Ms. Haiti

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

Magdala was nerve-wracking for me to be around, a feeling that was soon shared by the entire small family business that hired her. She's tall, smart, pretty, and cultured; in short, she is exactly like every other gainfully-employed woman working in Manhattan and its environs, which caused her an enormous amount of distress. In Queens, she was just another Haitian-American, but something happened to her during her long subway commute into the city. She began to have dreams and visions of her self that she could market and sell to us as her co-workers, which was the exact job description she had, as so many of the marketing/acquisitions/sales staff who function as our support personnel and in-house cheerleaders. She is, to be succinct, a fan of mine, without being a friend or even particularly friendly.

At the time of her hire, she was "engaged" (or "enfianced" in Magdala's irritating patois that was designed to be "exotic") to a short, bland, and rather unattractive French man who's also a single father, which was absurd. She was better-looking than him, and as pretentious as she could be, that tall black girl ain't never gonna be no damn Parisian white girl, knowwhatimsayin'? Too many big white teeth in that large head of hers. She's "bougie" as fuck, fellas, but to so many Euros who drank the waters deeply from our American import t.v. show that now reads like a prolonged tampon commercial about boring yentas living (and sexing) in the city, she was just the ticket he needed to take to New York and our lifestyle here, like a pretty tour guide on his payroll.

His daughter was disastrous for her, too. She was blond, petite, and Euro-pretty, which means she missed her French "maman" the way I miss really good baguettes and appropriately-named croissants livin' in the 'burbs. Oh, well. Ain't nuthin' but a thang, right? Whereas the little Chinese girl of our house bookkeeper spoke broken baby "Engwish" to me and wiggled onto my lap in a record-breaking couple of seconds the first time she ever met me, this carefully-dressed girl of eight or nine spoke haltingly and bristly to a very nervous, buck-toothed, skinny older girl of about 28-34, also over-dressed for her role as part of our sales staff.

She was obsessed with her looks, too, making sure she rushed into my office to tell me "the good news" about her lunchtime experience with a former model's outdoor staff working the line around the block for her t.v. talk show in the nearby studio, asking her to stand in line for hours to try-out for the star's main show about amateur "would-be" models. Again, I was nonplussed as a native New York girl. Well, yeah, sure. You're tall and skinny enough. I mean, that's where it starts nowadays, before attractiveness and beauty. Fit the tiny clothes, first. Them little rich kids in Hollywood diet all the time. Also, how good do you look in pictures? She went into a fretful paranoia right after her initial bout of giddiness, which is not a good sign for any industry, particularly the extra competitive ones. My queries to her were brief and direct, because any really good art director knows I just don't have time for it while I'm on the clock.

She was less sure about her photogenic qualities ("Well, take some pictures. You have a camera, right?"), and her "prominent mole" (honestly, I hadn't noticed) that she felt sure would make her fodder for the people on the show. Well, that and her age. "Oh, they'd just choose me to 'make fun' of me." Yeah, well, if that's your attitude, then modeling isn't for you, because if this little brush-up freaks you out (where it's all about how you look and what doesn't look right), then the actual business of modeling is out because of your sensitivity to perceived criticisms, so I guess publishing was a better choice for you. End of story. I mean, really, where could you go with it? Rehabs are filled with insecure girls waiting for their next big break. Be a scholar!

But, of course, she was massively problematic in our equally competitive book program, questioning her every decision with an infamous defensiveness that was even more offensive when spoken in her hackneyed "Franche" accent that she put on for show. She was a generic drama queen, which is the absolute kiss of death in a town filled with the real deals "trodding the boards" never-so-lightly each and every night. An egotistical diva who doesn't make art...what the fcuk is that? I had no idea what to do with her in our company, and soon my co-workers filed complaint after complaint about her attitude, too. She was snippy and disrespectful, even "on paper" in our in-house emails, and keeping track of the written word is what we do best. Poor thing. She was on a short clock with us.

Within fairly quick succession, she broke up with her "Fiancee" (we weren't impressed enough by her overt "bling", I guess), had a bad affair with an actual good-looking Frenchman with his own media company who soon got his other French (and white) girlfriend pregnant right before Magdala quit our outfit to go work for him in Paris, but she didn't care. She was going to be "a star", baby! With his over-priced "Breakfast at Tiffany" books that were Euro-friendly and arty enough for his snobby coffee-table audience? Yeah, right. 

But, things had been going downhill for awhile. She began showing symptoms of our temperamental publisher's typical firing arc: too many sick days taken without advance notice, eating quickly through his 50/50 health insurance for her bad teeth and multiple gum surgeries brought on by anorexia and bulimia (that raises some red flags, even in New York, as a notorious food town), and then her too-gossipy friendship with our ferociously evil Jewish secretary sealed her fate at the business, forever, all of which I had warned her about during her first few months of employment.

At a company and a town as fucked up as Manhattan, not even a wanna-be media type like the kind who hides months without lunches, punctuated by the occasional fast food binge that's stuffed hurriedly into her mouth for publicity's sake in the company's kitchen (on recommend as a political tactic by the daft-idiot white-blond yenta aggressively manning the front desk) can sneak past us. Yeah, bitch. We know. It didn't work out the way you thought it would. Fantasies can be like that, though: brutal and cruel and quick, kind of the way I imagine most beauty pageants and their contestants are. In real life, I mean. Not theirs. Ours. The real thing. Living a real life is the only true thing we have on this earth, girl. Get some before it's gone.


For Mr. and Mrs. Jay, of "ANTM" fame: yeah, girl,  I saw you scoping me on the down-low while you was underground during my daily subway commute, wit ya reared-back head and "dah-yummmm, 'cuse me!" look on yo' face and your seven foot frame dressed in all black pretending to clutch at invisible pearls. I do know I look that good. And Mr. Jay, ain't nobody incognito at 6'5 with silver-blond hair gelled into spikes walking around Chelsea. That was an "off" day for me visually, BTW. I was on break from the office getting a lunchtime walk after too many years eating at my desk. Feel me? Yeah, you do. I know fellas too scared to approach a lady, even plush "shorties" like me :) Bahaha! Booyah!

Exile

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

Acadians from Nova Scotia have a saying about their people who live in different areas: that we've been "away" for awhile. Certainly, with a small settlement of houses still in Doucetteville, it has always felt that way to me. I tried to describe it as a feeling to a work-related acquaintance from years past over a few drinks (with his own engaging immigrant story about emigrating from China through Cuba), but instead of sounding poetic, I found that my words didn't quite match the concept, sounding trite and hollow to my ears instead. Unlike, say, a communist country, Acadians do not consider each other "foreigners" because, by necessity and social engineering, we were forced out of our homeland centuries ago.

It's a strange thing to be considered a "stranger" in your own land, especially in a huge city like New York, a place with actual foreigners. If you think Rockland County is hard to explain to native New Yorkers and out-of-towners alike, try explaining "Acadia" to someone with a more recent grasp of the English language. It just doesn't fit into their pop cultural constructs about America, derived mostly from years of fine fictional programming and Crash!Bang! movies with subtitles. There's something about me that defies their new idea(l)s, like maybe they fit in here a lot less than they fucking thought, based on a false picture that they made in their heads, greatly assisted as they were in their delusions by so many advertisers. Fantasies will do that to people.

You try introducing the idea that they stand on your soil, as land ripped (or bartered) away to Europeans, with real estate being the game that it is in the city. People have died for less. Still, I wanted to tell this designing pop culture "guru" about my travels out west, and what it means to have a far-away view of the world, because just like any other Mac-drooling hipster deeply indebted to the latest fad(s), he will never know what it's like to be outside of his very small circle. Over drinks and the time of our reacquainting, he finally confirmed for me his truth: that his Adult ADD/ADHD and sexual dysfunctions (mother-obsessed) keeps his reach just within his easy grasp, and so I knew that, too.

Like that <snap>, his former status as "the" hot book designer in our industry vaporized, so powerfully does he monitor adherence to his cult of personality. It's a daunting life to live. Still, he feeds off the newer fresher energies of the younger talents dependent on him, and even though he viciously guards "promoting" anyone he feels he can't pull into "his" scene, I used him as my industry earpiece for awhile, knowing that I can exert a stronger influence than him when I need to, not that I particularly wanted to. He occasionally professes to have a deeper spiritual side. I wanted to preserve that for him and encourage it.

So, I told him about it: how I could feel the touch of the brick walls lining my subway commute seated within the car, as a material I knew in a visceral sense, passing under my hand like the passing born of many times. I knew the stones of the area, and the plants, the trees, the birds, and the animals. He squirmed a little in his small bistro seat at the tiny table, and then casually dismissed it, for its discomfort to him ("Yeah...I get it..."), as the son of Chinese laundry workers who'd played the oppressed minority card "to the hilt" in exchange for tuition, jobs, industry contacts, or a design strategy in company meetings...so easily did he feel pressed against a wall he didn't make, nor did his ancestors.

Still, he had to go on singing the song that paid for all those after-hours "business" dinners he could comp with the creative accountant he wanted me to use, so he could get free services with each referral. Over one of the loudest dins I'd ever heard in a restaurant in my life, his small voice popped in-and-out of focus to me, bustling as the trendy Korean chicken joint was, during the time of our talks. "You know, Marie..." Ugh. He talked to me like I was a Midwestern ingenue right off the bus working my very first "major league" design job, and I had never been that. "You should 'take advantage' of living in the city now!" Uh, what the fuck did you say to me? I'm a native, yo! Not some out-of-towner. What an ass.

He persisted, like the pushy grad from a slick school he is. "I mean, you should, like, go to more design shows and openings and museums and stuff!" Right...so I can kiss your ass to get cover design work out of you, work that he always failed to give to me out of a misplaced loyalty to his precious alumni network of self-feeding cannibals stuck in the same loop. Yeah, native here? Remember? He pressed on. "You know, to 'make it' here you really have to work all the venues, Marie." Sure. Like a coke-sniffing Art Director with lots of fancy awards from his network coupled with a serious case of manic depression? That way, I can stay up all night to roll into work like a diva at noon. Sounds great! Sign me up! When had I ever been that vulnerable?! 

In my thirties, it was hard-to-excruciating for me to pretend a fake naivety that had never really existed. Now, with someone that mentally disordered, I just leave the room or hang up the phone. No point. Not enough brain matter. But back then, I thought I still needed someone like him to talk to, as an excuse to find out why the fuck "show ponies" hated me so much. It didn't take long for me to find out. I tried again. "Yeah, Henry, but here's the thing." He looked up at me unhappily, finally pulled away from his all-engrossing food and drink. Wha...? Talking to me? What an act! It was insufferable to me, so I just pulled the safety, loaded the gun, and fired away, speak loudly and clearly the words that would ever deflate him, just when the club music cut out.

"I already made it!" Oops, that came out louder than I thought. In the uneasy lull that followed the awkward cutting of their annoying house music, I adjusted for volume and continued. "Henry", and this I spoke gentler to him, "I knew I 'made it' when I got into RISD. That's how I know. I've already done it." He shoulders sagged. And that was his biggest fear: failure. Of being all talk and no action, of being a slick hack who couldn't really deliver without better artists and designers to pillage from. What could we do? Sue him? He had all the money and power. Right? Wrong! You, my dear readers, are the proof of my greater success, because show ponies tend to forget who actually sits at the top, and it's not them. It's me. The publisher. So, you tell me: who's on who's turf now? Yeah. That's what I thought back then, too. Like the trendy eatery we were in, it was finally silent. And static-free.

Color Blind

I don't subscribe overly much to trends, or "memes", or cutesy jargon. It doesn't help me or my audience to be too specific about a subject that's relatively easy for anyone to understand, or at least "easy" as it's viewed by the most literate people on Planet Earth. Sometimes I get caught in whirlpools of astonishment and bewilderment watching t.v. (which occasionally deepens into embarrassment and/or anger for all of you uneducated messes, living out there in "T.V. Land") that reflect my advanced education and prolonged work experience in such a profound way, I simply can't entertain the discussion as relevant or useful, and that's when I know you've been sold a bunch of total fucking bullshit.

Last summer, a dressmaker decided to time the sale of their knockoff dresses for prom season to the award show red carpets and your unfortunate color blindness, which, to an expert visual communicator like me, is a really fucking nasty thing to do. As soon as I saw the image pictured above, I immediately said "blue and black" and I knew I was right. I cannot be (and could not have been, in chronological order) an artist, designer, art director, or publisher without my great eyes, and failing that, entire sectors of my industry are devoted to achieving correct color matching results. Most desktops use RGB color mode for the Internet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RGB_color_model) and CMYK for print (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMYK_color_model), reflecting the pixels and paint used in the two processes.

If you blow up an image in digital imaging software, you can see the blocks of color that comprise a digital color photograph.You can then select an eyedropper tool in Photoshop (really $$$ high-end professional-grade software) to break down the color values into separate divisions of red, green, or blue (for the Internet), or cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (or "K" in printing). We also have color chip manufacturers that produce tear-off swatches that we attach to layouts, in case we feel further color clarifications are needed.

Color separations are an art of their own, woefully ignorant as the public is to such practices. CMYK color values are available for any color we see as humans, rendered into palette chips that we detach from very expensive color books, for the purposes of paint mixing at the color separators. For really tough material that needs extreme accuracy (like museum-quality reproductions of famous artwork well-known for their colors), we build even more steps into the proofing process. But, that's print. In the digital world, you are much more vulnerable to suggestion and the crudeness of a programs' blocks of computer coding used to simulate color onscreen, which is much less sophisticated than the human eye, and that's the trap you all fell into.

After launching a dress campaign timed to the ball gown season of the pop culture world, the maker(s) generated a few more images to create a fake online debate that would drive up the sales of their dresses by driving traffic to their site, which is something that's actionable in my world of better ethics, but that's show business for you. Not exactly known for its morality, if you get my drift, and I know that you do. After a series of gradually lighter jpegs were posted online, the color blind people of the world went nuts, which is one of the meanest things I've ever seen in manufacturing. It points to the desperation of dressmakers and show biz people in this new economy, as a digital marketplace where the truth will "out" you in a few nanoseconds after publication.

For me, any jpeg online (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG) is simply a digital image that I can potentially pull into imaging software to color match, which not one single person or entertainment news reporter that contributed to this phony scan did. Not one. Not one of you "outed" it as a scam, so that you could all enjoy the benefits of increased traffic to your show or site, which makes you complicit in the extreme, so I'm telling you this right now: if you see anything besides a blue dress with black lace trim, get your eyes checked. You are severely vision-impaired or color blind. And you're welcome, by the way. Also, welcome to wide world of desktop publishing as the new international language for the visual arts, plebes. It's "old school": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantone.

Your homework for today, lemmings:
-    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_printing
-    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_printing
-    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness
-    http://pantone.wikia.com/wiki/Pantone_Color_Matching_System 
-    http://pantone.wikia.com/wiki/Pantone_Wiki

I fear for you...somewhat.