An austere morning here at the Forge: hot tea, a single small biscuit, and catching up on the news of the world while the rest of the house slumbers. There will be no egg hunt, no chocolate bunnies, no jelly beans, no squeals of young children. It's perfect.
While reading the latest from Germany, I suddenly remembered (for this is how my parenthetical mind works) a box of drawings I have from Philadelphia's punk rock legend, Mikey Wild. When I wrote about his death almost a year ago,
I wrote about his drawings in particular:
Almost childlike in their simplicity, Mikey's drawings could be also dark and revealed an impish sense of humor. He sold the drawings on paper for as little as a dollar each or as much as ten. I have a folder stuffed with them.
Turns out that I have not merely a folder stuffed with them. When moving to our new house, I discovered a box labeled
Michel Sauvage. What the hell was this? On opening the box, I was faced with a drawing of Jesus drinking moonshine and realized, as I flipped through all the loose pages underneath, that I'd come across a forgotten trove of his drawings.
For this Easter morn, I offer two additional Mikey Wild drawings:
The White Jesus Fighting the Black Jesus and
The White Easter Bunny Fighting the White Easter Bunny. Hey, that's how Mikey titled them. I like that there may be multiple Easter bunnies duking it out for supremacy. Likewise, a multiplicity of pugilistic Jesuses opens entirely new vistas of possibility. And why are they fighting? No idea. Knowing Mikey, though, I wouldn't read any racist angles into it. I'd venture that black/white, good/bad, and, yes, even white/white are simple binary oppositions — why wouldn't they fight?
Goes well with:
Rabbit à l’Epicurienne, an Easter Treat— from last Easter, a Victorian bunny treat from Agnes B. Marshall. Who's Marshall? She's just the one who was writing about making and using ice cream cones almost two decades before their supposed invention at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and who suggested using liquid oxygen at making ice cream at the table generations before anyone heard the term
molecular gastronomy.
