Myth/Nostalgia/Ache/Absurdity/Beauty

Life of Pi is one of those movies that no longer is a movie in your head after you see it.  It's a pattern of wallpaper from your childhood, a beautiful/horrible incident that you recover from but never get over, a look a school-bus driver gives you in his rear view mirror, a fading sunset in the basement of your best friend's grandma's house after a flood...  In short it's pure poetry with an engine of narrative so efficient you don't feel the story as story, the movie as movie.  You feel the story as myth/nostalgia/ache/absurdity/beauty.  I could go on about how Ang Lee is a genius, about the CGI and the 3D effects, about the brevity and kindness of both the novel and the screenplay...  But I just want to concentrate on the experience of having gone through this "thing."  It's a dream that doesn't linger as much as reverberate, like post traumatic stress disorder. 

And then, toward the end, that tiger Pi loved and needed to love just walking away from him into the darkness of a jungle.  That's wisdom turned inside out, sentiment too.  Nothing means anything, and yet everything is alive with meaning. 

The best movie of the year.

The Imagination Is Not Our Escape

Six Degrees of Separation has been haunting my thoughts since I showed it in a disability studies class I'm teaching about alliances and advocacy involving people with and without disabilities.  I wrote a post about the movie a few weeks ago ("Just Fill in the Names"), but now I've read the papers the students in the class wrote about the movie, and I feel inspired.  While not explicitly about disability, Six Degrees focuses on the complicated and emotional relationships forged when people from completely separate cultural and socioeconomic worlds decide to make an alliance.  It's rough stuff.  In the movie, Paul (Will Smith), the African American, gay, homeless kid starving for upscale approval and connection, and Ouisa (Stockard Channing), the rich socialite who loves him and sees his worth despite the circumstances of their meeting, represent two forces coming together and changing one another in ways they could never have foreseen before their collision.  It's life-changing, for everyone involved.

Here's what some of the students wrote:

From Shelby Stanovsek:

"The main character in this film, Ouisa, works for justice because she is willing to look outside of the boundaries and lines that her class of people creates and is willing to accept someone who was not born into a life of privilege...  In the film it is evident that she has developed a deep emotional bond with Paul, and is proud of the work he has done to better himself.  She does not feel he should be punished for lying about his identity because she knows that had he not constructed a fake story to get into their lives, they never would have allowed him the chance, and I think that she admires his bravery and commitment in that regard."

From Hannah Hampton:

"Regardless of the way Paul has taken advantage of them, they still agree to help him.  This is a true portrayal of an ally -- they overlook Paul's flaws and realize he is just a boy who needs help."

From Caitlin Coholich:

"Six Degrees tells the story of how easily alliances can be made; however it also shows how easily they can vanish."

From Jennifer McMillan:

"Ouisa doesn't fully transcend the boundaries of her upper-class lifestyle until the very end of the movie when she ultimately and fully rejects the society and the imagination-starved life she had been living.  The fact like Paul was black and homeless is perhaps what kept the alliance between Paul and Ouisa alive for as long as it was.  He was the opposite of what she symbolized, and this enabled her to enter an opposite world by connecting to him.  Ouisa was a controlled person before she met Paul.  Paul completely turned Ouisa's life into chaos.  However, chaos is not always a negative experience.  What comes from chaos is often a rebirth, an invigoration."

From Tori Evans:

"Paul stated in the movie, 'The imagination is not our escape.  On the contrary, the imagination is the place we are all trying to get to.'  He wanted people to expand their stereotypes and prejudices and see others not for their color, sexuality or class."

Bondage

Skyfall, the new James Bond film, is exhilarating to watch to the point you forget it's a total retread.  The whole purpose of Bond movies now, of course, is aggrandizing deja vu, finding pleasure in reinventing what has been reinvented to the point it's no longer cliche, just a kind of movie-movie shorthand.  Skyfall is one of the best examples of taking formula and reformulating it to create a little shock to spice up nostalgia.  And its first five or six minutes are probably one of the best action-picture sequences in the history of movies:  car crashes, motorcycles zooming over roofs, a speeding train with two men fighting atop it.  It's an old-school triumph of style over logic.  The ending, as well, has an early-90s independent-movie vibe to go along with its crashing helicopters and armed groups of bald mustached men.  It takes place in a small Scottish church, and delivers a dramatic punch in the gut that evens has tears rolling down 007's cheeks.

Daniel Craig plays Bond as if he is in a trance, all blue-eyed soullessness, his anger engineered to create simple solutions to very complicated problems.  And Judi Dench, as M, is so beautifully understated in her portrayal of power-hunger and regret, she practically steals the show. 

One part of the retread pleasure that doesn't work for me is Javier Bardem's supervillain, Silva.  Bardem is an incredible ham, and it is always a joy to watch him ham it up, but in Skyfall the character does not deserve such deliberation and vigor.  Silva is a one-note psycho, and is particularly sad because of the way the screenwriters define him:  he is disfigured from a botched suicide attempt, and that disfigurement becomes the reason he is what he is, that disability defining him.  He also has dyed blond hair and eyebrows, and a sort of proto-effeminacy that borders on camp:  a guttural, grotesque prissiness that makes it seem like Silva's insatiable villainy is unspooling from Silva's "monstrous" (at least in the moral code of the Bond movies) sexuality.  In one of the first scenes between Bond and Silva, Bardem plays Silva like a catty homo happy to be indulging in a little kink.  With Mr. Bond helpless, strapped to a chair, Silva opens Bond's shirt and licks his lips and it's awkward not because of the gay vibe as much as what the gay vibe is being used for:  to define good and evil.  It's a quick way to divide the universe.

Even when you indulge in retreading a retread after 50 years of service, you still need to rethink the villainy just as much as the heroism.  Isn't there a way to create "evil" without making it feel like gay-bashing?  Can a villain not have a facial disfigurement and still be evil?

Just Fill in the Names

I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names. I find it A) extremely comforting that we're so close, and B) like Chinese water torture that we're so close because you have to find the right six people to make the right connection... I am bound to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people. 

Ouisa Kittredge in Six Degree of Separation, a play and screenplay written by John Guare



I've blogged a few other times about the Disabilities Studies class I'm teaching this semester at Miami U.  It's titled, "(Dis)Ability Allies:  Making It Work," and basically we've been trying as a class to figure out how authentic, effective, meaningful relationships among people with and without disabilities happen, and once we figure out how they happen -- how we can ensure these alliances provide ways to address social injustices, including decolonizing people who have often been relegated to institutions, both logistical and cultural.  

In trying to come up with unique and fresh texts to talk about along those lines, I remembered a movie that came out almost 20 years ago that is completely about how human relationships can change the course of people's lives irrevocably, and how hard and gut-wrenching that process is.  Six Degrees of Separation, written by John Guare and directed by Fred Schepisi, tells the true story of a homeless, gay, African American man who conned his way into the homes of the upper-classes in New York City during the early 80s by claiming he was the son of Sidney Poitier.  The story centers around that man, named Paul, and one of the people he connected with, Ouisa Kittredge, the wife of an art-dealer with children at Harvard and Groton.  Ouisa, in the film, is played by Stockard Channing, and Paul by Will Smith.  Paul and Ouisa make an alliance despite the fractured, fraudulent way they meet, and through the course of the film that connection pulls Ouisa away from her comfortable life of nights at the opera, upscale fundraisers, and champagne luncheons.  She actually feels a maternal impulse toward Paul, and Paul finds succoring shelter in her presence. 

They make an odd, and oddly poignant couple, and as Ouisa realizes that she may have more in common with Paul than she does her own children, husband and society, she starts to disconnect from that world.  Finally, in a penultimate scene, during a stylish brunch peopled with the cream of the crop of Manhattan culture, Ouisa loses it.  By this time, Paul has been found and arrested and he has disappeared into the prison system.  By this time, as well, Flan, Ouisa's husband, has used the Story of Paul as a way to aggrandize himself and his status; their relationship with Paul is now a piece in the New York Times about how the Kittredges were bamboozled because they were so kind and openhearted and gullible. 

Ouisa wants to correct this narrative.  She has made an authentic alliance with someone so alien to her existence she does not want him to become an anecdote.  At that elegant starchy affair Ouisa tells the crowd that she loves Paul.  It shocks the room.  She ends up stomping off, eventually separating not only from her husband, but from the world they have always occupied together.  Her connection to Paul is both freeing and terrifying, in that it rips away the restraints and manners of charity and replaces it with actual empathy, a state of grace that does not allow for sentimentality.

That alliance between Paul and Ouisa never comes to full fruition in the movie.  In fact, it is thwarted.  But that's not important.  Ouisa's desire to go beyond charity, as the privileged person in the relationship, is what the movie is about, and what possibly will spur her on to make changes in her own, and in other people's lives that have meaningful ramifications.  It takes someone who has power and connections and resources to help people like Paul break out of the colonization that has always kept people like Ouisa and Flan feeling safe and secure.  Ouisa abdicates her power in order to love Paul.  In other words, being an ally to people normally shut out of the conversation (people with disabilities included) is not a touchy-feely exercise.  It is often about sacrifices you never intended to make, but have to in order to stay sane.

Here are the questions I asked the class to answer in order to draft a short paper...

How does the film deal with alliance issues?


• Hostility & rejection leveled at ally by majority: 

• Stigmatized by association with marginalized

• Dismissed by majority for giving up privilege



How does, or does not, the main character:

• Work for justice?

• Work with passion?

• Seek immediate change?

• Work to effect long term change?


How do Class and Race factor into making, and sustaining, alliances in the film?

I'll be reading their papers this weekend and will share some of what they've written here on the blog soon...

The New Abysmal

Ryan Murphy's The New Normal is a sitcom that has a prefabricated and self-congratulatory smarm all its own.  It feels so plastic that you want to throw it into the recycle bin in hopes it gets turned into something quiet and useful, like maybe a beach ball or an umbrella.  When it goes caustic and mean, in the guise of Ellen Barkin's caricature of a conservative Ohio grandma, it comes off as gay self-hatred championing openmindedness, and when it goes all sweet and kind it feels like a horrible cartoon of actual feeling.  Everybody in it is so amped up that there's no human left -- just these off-kilter stereotypes chiming in, like Murphy's Glee without one speck of glee, added to a propensity to be offensive just for shits and giggles.  The two gay guys are having a baby with a blond, dewy-eyed surrogate straight out of central casting who has a daughter who I think was cloned from the twee little girl twerp in Little Miss Sunshine. 

The three or so episodes I've seen play out like parodies of some other show about two gay guys having a baby with a blond surrogate that's not that good but at least might be trying harder to get at something beyond the homosexual/heterosexual divide.   The New Normal has a distinct Romney era feel, as if Murphy and his creative team are prematurely welcoming in a new kind of zeitgeist in which gay people and straight people live separate lives and only come together for baby-making and bitching at each other. 

God help us.  What's the word?  Forward.  This thing is backwards to the extreme.
       

One of Those Things

Ms. Apple

An Anthony Luensman neon ladder.

Saturday night I saw Fiona Apple at the Aronoff Center for the Arts, downtown Cincinnati.  Her performance conjured many images, many reactions inside my skull:

• Carrie right after the bucket of pig's blood gets dumped all over her head.
• This bit from "Lady Lazarus":  Herr God, Herr Lucifer/Beware/Beware.  Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air.
• That movie where the teenaged girl gets all mean and nuts with her mom, Thirteen.
• Edward Munch's The Scream.
• Holden Caulfield after a beautiful sex-change.

But beneath all that floated something I had seen next door to the Aronoff, at the art gallery, in a one-man show called "Taint."  Anthony Luensman is the artist.  The show itself is kind of creepy and old-school-contemporary.  Like Jeffrey Daumer went on a shopping spree at Ikea, or Andy Warhol's ghost is thinking way too much about "desire."  But the one object/image that stood out from the show -- and that kind of fused with Ms. Apple's demonic/angelic/bipolar/mercuric/girl-pissed-off-because-you-did-not-call-her-back voice -- was a white neon ladder in the basement gallery there.  It shoots up off the floor and crashes through the ceiling tiles, and its eerie, funky glow shines inside and across the ceiling so that wires and insulation and pipes become a secret that is being told.  Ms. Apple's voice and that ladder intertwined while I listened, and I could almost close my eyes and start to climb up the artificial light bars into a metaphysical ceiling, like that voice and that ladder merged into both a way to escape fury and to somehow blend into its heavenly glow.

None of what I felt or heard or saw in my head was meant to be connected.  It was total serendipity.  But somehow Luensman's ladder and Ms. Apple's voice were meant to be combined into that one moment when there's perfection that was never intended.  That's when art works the best for me.  When it is unintentional, stupidly intertwined, momentary, and oddly blissful. 

What Is the Point?

Two things are coming together this year for me, and somehow the main nexus of this connection hits me hardest when I'm teaching the Disabilities Studies class at Miami on Wednesday nights.  It's a class about how to create alliances with people with disabilities, so it's built around first and foremost trying to understand the history and the social/cultural/economic/political ramifications of that history.  And mainly the historical aspects,  especially for those folks labeled developmentally disabled, are pretty much horrific.  For much of the 20th Century, they got disappeared, sent off to State Schools and other places a lot of the time, and even when they were not removed they were relegated to sub par environments created to "fix" them, and  in order to make a better world for everybody else. 



Antonio Adams standing in front of a portrait of Raymond Thunder-Sky in the Thunder-Sky, Inc. Gallery.

The mural Antonio designed and executed with help from Artworks, on the side of the building where Visionaries and Voices is located.

A Raymond drawing Antonio "finished," in the permanent collection of the Museum of Everything in London.

So far we've talked about eugenics, Goddard and the Kallikaks, Special Education, ADAPT, the American with Disabilities Act, Applecreek and Orient (two large and terrible institutions in Ohio that were eventually shut down), and other aspects of disability history.  We've also focused on how to decolonize and deconstruct attitudes and reactions, as you enter into relationships with people with disabilities that are meant to be kind and helpful. 

Often "help," in the way we approach people with disabilities, becomes a way to control and to erase and to make ourselves feel better.

I'm using "colonization" as a gateway into many ideas in class, hoping that metaphor with its contexts of Diasporas, plantations and ghettos bleeds over into the way we understand nursing homes, hospitals, day programs, special education classrooms, and other institutional settings  people with disabilities so often were (and still are) consigned to.  That turn from thinking of institutions and services as "charity" and "necessary" toward seeing them often as places to house and group in order to "fix" and "erase" is the hardest rhetorical and moral move to make.

“People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.”  (Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization:  A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason)

Which brings me to:  Antonio Adams and Raymond Thunder-Sky.  Right now I'm also getting ready to write an article about Antonio and his relationship with Raymond for Raw Vision, an outsider art magazine.  I've invited Antonio to come to the Disabilities Studies class, as a lecturer.  The main reason I did this is that I am beginning to understand now what happened with Visionaries and Voices and me.  I feel more than a little disillusioned about the whole thing.  I started out trying to make my relationship with Antonio and Raymond and other artists with disabilities Bill and I met as authentic and systems-less as possible, meaning I never thought in a million years meeting up with them would have been the genesis of a day program.  That was very naive, because one of the main reasons I met them was because I was a systems-worker. 

In fact the whole time I did what I did for Visionaries and Voices I never saw it as constructing an institution.  I saw it as a renegade enterprise in which people of all sorts, all classes and creeds and weirdnesses, combined their talents to make a big impression.  That's Utopia, I know, but I didn't even understand the limits and dangers of thinking that way either.  Because day to day I did whatever I could to make Visionaries and Voices secure.  I wrote grants, I helped hire people, I pushed and pulled to make it have a "revenue stream" outside of the grants and donations, eventually advocating for it to be funded by Medicaid, with its very colonizing rules and regulations.  But even as I stubbornly fixated on sustaining Visionaries and Voices as it grew from informal art shows to finding a studio space to hiring a studio coordinator to finding a bigger studio space and hiring more studio coordinators to finding two studio spaces and getting Medicaid involved to coming up with a Table of Organization, etcetera, etcetera., I still did not get the ramifications until it was too late.  And as the number of artists involved in the effort grew from three or four to forty to fifty, and as their statuses as "artists" sharing materials and ideas became closer to "clients" sharing staff,  all I thought about was:  let's keep this thing going.

I hypnotized myself into believing once Visionaries and Voices was fiscally and organizationally sound, THEN the real work would begin. 

What was the real work?  Oddly enough, for me, the real work was ensuring that Visionaries and Voices was the opposite of a day program, the synonym of an institution.  Oddly enough, it has turned into a day program, a well-run one with much the same spirit as what we all began with, but what's missing is that sense of "systems-lessness," that sense of breaking free from the structures that created the colonization of people with developmental disabilities in the first place.  In other words, in Foucault's words,  I knew what I was doing; frequently I knew why I did what I was doing; but what I didn't know is what what I did does. 

The joint.

A poetry reading at the joint.

Opening night of Antonio's show, "Unrealized and Unforeseen."

The real work for me is right now, as we try to build a gallery and a studio that is not about charity or Medicaid funding, but a serious reinvention of what "disability" and "outsider art" can mean, without the need for constant fundraising and without the tendency to label people so you can raise awareness about their labels so you can fund the programs that will help them be a part of the community.  

Thunder-Sky, Inc. is the gig now -- a small, storefront gallery in Cincinnati that sponsors six exhibits a year.  It's a non-profit enterprise but without a lot of frills and machinations.  No telethons.  No silent auctions.  We incorporated in 2009, and Antonio is the Artist-in-Residence.  And so far we've been able to keep it going through art sales and private donations that aren't based on the "disability" trope, but on the idea that people need an unpretentious, unofficial, beautifully unique gallery space in their midst.  The shows and mission aren't based on anything except Raymond's unique life and legacy.

Antonio and Raymond were artists I met coincidentally, because I have a connection to the system that supplies services to people with developmental disabilities.  I loved their work, though, not because of their diagnoses or because it had anything to do with systems, but because I simply loved their work and the way they went about making it:  stonecold dedication, without a lot of help from anybody.  I was adamant my connection to the system would not dictate the way I tried to help them, and yet in the end it did.  I wasn't a great ally because I was focused on "helping" them in a generalized, charity-based fashion.  I thought by doing this I would end up "helping" a lot of people. 

Maybe I did, but in the end I kind of regret it because Utopia did not occur.  A day program did. 

I'm not whining.  Of course, Utopia never occurs.  Visionaries and Voices is a wonderful thing.  But it's not the thing I intended, even though it is everything I thought it was supposed to be.  Maybe that's contradictory and selfish and silly, but it's my truth.  And as I try to think and rethink and theorize about how to best "help" people with disabilities now I feel like I always need to start off with a warning:  try to know implicitly what you do does.  Try to figure out as you try to help what that "help" means morally and ethically and culturally, so that what you're adding to the whole mix isn't yet another version of what's happened so many times before.

A painting of Raymond by Antonio.