My good friend Mark Seabrook from Melbourne, Australia is a man of many talents. One of them is being an acclaimed artist. His award-winning work has been on display in many galleries. You can check out his Art Slightly Left of Centre online, and to conjure the chutzpah of Mr. T, “I pity the fool who doesn’t.”
Mark also knows the value of play, quizzes, and tomfoolery. So as a father, he refuses to cut his kids’ sandwiches in the usual way. Straight, or diagonal? Pshaw, so Passe! Mark doesn’t quite go “Full Escher” on the lunch front, but his culinary efforts are extraordinary, nonetheless. Here’s what his latest Sandwich Sensation looks like:
My Rorschach Reading:
Being a playful sort myself, here is what went through my “mind” upon first seeing today’s lunch:
1) It kind of looks like the Cleveland Indians C eating a cactus
2) A “sandwich de sac“. Good luck clearing the snow on that dead-end street in the NW quadrant, mate. Even urban planning is upside down and backward Down Under!
Well, if they absolutely insist on building the wall…
Apparently creative sandwich slicing is an entire subculture, and it may or may not be headed toward the southern US border. So, if they insist on building that wall, I say build it so it resembles one of Mark’s sandwiches. There seems to already be efforts on that front, and artists may or may not have been mobilized. The proof is in the guacamole, as can be seen here:
You can see the resemblance to a sandwich, right? The seesaw slicing through the wall like a knife slicing through bread, cultures interlocking regardless of political philosophies, peanut butter and jam combining and becoming better once they do…
Enough of this sitting on the fence
I requested Mark create an art installation of his sandwich masterpieces, putting them on display in a Warholian soup can inspired installation. He responded with crickets. That broke my heart, making me feel like half my sandwich was soggy, the other half stale. A bit like the current state of what passes for political discourse these days, and a total #FAIL as the kids used to say.
This monkey gone to heaven?
Not able to accept “LOL, get bent” as an answer, I decided to conjure some old Peter Gabriel spirit, defiantly shouting “Don’t you monkey with the monkey” to the world wide void. I’m in a conjuring mood today (see above), and like Mark, I’m a monkey man. Seeing his sandwich today was the “lemon squeeze” that triggered all this monkey business.
In full-on monkey mode, I took Mark’s picture and altered it using Word and IrfanView, then putting the images together as a collage using the online tool befunky. Inspiration for making a collage came from The Doors of London, one of the prints that I recall hanging in my doctor’s office when I was young. (Odd they gave me a doctor and not a vet, with all this monkeying around, come to think of it.)
The Doors of London was one of those prints that were omnipresent in the 70s. You’d see it in real life and then on the TV show Three’s Company. To conjure John Lennon, “most peculiar, mama, roll!”. Oh yes, there goes that conjuring machine again…
OK, now on to the bit about Alzheimer’s…
As you may or may not recall, the title of this post is Can Vegemite Prevent Alzheimer’s? Again, see above. Here’s how that works:
- Mark is an Australian, a vegetarian, and an artist. He refuses to cut his kids’ VEGEMITE sandwiches with any form of orthodoxy whatsoever. I believe that has been proven without a doubt. (again, see above.)
- Keeping one’s mind active through play and games can offset the development of Alzheimer’s. Mark does this by including play when packing up his kids’ lunches.
- There ya go: Eat Y’Self Fitter1.
1 I conjured up the late, great Mark E. Smith when I mentioned Eat Y’Self Fitter. By my counts, Mark E. Smith sings the word “conjured” 4 times in the song. I lost count of how many times I used conjured, or a derivative of conjured, in this post.
*This just in from The Annotated Fall: “Eat Yourself Fitter” is a slogan used to sell Kellogg’s All-Bran breakfast cereal. This particular ad campaign seems to have begun sometime prior to 1982: “The TV campaign for All-Bran, in area test at the time, went national from July 1982″ (Twenty Advertising Case Histories, second series, edited by Charles Channon, Cassell, 1989.” View the commercial here.
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