Welcome to this new blog column that I hope to feature regularly, in which I pose inane questions to my friend Alison and she answers them.
-dh
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Trust is key for this column. You are about to follow me into the void, so I’ll deceive you not with pretensions of nobility or intellect. Hereto forth will commence a most serious discussion of the most asinine concepts laid out for you, the reader, with utmost sincerity. What will be revealed: profound logic? Profound madness? Most likely a light drift into the supple lap of mediocrity where so many, so long, so languid, lie. You’ve bought the ticket, but only at the price of a few moments. And possibly a small dulling of your wit.
Q: Imagine a place called ‘Bestaurant.’ What would that be?
A: My initial thoughts went towards the automat, that 1960’s bastard child of a diner and a vending machine where pre-made sandwiches, layered puddings, and iceberg salads carouselled with the urgency of unclaimed orphans. You saw your meal, you grabbed it, you ate it. All immediate, sterile, and in the name of progress.
The automat was ahead of its time, predicting a future wherein human interaction is increasingly obsolete. It predated the ATM machine, the self-checkout, Amazon.com, those modern conveniences which further dull our lackluster social skills, creating a race of self-involved (yet not self-reliant) consumer drones who buzz from task to task interested only in the final product, the get, with no thought for the simple beauty of getting there, that oft-forgotten phase of consumption that is, essentially, life.
The automat, though not without its value in kitsch, is representative of a certain ideal: a value placed on speed and sterility that was mark of the Greatest generation and later so hypocritically embraced by the baby boomers whose culture of WANT has left us to tread within shoddily founded societal structures that make each life step so necessarily tentative. So when every rung on the ladder placed in front of you seems rotted out by greed, lack of forsight, and -just generally- Facebook, where do you place your next step?
The answer is, of course, to go down to the ground. The Bestaurant lies at dining’s very foundation. And what is the prototypical meal?
Mothers’ milk. Bestaurant, is, in fact, Breastaurant. The ultimate marriage of food and human togetherness. That paradigm upon which all comfort and satisfaction is based, that unceasing focal point of art, science, all great pursuits of humanity:
The tit.
