Here we are, Christmas Eve! The end of an advent calendar. Before I sign off for the year, thank you for reading the guest contributors’ and my work this month – it’s been a real treat. This is a finale double-bill, because I couldn’t decide which one to focus on as an ending. Hope you have a decent end to 2020 and start to 2021, all things considered.
The Big Yearn
There’s something a little disquieting about the historical lesbian film thing beyond my poor attention span (while obviously a fine piece of filmmaking, watching A Portrait of the Lady on Fire early on in lockdown of a weekend evening was a bad choice for me, given the pacing). It’s not purely an aesthetic objection to daintiness (or dare I say it, preciousness) but rather that it’s the opposite of the fictive thinking of the superpowers stuff from around 21st. Gay people, queer women, have shift work and weird bosses and houseshare interviews and family squabbles and subpar meals and filthy nights out and raging hangovers and too much screen time. It feels weird to me that the city, a long-time site of queer liberation and discovery, is too squalid (perhaps too ‘vibrant’?) to be greenlit.
This Vita and Virginia-ness of is rife for co-option. Taylor Swift’s first album of the year, folklore, was decidedly cottagecore adjacent and it’s vocab pointed to queerness. Except: ‘the last great american dynasty’ is about the rich lady who owns the house in Rhode Island before TS, which is fine, but it owes more to Phil and Kirstie or Grand Designs than it does land justice or dreams of a shorter waiting list for the allotment. Each time I hear ‘chosen family’ in reference to her boyfriend’s brother, I just think: babe, isn’t that just an in-law? There are some really good songs on the album, but I’m curious as to the placing of nearly radical approaches to kinship and the like given the it also contains the puerile line ‘women like hunting witches too.’ For more on cottagecore and its meaning for queer teens in particular, Sarah Woolley wrote about it for i-D back in February.
Interiors
From confinement, escape. I’ve got just over a week in my current house before I move, and my family are moving soon too with any luck so at the moment, I’m thinking a lot about the objects we pack up and carry with us.
I still enjoy looking at photos on properties listed on The Modern House, an estate agent that probably doesn’t want to be called that, but it is increasingly funny noticing that you can ask for £20k more for a property because the current owners have painted a few walls a deep blue or pistachio in a chalky, pre-glazed pottery sort of finish. But I’ve particularly enjoyed looking at the homes of Africa Daley-Clarke and Sophia Cook. The former is a council house tenant, the latter a homeowner. Both are Black mothers living and raising young children in London with their partners. Given only 20% of Black people in Britain are homeowners and the waiting lists for social housing, both their situations are relatively distant for many, still, but there’s something so nice about looking at practical, colourful, inventive homes after a sea of sober, considered minimalism+. Gal-dem has some tips on renting and creating spaces that suit you.