Posted by pancho (148.244.221.66) on November 15, 2001 at 12:05:03:
The thing that remains is for me to be sued in return. It’s common procedure when you sue someone. They have to sue back…it’s kind of like being slapped across the face by someone with a glove…a gage. You’ve been challenged, so you have to slap back.
The first thing the people I’m suing have to know is who they are…which ones are involved. I’d rather let them find out when the time comes. The next thing they have to figure is if they want to go it alone or get their own lawyers. I suppose as the people are all either members of the AANF itself, or its affiliates, they could conceivably have one lawyer defend the lot of them…but there are problems with that when monetary damages are concerned. And we aren’t just going to sue them as officers and members but as private individuals too.
Where money and reputations and testimony in open court are concerned, people tend to want to watch out for themselves…they don’t like the feeling of being pulled down by others where they think they might swim away free if they were less encumbered. Then there’s always the factor that none of these people really care for each other, or have any sense of loyalty. This is what comes of pretending so much…keeping up surface appearances. No one knows where he or she really stands with the others, knows what secret treacheries and betrayals lurk beneath the surface. At the first sign of trouble…or a way out for any one of them…there will be a mad dash for the door…brotherhood or no brotherhood.
A question also arises as to what they would sue me for. Nimrod made a vague threat to the city of Chicago that my suing Helen’s estate called for his bringing a counter suit…the one that allegedly would have ensnared the city, the threat that made them hold off until any one or two of us came to our senses…which we never did. He never counter sued…as I knew he wouldn’t…what would have been the grounds for it…he just paid up finally when faced with the prospect of mounting that witness stand in front of all those people and being questioned by me…under oath where he didn’t want to repeat the lies he’d been spreading in private.
So what would be the grounds in their case…what would the AANF, the AUA and Jackie’s Club sue me for…not to mention the other individuals. They can’t sue me over the Ashurbanipal…we did everything we said we would do and it stands there now in a most prestigious location in San Francisco. They can’t sue me over the Shumirum…I did everything I said I would do there as well. Twice the city offered to pay for the pedestal and twice they took back the offer due to Nimrod’s idiocies. It will be no trouble at all to get Michael Lash, Elizabeth Kelley and Maureen Mizwiecki to give depositions. I made the monument, I gave it to Chicago and they gave us an excellent location…and then Nimrod stepped in and ruined the whole thing…they have his correspondence and their replies…and several more things they could add now he knows nothing about.
We can even bring up the meeting held between Jackie, Nimrod and I. The one in San Jose at Carlo Ganjeh’s office. John looked us both in the eye and lied. He said the Arts Council…Ms Mizwiecki in particular, had told him that they would discuss the locations he’d mentioned to them at their upcoming meeting. These were sites they’d long ago told him were unavailable…I was at the meeting. He also repeated his oft made statement that he was just going to get together with the Mayor of Chicago over a cup of coffee and settle the whole thing. He’d been saying that so long we began to wonder which Mayor he meant. After the meeting I told Jackie he was lying..and for a woman that familiar with the article herself, I’m surprised she believed him. I called Chicago the next day and spoke to Ms. Mizwiecki and she said there had never been any such agreement with Nimrod…on the contrary they had reminded him again that there would not be any discussion of the Shumirum at any meeting until he wrote the letter they’d been asking him to write for the last four years…a letter taking back the threat he’d made to involve them in his dorky counter suit…the one he hasn’t brought to this day.
The AANF gave $20,000 towards the two monuments, and where their own affiliate members and their past president didn’t get in the way…the thing was done as it was supposed to be, and would have been where the Shumirum was concerned. The AANF’s behavior at the Chicago convention, not only in regards to me, but Rabel as well…is all admissible evidence for it points to the core of our allegation…that there was a conspiracy among the leadership to undermine, frustrate and ruin my career and anyone else’s who didn’t use the right colors in the right ways… and my ability to continue with the very work past administrations of the AANF had funded and even now, with the Hammurabi, were officially sponsoring. So what changed…I didn’t. But the leadership of the AANF DID change…and that boys and girls…is one major peg to hang this case on. Just as Jackie made an abrupt change when I wouldn’t bow to her wishes. These things are facts…hard and clear. They are not opinions or rhetoric…but things you can map out and see the progression of.
The only thing I can imagine…the thing I hear most often, besides the business about my art being “wrong” art…is that I have taken money from people and not delivered sculpture. These rumors have persisted…as any number of rumors in our community do…as Francis Sarguis started one about Narsai’s education and added an elaborate lie to the mess he never thought would be uncovered. We are a rumor mongering people.
Jackie came to me once, concerned about a rumor she’d heard about how someone’s uncle had donated $5000 to the Ashurbanipal Monument and had never received his maquette. This was some twelve years later. I’d heard that one too at intervals and Narsai and I had wondered how it could be since we knew all ten donors personally. Who was this guy.
Jackie was worried at the time because she didn’t want to get involved with me in any way that might compromise her and she wanted the thing cleared up. A woman had been spreading the rumor for some years…it was an uncle of hers who’d supposedly been stiffed. I met her at a picnic and though she wouldn’t give me her uncle’s name, although she repeated the thing to my face…she took down my number and promised to give it to her uncle. That didn’t suit Jackie and she chased the woman down…got to the uncle and found out from him that he had donated $500 and not $5000…and he’d never expected anything because he’d known that we only gave gifts in return starting at $1000. Where his niece had gotten it into her head that her uncle had donated ten times what he had, and that he was owed a maquette and that for all those years I had simply not delivered it to him…or why she had been spreading this rumor, made up in her own head…I don’t know…except to say it is a common thing among some of us to pretend to be in on something…to relay a secret crime…for it is usually something negative…and reap whatever satisfaction there might be in such a thing. That we are ruining someone’s livelihood…his life’s work or hurting his ability to feed his family never crosses the minds of such people…it may even be their intention from the start.
There are other such rumors afloat no doubt, and it will give me great satisfaction to have these things brought up in any counter suit…they aren’t relevant to my suit and can’t be mentioned at all…for they have no bearing on the issues I will be raising. You can’t very well say you did what Nimrod and the rest did because you were mad at me because you heard I cheated people. If that were the case then you simply don’t buy sculpture from me. And as this allegation, if that’s the one they make, has never involved the people in my suit…what business is it of theirs anyway…are they going to present themselves as the Robin Hoods of the Assyrian community…protecting the weak from my depredations…will they try to mount a class action law suit in which they assemble all of the rumors into one rumor and seek justice for all the rumors.
Will they claim that in order to keep me from cheating people at their convention they decided not to allow me to sell…just show. If that were true then how come I delivered the one piece they allowed me to sell, before shutting me down, that very week…a $5000 sale of which there could have been more. And if it’s greed they accuse me of…then it’s a strange kind, since the money is used in making the monuments…monuments that bring nothing with them when they’re finished…no bonus, no new commissions, nothing but the satisfaction of doing important work.
The letters Nimrod sent to Detroit to ruin the Hammurabi are a good case in point too. He knew damn well I wasn’t into anything for the money…as he said to them. And besides, that allegation only has meaning among the peasant minds in our community and those who know the value of catering to small minded people…among people who work at menial jobs, if they work at all, who resent anyone getting money for making stupid things with clay. Imagine telling a white judge that an actor became one…because he wanted money…or a lawyer or a doctor. Only among us is it such a damning thing to be skilled and talented and actually expect to be paid a fair wage.
Let’s say it was true, let’s say that I threw up each night I worked on the Shumirum and the Hammurabi I hated them so…that it was only the thought of all the money I stood to make that kept me going at it…in the case of the Shumirum for over 14 years. So what. Did I not manage to get the Ashurbanipal installed…did I not manage to get the Shumirum approved by Chicago, only to be blocked by Nimrod. Any judge, any normal person, any white person, will stare incredulously at anyone making the claim that because I wanted only money…I was somehow different than the judge and everyone else in that courtroom…including all the people I’m suing. Just what is the allegation that I expect fair compensation for my work supposed to mean to people.
And when we explore just how these monuments were really funded, and how there was no artist’s fee or profit to them…and that I was essentially taking my profit from sales of maquettes and paying for the monuments myself…and presenting them on behalf of our entire community, world wide…I WILL look like an idiot…but not the kind they hope I’ll look like.
And if I were Jackie I’d get that sculpture I gave her to auction off as a benefit for the AAS off of her office desk…and I would remove the Lamasu I gave her as a gift for her club to be used on her TV show…from the hallway in her home. Just a helpful hint.