Providence

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Providence,_Rhode_Island

The city of Providence was in pretty bad shape during my time attending the Rhode Island School of Design. Downtown was a workplace for the suburban 9-to-5-Monday-through-Friday set, abandoned to junkies and the homeless people on the weekends, like a ghost town. There were no stores open or attractions to see, other than a small mall built inside of a beautiful old building with an ornate glass ceiling. Surrounding the town was a large concrete sewer that reduced the river to a dirty little stream filled with garbage.

College Hill was a bastion of old houses and historic cobblestone streets by comparison, so the lack of any type of inviting nightlife (save for the one music venue we all frequented for discount tickets to traveling punk acts on their way from New York to Boston) actually spared us from a lot of the violent random crimes that plagued less savvy college kids. Occasionally we went to the Italian section on the other hill facing downtown for big spaghetti dinners, to be greeted by an archway hung with a copper pineapple for its guests, a sure sign of a paisan good time.

The misty narrow streets once haunted by the likes of Edgar Allen Poe were still as captivating to young artistic imaginations as ever, easy as the old scenes were at blurring the lines between then and now, in the dense fogs that would descend upon the town, blown inland from the sea. The air would become thick with moisture, salty and briny as the ocean, as every Northeastern city does. Anyway, the hill held enough for us to explore. The main drag at the top of the hill in our college district had cheap eats, like the vegan-approved falafel joint I went to with my hippie housemates that inspired me and my friend Dave to coin the phrase "The Falafel Mafia!" yelled out loud in an Arabic-sounding voice. 

We wanted to make t-shirts for our next punk band that would have one really bad performance before folding forever. Screeching is tough on the vocal chords! It wasn't until years later in Denver that I met a Portuguese/Italian guy from Massachusetts also living out west, who told me about the wackier side of town. He asked me if I knew a big decorative element downtown, and then I remembered. Oh, yeah! There was a building like New York's Flatiron skyscraper: narrow to a point, to fill out two bigger corners in a triangle-shape. "Right," my friend Chris said to me while we worked at The Denver Post. "It's evil." Uh...okay. Why? This should be good.

Chris had some traumas growing up that he felt pushed him into evangelical Christianity, trading his sex addiction for the headier blend of this weird-ass new age cult that flourished in the midwest during the 80s and 90s. It was the time of the "SuperChurch" with its strange crystal palaces and homosexual pastors who always seemed to be caught with illegal drugs and a hooker. My work friend was now a passionately ignorant "Born-Again", which was made doubly weird by his self-professed Catholic upbringing. The arid plains out west can do strange things to some people. 

Still, it was far better than dying from an overdose, so I tolerated his blowhard lecturing about my own faith as good-naturedly as I could, without letting him cross the line into offensiveness. I already knew who I was. Did he? I wasn't so sure. People with mental problems get confused easily. Chris had lived in Arizona with his divorced mom after they left the Northeast years ago, and even though Denver throws down some serious snow, homeboy continued to wear linen pants and a thin golf jacket like he was driving a golf cart around his retirement community. His brain wasn't catching up to the change in locale. 

Like office people everywhere, Chris preferred fanatsies about tropical beaches, grumbling about the weather while planning his next bad tourist vacation that would put him right back on the work-wheel he loathed so much. But, back to the story. So, what's wrong with that building's sculpture? It was a stone carving of a guy in a turban that faced people who came into town down a certain block. Oh, the genie is an evil symbol designed to be a focal point that draws in bad magic. Sigh...really? I don't think the oldest Ivy League schools in American give two fucks, other than its aesthetic appeal. Didn't stop us from doin' a damn thing.

He gave me that special kind of smiley condescension that marks the kook who's just been exposed. Turns out, Chris recruited another wack-job from his mega church to go on "hunting trips" that would neutralize evil hotspots. Ah, what the fuck...I'll bite. It was an office job, after all. What else was I gonna do at a plush union gig besides crossword puzzles and free music downloads? Well, first he lightly chastized me for my naivety about the creepy-crawly things I didn't know. Right. Yeah. So, the genie? Right! Well, you're supposed to counter its dark forces by staking out the four corners of a cemetery resting on a hill before town with a magical string that keeps the evil graveyard spirits from entering. 

That's what he and his brain-dead friend were doing with Denver (and it had to be done at midnight, too), and that's what I should have done for Providence. Uh huh. Besides the three jobs and all that art? Yes! Okay, neat. Thanks for that. In any event, I'm happy to report that my lapse in good judgment about crazy rituals did not hurt it one bit. In fact, after I left the city, great changes were already taking place. They removed the concrete blocks that held back the river, building a beautiful outdoor riverwalk that ended in an amphitheater for concerts and plays. A gondola boat gave tourists rides up-and-down the canal like Venice, with charming lights illuminating the scene at sunset. 
Not a bad ending after all, is it? 

The Bronze Age

My bronze sculpture.

Years ago one of my part-time jobs was "pizza-maker" at a small place in Providence. It was boomin' when I applied for a job that first summer in town, but it went down quickly from the owner's neglect. He was all about money, which pretty much guarantees that you lose the soul you have for your food like <snaps fingers> this!

It was actually the perfect lesson for master "Artists-in-Training", and there were three of us who worked there: Crystal, a beautiful girl with perfectly straight, long brown hair with a sweet attitude, Greg Van Zandt, a disturbingly talented sculptor in love with Crystal the photographer, in a relationship that didn't quite work because it felt forced, and then there was me, awkwardly stuck into their love triangle at the restaurant. The other worker was an Italian-American lady from East Providence, working class like our boss, and friends with all the native-born security guys who worked at the school.

Close-up of the casts' cutting.

Gradually we quit the joint, one by one, leaving us with less people, and then less customers, as he took the heart out of the business and walked away. People could feel it, and his longer-term staff tried to talk to him about it, but at that point, he was all about the "Benjamins", which culminated in me working the counter and the ovens one night solo, and you all knew what happened to me from that scenario. 

We were fleeing a sinking ship, and we knew it. The food had no more soul, which is a major shame because we served a deep dish, Chicago-style pizza that's still rather unique for the East Coast, and a Providence version of a subway sandwich that they call "grindah's" which is "a grinder" in English. Oh. Yeah, I never heard of it either. 
It's a food word that exists only in Rhode Island.

The details of the shoots that grew out of the potato.

Anyway, one night when the work was slow, Greg was in the back with me talking about, well, work. It was pretty much all we thought about, because that's the way they want it, "they" being the Master Educators/Artists who trained us. But crossover was always there, as our worlds collided between the kitchen and the studio. Greg was a handsome boy with brown curls and light eyes who reminded me of my Irish twin brother, driven mad with work. 

He started having "hauntings" at the old house he lived in, that he said he captured in his black and white photos (or so he told me about his crit, but you couldn't really trust a fellow students' word because competition starts to eat at them badly, making them do rotten things to one another), so I took his mental degrading with a grain of salt, thinking it would ease with time upon his graduation, not knowing then that our teachers' built into us a type of post-RISD "PTSD" that's part of our artistic journey home.

Such intricacies in nature captured in metal that has cooled.

He was walking, eating, breathing stress. As he stood in the back, chain smoking and leaning against a stainless steel kitchen fridge, he told me about some of his background, none of which I can verify to you today; that he was related to the musician/actor Little Stevie, and that he got into Cooper Union by crumpling up his cigarette package into art (the only object he had on him) to complete the 3D portion of the exam in the prof's office, which immediately got him in and which he turned down, even though it was a free ride. That's how exalted our school was then, as it is now, and as it will be forever.

A bronze patina over time.

He began a series of castings in the same way, taking an old potato growing in the fridge and dipping it expensively into liquid bronze. 
It was experimental, extremely hard to do with unstable materials that made it completely risky, and also very brilliant. It was beautiful. 
He had one in his backpack that he tossed to me. Whoa... It had the heft and surprising weight of a much denser object, and it was art. He told me diffidently that I could have it, which astonished me. We were so broke, we depended on the food we made for our customers because we ate it at home, too. 

A sweeping motion captured in its' curved lines.

I fed my housemates with the stuff we made, as well. He shrugged his shoulders, and explained to me that the first castings were practice. See how he cut it here after it cooled? It didn't stand right, and at RISD we study "The Art of Perfection". It just didn't make the cut for a class critique. I understood, but I also realized that I would never get an objet d'art like this again. After each and every wandering gypsy move I have ever made, I have kept it with me, and here it is, photographed in my kitchen: with objects both precious and plastic, light-hearted and serious, expensive and expansive. Thanks, Greg.

Atop the kitchen fridge: it doesn't sit right, so it topples over. I love it!

Greatest Hits - The Simpsons

Many of my readers know I'm a big Simpson's fan. There's jokes and references for the pop culturally savvy to chew on for years. The gags just don't get old. Part of what makes it classic is impeccable comic timing, brilliant writing, and the key addition of music. I remember watching Barry White on an episode and thinking to myself "This is the best show I've ever seen." Still do. "The Man" has blocked much of the English-language Simpsons clips from the internets, so we get bonus Español. It's like a Bumblebee Man sketch from Channel Ocho:

I was in college when The Ramones still toured heavily. One year, me and my friend caught a show in the basketball stadium of Providence College, with a GabbaGabbaHey ending and everything. Needless, when The Ramones appeared on The Simpsons, it solidified our fandom for life.

Ever had a wacky Mexican holiday? The campers from Kamp Krusty did, as payback for one of the worst experiences ever. The kids went Lord of the Flies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies), and it is awesome. Ultimately, it's nothing a little Tequila and Tijuana can't fix.

Hey, it's Tuesday! 

When's your next holiday?