Vanilla

The rather typical Jewish family I worked for years ago liked to embellish themselves with decorations, to make up for their obvious embodiment of average New York stereotypes: they were short, annoying, bland, and "artsy", without having any real drive or talent. They wanted to appear "interesting", except they weren't, at least not for the commonly-held ideas they sold around town to a gang comprised mostly of outsiders. I liked their native roots the best; he, as an athletic man who studied ballet with some of the greats back in the day, and she, as a Brooklynite growing up in a strong Eastern European neighborhood by the beach that remains so to this day.

They met in college. She was already a risqué "gay divorcee" who had to be talked into marriage by him, a pathologically shy orphan raised by his grandparents who learned to approach strangers by sitting on park benches to force interactions with pretty girls. They were odd eccentrics with typically neurotic mental problems, and that was more engaging to me than their "New Yorker" brand of popular intellectualism, sans the real intellect needed to sustain new ideas, or even slightly visionary ones sometimes. But, they were pretentious about literature and they had lots of money, which are both my bags.

Like many people who aspire to creativity, they decorated their office with kitschy types, the same way they hired an expensive gardener to create a balcony none of us regularly used, because it was in direct sunlight at lunchtime and done almost completely for show. You couldn't sit out there at comfortably in the bright noonday sun that high off the ground, and I was often way too busy to do so, working at my desk while eating lunch. If I did venture outside of my studio space during the workday, it caused a stir that rippled throughout the office for the rest of the day, so dull were they in comparison to me. It was a reflection of their poor character, made by flashing money around where it wasn't needed (like your average bourgeoisie), preferring to spend thousands of dollars on their bullshit "outdoor garden", in lieu of creating an investment plan for their employees to retire on. They were almost completely full of shit.

Same thing with their kids. They had a grand piano lugged up to the publishing offices, hiring another expensive gadget-maker to tune the thing every week, even though none of us had the time or inclination to play, because we aren't musicians-for-hire. Both of them bragged about drawing income from the company without really giving a full effort into making the company profitable. The son liked to say he was a musician (as a hobbyist not earning from his music), hiring a company to make CD's he could pass around the office, without being good enough to ever earn a recording contract with a major music company.

The daughter was even worse. The son could do some IT/computer work they needed as a smaller cheaper company (being dumped when we leveled-up to the majors), but the daughter was a total disaster. She wasted millions of dollars, freely spending Euros overseas in London, so she could pretend to be a "playwright" over there because she wasn't good enough to breakthrough into our native Broadway theater scene. She even bragged to me about it one time, while trying to force me to make color copies about some article done over her expensively decorated flat there, while we still didn't have a decent 401K plan.

In short, they were total cunts best ignored by the entire staff, which we flagrantly did, often with wild abandon, so arrogant and condescending were they to us, as the actual hard-working talent that the back of their family business stood on. They were desperately striving and achingly insecure, which was great fun to watch, because they had to continually escalate their "quirky factor" almost in direct proportion to our greater gifts earned through hard work. I designed the cover for a hot new best-seller? Okay...let's force our bad housewife photographer friend on her as a test, so she has to look at her book without insulting her (or us by extension), as the company benefactors. Done!

I learned a long time ago about lifting money out of the wallet of a rich buffoon without actually stealing from him, making our trade the most honest kind of business they'd ever done. They were actually paying me market value for my talent, a rarity then as it still is now. Did the other Art Director receive some sort of kudos publicly in a meeting, as the lesser of two designers working in-house? Hmm...let's call in that total bitch of a rich housewife we know (the one who did weird shit to the walls in her husband's spare time and called it "interior design") and make the real designers talk to her....and so it went. They'd hire one of their rich cronies' bored housewives to be a company admin, or put one of their nephews on the payroll to gossip, spy on us, and do boring database shit we didn't have time for.

Almost every week, they played a "one-upmanship" game only they knew about, so busy were we with the real business that made money, next to their arty side ventures that went nowhere and did nothing, like the old man's wife and her bad poetry. It only won obscure awards no one heard of because she had the time, money, and manpower to use the office and its staff to submit work for her, done in the 60s when she was at home with her kids. That must have been fun. I could practically see the old man pulling out his hair at the office, back when he worked for S&S, eager to push a distraction on her that fed her voracious ego. They were monstrous to behold during their worst fits, almost pure evil down to their rotten cores, such was the level of their incomprehensive unawareness and sheer ignorant naivety.

Most of their staff reflected their poor decisions, rampant egomania, and various mental illnesses, in one way or another, except for moi. I expected to be revealed soon, as is my level of exposure in society, and so I was prepared for it. They sicced sick person after deranged weirdo after secretive lesbian after me, and none of them penetrated me in the slightest degree, because I fed them whatever I wanted them to know, so I could set events into motion, like "The Maestro" I am famous for. After a certain point in one's career, playing office games with mental patients becomes a bloodsport. Sometimes I felt bad for them (okay, every single day), and I'd tell them the unvarnished truth about themselves and their respective conditions, which they pretended to be offended by, as I passed by their desks on my way back to the studio that made the books we sold for a healthy profit. 

I did it because it was my job, not because I wanted to shock the plain-looking Jewish girl from Long Island sitting at the front desk, with her "scandals" about sex she didn't understand or know how to have properly, within clear earshot of respectable business-types with keener minds than she'd ever met before. The slutty office girl sleeps around? Huh...well, I'll be a "monkey's uncle"! And then the joke wouldn't be understood, as I stood there with a copy of a book about evolutionary theory in my right hand, held up jauntily for anyone to see. Nice book, right? Am I right?! Nothing but the sound of crickets. 

She almost broke her back trying to shock me and the other older designer working in the studio who'd been cast off by the majors for a lack of ability, plus her plush expense account (typical middle management shite), by inventing one stupid story after another, like the married Nuyorican kid she commuted with on the L.I.R.R. Oh, what should I do? We'd sit there in our swiveled desk chairs, breathing at her in false sympathy, nary a spoken word shared between the two of us, because about her a soon as she left our work area, we turned right back to our work. Uh, who the fuck is she compared to the astronomy in our books, yo? Muthafuckin' nothin', y'all.

And on and on it went, one dull fetish after another. Oh, she liked being choked, because we took martial arts classes and she thought she could fold that in somehow. Uh huh, neat, sister. Get the fuck away from me. Usually it was sex-centered, like a teenager with ADHD going through puberty while on (or off) their Ritalin, except that one of us was likely to be designing chapter heads or openers for Lady Chatterley's Lover*, with a nude women on the cover proposed as the design that set our company (and the retailer), and, by extension, the entire industry, on fire with the real scandal of an exposed woman gracing the cover of every hardcover classics version we printed for their stores, to be distributed throughout the country and then the entire world. Kinda hard to beat, eh?

And that was finally the problem with them, and all of their dull characters: no matter how hard they tried to "top" someone at a typical Manhattan office engaged in making books, nothing could compare to the writers' lives and loves that we had our noses deeply buried in. Nothing. It made them finally realize, at the end (I think or, at least, I hope) how much it takes to become famous worldwide. You can't buy it, or strap it on, or paste it onto yourself for some necessary color; you have to be actually be it, that thing that makes you print-worthy all around the world. And here we are today, my dear readers. Better than some plain ole vanilla** flavor of ice cream, isn't it? I got all the flava I ever needed, and you ain't gone none, “hon”.


*    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Chatterley%27s_Lover
**  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_sex

Half-Assed: A Homer Simpson Story

At my first "real" job after college (working for a publishing company), me and my art department friends quite quickly and easily noted a disturbing trend among office staff, a term forever "re-branded" for me by an ex-boyfriend as those low-paid women who are our "Office Cows": mostly useless ladies who wander around grazing on break room tidbits so they can gripe about their weight to anyone who will listen, gossip, backbite, email petty plots and schemes around using the company IM (not the smartest crowd, as me and my IT friends noted), talk on the phone, surf for shoes on the web, hate their friends on Facebook, and make bitchy comments under their breath each and every time you walk past them to use the bathroom, in case you ever forgot that you got your job through grueling years of hard work and a three-tier interview process that's harder than most exams the President takes on any given day, you know, because design is up there with a nuclear attack on the scale of importance for humanity. 

Oh, it isn't? Huh...well, that certainly isn't what that fat bitch behind the desk is projecting at me. She's telling me with her "death stare" that I rule the world, and so I must. I mean, it happens to me everywhere I go, so it has to be true. Kidding aside (I really do use my intelligent design to help save the world, as is the gist behind my intellectual and academic movement), gifted people are used to being the center of attention wherever we go, dull offices included. You saw "Whiplash", right? It's kinda like that, except instead of an overpaid actor starring in a hammy ripoff of every artist's actual life, it's the real thing that you cannot buy. We go into rigorous rounds of critiques with the biggest power brokers in business, while they sit there gleefully taking potshots at us, under cover of a "meeting". We're ready for it. We've been trained to do this exactly. But...you haven't had you? I imagine that must be really hard for you to withstand psychologically.

So, you do catch my drift, then? OK. That's what I thought. We can resume our regularly scheduled programming (one that doesn't include you) to return to the task at hand: the hard job done under an impossibly tight deadline (rigged for failure on purpose), with as many human douche-bag obstacles as middle management thinks they can safely get away with, to deliver you the best information available on Planet Earth, in each and every century, regardless of country or language. I'm sorry. I don't understand "Office Cow" when your mouth is full of donuts from the break room. "Gosh, she looks sooooo fat in those jeans!" (Whisper it loudly in a blatant showy stage-whisper for the best effect). Heh heh. Maybe you should go on a diet? Or, you could passively-aggressively suck at each and every task that we ask you to do for us, because you're a complete bitch who thinks we don't see your blind hate and envy coming right at us. Because we do.

You see, that's the "Homer Simpson Way": do each and every job task really half-assed, until someone better than you notices that you suck, and then re-does your shitty work on the company's dime with absolutely no support whatsoever. Yeah, just like that! Do everything really half-assed. That's why they pay me the big bucks. And hey, you're welcome for saving the company again, on an underpaid teacher's salary. Ah yes...there's the almost silent "fuck you" mouthed behind my back that I was waiting for. Thanks! It was the opening I needed to get you fired. Buh bye!

The Irrelevance of Offices

Over the course of my career, I've had a range of employment experiences: part time, temp, freelance, and permanent staff, with different pros and cons. As I see what is being called in various media outlets a "recession" lengthen into more than a speculative stock market game, I know that change is happening, and fast. In my book, it's about time. More time is wasted on a job site than any other environment. Think about a typical 9-5 day in an office.

There's checking emails, talking with co-workers, bullshitting with friends, water cooler talk, calls to and from home, chores and errands done online or during lunch break, shopping online or on break, trips to the kitchen and back to prepare food or get coffee, which necessitates more small talk with co-workers, then lunch, maybe a computer game or two, web surfing, day dreaming about vacations, arguing with HR about vacation time, checking social media sites, meetings that may or may not draw productive conclusions, the obligatory awkward office birthday party with cake, other mandatory "social" activities, which force us into more interactions, hobnobbing with bosses, client meetings, and in my case, towards the way end of the day, I may actually have time to make some art or design, or at the very least, generate a layout.

The bulk of my day is devoted almost solely to non-creative tasks, which is exactly what I was hired NOT to do. By the time I'm hired on staff, I've met at least two times (typically it's 3-4 meetings) with creative management, who have carefully screened my portfolio online, work which has taken years to generate, that I then bring in person for an interview presentation, in addition to the typical interviews other workers have with administrative staff like Human Resources, who are unqualified to accurately assess art and design talent. Let's not forget the myriad of distractions we must endure: office banter, rumors, gossip, bitching, griping, backbiting, politicizing, ass-kissing, backstabbing, sabotage, plotting and scheming, the dating games, music from the cube over, conversations overheard that are too intimate for such an impersonal setting, food smells (and body smells) that are not your own, it goes on and on. And it's inhuman.

Sharing ones' personal space with a myriad of total strangers selected by people other than yourself seems to guarantee social madness. We are humans, and as a species, we tend to separate into groups that are like-minded, or align ourselves with genetically linked people like family, someone who shares something with us other than a paycheck by a faceless company. It's simply not enough of a bond for such a complex animal like Homosapien. No wonder there's a dog-eat-dog mentality! It's not geared towards human living. Put a random bunch of people in a series of sterile boxes with artificial daylight, and then observe them freaking out on one another. A reader would think it's the plot of a sci-fi story, or the basis of a psychological experiment.

So, what's the alternative? It's called "Living", and it's most conducive to humans! Kidding aside, any environment can be used for labor in the 21st Century, as the bulk of our work moves into the digital sphere. Artists and designers have been on this forefront for decades and we relish it, as long as we can solicit enough work to pay the bills. We interact with most professionals in our work flow via email and phone anyway. Of course, nothing replaces "face time" and the information that brings, but really, a meeting space should be just that, and nothing more. Who needs an institutional feel for communication? Many artists use the local café for meetings, cyber-meetings with Skype are becoming standard as we go global economically, making the status quo way of doing business extinct anyhow. And for those big clients who require a more traditional setting, many studio buildings shared by small businesses and workers have a space set aside with the obligatory meeting table, just for such purposes. You can even sport a suit-and-tie corporate look to recreate businesses past, like an episode of Mad Men, which completes the retro feel.

I love conducting business, so I see this move as a huge leap forward, one that's advantageous to many, many people. It's certainly more beneficial for women, because working from the home is aligned with the way we actually live and behave. We "work" 9-5 at an office, on company time, following their rules, at their convenience, then go home to start our 2nd unpaid job: making life run smoothly for everyone else. The flexibility of a work/home situation allows us to be truly productive, on our terms, by removing the stress of being dropped into a foreign environment that is (most often than not) a glass-ceiling, top-heavy with men in management who profit from the status quo. 

In publishing, which is the core of my business, flex-time is a reality. Editors and designers are issued company-standard laptops that connect them via servers to other workers, maintained by what are typically IT workers in India, who are wayyyy off-site. It greatly reduces the amount of overhead paid out by a company, by minimizing or eliminating enormous real estate costs, which are particularly astronomical in New York and other urban areas, plus other costs associated with a large group of people gathered in any area: coffee, water, food, paper, office equipment and supplies, maintenance, bathroom and health services, etc. Employers also limit themselves to the available pool of talent, from being tied geographically to a space. As we move forward, let's embrace and encourage "The New Frontier". 

 What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

http://www.lyricsvip.com/Steely-Dan/I.G.Y-Lyrics.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.G.Y._(What_a_Beautiful_World)