Laurel Casey

Laurel's columns

The question is, why bother? Isn’t that the first question of your day? What is your answer? If you aren’t prone to fantasy tales or dopamine receptors, you’ll be stumped. The energy it takes to come up with a good reason to give a shit, if you are also trying to stay true to reality, is daunting. Last night’s Indian restaurant drink with a curator friend who actually read me the cover letter she’d concocted for a museum position was so hungry and verbose that I retreated, again, to my garret to ponder the mystery of meglomania– and in doing so, became re-determined to stop promoting. Granted, there are numerous rewards in grasping. If you aren’t grasping, what are you doing-? What else is there? I am determined to find out. — That letter she’d submitted. The position she’d applied for. The art at stake. A bottom feeder. A synthesizer. The middle man. The cusp of reality and commerce. The gal that wears the leather and beret- and gets a percentage. No talent, no ability per-se- just an societally accepted appendage- a slog in the capitalist machine, taking the pure and packaging it for a shipment to mediocrity. Why have the intellectuals started to eat themselves? Oh yes, they are paid by the Universe-ities. If you follow the money, as the radicals suggest, you will simple stop going to Indian restaurants with artistic friends who profess liberalism. Choking with the bullshit I found myself at a mental health facility questioning my sanity. They wanted to offer me pills that would protect my psyche from the people who were my only known friends. Friends who had succumbed to the bullshit. Friends who meant well and were concerned about my visit to the mental health facility. Friends who picked up the tab at the indian restaurant. All I have to do is keep my mouth shut.

I was living in a dump in 1992 which seemed romantic because it was a short subway ride from Manhattan- the idea of a dumpy area being withinn 100 miles of Manhattan is beyond comprehension to us now, just as outrageous as thinking that living anywhere in Rhode Island, dumpy or worse yet not dumpy, could lead one close to a Promised Land. Well, the wheel keeps on turning. It is 2011 and my previously dumpy home base is now a Disney Land Soho – a Bohemians-R-US theme park of grooviness, not a crack whore or curbside sofa in sight. Where are the crack whores and the sofas? The Elmwood section of Providence, what I have now labeled The New Bohemia, just as they did with my dumpy neighborhood in Brooklyn- 1993- when New York Magazine labeled it, The New Bohemia. Well, there went the neighborhood. They took the train over from the Lower East Side and we all had to relocate as the rents skyrocketed. Old familiar story. Gentrification. I had to move on, move out, but forgot to move up and so have ended up in what is considered the worst section of Providence, RI- Elmwood, or Slumwood, as I call it, a real trash-strewn downer with an exceptional ethnicity. If only somebody, anybody within a mile had more than 5 dollars, whatever our race, creed or color. No luck. Thanks Wall Street. Unlike 1992- the crack whores and aging whitey artists and latino drug dealers and asian noodle pushers all understand that it is not our fault after all that we’re broke, and we are all in this together, hence, there are less break-ins, less crime, than twenty years ago. Sure, we’re all still suspicious of each other, but the new divide is rich and poor not brown black white yellow. Plus, we all know that none of us have anything to steal. I am feeling Deja-Vu, living in Elmwood, — the trash, the potholes, the broken windows, the ramshackle historically signifigant houses, the chain link fences, the blight…the ugliness….where have I seen this before? Brooklyn. Williamsburg. 1993 – just before the TIpping Point- the New Bohemian label- the dumb-dumbs moved in, thirsting for hip-dumb, the scene, – the turning point- the scene starts before the rents rise- then boom it’s over and on to some other boom. Rhode Island, the last place and yet first place for a renaissance. They call Providence the Creative Capital, and I must say we are saturated with artists- with the thugs in control but being herded up by the FEDS. It’s a city larger and yet smaller than its parts. An enigma. I keep coming back to it. Confused. Now wait a minute. It’s ocean close, near New york and Boston, what is the PROBLEM? I won’t get into that now. Gentrification is germinating, but ever so slowly in Elmwood. Despite the bygone gorgeousness of the oversized Victorian houses, many of which have been invaded by lawyers and real estate agents and yuppies looking to double their money- block to block, it’s still a shit-hole. No matter how many lovely homes you have, with crack houses and no place to walk to except an overgrown cemetary, it’s pure dump. So, what’s next. Certainly, artists move into dumps. Here they come. But slowly. with hesitation. They need coaxing, the monied artists. The ones who can Tip that Point. And that is what a New Bohemia is all about. The CUSP before the fall into a pool of potential for payback. It’s sickening, I know, dealing with the vapid cheerleader consciousness of the pioneers, scared shitless, but buying in anyway- hoping for the miracle. And the miracle, I now predict, is coming and would it be anything less, RHODE ISLAND??– Providence? The worst SIDE of Providence. We proceed on tip-toe. We step over the garbage. We smile at the muggers,…Have a Nice Day. – and the soirees are about to begin, sabotaged by anxiety. We would have had much more fun in Williamsburg had we known it was going to turn out swell. I predict a swell outcome here in Elmwood. I am going to try my darn-dest to enjoy it this time around.

Essays

“Losing site of her objectives, she redoubled her efforts” Truer words have never been plagarized. At some point between loneliness and confusion I realized that I did not want a boyfriend. How could this be? Everybody wants a boyfriend, or partner, or girlfriend or mistress or husband/wife, SOMEONE Read more »

Stories

I was standing on the front lawn in a starched Sunday taffeta, clutching a small purse, rubbing a stiff white patent leather shoe against a mosquito bite. As the afternoon sun drifted behind a maroon cloud, my mother took a photograph. Read more »

Advice

That’s right, buy your oil paintings from a true non-professional and save, save, save. I have as much chance of becoming the next Van Gogh as most of my serious artist friends, maybe more so, because I am much more insane than they are.

In a dark casino, next to the stage, the elderly couple in wig and toupee took off their sneakers and slipped into a matching pair of patent leather dance shoes. The four shiny shoes were very still under the cocktail table, waiting for something. The woman in a Dress Barn outfit hugged her purse to her chest like a hot water bottle. Mona Lisa smile on her face, head nodding like a doggie car ornament, she seemed content listening to my droning ballad. The man, fidgeting, finally walked to the stage. He stood head to hem with my sequin gown.

“We’d like to dance.” he said. “We come here to dance.”

It was a Sunday afternoon on a beautiful spring day in Lincoln, Rhode Island. Inside the cavernous casino, the size of three football fields, there wasn’t any weather, any spring, any Sunday. Hundreds of slot machines clanged and whistled under flashing lights and piped in light rock music. Heavily painted, perky older woman and road weary, leathery men with cigarettes hanging from their lips pushed quarters into the noisy machines, hundreds of them, then went to the cashier to get more. There were several men and women in wheelchairs with oxygen tank hoses stuffed into their noses. Their husbands and wives pushed them from slot machine to gambling table to the bar. They were also smoking.

I asked a coughing woman about the smoke.

“They’ve got a state of the art ventilating system here, so it don’t bother us too much.”

My trio had been hired for the 2 to 6pm Sunday Jazz Series. The stage, dead center, had a nautical motif – a life-sized lighthouse surrounded with hunks of painted plastic resembling boulders. I was singing “Old Cape Cod” when the man in the dance shoes interrupted me.

“We need something with a rhythm, dance music. We come here to dance.”

His wife called to me from her table. “We enjoy a rumba.”

The lights on the stage were so bright that I could not make out their faces. All I could see were the shining shoes. All I could hear were the slot machines. I didn’t know what a rumba was. I faked “Besame Mucho” with invented Spanish. Suddenly, everyone was on their feet, alive and moving and happy. Shaking arthritic hips beneath pot bellies camouflaged behind unbelted shirts. Salt of the earth, spending money they didn’t have, manufacturing joy on a Sunday afternoon in a casino, the world that screwed them every day temporarily expunged from their minds.

In the dim light, they were young again, high on nicotine and vodka tonics, surrounded with the hope of a big win. My self righteous loathing for gambling and casinos evaporated. Where else could you take 50 dollars and turn it into an afternoon of possibility? Sure, a few would overdo it, but what was there to lose, really? A double wide trailer? If we all lost the little we have wouldn’t our lives be more exciting? Living under a highway, scavenging for food, a good story in our pocket about how we almost hit the jackpot? Isn’t that better than the drudgery of responsible serfdom?

I come from the same stock. The hardy folk shuffling around the dance floor reminded me of my parents and their ability to enjoy life at a VFW pot-luck supper or a Saturday night dance at the American Legion.

I’d almost felt superior. When was the last time I had enjoyed myself so completely? When was the last time I’d felt hope instead of cynicism? These people in their outdated clothes and sickly countenance had me beat. The casino, for profit, offered an afternoon of hope. An honorable business practice, in my opinion. No matter how futile, hope wins the day.

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