Idol Worship

The differences between kids from upstate versus the ones from downstate can be pronounced, as we were to find out during college. Much like the rest of the country takes the social distortions of Hollywood to be synonomous with being Californian so, too, do upstaters sometimes feel mischaracterized by ethnic stereotypes from the tri-state area. Whereas southern New York is almost tropically warm during the spring, summer, and fall (made more acute with global warming), winter for many New Yorkers is the same as Canada: long, brutal, and cold.

In Oneonta, we had a saying: the sun set in September and came back in June, giving us nine full months of cloudcast winter. You had to bring the jolly with you, is what I mean, rather than being overly dependent on nature's cues about weather and personality. Suffice to say, me and my friends were more accustomed to a colder climate than the city kids warmed by so much heat-retained pavement, and the Gulf Stream that blows through coastal New York. Rockland County is at least 5 degrees cooler than the coastline, sometimes as much as 10-20 degrees, especially at night. It fools you into thinking that those city miles to the country are no big deal, but the Hudson River's massive size takes umbrage at that bold claim.

Suffice to say, it shows up in our varied taste, styles, and cultures, often worse for the wear. Like rednecks everywhere, hard-to-reach mountain terrain can breed some strange bedfellows, like those of our dorm-mate Tracey from Buffalo, and our "crazy Injun" friend Dave from Schnectady. We met Tracey from down the hall through her roommate on the soccer team, Lisa, who rocked a softball mini-mullet like the 80s would never die. Their uncanny retro qualities, channeled while living in the present, signalled to us of their rural clans proud identity as stallers of change and slowness to adapt. A lot of folks "head to the hills" seeking escape from the pressures of conforming to everyday societal norms, and they're proud of it.

Into this reactionary niche fit punk rock star turned pop culture MTV videomaker, Billy Idol. He'd gained fame as a young musician for the band "Generation X", to churn out hit after hit and video after video in the 80s. It was catchy at first, but then, almost instantly, his overplayed songs became dated, just like our upstate friend's 10-12 year lag behind our more sophisticated urban values.  Songs like "Rebel Yell" reflected their stubborn insistence at pushing away trends and new things the way vampires hate the sign of the cross. It spoke to their view that the rest of the world sucked, in rejection of their almost non-status as upstaters who felt shunted by the downward cast of Albany to the more populated areas we came from.

The first time me and Karen knocked on Tracey's door, we were greeted with her credo drawn onto the dorm door's message board that read "Idol Worship Lives!" in the logo type of his album covers. Oh...okay. They chafed similarly at my cool drawing posted on our door, done in a surreal "Alice in Wonderland" illustration style that was later ripped off, but not before the Lawnguyland girls wrote on it to let us know they disapproved of us as so-called "hippies", what with Karen's turtlenecks worn under her sports sweatshirts and big silver cross, paired with my cooler rocker-chic flair. Those girls smoke pot and attract boys=bad. We'd made our mark on them that quickly.

But, worshipping a dyed-blond skinny dude in leather pants? Uh, not exactly our style. He was too cheesy for us, and he always looked like he was on heroin, with his dark undereye circles. What was there to love? His videos were even worse; tacky over-produced "art tableaus" for people with poor taste, rife with pseudo-religious imagery he'd ripped off from Catholicism to seem commerically counter-culture. Wanker. British pop stars were "a dime a dozen" for us back then. We didn't need them to become cults of personality for us.

Sure enough, "Pretty Boy" Dave and Tracey from down the hall hooked up early on during the first semester, because he was drunk and she was smitten with his looks. It was great fun for us, because we got to hear in detail how Dave was too drunk to "do the deed", passed out on her twin-sized dorm room bed. She was cool about it, too, laughing it off the next time we were all together, because homeboy hadn't remembered their encounter, like whether or not he had sex. He didn't. It became our party circuit's favorite target for awhile, expressed through the punk rock song "Too Drunk To Fuck"* as Dave's theme.

Tracey "heehawed" at his attention-getting antics right along with us, brushing off Dave's puppy lust like the solid blond girl she was. No big deal. "That kid's got a lot to learn, and not by me. He's so cute, though!" Yeah, we all liked Dave. Then, she went back to smoking her cigarette, drinking her coffee, and putting on her makeup on a face that was underneath some of the hardest sprayed hair on the whole campus, and that was hard to beat. She just rolled with it, like the fun country girl she is. You, rocker. Rock on! Those were the days of our early lives, and nothing could beat it. Seriously. She was 23 and had already been to a community college. We were just geting started.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Drunk_to_Fuck

Summer Storm (2015)

 

Walking home in the rain, on a Sunday afternoon.

Going to Graceland

We were much more Beatles fans than Elvis fans growing up in my household, a distinction in tastes sharply noted in "Pulp Fiction", in an infamous scene between John Travolta and Uma Thurman. My college boyfriend was an Elvis fan from Brooklyn, which is sort of like being an urban cowboy. It didn't fit, but he liked to cop tastes contrary to the norm to appear different, like sporting a beret or wearing an ascot.

And so I found myself going to Graceland one summer, on an epic road trip that spanned the South to my Dad's place in West Texas. I love road trips, finding them much more preferable to horribly bumpy and terribly turbulent flights that go against the Gulf Stream, a fact that was confirmed for me when my Colorado boyfriend began private pilot lessons. It's gotten worse, too, from compulsive over-travelling brought on by a runner's type of fast pace neurosis that's as addictive as their high sugar and highly caffeinated lifestyles. Chemtrails are the sign that you've polluted the sky, you ugly American.

My exes would fight me on my American preference for the open road, but given my quickness of mind, I usually won out, as I did in this case, because my Brooklyn boyfriend didn't have a driver's license or a car. He was captive to me and my advanced skill sets, a state of affairs that never abated during our acquaintance, much to his chagrin. I made the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia my first day driving, to a smog-filled summer's day that took the wind out of my sails for the rest of the trip. Going to some tourist trap to see the housed remnants of a overdosed singer I never really liked? Great. What a way to spend my summer.

Two days later, I brought us to the state of Tennessee, for a tour of Elvis Presley's house. My very stoned boyfriend was so out of it from getting high in the parking lot, he blurted out that he wanted to see "EVERYTHING!", when the ticket agent asked him which tour he wanted. We'd been flagged by the golf cart security duo as outsiders, for walking towards the house from the graffitied walls outside the grounds, when you were supposed to know to go across the street to buy a ticket, even though no signs were posted with instructions to do so. When he found out that it would cost us over $150 (in 1988, on a working class college kid's budget), he blanched white, and in an embarrassed whispered aside, I told him to just do the house tour.

It was horrible. Priscella still lived in the top floors when she was in town, so we went past his recording studio and racketball court to an impromptu grave site in their backyard, which gave me a blessed moment of silence among the weird hick crowd, who worshipped him like he was some sort of demigod. They also toured his tour buses, his car collection, his costumes, his airplane collection (one of which was named the "Lisa Marie"), and a movie theater that showed his films exclusively. I half-heartedly bought a couple of tepid souvenirs in the gift shop, and then we got back on the road.

My naive New York City boyfriend didn't know how much trouble I steered him out of, until we stopped at a gas station in Mississippi, with a visibly pregnant (and cigarette smoking) woman talking with the clerk behind the counter. They both narrowed their eyes at us when we walked in, eyeballing his dopey "CULTURE" t-shirt, with the word emblazoned over a picture of 70s rhinestone jumpsuit Elvis visiting the White House, posing with Nixon in the Oval Office and shaking hands. He wanted to make an ironic hipster statement that was cutesy "tongue in cheek", and definitely not appreciated by them, which was backed up by our brief exchange with the rural couple at the counter.

The large beer-bellied clerk said to him: "What does that t-shirt mean, boy?" My young boyfriend nervously deferred to him with two palms up, in a conciliatory gesture: "Oh, we've just been to Graceland. It was awesome!." I paid for the gas and asked for smokes, while the two hicks pondered his statement. After a very long pause with continued staring, the large man finally said to us: "Well, we worship him around these here parts." And with that, we were back on the road, albeit with a much more sober and quiet white kid from the city sitting next to me.

Happy trails to you America, on all of your summer road trips. For most of the masses, this is prime vacation season. Just be sure to steer clear of rural areas that worship dead, drug-addicted rock stars. See you 'round the way, mes amis.

CULTURE

Insane Cat Posse

Uh oh. I feel eyes on me, like I'm being watched....

Rockland County rednecks like lots of things: Hooters, hot wings, beer (all in one great location), huntin', big trucks with flashing lights and awesome monster tires with stripper silhouettes on them mudflaps, and dollar stores. The dollar store in my town is no different than, say, a Wal-Mart is out west. There are pairs of scratchy polyester pants, cheap plastic shoes; in fact, a bevy of plastic goods that "off-gas" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outgassing) at such an alarming rate, you get a headache if you're in there long enough. It's an unhealthy but sometimes necessary place to shop, for financial reasons.

Ah!! Scared the bejeesus outta me!

And just like my truckin' neighbors, the t-shirt rack rarely disappoints. It's a wealthy mix of loud cheesy prints, sayings, and slogans, most of it overly jingoistic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingoism) nonsense about flags with colors that don't run, big deer heads, guns, and camouflage prints that relay strong fears about "foreigners", and that's just the male shirts.The women tend to like chocolate and cats; lots and lots of cats. This one design is so particularly egregious, such a high temple to offensively bad taste, I had to snap a few pics. These cats' eyes follow you, and they are angry; oh so angry. Beware. Halloween is a'comin'.

Half Moon Sky

Half Moon in Daylight.

The Rabbit Head

WTF?!

I was on my way to the library, when I saw this from across the street. I had to cross the street for a closer look. Sometimes I see random objects hung in the chain link fence, like the skateboard sold at the dollar store or a missing baby sock, but this stuffed animal took me way back, to a time when me and my brother outgrew our childhood toys forever. 

Instead of play, my Barbie doll got a Mohawk haircut that I dunked into a paper cup of blue food coloring on the kitchen counter, and we froze my brother's Stretch Armstrong doll in the freezer, just for kicks, to see what the red goo inside would do. It cracked into big chunks after we took it out and threw him onto the hard kitchen tiles. Oh. Neat! 
After that initial experimentation, everything we had was up for grabs. 

Oh, I see. It's "Don't let this be you!" in kid-talk.

My Kermit the Frog doll was hung by a rope-fashioned noose from the top of the stairs by my brother and our cousin, as a tribal warning to me when I came through the front door about what was in store. Aha! Something was afoot with those boys, and methinks our childhood is officially over. I could fight the tides that be, but true to me, I shrugged it off and joined in the fun. 

Kermie went into the dryer, Barbie was blown to bits by firecrackers (after she drag raced Mad Max style a few times in several horribly disfiguring crash-and-burn scenarios), and then we just simply tore things apart. The next year in junior high school, we read Lord of the Flies for the first time. Lesson learned.

Crescent Moon

Sunset and Moon, tied together forever: "Anaksunamun!"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankhesenamun

 

Rockland County Redneck

Tits, guns, cows, and lots of red meat. Fuck you, city folk!

Believe it or not, we have serious hicks in New York. It's hard for outsiders to acknowledge that, because they see these crime dramas on t.v. about city people, but truth is, we have an enormous amount of wilderness here; a state so vast up north, driving in that direction will take you to Canada.

I need fake books, hot wings, and beer to be American!

And so, we have certain pockets that stand out in stark contrast to the neurotic, uptight, therapy-case Manhattanite who's originally from "Lawnguyland", or "Long Island", as it's referred to in English. Upstaters chafe at "The City", citing Albany as the state capital and all them types that frequent urban areas as being different and threatening to them and their culture, and they aren't exactly wrong about that.

Spelling and punctuation sucks! If you do it right, you're a pinko liberal.

Truth be told, an upstate accent sounds much more like a Wisconsin "donchaknow" type of folksy backwoods talk than a "Nuyorican" (a New Yorker of Puerto Rican ancestry) who's lived on one city block for his entire life. Provincialism exists everywhere on the globe, and we are no exception in that regard, either.

Mah huntin' dog gets me through deer season. Fuck you! Go hump a tree.

But ideally, genuine native New York culture is actually one that incorporates town and country, like the magazine of the same name. Urbane, sophisticated people typically have a home at the beach or in the woods, and an apartment in the city, switching up locales on the weekends and holidays. It's a harder lifestyle because it necessitates a certain level of income, but also a flexible and adaptable mentality to go along with the life, too.

I needs guns to express myself, asshole. Get a job!

It's something me and my group of friends have always had that marks us as not quite fitting into rigid categories of "city", "country", or "beachcomber", which some people trade on and off like a set of clothes. We do it all because we love it all: the beach, the mountains, the woods, the waterfalls, the wild untamed forests, the parks, the culture, the food, the weather, the changing landscapes with their exceptionally beautiful vistas, and most importantly, our fair Gotham.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Yorker

To know us well is to know and appreciate those things, too, with all their individual facets, and if you can't do that, then we don't have much to talk to you about, so bounce, muthafucka, because that's how we roll. Keep up, will ya?

Nature: Bronzed and Glowing

Where are the leprechauns?!

I had an interesting week (as usual), which included walking among a profusion of huge mushrooms in a local park, grown overlarge thanks to springs' watery bounty, picking up a few beautiful objects for my personal perusal (now part of my natural collection), and having an animal encounter of the closest kind. Let's begin, shall we?

Hmm...maybe behind these toadstools?

First up: a absolutely shining, beautiful collection of perfectly bronzed mushrooms, flourishing in the springtime sun and remaining rather unmolested by human disturbance. It looked like a leprechaun's fairy tale home, or maybe the tiny abodes of some quick and unseen sprites, hiding behind a stand of trees and looking at me from afar.

Whoa! The is one HUGE mushroom!

A few specimens were of the largest kind that I can't remember seeing before, and which I'm attributing to our rather profuse rainfall. I dabbled in mycology last year (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2013/10/mushrooms.html), but concluded (after closely examining a few specimens on my mom's kitchen table), that foraging for cooking would be best done under the watchful eyes of an experienced, licensed guide. I don't want a bad trip, the worst trip being my untimely death, but I did really want to keep a few.

Hey! Who took a bite?

The other plants grew with equal veracity, as this fairy circle attests to. I mean, honestly, those fairies need to be less obvious when creating their homes with secret entrances growing in the ground.

A rather obvious fairy circle. Can you see it?

For scale, I got a picture of a fly resting on the trunk of one such monstrous 'shroom. Good Lord! Look at it! The next day, sadly, it was gone, harvested by a braver soul than me, surely. I hope it tasted good, or at least provided some fun and harmless recreational amusement.

For scale: fly on "Mushroom Monster".

Another beauty is this perfect robin's eggshell, so unique in it's representation of a color that we still refer to it as "Eggshell Blue", or "Robin's Eggshell Blue", as the shelves at your local paint store will surely attest to: a classic, timeless color.

A robin's eggshell at my fingertips.

While at the park, I took a rest after practicing some tai chi, when I noticed some motion below. Aha! An inchworm! Why, hello there "Inchie". It's the season for them to come out, releasing strands into the air, looking for something (or someone) to attach itself to.

Hard to capture on camera!

I played with it for awhile, picking it up on a stick, trying to capture an image for you to see. The funniest part was a trick of light that produced a halo effect around my new, tiny friend, not unlike those cute lil alien critters from that YA special The Host, by you-know-who (think Twilight series....shudder).

Glowy inchworm. Friend or alien foe?!

Another bronzed beauty in my path was the perfect leaf, shined by nature to a luster and sheen that a human would be hard pressed to capture on their own. So inspiring! As always, such beauty awaits us in the world, for all of us to see, for free.

Bronzed beauty.

Last, but not least, is the beautiful and also obvious to spot wild onion, which grows alongside a bevy of other edible beauties, like wild garlic, other types of onions and shoots, wild grapes, small sour crabapples, you name it. There's so much to harvest around here, that I'm glad I still remember my country ramblings as a kid; the familiar alongside the extraordinary, a type of every day magic that I realize is so rare, I'm still awed by it as an adult.

Wild onion.

I hope your week is as fruitful as mine, even if it's "just" the humble country walk. You never what (or who) you may find out there in the world. Happy Trails to you!

Me? I gotta have park.

Winter Beckons

Blue patterns on snow, and dark shadows.

Afternoon shadows, winter light, and freshly fallen snow.

Frozen pond and snow-covered bush in winter landscape.

Cottages: The Fall Edition

Fall colors, afternoon light.

Made for autumn images of the quaint, quiet life, in the Hudson Valley. 
http://www.pinterest.com/mariedoucette/cottages/ 

Blue house, yellow tree.

Afternoon light, tall pines.

Picket fence, autumnal leaves.

Small Town America: Country Roads

Back road to town.

Bower of branches.

I love old country roads, especially the kind of back roads we have here in the Hudson Valley: winding, curvy tree lined roads, free of traffic, with nothing but a green bower of branches overhead. New York City driving is a thrill of it's own, like something out of a video game; it's fast and stressful and occasionally fun, but real relaxation behind the wheel happens when no one is around to witness it. It's just you, a car, the pavement, and the sky above. That's freedom to many Americans, and small town people know what I mean about the pleasures of an empty rural country road laid out for miles in front of you, without any traffic in front or behind to get into your head.  Relax, and enjoy the ride.

Country road.

A Walk in the Park: Playgrounds

 The city in the country.

There's something creepy to me about empty playgrounds. Most of the scariest bully attacks happened to me on playgrounds as a kid. Me and my cousins were surrounded and hassled by a big group of tormentors, on a family visit to their hometown, when our parents urged us out the door to "go out and play". Some fun. I whispered to my cousins to make a run for it at my sign when the older kids were distracted by some other young kids coming to play in "their yard", and they did. Nothing like running for your life, being chased by several very large punk ass kids, jeering and making threats at your heels, to give wings to your feet. Never have I run so fast for so long without getting winded. It remains my example to that very basic question: fight, or flight?

Getaway ride? I think not.

Me? I'm a fighter. I stand my ground. But my younger cousins from upstate would never had made it out alive using their fists with these toughs from the city,  who came with the flight families made to what they thought harbored safer grounds in the suburbs. See that empty horsey ride? Yeah, I don't like the looks of it either. What do some things remind you about childhood? Night lights, for a fear of the dark? Open closets, to foil those horrible nightmarish monsters? Tell me. Mommy understands.

Fly away home.

Nature: Meets Pavement

A Maple leaf print.

A helicopter lands.

You see different things in the country. Pavement marks in the city usually say that someone loves someone else, or they were here; desperate signatures from a place teeming with people seeking to make their mark, though more often frustrated, alone, and unheard.


Here, it's nature that does the louder talking in a much gentler way: a leaf falls from a tree, and a helicopter lands on the ground, quietly but powerfully, making the same impact on cement.

It reminded me that a yell and a whisper both say volumes if we learn to listen better. What do you hear?