Kitchen Erotica

Warsaw singer-songwriter Milito is cooking up beauty, sensual pleasure, and masculine sensitivity

Milito sings, “Love is a choice” in this week’s FED feature. What a powerful and empowering choice. Consider the many less noble options we tend to choose throughout our day—greed, jealously, selfishness, consumption, stress, convenience, anger, and passivity to name a few of the pricklier ones.

What if we paused before each everyday choice and chose love first? All of us. Imagine a world full of humans choosing love first. I like to think we’d be staring down the Eroticene or the Generoticene instead of the Anthropocene. I like to believe that we’d each be appreciated and supported for who we are at our core, that we’d each have a valued place, and that in turn, we’d care for each other and the planet sustainably and generously. I like to imagine what a world based on authentic, harmonious, and holistic love would look like. I want to live there.

Kamil—as I know him—and I met at Zachęta, the National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, a little more than ten years ago. It was the after-party for an opening, and DJ Vika was spinning. A tangent here is necessary, and you’re going to want to go back and click that link and then find some more to explore.

DJ Vika is in her 80s and one of the coolest people I’ve ever met. She spins one heck of a party, and what an inspiration and model! This beautiful soul inhabits and creates love. She radiates it. Kamil and I met in DJ Vika’s love-verse, surrounded by artists and art lovers in one of the hottest, most interesting, and most socially-grounded art scenes on the planet. It was a beautiful start for what would become a sustaining transoceanic friendship.

In the intervening years, I have born witness to Milito’s blossoming into himself, to the evolution of his music, art, and thinking, to the coming into his own as a singer-songwriter. As he sings in “Kitchen Table,”—featured here—“it’s always a matter of love.”

Big love, Ashley

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Milito, Milito – who am I? a singer? sure! a songwriter – yes! a poet? no doubt. But more fundamentally, I’m a man, and I only recently started to really relish it. Part of this joy stems from the courage to embrace the full spectrum of my own masculinity.

It took me lots of conversations, hours of thinking, and a few very good books to understand how many things have been frozen in me by socialization. From this wide array of goodies, I took what I wanted to unblock the expression of my original defining chromosome.

Now, I can genuinely invite you, whoever you feel you are, to join me in this oneiric dance through the symbols of my soulscape. Cook with me.

NINE ½ WEEKS OF THE ROOSTER

Warsaw, January 26, 2020 (translated from Polish by the author)

An open fridge
sheds
soft yellow light,
just like a Rembrandt.
A rooster stands in front of it,
handsome: sparkling eyes,
crest - erected,
these wattles fluttering under 
a beak.

Fleshy caruncles
redden
and with hand prepared as if for 
a karate chop
the rooster slowly deprives 
himself of plumage, majestically 
revealing parcels of his crudely outlined
meatiness.
He's already climbing up
the shelves as if a scaffolding
high, the highest,
firm and exposed.

He rolled in between
cheeses and vegetables,
completing this multiplying Infinity
Foodscape-by-Erro-1964.
In the dimmed light he closed eyes and door –
hands tight to the body:
Et Arcadia ego.

Now he tenses up like a scrotum at zenith
ready for Sunday resurrection.

When you open the fridge,
he will react with spasmodic impulse
to the light,

in total alacrity
to be picked with a toothpick 
fiber by fiber

in the rumpled sheets.

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Dive in for more goodness…

To learn more about Milito and FED’s entire Spring 2024 all-star line-up of musicians, artists, writers, growers, gleaners, cooks, and craftspeople, check out Special Guests.

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