Color Blind

I don't subscribe overly much to trends, or "memes", or cutesy jargon. It doesn't help me or my audience to be too specific about a subject that's relatively easy for anyone to understand, or at least "easy" as it's viewed by the most literate people on Planet Earth. Sometimes I get caught in whirlpools of astonishment and bewilderment watching t.v. (which occasionally deepens into embarrassment and/or anger for all of you uneducated messes, living out there in "T.V. Land") that reflect my advanced education and prolonged work experience in such a profound way, I simply can't entertain the discussion as relevant or useful, and that's when I know you've been sold a bunch of total fucking bullshit.

Last summer, a dressmaker decided to time the sale of their knockoff dresses for prom season to the award show red carpets and your unfortunate color blindness, which, to an expert visual communicator like me, is a really fucking nasty thing to do. As soon as I saw the image pictured above, I immediately said "blue and black" and I knew I was right. I cannot be (and could not have been, in chronological order) an artist, designer, art director, or publisher without my great eyes, and failing that, entire sectors of my industry are devoted to achieving correct color matching results. Most desktops use RGB color mode for the Internet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RGB_color_model) and CMYK for print (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMYK_color_model), reflecting the pixels and paint used in the two processes.

If you blow up an image in digital imaging software, you can see the blocks of color that comprise a digital color photograph.You can then select an eyedropper tool in Photoshop (really $$$ high-end professional-grade software) to break down the color values into separate divisions of red, green, or blue (for the Internet), or cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (or "K" in printing). We also have color chip manufacturers that produce tear-off swatches that we attach to layouts, in case we feel further color clarifications are needed.

Color separations are an art of their own, woefully ignorant as the public is to such practices. CMYK color values are available for any color we see as humans, rendered into palette chips that we detach from very expensive color books, for the purposes of paint mixing at the color separators. For really tough material that needs extreme accuracy (like museum-quality reproductions of famous artwork well-known for their colors), we build even more steps into the proofing process. But, that's print. In the digital world, you are much more vulnerable to suggestion and the crudeness of a programs' blocks of computer coding used to simulate color onscreen, which is much less sophisticated than the human eye, and that's the trap you all fell into.

After launching a dress campaign timed to the ball gown season of the pop culture world, the maker(s) generated a few more images to create a fake online debate that would drive up the sales of their dresses by driving traffic to their site, which is something that's actionable in my world of better ethics, but that's show business for you. Not exactly known for its morality, if you get my drift, and I know that you do. After a series of gradually lighter jpegs were posted online, the color blind people of the world went nuts, which is one of the meanest things I've ever seen in manufacturing. It points to the desperation of dressmakers and show biz people in this new economy, as a digital marketplace where the truth will "out" you in a few nanoseconds after publication.

For me, any jpeg online (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG) is simply a digital image that I can potentially pull into imaging software to color match, which not one single person or entertainment news reporter that contributed to this phony scan did. Not one. Not one of you "outed" it as a scam, so that you could all enjoy the benefits of increased traffic to your show or site, which makes you complicit in the extreme, so I'm telling you this right now: if you see anything besides a blue dress with black lace trim, get your eyes checked. You are severely vision-impaired or color blind. And you're welcome, by the way. Also, welcome to wide world of desktop publishing as the new international language for the visual arts, plebes. It's "old school": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantone.

Your homework for today, lemmings:
-    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_printing
-    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_printing
-    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness
-    http://pantone.wikia.com/wiki/Pantone_Color_Matching_System 
-    http://pantone.wikia.com/wiki/Pantone_Wiki

I fear for you...somewhat.

Performance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Sprinkle

When we were students at the Rhode Island School of Design in the 90s, we had a few interesting guest speakers and the occasional crazy prostitute who used "shock value" to sell a really horrible performance to a bunch of fucked-up WASPs afraid of everything. It wasn't like I had tons of experience with middle-aged Jewish hookers, it was just that I already knew the deal: that it was a long dull prelude to her inevitable down-spiral into rehab, where she will try to shock the shit out of a bunch of mental patients who desperately need genuine psychiatric care over the hubris of some Jewish lady opening her legs without prompting from anyone, in a lame attempt to top the crying Albino Asian girl rocking back-and-forth in the corner of their white room because she fears being raped by her scary rabbit doll. 

It's just another game of one-upmanship for most native New Yorkers, used to seeing weird shit in the middle of what was once a normal workday, until some crazy guy flashes onlookers crossing a city street wearing nothing under his drab khaki raincoat other than a deranged expression, but that's a story for a rainier day than today. What's next? Toads falling from the fucking sky?! You know what I mean? It's, like, just another fucked-up thing you have to deal with because of other people's problems, when you really want to be at home with your feet up on a cozy ottoman, sipping a nice warm cup of honeyed herbal tea.

And that's exactly what it felt like for me to be in the audience of an Annie Sprinkle "show", and I use quotes as a description because there's no fucking way that what happened up on that stage was "art" for anyone other than my particular brand of fucked-up WASP's who were also my vegetarian housemates back in the day. I saw it as a cry for help that two very suppressed individuals needed, along with meds and sex therapy, the exact same boat as the poor ugly hooker onstage striving to be someone other than a banged-up prostitute looking for a second act. It was sort of like the political game of art school itself, albeit as a nastier version of the real school, where your psychotic prof is searching for shit-on-a-shingle served up to her as "art", as part of her anger issues with her more talented artist daddy....okay, but, fuck! Me and my broke-ass crew are paying for this joint right here!

Why give our hard-earned money to this fuckin' chick?! Why do I have to do art therapy with these fucking headcases?! Shit...I mean, man, I needed solid drawing skills like a daVinci born yesterday, not this shit right here, yo. That's how angry a R.I.S.D. experience gone wrong could be for us, because the meter was running at an exorbitantly high rate that was much higher than the highest priced call-girl in Manhattan, and that chick wasn't all that, bro. I felt that nervous with each passing dollar thrown away on crap, but my richer WASPier friends didn't care. Sue had (has?) a trust fund from her rich Boston lawyer dad (a well-respected tort lawyer she used to work for as a paralegal in between her questioning phases, like punk rocking in San Francisco), and Riddell worked the "perpetual student" angle as a local-yokel from rural Connecticut who got sympathy money from a New England state that still wants to believe they have strong homegrown talent among them. 

So, there I sat as a last-minute tag-along with them in a somewhat full auditorium, in the middle of the day, that was nowhere near as fully attended as the works of other major art stars of the day. We sat in one of the back rows that had a limited view of the stage, which suited me just fine. I had a feeling she'd be even worse up-close than from this relatively comfortable distance. She then asked the audience to line-up in front of the stage for a "viewing", which basically meant that this particular crazy lesbian spread her legs on a table, inserted a speculum, and then said through her mike that we could look at her cervix. WHAT?!!! Why the fuck would anyone want to get near her?! 

I guess that was part of the point, because even with heavy makeup and bleached-out hair, some of the attending lesbians couldn't get past the reality of her pasty flabby skin and banged-up face. I chickened out at first, but Riddell (as the hetero male in our trio), hopped up quickly from his seat, ready to have a look. I stayed in my seat looking at my assignments, but luckily for me, my hippie-mom Sue went to the stage to see firsthand. She came back to me in my seat, and said there wasn't much there. No shit! We went back down to the stage together, to give Riddell moral support for waiting on line on a side staircase leading up to the stage. We milled around the front of the stage, looking for any print materials that would back up her performance or artistic cred but, of course, there was none to be had, because she's a complete fucking hack. There were no drawings, no brochures, no artist statement (other than her onstage ramble of fake "artspeak" followed by a mental prepping to her audience about her nudity and insertion that was supposedly her "piece"), and no actual art at all. 

Oh. It was kind of exactly what we expected, which was nothing. Afterwards, we grilled Riddell about what happened: "Yeah, it was awesome!" He said that he went up there, spoke to her two female "assistants" who may direct your questions to her as she reclined on a surgical table with a gynecological instrument and a microphone, then you peeked between her open legs that were covered by a white sheet like a doctor's exam, and then he saw a cervix as a 30-year-old guy. 

Jaded as we were becoming about our burgeoning learning in the art scene and its lurking pseudo-denizens, it actually bolstered our faith in our sometimes difficult-to-follow classes, because the real thing is never a substitute for pure bullshit. It was actually a great life lesson to learn, delivered to us during a critical time in our studies when we sometimes felt like giving up. After that, I knew without a doubt that I could be beat that crazy fucking bitch in art, design, photography, painting, nudity AND health care (along with everything else) any day of the fucking week, whether awake or asleep. Thanks. I guess....
 

Here's what it really takes for a "free ride" that's for less than half of us: http://www.risd.edu/admissions/student-financial-services/types-of-aid/RISD-financial-aid/

"Beats, boy!"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headphones

Like all the other decisions I watched Cotto make on his own, each and every single one of them was the wrong one, just like the other scared kids from Brownsville before him. He was angry and arrogant about his lies, too, preferring instead to say to me that he found "creativity" similar to "lying", because that's what most 'hood heroes do: they puff themselves up beyond average human reason and typical imagination, creating the sense that everyone and everything around them is bullshit, so used to the scammers and liars most project folk also believe themselves excellently to be.

His brush-up with "the real" through me was absolutely horrifying for him. I saw him turn white in shock while I sat on his floor describing my hard-working studio days, and he was a rather dark-skinned male when I knew him. "What you're saying to me is absolutely terrifying to me", as he shook his head slowly back and forth, hamming it up to me over the drinks that I bought for us down the block at a hipster joint, now that I had money again from my design work. Any real welfare queen has great acting chops as part of his/her arsenal that are the ideals of the insane. Cotto tried in vain to convince me that waiting all day in the depressing rooms of Public Assistance was his "job" when he did it full-time, and if I wanted to work it, that's how I had to think about it, too. Uh, excuse me, what...?!

It was so utterly poor in quality and convoluted in its execution, that the few days I did interact with the staff there, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the "social workers" working there were just as crazy as the people who worked them over for a living. It felt like the blurry line that sometimes divides inmates from officers in a prison setting, as time spent together that sometimes created an artificial camaraderie not actually existing between a convict and their supervising warrior. When was the last time you met a timid Samurai?

As soon as I got a job, the "case worker" in her early twenties assigned to me immediately shut the door to all the city programs and services that were supposedly available to someone like me, even though I told her I would still need help as a single working woman living alone in the city. Ever heard of back rent that's due and unpaid bills? She blew aside my concerns, so rare an experience it must have been for her working in a dead zone of Brooklyn that's atypical for our lives there, living in one of the most beautiful boroughs of the world. Case closed! She seemed relieved to have less work to do, though I doubt she'd ever met someone like me before. For all my time spent waiting and shuffling between odd appointments, all I got out of their bloated bureaucratic structures were a few Metrocards for the mass transit trips necessary to reach the wacky appointments made for me by various city agencies, scattered around town in a way that made no sense, especially to an efficient and practical Acadian like me.

Cotto worked the rooms he visited at welfare like he was born to the life, and he was. It was, for him, the perfect fit. He described the one part-time beginner's web job he had (self-described to me as his brief work as a "designer", even though he couldn't draw his way out of a paper bag), and much like his beginner's job in the professional world of cuisine, he felt that this paltry desk job was wayyy beneath him, lacking as it was to his superior sense of self. You see, he told me his employer was "crazy", making him work out of his home as a self-starter in his own business, constantly watching over his shoulder while he did all these banal chores like scan in art every single day, over and over again. It's called being a "Production Assistant", or "Production Designer" in desktop publishing, Cotto!

Much like the other jobs he tried working, he hated every single one of them. What could compete with sitting in a small room playing superhero video games stoned off your ass, day after day? Like a perpetual teenager who never really got a full kickstart in life, he just felt that wasn't made for real life. His juvenile dad (his "best friend" and favorite drinking buddy) had died at the early age of 53 from heart disease, and Cotto told me that he knew he would, too. He already had a disturbing hacking cough. What was left for him to do? He felt that his lazy rolling about the streets had given him all the "life experience" he needed. What could there possibly be for him? It was shocking in its' ineptitude for someone like him: someone who'd never really traveled anywhere or seen anything really good in life. 

He'd partied with a bunch of people who were dead, in various key spots around the city. Wasn't that what I meant? He'd then adopt a quizzical look for show. Sigh....always another tiring con job to front. He could memorize the best subway route he needed to buy weed at Washington Square Park, shocked by the commuter routine I'd adapted to early morning weekday life as it was for me then. But, but...that's too slow! What if he wanted weed quicker? He could get me there in 15 minutes! Of course, his route meant shite to me on the weekends that I had time to explore or run errands around town, because the tracks changed routes for servicing then anyway, but like any of the other real points I shared with him, he'd feign disinterest, suddenly closing his eyes and dozing at the diner table I brought him to in the middle of the day, so we could get breakfast (paid by me, of course) before hitting the laundromat, so I'd have fresh clothes for work during the upcoming week.

As soon as I finished cleaning up the room next to his that was "for rent" by the squatting former super operating in a tenuous situation I hadn't been made fully aware of (seeing as I went to another corner store than the local Nuyroricans living closer to Sunset Park than Park Slope), Cotto soon became paranoid by our change in circumstances. I figured from the cocktail of meds he showed me that he purposefully weaned himself off of them to hurt me with his burgeoning psychosis anew, but by then, I'd handily locked myself into the room I cleaned out with a thick chain through the punched-out doorknob that he'd have to borrow a heavy cutter to undo, and that was labor, man. Not worth it to him, I guess. Besides, I actually paid full market value for the rooms' legal worth, and as such, I wasn't a person of interest to the other 'hood rats in the building, or the people in the neighborhood watching us. I'd be gone soon, anyway, funded by my earnings.

As soon as Cotto got his money from the city for his cheap community college (and I doubted that story, too, but that's life in any ghetto), he cashed it and went on a spending spree, like I knew he would. He told me "they" gave him $30,000 for tuition, books, supplies, food, and rent, but have you ever heard of a two-year CUNY school on Staten Island for that kind of cash? Exactly! One of his stories surrounded this myth that he was a "media major" at school, because he got baked and watched a lot of t.v. shows and movies. Oh....times have sure changed! Must be expensive to study it at school, wink wink. The one paper he showed me was clearly written by the prof with his college study group. It was like a bad essay from a kid attending junior high school. In his make-believe role as a hardworking college kid from the 'hood looking to "make it" on his own finally (like the welfare myth about "a hand-up, and not a 'hand-out'!"), Cotto greatly justified his purchase of a fancy new digital tablet he didn't actually need for his school coursework, because he showed me the curriculum he had.

After that, he felt free to dream aloud on his small twin bed at me as I barely listened, nestled comfortably in his Army/Navy sleeping bag on the floor, ready to drop off to sleep like the hardworking girl without medication that I am, in stark contrast to his rapidly firing mania. That's why he was a coke addict, too! Did I know that? It was always something with him. As he fantasized aloud to me about a future he'd never really wanted to have, he pretended to me that he needed a fancy pair of designer headphones that every single 'hood rat from around the way sported on the trains, colored as they were to match the "kicks" (sneaks) and caps that were trendy then, like every sad pricey item that came before it, perpetrated by the same con artists who charged extra to their home crowd for the distinction of selling their shattered dreams of fame and stardom back to them, in an endlessly parasitic cycle that marks the life of hardened criminals.

After all, the rapper who sold them was from the "mean streets", too, yo! He makes some fresh gear that I just gots to have! It was always this craving for stuff that was barely hidden hidden behind false ideas about an American Dream that most of the cons never genuinely wanted, anyway. They'd be us, if they really wanted our lives to share. I'd known that as well, but like his other reveries, he didn't bear up under the close scrutiny of another native New York kid like him. He just wanted to sell you some "beats" that you missed out on, man! Hey, where were you for that? Huh. He wasn't there for it with you, you know. He just disappeared at the exact right time by lurking creepily in the background, to the murky depths lingering on the edges of any true society where he feels he belongs, happy to catch our petty little crumbs and call them "bad", because that's the way he liked it. Badly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beats_Electronics

Counterfeit

My attempts at creating a home out of the remnants of my aunt's apartment in Kensington were often met with sneers from the 30-something crowd who competed with us as teenagers at RISD (taking the one available scholarship for Illustration from us as well!). She dropped snippy remarks about my poverty, like: "Oh, this is such a claaasic 'starter' apartment", the very same privileged bitch who took college money from us by working professionally as a graphic designer for many years, and was taught illustration by her illustrator dad before going to school with us for Illustration (hence "winning" that Hallmark prize money, the one and only prize awarded to students for Illustration), living off the comfort that her IT husband provided for her. She then set at sabotaging our lives and work when she realized NYC was out of her reach (even after she ripped us off), to finally retreat to that northern place where all rich hippies go: Woodstock, NY.*

But enough about her. I was left with whatever my aunt didn't want to pack and move with her, like she was on the run from a serious crime, instead of the easy living my father's sponsored support provided her, present at each and every level of her life, which included (totally free of charge): apartments (in New York City), houses (in West Texas), jobs (in his company), healthcare (from out of his pocket as her employer), furniture, movers, cars, insurance, food...everything was always included. The only way I could do my apprenticeship in the city and stay alive was living in her cast-off apartment that had some furnishings, leaving me to pay off her monthly maintenance fee (it was a co-op), and all of the other bills that came with living in Brooklyn.

Anything else that I needed to survive, I had to either find, make do with, or do without. It was with this barely-able-to-eat budget that a basic answering machine came to mind because I had none, and I needed one for potential employers to contact me while I interviewed for work. I had nothing except my clothes, my artwork, a drafting table, and a few lamps, moving out of my mother's house at 17 for school, and not looking back. I have always been almost completely and totally on my own, for most of my life so far. I told my cousins from Sheepshead Bay (they liked to drink at the old man's bar on the corner, down the block from my aunt's place, because it's a cheap dive with a great jukebox), that I needed an answering machine, and they told me not to shop on Canal Street for home goods, but what could I do? I was flat broke with just my work savings from college jobs and a credit card, before I began living paycheck-to-paycheck.

I'd known about Canal Street since my student days, because there's a really well-known art supply store there, packed with several floors of stuff. It's the one place in the city where you can find everything you need to make art, and that's a rare thing. Back in the frontier days of Brooklyn, I had to do most of my shopping in Manhattan, and lug it home on the train or (if I just got paid) in a taxi, but that was extremely rare. Every penny counts. I screw up my budget, I starve. End of story.

So, I knew when I picked up a shrink-wrapped machine down on Canal Street (which cost me two subway fares to get to, for the ride there and back from way-out Brooklyn, taking me hours to do, with transfers and construction re-routing on the weekend) that I was entering into a shifty no-man's land of goods and services, a shady place to shop where there are no guarantees, but when was my life any different? If I didn't do something (anything) to help myself, nothing happened. Absolutely nothing changed, because no one did anything about it, just like it is today. It looked "hot" and slightly used when I picked it up in front of a street stall, but it was either this or nothing, so I bought it from some chain-smoking Chinese guy for $15.

My dad's cousin laughed drunkenly in my face the next time I saw him, because within a month, the two mechanical arms that sprang up when you needed to change the tape broke off. They completely popped out of their tracks, never to be put back into proper working order again. "I told you so", he slurred at me, and then he bought another round. Thanks. Within a week, I made the painful decision to invest in a $25-35 machine, knowing I'd feel the squeeze at the supermarket that weekend; no after-work drinks or take-out slices for me. When I turned to look around the joint, I simply saw myself reflected in the mirror behind the bar, because there was no one else to turn to. Ain't never been any different for me than that.

* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/trustafarian

Targhetto

He was just casually shopping at Target without any pants on, like any teen!

Every summer the city pops off into violent squalls, punctuated by house-party gangland murders. It's so regular to us town-and-country New Yorkers, we plan for it and even text about it to each other, like how we know that the drunks living next door to us will creep out of their rank dank holes once the sun comes out in May, to get violently drunk and cause problems now that winter's over, causing them to carve out their boringly repetitive and totally dysfunctional turf wars on property that isn't theirs, just like the descriptive term "porch monkey" was actually meant for: nonexclusive of skin tone, and they are indeed a stereotypically lazy lot at that (and also white).

Clichés are very good and especially functional for all societies, while also ripe for game-playing idiots. In  Brooklyn, it means you can flip a perp into a martyr by trotting out some cleaned up high school grad photos over yo kid's most recent mug shot when the shit hits the fan and he's screwed up with the law, yet again: neck tats not included, which is exactly what happened in Flatbush last week.

For years I've known about the teen phenomenon called "wilding", which is cutesy slang for this century's "jumping in": a vicious, seemingly random beat-down that's very much planned. When I lived in the Slope, I'd walk down 5th Avenue to Atlantic Avenue because it has an awesome Target store, and I could flip through the designer racks without fear of molested goods, like the pawed over markdowns in the Spring Valley shops here, that are picked over a billion times by Hasidim women with a lot of children, covered in makeup, sweat marks, deodorant stains, and other stuff you don't want to know about.

And so, I shopped in relative comfort for the "phresh" duds I needed to play my "Slick, Big City, Cover Designer" role to perfection by looking the part. It was (and still is) part of my overall presentation, and in any really good business, presentation counts. After one such journey through the clothing stacks, I was back on the floor putting back some duds that didn't work for me. It's a habit I picked up during my tenure as a teenie retailer in the old Nanuet Mall, an 80s heaven of a shopping mall when doing such a thing counted as a recreational sport.

I saw the fitting room racks clogged with clothes left by lazier shoppers than I, so I figured I give the floor ladies a break and do my own put backs onto the racks. Within a minute of leaving the changing rooms for the floor, loosening up the rack, and talking to a floor clerk who asked if I needed help, a...something broke out. I write that because it happened so fast, I was totally scared and unprepared for it, which turns out to be the point: pure shock value.

"What was that?! What happened?" I quickly turned to the store clerk. She sighed and said to me: "Yeah, this happens every afternoon around this time. Every day, and it's always between 3 and 3:30 in the afternoon, when the high school gets out. They're called 'wildings'. The kids text each other at school all day long, so they can arrange to meet here and have fights with each other."

Jesus! That's so scary!! I said to her, while my heart still raced. It was so fucking violent, and I'm a fighter. I thought someone had been stabbed. She told me that was the point, and that as far as "wildings" go, the one we just witnessed was pretty mild, in terms of violence, because no one had been stabbed. "So they do that, too?!", I asked. It was surprising to me, because the Slope and the surrounding neighborhoods are really good, well-established, old neighborhoods, independent of racial background. I mean, the hoods have been the hoods for a really long time, and not within the past 100 years. Where exactly do they come from? Prospect Heights? Fort Greene? Boohoo!

Many an African-American kid from around the way has a dentist for a dad, and a mom who volunteer teaches modern dance in the afternoons at the local BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music). The real "Fight da powa!" had passed for them a long time ago. But, I guess like a Bay Ridge kid's right of passage climbing the Verrazano on a dare, they needed to simulate danger and feats of strength as trials to their fragile identities, so they could brag to each about it later.

"Yeah", she sighed again, as she slowly reached for her walkie-talkie, when I asked if security knew. "Oh, yeah. They know," she clicked the call button, "so does the local precinct, because we call them almost every afternoon." She would know, because as I hurriedly shelved my rejected clothes and walked towards the elevators, she looked like she could be one of their own grandmothers: a decent, hard-working lady starting the second shift of her second day job.

Don't believe the hype, man. It ain't what it seems "in da 'hood" these days. Flatbush kids, I mean you, too. You can't get away with murder for kicks by blaming "the white man" anymore. We all have cameras in our cell phones, regardless of it's price point, and this savvy-with-retail working class mom knows the how much gear (yo shit) costs, or at least a roundabout guesstimate, anyway. Get real wit it, kid.

http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20150727/flatbush/video-police-punch-suspect-during-arrest-brooklyn-target

http://abc7ny.com/news/teen-arrested-in-mcdonalds-brawl-indicted-wednesday/554045/

Look at this purely ghetto-ass shit: the "moms" (or "grandmoms", who was probably made that at 40 fuckin' years old, or some twisted shit like that) jumps into the action with her nasty-ass attitude, while the baggy pants "security guard" loping around in the foreground (in reality, working his minimum wage after-school job while dreaming of his "big time" music career in the city as a "hiphop artist", most likely), looks on ineffectively, just like his punk ass has been doin' all along, totally hip to "da game". Tell me they don't fuckin' know about the trend that I've known about for at least 12+ years! That's some fake ass shit, right there. Home girl had the audacity to play victim with her boy's clean-cut yearbook pic on the evening news programs, which was a heck of a lot nicer than his fucked up (and much more recent) neck tattoo mug shots. But that's life in "da hood": a place where every day is some kind of bullshit con job. We on to you, hardcore, girl. Get it right! Jeeesus...what in the bitch is that....???! <shakes head in disbelief> "Oh, you triflin', petty-ass fool. Always lookin' for handouts. Fuck y'all man!" (That's what I said to the t.v. when I saw it play out on the local programs here in New York) "That's it! I've had it! Fuck y'all! I'm writing 'Targhetto' next week , bitches!!" <scowls mostly to self).

Take it to the bank

Traditional banking is going away for good, and I mean that sincerely. Why put your money in a safe house that's compromised? You don't. Banks were supposed to be the place where your paycheck was protected from the bad guys, but a fortress is only as good as its' security. As recent as two years ago, anyone could deposit money into any type of account, under any name, with no I.D. check. Yeah, that means what you're thinking. Your nice grandma with the fly car also has a grandson who deals drugs, and every week he'd put stinking cash reeking of pot smoke into her account, without anyone doing anything about it.

But that's why criminals worked as "inside men" at banks nationwide: that's where the money is, and that's what robbers steal. The banking industry has become such a magnet for illicit use (Off-shore banking, anyone? Sweden?), that the notoriously criminal firm of Goldman Sachs* recently announced their entrance into the banking game, for rich people only, of course: http://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-chair-writes-anticorruption-letter-2015-2.

I had my own run-in with the old crime syndicate a few years back, one that has its' hooks into every con in town, real estate and the city court systems included. The system temporarily bankrupted me, but not before I made each one of their key players do every financial tap dance there is, because no one messes with me and gets away with it. I am always a native New Yorker, no matter where I go.  

As the world's capital, we've always been a very wealthy area. Commerce was my dinner table conversation growing up, hence the lack of a business school on my curriculum vitae, but you didn't know that about me, did you? No, you didn't. That's because my dad was a greaser who played suckers for pool, one of my granddads' was a bookie during the Depression (in between pony rides), and they both taught me how to shuffle a deck of cards, just in case that junkie in Times Square wanted to shake me down playing "Three Card Monty" back in the day. So, we're back to the beginning, right? Not exactly.

After a corrupt system robbed me of all my pocket change, I was forced to do what I do best: improvise under the gun in the tightest of squeezes, which is exactly what I did. It's called "High Performing" in the circles where strong games are played. I ditched all my accounts, ran on cash, lived off my tax refund with a debit card from a chain tax service, then ditched that debit card the next year for a hard check. 

Of course, the well-known tax service couldn't cash it for me, because they aren't a bank. I knew that already, because I know businesses from the inside-out, and that's exactly what was told back to me: my own answer coming out of some admin's mouth (sorry, I meant "Office Manager"), which is certainly not my first ride around the block.

So, if you think financial calisthenics is the type of bloodsport you can handle, have at it. I know I can do any kind of weird gymnastics the system wants to throw my way. Sick and tired of being played? I got your back.  Read, learn, then do.

http://comptroller.nyc.gov/takeittothebank/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou_shalt_not_steal

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