Providence

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Providence,_Rhode_Island

The city of Providence was in pretty bad shape during my time attending the Rhode Island School of Design. Downtown was a workplace for the suburban 9-to-5-Monday-through-Friday set, abandoned to junkies and the homeless people on the weekends, like a ghost town. There were no stores open or attractions to see, other than a small mall built inside of a beautiful old building with an ornate glass ceiling. Surrounding the town was a large concrete sewer that reduced the river to a dirty little stream filled with garbage.

College Hill was a bastion of old houses and historic cobblestone streets by comparison, so the lack of any type of inviting nightlife (save for the one music venue we all frequented for discount tickets to traveling punk acts on their way from New York to Boston) actually spared us from a lot of the violent random crimes that plagued less savvy college kids. Occasionally we went to the Italian section on the other hill facing downtown for big spaghetti dinners, to be greeted by an archway hung with a copper pineapple for its guests, a sure sign of a paisan good time.

The misty narrow streets once haunted by the likes of Edgar Allen Poe were still as captivating to young artistic imaginations as ever, easy as the old scenes were at blurring the lines between then and now, in the dense fogs that would descend upon the town, blown inland from the sea. The air would become thick with moisture, salty and briny as the ocean, as every Northeastern city does. Anyway, the hill held enough for us to explore. The main drag at the top of the hill in our college district had cheap eats, like the vegan-approved falafel joint I went to with my hippie housemates that inspired me and my friend Dave to coin the phrase "The Falafel Mafia!" yelled out loud in an Arabic-sounding voice. 

We wanted to make t-shirts for our next punk band that would have one really bad performance before folding forever. Screeching is tough on the vocal chords! It wasn't until years later in Denver that I met a Portuguese/Italian guy from Massachusetts also living out west, who told me about the wackier side of town. He asked me if I knew a big decorative element downtown, and then I remembered. Oh, yeah! There was a building like New York's Flatiron skyscraper: narrow to a point, to fill out two bigger corners in a triangle-shape. "Right," my friend Chris said to me while we worked at The Denver Post. "It's evil." Uh...okay. Why? This should be good.

Chris had some traumas growing up that he felt pushed him into evangelical Christianity, trading his sex addiction for the headier blend of this weird-ass new age cult that flourished in the midwest during the 80s and 90s. It was the time of the "SuperChurch" with its strange crystal palaces and homosexual pastors who always seemed to be caught with illegal drugs and a hooker. My work friend was now a passionately ignorant "Born-Again", which was made doubly weird by his self-professed Catholic upbringing. The arid plains out west can do strange things to some people. 

Still, it was far better than dying from an overdose, so I tolerated his blowhard lecturing about my own faith as good-naturedly as I could, without letting him cross the line into offensiveness. I already knew who I was. Did he? I wasn't so sure. People with mental problems get confused easily. Chris had lived in Arizona with his divorced mom after they left the Northeast years ago, and even though Denver throws down some serious snow, homeboy continued to wear linen pants and a thin golf jacket like he was driving a golf cart around his retirement community. His brain wasn't catching up to the change in locale. 

Like office people everywhere, Chris preferred fanatsies about tropical beaches, grumbling about the weather while planning his next bad tourist vacation that would put him right back on the work-wheel he loathed so much. But, back to the story. So, what's wrong with that building's sculpture? It was a stone carving of a guy in a turban that faced people who came into town down a certain block. Oh, the genie is an evil symbol designed to be a focal point that draws in bad magic. Sigh...really? I don't think the oldest Ivy League schools in American give two fucks, other than its aesthetic appeal. Didn't stop us from doin' a damn thing.

He gave me that special kind of smiley condescension that marks the kook who's just been exposed. Turns out, Chris recruited another wack-job from his mega church to go on "hunting trips" that would neutralize evil hotspots. Ah, what the fuck...I'll bite. It was an office job, after all. What else was I gonna do at a plush union gig besides crossword puzzles and free music downloads? Well, first he lightly chastized me for my naivety about the creepy-crawly things I didn't know. Right. Yeah. So, the genie? Right! Well, you're supposed to counter its dark forces by staking out the four corners of a cemetery resting on a hill before town with a magical string that keeps the evil graveyard spirits from entering. 

That's what he and his brain-dead friend were doing with Denver (and it had to be done at midnight, too), and that's what I should have done for Providence. Uh huh. Besides the three jobs and all that art? Yes! Okay, neat. Thanks for that. In any event, I'm happy to report that my lapse in good judgment about crazy rituals did not hurt it one bit. In fact, after I left the city, great changes were already taking place. They removed the concrete blocks that held back the river, building a beautiful outdoor riverwalk that ended in an amphitheater for concerts and plays. A gondola boat gave tourists rides up-and-down the canal like Venice, with charming lights illuminating the scene at sunset. 
Not a bad ending after all, is it? 

Bodega

Bill Clinton was considered the first "black" American president because he came from the lowbrow South (earning him the name "Bubba"), with a crazy-ignorant mama and an alcoholic brother who's in-and-out of jail, before, during, and after his Presidency. It was something that people like us from the 'hood could understand, with a huge sigh of relief. It certainly made a lot of sense to me as I entered the Ivy League, because I'd never met that many fucked-up rich white kids in my life. I wasn't "out" as Acadian, because I was close enough to Canada that a New Englander with an axe to grind could destroy me through bias against French-Canadians as the key to my college career ruination, which is exactly why my people were mass murdered centuries prior: for a supposedly shameful act of love between a European man and an Indian squaw with offspring so defying beautiful, that many of us are still hunted in envious sport.

Think I'm exaggerating? The Canadian government has just officially recognized the "ethnic cleansing" of Acadian Métis (or "Aboriginals", as they derisively insist in calling all natives  common to the Americas), let alone admit to the child abduction and rape that was a common practice for wealthy Europeans hoping to wipe out key witnesses to their crimes. It's not unlike the United State's checkered past with it's own native peoples, that a President like Barack Obama has been actively working to address with Sally Jewell, the Secretary for our Department of the Interior, by taking meetings with tribal elders to heal the hurts here, from way back when.

Instead, I stuck to what I thought were the relatively easy immigrant-bias experiences of my maternal Irish and Italian forefathers, but I was wrong on those accounts, too. I was attacked in an advanced photography class for daring to refer to me and my ConEd grandfather as "working class," by a British git who thought he could get away with it, and he was right. The teacher was a grad student I knew, who chose to smooth over my revelations with an "across the pond" type of cultural misappropriation that was grossly ignorant, preferring to refer to their welfare childhoods as much more severe in poverty and bias than anything we could have possibly have endured in New York City, paved with gold as the myths were.

They co-opted my conversation (which would have opened the door to further inquiry with the mostly New England student body present in that class) between the two of them; he as a poor boy from Mississippi with torn jeans he couldn't afford to fix (?), and he with council flats and a company coal-mining dad. Both were older than me, too, and so it was easy for them to swipe my background to the side successfully, as having the most hurts from the working class, and it certainly didn't end there.

In the tony Painting Department (I was in the relatively "working class" major of Illustration so that I could get a job after graduating which I did. I was also the first in my graduating class to obtain a full-time job with "health benefits", too! I also had 3-4 part-time jobs while attending RISD, in stark contrast to the po' white boys who were on scholarship just for singin' their song), and I was openly laughed at by the slightly dykey, arty, rich white lady with the short, mousy-brown haircut and the "John Lennon glasses" for daring to make a painting about my Irish great-grandfather's work on the iron and copper work around New York City. When I asked her why, she just huffed at me, "I don't know 'why'...it's just so...so...so...funny!", because she'd never seen a project like that before.

Me and another kid from New York (a rich Jewish Long Islander in school for film-making, but with a populist bent that was extremely unfavorable at the time) decided to prank her for being a delusional rich asshole with no sense of reality, but that's a story for another day. Suffice to say, my working class housemate Riddell helped me forge the copper frame for the piece, and I used copper wire to sew the denim to the frame as a canvas, direct references to his bridge-building and metal shop-work (he was a master craftsman who made a copper version of "The Last Supper" that still hangs in my mother's place, and which I cleaned myself many times, so as to carefully note the finesse and detail attached to it as being very finely done), as direct references to our "working class" history that couldn't be denied, and that was just the easy Irish stuff from a century ago. I could not have built with my current lexicon the full story of my people, built on the backs of murder, rape, and theft as they are.

I ran up against white bias and European prejudices all the time, in almost every critique I had in studio, or outside-of-class social encounters. Out as an "Indian"? Do you know what they did (do) to us?! It was a family secret that had no time during my tenure there, fraught as it was with all the above reasons I just noted, easily observed as they were by my friends and classmates. I barely made it out of there with my life, as a crime victim of robbery while working a job, and "blacklisted" by rich profs afraid of losing their tenure, as they lost their minds at our expense. You see, "The Ivory Tower" is only good as an edifice if you uphold their traditionally white WASPy values tied to lip-service and exclusion, not by extolling the real, true, expat rebellion with a long-storied past, as actual descendants of the "Daughters (and Sons) of the Revolution" like I am through my paternal grandmother's line (http://www.dar.org/). It was too much for their warped, privileged minds to bear.

It was in this way that I became infamous as the first openly "black" student at R.I.S.D., which I didn't really know at the time, because I always had three or four part-time jobs and a full studio schedule, which is unheard of among the plush upper crust set who struggle to read and write, like the illiterate cast-offs from wealthy families who were in the majority against me and my offensively real New York roots. I could get away with "ethnicity" if I did phony displays of African Dance (like my friend Riddell did), because the museum wanted African artifacts and a faux arty display would play well overseas with fancy donors, not with actually beleaguered native Americans hip to the game. Money came untied with that kind of awareness.

And so I found myself in a car ride with my punk rock housemate Sue and her weird hippie friend Ellie, who I naturally thought was a rich Jewish girl from Michigan, because she had all the superior airs typical of the boho "Trustafarian" set with no real talent, but who liked to spend time in academia as pretentious intellectuals. She never really liked me, open as I was about my ethnic roots (as much as I could get away with, alone and unsupported as I was), and it wasn't until many years later that I figured out the specifics as to why. I knew she hated "pretty girls" (not that I thought of myself, even as people openly gape and stare at me). I thought she was embarrassed because she and I had to take basic drawing class (with my mentor, Lenny Long), because we were really far behind the older and richer matriculated students.

It didn't bother me, especially since Lenny had gotten to me at my core (he's from New York), by giving me an infamous speech about not letting "them:" win by making me quit, and it worked because I got angry enough to channel it into energy I could use, like fighting does for me as a warrior), plus I also knew that I had the deck stacked incorrectly against me, through no fault of my own. So? Do the work, he said to me, and that's what I did. That's what real working class kids from New York do, but Ellie didn't know that. I knew she was a former forest ranger in Oregon during the Mt. Saint Helen explosion, alone like a lot of anti-social hippies are in a fire tower for many months on end. 

She had that typical awkwardness about her, often wearing the usual Birkenstock-with-socks hippie garb that marks the warm weather kind who does not cotton to our climate well, because they "winter" in warmer climes. She also had the type of curl that we call here on the East Coast a "frazzled-haired yenta" and her last name was "Leon", a new Jewish name that easily could've been anglicized years ago for the MidWest, from what might be the original Leonberg(er), like they used to do with newly-arrived immigrants to Ellis Island, which coincidentally was the photo essay my first photography teacher from S.U.N.Y. had been assigned to through a grant from New York State: to document the renovations of Ellis Island in New York. She also told me back then that I could get into R.I.S.D., if she got into Yale as an Italian-American. "You can do anything", she told me. Thank you for that.

We were on a beer outing that went comically awry one afternoon, for reasons that puzzled me for many years. As we drove up to a shady-looking joint, I immediately balked about going inside to get beer for our group. "Uh uh," I said, "I'm not going into one of those places." Ellie turned to me in the backseat, with her childishly barretted hair in plain metal clips, and the de rigeur makeup-less face that are necessary components for the rich hippie crowd, "What do you mean 'that kind of place?'" I knew I said something wrong, but I was only 21 and living outside of New York for the first time, unlike my housemate Sue and her friend Ellie, both women in their 30s on their 2nd, 3rd, and 4th careers and educations. "That's a bodega!", I giggled slightly like she was a dimwit, or she had deliberately set a trap for me, and it was the latter. "Yeah, a bodega.", she huffed impatiently back at me. Uh, okay. Poor thing. "Yeah! That's a Puerto-Rican joint in New York." She turned up her nose at me, turning slightly in direction without looking at me in the backseat of their car, "And what exactly are 'those types' of places?", like a sour-faced teacher calling on the retard kid who never knows the answer.

"You know!", at this point I was the exasperated one. Where's she from, yo? "A Puerto Rican grocery store!" She sat still, so I went on, "See those 'booty' posters in the window", and I pointed to the ass-shot beer posters typical for a Hispanic deli in the 'hood. "They always have those in the window". She huffed again, "They?"...uh, yeah..."THEY always have those?!", she continued, working up steam to make some unknown point, "I'll have you know that I'm a 'Catalan'!!" Me and my friend Sue from Boston waited for her to finish her sentence...yeah...and? So...? "Tsk", she tsked-tsked fussily, still in a huff. "I'll have you know I'm a Catalan Spaniard* from my father's line." Ohhhh! Whew! What a relief. That's it? Yeah, bitch. We know! You're a European white girl, esse. I laughed, took their money, got out the back of their car, and bought us all beer for our party back at the old house on Benefit Street.

Shit, that bitch just wanted us to know that she was better than us. Just another day at R.I.S.D. for me, and then I didn't really think about her unless I made contact with my former housemate, Sue. How come she never reconnected with the rest of our transfer group? And then, a couple of weeks ago, I got an email from Sue that finally cleared it all up for me. She was more than embarrassed by her time at R.I.S.D.; she was mortified. You see, Sue went to see Ellie in Michigan, her home state, and on that trip she finally learned her really shameful secret, the one that she really didn't want us to know about back then (besides some banal European history) and that's this: she's the daughter of a well-known and much more successful illustrator father that she could never compete with or keep up with, and that was why she picked on the one "negro" she felt she could safely get away with picking on: me. And she did get away with it, until today.

This one's for you today, Sue. Long may truth and freedom ring with a loud "Yanqui"** rebel yell! We know who we are, girl, and we are revolutionary. Keep on shining, my true punk-rock friend. We tore it up rough enough to scare 'em, didn't we? Yes, we did.

Kirk Lazarus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropic_Thunder

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_language
 ** https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yanqui

Gold Leaf

Gold Leaf (nature's walk home) - Pearl River, N.Y. (April 2015)

Many years ago, when I was an apprenticed hopeful seeking enlightenment at the real-life "Hogwart's" that is the Rhode Island School of Design, I remember taking an art history class for relief. Why, you ask? Well, long before there were things like dual Liberal Arts/Illustration majors existing concurrently between Brown and RISD, this young Illuminator took a full major of liberal arts classes at a SUNY school cheaply before specializing at one of the hardest schools on the planet, in the studio classes needed to enter our hallowed halls of publishing. 

I got a lot of ribbing for being on the "5 year" plan because I lost all of my SUNY studio art credits (RISD does not accept other school's ideas about "studio" and "art"), though I could have earned two degrees in four years if I remained in the 2:1 program that Oneonta had back then with F.I.T., but it was far too late for that: I saw the Chi Ro* page in a darkened SUNY art history class and I was done, especially after me and my college boyfriend took a trip to Dublin in the 90's. Gutenberg bibles in the real at Trinity? Done! I knew it, so I took the snide comments in stride, just like I always have and I always will.

Detail from the Book of Kells "Chi Ro" page.

And so, I found myself with three part-time jobs and a fully loaded studio curriculum (with the odd house painting job or two me and my fellow Yankee housemate Riddell put into the mix during one summer session in Providence), something which I think remains untouched as a feat, or at least I hope so. It was insane. You see, during the school's calendar year, studio classes are full 3-4 hour long labs that do not include the required out of class homework assignments. Oh. It was rad and intense and sometimes I had night sweats with baby freak outs (I'm still convinced the historic house we rented back then is totally haunted, stressful breakouts aside), but I regret it not one bit. 

Anywho, when I wanted an easy "A" coupled with the blissful ease of a simple mutiple-choice exam and an essay composed of my thoughts, I sometimes took a liberal arts class just for the relief of it, and like everything else in my good life, I am so glad that I did. It was there in another dark classroom filled with the bright slides of art that I learned about the concept of "intrinsic value" attached the the highly valued pigments from illuminators of yore, and why a leaf so golden it looks unreal stopped me cold on one of my walks home from this small public library in New York that I now write to you from. Because it's all connected, dudes, and that totally blows my mind. Time travel is a real thing, man! Join me in my quest, the quest for truth and knowledge.  
Seekers, welcome: http://www.risd.edu/academics/havc/courses/.

http://www.museumsassociation.org/collections/16022015-research-and-conservation-of-illuminated-manuscripts

*https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=Chi+Ro