Gimme a pigfoot
and a bottle of Alsatian wine, and maybe some human growth hormone pills and the centrifuged blood of an 18-year old.
“An argument for aesthetic morality: Elisabeth Schwarzkopf appends a missing high C to a tape of Tristan otherwise featuring Kirsten Flagstad, and indignant purists, for whom music is the last blood sport, howl her down, furious at being deprived a kill.” – Glenn Gould, 1966.
THE KOREAN WOMAN – C. can’t remember her name – had been friendly during the first rehearsals. Her chair was next to C.’s, and when they met, she stood up and bowed, and at the end of the rehearsal, she complimented C., not on her playing but on her horn, a Yamaha student bass clarinet, black resin, nickel keys, brand new. C. is paying for it in monthly instalments. “So big!” said the woman, smiling, eyes wide. Her clarinet was a limited edition Bb Selmer made of African hardwood, with special engravings. C. looked it up later online. There are only 85 worldwide.
After the fifth or sixth week, however, the woman stopped acknowledging the presence of anyone in the orchestra. C. thought the change must have stemmed from disappointment – several times, she had observed, in the woman’s usually composed countenance, the faintest wince: a minute, involuntary contraction, usually in response to a squawk from the brass or the string section’s woefully discordant wobble. Or was it C.? Maybe the woman didn’t think she was serious enough. For scheduling reasons, C. had missed two rehearsals, and she never has the time to practice as much as she should. At one point, after one of the Rameau’s fast, hard-to-control rhythmic passages, C. thought she had caught the woman looking at her in horror.
Perhaps it was something else. Unrelated. A personal issue. Or maybe dissatisfaction with her own playing. Or embarrassment. The woman had always been the most diligent in the section, in her chair when C. arrived, instrument assembled, partition in place, already working through the more challenging Largo passages, especially the climactic moments of the main theme, where the line rises above the staff. Though within the standard clarinet range – nothing requiring true altissimo – the Korean woman couldn’t hit them, her high notes were squeaky and shrill. According to C., they set everyone’s teeth on edge. Once, she had seen the conductor look over while talking on the phone, look like she was going to tell the woman to stop playing, think better of it, and return to her conversation.
Perhaps the conductor, Brazilian, energetic, kind, but tough, said something to the woman on another occasion. Or maybe the woman saw how others were looking at her. Whatever the cause, according to C., she suddenly grew quiet and distant, cold even, as if something had turned off a tap in her head. At the beginning of the last rehearsal in March, she announced that her government was reassigning her to a different diplomatic post, and that this would therefore be her last rehearsal. At the end of which, she packed up her eight-thousand-dollar Selmer and left.
“She didn’t even say goodbye,” said V., who also has a student Yamaha and now sits next to C.
V. suspects the Korean woman of being dishonest, either about the restationing or perhaps right from the start, back in January, when everyone signed up and pledged to attend, if possible, every rehearsal, and, above all, not to miss the final recital in the Grande Salle Pierre Boulez, the main concert hall of the Philharmonie.
Then, D., three chairs over from C., announced that she was pregnant. And now V. has a sore bottom lip. Which happens often to clarinettists, C. had been warned about it, if you play for long periods, and if your bottom lip curls over your bottom teeth when you play, the teeth will often cut into the lower lip. The area becomes enflamed. Each day, the pain intensifies. Playing becomes terrible, an ordeal.
The conductor, who C. says pays little attention to their section – “I don’t think she can hear us” – told V. to put a folded-up cigarette paper over the bottom teeth when she plays, but V. says the paper quickly gets soggy and doesn’t alleviate the pain. “It just makes me feel sick,” she says.
C.’s lower lip doesn’t curl over her bottom teeth, so she doesn’t have this problem. Playing has never caused her physical pain. Ontological pain, she jokes, existential pain, emotional, psychological pain, maybe.
C. says V. dresses like Olive Oyl. A red, long-sleeved top with a white ruffle, a long black skirt with a yellow line just above the hem, and red pumps. Like the Korean woman, she also makes faces when someone in the orchestra plays incorrectly or squawks. Or, especially, when the poor English horn plays the famous main theme in D-flat major in the Dvořák. But unlike the Korean woman, she doesn’t try to hide it.
She also got mad at C. once for letting her partition fall to the floor. “J'espère que ça n'arrivera pas pendant le récital,” she said with a sniff.
“So what if it did?” C. said at dinner that night. “The orchestra sounds terrible. The brass section is especially terrible. And loud. But at least they’re having fun.”
V. does not have fun. She is always complaining. She says either C. to her left or M. to her right plays out of time. She’s unsure which, but she can’t follow either, and she can’t yet look up from her partition to follow the conductor. This exasperates her. “Ça me rend dingue!” she said fiercely at the last rehearsal.
C. is confident in her timing, that she plays correctly, and that V. does not. M. wants C. and V. to change seats. C. cannot hear M.; her playing is barely audible. Hearing C. say this reminded me of my musical education – recorder recitals in grade school, where I fingered the tone holes and pretended to blow into the mouthpiece. I did the same thing in the Christmas choir. Mouthing the words.
Last night, some orchestra members went for drinks after rehearsal. The brass section organised it. The English horn player complimented C. on her playing. “It wasn’t really a compliment,” said C. “He just said he could hear me.”
The recital is in mid-June. The English horn has not improved. C. says it is excruciating. She is not inviting any of her musician friends to the recital. They all want to come. It will be too painful, she says.
She says I have to go.
I wouldn’t miss it for the world.
Eli Sunday: Now beg for the blood! Daniel Plainview: [sotto voce] Please, give me the blood, Eli. Let me get out of here. Daniel Plainview: [aloud] Give me the blood, Lord, and let me get away! – Paul Thomas Anderson, Let There Be Blood, 2007.
Last night, while drinking wine and eating a fat slab of pork paté on the patio of a natural wine bar overlooking Montmartre Cemetery, my friend mentioned that her father is searching for a German centrifuge to process pig’s blood. He plans to inject the blood into dying dogs in China – and if the results are promising, to try a transfusion himself.
It was slightly chilly on the terrasse. The paté came with pickled radishes. There was another couple seated nearby. I couldn’t work out their language – I’d never heard it before – but their English was flawless, as was the bar’s owner’s, who, my friend told me – she’s in the food world and knows everyone – is from Luxembourg.
“Can I get you a glass of something?”
“No, a bottle, I think,” said the woman. “White, somewhat minerally, and fresh, with some florality and fruit up front, but not too flamboyant.”
The owner nodded knowingly. “I’ll bring you a couple of ideas.”
Less than an hour later, I saw the owner again at another patio up the hill, on rue Caulaincourt. He was on a fixie at the curb, draped over the handlebars and talking to the server and the man seated next to me, whom I recognised as a Paris restaurateur. The place was packed – the restaurateur, to get to his seat, had to squeeze in behind me, and while doing so he feigned a sexual gesture, like the one people used to do on dance floors in the nineties – one behind the other, leg up, leg down, mock-grinding the back partner’s groin into the front partner’s lumbar. I remember hearing about a friend doing this surreptitiously at a house party in San Francisco to the man in front of him, whom he didn’t know, and who, unfortunately, turned out to be an off-duty cop. With no sense of humour.
Here, however, all was jovial.
The reason for the big crowd was the guest chef, an Englishman who, for probably easily explainable reasons, has spent the last three years ladling out bowls of hand-rolled ramen with all the toppings at sold-out pop-ups in hipster venues in Paris, London, Brooklyn, and Tokyo. The kitchen of this one was small and slammed, which probably explained why the bowlfuls didn’t have the composed allure they had on the chef’s IG posts. The noodles were thinner than I like, and a bit, well, sigh, flaccid, with not enough resistant snap or bounce, but the nomadic man’s broths – shio, shoyu and veggie miso – were excellent.
The wine, too, from Alsace, or, as my son once referred to it, his first public joke, made at the age of eight in a wine shop in Kitsilano when he walked up to the owner while I was perusing the stock and asked, straight-faced, “Do you have any wine from Al’s ass?” To which the surprised owner responded, “Why, yes, we do, young man!” — was excellent. Rieffel Lâcher Prise, late-harvest, Riesling grapes, Gewürztraminer juice, skin-contact, floral – I think that’s what was said. Maybe the other way around, late-harvest Gewürztraminer with Riesling juice. Tasty. Big nose. Lichee. Expensive.
The Luxembourgeois wineman down near the cemetery had been even more forthcoming – the wine we selected from the three he presented was made by a négociant-winemaker in the Aude. A blend of several macerations and pressings of Mourvèdre and Muscat of Alexandria and some secondary varieties, all grown on different parcels in the Languedoc and Roussillon on clay-limestone soils. He described at length which cépage was pressed, which was macerated égrappée and which en grappes entières – and how long for each and what kind of barrels were used, and I think even where the moon was on the night of its bottling – but I fazed out about halfway through as he’d already given us full Foster Wallace essays on the other two bottles, and, what’s more, I was entirely focused on my friend’s story of her father’s pig blood.
He is in his seventies. He had a heart attack six years ago. Since then, he has become obsessed with his health. His daughter thinks he suffers from orthorexia nervosa, an eating disorder not in the DM-5 but all over the Internet, where it is described as a pathological fixation on consuming only foods perceived as healthy or pure, often leading to restrictive diets, anxiety, social isolation, and, in her father’s case, perhaps malnutrition. “He’s keto, he refuses seed oils, and he’s way too thin.”
So, pig’s blood. But not boudin noir, and not just from any pig, but from a special pig, a genetically engineered pig called a TKO pig because it has triple gene “knockouts” to reduce immune rejection. The human immune system rapidly rejects wild-type pigs’ cells, but the advanced TKO pig model’s red blood cells evade the human immune system because they lack three key antigens – Gal (galactose-α1,3-galactose), Neu5Gc (N-glycolylneuraminic acid), and Sda (Sd^a antigen) – and are further modified to express human proteins like CD47 and CD55.
They’re the pigs being used, somewhat successfully, for organ transplants.
The scientific name is Sus scrofa domesticus.
Her father’s pig blood idea, while unusual, echoes the long and controversial history of xenotransfusion – the transfer of blood between species:
“As early as the 17th century, scientists speculated about the potential of animal blood to supplement human needs, and pigs have often been considered possible donors due to the similarities between porcine and human blood cells. Pig red blood cells are close in size and function to those of humans, and advances in genetic modification have made porcine blood even more compatible with human systems. However, the practice remains highly experimental and fraught with ethical and medical risks, not least the potential for severe immune reactions and the transmission of animal pathogens. While the allure of rejuvenation through animal blood persists in some circles, the scientific consensus is clear: xenotransfusion remains a risky and largely unproven procedure, more the stuff of medical history and speculative fiction than reliable therapy” – perplexity.ai, 2025
Xenotransfusion should not be confused with parabiosis, a lab technique in which two living creatures of the same species are surgically attached so that the blood from one (usually the younger) circulates through the veins of the other. Parabiosis became media prominent in August 2016, when in an interview, Peter Thiel, then 48, newly Trumpy and determined to live forever, said he was “looking into parabiosis stuff, which I think is really interesting. This is where they did the young blood into older mice, and they found that had a massive rejuvenating effect.” In June 2016, Gawker, just before going belly up – Thiel, as you will recall, drove it into bankruptcy by funding several court cases against it for defamation – supported a rumour that Thiel was spending $160,000 annually to parabiotically drink the harvested blood of an 18-year-old. The rumour was never substantiated. Gawker disappeared into 404 land, and Thiel issued the following statement:
“I want to publicly tell you that I’m not a vampire. On the record, I am not a vampire.”
Off the record? Palantir stock is a major outlier, with soaring gains in a declining market. Its software partnerships with ICE are flourishing. So are its Pentagon-backed big-data warfare efforts – four of the six steps in the kill chain are now fully automated and widely deployed in actual conflicts, and the last two – assign prioritised targets to firing units and fire – are performing better than expected in live-fire exercises. But the stock rally is unsustainable – it is trading at over 500 times earnings, with a price-to-earnings-to-growth (PEG) ratio above 8 – and its heavy use of stock-based compensation is freaking out shareholders. A downturn is unavoidable.
Meanwhile, the clock ticks, the blood thickens. Thiel’s 57 now, and his stem cells, like mine, are declining, and our senescent cell counts are increasing unchecked. Many of his LGBTQ friends have abandoned him. His New Zealand bolthole bunker plan has been quashed. He no longer talks about seasteading oil rigs. His “apokálypsis” piece in FT was met with unbridled ridicule. He seems to have broken with the ever-greying Aubrey de Grey. His katechon-Antichrist ideas are getting loopier. His DOGE-y ideas have bit him in the ass. The new Pope thinks he’s a dick.
Still, he remains optimistic, but if the forever thing doesn’t pan out, he has a backup plan: a private cryonic team, on full standby. Upon death, should this ever occur, his blood will be pumped out, as it was for the pharaohs, he will be vitrified, and placed in a well-guarded titanium chamber, head down in case of liquid nitrogen leaks, until the end of time. Every tear will be frozen, and then, on Judgement Day, or soon thereafter, thawed and wiped away. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, and pigs will fly and love will overcome all, just as it does in C.’s section of the Rameau, in all lands and in all ways, and reconciliation and festivity will rule the day.
I'll pass on the pig's blood, but I'm gutted to know I'll be missing C's concert!!! Maybe we can talk her into a private recital.