WHOLE LOTTA FISH

 I’ve always thought that John Paul Jones did well to stay sane while playing bass for Led Zeppelin but I think he was probably just that kind of guy.  And it seems that his eating habits are equally undestructive. 

 

In Friday’s Guardian there was an interview with Gillian Welch who did a tour with JPJ in the States.  She  says, “He travelled in the Cadillac.  I’d say: ‘John would you like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?’ He’d say he would. I’d make one and we’d roll on down the road."  Pretty wild eh?

 

Well you might say, he’s probably calmed down over the years, but my researches led me to an article in the Times magazine dated 2^nd October 1991, admittedly not the year of peak Zeppelin madness, titled “Our First Meal” one of a series of articles with a self-explanatory title – this one about when John Paul Jones met Robert Fripp.

 

JPJ talks about being a pescatarian, about finding good places to eat in Chicago and New Orleans “for the blackened cat fish and shrimp’  and Japan for the sushi.  He says, “I’m not a great restaurant person” but then says  “We go to Ravi Shankar in Drummond Street," which is in London, and it so happens that I’ve been to the Ravi Shankar in Drummond Street.  It’s still there as far as I know.  JPJ implies that it was a vegetarian restaurant when he went but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t when I was there.  And I’ve never known whether there was any connection between the restaurant and the  Ravi Shankar.

 

         JPJ also says, “You can’t live on drugs and alcohol alone.”  Words to live by.

 

         Robert Fripp, when he was in King Crimson, did record the album Cat Food, 

 

and he also appears to be a pescatarian.  In the Times article he says, “When I go to Nashville to visit Adrian Belew, my friend from King Crimson, we go to a vegetarian Mexican restaurant called Loco Lupe.  They have a Margarita called ‘the monster’ that comes in a 52 ounce glass."

There are a few Loco Lupes still in business but as far I can tell the one in Nashville isn’t among them.  It appears to have closed down in 2002.

A 52 ounce margarita glass is impressive but I think it all comes down to how much ice and how little tequila they put in there.

 

 This is Adrian Belew:

This is from Adrian Belew’s Facebook – posted on Sandwich Day 2018:

And I decided to have a deep dig through the archive because I reckoned I’d taken one or two pics when I was at Ravi Shankar.

 

I found them in the end, and yes, if the sign on the front to be believed it was indeed a vegetarian restauarant – this was in 2018.

 

I don’t remember exactly what we ate but there are pictures.  This:

 

And also this – top photographer Jason Oddy included for scale.

FLASHING

Once again I’ve been thinking about food photography, which also of course includes drink.  It seems, in many ways, that it could be a very difficult and frustrating profession, but the only food photographer I know, of any sort, Anne Fishbein who and as far as I can tell is a perfectly happy woman, and takes photographs like this, which are great:

As discussed passim on this blog, most photographers of any sort, have at one time or another taken photographs of food and drink, not least William Eggleston, although his photographs always seem to be about something other than food and drink, which is obviously a very good thing.

And I was indulging my Eggleston obsession the other day and came across an article and interview in Vanity Fair by John Heilpern from November 2015, titled “Does William Eggleston Love Women? You’re Damn Right!”  I really don’t know how many ironies there are in that headline. Anyway, at the end of the interview Heilpern asks if he can take a picture of Eggleston on his cellphone.The article runs:     

“‘Go ahead,’ he obliged. I took three of him. Then he sportingly offered to take a cellphone shot of me, although he confessed he didn’t know how. After a little explanation, he figured out my cellphone’s push button and took one picture, scarcely glancing through the lens.   

“The difference was laughable. Mine were just the usual snapshots, while his was a single, masterly composition of someone seated amid the day-for-night kitsch of El Quijote. He’s a magic man, that’s for sure.”

Well yes, Eggleston is a magic man, but I still don’t quite know why so many of his interviews seem to involve El Quijote – a slightly grim Spanish restaurant next to the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan.

         

Hold these thoughts. Last Friday I went out with Jason Oddy, a man who seems as far from being a food photographer as is possible.  But he told me that Eggleston was one of his great heroes, and it was seeing photographs by Eggleston, more than any others, that made him want to take photographs. Oddy generally takes photographs like this:

         

We were having an art and food night. We started out at Mosaic House in Earls Court at an exhibition by the Persian artist Behjat Sadr (1924-2007), titled Dusted Waters.  There was a DJ set by her grandson.  Her work looks like this:

There was wine to be had at the Mosaic Rooms, and afterwards we rolled out into the night and thought it would be only appropriate to go to a Persian restaurant and we ended up in Apadana, in Kensington High Street, which has been there since pre-revolutionay days. It was founded in 1967.  So obviously there was wine there too.

It was a decent enough place - we had the hot mezza sampler, spicy Koobideh, and seabass.

And I’m no fool, I don’t brandish my camera when “real” photographers are around, but I asked Jason to take some photographs, and he did, and everything looked great – better than I’d have taken (obviously) and better than it actually appeared in “reality.” There was also this fellow in the restaurant:

The next day I looked up another article about Eggleston, this one by Augusten Burroughs, from The New York Times Style Magazine, dated October, 2016. The title of the article was “William Eggleston, the Pioneer of Color Photography” – I can imagine more banal titles, but not easily.

And the end of the article runs, “We leave the offices of the Eggleston Trust and go to his apartment. The first thing one sees upon entering is a bright red plastic sign with a yellow border, printed with capitalized white sans-serif text. It warns, “THE OCCUPANT OF THIS APARTMENT WAS RECENTLY HOSPITALIZED FOR COMPLICATIONS DUE TO ALCOHOL. HE IS ON A MEDICALLY PRESCRIBED DAILY PORTION OF ALCOHOL. IF YOU BRING ADDITIONAL ALCOHOL INTO THIS APARTMENT YOU ARE PLACING HIM IN MORTAL DANGER. YOUR ENTRY AND EXIT INTO THIS APARTMENT IS BEING RECORDED. WE WILL PROSECUTE SHOULD THIS NOTICE BE IGNORED. THE EGGLESTON FAMILY.”

Both Augusten Burroughs and I find ourselves wondering where exactly you find a doctor who prescribes a “daily portion of alcohol,” and what exactly is the dosage.  It wouldn’t happen in Tehran, I’m sure.

A SLAP UP FOR THE EYES

I’ve been thinking again about food and photography.  Taking pictures of food used to be a highly specialized skill, and now every Tom, Dick and Shirley with a cell phone does it.

There was a glorious moment in my career as a jobbing hack when I went up to Yorkshire to talk to a soup maker (Yorkshire Provender) for the Daily Telegraph.  It took all day, and a photographer and his food stylist were there all the time I was.  And when I’d finally had enough – at about six in the evening, having been discussing soup for 8 hours or so - the photographer was still hard at it, arranging elegant soup bowls, swirls of cream, and sprigs of chervil.  I admired his focus.

This is one of the pics from Provender’s current website, though it wasn’t taken on that day.

And so to my friend Jason Oddy.  He usually takes photographs that look like the one below; it’s part of Mentouri University, in Constantine, Algeria, 2013, from a series titled “Concrete Spring.”

I happened to have dinner with him in London in a Turkish restaurant called Yasar’s, in Blackhorse Road, in Walthamstow.  And since he had his phone with him, and since he was the professional photographer, I asked him to take a picture of the kebabs we were eating.  It came out looking austere, simple without being exactly minimalist, and definitely architectural; very much like a Jason Oddy photograph in fact. I think that’s a good thing.

FRY BOYS

And speaking of fried cheese (as I was, in the previous post about the sandwich at Cassell’s Hamburgers (that’s a close up of it above - the cheese is the flappy, wing-like things sticking out at the sides) – the other night I went to Loteria, a superior and not entirely inauthentic, Mexican restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard, with top English photographer Jason Oddy, who’s in town for one thing and another.

I always think the best thing about Loteria is the chicharron de queso, “griddle toasted Oaxaca and Jack Cheese with with corn tortillas, guacamole and salsa verde cruda” though I must say I always refer to it as the “cheese hat.” Young Oddy seemed puzzled by it at first:

But soon saw the appealing side:

You could perhaps think this was a move from anticipation to acclamation, as in Fry’s Five Boys chocolate, but without the desperation and pacification, and certainly without the realization that it’s Fry’s:

I know I ate a fair amount of Five Boys chocolate as a kid, though I’m pretty sure I ever went through the five stages.   I also think the chocolate was pretty ordinary but the packaging and the form was unbeatable.

And I started wondering whether there was any connection between Five Boys chocolate and Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stage model of grief and bereavement.  It seems a little unlikely.  Five Boys was launched in 1902, and manufacturing ened in 1975. Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying wasn’t published till 1969. I haven’t the slightest evidence that Kübler-Ross ever ate or even knew about Fry’s Five Boys, and of course she was Swiss, so I imagine she wasn't a fan of English chocolate.

Still, I can’t help thinking there’s some curious convergence at work here.   And I’m pretty sure I’d buy a chocolate bar with five faces moulded into it labeled Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.  Sounds like a project for Bompas and Parr.

"AND IT WAS ALL YELLOW ..."

Only once, as far as I know, have I ever been refused service in a restaurant because of my ethnicity.  It was back in the day, in Brixton.  My hippyish girlfriend and I went into a Jamaican restaurant, sat down, and a West Indian waiter approached the table, a large man who in other circumstances might have appeared quite avuncular.  He towered over the table and said calmly but sternly, “We don’t serve white food.”  Of course, what he really meant was “We don’t serve white people,” but we were happy enough with his use of euphemism and we went, all too meekly, on our way.  I wish I could say we went to the eel and pie shop, seen above, but we didn’t.

Well, times have changed in old Brixton town.  The place seems to be an all-inclusive foodie heaven, largely because of the Brixton Village Market.  I went there with my pal, Jason Oddy, a top photographer, and about as far from being a “food photographer” as you could easily imagine, though his work does show food once in a while, as in this picture from his series of interiors of the homes of the recently deceased.

 In Brixton he selected KaoSarn, a Thai café (more seats outside than in, bring your own booze, no toilet but an arrangement with the nearby pub) which gets some stunningly good reviews.  Time Out says the grilled half chicken with som tam “propels you right into the streets of Chiang Mai, the Northern Thai city that this dish originates from.”  We had some deep fried vegetables and pad thai and it was all pretty decent, even if we weren’t transported very far from Coldharbour Lane.

 The staff were, in the main, Thai and female, and a brusque lot they were too, except for one of them, the most charming and friendly by far, who (we were pretty sure) was a ladyboy, or perhaps, given a certain maturity, a ladyman.  I’m not sure how she’d have been received by the local community back in the day, but here and now she fitted right in.

 *

Next day I went to Woking – I had my reasons - which included walking on  Horsell Common, partial setting for H.G. Wells’ War of The World. Woking seemed amazingly prosperous, and many of the food options were a bit too “nice” and/or gourmet, or in some cases corporate.  I hadn’t gone all that way just to eat in a Pret A Manger.  So I found an old school sandwich shop and bought a Cheese Salad Bap, which I took to the common and arranged in this winning still life. 

Then I opened the cellophane and examined the sandwich.  It consisted of a thin slice of processed cheese, a thick smear of margarine, and a sad lettuce leaf.  I took a bite.  It was the foulest thing I’ve had in my mouth in a very long time.  It certainly did seem like very “white” food in some sense, perhaps the kind of thing you might have bought from the back of a van, in a layby on the  A1, sometime around 1962.  Reader, I did not finish it.

And then, just a couple of days later I was reading Don DeLillo’s novel Point Omega, a wonderful book about (among other things) time, war, lost ideals, absence, and extinction, which contains these remarkable lines:

     “Lunch was movable, flexible, eat when and where you want.  I found myself at the table with Estler, who examined the processed cheese that Jessie had bought on our last trip to town.  He said it was colored with spent uranium and then he ate it, slopped with mustard, between slices of prison bread, and so did I.”

     You know, I still really can’t decide whether slopping my Cheese Salad Bap with mustard would have made it better or worse.

When he speaks of “spent uranium,” I assume he’s thinking, or at least he makes me think, of yellow cake uranium, which as I understand it, is not in fact spent, but rather on the way to becoming a substance that can be used in nuclear reactors and bombs.  Nevertheless, at least in the photograph below, it does look strangely appetizing: I’ve definitely had worse things in my bap.