JULES J FOREMAN: Best Brighton Buddy for 25+ Years
JULES J FOREMAN was the first friend and ‘non-emergency services person’ able to enter Mark’s flat after his death – something she describes as a ‘responsible honour’ (photo: Gary Silver)
MARK WAS ONE OF my best buddies for more than 25 years. Both of us being autistic meant we found it easy just being factual with each other.
JULES says Mark was her ‘Aspie wing man’ for a long time (photo: Bob Pendar-Hughes)
When we were young, we would roll our eyes at the volume of the music in the nightclubs and assess people’s characters with our Spidey Senses, while amusing ourselves by bending people’s brains with our own brands of eccentricity.
Once we were older, we would do exactly the same in coffee shops, always up to an idea-scheme or two.
Mark was my Aspie wing man for a long time, and my daughter thinks of him as super-cool too — she calls him ‘MagicMarkBennett’. Because he was, and to us, still is.
People assume us Aspies lack empathy, but our senses are actually all-encompassing. We see, hear and feel everything, then rationalise. Mark was/is a Spy From The Future in his senses!
It was a responsible honour to be the first non-emergency services person in Mark’s flat after his death.
So I created a little shrine with his X-Files mug (full of sweeties, of course), an unopened bottle of absinthe, and a Fringe badge (which once mysteriously appeared in the post), along with a bunch of flowers left by one of his neighbours. (His neighbours all loved him, of course.)
Our little team of friends simply worked around that little shrine while we began to sort through Mark’s things.
Our little team also took a Mr Spock figure, which Mark had given me, to his cremation, and insisted Spock sit on the top of Mark’s coffin to accompany him on his way. It was cold that morning and our hands left handprints on the coffin, so parts of us went with him too.
Never gone-gone, just in another realm, through a curtain. I am sure we will speak again in some shape or form.
Jules J Foreman Collage Artist
BELOW: Spock figure placed by Mark’s friends on top of his coffin to accompany him on his journey (photo: Jules J Foreman)
‘I created a little shrine with Mark’s X-Files mug, an unopened bottle of absinthe and a Fringe badge, along with a bunch of flowers left by a neighbour’ – Jules
JACK SARGEANT: Subculture Author, Coffee Drinker
JACK SARGEANT outside Brighton’s Zerbs Café sometime in the ’90s (photo: Mark Bennett)
I MET MARK SIMULTANEOUSLY in two different worlds, which makes subsequent sense to anyone who knew him.
The first, if memory serves, was through Mark Waugh and Marq Bailey, who at the end of the 1980s/beginning of the ’90s shared an apartment at the edge of Brighton’s North Laine district.
This flat was a hotbed of people reading philosophy, acid house DJs, video artists and performers. Somehow, yet unsurprisingly, Mark seemed to be part of that world. Simultaneously I was working in a comic shop, and he came in there too, looking for unusual publications.
Almost invariably we became friends and his interests in publishing Black Ice and in fetish fashion crossed over with my fascinations. I was less interested in his more conspiratorial bent, but it was always interesting talking to him about these ideas.
Through the late ’80s and into the ’90s we would meet regularly for coffee and satay sauce and chips at Zerbs Cafe in Gardener Street, spending hours talking about numerous strange and wonderful topics.
As the decade wore on I remember semi-regular Sunday afternoons spent at his flat watching Korean and Japanese genre movies; seeing him photograph at Torture Garden; and encountering his seemingly endless collection of devices, from ghost-hunting tools to 3D cameras, discount computer parts and lumps of orgonite.
I recall sometimes heated meetings during the Black Ice era when people from various backgrounds came together to talk. Through Mark during this period, I met many others who were in his orbit: writers, fetish models and photographers. I have many memories from the ’90s and we saw each other a lot — part of a loose-knit coffee-drinking scene.
Although his life often seemed hard, Mark never gave up, somehow producing a pilot for a (sadly unrealised) slipstream SF show in the ’90s and publishing Black Ice, as well as endlessly researching Fortean conspiracies.
I remember he once went on a date during the peak of The X-Files mania, and told me afterwards that the woman he met commented that he didn’t look like Fox Mulder — he was Fox Mulder.
I increasingly moved beyond Brighton and eventually moved away as the new century dawned. Mark, always exceptional in his generosity, gave me a photograph he took of William S Burroughs for a book, and we’d still talk ideas whenever we met.
He would explain new projects and theories, but we butted heads more in recent years. Sometimes his apparent inability to understand my reading of things frustrated me and I’m sure he felt the same about me. I remember arguing about the afterlife; he believed there was more to come, but was cryptic when pushed on this.
In Sydney and unable to travel for 18 months due to covid restrictions, I’d watch his posts and see that I was occasionally tagged. I’m sad we never got one final coffee, one final conversation and, yes, one final argument.
Mark was unique in a world that too often stifles uniqueness and he never stopped. I still don’t believe in an afterlife, but if there is more to come, I hope he’s there now causing trouble, developing new projects, meeting people, photographing people in rubber fashion, and searching for answers to questions no one has thought about yet.
‘Mark went on a date during peak X-Files mania, and told me the woman he met said he didn’t look like Fox Mulder – he was Fox Mulder’ – Jack Sargeant
ART OF THE COVENANT: Ray Leaning & Jonathan Swain
RAY LEANING’S design for the Ark of the Covenant; and, right, after ‘ageing’ (photos: Ray Leaning)
ARTIST/DESIGNER RAY LEANING was friends with Mark for more than 20 years, during which time they collaborated on “so many odd projects” together.
Ray says that, after learning of Mark’s death, he lay awake thinking of one project in particular that they’d worked on in 2005. It was focused on one of Mark’s many fascinations: The Ark of the Covenant.
Ray decided to dig through his archives, and found the artwork he created for it. On the left, above, is the original drawing, and on the right is how it looked after he ‘aged’ it for some nefarious reason.
The idea behind the Ark and the Tabernacle concept was, he explains, that the tabernacle generated huge amounts of static electricity that was stored in the Ark… making the ‘mercy seat’ a scary place to sit”.
Ray originally posted both these images in the Mark Bennett Memorial Facebook Group,
which quickly attracted various responses including one from JONATHAN SWAIN.
“A few years ago,” wrote Jonathan, “I made Mark a scale version of the Ark for his birthday. Made from take-away pizza boxes, Blue Peter style.” His very impressive pizza-box Ark is shown below.
‘Friends for 20 years, we collaborated on so many odd projects together’ – Leaning
‘I made Mark a scale version of the Ark from pizza boxes for his birthday’ – Swain
‘SOME SORT OF SPY FROM THE FUTURE’
JOHN JORDAN, a friend of Mark’s from Montreal (photo: Jeff Lauber)
a poem in tribute to
MARK BENNETT
1965-2021
by JOHN JORDAN
What can I say about Mark?
Like J Alfred Prufrock
He was a man out of time
And a good friend of mine
A long time ago he lived with me
He saw things differently
The man was no moocher
Some kind of transducer
A genius diffuser
Some sort of spy from the future
His eye of the beholder
Was known to smoulder
Capturing his pictures
And mocking the scriptures
With Chick comic tracts
His was not an act
Esoteric producer
Concept reducer
Inspiration inducer
Some sort of spy from the future
Moose heads on his feet
Time on his mind
He shot it on film and on digital
Mark my good man you were integral
Taught me so much I never would have known
So many eyes you opened on your own
PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS AND LINKS
UPDATE, APRIL 18: Mark in a shoot from May 2019. We originally believed this and the Banner image at the top of the article were from a self-portraiture shoot by Mark, but now know they were shot by Susan Grace Hinman, another good Brighton friend of his. Our apologies to Susan for the initial crediting errors. We have corrected these and also added Susan to the photography links above
Tags: Innovators, Personalities, Photographers, Tributes
Share On Facebook
Tweet It
