Slackers

All of my early life, I was told that I was sloppy, lazy, careless, and a pig, without actually being any of those things. The name-calling was used by my parents to hide their real agenda: using children as a workforce to make their lives easier. It was simple to them. Why else were we born? I was talking to my friend Katy today (while getting a haircut from her) about wild American politics, because the Russia she's from is so very different from our world here. But, times do change. We no longer allow children to get work permits from their elementary school principals for a paper route like they did when I was a kid, nor do we ask children to bear adult economic burdens by letting them leave school, like my grandparents had to do during The Great Depression.

But, my parents didn't have that to deal with. My mom had one (ONE!) part-time job during school wrapping Christmas presents at a department store (and that was only seasonal) because she complained bitterly about the homemade food my grandparents served her, so they told her to go out and get a job and go buy her own food. They were great cooks, by the way. My dad always complained about his terrible childhood and crippling poverty...with my nursing assistant grandmother and medallion-owning grandfather with his own taxi. 

It never added up to their self-described portraits of severe deprivation that they continually tried to sell us as a reason for their abuses against us, especially since I grew up with my maternal grandparents a mere 5-minute drive away. Sometimes the truth could be had for a 30 second phone conversation with them, too. Into this toxic cocktail came the Baby Boomer hangover about "free" everything without any work required (just like life!) that lasted for a couple of years in the 60s when they were teenage drop-outs, followed by my parents Silent Generation of rabid consumer fantasies fueled by massive t.v. consumption, where anything can be bought for a price including happiness, again, just like real life!

Any GenX'er wanting to make it had to give lip service to a bunch of half-baked stoner ideas from the late 60s, or subliminally gay "buddy" Western movies from the repressed and deeply closeted 50s, with neither being the culturally correct stance to have. People were totally full of shit all around us, every single day, parroting lines from t.v. commercials for dish soap like a long lost savior had just given them the winning golden ticket to a better life. It was fucking insane. No one told the truth anymore, because you couldn't make money that way.

Just like fashion magazines pushed the same vapid blond as their falsely generic ideal about "American" beauty so, too, did movies "toe the line" creatively by flattering fragile Baby Boomer egos with their hugely overblown senses of self (derived mostly commercially and economically), by rehashing the old media term "slacker" as a deliberate mischaracterization of GenerationX, the same way marijuana was demonized for being dark and mad. It had absolutely no resemblance to the blue collar roots that me and my friends had coming up from the city, with some of us from the projects, while working 3 part-time jobs just to get to school.

Of course, that's the plan behind any kind of serious bullying: make up a falsehood passed off as the truth, spread it around, and then sit back to enjoy the show. While some Ritalin-dosed muthafucka easily got funding and industry backing in the early 90s to make a really bad movie about arty assholes in Austin*, the rest  of us did what every real working artist does: we got a good night's sleep so we could wake up and go to work again, day after day after day. Not the exactly same picture as Hollywood's version, is it? It's not mine, either.


* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slacker_(film)

Reefer Madness

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reefer_Madness# 

Yesterday afternoon, I watched a popular entertainment program like I usually do, to be somewhat familiar with today's pop stars, because it's hard for a punk rock fan like me to identify with such rabidly followed trends like its the final Wimbledon match or the last game of the World Series. I wasn't exactly a "Tiger Beat" reader* growing up, and I'm pretty sure it would've been banned from the house for being stupid, anyway. My parents can be really egotistical about their educations. Like a lot of bourgeoisie in suburbia, they're still uptight about their relatively recent "escape" from blue collar life in the city; they can be fretfully uptight as a result.

And entertainment news is considered lowbrow t.v. fare, but I am thankful I'm not working their celebrity beats, too. They all look, sound, and act the same to me, anyway. In between the latest "bad boy" arrest was a refreshing live interview with former t.v. host Montel Williams, a proud American military vet and an outspoken advocate for fellow MS sufferers, which speaks to the heart of my family. He spoke about the relevance of medical marijuana to his treatment, and it wasn't the first time I'd heard of it. My mom and I talked about an article I forwarded her about cannabis for her MS, and she didn't reject it as an option outright, which was surprising at first.

When I was growing up, a common attack amongst my mother's family was the demonizing of anything illegal, like smoking pot or underage drinking, that served as an effective cloud cover for their shopping/sugar/pill-popping addictions that had thus far escaped mainstream notice, though times were quickly changing. With the advent of reality t.v. came widely-available media content about mousy fringe types, like the extremely anti-social cat hoarder, or the guy who dresses up in diapers to heal from his abusive childhood. 

Unlike obvious (and legal) social behaviors like smoking and drinking, mental illness became a mainstream topic, thus blowing the lid on their hereto hidden afflictions, especially when my aunt's "dear friend" died from botched surgery as a quick fix to the hoarding habit that placed her in a low-rent apartment around the corner from her late mother's Bronx multi-level townhome that she filled to the roof with junk, floor by floor. Nowhere to run, after that. Still, their semi-public bristling at my lifestyle differences behind their closed doors worked well among their small familial group, where clinically-diagnosed paranoia reigns supreme. Pot smoking became attached to schizophrenia through their compulsive repetition of it, aided and assisted as their pea brains were by so much widely available "newsie" propaganda. 

With the crack craze of the 80s and 90s, lawmakers were desperate to end the murderous rampage from the drug's use that practically bankrupted the city, causing the "white flight" that my mother and her family still rant about, comfortably entrenched as they can be in their casual racism. There were news reports after news reports about "gateway drugs" and "latch-key kids" that my mom and her sisters passive-aggressively sent as news clippings to one another, in a search for the minutely incremental leverage that marks the habitually anti-social. But, they were just following along with the masses.

Of course, me and my friends attending a well-regarded teacher's school in upstate New York knew better about a plant called "MaryJane". Me and my Irish/French-Canadian boyfriend referred to it as "herbe" and "l'herbe" at the same time that classes like "The History of Jazz" and "The History of Rock n' Roll" were filled with students every semester. And therein lie our generational cracking open of the case, forever. I mean, we were taking astrophysics and/or high school SAT's on weed and beer, yo. We already knew what science would eventually catch up to. But one cult movie classic really tied up the loose ends for us, culturally.

Marginalized as African-American people and their works were, no one could deny the artistic relevance of jazz and blues as predominant musical forms that were (and still are) undeniably American. Classes about another American artistic import, the movies, showcased cultural prejudices on a world stage, like the stigma portrayed in the old film "Reefer Madness" turned white audiences against some jazz cat's homegrown stash, versus the huge pharmaceutical megacorporation's factory-manufactured outputs of "Class One Opoids" that are much more addictive, and much more of a gateway to hard street drugs like heroin than some ole weed could ever be. And therein lies the brilliance behind co-opting artistic businesses for mass coercion.

I was impressed by Mr. Williams for being a public proponent for research about alternative delivery methods of medical marijuana that don't open patients up to smoking-related health issues (which my mom and I had already discussed, because she's a pill-popper), as I also noted that he is no longer a daytime t.v. talk show host, either. Still, he represents a celebrity voice in the African-American community that stands by its roots, one rational conversation at a time, now that the real junkies in society are dying off in droves. Finally, GenX gets to share its healing message of peace, love, and understanding through traditional medicine, one patient at a time. "You're welcome" for saving your lives, once again.

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_Beat

The Teflon Septum

Charles liked to brag to us, in between his flagrant bouts of work avoidance, that he was a complete burnout because of the 70s and the disco scene in New York City back then. Of course, it didn't hurt his existential angst that he was also a complete asshole to the entire company, but that didn't seem to deflate his overwrought sense of self at all. I'd never met someone so arrogant with so little skill before, because I never saw him actually design anything. Nothing. Not one book cover. It was fascinating to me. Not that it stopped him from taking credit for other people's designs made under his "direction", which was such a fucking joke compared to our grueling schedules and after-hours work that we began a more honest and realistic process of each designer claiming credit for his or her own work. 

He never talked to me about books, computers, design, technology, or publishing, except if it was to order me to help him through another horrible crise, in staged scenes with tons of sighing and nasty looks made from his inert position behind his desk. Oh, and he liked my handsome new boyfriend Dave, so he thought up a way to take pictures of him by using a potential book cover design about Jewish people with us as the romantic couple in some test shots, but after just one cursory glance, the design was immediately killed because Dave and I are so obviously goyim, even in profile, just like his dip-shit test Polaroid of us taken in the office one afternoon. Before his budget was completely cut-off, though, he made me take the train to some far-out Brooklyn photographer's fancy brick studio in the middle of a work day for yet another test shoot. I was just happy to get the fuck out of the office for a little while.

He was also one of the most grossly incompetent people in power I'd ever worked with, which naturally led us to question his position of authority at the company. How? How the fuck had this even happened? The "higher-ups" at the house gave us a string of excuses, like he had a lot of work experience, and that he'd been bounced from every single work department we have in publishing, which didn't make us feel any better about him, especially because we were all working class kids busting ass in a too-expensive city not designed for us. It was like the city had become a gay stage set for rich white out-of-towners, which we clung to as more favorable than the nightmarish 70s and crack-fueled 80s. Of course, Charles had loved that time period the best!

He'd sweep through the office with his air of superiority, stopping by our desks only to share more of his greatness with us, like his rank of Buddhist priest (get the fuck out!), or his splitting headache that required pills from the nurse's office, or his clogged sinuses that were the result of poor drainage because of his, ahem, compromised nasal passages. Okay...whatever. It didn't take with me as even a casual recreational drug reference, because during my supposedly "hippie" days at O-Town that were greatly exaggerated by my much more productively "high" group of friends (I worked too much, went to classes, and got tired in the evenings or nursed bad hangovers from too much drink in secret), I actually got a real education.

So, Charles, had to gear up for another wittily dropped bon mot that seemed cool and casual, le tres chic. The next time he had a diva fit of "the vapors" in the office during actual work hours, waving around a gauzy, thin, brightly-colored hankie while dancing around to George Michael (hint, HINT), he dramatically paused by my studio desk to declare the same poor nasal passages with the clear sign of a finger held against the side of his nose. OH! You were..in the mob? That's what it used to mean here in the city. Tsk! Nooo, Marie. Sigh...I was so dreadfully dull and uncool to talk to. "I have a 'Teflon' septum!" Okay, wait a minute, are you telling me that you have an artificial bridge in your nose? The conversation only became more baffling to me with his continued explanations that he thought were so subtle.

Finally, he gave it up to me in a normal voice that was his alone, and not the affected soprano he usually trilled around us airily. "No! I had a deviated septum that I 'burned through' completely that had to be replaced." Jesus! I didn't realize allergies could be that bad! That actually happens...huh. No! Marie! His shoulder sagged as the hot pompous air deflated right the fuck out of him, only to be squared again while he quipped at me that "children" today were soooo ignorant. "I did a lot of 'coke" during the seventies!" Oh! Aha! I had inadvertently caused one of the biggest douchebags ever to work in publishing to declare loudly, out in the open, that he was a washed-up addict, right in front of a bunch of rabid designers who hated him with the passion of a thousand burning suns. My day was finally done.

Of course, the bitch that replaced him was even more insufferable, but at least we had our jobs and cover designs back. And one less "former" manager of "The Village People", but only during their really early days on the club scene, like wayyyy before their peak Studio 54 days, so if you look him up, you won't find him in the liner notes credited as their manager because he worked for free back then, just for the love of music. Sigh...he was so naive back then. Uh huh, of course not. Why would there be an actual documented work history for him to have that we could verify and see? We had all the ammo against him that we needed for his ousting, and that was before the hot pants-wearing gay boy messenger service became a regular thing for him. Thanks, Charles! You finally did me a real "solid". 

for Orlando, Florida - June 2016

Exiled on Main Street

Being an exile in your own land is a strange experience. People descended from more recent émigrés to our beautiful land here don't know (or understand) my last name. I've already had to spell it out twice today while explaining its long heritage, in this small hamlet that is rather fluent in "immigrant" (as is most of the New York area), so you can imagine what the rest of the country (and by extension, the world) is like for us. We need better publicity!

The land of "Acadia" pre-dates the creation of the current borders that divide the United States and Canada (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acadia), much like my sophisticated Norman ancestors (pre-dated by my ancient Greco/Roman/Mesopotamian ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Roman_world) dominated Europe through trade and their cultured abilities to connect with the local people around them, wherever there may be around the globe, much like I do today. That does not mean that I have that state of awareness reflected back to me often, resulting in my infamously patient temperament I learned to develop, lovingly guided by my grandparents.

"You're gonna learn all about patience now!", was something my grandmother told me more than once, in recognition of those greater gifts that need much more extensive (and slower) explanation to the crowd gathered around me. Leadership is not easy, and like any great educator, repetition is a big part of our toolkit. Publishing is rife with trends in the human experience that need more than one or two nuanced marketing niches to accurately describe content to an interested audience, and that could be just a single genre.

We like to research by looking at a subject from all angles, then pick the entry point we think you can plug into the easiest, so as to enhance your comprehension as you move forward, with or without us. But, how do you do that with a people who were cast out, dispersed, and strewn around so as to prevent a congregation of support from building a case for us that we were supposed to make for you? You're reading it now, and how many years has it been? It seems backwards, doesn't it? That's how long it's taken for me to unfold our red carpet ride through history for you, with its complexities and various moving parts.

Today I am grateful to have this public forum that reintroduces you back to us as a concept in these modern times as your loving ancestors; marginalized, impoverished, and beset as we have been. Rest assured, my dear majority, we have always been here for you. Sometimes a minority group is small for its precious rarity, not for its insular exclusion, and so I ask you to rethink your rigidly guarded boundaries done quickly and incorrectly, to be carefully redrawn by the people who came here to lead the way back home, not block the passage of others seeking to enter. Are you worthy of us? Are you worthy of Acadia? I hope so, because we're here to stay. That's our “forever” promise to you, as our beloved descendants.

∞

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcadia 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcadia_%28utopia%29 

∞

More

“3 years, 10 months, and 19 days...” That's what a woman buried on Mount Moor had lovingly carved into the tombstone for her child. "That's a mama who loved her baby", I said to my brother in passing. We read off their names, dates, and military service as we walked around the small grounds, hemmed in on every side by a new mall and its parking lots, in an area of Rockland County that was swampland when we were growing up here. There was actually nothing to see on the road from Nanuet to Nyack, but for this hidden little gem of a cemetery tucked into boggy marshland nobody else wanted, as fitting a historical tribute to segregation for ethnic minorities as ever.

Acadians, Cajuns, and Creoles shared the same fate, too. Bayou water is considered "bad" water, because mosquitoes give sickness to the people forced to live there. What the new laws couldn't wipe off the face of the earth, nature certainly could. It was an economical way to get rid of a despised people (often better than the European colonists around them who couldn't acclimate to this new place, similar as it is in climate to Europe, but that wasn't the real problem) through deliberate marginalization and severe economic poverty, except for one powerfully overlooked fact, and that was this: already-oppressed minorities often bond with similarly afflicted tribes, and so we did.

What was once a power play among the socio-economic elite, based on their weirdly outdated prejudices against "interbreeding", allowed our ancestors the relative freedom of marrying whoever they choose, which often meant mating with the much greater genetic stability present in the indigenous people who walked their way here, carrying their culture and robust good health with them. And so, it backfired against the minority elite horribly, which only angered the white man even more. We saw name after name of a people who lived over 80 years and more, way before modern medicine was available to them.

Unfortunately, their children didn't fare better. We saw a lot of markers and smaller headstones with one date etched simply into the stone, as places to memorialize their still-born babies before a naming ceremony could take place. I'd passed by the small cemetery many times, always rushing to make an errand on someone else's time, but this time, my brother went along with whatever I wanted. I priced out a few items in the bloated mall that are completely overpriced for this land and its economy, and we both left empty-handed, to visit my grandparents at their resting place. It only seemed fitting.

We were baffled by the overly ornate constructions of chain restaurants that we know are no good, wondering aloud how any amount of business could sustain such an obvious waste of space. Most of the square footage was blown on bad plastic decorations serving one purpose: to attract the eye of someone who'd obviously never been to a mall before, which is totally out-of-date for the area. I can't imagine that this "new" mall will up stay for very long, and that's a comfort to me, too. Long after these stores (with their cheap shoddy merchandise) will be plowed underground, our ancestors will still reside in relative peace, nestled in a little hillside that overlooks the real Palisades of Rockland, with their beautifully rocky facades. Happy Earth Day, 2016.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Palisades_%28Hudson_River%29

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Moor_African-American_Cemetery

Spy vs. Spy

Genius isn't something people enjoy, like real beauty that frightens without airbrushing or makeup applied. You can't fake it, and for people who lie their way through life, authenticity is very scary. I never understood the weird tactic behind pretending to know more than you do, because it's a viciously anti-scholarly mindset to have about life and the world. Curiosity is the driving force behind intellectualism, so someone who hides out daily from reality represents crass ignorance to an openly inquiring mind. And so, with no surprise, I wasn't welcomed into the arms of the publishing industry by anyone besides my mentor and her supervising V.P.

Even though we were transparent in our agenda to have me apprentice first in Production Management before I moved upstairs to the Art Department, it was considered such a huge intellectual leap to make at the time, that we were greeted with suspicion from the very start of my employment. Just like the limited scholarship that represented a typical S.U.N.Y student in the 80s, destined to spend a lifetime working in a series of barren offices, R.I.S.D. students were often functionally illiterate, unable to write even the simplest of essays in their native English language, so I'd seen limited brain function before I hit the big hallways of Academia.

Still, it was shocking. Some departments, like Production Editorial, hired English Lit majors from the Ivy League, drawing heavily from the pools of Brown, Yale, and Harvard, and those were just the folks who managed copy-editing and proofreading within the workflow. From someone like me, it was downright revolutionary. I did business like a non-artist, drew like a professional, and thought with any side of my brain I could tap into to get the job done, which was in direct contrast to the big bestselling "Left Brain/Right Brain" publishing hype.

People felt comfortable with the darkly brooding hipster stereotype who preferred sitting alone in a corner doing highly repetitive layouts, but that's not an Art Director, which is what I aspired to back in the day. Conversely, the short bespeckled editorial assistant with the flood pants, thickly rimmed glasses, and bad dandruff fit easily into their preconceived expectations about what "intelligence" looks like, like bad casting for every cliched Hollywood movie you've ever seen: beautiful blond bombshell with the charmingly absent-minded but kind-hearted nutty professor. Where did I fit in? Mostly, they hated me.

And so began my real office career involving staving off covert attacks done on the sly, to delay the inevitable firing that marks the deeply insecure incompetent working in an office of actual American scholars. We spoke and wrote in an English that was frightening to the uneducated and unknowns in our very own houses. It was shockingly ignorant to behold, because we made the stuff we sold, which is one of the clearest, direct lines to any serious business transaction. More days were spent clearing houses of the weak than in pursuit of the labor behind making books, which is one of the most complex commercial manufacturing processes in the worlds of art and design.

People whispered in the wide stairwells of the Flatiron Building (a historical landmark) that I was a "spy", which made me laugh. For who, exactly? Production? Why would the VP and the Senior Production Manager want me to ask questions for them? That's what they did every day. For the book cover designers?! They couldn't even attend weekly production meetings without a liaison like me involved, living in some constant pretend fear about book manufacturing schedules and deadlines, which is like an accountant who's afraid of balancing his or her checkbook. Why that? It was utterly bizarre in its limitations to me, but that was the vacuum I filled that was so badly needed during the technological shift to desktop publishing.

One of the quickest managerial stints at SMP was a certain penguin-identifying Design Manager with poor book design skills but a fussily meticulous eye for administration, efficiency, and bureaucracy, which again, was something only businesspeople could apparently perform without having a nervous breakdown like any true designer would. Oh, the pressure to file! So hard! It was pure bullshit to me, but that's how they angled their way as a department out of "boring office work" to stick it onto me, because I "didn't know computers" or design according to the rigid New York school kids who were trained to be one-trick ponies, again, about as far from a scientifically-informed scholar like a da Vinci-based RISDoid as possible, but that's exactly why I excelled so far ahead of my class.

She rode me temporarily as a target to do dull shit she called "organizing" the enfants terrible of the art department, who were (and still are) a group of learning-disordered people who can only handle so much mentally, but that didn't stop their fearful marginalization of me anyway. It was nothing new. Within weeks of that crazy skinny bitch writing me up for (get this) READING on the job, a big art/design department "no-no" apparently, she quickly went downhill into psychosomatic back pain so bad, the company had a crane lift a couch into her special office so she could lie down between bouts of her pain. That's who they chose to be their "manager". She flew back to her old imprint within months after I quit for less crazy-filled pastures (which worked!), and she's stayed there ever since.

During her entirely panicked, whirlwind stewardship of a multi-billion dollar publishing company with strong international ties to Britain and now Germany (after a few carefully leveraged corporate buy-outs), not one higher-up ever thought to inquire whether or not one of our competitors would actually send over a genuine corporate spy over to us, for the real deal of sneaking around without getting caught, choosing instead to center their hysterical drama around one particular Acadian Métis girl who could give a fuck about their petty head games, because here I sit, and there you are in the exact same seat. Still. Spy, indeed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_bias_in_the_United_States

P.S. - I just fucking looked up Jaye's suicide obit online, SMP'ers, another fucking "Design Manager" back then!!! You hateful humps. You owe me.

Brown

Every day of my life I'm the target of abuse, because I am not like you. I know! It's weird, right? Weird but true. I'm an actual ethnic minority, which is also really strange, because most welfare offices operate on the flawed premise that people who come from the biggest continent on Planet Earth (also known as "Africa": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_diaspora) are rare as human beings, hence the marketing terms "urban demographic" and "minority", which is not actually true in any of the numbers I've ever seen (creative accounting aside), you know, because of the size of it. Nor does your status as a descendant of the formerly vast Spanish Empire entitle you to cash money, gifts, and/or prizes, or anything else that's totally free. Again, see the real numbers here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaniards. You read it right, amigo. That number is 48 MILLION PEOPLE. Stick that on your flag and smoke it!

With that in mind, I use an herbal-based cleansing conditioner that's oddly shelved in the "ethnic" section (read as "black" or "brown"), because apparently the only weirdos with this kind of fucked up hair must be marginalized at each and every opportunity that presents itself to the makers of said products, just in case you somehow wake up one day to realize that you are not alone. In fact, there are BILLIONS of you muthfuckas, a'ight? I know what you're thinking: "Mommy" is trapped in a weirdly fantastical bubble that is suburban America, a place where "white" people think they are normal, and you are the oddball. I know, because every time I go into a commonly overpriced drugstore chain here in New York, some bitch behind the counter pretends not to see me if I may (rarely) need her help because the self-service machine is fucked up, just so she can signal to me anew my lowly position in relation to her, in case I forgot that my status as "Other" did not scrub off my skin during bath time.

It's become such a joke with my peeps around here, that I openly signal my understanding of the situation to any other "minorities" waiting in line who are similarly ignored by retail clerks (read: black folk. Yep, in 21st century New York), by pantomiming a scrubbing motion up and down my arm, mouthing to them: "It didn't wash off me, either!", then pointing to them, "Didn't wash off on you neither? No?", finally throwing up my hands in mock frustration to shrug my shoulders and just walk away. What's a n***a to do, right? The ad copy on a brown-colored bottle of cleanser marketed to "n****s" is so offensive, I had to read it a couple of times just to get it down. I think I counted at least six references to my "unmanageable" "unique" "twisted" "natural" hair, like I am some fucking Aboriginal Pygmy from New Guinea, recently discovered by a jauntily-dressed British explorer on safari.

I am not your particular pygmy dream child to fret over, Weird Marketing Wacko. I am just not entirely "white", like billions of other muthafuckas on the planet. Deal with it, yo. 'Cause we fuckin' do, every damn day. Every day we deal with your inbred isolated pocketed of protected weirdness, ya frightened Hobbit folk. Get wit' it in this century. People MOVE AROUND the globe. Fuck! Alright, now that we got that mess taken care of, let's look to my numbers for the real deal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9tis_people_%28Canada%29. Join me here in my land that is without delusional fantasies. It's fun! Ain't no one throwin' a better party than Acadians. Trust! I am your "One Percent", and I am the home you seek in this time of sickness among the rare who remain healthy. Come back to me in this world. 
We are forever, my love.

"To infinity and beyond!"