Holiday like a bohemian artist
Example: let a single teardrop roll down your face in halcyon surroundings
Welcome uncultured swine!
The holidays are upon us and I’m too poor to do anything remotely instragam-able about that. Oddly this pleases me. We’ve reached peak pleasure in the west: we expect to travel every year, have gadgets that show us anything at anytime, eat any fruit or vegetables we desire regardless of season. We have so much we don’t need, yet lots of us are now struggling to hold on to what we do.
So, I’ve compiled a list of bohemian recreational activities, taking inspiration from creative colleagues and of course my own IMPECCABLE good taste. If we’re going to live under the poverty line we may as well start a game of limbo.
10 Holiday Activities for the Bohemian Artist
1. Get some sea air
Edward Hopper (see above) did his best work summering by the sea and so will I. The seaside is rife with poetry and simmers with potential lovers whose income might be higher than ours (see Persuasion). Don’t have a beach house? No matter. It’s understood that regardless of where you live in Australia, if you have access to amphetamines, you’re within walking distance to the beach - I’m not letting proximity dampen my ambition.
2. Keep Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh in the arse pocket of my jeans
Too working class to afford therapy for trauma inflicted by Emerald Fennell’s new movie, Saltburn? Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall gives us a similarly disgraced Oxford man sans irksome erotica but pro 1920’s razzle-dazzle. Unsure if I need to read this in earnest or if just having it on my person will give me the social approval I clearly crave.
3. Drink Makers Mark bourbon & apple juice at breakfast
A cocktail recommended by 2010’s socialite, Alexa Chung, who would read Decline and Fall in earnest but is NOT fiscally bohemian.
4. See Vasily Kandinsky’s work at Art Gallery of New South Wales (and throw soup at it)
Seen and APPROVED by mystery shopper and Dis Content Sydney correspondent, Grace (I’m very well connected). I’ll admit this is an indulgence at $35 a pop but Kandinsky is the abstract artists’ abstract artist. He literally wrote the book on it but tbh you’d have an easier time deciphering his paintings, that shit was unreadable.
5. Start planning a revenge plot for 2024
First: re-watch Blue Eye Samurai (above), both Kill Bill movies, Yentl and Miss Americana
Second: Write a list of enemies in cursive by candle-light (undeserving of expensive electricity) while Writer in The Dark by Lorde plays in the distance
Third: Cover my body in tattoos and lift weights? (exercise is foreign to me) in preparation for impending comeuppance.
6. Listen to Rhye’s album Woman in clouds of smoke
Just think of all the slow love-making this album enables! And in the absence of slow love-making, the stifled tears of longing. Best paired with a cigarette in the hand - cigarettes are the bohemian equivalent to scented candles, not lit to be inhaled but to make you feel less of a dickhead for just sitting in a chair awhile.
7. Catch a train to the countryside
Nothing says cost-effective whimsy more than sitting on a train and watching the world whirr by at an ingratiatingly slow speed. Impressionist artists, Claude Monet (above) and Paul Cezanne, would frequently train to the country for picnics, plein air painting and garden saunters. Sure, their trips to Provence might differ slightly from mine to Rockhampton, but you can’t say I won’t come back changed. Take a moleskin.
8. Pack a scant travel bag
Is exactly what writer Joan Didion would say. Below is a packing list from her 1979 book, The White Album. I admit I had to google it because she didn’t have the marketing foresight to include The White Album in said packing list.
To Pack and Wear:
2 skirts, 2 jerseys or leotards, 1 pullover sweater, 2 pair shoes, stockings, bra, nightgown, robe, slippers, cigarettes, bourbon*
Bag with:
shampoo, toothbrush and paste, Basis soap, razor, deodorant, aspirin, prescriptions, Tampax, face cream, powder, baby oil
To Carry:
mohair throw, typewriter, 2 legal pads, pens, files, house key
*not packing any undies is contrary to my usual 5 knickers to 1 night ratio? but it’s Joan Didion.
9. Frida-y fiesta well into the evening
Frida Kahlo understood that cooking was akin to making art. It gives the same mental reprieve as painting, except when you cook you end up with something capitalism deems useful. Like Kahlo, cooking is my escapism and I love love making tortillas. The ingredients are cheap, vegan (v bohemian) and the act of kneading, rolling, frying feels sensuous when paired with a rebozo and bra-less bosoms.
Easy As Fuck Tortilla Recipe
Ingredients
3 cups of maize flour (or plain tbh)
1 teaspoon of fuckennnnn baking power
1 cup of warm water
1/3 cup of oil
pinch a salt
Method
Put all the dry shit into a bowl and make a well in the centre. Add the fucken water and oil into the well and slowly integrate with the flour. After mixed, knead for like? 1 minute.
Divide mix into two balls on a floured bench, then chop each ball into fucken eight portions like a wee pie (total 16 portions). Shape these little c*nts into a disc with your hands, set aside for at LEAST 15 mother-fucken minutes.
Roll these discy discs flat (bout 5mm thick) on a floured bench (flour that rolling pin o’yours too).
Put tortilla onto a HOT pan with NO OIL OK? Should be dry as shit. If that tortilla bubbles really quick, pan too HOT, turn down a smidge. But essentially after a thirty seconds-odd these tortillas should bubble, then you flip em. Like a pancake.
Take them off the pan after a tick, put some grub into them and eat them. Delicious and cheap.
Pair with:
Fresh fresh salsa (I want seasonal onion, cherry toms or tomatillo and coriander)
Frozen battered fishies (or meat alternative like panko cauliflower)
Lime
Hot sauce
Box red with alc ginger beer and an orange slice - you will get drunk.
10. Disappear in perpetuity to create my masterpiece
Escape the costs of gift giving and hosting entirely by losing yourself in the creative void. Franz Kafka regularly fucked off to achieve complete silence in which to write, I take no issue with this method coupled with a light staged kidnapping. Envisioning me arriving at a cottage, not unlike that of Colin Firth’s in Love Actually, and finally writing my debut erotic novel (sans dragon sex ala Fourth Wing - do not read this book. This is not a holiday recommendation. It is not good. And yet at 2am I find myself reading about dragon copulation).
PLEASE email back/comment with ANY further suggestions! Books to read, free things to see, free things to do, movies or series to watch, art to tend to etc. Until then but,
C U Next Tuesday - love you (spesh Editor Grace) xx
Maggie jean xxxxxx
Off to obtain a copy of Decline and Fall!