Book Muffin

Steve

Clues (1996-2002)

Crayon on Handy Dandy Notebook

Dear Blackout,

My mother has never called me by name, 

she calls me beautiful

"How was your day, beautiful?"

"Beautiful, help clean up."

"Yes, beautiful?"

And I believed her.

But then I turned on the tv,

flipped through the magazines,

saw the only thing deemed a “beauty”

to look nothing like me. 

And as all the boys chased my friends,

with flirtatious words, fawning over fair faces, 

mine received not one glance

not one word

and the silence erased my mother’s words

in a deafening, hollowing way.

But days like today,

moments like this,

I hear her loud and

clear 

(once again)

"I see you, beautiful."

"I love you, beautiful."

”Beautiful.”

And so thank you, blackout,

for the reminder, 

sweet as honey,

warm as my mother’s voice,

that my black is beautiful.

(You all are beautiful to me.)

This is a movie about a kid who leaves her birth family.

Not a kid who find that they have a secret lineage or something that allows them to find their ‘true family’ - this is a movie about a kid whose true birth family is made up of bad people. So she gets out. And that is played as the right thing to do. She isn’t punished for it or made to feel bad about ‘abandoning her family’. There isn’t an underlying ‘but they’re your family and you have to love them’ or ‘they’re your family and they love you even if they don’t show it well or do hurtful things’ message of the kind that I see OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER in media. Matilda gets out and lives happily ever after because of it.

BLOOKS = Objects made in the emulation of books

The word “Blook” first surfaced as a word in 2001 when Jeff Jarvis coined it to represent a printed book derived from a blog. In 2006 the word was short-listed  for inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary and was a runner-up for Word of the Year.

Now, thanks to Mindell Dubansky, it has a new meaning: objects made in the emulation of books, either by hand or commercial manufacture.

Dubansky, who is head of the Sherman Fairchild Center for Book Conservation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art,  is waving the BLOOK flag on a new blog devoted to these bookish gems.

All over the world, for hundreds of years, people have been making, collecting and presenting book-objects that reflect their devotion and respect for books and for each other. There are countless examples; they include bars, cameras, radios, banks, toys, memorials, food tins, desk accessories, book safes, musical instruments, magic tricks, furniture and jewelry.

Amazing stuff. For those who need more Blook’s in their life I have started a Pinterest board to chronicle these delightful objects.

Dubansky’s blog - About Blooks