"We want the airwaves, baby!"

A bunch of loud-mouth, no-talent "nobodies" from Queens, N.Y.

 
Part of any genuine rebel movement is acquiring attention, sometimes by any means necessary, although the intention is to always have a firmly authoritative foothold on your audience's consciousness, which falls outside of a teenager's general parvenu. It's the main reason that my first outsider culture, punk, had to grow up. Heat, energy, and movement is fast fun, but after awhile, noise just makes your head hurt. Musicians with long legs in the game learned to play their instruments properly, and after my wild excesses of high school and college, I was sick of the stupid drunk parties. Raping frat boys and vomiting girls are not people one aspires to be around as an adult.

And so I moved on from my infamous New York State party school because I had enough, and I was bored with easy classes. It was a mature decision, and it cost me a lot to make it: studio credits well-earned but not accepted in the Ivy League, friends not confident enough to make it on their own without my constant steadying support, plus a boyfriend or two. I considered it (and still do) and great bargain to become educated, because the kids who couldn't follow along with me would be hangers-on, anyway. They'd hate my new life, studies, and interests. 

It opened up parts of my personality they didn't know (or like). My person changed, grew, and adapted, while my old friends peaked, stopped growing, and then just stopped, sometimes living. It made them extremely nervous around me, and they sought to sabotage my new life violently; a new life that was shifting in front of their eyes. 

One friend accused me of having a totally new signature as proof of my extreme changes, though in reality, it was brought on by being constantly busy as an apprentice in publishing (which she then mocked by prank-calling me at work to say that my new house was for nobodies, a sure sign of threatened youth) and my easy adaption to adulthood. My hand continues to develop into a busy-person's scrawl, not unlike the handwriting of a doctor who writes all day long.

Another friend wanted to sabotage my new group of friends by sleeping with a guy who used to date this girl I set him up with at school, then flirting with my boyfriend while he hung about my aunt's place, looking for a life in the city. In any case, I evolved past all of them, which was their great fear: not being able to ride on my coattails any more for the free fun ride.

One of the worst let-downs (though not totally unexpected) was my best friend from high school and SUNY, who decried me as a "sell-out" for my beginning salary of $17,500 a year at St. Martins' Press; a place I could only afford to work and compete with trust fund English Lit majors by using my aunt's place as a crash-pad. She tried to position it as someone who was looking out for my best interest as a children's book artist, though in reality, she wanted an object to show her students in class, to boost her rep as a new teacher.

The RISD girl was even worse. After giving her a place to stay that was huge and practically rent-free, she also chafed about my new learnin' and a-changin' and a-growin', by ripping out some ad from The New Yorker about a therapist specializing in "creative" people who stopped producing, because she couldn't torpedo the new production and design skills I was learning in the city if she didn't have layouts and drawings to look at.

It didn't stop at work or at home, either. Once I reached the coveted Art Department as a Manager who could do business and book design, the claws came out of the bitchy SVA show-pony crowd, which told me (yet again) how threatening I was to them and their system. 
A well-known Creative Director (then, an Art Director on the rise) has never stopped gunning after me. He bragged about setting balls in motion to harness, control, then humiliate, demean, and fire me at work by trying to position me with a lower skill set than the other one trick ponies at the stable. He told me dismissively in front of a group of designers that my name really meant "Secretary", after reading some pop culture book on name meanings (and repeating it often), because I was behind the slick city crowd in desktop publishing skills, but way ahead in life, and art. It was unnerving.

But all the madness I went through was purposeful and driven, though not always clearly defined enough for my competitors. How do I know it worked? You're reading it right now, because I AM THE MEDIA, and I have made it all the way to the top. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, suckas. Shout that from the mountaintops, baby.

"Generation X" by Doug Copeland for St. Martin's Press (© 1990's): produced by Twisne Fan, Marie Doucette, and Curt Alliaume in several consecutive, co-running, differently-colored versions. 

"We Want The Airwaves" 

Nine to five, and five to nine
Ain't gonna take it, it's our time
We want the world, and we want it now
We're gonna take it anyhow

We want the airwaves
We want the airwaves
We want the airwaves, baby
If rock is gonna stay alive

Oh yeah
well alright
Let's rock
tonight
All night

Oh yeah
well alright
Let's rock
tonight
All night

Where's your guts and will to survive
And don't you wanna keep rock 'n' roll music alive
Mr. Programmer, I got my hammer
And I'm gonna smash my, smash my brain!

We want the airwaves
We want the airwaves
We want the airwaves, baby
If rock is gonna stay alive

Oh yeah
well alright
Let's rock
tonight
All night

Oh yeah
well alright
Let's rock
tonight
All night

We want the airwaves airwaves
We want the airwaves airwaves
We want the airwaves airwaves
We want the airwaves airwaves
We want the airwaves, baby 

Reading

Ah, that "Q" is perfection. Well done!

I've been a reader for so long, I don't actually remember when I couldn't read. I know I was a very early reader, about 2 or 3 years old, and so was my oldest brother. My mother said he taught himself to read The New York Times so he could check the Mets score, and that certainly may be true. 

I know I attended a pre-K reading class for toddlers at the local library, because I begged my parents to take me to school so I could read, and that was the closest they could find to nursery school before 
I went to an actual school, during the brief year we lived in rural Pennsylvania after leaving the city, before settling down in the Hudson River region.

Discovery and a new chapter.

It's hard for me to describe an experience I do so fluently; it's almost a subconscious thing at this point. I take in information so quickly visually, that I see things way before the lay person can. I've likened in to being an expert swimmer dipping and swirling through the clearest, warmest tropical waters (and I am that, too). Reading is a feeling so sensuous and fluid, few hobbies can replicate that kind of pleasure for me, and I know the same is true for other hardcore readers. 
We occasionally speak between nose dives.

Oh, I've designed flaps like this before.

Few hobbies create the kind of erudition and experience that bibliophiles have, with the exceptions of medical fields and clergy. 
We empathize immediately with the writer, because as soon as we read words, we're right there with the author. Some of us are so adept at it, we work at it professionally through publishing and media. Unlike a purely visual artist, I am also a writer and reader: the harmonious blend of a variety of highly skilled sets that transcend majors taught at the leading universities.

Lots of decorative elements and ink coverage. Some gaps in typesetting.

And so it is that I can talk with ease to an advanced physicist at their level, because I read their words when I design books for the students majoring in their curriculum. I sing along perfectly to Ella Fitzgerald while I riff through a series of graphics that vibe off one another, like a flutist times himself to a jazz pianist, either in the planned syncopation of an orchestration or the more advanced styling of an abstract expressionist who goes off on a tangent. 

To find someone who can follow along like that is the rarest of the rare, and just like the books we collect, so too are the odd ducks of the creative world who finally find their intellectual homes within the great literary houses of the world: those weird combinations of dancer, musician, photographer, model, writer, reader, designer, engineer, artist, and muse, because we are all of those things, and so much more. Open a book, and come find us. We'll be there between the vanilla-scented pages of a hundred year old volume and the near-constant flickering of a computer screen. See you soon.