Short Fat Poem

When travelling abroad,

Hide your credit card in a block of lard.

It’ll never be stolen.

Safer than in a salad, where it could be eaten.

And when the cash machine eats your card,

And you’re left fingering a fatty slot,

Praise the lard

For making the bank fat. 

Contact With Lard

Issued By The Lard Information Council

Visual Daftness

I once saw a horse jump over a car. I saw it on an old postcard: Tipperary, ridden by Jack Prestage at the Augusta Horse show, March 1st (my birthday), 1924. But I was more shocked by a postcard I received the other day; one of those local delicacy-recipe-postcards - for Eccles cakes. The photograph depicted a couple of anemic-looking, misshapen puff-pastry discs, on a cushion. They had an aura of abandoned
shoulder pads. But the recipe informed me of the fact: dead-fly cakes are made out of animal fat. Lard.  

Fatography

Yesterday. I’m in Cheddar George – in a tearoom – when a woman says, “Stop looking at me like I’m fat”. I avert my eyes, contemplate my gaunt reflection in my black - calorie-free – coffee; count the flecks of dandruff floating on the surface. I get up to seventy-six – the amount of calories in a cup of Olvantine Light - and the coffee’s gone cold, so I run my fingers through my salt and pepper hair to try and make it 114 – the same calories as in a Milky Way. I think its safe to look up, but she’s still sat at the next table. I attempt a thin-smile, but gawp at the amount chins I’m faced with. She’s got more chins than Mount Rushmore - and none of them chiseled: we're talking President butter-mountain here. “You’re fattist you are”, she screams. I’m about to leave anyway – I like my coffee like I like my liposuction: sucked through a very thin straw. And I’ve never been known to flatter, as I’m slipping out of my chair, I utter: “ How can I be the fattest? You are clearly much fatter than me - by at least four dress sizes - I’m a size 12. I’ve always responded better to flattery than to a factory. But the factory responded and my dandruff ends up back where it came from: back on my head (along with my coffee).  

Reunited with my dandruff I go in search of the scientologist (climbing partner) I’d left in a cave, reading: “Ron The Photographer: Writing With Light”, L Ron Hubbard’s (the founder of Scientology) classic text on photography. “What’s scientology’s line on fat? No, lets start at the beginning. Where did L Ron Hubbard stand on Fat? And what does the strange L before the Ron stand for? Lard? Lard Ron Hubbard?” Consider the front-cover: a photograph of a somewhat bloated L Ron wearing a jacket, tailor-made to hold lard. Look. The pockets are the size and shape to hold lard. L Ron’s pictured contemplating a landscape of thin trees and thin sunlight, with his feet cut off. He could be standing on two blocks of lard (explaining why his pockets are so deflated) for all we know? 

Not so farfetched. Scientology fights obesity with something called: The Purification Rundown Programme. Amongst other things this detox-diet programme advocates lots of saunas and massages (5 hours a day for 5 weeks), and you wouldn’t expect to find fat – a block of lard - balanced on a sauna and massage sign in the street. Even more bizarre: notice how the sauna changes its name but the block of lard stays there just the same. One minute it’s ‘Secret Moments Health Studio’, the next it’s, 'Whispers Sauna - Massage and Relaxation Centre'. ‘Secrets’ or ‘Whispers’ doesn’t hide the fact that both are brothels; and I think the lard’s there to attract punters; as a kind of a take on the saying: “I only have to look at food to get fat”. But in this case: “I only have to see lard to get hard”. And in they flock. Marshall McLuhan was right: “The medium is the massage”.

What ology or ography explains a fat-fact like this one? Or the case of a man called Croissant loosing all that weight? Strange fat-facts can only be preserved through the prism of new medium: Fatography. How can I be fattist? I’m a Fatographer. I’m going to start a new movement. We’ve had Golfography. Now let me lipo-introduce Fatography. And I’m not Greg Lucas, or Robert Croissant. I’m the father of Fatography: Eugene Dupont. 

Walk The Talk

They may have been black and white days, but things were far from clear. I had a slippery relationship with my parents - got into the habit of finishing their sentences (prevented them getting to 'the point'): in the presence of my parents, doing replaced thinking; ‘actions spoke larder (louder, larger?) than words’.

All this ‘doing something visual’ eventually took its toll and I ended up spending a lot of time (and money) under a doctor in Germany (the only country where I didn’t feel bloated). Dr Rusteberg not only treated the cause of my bloating, over time, he became interested in healing the cause of my photographs.

A typical consultation would go something like this: I’d present Rusteberg with a photograph (usually a self-timed, self-portrait) and he’d silently study the image, during which time I wasn’t allowed to say a word. The cue for me to speak came in the form of a windowed envelope; Dr Rusteberg would insert my photograph into a large, used, slit-at-the-sides, windowed envelope. The doctor would then move the photograph around inside the window, examining every inch of the image, until some detail - often small and seemingly insignificant in the photograph, but large and made centre-stage, in the window - was isolated and framed.  Rusterberg was searching for, what Barthes, in Camera Lucida, called, the punctum. This point-of-reference quite often proved to be a 'telling' point-of-departure: Rusteberg, like Telly Savalas (in his song, “If”), understood that a picture’s worth a thousand words.

While good doctor’s ‘window-to-my-world’ technique, proved pivotal in reducing my bloating, it only acted to inflame my nasty habit of finishing other people's' sentences – even Dr Rusteberg’s. I’d presented him with a photograph of my parents ignoring me (my father reading the paper, my mother knitting) as I fell off their house.

In an accompanying image, I'm buttering the house – melting bricks of lard onto the wall with a blowlamp (making for a ‘difficult home’). The doctor moved the window over my blowlamp, before settling on the lard, and said, “It’s time you came down off the fence, you’re walking on a knife-edge; it’s a slippery slope, on the one side sanity…” But I didn’t give Rusteberg chance to finish the sentence; I stepped in and ejaculated, “On the one side sanity: on the other, towels”.

Nowadays I’m of the opinion: far from curing me, those ‘windowed consultations’ with Dr Rusteberg, only served to fan the flames. Within days of my return to England I was attempting to ‘walk the talk’, as it were. I’d swapped the window for a widow (my elderly neighbour, Mrs Sharpe) and any sanity, for towels. I threw Mrs Sharpe a block of lard (she was used to handling lard), it made her feel comfortable in front of the camera – gave her something to do with her hands.

My neighbour might have been a widow without a window, but she had her own ‘take’ on what would make a good photograph. After I’d finished snapping, as I was taking the towels down off the fence, she said, I’m disappointed in you Greg: I thought you were a nice boy? I’ve been stood here with lard, all this time, waiting for you to walk my washing line”.

Coda: Face-Jam

The distraction of deathly children aside, I still dreamed of getting my face into that crack. A couple of weeks after my first attempt (to jam my head in the crack and hang from it: see Head-Jam 5/12/09, before reading on) I was back, hanging around beneath the crack. The children's bodies hadn’t been moved; I'm going to write to the Blind - send them some photographs: The Institute for the Blind shouldn't be exhibiting young corpses, in an aquarium, on a pay-as-you-gawp basis.

My thinking: my head’s too big but my face might fit. I could jam my face into the crack, puff out my cheeks and thus support my body with my face.  Hence, the birth of a new ‘crack-technique’: “The Face-Jam”: the birth of a new slogan, into bargain: “The Face-Jam: It’s never too late to let your face take the weight”.

I set-up my tripod; anchored it to the street with my rucksack; set my camera on ‘custom-timer’ (to take a photograph every 5 seconds) and set to work on the crack. 

My head's too big - my face is too small: puff as might, I couldn't let go of the wall.  I had to face it: my face wasn’t fat enough to fit (too fit a face perhaps?).

It’s ironic: when I jammed my fists in my elderly neighbour, Mrs. Sharpe’s cracks, twenty years ago; she was happy to pose with lard.