolling Out the Red Carpet: Procession, royal and grand. Lushness, rit-
ual, ceremony and renaissance perspective, chess games, Le
Corbusier, modern cities and skyscrapers, abstract space in the mind
and charting. The Grid.

Light Stories: Pouring in the windows, stuck inside walls and bouncing
out next to a light filled TV. The movie 2001 or Close Encounters of the
Third Kind, ET. Or the Opera Einstein on the Beach, or stained glass
windows in churches, incorporeal and akin to those parts of us that
might be floating next to our skin, flesh, and bones.
Electric light is steady day to day and constant. Perhaps the lights
are turned off at night? On one side the light is cool and on the other it’s
warm, part of the picture and picture making. The sunlight from the
window changes moment to moment. The bricks, carpet and painted
surfaces are still, next to our ever changing moving, breathing, aging,
full of blood and flowing bodies. Life passing and time always, unre-
lenting, moving, slipping, lagging, dripping and ticking but never gone,
with stillness as its container.
Going through the cracks, to get off the train and look around; light
at a standstill.