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the unexpected joy of the worst summer of our lives by christine mi for vox

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If you aren’t listening to the BBC’s radio adaptation of Fatherland, you are missing out.  … On, for instance, Miss Maguire (above), American woman journalist in a 1964 Germany where the Reich is still in power.  Can we say ‘agent of chaos’?  I think we can.

Episode 1 only lasts till Monday the 8th, and as you have to start there you’d better hurry and catch it!

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Yew trees, 7-8pm

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We’re having a sale–

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Reviewing 1950s Nuclear Family Barbecuing Art

Notice how the wife is in the background waving for help before she plans to toss her son into the river, she wishes the husband would look at her, but the husband only cares for MEAT– pay attention to these themes for they will show up later.

wife is still in the background and MEAT is still in the foreground, but she is happy this time in her virginal white dress and all is right with the world. There son has yet to be tossed into the river.

TWO children now with a girl child learning to dispense not only MEAT but alcohol, the wife is in the background, but her smile is frozen and stiff on her face. She knows what the raggedy anne doll at the bottom knows.

everyone is so fucking HYPED for this new meat STICK– no longer limited to the round, finite circle. The father is the most excited of all. Watch as friend Tommy enters the scene from the background and the wife is now wearing pink instead of white. She will never return to her perfect unknowing ways.

1950s gay fucking panic. the circular meat is burning. the wife is wearing red. Jimmy and Tommy are going to go on a “fishing trip” and he won’t look her in the eye when they return. The other wife in white lives in ignorance, but not for long as DOUBT enters her expression.

the wife has finally taken center stage. She sets the table without looking at her husband who stands guiltily with his weird magic stick in the background. The daughter rushes away from her brother who has emerged from the river to hover across the ground and seek vengeance.

They are a broken family with only MEAT in the center left to remain.

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You are my pride and joy

prints | etsy | instagram | twitter

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Trees.

https://www.instagram.com/dock.vincent/

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exactly

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The conversation surrounding cultural appropriation has been so severely mutilated by white “allies” that the original intention behind that conversation has become almost unrecognizable in most social contexts.

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PRIVACY IS A THING

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finding you

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One of the first books I read in English as a kid, maybe 1 year after I started learning English, was a booklet with a title like, How to Have a Great Time at Summer Camp. I don’t remember the exact title and I know I only picked it up because the other books in English in my school’s library looked way beyond my level, stuff like Austen and Dickens. The summer camp booklet didn’t look too interesting but it was small with simple sentences. I ended up being fascinated with it because it was the most American thing I had ever seen and it felt impossibly exotic

all the kids had cool American names like Jill and Mike. One of them at one point talked about the “chipmunks” in the woods near the camp, a mysterious word that didn’t exist in my tiny English dictionary, and for some reason I pictured them as scrawny wolves. I had read Little House on the Prairie so I knew wolves were a major concern for Americans

camp “counsellors” were often mentioned, and my pocket English dictionary only defined that word as “psychologue”. I thought it was weird how American summer camps had dozens of psychologists roaming the premises, one for every 5 to 10 kids. That felt like a lot of psychologists

I had no idea that the word “pet” could mean “favourite”. When the booklet said one kid might become “the camp counsellor’s pet”, my dictionary helpfully led me to believe it meant that a psychologist would pick one unfortunate kid to be his domestic animal for the summer. Slightly disturbing. I moved on

the kids slept in “bunks” and my stupid dictionary only defined this word as “couche”. Which is not wrong, but we would probably say couchette instead, or better yet lits superposés, and couche is also our word for diaper so you can see why I continued being deeply intrigued by every new detail I learnt in this booklet. American kids are excited about camp because they get to sleep in diapers

I had never encountered the word “baseball” before but managed to guess it was some kind of sport, but when the booklet mentioned the “baseball diamond” (in the context of a kid saying the baseball diamond was big) I of course assumed it was an actual diamond that you could win if you won a game of baseball at camp. For some reason I had a debate with a classmate over the plausibility of this. I say for some reason because I didn’t really question the wolves or the psychologists with their human pets. A diamond though? Doubt. I just remember that we were queueing up for lunch and I was like “What do you think?” and my friend said hesitantly, “Maybe if it’s a small diamond?” and I insisted “No! The book says it’s big!”

among the basic items the book said every kid should bring to camp were “batteries”. I didn’t bother looking up that word in my dictionary seeing as it’s the same in French. I didn’t know it was a false friend, and I was impressed to learn that most American kids own a drum set and bring it to camp as an essential item

on the same page, in the list of things every kid should put in their suitcase for summer camp, another item was “comic books”. I wasn’t sure what those were since in French we call them BD, but basing myself on the word “comic” I assumed they were books of jokes and puns. I loved learning that in the US all kids bring humour anthologies to summer camp, presumably because they worry about running out of funny things to say. I thought American kids sounded nervous and sweet. But also really cool, because of all the drums

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I always get so fucking mad when I remember that it’s actually a 16-year-old Algerian girl who influenced BOTH Picasso and Matisse. and. No one gives a rat’s ass about her work which was very focused on women and nature. History -or people dare I say- didn’t bother to remember her name because she was a young Algerian woman and no one cares about Maghrebi/Arab women. unlike P*casso & M*tisse who both became legends, almost gods both during their lives and after their deaths, no one knows her.

Her name was Baya Mahieddine.

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“For lonely people, rain is a chance to be touched.”

— Simon Van Booy 

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Sun Cat. 7 x 5 inches, oil on hardboard.

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The Untamed | Fatal Journey