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.

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.