Bench Cuisine 31/3/2011

Bench Cuisine 25/3/2011

The same banana skin four days later (see last blog), accompanied by beer, eggs and a potato.

Bench Cuisine 21/3/2011

Bench Cuisine 14/3/2011

Bench Cuisine 5/3/2011

I didn't find any food for the whole of February. But in the first week of March: six cherry tomatoes and the shells of half a dozen eggs - washed down with a can of beer.

Bench Cuisine

Known this bench for 22 years, and in all that time I’ve never seen anyone eating on the bench or, the bench eating anything sitting on it. Yet now, just as I’m about to leave London to go and live in Brighton, I keep coming across ‘bench cuisine’.

It started off quite innocently - like all good bench meals – with bread. But the foods soon turned much darker (and I don’t mean toast). It was as if the bench knew I was leaving and had decided to try and keep me in London, and as every park bench knows: the way to a man’s heart is through his seat. 

In his book, Teach Us To Sit Still (2011), Tim Parks - no relation to the bench – does some research on the Aneros anal massage and sex toy: ‘God knows why the male G spot was put up the arse but there we go, if its done correctly along with stimulation of the penis the orgasm is out of this world! Try it!’

Sandwiched between the two bread images (in bread with?) - the first made in January, the latest yesterday - was a bench cuisine menu so bizarre that, I just had to keep going back for more.

To be continued… 

Spied But Untried (No.4)

Rocks And Trees

Nowhere near the un-rocking rock chair, in a wood closer to the sea, I find a rock, like an apple, under a tree.

I’m thinking of the time I was in the country, in the company of the photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper - and we weren’t playing a round of golf. We were passing through a forest festooned with boulders when Cooper said, ‘Have you heard that Buddhist saying: to the man with no knowledge, trees are just trees and rocks are just rocks. Yet to the man with a little knowledge, trees are much more than just trees, and rocks are never just rocks - both are invested with a spiritual significance. But to the man with complete knowledge, trees are just trees and rocks are just rocks?’ Funny thing for him to have said: Tom Cooper’s spent the best part of the last 40 years photographing nothing but trees and rocks.    

Rocking Chair

Self-timer - at the start of the affair

Self-timer - at the end of the affair - two years later

Same boulder.

In between times (we were miles apart), I lay on this rock more than I lay on her.

Next to the rock stands rock chair. 

I'm thinking of The Flintstones, I'm thinking of Buster Keaton in a rocking chair, in Beckett’s only movie, Film (1964). As Keaton rocks opposite a denuded wall, he examines seven photographs, all of him: 1. 6 months old - in his mother’s arms 2. 4 years old – kneeling in an attitude of prayer 3. 15 years old - in his school blazer teaching a dog to beg 4. 20 years old – in his graduation gown receiving a scroll 5. 21 years old – arm around his fiancé 6. 26 years old – a newly enlisted man with a little girl in his arms 7. 30 years old – looking 40 with a patch over one eye and looking grim. He spends twice as long looking at 5 and 6 before ripping up the lot.       

Hearing From An Ex

The X-Factor

Surprise is the greatest factor in art and the X in the sea is the x-factor in this picture. Remember it was a couple of Xs that got me here in the first place: the Lydstep sign and its x-rated pinnacle, the text Extreme Golf (too with an x-rated pinnacle). I wanted a marriage of Xs, a marriage on the rocks. But I never bargained on the x-factor of the outboard motor.

Factors are numbers you multiply together to get another number: 4x4=12. But what a surprise: the correspondence between the number of golf balls and shoe size.