After Midnight

Despite occasional harsh prejudices to the contrary, I remain an unpopular "day person" awake in the dawn of your socially acceptable manic-depression. In my small town of Pearl River, only two businesses operate 24/7, 365 days/year: the convenient store on the corner doing a brisk business in chemically-laden tobacco, booze, energy drinks, junk food, and lotto tickets, or the chain drugstore right across the street with its handy drive-up window. 

It speaks to our priorities about what we feel is most important to us in our lives, and it's the commercialized convenience of excess, which makes my natural body-clock jarring to the pale shakiness of a typical "night owl". Nor does it stop at a simple day/night dichotomy either, observed through the touchy tenderness about "alternative" circadian rhythms. It was in this vein that I suffered through each and every New Year's Eve with my mom growing up, who gets a "jolt of energy" (her words) between 10-11 p.m., moving around her carefully controlled, highly monitored "home environment" (her words again) to wash dishes and do laundry, then check her emails until 12 p.m.-1:30 a.m., unless of course I want to watch the UFC fights in her apartment airing "late" that end around her usual bedtime of 2:00 a.m. Then, my entire life and schedule is immediately suspect and abused.

It didn't matter how much my mom and her freaky friends or family "made fun" of me for sleeping at night, even if it was New Year's Eve. When you wake up between 6-7 a.m. in the morning, you go to sleep in the evening whether you want to or not, and that's healthy, except if you're paranoid and bipolar. Then, it's the complete opposite. Most of the seriously disordered people I know crave sugar, caffeine, or cocaine to get that rush when the depressive side of their illness kicks in, making them miss active late nights over a feeble, disabling, daytime lethargy. Of course, I can stay up for an event if I plan for it, but if I don't have to, I don't. It's simple: no dinner date or late-nite party to attend, I'm asleep. And I'll probably be working the next day. 

So, to all you lone wolves regularly sleeping with the sun like I do, know that you're not alone in your healthy sleep habits this New Year's Eve. And no, Jane, there's nothing wrong with getting a full 8-9 hours of sleep, despite peer pressure or what you've been told about "peak performance hours" for "maximum productivity". They're marketing buzzwords for anxiety and mania, anyway. Have a good night's sleep, and I'll see you all in 2017, fans of daytime. G-d bless. 

Arena

Warriors have always been regarded by society with fear, awe, and a little trepidation. Would you want to get on the bad side of someone who could kill you ten different ways before your body even hits the ground?! It might make friendships and relationships a little bit trickier, but I like to think that it makes us more honest and respectable towards each other, because we're both combatants. After all, fighting is a legitimate (and fun!) sport of women competing against other women, not men. It isn't a fair fight, anyway. Men have the biological advantage because of their greater height, strength, and muscle mass.

That's not to say that a female black belt can't take out a larger, less well-trained man, because they do so in dojos around the world every day. It's just stating that two athletes of the same skill and experience who are of different sexes are not evenly matched, which is why we do not compete in arenas together....in this century. In the past, prisoners, exiles, and other enemies of the state fought their way to freedom in Ancient Rome's Coliseum.

It is an awesome site to see. It's much bigger than it looks in pictures, which makes its past more frightening when you think about how many people watched other people (and every kind of animal known to mankind) die very violent deaths, for so many years. It was their Metropolitan Opera, major Broadway musical, and giant concert stage, operating around (and between) fights to the death. There were side stages, dropped floors with hidden panels, rising platforms bringing up lion cages to the main stage, chambers for costuming with props, an armory, and a network of highly sophisticated, intricately complex irrigation systems that flooded a stage with water, to re-create epic battles at sea for "The Empire". 

The sheer spectacle and grandeur of it, even all these years later...to say that the Coliseum is impressive is a totally inadequate understatement. It wasn't just the size and scale of their stagings, either. Gladiatore were huge stars. You can still see graffiti in Rome scratched into the ancient walls that publicize and congratulate favorite fighters of the day. Cemeteries have stone tributes to enslaved warriors who won their freedom from the empire through the shedding of blood for sport, which must have sat uneasily on a cornered Christian's shoulders, new as they were back then to the pagan state of Rome. It's a good thing we believe in forgiveness and redemption, mes gendarmes, because death by mass suicide isn't in our credo either. Rest easy, warrior.

The Book of Ende

Becoming a female illuminator in the late 20th to early 21st century has been arduous, odd, and ultimately, my raison d'etre thus far. Unlike, say, Impressionism or the Renaissance period, any examples I found of exceptional illuminating were extremely rare, and a female's excellent works rarer still. But, they were there. Back in my apprenticeship, St. Martin's Press had annual editorial buying trips to England, in a reverse production process that had us recalibrating equipment to accommodate film flats done the exact opposite of our photographic process used for plate-making on American presses, but I digress.

Murder mysteries were (and still are) an export with an easy audience here in the States, as any real publishing professional will tell you. Just look at the numbers for Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie, and the "Dial __ for Murder" series. My mother is particularly enamored with a British show currently airing on PBS about two older women who plan estate gardens and solve murders, in the exact same format every single week, which is the core demographic for any murder mystery audience.

Edward Gorey famously illustrated an opening spot for the introduction to the PBS "Masterpiece Theater" murder mystery series, in a gothic pen-and-ink style that had the 90s graduating classes of RISD's Illustration department completely under his spell: a cool, hermetic character who left New York City after his own career in publishing for Provincetown, to create work reminiscent of the the 1900-1930s Art Nouveau revival, but I digress again. 

At work, we produced a series of murder mysteries by British authors that I still have on my bookshelves, with one stand-out selection: "The Apothecary Rose". Here, we find a female herbalist working in a medieval abbey garden attached to a cloister, who also solves murders most foul. Back then, the weapon of choice was often poison secreted from the abbey garden or her own apothecary shelves, for death-dealing instead of healing. 

The same fictional construct used in murder mysteries was the actual historical context for female illuminators working in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: artists who were either raised in the family business of making books attached to a prestigious monastery, or the nuns working in the scriptorium of their own monasteries. It was uncommonly educated and rare for anyone to read, write, and paint with such skill, but for a woman? Well, that's another story entirely. 

Happy Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa, to my illuminated readers of 2016.

The Agony and the Ecstasy

Seeing famous art in person is revelatory for artists and designers. We first learn about art through slides (for older artists), photographed reproductions in textbooks (for most current generations), and now online jpegs (for GenY and Millennials), in images that don't capture the texture of a piece, or its lighting from different angles. There are a lot of details you can miss, like, say, the sexual orientation of the artist, and/or their deeply-ingrained personal preferences.

The "Ecstasy of Saint Theresa" was just such a piece for me, when I saw it on my honeymoon to Italy. It's so obviously NOT exclusively religious in emotional tone, that I was a little shocked no one else in the church noticed it. Bernini must have had one heck of an understanding patron, if you know what I mean. The Middle Ages and Medieval Europe were notoriously prejudicial against homosexuality, unlike the bathhouse days of ancient Rome; an embarrassing reminder of Italian decadence that brought "The Hand of G-d" down upon them through plagues and pestilence. 

The great cathedral-building days of Europe were a time for repentance and the outward shunning of excess, unless you were a gifted artist with a thing for sumptuously expensive fabrics backed by a very appreciative admirer with extremely deep pockets, like my man Bernini so clearly was. The statue, more than anything else, is about his careful study of drapery and, after that, sexual experiences between a saint and an ambiguously-gendered cherub thrusting a "ray of light" through her, as she falls faint at his/her feet.

So.....totally gay. Okay, well, that makes sense. Creative communities are usually very accepting. But, to get it placed as the main altarpiece in the center of a repressive, regressive medieval Catholic church? That takes balls only a real Renaissance master would have. I'm sure the crowd swooned when his statue was finally unveiled with a dramatic curtain pull from the artist himself, from a cord made of the most fabulously braided brocade, with his smiling, exceptionally generous patron standing right next to him, beaming proudly. Remember: it's all in the details, kids.

The Etruscans

My best friends’ father Charles was her first inspiration for studying history, though he'd pursued a psychology degree instead, which got him a stressful social workers’ job in the Bronx during the height of the citys’ struggle with crack cocaine in the 70s and 80s. After his idealistic post-college stint in the Peace Corps, a time of hippie experimentation with native sweat lodges and hallucinogenic trips on peyote buttons in the Mexican desert, he struggled to find meaning and equilibrium among the hard-hit minorities who came to his office for help. 

Instead, he found bitterness and a lack of understanding that ingrained in him a casual prejudice fueled by his own inertia and passionless marriage. It was hard for us to watch her hip, smart, educated parents from the city, the first to attend college in their families, go down so deeply into alcoholism and madness, but like so many of their "silent generation", they refused to admit the seriousness of their illnesses to anyone, so they could condescend to the people stuck in the ghetto, who they wanted to see as having so much less than us.

We'd find him puttering in his garage during summer breaks from school, sweating in the heat and avoiding his wife inside the house. He'd made a little workshop for himself there, so he could paint tiny military figurines in exacting period detail, while he expounded upon his favorite topics like the Etruscans, always delivered in the exact same way: "Girls, have I ever told you about the ancient Etruscans? They were a very advanced civilization that pre-dated the Greco-Roman time period. Most people don't know that." Ah, okay. It was better than the usual power struggles between her parents, with their tense silences and chain-smoking drunks that'd go on for days. We'd go on beer and cigarette runs for them just to get the fuck out of the house.

With a little encouragement, her father would go on to describe Etruscan burial mounds and their sophisticated societal hierarchy that would inform and inspire the later governments of the much more famous Greco-Romans. We found it touching that he clung to Italy's historical underdogs out of some sense of loyalty to them and their almost-forgotten world, like any real historian would. Though her parents never made it out of their personal struggles with addiction and mental illness, I can still see him in my mind's eye working in his garage, at a time when the whole world was opening up to us from between the pages of our college textbooks, in the cold mountains of an upstate New York winter. Ta, Charles. Thanks on that. 

Hieronymus Bosch

My quest to find Illuminators from the past (and present) took me to some interesting places, like "The Dark Ages" of Medieval Europe. At the same time, my best friend and college roommate's classes as a History major crossed over into the Art History and Painting classes I needed for my "two-degrees-in-four-years" program that I was enrolled in at Oneonta State, called the "2-1" (or "Two-To-One").

While I poured over the detailed Celtic knotwork in "The Book of Kells" like it was inscribed upon my heart (and it is, I know that), Karen delved into the socio-economic peculiarities of an uncivilized Europe caught in the massive death-grip of "The Bubonic Plague". Like the Salem witch-hunts of New England, paranoia and fear ruled the landscape, creating myths and superstitions that persist in the more rural parts of Western Europe to this day.

It was gothic and horrific, perfect intellectual fodder for two kids like us who'd already lived through some incredibly dark times, to study in the deep dark cold that settles upon upstate New York in a thick blanketing cloud of snow lasting six months or more, because that's "winter" to us. I could relate to her fascination with the macabre. I was a devout reader in my childhood and early teens of creepy and ghostly tales, like Edgar Allen Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death", considered one of the best pieces of literature ever written about the plague and its impact on medieval society.

One artist in particular grabbed her attention for a few months (or weeks) in an appreciation that has not abated time, for its stunning intricacy and originality: Hieronymus Bosch. Like the illustrations in the first edition of Dante's "Inferno", Bosch was seen as a gruesomely realistic painter who'd channeled Hell itself in his fantastical depictions of the imps, demons, and devils that lurked in the darkest corners of his twisted, surreal landscapes.

The amount of detail...it was captivating in its volume and visual complexity. How many creatures he'd crammed onto his canvases, like a man on fire to reveal the depths humanity had sunk to in its darkest hour; a real-life emotional landscape that captured the psychology of the times and the mindset of medieval man during one of the worst holocausts in human history. It must have felt smiliar to the fictional world of "The Walking Dead"; bodies piled by church graveyards at first, then covered over in carts, to finally be dumped by the side of the road in abandonment, festering and spreading even more disease.

Much as my generation (like many generations) still thinks of its cultural influences as widely known (like our music), I realize in middle-age that if I want to keep our kind of awareness alive, the type that sparked the interest of a few young scholars in late adolescence, then it's going to be me who does it. This is "My Illuminator's Life", in full circle. Enjoy it my little gremlins and goblins, because something wicked this way comes....and it's downright Medieval.

Poor Richard's Almanack

I didn't know anyone like me growing up, except through books and magazines. My older cousin was married to a graphic designer who designed HBO catalogs in the city back in the 80s (like a weekly "T.V. Guide" for cable), and then hand-painted wooden duck decoys at their home as her "creative outlet". Not exactly what I wanted to do as an adult, but then again, I had no idea how to tell people around me who I was and what I'd become: "sort of like Benjamin Franklin", which would've been met at the dinner table with lots of eye-rolling and violent denials. 

Usually, my brothers just called me "gay" or a "retard", so I spent most of my childhood in my bedroom with my best friends who lived in the books they wrote just for me; that's how it felt. It was warm, intimate, and always understood by me, which helped with the adversity in my childhood home that's also the world we live in. It's never easy to innovate, or "to become", or to be that thing people fear the most: powerful, educated, and righteous. It wouldn't have done me any good to talk about something so rare and special that eludes so many people for so long. Why chase after it?

Luckily, my dad loves history, government, politics, the military, and quotes, which gave me the plug-ins I needed to create space for my work to grow; work that was rough and under-funded so it would seem amateurish, though for the ferocity of the concepts underneath. "Concept is key" is one of his favorite sayings, along with this one attributed to Ben Franklin: "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise." He and I were the only regular nighttime sleepers awake before dawn to the awesome silence of a tense house so often governed by my mother's manic cleaning sprees and dramatic scenes, especially the evening before another stress-filled holiday that felt more like torture than celebration to us.

Then, we would have an excuse to go hiking in the woods before anyone else in the house woke up with their needs that took precedence over two "morning people" openly disparaged in a dreamy, late-night t.v. world that made chronic insomnia seem like this hip, new thing. Where would we have been without history and a few good quotes to back us up? I still go to bed way before it's considered "cool", to take quiet morning photos of empty streets filled with big dark houses under beautiful Hudson Valley sunrises. 

Wish you were here.

Landmine

I recently read online that a well-known American actress has "come out" as a former Scientologist, while promoting her film that accuses the cult of brain-washing and coercion, which definitely fits the profile for cult status. Former members are shunned from the community after they leave, like the practices of the Amish and Hasidim. It's an intensely painful way of assuring "brand loyalty", because once someone questions their commitment to certain doctrines within the religion, their families are immediately pressured by the rest of the group to conform the questioning family member back to their faith under threat of ousting, too, and failing that, they turn their backs on non-conformists for the rest of their lives.

Brutal, isn't it? But, the members of these groups point out that this is the way they maintain their traditions over the centuries (not that Scientology has a long history), and if an individual disagrees so strongly with their beliefs, why stay? They're free to go! The Amish have an adolescent rite of passage called "Rumspringa" that allows for freedom of expression through a temporary relaxation in their strict rules about smoking and drinking and dating, as long as it's done outside of the community's boundaries. Once that time period ends, the teenager has to decide whether they want to return to the community and re-affirm their beliefs, or leave for the world outside. 

It sounds deceptively simple, until you realize that by leaving their homes, they will never see their Amish family again, unless it's a quick "hello" from a car parked in front of the family farm by a lonely son waiting for his brother and sister to return from church in a horse-drawn buggy, because the Amish don't use electricity. Their shunning extends to the entire community, too; their parents will never know their children with the "English" (their word dating back to Colonial times for Americans living outside of Amish country), nor when their beloved grandmother passes away, or how many children their sister has with her husband. 

There are no birthday cards or anniversaries, weddings or funerals. To them, you cease to exist as if you had died, but you haven't. It's the particular pain of a deeply indoctrinated belief system that doesn't allow for sustained inquiries, because under the surface of their strict faith lies the doubt of their members who know they won't hold up for long under the scrutiny that serious challenging brings. That's not to say they aren't religious, moral, or ethical in their beliefs. 

When an emotionally disturbed man walked into an Amish school with a gun (they're pacifists who don't believe in weapons) and murdered their children, they issued one statement to the public about healing, then tore down the schoolhouse and built another one away from the site of the massacre. There were no lawsuits or ongoing prosecutions, no threats to sue or vows of revenge. They acknowledged what happened and moved on from it, in a powerful expression of forgiveness and faith. I think it made a lot of Americans see the other side of their lives, besides the rather tawdry reality shows on t.v. about ex-Amish and their struggles outside of the community.

For the bipolar receptionist at a small family firm I worked for, there were no other sides to her life or her faith. She was prone, vulnerable, and suffering. When her youngest brother pulled her into his quick-moving world of martial arts McDojo's and "Landmark" seminars, she fell hard for both pyramid schemes like a drowning woman clutching at a rope tossed to her in high seas during a really bad storm. In lieu of actually healing from her serious brain disorder(s), she'd been fed a steady pop culture diet of group therapy, rehabs, extremely expensive pharmaceuticals, and, yep, more talk therapy, but no cure. In the wake of healing, the hard-pushed and deceptively marketed products of the world pulled her under, into her next psychotic break from reality, because the pressure of a fully-functioning adult life was too much for her to bear.

When the members of her Landmark group sensed blood in the water after she started attending their "sessions" and "classes", they moved in on her with great force. I'd pulled away from her after her unrequited crush on a 19 year-old at the dojo that quickly became obsessive officially kicked off her down-spiral towards illness again, because I could see she wasn't handling the intensity of fight training well, and given her psychosis, exposing someone as sick as her to violence was like putting a match to gasoline to watch it explode. It seemed cruelly unnecessary. 

Whereas her brother and her new friends from the group benefited from the est-style seminars, she quickly became entangled in their network overmuch, staying on the phone for hours at work with Landmark members who put the "hard sell" on her to find more people so she could afford more classes, in classic pyramid-scheme style. One of the more memorable images from that time period was a story she told me about all-day "lectures" with severely restricted, member-supervised food and bathroom breaks, while they were shouted at from onstage by the senior people in the organization running the show. They decided when a member had enough, or if they needed more pushing. If they found their extremely personal reveals acceptable, they would ring a large bell that everyone in the auditorium could hear, yelling "BREAK THROUGH! BREAK THROUGH!", like the proverbial Pavlov dog salivating at a dinner bell. She never had a chance.

http://m.motherjones.com/media/2009/07/landmark-42-hours-500-65-breakdowns