Rotten Milk

TW: internalised racism, racist images from the 'tragic mulatto' trope

her/she was drab faded out 
yellow like a scorched july sky
just fores it rains & rinses
away the hint of brown from the smog
-on not bein, mary hope lee

I wish I knew what my Ethnicity is. I wish I were darker. No jk, I wish I were lighter. I want to grow lighter and lighter until I am invisible, and I disappear from this earth entirely,  I never was allowed to sunbathe as a child. It would only make the symptoms worse. Sometimes I worry that I have made myself up entirely. In certain photos my skin is the colour of milk, rotten milk. Spoiled milk that you would want to throw in the bin. But milk nonetheless. On these days I wonder how un-white I really am. But I wasn’t the one who started all this business. No. I did not have An Ethnicity until nice white ladies wanted to know if I was Mama’s sponsor child. I live a girl’s life but I am not a girl. I live a white life but I am not white. 

-something I wrote a few months ago...

Mixed girl feelz on whiteness, white passing, light skinned privilege, colorism, first world mothers and third world daddies, sexualisation of mixed girls, being an ugly mixed girl, being a pretty mixed girl, white girl femininity born from brown masculinity and wondering whether I can truly 'get' my identity if I can't even spell my fathers first name.

p.s had this post in my drafts for a while but finally decided to post it after reading Tabitha's wonderful post on  identity and white privilege

Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Blood and Feathers #2), 'I crossed the color line' also known as the Black Klansman (1966), Photograph of Nella Larsen (author of the novel 'Passing), A Redenção de Cam (The Redemption of Ham) by the Spanish artist Modesto Brocos (1895) [more information about the racist ideology and glorification of whiteness of this painting here], Firelei Báez, Can I Pass? Introducing the Paper Bag to The Fan Test for the Month of December, 31 individual self-portrait silhouettes, configured in a 31 day calendar grid, 2010, Gouache, ink and graphite on paper, 108 x 84 inches, pulp novel cover, from Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memoribillia, Gordon Parks, Dr. Kenneth B. Clark conducting the Doll Test, Harlem, New York, 1947

Lovely Creatures

“She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening."
-Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber

Enchanting picture book perfect pictures from two super duper Rookie photographers.... 

Chrissie White, Chrissie White, Chrissie White, Eleanor Hardwick, Eleanor Hardwick,Eleanor Hardwick,Eleanor Hardwick.

hey girl!

“All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us--all who knew her--felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used--to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.

And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the World.” 
-Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

Andre Kertesz, Distortion no 41, Kristie Muller, Richard Nixon, Esquire (May, 1968). Cover by George Lois. Andre Kertesz, Distortion

picz pls

Patricia Piccinini, Library, Patricia Piccinini, Twins, Philip Guston, Steven Allen, We're all in this together, Philip Guston, Study for Tormentors (1947), 

Lovely and Vile

“Partly why we’re such control freaks is because, when you are going that far, if it’s also crappy and not well done, you look like a shithead,” Parker reasons. “Whether it’s [Book Of Mormon] or an episode of the show, we work really hard to make it structurally sound, have a point. We have to think of a reason why something that’s funny has to be in, so someone can’t say it was gratuitous.”

-Trey Parker

How much is too much? I'm not sure. I don't have the patience to be subtle. I like repulsive gross shit that makes people uncomfortable. I would rather make someone retch than make someone think. I love that the first thing that comes up when you google me is the Period Pants piece from the Rookie show and not like my ten thousand word thesis. I look that piece because it is sweet and icky and crap and perfect. I have been thinking about Mat Collishaw's work today after Jonathan Jones published a piece on him. I have been thinking about creepy good-bad mega nasty cartoons after my cousins made me watch Salad Fingers on YouTube. 

"For me, Collishaw is a good political artist for the same reason he is a good religious artist and a good artist-artist. It is because he believes in the efficacy of images. Not for him the abstract evasion, the minimalist half smile – fashionable or not, he wants to punch your imagination in the stomach." 

Infectious Flowers, Mat Collishaw (2004), Conjoined Fetus Lady, Mat Collishaw, The Venal Muse (2012), The Fly, Infectious Flowers, Mat Collishaw (2004), Kyle's Dad's dolphin surgery, Mat Collishaw, Insecticide, Salad Fingers, Mat Collishaw, Last Meal on Death Row, Texas

ouch

"The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flame yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don‘t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling." — David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Dylan Menges snapped this haunting silhouette left behind when he moved the still-warm corpse of a roadkilled coyote: “She hadn’t been there long and moving her carcass off the road revealed the salty silhouette from passing cars on a winter highway.” Photo credit: Dylan Menges

"I’ve seen other comics use this visual metaphor for depression’s oppression — a sea of black slowly taking over the panels until that’s all that’s left. Hanselmann’s treatment of the idea is distinguished by two factors. First, we get a full page that’s just drawing after drawing of Megg lying in her bed, wide-eyed and supine. If not for the painstaking and lush detail of her hair’s slightly shifting tendrils you might even mistake her immobility for a copy-and-paste job. By waiting this long before the metaphor takes hold, Hanselmann forces us to reckon with the human beneath all that blackness, and it’s riveting.

The second factor is that the blackness has a source: three huge, floating demoniac hag heads, drooling the darkness out of their open mouths. There are times, this suggests, when the pain is so unbelievable that the literally unbelievable makes as much sense as anything else in that moment. In a cycle that’s both vicious and virtuous, this interplay of supernatural-horror imagery and real-life-horror emotion enriches and strengthens the power of both."

"Misery is a vacuum. A space without air, a suffocated dead place, the abode of the miserable. Misery is a tenement block, rooms like battery cages, sit over your own droppings, lie on your own filth. Misery is a no U-turns, no stopping road. Travel down it pushed by those behind, tripped by those in front. Travel down it at furious speed though the days are mummified in lead. It happens so fast once you get started, there’s no anchor from the real world to slow you down, nothing to hold on to. Misery pulls away the brackets of life leaving you to free fall. Whatever your private hell, you’ll find millions like it in Misery. This is the town where everyone’s nightmares come true." — Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

I am a dumb piece of meat 

and i rot everyday

my flesh gives a rotting smell

and people say it’s the smell of life

and they come to me

and watch me rot

and get happy and upset and

annoyed and disgusted and maybe

sometimes feel compassion

but they don’t realize 
they are rotting

too.
-Daul Kim

As we sat there listening to the carolers, I wanted to tell Brian that it was over now and that everything would be okay. But that was a lie, plus I couldn't speak anyway. I wish there was some way to go back and undo the past. But there wasn't. There was nothing we could do. So I just stayed silent and tried to telepathically communicate how sorry I was about what happened. And I thought of all the grief and suffering and fucked up stuff in the world, and it made me want to escape. I wished with all my heart we could just leave this world behind. Rise like two angels in the night and magically disappear. Mysterious Skin 

“Well, you know what grown-ups are,' said Dinah. 'They don't think the same way as we do. I expect when we grow up, we shall think like them - but let's hope we remember what it was like to think in the way children do, and understand the boys and the girls that are growing up when we're men and women.” 
― Enid Blyton, The Island of Adventure

 Dylan Menges, text and image from here, Megg and Mogg - “Megg’s Depression” by Simon Hanselmann, google maps, Peter Pan newspaper cover from here, Badlands gif, unknown, Ronan Barrot

Be A Body

I've had this photo essay thingymaboo in my draft posts for like a month but have been putting off publishing it coz the most articulate accompanying text I could come up with, the best description of living in the crack between body and self, was this-

Why I never became a male model-A Super Critical Super Detached Essay About My Emotionz

-------

:/

:S

------

:(

-------

D:

--------------------

X.X

-------

I know. I know. It's good.
A little too good.

In all honesty I'm not sure if that last one is even a real emoticon.

Erika Linder being perfect, book covers of Bill's New Frock by Anne Fine, Vitto Acconci, Michelangelo's David boxer shorts, Pablo Picasso, Boy with Pipe (1905), Ana Mendieta, Silueta Works in Mexico, 1973-77, unknown from girlfarts, Gunter Brus, unknown found in my tumblr archive