Proud to be a N*gga

My cousin Kenny is proud to be a n*gga, because he's told me that more than once, even singing it to me like this: "...bee-cause I'm proud to be a niggggaaaah!" His cellphone used to have a recording of him singsonging "Kennndaahhhl!" every friggin' time it went to voicemail, which drove my ex-boyfriend crazy, because John would need help at the yard and "Ken Doll" couldn't be bothered; exactly what we'd come to expect from a fat, bald, 6'1, Celtic-Jewish-Indian like him.

He never wanted to fit in with the 9-5 crowd, and for years, he struggled to find work that was inoffensive to his cocktail party persona, before he finally settled on joining a pipe-and-drum band near the beach. He's good at it, too! He and his then-girlfriend (now wife) played together at the biggest parades 'round the way, turning their alcoholism into a somewhat respectable McOpportunity. It wasn't what I'd want for him, but he's made a life from the broken shards of his rough Brooklyn upbringing that's left most of his family dead, and he's not even 50, yet.

I just hope someday he'll realize he doesn't have to jettison parts of his identity that he feels he needs to hide in order to fit in with typical American society, because I personally know of a clan that would dearly love to have a musician with the heart of an Irishman, the beat of an Indian, with the soul of the faithful play at their tartan-clad family gatherings on a certain New Scotland beach. We pay with real money, too. My father always used to tell us as kids that we should be proud of who we are, because it's not like we had a say in the matter, and he's right. We don't. It's already happened.

Remember, my Americans: the freedoms you take for granted have not been equally extended. Some of us can't even walk on ancestral lands and feel proud about it, without someone else looking to take it away to sell it back for a fee. Think about that while you bitch about the line at the polls, or your simple black-and-white racism, or any of the other issues that you think take precedence over basic human rights like dignity and equality. We're not there, yet with this country, but some of us would really like it to be. They're colored, too, just not like you.

Bodega

Bill Clinton was considered the first "black" American president because he came from the lowbrow South (earning him the name "Bubba"), with a crazy-ignorant mama and an alcoholic brother who's in-and-out of jail, before, during, and after his Presidency. It was something that people like us from the 'hood could understand, with a huge sigh of relief. It certainly made a lot of sense to me as I entered the Ivy League, because I'd never met that many fucked-up rich white kids in my life. I wasn't "out" as Acadian, because I was close enough to Canada that a New Englander with an axe to grind could destroy me through bias against French-Canadians as the key to my college career ruination, which is exactly why my people were mass murdered centuries prior: for a supposedly shameful act of love between a European man and an Indian squaw with offspring so defying beautiful, that many of us are still hunted in envious sport.

Think I'm exaggerating? The Canadian government has just officially recognized the "ethnic cleansing" of Acadian Métis (or "Aboriginals", as they derisively insist in calling all natives  common to the Americas), let alone admit to the child abduction and rape that was a common practice for wealthy Europeans hoping to wipe out key witnesses to their crimes. It's not unlike the United State's checkered past with it's own native peoples, that a President like Barack Obama has been actively working to address with Sally Jewell, the Secretary for our Department of the Interior, by taking meetings with tribal elders to heal the hurts here, from way back when.

Instead, I stuck to what I thought were the relatively easy immigrant-bias experiences of my maternal Irish and Italian forefathers, but I was wrong on those accounts, too. I was attacked in an advanced photography class for daring to refer to me and my ConEd grandfather as "working class," by a British git who thought he could get away with it, and he was right. The teacher was a grad student I knew, who chose to smooth over my revelations with an "across the pond" type of cultural misappropriation that was grossly ignorant, preferring to refer to their welfare childhoods as much more severe in poverty and bias than anything we could have possibly have endured in New York City, paved with gold as the myths were.

They co-opted my conversation (which would have opened the door to further inquiry with the mostly New England student body present in that class) between the two of them; he as a poor boy from Mississippi with torn jeans he couldn't afford to fix (?), and he with council flats and a company coal-mining dad. Both were older than me, too, and so it was easy for them to swipe my background to the side successfully, as having the most hurts from the working class, and it certainly didn't end there.

In the tony Painting Department (I was in the relatively "working class" major of Illustration so that I could get a job after graduating which I did. I was also the first in my graduating class to obtain a full-time job with "health benefits", too! I also had 3-4 part-time jobs while attending RISD, in stark contrast to the po' white boys who were on scholarship just for singin' their song), and I was openly laughed at by the slightly dykey, arty, rich white lady with the short, mousy-brown haircut and the "John Lennon glasses" for daring to make a painting about my Irish great-grandfather's work on the iron and copper work around New York City. When I asked her why, she just huffed at me, "I don't know 'why'...it's just so...so...so...funny!", because she'd never seen a project like that before.

Me and another kid from New York (a rich Jewish Long Islander in school for film-making, but with a populist bent that was extremely unfavorable at the time) decided to prank her for being a delusional rich asshole with no sense of reality, but that's a story for another day. Suffice to say, my working class housemate Riddell helped me forge the copper frame for the piece, and I used copper wire to sew the denim to the frame as a canvas, direct references to his bridge-building and metal shop-work (he was a master craftsman who made a copper version of "The Last Supper" that still hangs in my mother's place, and which I cleaned myself many times, so as to carefully note the finesse and detail attached to it as being very finely done), as direct references to our "working class" history that couldn't be denied, and that was just the easy Irish stuff from a century ago. I could not have built with my current lexicon the full story of my people, built on the backs of murder, rape, and theft as they are.

I ran up against white bias and European prejudices all the time, in almost every critique I had in studio, or outside-of-class social encounters. Out as an "Indian"? Do you know what they did (do) to us?! It was a family secret that had no time during my tenure there, fraught as it was with all the above reasons I just noted, easily observed as they were by my friends and classmates. I barely made it out of there with my life, as a crime victim of robbery while working a job, and "blacklisted" by rich profs afraid of losing their tenure, as they lost their minds at our expense. You see, "The Ivory Tower" is only good as an edifice if you uphold their traditionally white WASPy values tied to lip-service and exclusion, not by extolling the real, true, expat rebellion with a long-storied past, as actual descendants of the "Daughters (and Sons) of the Revolution" like I am through my paternal grandmother's line (http://www.dar.org/). It was too much for their warped, privileged minds to bear.

It was in this way that I became infamous as the first openly "black" student at R.I.S.D., which I didn't really know at the time, because I always had three or four part-time jobs and a full studio schedule, which is unheard of among the plush upper crust set who struggle to read and write, like the illiterate cast-offs from wealthy families who were in the majority against me and my offensively real New York roots. I could get away with "ethnicity" if I did phony displays of African Dance (like my friend Riddell did), because the museum wanted African artifacts and a faux arty display would play well overseas with fancy donors, not with actually beleaguered native Americans hip to the game. Money came untied with that kind of awareness.

And so I found myself in a car ride with my punk rock housemate Sue and her weird hippie friend Ellie, who I naturally thought was a rich Jewish girl from Michigan, because she had all the superior airs typical of the boho "Trustafarian" set with no real talent, but who liked to spend time in academia as pretentious intellectuals. She never really liked me, open as I was about my ethnic roots (as much as I could get away with, alone and unsupported as I was), and it wasn't until many years later that I figured out the specifics as to why. I knew she hated "pretty girls" (not that I thought of myself, even as people openly gape and stare at me). I thought she was embarrassed because she and I had to take basic drawing class (with my mentor, Lenny Long), because we were really far behind the older and richer matriculated students.

It didn't bother me, especially since Lenny had gotten to me at my core (he's from New York), by giving me an infamous speech about not letting "them:" win by making me quit, and it worked because I got angry enough to channel it into energy I could use, like fighting does for me as a warrior), plus I also knew that I had the deck stacked incorrectly against me, through no fault of my own. So? Do the work, he said to me, and that's what I did. That's what real working class kids from New York do, but Ellie didn't know that. I knew she was a former forest ranger in Oregon during the Mt. Saint Helen explosion, alone like a lot of anti-social hippies are in a fire tower for many months on end. 

She had that typical awkwardness about her, often wearing the usual Birkenstock-with-socks hippie garb that marks the warm weather kind who does not cotton to our climate well, because they "winter" in warmer climes. She also had the type of curl that we call here on the East Coast a "frazzled-haired yenta" and her last name was "Leon", a new Jewish name that easily could've been anglicized years ago for the MidWest, from what might be the original Leonberg(er), like they used to do with newly-arrived immigrants to Ellis Island, which coincidentally was the photo essay my first photography teacher from S.U.N.Y. had been assigned to through a grant from New York State: to document the renovations of Ellis Island in New York. She also told me back then that I could get into R.I.S.D., if she got into Yale as an Italian-American. "You can do anything", she told me. Thank you for that.

We were on a beer outing that went comically awry one afternoon, for reasons that puzzled me for many years. As we drove up to a shady-looking joint, I immediately balked about going inside to get beer for our group. "Uh uh," I said, "I'm not going into one of those places." Ellie turned to me in the backseat, with her childishly barretted hair in plain metal clips, and the de rigeur makeup-less face that are necessary components for the rich hippie crowd, "What do you mean 'that kind of place?'" I knew I said something wrong, but I was only 21 and living outside of New York for the first time, unlike my housemate Sue and her friend Ellie, both women in their 30s on their 2nd, 3rd, and 4th careers and educations. "That's a bodega!", I giggled slightly like she was a dimwit, or she had deliberately set a trap for me, and it was the latter. "Yeah, a bodega.", she huffed impatiently back at me. Uh, okay. Poor thing. "Yeah! That's a Puerto-Rican joint in New York." She turned up her nose at me, turning slightly in direction without looking at me in the backseat of their car, "And what exactly are 'those types' of places?", like a sour-faced teacher calling on the retard kid who never knows the answer.

"You know!", at this point I was the exasperated one. Where's she from, yo? "A Puerto Rican grocery store!" She sat still, so I went on, "See those 'booty' posters in the window", and I pointed to the ass-shot beer posters typical for a Hispanic deli in the 'hood. "They always have those in the window". She huffed again, "They?"...uh, yeah..."THEY always have those?!", she continued, working up steam to make some unknown point, "I'll have you know that I'm a 'Catalan'!!" Me and my friend Sue from Boston waited for her to finish her sentence...yeah...and? So...? "Tsk", she tsked-tsked fussily, still in a huff. "I'll have you know I'm a Catalan Spaniard* from my father's line." Ohhhh! Whew! What a relief. That's it? Yeah, bitch. We know! You're a European white girl, esse. I laughed, took their money, got out the back of their car, and bought us all beer for our party back at the old house on Benefit Street.

Shit, that bitch just wanted us to know that she was better than us. Just another day at R.I.S.D. for me, and then I didn't really think about her unless I made contact with my former housemate, Sue. How come she never reconnected with the rest of our transfer group? And then, a couple of weeks ago, I got an email from Sue that finally cleared it all up for me. She was more than embarrassed by her time at R.I.S.D.; she was mortified. You see, Sue went to see Ellie in Michigan, her home state, and on that trip she finally learned her really shameful secret, the one that she really didn't want us to know about back then (besides some banal European history) and that's this: she's the daughter of a well-known and much more successful illustrator father that she could never compete with or keep up with, and that was why she picked on the one "negro" she felt she could safely get away with picking on: me. And she did get away with it, until today.

This one's for you today, Sue. Long may truth and freedom ring with a loud "Yanqui"** rebel yell! We know who we are, girl, and we are revolutionary. Keep on shining, my true punk-rock friend. We tore it up rough enough to scare 'em, didn't we? Yes, we did.

Kirk Lazarus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropic_Thunder

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_language
 ** https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yanqui

Hieroglyphics

"Gifting", with strings attached.

For years, I've doodled little shapes and swirly glyphs until they covered a page. It was something I typically did during a boring class, or in attendance at yet another dopey meeting for people at much slower speeds, so there was no point in me paying attention with the full force of my consciousness. Of course, I'd learn later on that's exactly what you're supposed to do with massive amounts of mostly useless data: use other parts of your brain to take in information, which has the unfortunate effect of giving my a memory recall so profound, it's like a party trick for me now: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/12/doodling-benefits_n_7572182.html.

But they sometimes took on a deeper meaning to the people around me. One year, my former RISD classmate turned housemate used them to make fun Christmas cards."They're like wrapping paper", she said dismissively to me, and then took them to her day job to work on and show her co-workers, which was weird, since she was so paranoid about people ripping her off without getting paid. I didn't care, because she photocopied them onto colored paper and colored in the Christmas tree, so I used them for cards that year, too.

The pens bled through, creating a constellation of dots on the other side.

Sometimes people noticed me drawing in meetings, like they had in school, but given my chosen profession(s), it hardly seemed worth mentioning to an artist/designer like me, so no one did. Until the year I began working for a small Jewish family that had great book packaging deals with the retail conglomerate Barnes & Noble. It put a whole new focus on me, as their star designer for a major American retailer. People jumped out of their skin around me, with their claws fully out, just like in art school.

They had a dysfunctional receptionist ("No, I'm an 'Office Manager'", and then she'd tell everyone around her that she didn't do office work), who clung to me voraciously, with the desperation of the drowning. She left me alone for awhile, until she got her "best friend" from high school fired, and then she turned her obsessive focus elsewhere, which naturally fell on me, the shiniest object in the room. I knew she was mentally ill because of her twitchy mannerisms and oddly disjointed way of speaking, plus she interrupted my work in the middle of a major deadline, which is the largest taboo we have in my industry. 

Magical dancing snowflakes, forever etched into my mind.

My look registered such shock at her brute assertion into my face for attention (over a banal relationship thing or another email about her poor socialization skills), that she immediately blurted "Oh, I'm bipolar" because it was that out of place for someone to do that to me at that point in my career. She promptly tried to retract it later on, when she turned on me (which I knew she would), after embodying every single facet of her original medical diagnosis many times over, for 10+ years on the job. After many a run-in with the psycho co-worker, I laid some serious ground rules with her in that first intimate conversation about personal matters, which she promised to abide by, but of course, couldn't fulfill.

Anyway, the owner was pushing me hard to befriend her, with a twinkle in his eye, because he used her gossip like a seeing eye dog would, which was fine by me. I got coveted face-out shelf space to promote my imprint (which is actually part of the job), and he could pick her straw head about whatever weirdo thing he wanted to. I knew the game of "Telephone" like a pro. And so we hung out a few times after work, but she couldn't get the necessary dirt she wanted to have as leverage over me with my genuine after-hours bonhomie.

Windmill toys, like the ones we played with as children.

Besides that, she had briefly attended F.I.T. for painting, and it's also part of my job to mentor junior design staff. She could never be a designer because of her learning impairments, but she could do basic illustration work, and so I allowed her to grow closer to me, while I was the one with the authority to careful demarcate appropriate adult boundaries. I still needed good press at the time, and her dull PR about me would help me buoy up a imprint that had lay fallow, so I could have time to turn it into a major moneymaker for the company.

It worked like a charm. She sung like a canary to anyone who would listen to her, and I got to pull a very lucrative project out of the fire, to infamous success. And, I did really like any person with creative aspirations (as I've been taught to do) who want to learn and do better, which she did seem to have, in spurts that came and went with the ups-and-downs of her serious brain disorder. It was really therapy for her, but that was fine, too: RISD masters in degree programs like Art Therapy and Art Education. The better I could break through to the rough spots on her mind, the better I got at my job.

You're a major star, baby!

I used her as a training tool, to better my conversations with a staff that was sub par for big city publishing in the tri-state area, and that was also part of my job, because the owner of the company told me that on my very first review. And so I signed concepts like "books" and "design" and "art" over and over into their hands, realizing that his employees dysfunctions mirrored those of his family, and not me or mine, because I met a lot of his family during my employ.

Their admin used me to gain artistic insight into creative genius, and I used her as a mouthpiece to telegraph whatever aspect of me that I felt the rest of the staff needed to know. She gained inspiration from me and my labors, which is also very typical for someone like me, too. I didn't mind. As I lectured to her at the reception desk, I could feel the entire company leaning in to listen to me, which was the gold in the bank that helped me to gain confidence and break through. I had an entire audience in the palm of my hand, every single day of my life, which has naturally led me here to you all.

A screw loose or two, or is it three, or...how many more?!

She was genuine in her admiration of me, as I was skillful in schooling her with the rest of the Special Needs adults who worked in the fringes of media. The first year of our acquaintance, she gave me a notebook, with the requisite hidden agenda attached: why don't you draw something we can sell to make money off of? I did no such fucking thing, because I was already making major bank that they could coattail off of, but I always enjoyed doodling. She once asked me what my scribblings meant, and I hesitated....who cares? But, as she eagerly awaited my answer, I gave her the most honest reply I could think of at the time: "I don't know....it doesn't really matter to me what they are. I call them 'hieroglyphics'".

A Keith Haring-inspired paramecium dancing in primordial fluid.

And now here we are years later, on a spiritual journey that has brought me back to very essence of my family's historical and cultural roots, buried deep in my DNA, but still very, very real: that time from our most sacred human area in a fertile river valley, tied forever to the lands of Ancient Mesopotamia, then Egypt, then the Greco-Roman era, onto modern Normans (be they Italian, Irish, or French-Swiss), and then my tribe that turned right and went east to India, walking (or sledding) over the Bering Land Bridge with our ancient dogs, to finally meet a boat of French men from Western Europe on the Americas most eastern shores, men who married the M'ikMak squaws from Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia, people who drew the cuneiform shapes that resembled the ancient language for those of us who have always loyally worshipped The Great Spirit. 

A "commercial artist", indeed.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Mikmaq_sample_%28ave_Maria%29.jpg

 

RISD’s Ongoing Mission

The mission of Rhode Island School of Design, through its college and museum, is to educate its students and the public in the creation and appreciation of works of art and design, to discover and transmit knowledge and to make lasting contributions to a global society through critical thinking, scholarship and innovation.

Original Mission Statement
On March 22, 1877, the Rhode Island General Assembly ratified “An Act to Incorporate the Rhode Island School of Design.” The corporation, comprised of a forward-thinking group of men and women, artists and business leaders, educators and politicians, was formed “for the purpose of aiding in the cultivation of the arts of design.” The original bylaws set forth the following key objectives for RISD:

First. The instruction of artisans in drawing, painting, modeling, and designing, that they may successfully apply the principles of Art to the requirements of trade and manufacture.

Second. The systematic training of students in the practice of Art, in order that they may understand its principles, give instruction to others, or become artists.

Third. The general advancement of public Art Education, by the exhibition of works of Art and of Art school studies, and by lectures on Art.

http://www.risd.edu/About/History_Mission_Governance/Mission/

Trinity

An old tree stump is rife with mushroom life,

as a forsythia bush mixes with the trees, roofs and sky,

and "The Great Tree*" opens up to the world with many arms.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9tis_people_%28Canada%29

( Welcome home, "Mes Gens" )

The Dragonfly

Hungry is the lone hunter; here sits "Brother Dragonfly".

I've always loved dragonflies. My middle brother hated them when we were kids because they're big and scary, but he's also highly allergic to bee stings, so pretty much all bugs are on his "no" list. But, I love them: their gossamer wings, their iridescent and sleekly bejeweled bodies, their swooping, precise aerobatics... I think they are so beautiful and strong. Many other cultures feel that way, too. 

The Dragonfly, up close: a study in beauty and aerodynamics.

Years ago, I was inspired to draft and draw a children's story about a dragonfly (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-isle-of-dragonfly-on-pubslush.html), using the noble, high-flying hunter as a symbol and metaphor that would also speak to an adults' poetic sensibilities. I usually see them flying and dipping high above my head, but the other afternoon, I was privileged (and very surprised) to see a young beauty perched on an old yellow house that sits high on a hill in the lower Hudson Valley. I consider it a very good sign on this year's last, warm 68° day in New York.  

So close! I hold my breath, and take another picture.

http://www.dragonfly-site.com/meaning-symbolize.html