PIECE BE WITH YOU

I can’t say I’ve spent a lot of time wondering about the eating habits of Sharleen Spiteri, from the band Texas, but there she is in the Observer Food Monthly telling the world, ‘Every time I come off stage, I always have a piece and crisps and a cup of tea. I call it a piece and crisps because I’m Scottish, so basically for your readers that’s a crisp sandwich. Two slices of bread, proper butter – you can’t have crappy butter – and a pack of crisps and squeeze it down. I have that everywhere apart from when we get to France. Then it’s baguettes. Because then you’re getting the good shit.’

 

Hair and makeup: Sarah Reygate. Photograph: Alex Lake/The Observer

 

I hadn’t actually heard of a ‘piece’ in this context, but good for her although later in the article she says she doesn’t like lamb or pork so that’s probably less good.

 

Naturally my mind drifts back to a story about Mark E. Smith in Stuart Maconie’s book Cider With Roadies. Maconie is in Smith’s flat after a boozy night out and Smith asks if he wants something to eat and Maconie says sure, so Smith goes into the kitchen and bangs around for twenty minutes and comes out carrying two plates of crisp sandwiches. And because Smith is a surprisingly good host, he asks Maconie, “Do you want a pickled onion with that?” 

 

You don’t have to be Scottish or a Mancunian to enjoy a crisp sandwich, below is one I made much earlier in Los Angeles: 

The eagle-eyed may spot that I used mayo rather than butter which some, including Sharleen Spiteri, would consider a mistake.

And here's another one with crisps and bacon:

 

And shortly after that I started to fantasize about the BLP sandwich.  For one blissful second I thought I’d had a really great idea, if not a money-making one. 

Whereas the BLT contains bacon, lettuce and tomato, I abandoned the tomato and replaced it with potato, and not just crisps but fried potatoes – they’d be called scallops where I come from in Yorkshire - but I’m sure there are regional variations,

 

Obviously it’s slightly time-consuming because you have to fry the bacon and the potatoes: opening a bag or crisps is a whole lot easier, but I thought it was well worth the effort.

 

It didn’t catch on but you know, I never really thought it would.

 

THE OUT OF SCALE SANDWICH

 I like Sarah Lucas’s art, and I like the idea of Sarah Lucas.  

I was once eating lunch in St Johns restaurant and I noticed this incredibly charismatic woman sitting a few tables away.  There seemed to be nothing very remarkable about her and yet she was incredibly compelling. I suppose that’s how it is with charisma.  It was, of course Sarah Lucas.  This was long before she was nearly as famous as she is now.

 

So last weekend off we went to see her piece Sandwich, one of 20 works around the City of London, part of the annual ‘Sculpture in the City’ programme.

 

On the train to London I read Private Eye and Sarah Lucas had made into Pseud’s Corner (tis a consummation devotedly to be wished) with this description of the work in question:

“Sarah Lucas’s recent large-scale sculpture, Sandwich, 2011-2020, stands in opposition to traditional public sculpture. Its horizontal configuration opposes veneration and pomposity through its prosaic absurdity and functional accessibility. Mining at themes of British culture, Lucas ambiguously transposes the humble sandwich on a monumental scale with a metaphoric and literal sense of hyperbole; simultaneously satirizing and celebrating the commonplace foodstuff as a proletariat symbol. The material austerity of the work in concrete, elevates and inverts the object’s ordinariness with irreverent humour.”

 

The Sculpture in the City website says “© Sarah Lucas, Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London” but I don’t know if Sarah Lucas actually wrote that. I hope not unless the pretentious art-speak nonsense is also part of the joke.

 

Anyway, Sandwich is indeed austere – which I liked – just a plain concrete thing and you couldn’t guess what was the filling was.  And of course I thought about the recently late Claes Oldenburg’s Giant BLT, 1963, which which looks like this: 

 

It’s colourful and overstuffed, with the filling spilling out.  And maybe that’s Sarah Lucas’s point.  The American sandwich is an exuberant and extravert thing, while the English sandwich is plain and muted. 

 

And the great thing about Oldenburg’s Giant BLT is that it’s made up of various components (just like a BLT in the real world) and these components have to be put together again whenever the sculpture’s moved and reinstalled.  Isn’t that kind of wonderful?

 

And it so happened that later in the weekend I was passing an Aldi supermarket, and I went in and they were selling pre-packed BLTs, so in honour of dear departed Claes, and partly in honour of Sarah Lucas, I bought one.  It looked like this (not a work of art):

But it really didn’t taste bad at all.

 

A LITTLE LACTUCA CAN GO A LONG WAY

You know, nobody in the history of eating has ever said, “That was a really great BLT.  There was just SO MUCH lettuce.”

ACID MOTHERS BUFFET

It has come to this: blogging about Facebook. 

There’s a book, by Margaret Mason, titled No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog, essentially a series of “prompts” to make your blog more interesting.  I do think there’s a amount of certain wisdom in that title, however I’ve recently become a Facebook friend of Mitsuru Tabata, who in lives in Nerima, Tokyo, and is currently second guitarist in the psychedelic Japanoise band Acid Mothers Temple (the guys I want to play at my funeral).  He’s also a sometime member of The Boredoms and Zeni Geva.  That’s him at the top of this post, a happy soul as you can see, and yes that is a hamburger shirt.  To be fair he doesn’t always look like that.

And the fact is, Japanophile that I am (with some slightly half-baked plans to go to Japan early next year), I find I’m deeply fascinated by what he has for lunch, and for dinner too.  Fortunately a fairly high percentage of Tabata-san’s Facebook posts feature food, both home-cooked and eaten in restaurants.

Certainly some of the food he has at home looks very much the way you’d expect Japanese home-cooked food to look: simple, elegant, exotic in a way but not at all outlandish, and not at all the kind of thing you'd find in a western Japanese restaurant: 

And here’s what he eats at his mother’s house (not an acid mother necessarily), which looks even better: gorgeously stylish and appealing.  She had me at "stewed smoked herring."

But then, who would think that a Japanese noise guitarist would be eating spaghetti alla pomdoro for lunch?

Much less a BLT?

 Tabata is evidently a great fan of curries, and we know that the Japanese do a good curry, it having been taken there, I gather, by the British who imported it from India.  Wikipedia tells me that the Japanese navy was introduced to curry by the British Royal Navy, and now every Friday is curry day in the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force.  This may be true, but my dad was in the Royal Navy and he’d have thrown himself overboard rather than eat curry.

In any case curry is now a thoroughly international dish and so Tabatha eats in various curry houses in Japan. Some apparently have more Indian influence than others.  This one looks like it could be had in any could English curry house.

This one less so:

But of course again it’s the odd unexpected “fusion” food that really catches the eye, like this one:

Yes it’s easy to believe the Japanese eat hamburger steaks with rice, but this one appears to be varnished with some kind of glistening gravy and those two semicircles of carrot really do look out of place.

Tabata is an international touring musician, and one of his latest posts has him in Holland eating or at least posing with, something called a Lucifer. 

And finally he gets to England and gets a curry, in Ramsgate, a place not known for its simplicity, elegance and quiet exotic.

I sure hope that curry tastes better than it looks.  The English, they’re so inscrutable.

Meanwhile, unconnected with Tabata-san, the website rocketnews24 - “Bringing you yesterday’s news from Japan and Asia, today” - reviews a restaurant called Maruhachi Sushi, located in Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture.  The most spectacular item on the menu is something called Sexual Harassment Sushi.  Yep, really.  It looks like this:

It’s a single octopus tentacle and blood cockle wrapped in seaweed.  The reviewer, named Kuzo “liked the unique combination of textures in the octopus and shellfish. The seaweed also had a pure taste that was exquisite.”  Hey, it takes more than that to sexually harrass anybody I know in the Psychogourmet set.  But it does look wonderful.