Music Friday: Antony and the Johnsons

My newest music obsession is Antony and the Johnsons. Antony Hegarty is, as described by SignOnSan Diego, a "brawny-looking, transsexual Irish-American maverick with a wonderfully androgynous voice and a tremulous chamber-pop style all his own."

One song on the newest album, The Crying Light, is called "Epilepsy is Dancing." To fully appreciate it, read the poetry of the lyrics first:

Epilepsy is dancing
She's the Christ now departing
And I'm finding my rhythm
As I twist in the snow

All the metal burned in me
Down the brain of my river
That fire was searching
For a waterway home

I cry glitter is love!
My eyes pinned inside
With green jewels
Hanging like Christmas stars
From a golden vein

As I came to a screaming
Hold me while I'm dreaming
For my fingers are curling
And I cannot breathe

Then I cried in the kitchen
How I'd seen your ghost witching
As a soldering blue line
Between my eyes

I cry glitter is love!
My eyes
Pinned inside
Sea green jewels
Hanging like Christmas stars
From a golden vein

Cut me in quadrants
Leave me in the corner
Oh now its passing
Oh now I'm dancing

Then listen to the song. Many songs by Antony and the Johnsons have an operatic, cabaret feel, with Antony's soaring voice. This song is delicate, with piano, guitar and strings.

After just hearing it, if you're able, then watch the video from Pitchfork TV (NSFW):



Video description: From the record label: "Antony asked his friends the Wachowski Brothers to work with him on a video for his new single 'Epilepsy Is Dancing'. They in turn invited painters Tino Rodriguez and Virgo Paradiso to create costumes and a mystical environment and choreographer Sean Dorsey and his dancers to bring the dream sequence to life. Antony's artistic partner Johanna Constantine stars as herself in the role of 'Deer Monster'. The video was lit and shot by the up-and-coming directors of photography, Chris Blasingame and Banker White, and produced by Jim Jerome. The production team collectively named themselves AFAS. Please enjoy the fruits of their San Francisco art party."

The video begins and ends in an alley where a woman walks alone and sees a deer many yards ahead of her just as she has a seizure and falls to the ground. A colorful Midsummer's Night Dream-esque world of half-nude body-painted dancers awaken the woman, now painted silver and wearing a headdress of leaves and deer antlers, in a sensuous little orgy of dancing. Some wear carnivale type masks, as does Antony, whose head appears superimposed and flowers flow from his mouth as he sings. The dancers cradle her, carry and writhe with her, then set her down in a leaf-covered woodland with a male dancer very reminiscent of Shakespeare's Puck leaving her last, their outstretched fingers slipping from each other's grasp as the seizure causes spasms and the woman's hands curl. She wakes back in the urban alley with the real deer nuzzling her hand. Then she's all alone and rises and leaves, smiling.

Here's an alternate, touching live performance of "Epilepsy is Dancing," along with a brief interview and "Another World," a second song from the new album, from The Culture Show of the UK.

For another song about an epileptic seizure check out Joy Division's "She's Lost Control."

Sign language in Sia's videos

Sia, an Australian pop singer perhaps best known for her song "Breathe Me" which played during the closing sequence of the Six Feet Under TV series finale, has released a music video for her newest single "Soon We'll Be Found" that features American Sign language throughout:



Video description: As the music begins, Sia, a blonde woman, is in what seems to be a warehouse. She walks up to a bowl filled with milky white liquid and dips both hands into it. With a full-body view of her, she begins signing the lyrics (though I don't personally know how accurately). Editing cuts between close-ups of her hands signing and the full-body view. Then the room darkens around her and she stands in a spotlight while the editing back and forth continues. When the chorus is reached, the lights come back on and here are people dressed in black lined up, three to either side of her. They each have had their hands dipped too, but in a variety of colors. They all sign the lyrics together, their hands standing out colorfully against their black clothing. As the next verse begins, the camera shifts to follow Sia's signing in shadow on a wall where her hands are joined by the shadows of many others, some signing and some forming shadow puppets on the wall -- animals, trees, a Garden of Eden with a shadow puppet snake slithering by. A jumble of gracefully waving hands and arms eventually overwhelm the lighted wall and fade it to black. Then Sia dances alone in a blacklight, her white clothing, painted face and green hands showing brilliantly in the black with dozens of bluish hands -- just hands -- around her, as stairs beneath her feet, as a halo around her body. She continues to sign the lyrics while the halo hands flutter and editing cuts between close-up and full body views. Then the hands scatter and while she signs the chorus they appear as bluish streaks signing with her, indistinctly seen in the black. Then her hands and the disembodied ones begin painting in the blackness, a little like a toy LiteBrite -- a sun, trees, clouds, a landscape of colorful flowers. Blue hands perch as birds in the painted trees against the black background. Then suddenly Sia is in the white-walled warehouse again. The six people are gone but black clothing lays in piles where each once stood. Sia looks up and smiles as disembodied blue hands fly like birds into the rafters.

The lyrics to "Soon We'll Be Found":

Come along it is the break of day
Surely now, you'll have some things to say
It's not the time for telling tales on me

So come along, it won't be long
'Til we return happy
Shut your eyes, there are no lies
In this world we call sleep
Let's desert this day of hurt
Tomorrow we'll be free

Let's not fight I'm tired can't we just sleep tonight
Don't turn away it's just there's nothing left here to say
Turn around I know we're lost but soon we'll be found

Well it's been rough but we'll be just fine
Work it out yeah we'll survive
You mustn't let a few bad times dictate

So come along, it won't be long
'Til we return happy
Shut your eyes, there are no lies
In this world we call sleep
Let's desert this day of work
Tomorrow we'll be free

Let's not fight I'm tired can't we just sleep tonight
Don't turn away it's just there's nothing left here to say
Turn around I know we're lost but soon we'll be found

The music video has circulated fairly widely as it was a free download at iTunes a few weeks ago. On the making of the video, Sia says:

I’ve always been obsessed with the beauty of sign language. The movement and expression just appears, to ignorant-hearing-me as a dance… a beautiful, emotive dance. But the real beauty is that, hidden in these perfect shapes, is communication.

I'm always curious how Deaf people feel about their language being used as art by hearing people, particularly in video format where the full view of the person signing seems to me to often be mangled in order to make it artsy but, ironically, useless as communication. I don't know that the ASL is useless in this video, but its use has been discussed at The Deaf Edge where it's raised conflicting emotions and opinions.

Whether it's to her credit or just an interesting obsession, Sia also uses a bit of sign language in an older song, "The Girl You Lost to Cocaine":

Wheelchairs in modern furniture design

David Pompa, an Austria-based designer, has created a collection of office furniture called Surreal Minimalism that includes eight chairs created by combining a variety of upholstered seats with different metal bases. Some of the metal bases are lifelike shiny metal human legs and feet, and other bases are wheelchair-like.

The first photo here shows a red seat attached to a metal base that is a minimalistic take on what a manual wheelchair looks like, with two big rear wheels and two small front wheels. It's not clear if the wheels are functional, but I don't think the back wheels would turn and while all the wheels are, of course, round, none of the edges anywhere appear to be rounded to accommodate gripping and pushing with hands.

Created as a project for his graduate studies at Kingston University in London, Pompa says, "Interaction is often reduced to a functional basis; this collection is an approach that objects and humans can interact on an emotional level with the aim of stimulating creativity."

The second photo here shows the same red seat with a metal base that looks like two silver human-shaped calves and feet that rest on short metal strips that look a little like truncated skis. From this angle you can better see the bright red seat which looks a little bit like a Lego with a cushy inner seat carved out of it. The armrests are the same solid unyielding plastic-like material as the rest of the seat's shell, and from this angle you can see it would be impossible to reach around these sharp-edged arms to push oneself with the wheelchair-base. By "sharp-edged" I simply mean the edges of the seat are not rounded off anywhere but are perpendicular corners. The top is blocky and the bottom is human-shaped.

At dezeen, Pompa clarifies in comments that the "objects are not meant to be comfortable, aesthetic, or usable furniture. the objects are symbols to question the stereotypical situation many people face in their office enviroment. there is no intention of putting these objects into an office enviroment and i am still at the beginning of their design process."

This third photo is of an entire room with several pieces of furniture that have regular furniture legs combined with either wheels or human-like legs. The furniture is either yellow and white or pink. A long oval yellow conference table has ten different "legs," one pedestal leg, several large round posts of varying styles and several that are either clearly human-shaped or mimic the organic curves of the human-shaped but lack an actual foot at the bottom. The chair at the table is like a basic dining chair with upholstered seat and back, and wooden arms and front legs. The back legs are replaced with yellow-tired wheels complete with handrims. Against a far wall is a chaise-like yellow upholstered sofa where the two back legs are replaced by slightly scaled-down versions of the yellow-tired wheels. A pink easy chair with ottoman looks quite comfortable. The ottoman has a metal pedestal base with four legs to the pedestal. The chair has half of that metal pedestal and is balanced in the back by pink-tired wheels with handrims. Between these last two pieces is a lamp that has small wheels (about the size of the front wheels on a manual) as part of its base. Obviously these chairs would not roll unless you lifted the half without wheels off the floor, but these are clearly images of a basic manual wheelchair worked into otherwise classic-design furniture.

Do you like what you see and how Pompa uses the wheelchair in the same way he uses human form in these designs? I wasn't sure how I felt about them until I read this analysis at notcot:

why do we always think about functions when we talk about inclusive design? design icons are icons for an exclusive range of our society. why?

I'm not sure if that's a writer at notcot or Pompa further explaining his design, but I like that very much. I think that inclusiveness is still not nearly a big enough part of even design discussions about function if the design of everything around us is an indication of what's being talked up, but hey, I'm all for inclusive design icons too.

That third photo above clarifies for me how furniture design could naturally incorporate the iconic wheelchair image so typically used as a symbol of inability and pity into design without it looking medical or unwelcoming. That's far more interesting to me than the first two chairs or the other variations in the collection that can be seen here.

Browsing Pompa's website, I found this last image of the design for what looks like a fashion show or possibly a nightclub. It's a big room with many tables, seating perhaps a couple hundred though there are no people in the photo. There's a bar seen dimly at the very back and a long runway or stage through the center of the room. Above it is some interesting angular architectural design. There are several stairs at each end of the long runway stage, but angling off from the stage's center are wide ramps that slope into the audience at either side. The ramps are a natural part of this whole angular stage and design above it. A half dozen big globe lights hang over the runway as a contrast to all the crisp corners and angles. Everything is white and stylishly accessible.

Slumgullion #46

A random collection of links, starting with blog posts on Palin and disability:

Sarahlynn at Yeah, But Houdini Didn't have These Hips wraps up her assessment on the veep and presidential candidates' stances on disability with a look at Sarah Palin's actions on disability issues (as opposed to her convention declaration of a "friend ... in the White House"). See her posts on Obama, Biden and McCain. Also, her initial reactions to Palin's nomination as McCain's running mate.

In a "Memo to Governor Palin," Penny at Disability Studies, Temple U. responded to Palin's RNC speech, and she includes a link round-up of other disability bloggers on Palin's statement that her having an infant with Down Syndrome gives parents of special needs children "a friend and advocate in the White House."

More on Palin's RNC speech from early September at Shakesville: Shapeling and Shaker Sweet Machine write on "Disability, Parental Martyrdom, and Reproductive Choice."

At Feministing, drahill writes: "Undecided: Sarah Palin, Disability Rights, and Abortion."

In a guest commentary at Patricia Bauer's disability blog, Paul K. Longmore also responds to Palin's announcement by writing on What Kind of Advocacy Do Americans with Disabilities Really Need?"

By the way, since she took point on bringing publicity to the ableist humor in the summer comedy Tropic Thunder, Patricia E. Bauer's News & Commentary on Disability Issues has become a must-read for me. She's always thoroughly covered the latest news, but comments have become especially lively as well.

Back to Shakesville, where Melissa McEwan recently requested:

I just wanted to take a moment to ask that we all please refrain from using the term "McLame" in comments. It's ableist, and therefore violates the tenets of the safe space.

I know I set a terrible example, because I once used it myself, but it was pointed out to me that I was being an asshole, so I don't use it anymore, and I'm sorry that I did.

My comments on that:

YAY! Yay to working for ableist-free safe space. Seriously.

Also, though he'll never label himself so, McCain is a candidate with significant disabilities, so referring to him as "McLame" does matter. It's not just rhetorical play.

Friday Music: The Blind Boys of Alabama

The Blind Boys of Alabama are an old-school gospel group that's been singing and touring since 1939. Yeah, 1939. That's a lot of cultural and music business changes to weather over seven decades. Originally called the Happy Land Jubilee Singers, the five original singers (Jimmy Carter, the current lead singer, has been with the group since it began) met at the Alabama Institute for the Negro Blind in Talladega.

Clarence Fountain, another founding member, recalls the early years while the singers were still attending the institute: "The school was not happy for us to go off campus, but we would sneak out," Fountain told Folk Roots interviewer Dave Peabody. "We would go out and make some money. There was a big soldier camp up there,had about ten or twelve thousand soldiers. We'd perform for that soldier camp and we'd do alright."

On the band's name change, Fountain says, "For a while we called ourselves the Happy Land Singers and we toured all around the country. Then a promoter put us on a show with another blind group, the Jackson Harmonies from Mississippi. He billed it as a contest between the blind boys of Alabama and the blind boys of Mississippi. The name worked good so we stuck with it."

Known for remaining contemporary and collaborating with many mainstream artists while keeping their traditional gospel sensibilities, the Blind Boys have won four Grammy Awards and their most recent album, Down in New Orleans was released earlier this year.

People not apt to listen to gospel music might know the Blind Boys from their cover of the Tom Waits' song "Down in the Hole" that was the theme song for HBO's drama The Wire. (The show has used a variety of covers of the tune, with the Blind Boys' version used in season one.)


YouTube has a wonderful selection of video performances:

"Something Got A Hold On Me" -- a 1960s live performance
"Too Close" -- the same early-to-mid 1960s performance venue
"Look Where He Brought Me From" -- a live performance in a church, I think, maybe in the 1970s
some old-fashioned musical testifying at an outdoor concert or tent revival
"Run On" -- live 2001 performance on the British tv show Later
"Amazing Grace" -- their live version sung to the tune of "House of the Rising Sun," and here's a studio version someone has set to images of Black American history
"Satisfied Mind" -- Ben Harper & Blind Boys of Alabama performing live (There Will Be A Light, Harper's album with the Boys came out in 2004)
"Shall Not Walk Alone" -- with Ben Harper, video is of a recording studio performance
"Jesus Hits Like the Atom Bomb" -- the video is some cute, quirky animation (2005 album Atom Bomb)

Source

Praying with Lior

I've heard good things about a new documentary film, Praying with Lior, only opening now in a few cities and playing primarily at Jewish film festivals. From the film's website:

An engrossing, wrenching and tender documentary film, Praying with Lior introduces Lior Liebling, also called "the little rebbe." Lior has Down syndrome, and has spent his entire life praying with utter abandon. Is he a "spiritual genius" as many around him say? Or simply the vessel that contains everyone’s unfulfilled wishes and expectations? Lior – whose name means "my light" — lost his mother at age six, and her words and spirit hover over the film. While everyone agrees Lior is closer to God, he’s also a burden, a best friend, an inspiration, and an embarrassment, depending on which family member is speaking. As Lior approaches Bar Mitzvah, the Jewish coming-of-age ceremony different characters provides a window into life spent "praying with Lior." The movie poses difficult questions such as what is "disability" and who really talks to God? Told with intimacy and humor, Praying with Lior is a family story, a triumph story, a grief story, a divinely-inspired story.

It sounds like this could go either way, right? The stereotyping of a child with Down syndrome as closer to God than the rest of us, an inspiration or a burden are themes on developmental disability we've heard many times before.

But filmmaker Ilana Trachtman's motivations as reported by Devorah Shubowitz at Media Rights reveal complexities behind the intent of the documentary:

As Trachtman struggled to focus during a Rosh Hashanah service at Elat Chayyim, a multi-denominational Jewish retreat center in the Catskills, she was mesmerized by the soulfully attentive off-key voice that came from behind her. When she saw the source, a boy with Down syndrome, she was shocked. Lior's praying shattered her expectations of what people with disabilities can do. "He amazed me. He could do something that I can't do -- pray with real concentration in Hebrew and in English. So I stalked him because of my own spiritual curiosity." When Trachtman heard Lior was going to have a Bar Mitzvah, she thought somebody should tell his story on film and shortly after, she decided to be that person....

Audiences may debate whether this photogenic young person's "star quality" sets him apart from other people with disabilities. Some may argue that Lior's integration is dependent upon his recognition by and attractiveness to non-disabled society. Others may think his charisma is connected to his disability. The film certainly brings to the foreground issues of the aesthetics of disability, and non-disability, in film.

Another review at Cinematical also suggests that disability is just one (important) facet of this complex family story about love and religious faith.

Cross-posted at Alas, A Blog

Update: Casting director fired from "Shelter" flick

According to the AP:

A casting director for the horror thriller "Shelter" has been fired after West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin's office objected to what it termed an insensitive casting call for extras with unusual features that might look inbred.

Donna Belajac Casting's Web site initially advertised the scene as being set in a "West Virginia 'holler,"' but producers Emilio Diez Barroso and Darlene Caamano Loquet said the movie is not set in West Virginia and the state will not even be mentioned.

"On behalf of the entire SHELTER production we regret and are deeply sorry for the very insensitive casting call sent out without our knowledge by our casting director Donna Belajac who has been dismissed from this project as a result," Barroso and Loquet said in a statement issued Tuesday night.

I don't care one way or another about Belajac's firing. It's not a victory for disability awareness if all the brouhaha was because it was offensive to suggest people of a geographical region all look abnormal or disabled. It was the association with abnormality everyone was upset about, not any assumptions about the worth of people who aren't picture perfect.

The movie studio will hire someone careful to not attribute the abnormal "inbred" look of its scary characters to a particular place, and we're all supposed to be placated by that. Rest easy. Be assured that the scary folk in the movie are not "us" and we are not "them."

See previous post here.

Blackface/Yellowface/*face

In "Blackface/Yellowface/*face" Wheelchair Dancer muses about identity politics, performance arts and disability culture:

Despite years of discrimination and oppression and despite a history that is as appalling as the histories of other minoritized groups, there is no performing arts context for disability face. And even though exaggeration of certain physical aspects of certain impairments, there (perhaps fortunately) has not been a systematic reworking of these localized moments into a "tradition." Any attempt at disability face would look like a party costume. And that's kind of the impression I get when I see non-disabled types acting disabled roles.

So, over to you. What would disability face look like? Would you be able to distinguish disability face from disability drag? What would disability drag look like (and here I really do mean *drag,* as opposed to *dress up*). Could PWD with one impairment drag another? Could you drag your own impairment? Or would it have to be non-disabled people dragging disability? When does drag become disability face?

Could there really be a set of performances of disability in which we can separate an actor dressing up as disabled in order to create, with some degree of verisimilitude, a disabled role (because you *know* there are no disabled actors who can do this kind of stuff) from someone in disability face? Would it have to be literally a "face" to be disability face?

Other posts by Wheelchair Dancer on the intersection of race and disability include this, this, this and this.

Cross-posted at Alas, A Blog

Liz Crow won a DaDa Award

I blogged about it back in early November. You voted for her. She won!

The award money will go toward her latest production, "a film-based installation about the Nazi mass-murder of disabled people and contemporary echoes." I will be talking to Liz more about that later this Spring. Visit her site Roaring Girl Productions to learn more about her work.

Congratulations, Liz!

Art program for disabled children in Uzbekistan

I've been posting images of art about disability that I've found on Flickr lately. But there's a program in Uzbekistan that uses art to help integrate disabled children with their nondisabled peers. From a Unicef news story:

Renata Karimova among over hundred of children does not suffer the fate of many other peers. Having come to the "SANVIKT" art rehabilitation Center, the children get opportunities for developing their creative abilities and communicating with healthy peers. "It is impossible to solve a problem of disabled children integration into everyday life without joint education and communication"- says Gulsara Rajapova, the Center Director. "It is a valuable opportunity for healthy children to learn to be tolerant, surmount deep-rooted prejudices and to look widely on life", -she added.

For many children staying with the Center is the opportunity for developing their creative abilities, increasing their capacities, acquiring necessary life skills and knowledge for the future realization of their potential.

And despite some obvious language translation problems, here's another informative article on the program.

The program's site, Sanvikt, is not in English. (Russian, maybe?) And the images of the art and people in the program are lovely, but not still images, so I do not know how to put an example here or even describe for the visually impaired, except to say there are dozens of images showing rooms filled from wall to ceiling with art, images of children working on art, and a big mural being painted by many. Anyone with suggestions of how to capture an image or two to put here, please enlighten me.

More wheelchair mural art

Flickr photo by mike fischer of a fantastically beautiful mural in San Franscisco. (I think Brown- femipower had this image in an entry about a year ago.) Two Latino women clasp hands above their heads and dance. A young woman with flowing dark hair sits in a manual wheelchair grinning at her able-bodied dance partner, an older woman with her hair in a bun. The older woman wears a sunny yellow top and blue print skirt. The younger woman wears turquoise pants and a lavender sleeveless top with the words "Earn Your Attitude, ACT UP" on it. The front wheels of her chair are not touched the ground, which is a field of grass and flowers.















Flickr photo by dabdiputs of a mural in the cafeteria of the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. Against an abstract multi-colored squiggle background the giant blue figure of the international wheelchair access symbol dude sits with a big grin and some sort of green helmet. I think the helmet is for Extreme Moshing, because he is surrounded by the multi-colored words "Rock 'n Roll Wheelchair."

Flickr photo by nicholsphotos of the Working Classroom Mural at about 3rd and Gold Streets in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It's part of the Albuquerque Murals Project. Detail of a larger image, apparently, this part is of a classroom of young students. A black woman in a bright turquoise dress stands before them holding up a copy of the Free Press newspaper while students of various races and ethnicities sit before her. The student on the far left, hand raised in the air, sits in a manual wheelchair.

A huge, very realistic image of a Latino or black man sitting in a power wheelchair. The dude is about ten stories tall and looks so real. Could an actual photograph be transferred onto a space that big? He's in a modern black power chair and wears a gray hooded sweatshirt under a khaki jacket. Baggy blue jeans and white sneakers. Flickr photo taken in Philly by robotkasten.

On a large wall with big white tiles of smooth brickwork, black silhouetted figures in profile travel toward each other. Coming from the left, a woman with her hair in a ponytail pushing a child in a stroller. Approaching from the left, an elderly man pushing a person in a manual wheelchair, with the leg rests of the chair sticking out in front. Flickr photo by LarimdaME. If the photo tags can be trusted, this mural can be found in the subway station at Prince Street, uptown in New York City.

Flickr photo by gregkendallball of a mural in an Edgefield hotel in Oregon. Three bald people in white sleeveless gowns sit in manual wheelchairs. They have small wings attached to their backs, so perhaps they're supposed to be angels? (I don't like that part.) On a cream colored wall with a bold blue river of water the people seem to be following. Yellow stars follow their path.

Liz Henry who blogs at Badgermama captions this Flickr photo from a Portland hotel: "i hate this hotel with its no elevators to the third floor and its 1-story high ramp in the back and how there are no lifts anywhere. and how smug everyone is. and how there is no bathroom in my room and no bathtub anywhere. But I especially hate its endless giant murals of smiling people in wheelchairs. What the fuck?" This mural of smiling people in wheelchairs is located in a stairwell, as you can see from the photo taken half a flight up, the closest someone portrayed in the mural might ever be able to get to the art. Ironic, no? I can't see the mural clearly enough to describe much detail, but there's a pool table and at least two people in wheelchairs, with a woman lounging sexily in the lap of one of the wheelchair users.

Wheelchair mural art

Posted at Flickr in September, 2006, by mexicosolidarity, who leaves this caption: "An incredible banner that has been created in the Zocalo for many weeks. It depicts the struggle. The people carry signs calling for death to capitalism and for APPO. Governor Ulises can be seen in the wheelchair along with many other members of his repressive government." The mural is long and horizontal, in shades of red, white and black. Soldiers with guns face a crowd carrying weapons and banners that read, in Spanish, "Death to Capitalism" and"Fire [Governor] Ulises!"

R. Hennessy's Flickr photo, captioned: "Sure, it's a mural of a scenic day at All-American City Rutland, Vermont. Guys playing guitars, kids on roller skates, old people looking at things, and guys in wheelchairs. But take a closer look. Why does everyone have on the same pair of sunglasses? What is it about Rutland, Vermont that makes everyone want to be an aviator? Or does the artist simply not know how to paint eyes?" An idyllic city park scene, the person in the right foreground is an older white man sitting in a manual chair he pushes himself. Yes, he has the aviator sunglasses too.

Nuevo Anden's Flickr photo of a wall mural in Brookline, Massachusetts. While the dramatic Mexican mural conveys action and the Vermont mural is very realistically painted, this close-up of a white-bearded white man in a manual wheelchair is blurry and expressionistic. The man is looking toward us, leaning to the right over his right wheel. There's a small brown dog playing by his feet and the man has a stick in his hand. There are trees, leaves and grass all around.

Zesmerelda's Flickr photo of a Philadelphia wall grafitti of a bold, white spray-painted manual wheelchair and a box with the word "wheelchairs" and an arrow pointing to the drawing.

Edith OSB's Flickr photo of detail of a mural at the Sierra Vista Elementary School. I don't know what city. It's a colorful painting of an Indian woman or girl in a manual wheelchair wearing a pink and green sari and traditional Indian jewelry. The spokes of the wheelchair have "virtues" written along them, including: "Commitment, Detachment, Diligence, Excellence, Flexibility, Gentleness, Humility, Idealism, Integrity, Justice, Modesty, Patience, Responsibility, Reliability, and Self Discipline." There's another woman standing just behind the chair with a peace flag with a white dove on it. This is the entire mural.

The DaDa Awards

Liz Crow and her Roaring Girl Productions is my biggest blogging failure. Liz and I first exchanged emails well over a year ago and I volunteered to interview her and discuss her work. I linked to clips of one of her award-winning short films, Frida Kahlo's Corset back in July on the 100th anniversary of Kahlo's birth, but have never managed to cough up interview questions for Liz to answer.

And I still haven't done that. Nor have I actually seen her full productions beyond the generous info at her website (that info includes film clips, stills, and scripts, by the way). But let me list a few of the many things that fascinate and thrill me about her work:

1.) Her documentary film The Real Helen Keller explores the famous woman behind the iconic deaf-blind celebrity. Here's the film script (.pdf), which is an excellent read by itself:

Narration: Helen was one of the first people to understand that charity was not the answer. She recognised that disabled people lived in poverty because they were excluded from jobs and that poverty in turn created illness and impairment. She argued that what was needed was radical change.

In an era when venereal disease was a leading and unmentionable cause of blindness, she was willing to campaign on this in the press.

Georgina Kleege (author of Blind Rage): People were scandalised when she wrote about it, because she had to write about venereal disease and sexual promiscuity and issues she wasn’t supposed to think about. But at the same time she talks about the issue obviously as a woman’s issue, a woman’s health issue. She also perceived it as an economic issue because she understood that more affluent women would have access to better healthcare, so for her it was information that needed to be given to less affluent women, so that they could make demands of whoever was providing healthcare to them. So she had a mind, it seems to me, that made these sorts of connections that other people weren’t making.

2.) Her short experimental film Frida Kahlo's Corset.

3.) Her project to design the Access Tripod, a tool that would allow wheelchair-using filmmakers to run a handheld camera themselves instead of directing someone else to capture their creative vision.

4.) And her experimentation with ways of making films more accessible to all viewers. Anyone who has ever tried to use the captioning feature tacked onto a commercial film DVD has experienced how separate the accessibility features are from the film itself. Sometimes the captions are ridiculously inaccurate*. Sometimes text is unreadable or descriptions incomplete. Often, it's not an available feature at all. In my family, that means one person who is hearing impaired misses out on much of the dialogue and the shared experience is lessened for us all.

Liz's company is exploring new ways of using captioning, sign language and audio description (ACS) as an integral part of the creative process of her films. Does it make me a film geek that I find this incredibly exciting? Maybe.

Anyway, Liz Crow has been short-listed for a DaDa Award under the category of "New Media" and it's time for the public to vote. The DaDa Awards are sponsored by NWDAF, the North West Disability Arts Forum, based in Liverpool, England. NWDAF is dedicated to promoting equal access to art for all disabled and deaf people, from celebration of disability culture within art to employment to full audience access.

Anyone can vote. Vote before November 27. And check out the other nominees in all eight categories too.

Other links about Liz's work:

Netribution Film Network interview with Liz Crow about Frida Kahlo's Corset

21 Things to Remember, a short film by Liz Crow (link is to "clip 1" with "clip 2" available below it providing audio description)



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*One of my all-time favorite films, Jesus of Montreal, has captioning where something like this frequently occurs: The character on screen clearly says, "I'm 18 years old" while the text just below reads "I'm 23 years of age."

Preschoolers: What happens when people get old?

Image description: A large piece of butcher paper hangs in an outdoor display of drawings by preschoolers prompted by the question "What happens when people get old?" This paper shows a simple line drawing of a character in a wheelchair. The character looks a little like a mouse's head sticking out of a large square cart on wheels. Below an adult has printed a child's thoughts, "You go in a wheelchair. Your body is a little twisty."

Flickr: Frauenfelder

Deaf Karaoke with David Armand

Direct link to YouTube video here. This is a live performance of the song "Torn" by comedian David Armand of The Hollow Men with singer Natalie Imbruglia at the 2006 Secret Policemen's Ball for Amnesty International.

Visual description: Armand is on-stage at a live event acting out the lyrics to the pop song "Torn" (lyrics here). The performance looks like sign language but has been described as "mime style interpretive dance". I don't know sign, so I don't know if any of the performance uses actual sign language, but much of it is puns and it's cleverly easy to follow for a hearing person: Armand holds up four fingers for the word "for", mimes reeling in a fish for the word "real", and mimes a magic act for the word "illusion". Halfway through this performance, Imbruglia appears on-stage singing and eventually joins him in the gestures. There's a wordless slide guitar part toward the end of the song where Armand and Imbruglia mime playing the guitar.

Is this cultural appropriation? A comedy act that has nothing to do with deafness and Deaf culture? Or is it cultural cross-over that might be useful to the Deaf, Deaf theater, and communication with Deaf folks?

Here's a different mime performance by Armand, to Paul Young's 1980s hit "Wherever I Lay My Hat, That's My Home"

h/t to Group News Blog

Friday music: Evelyn Glennie

Evelyn Glennie is a talented percussionist who is also profoundly deaf. As she explains, media attention that focuses on the state of her hearing misses the point:

Deafness is poorly understood in general. For instance, there is a common misconception that deaf people live in a world of silence. To understand the nature of deafness, first one has to understand the nature of hearing.

Hearing is basically a specialized form of touch. Sound is simply vibrating air which the ear picks up and converts to electrical signals, which are then interpreted by the brain. The sense of hearing is not the only sense that can do this, touch can do this too. If you are standing by the road and a large truck goes by, do you hear or feel the vibration? The answer is both. With very low frequency vibration the ear starts becoming inefficient and the rest of the body's sense of touch starts to take over. For some reason we tend to make a distinction between hearing a sound and feeling a vibration, in reality they are the same thing. It is interesting to note that in the Italian language this distinction does not exist. The verb 'sentire' means to hear and the same verb in the reflexive form 'sentirsi' means to feel. Deafness does not mean that you can't hear, only that there is something wrong with the ears. Even someone who is totally deaf can still hear/feel sounds.

Here is a YouTube video of Glennie's collaboration with Icelandic singer Björk for the song "Oxygen." The visuals are simply a collage of photos of Björk, but that's Glennie playing behind Björk's vocals. The song is part of Glennie's 1998 greatest hits compilation.



Here's a 34-minute video of a presentation she gave on "How to listen to music with your whole body." There doesn't seem to be a transcript of her words (how sadly ironic is that?), but she talks about and demonstrates the difference between technically performing a piece of music and playing it as an artist who listens to and creates nuance.



And here's an excerpt from the documentary Touch The Sound:



Bionic Ear blog mentioned Glennie recently here.

Alison at Noesis writes about the lack of transcript for that TED speech here.

Movie review: Living in Oblivion

Well, a mini-review. Because kactus is right, Peter Dinklage's rant toward the end of this film is both hilarious and great righteous anger unleashed.

Living in Oblivion is a 1995 comedy about the trials of independent film-making, where everything that can go wrong with a production, does, and yet the project stumbles along. Here's a review of the movie as a whole that captures the comedic angst of the film.

Dinklage plays a dwarf named Tito hired for a goofy dream sequence in the film-within-the-film. Among the many misadventures of completing the dream scene, Tito finally quits in disgust after this tirade with the director:

Tito: Why does my character have to be a dwarf?

Nick: He doesn't have to be.

Tito: Then why is he? Is that the only way you can make this a dream, to put a dwarf in it?

Nick: No, Tito, I...

Tito: Have you ever had a dream with a dwarf in it? Do you know anyone who's had a dream with a dwarf in it? No! I don't even have dreams with dwarves in them. The only place I've seen dwarves in dreams is in stupid movies like this! "Oh make it weird, put a dwarf in it!". Everyone will go "Woah, this must be a fuckin' dream, there's a fuckin' dwarf in it!". Well I'm sick of it! You can take this dream sequence and stick it up your ass!

While I am again waxing on about All Things Dinklage, here's an old review of The Station Agent that appeared in The New Yorker, and here's a USAToday article on short actors in Hollywood.

What would that look like?

In the recent discussion of Aimee Mullins in Sports Illustrated, Sara, Trin and I have been debating Mullins' portrayal in that mag, and the portrayal of amputees and disabled people, generally, by the media. In the sidebar at right I've got a category for analysis of media coverage of disability, Wheelchair Dancer frequently looks at NYT coverage (examples of that here, here, and here), and there's a thoughtful discussion at Medical Humanities Blog, also about a woman amputee excelling in her career.

So, what would positive media coverage of Aimee Mullins, specifically, look like? How would someone laud her successes without putting her on the supercrip pedestal or fetishizing her amputated limbs either textually or with photos? Here are a couple alternatives to the SI story's sexualized supercrip slant:

• Photographer Lynn Johnson offers twelve photos of Mullins' life -- athletic, personal, typical and extraordinary in so many ways.


• The Women's Sports Foundation, where Mullins is currently serving as president, interviews her about athletic training, being a role model, advice for disabled girls, runway modeling and changing attitudes.

And here is Petra Kuppers on "Addenda? Contemporary Cyborgs and the Mediation of Embodiment" where she specifically analyzes a fashion photo of Mullins wearing those old-fashioned wooden prosthetics she briefly mentions in the SI article. It's a complex look at disability, feminism, Mullins' agency or complicity with the image, "false consciousness" and media portrayal both of disability and femininity. I'm too short on time and energy just now to write about it, but it's right on topic here.

Visual description: There are three photos here. The first is one of Lynn Johnson's collection on Mullins and is in black and white. Mullins stands in her athletic uniform and high tech racing prosthetics on a race track facing a woman holding a microphone and two men with tv cameras on their shoulders. This is a media interview at the 1996 Paralympics in Atlanta.

The second photo is the fashion art pic Kuppers analyzes and this is her thorough description: "The large colour photo presents Mullins sittting on the floor, her head in her hand in a defeated or melancholic position. She appears squeezed into the frame, contained by the photo’s borders. The colours of the image are brown and beige, earthy, taking up the blond of Mullins’ wild hair and echoed in the make-up. Mullins is wearing various stiff items of clothing, all of which extend out of the photo frame. The clothes are referenced in the accompanying text, in accordance with the generic conventions of fashion photography. The comprise of: a calico-coloured skirt skeleton reminiscent of whalebone crinoline underskirts (crinolin [sic] frame, for hire from Angels and Bermans) and a textured close-fitting top (suede T-Shirt by Alexander McQueen) to which shoulder ornaments are attached that look like wooden filigree Japanese or Spanish fans (wooden fan jacket, by Givenchy Haute Couture). She is also wearing artificial ‘mannequin’ lower legs (not referenced as ‘model’s own’ in the picture blurb, but extensively discussed in the Press). The legs look old and stained, and while one foot with coloured toenails is visible in the frame, the other reaches out to frame-left."

The final photo is Mullins running full-out on a beach with the ocean and blue sky behind her. She's heading down the beach away from the camera and appears to be wearing the exact black bra top and string bikini bottom she wears in the posed studio photo topping the SI article -- that much-discussed other photo.

Frida Kahlo -- Celebrating the 100th anniversary of her birth

Artist Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907, in Mexico City, Mexico, to a Mexican Indian and Spanish mother and Hungarian Jewish father. She died at age 47, on July 13, 1954, but she is, quite possibly, the most world-famous disabled woman living or dead. Her art is her fame, as well as her relationship with fellow Mexican artist Diego Rivera and her communist politics. Deeply personal, her art is filled with imagery of impairment and physical pain.

There are indications that in addition to childhood polio, a devastatingly injurious tram accident at age 18, and the loss of a limb in her later years, Kahlo was born with some spinal condition such as spina bifida.

Along with the paintings shown here, I've got a collection of links more interesting than anything I can write about Kahlo:

Her paintings are catalogued and described fairly well (in both English and Spanish) here, as part of an excellent site all about Kahlo, her life and her work.

This article, "The Trouble with Frida Kahlo" by Stephanie Mencimer, published in 2002 in Washington Monthly explores how Kahlo -- and all female artists -- needed to have a tragic or sensational personal story to enter the male canon. Mencimer's analysis begs for a disability studies rebuttal, particularly comments like this:

Some feminist art historians have struggled against such reworkings of women artists, but Kahlo's pop-culture mania revives it with a vengeance. Kahlo certainly facilitated this process by painting herself as the quietly suffering female. In every possible sense, the mass-culture Kahlo embodies that now-poisonous term: victimhood. She was the victim of patriarchal culture, victim of an unfaithful husband, and simply the victim of a horrific accident. But that's probably one reason why she's so popular. "People like to see women as victims," says Mary Garrard, a professor of art history at American University.

And this:

Many of her surgeries may have been unnecessary. Even Herrera notes, "If Frida's physical problems had been as grave as she made out, she would never have been able to translate them into art." Kahlo's close friend, the famous doctor Leo Eloesser, believed that she used her many surgeries to get attention from people, particularly from Rivera. There's no doubt that she was obsessed with him in a way that should make feminists cringe. She also made several suicide attempts and spent much of her adult life addicted to drugs and alcohol.

Though the article is well worth a read for it's look at how Kahlo's inability to bear children is widely interpreted as a tragedy when she may well not have seen it as such. And for when Mencimer notes this:

One wonders what the postal service was thinking when it put Kahlo on a stamp. "Visas are denied to [foreign] artists with Frida Kahlo's politics," notes Chadwick.

Here is, I think, a more developed and disability-studies-friendly analysis of Kahlo's self-portraiture. (That's a link to the main page of a Frida site. Check out the sidebar feature labeled "Frida and her obsession of self-portraits.")

For true disability studies analyses of the 2002 film Frida, starring Salma Hayek, read Marta Russell's CounterPunch review and a wonderful discussion between Harilyn Rousso and Simi Linton at DisabilityWorld. Both movie reviews note the obliteration of any depiction of Kahlo's childhood polio and it's early effects, with the tram accident framed instead as the life-altering tragedy to her physical health. Also, her recovery from that accident is made complete in the film so that a tango between Kahlo and another woman is not complicated by what would have been an interesting limp. The Rousso-Linton discussion ranges beyond the movie itself to look at use of the word "cripple," sexuality, and class and disability.

Rousso says:

Remember the scene in the garden where she's sitting in her wheelchair a few months after the accident? To me, this is the quintessential stereotype about the person who is in an accident or illness--that their main desire, preoccupation is to be able to walk again. She is sitting in the garden, her parents arrive and she gets up out of the wheelchair, takes her first steps and suddenly becomes almost nondisabled.... I found it shocking when we finally do see her using a wheelchair in an ongoing way, which is about an hour and a half into the film. We are given no sense of the progression of her disability. Until then, her disability was not shown as affecting her daily life. It was shown as affecting her painting - both her decision to paint and at least some of the content of her paintings, but not the details of her life. She was by and large portrayed as a "non-disabled disabled women." Then suddenly well into the film she is shown as quite significantly disabled.

Here's a link about Liz Crow's short experimental drama Frida Kahlo's Corset. "Corset" refers to the orthopedic back braces Kahlo wore because of her impairments.

From a 2005 exhibition, here's the Kahlo site for the Tate Modern Art Museum in London.

Finally, this PBS site on the film The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo includes five of Kahlo's works of art made into image maps with additional info available to mouse rollover.

Links lead to visual descriptions in English and Spanish: The four paintings in this post are The Broken Column (1944), Tree of Hope, Remain Strong (1946), Henry Ford Hospital (1942) and Self-Portrait with the Portrait of Doctor Farill (1951).

Thanks to Penny for the heads-up on Frida's birthday.

Australian academics suspended over criticism of thesis on laughing at the disabled

A short summary of the story from The Courier Mail:

TWO academics have been suspended without pay for six months for criticising a thesis which they said poked fun at disabled people.

John Hookham and Gary MacLennan, both senior lecturers in creative industries at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), criticised the PhD work in an April article in The Australian newspaper.

The thesis is a film starring two intellectually impaired men and is entitled Laughing at the Disabled.

The academics said the men were put in cruel situations they did not understand - one in which they were sent to a rural pub to tell locals they were looking for romance, provoking advances from a drunk woman.

They said the scenes provoked raucous laughter at a university screening.

"The purpose of humour is not just cruelty ... we don't think it's funny to mock and ridicule two intellectually disabled boys," the pair wrote in the article.

An excellent detailed report from The Australian:

The project had been developed in conjunction with the disability group Spectrum and the two men depicted in it as well as their parents were comfortable with the idea, having had experience with Noonan in the making of Unlikely Travellers [a film about a group of disabled people who had gone to the Sahara Desert, which has been purchased by the ABC and will be screened later this year].

In addition, the university's ethics committee had cleared the project.

But after seeing the rushes, MacLennan, a lecturer at the university, said: "I have a handicapped child and I pray to God that my child never comes into contact with someone like you." Also present was Hookham, who questioned the use of disabled people.

That night, Noonan emailed MacLennan and Hookham, asking them to expand on their responses.

MacLennan emailed back, saying: "It's quite simple, Michael, I was brought up by my mother - one of the uneducated Irish peasantry. She was the best human being I have ever met. She taught me not to mock the afflicted. I had to go to a university to see the mocking of the afflicted being celebrated under the spurious rubric of 'post-structuralism'."

A few weeks later, Noonan gave a lecture that involved scenes from Unlikely Travellers, and at the end of his lecture he explained that the two disabled men involved in the film were present. Indeed they were, and they answered questions from the class. What happened next depends on who you listen to.

According to various blog entries written by students, some of them found the experience positively challenged their view of the disabled, as here were two men quite open about their disabilities and prepared to speak openly and honestly.

But others claimed the experience shocked and embarrassed them.

Here's a round-up of some bloggers on the events.

Here's a link to some videos on the academics' position, an excerpt from Noonan's previous work Unlikely Travellers, and some disability advocates on the controversy.

Thoughts?