March 8 2014: VSA Day of Arts For All

                                         Janine Moore's "Orange Groves", 1st Place Emerging Artist

                                                     Henry Hess’s “No Place Like Home”

               (Spartan meets Pyramid Head” by Jonah Farmer.)

If you follow my blog, you know I usually go to The Day of Arts for All on March 8, to report on it. But this year, I was even in it! My piece was called “Pig Head”, which used bright colors and saturation to illustrate a pig head via digital art. Aside from art, there was also some music by Sarah Bellish, a young soloist who uses her experience with disability to write music. A great opportunity to listen to some of the great life experience disability brings, in a soulful way! There were also videos meant to illustrate the experience of disability. The theme of the day seemed  to be representing these perceptive  personal experiences.

 Then the awards came. All who participated got an award. Including me! All the pieces were great, but the two I liked best were Henry Hess’s “No Place Like Home”, showing Dorothy’s ruby slippers, which won third place in the Youth Artist category. 2nd Place in the same category went to a Halo/Silent Hill inspired piece! “Spartan meets Pyramid Head” by Jonah Farmer. 1st place in the same category went to Nathaniel Curtiss of Worthington for Where Miles Davis Recorded The Birth of Cool! A super cool use of perspective! Best in Show was called: “Beautiful Nature Life: Where Everyone Would Like to Be”, a mixed media piece by the team of Wendi Olszewski, Shawnda Osswald, and Stephanie Spencer, depicting a brightly colored rural life.

But, everyone wins in my book, because we all told our stories through art: “Why the pig head?” Someone asked me in front of my piece. “Why not?” I said. The point for me is just to create something that didn’t exist before. The image that jumped out at me in the framework of my color scheme was a pig head. I’m interested in seeing how my mind and experience as a disabled person translates to my creations, as each
artist did through their own perspective. By his/her own experience.

Going back to perspectives, the films Be My Brother is an Australian short film about a man with Down Syndrome who records everything he observes, but he cannot get his brother to record something on the bench with him. He displays a dazzling intelligence, quoting everything from Shakespeare to The Lion King, and even charms a woman who he describes as the “most attractive woman in the world”. The film ends on a bus, with his brother hugging him.    

Sensory Overload is a film from the perspective of an autistic. As such, there is intermittent sound, and sometimes it becomes increasing overwhelming. From the blaring of city sirens to a cashier tapping a pen in a café. Wild colors add to the disorientation, and autistic perspective. The film ends in silence as a woman helps the boy pick up papers he lost from his backpack.

We ended with a comedy called Jazz Hand. In this a Californian woman with a prosthetic hand enters a dance audition. While tap dancing, her hand falls off and the choreographer recoils in exaggerated disgust. She puts her hand back on! But backwards! Lots of big laughs from this one, and nice to see a “disability movie” that is a comedy. “Do you think he noticed?” Asks the dancer. Duh! Yes!

I’m pleased to have been a part of The Day of Arts for all. It was a fun time, and I got to get my art out and look and other people’s art! That’s always a good day for me when I can get positive messages about disability! We are all capable of becoming more than we appear to be. Thanks, VSA! I had a great time.

For a full list of Day of Arts for All winners visit VSA's website: www.vsao.org

                                                     ("Pig Head" by Chris Bowsman.)

                               

ReelAbilities Columbus 2013:

ReelAbilities Columbus 2013:

When I went to Reelabilities 2013 this weekend, the first movie I saw was “Aphasia”, in the McConnell Arts Center. It’s an American film (2011) about Carl McIntyre, an actor and salesman who has a stroke, and suffers from aphasia, the inability to read, write, or understand spoken language. The film follows his year and a half trying to regain these skills. It’s a very comedic film, but not without it’s touching moments, such as when Carl first suffers the stroke, his kids jump on him and his wife yells at him to get up and stop messing around.
   
Also, the film shows Carl’s frustration of having to learn words again. Oddly, the first words he seems to learn quickly are curse words, which is sometimes played for comedic effect. (They must be stored in a different part of the brain…or linked to his frustration.) Such as when he goes to a fast food joint and tries to order a “Frozee”, but ends up seeming to order…something else! He also has trouble distinguishing between yes and no at first, which means he ends up with much larger orders sometimes and says yes when he means no.

    In his therapy,  he begins to show “cognitive flexibility” which is why he can relearn words by getting around to them in his brain. For example to say “when” Carl at first has to say “Chicken” which surprises his therapist. “Chicken?” she asks. Then, Carl says “Chicken! Eggs! Hen! Www-when!” The surprising thing for me was how much I empathized with Carl’s aphasia. Having learnt another language (And sometimes having difficulty with my own…but haven‘t we all had those?), it’s frustrating when you can’t convey what you want, and embarrassing when you say something completely different.

     This is a short film, 40 minutes long, that embraces the entire gambit of human emotions, and the human struggle to adapt to worlds which we don’t understand. Ultimately, Carl realizes when he’s watching himself on TV that: “There are two mes. The then and the now. And the now me is the only version of me this little boy [his son] will ever know.” And spoiler alert: He does finally get that Frozee!

   This is a great film for anyone who has struggled to communicate. Or likes to laugh. Funny story: as I came into the theater, people there must’ve thought I was with the Dancing Wheels, a disabled dance group that was there earlier that evening. They showed me into the theater, and then I got on this big metal lift, and I almost ended up on stage. I didn’t know! I thought it was just really good handicapped seating! But, then I told them I wasn’t a dancer, and they took me back down into the audience. Communication breakdown even between non-aphasiacs!

     The second day was when I saw “Renn Wenn Du Kannst” and “Yo Tambien” in the Wexner Center. These were the two films I’d planned to see originally. “Yo Tambien” (Me too.) is about a man called Daniel with Down Syndrome who falls in love with his able-bodied coworker Laura in Seville’s Department of Disability Services. Daniel is wonderfully arrticulate, and discusses philosophy, and art, and his disability with her. Laura is more of a “wild child” who has a dislike for rules, and is new in town, so Daniel is her first connection.

     However, just as Daniel is Laura’s first connection as a friend, Laura is taught how to love again by Daniel’s example. There are hints that Laura was abused as a child, and is estranged by her family. Likewise, Daniel’s mother can be a little to overprotective of him, and thinks he’s somehow being taken advantage of. Daniel also has a friend, Pedro, a dancer, who falls in love with a woman with Down Syndrome in his dance class. This serves to show how the concept of normative relationships doesn’t always function correctly.

    In both cases, it is the able-bodied people who do not approve of the relationships. But, they don’t want or need their approval. In Daniel’s case, people think he’s being bamboozled. In Pedro’s case, people think: He has Down Syndrome, how can he know what love (or sex!) is? These are the kind of presumptions the disability community has to work against! It’s not able-bodied vs. disabled. We need more stories like this that show us that. Also, it did remind me a lot of my trip to Spain, as I suspected it would. The fast, colorful language, the classical architecture and wild countryside, and Daniel’s family was always drinking wine. What a great Spanish presentation of the Independent Living and Disability Rights movements!  

    Now on to Renn Wenn Du Kannst (Run If You Can)! This film is from Germany, and follows Ben, a quadraplegic about to complete his MA (Boy, I’ve been there!) who falls for one of his assistants friends, a woman who plays cello, but has crippling stage fright to where she can only perform solo. Now, here’s what I thought was cool: In the opening scene, Ben in ordering his assistant around and cleaning up his apartment, but the moment his aide leaves, his thesis which he just PRINTED, flies out the window. I nearly cursed at loud as Ben does!

    You see, when Annika (His aide/Ben’s love interest, in a sort of love triangle!) has stage fright, she can run away, as she does many times during performances in the movie. Ben can’t run away from his fear which is that he will no longer be able to maintain relationships after his accident. Indeed, in the course of the movie, Ben kind of laughs off the notion that Annika could possibly love him. But, then of course, she does, but neither find that they can perform sexually under the weight of their traumas.

    Ben’s story is that he was in an auto accident that killed his disabled girlfriend as well as left him quadriplegic. Since then, he has developing a joking attitude (He calls his attendant Christian…Nurse Christiane!) and stays away from people, since he can’t run from his fear. As Ben jokes with Christian: “I was not put on Earth to have sex with women. I was put here to look at their backsides.” I must admit, I often take myself out of the game so to speak, before I even know if I’ll succeed. For many of the same reasons; and the fact that it was in German made it hit home closer for me.

    The film wonderfully juxtaposes the need for order (Classical music; cleaning the apartment; the Master’s thesis.) against fear and non-logical impulses. Though all three in the end remain friends, it is left unclear whether they will go their own separate ways. There is a small scene where Ben’s mom comes to visit, and she starts cleaning and Ben tells her to get out! That to me was pretty powerful, as a cultural analyst. This is Ben’s territory! Only he and his aides can order it!

     And hey, as a non-native German-speaker I learned a few new slang words! As usual the European scenery was great…but in a different way than Spain’s. The city of Bottrop, as presented here is large and modern, dominated by high-rises and steel. Actually, Ben climbs the Bottrop Tetrahedron and sits on top of it. Something he told “Christiane” was his “unattainable dream”. A wonderful film dealing with interability relationships…but certainly not as afraid to dive into pain as Yo Tambien. Yo Tambien was more colorful; more Spanish…for lack of a better adjective!

     Afterwards, a speaker read her academic paper on the presence of able-bodied/disabled actors in the media. And even gave some cursory background into the disability rights movement in Germany…by commenting that Germany’s movement is based on “self-determination” (Which she never called by the German Selbstbestimmung.)

   The trouble is, in the USA, it seems to be based on “Independence”. So, whatever differences both movements have based on those words are (to me.) completely rhetorical. I don’t get the difference…but the main argument seemed to be that media presence within the “community” is growing. This year was the opposite of last year’s for me: I came prepared to speak this time, but never quite got the opportunity to ask questions!
 
   All in all, a good ReelAbilities Festival, with some great intercultural discourse on inter-and-intraability relationships. And I got to see one more film than I originally thought! (“Aphasia”) I’m glad VSA Ohio invited me to take part. Each film dealt with the same issues, more or less. But each had a different cultural lens which with to examine our common humanity through stories about disability! ReelAbilities 2013 was a very fun, and very educational time!
     

 

ReelAbilities Film Festival 2013 Preview

ReelAbilities Film Festival 2013 Preview:

Well, I always love the ReelAbilities Film Fest in Columbus! You get to see movies dealing with disabilities and even discuss it afterwards, which is a rare opportunity to make one’s viewpoint as a person with a disability heard. It’s even better, because they always have international entries. So, I get to do some intercultural analysis as well.

     This year they have two entries from Germany, one from China, one from Portugal, one from Israel about a disabled soccer (Football to international viewers.) team. Other entries deal with Down Sydrome, (Yo Tambien, Spain.) and Aspberger’s (The clayamation feature Mary and Max, from Australia.) Longtime viewers of this blog know how important it is to me to promote strong, human portraits of disabilities. And I think ReelAbilities gives us all the opportunity to look at those kind of portraits. The festival begins Oct. 4 and ends on the 7th.

I will go to at least one showing…probably on the 6th, as I am close by the Wexner Center for The Arts. They will show “Yo Tambien” (“Me too”, from Spain.) and Renn Wenn Du Kannst (Run If You Can, from Germany.) Renn Wenn Du Kannst is about a paraplegic man in love with his nurse aide’s love interest. Since I speak German, I definitely want to go when one of the German movies is playing.

The Spanish film will probably remind me of Spain, which is a beautiful country. But, anyway, I rarely see disability films in an international context, so ReelAbilities is a real treat for me.
 
If you’re in the Columbus area, you can catch all the times by going to: columbus.reelabilities.org. Tickets are $5 at the door. If you’re an international reader, let me know of some good films with disabilities in them, and I will submit some requests. If you’re too far away to attend, I’ll provide analysis of the films after I see them to give you a taste. Regrettably, I think I’ll only be able to go to the one screening this year. But, we’ll see.
 
As usual, it should be a fun time, and give me a chance to share my human experience with others who have disabilities. We’ll have some guest speakers, one of whom I know is the poet from last year’s festival. In any case, it should be fun to see some disability stories with a little bit of international flavor! Maybe I’ll see YOU there!

Special (2006)

Special (2006):

Les: “I’m important and I keep this city running.”

Boss: “Good. Now, repeat.”

Les: “I’m important. I’m important. I’m important…”

Don’t we all wish we could be a superhero? A bored meter maid named Les wants to be able to make a difference in people’s lives. He’s tired of reciting his boss’s mantra “I’m important and I keep  this city running.” without really believing in it. So, he takes an experimental pill called “Special”, and now finds that he can walk through walls, fly, and is telepathic.

    But, his friends all think he’s crazy. And that’s because he is. See, the drug only reduced his capacity for self-doubt. Thus, critical thinking as well. In reality, he’s just running into walls, but he thinks he’s going through them. One time, he stops a robbery at a convience store, and his behavior starts to get more bizarre, and psychotic.
 
 When he reveals his powers to his friends (who own a comic book store.) they both laugh and play along, so he thinks they witnessed his powers, too. Soon, he jumps off a gas station rooftop and saves a lady’s purse from getting snatched; the friends start to realize that Les is psychotic.

     Meanwhile, Les’s delusions of grandeur only become bigger. He is confronted by men led by “Jonas Exiler” in suits who want to hunt him and use his DNA to clone an army of super soldiers. He successfully battles them off, and rushes to his friends to tell them they are in danger. But, as his friends become more disturbed by Les’s mania, they try to tell him it’s not real. He pulls a gun on them and accuses them of being brainwashed by “The Suits”. And what started out as a very comedic underdog tale becomes insanely darker as Les’s is tortured by his delusions and continues to lash out at the real world. He holds up his doctor at gunpoint, and in another scene is beaten by his delusions with a 2x4 though it’s apparent Les is only beating himself up.

    Having seen elements of psychosis before in others, I’m not entirely sure how accurate the film is, but it seemed to me to be that way. The delusion starts off as innocent, almost like a game (maybe I AM a superhero.) and then before you know it, he’s dressing in costume and beating up “Suits”. The recent influx of superhero movies kind of made me believe it’s a superhero story; so it makes you suspend disbelief for a minute. But, it’s not. It’s a “disability movie” about the nature of schizophrenia.

 I never once thought Les was a bad guy. On the contrary, his delusions reveal him to be a man of a sweet and good nature who only wants to make the world a better place. Before he’s beaten (first) by the Suits, he yells at Jonas Exiler “Who do you think would care if you disappeared, huh? You think you’re so much better than everyone else! Well, you’re not!” (I wonder if he was merely talking to his self-doubt. He wants to doubt himself again, almost.)

I have probably given away too much already, but this is a deeply touching character study about a man tortured both by his everyday life, and then his escape of it. It’s an emotional roller coaster that will keep you rooting for Les all the way through, even in his more psychotic moments, which reveal themselves to be manifestations of his humane motives. But, people don’t have superpowers. To believe otherwise is crazy, right?  

THE SECRET GARDEN REVIEW

As I said before, one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen when it comes to disability portrayals is 1993’s The Secret Garden. Colin, the disabled character is typecast as a sour young man, who is even rumored to be a hunchback. He is described as crippled, (Yes, I know it’s Victorian times, but this set up the pathetic portrayal.) and his father doesn’t want anything to do with him or children. That being said, his father Lord Craven takes her cousin named Mary after she loses her family in India. She takes him to the Secret Garden in this castle.

    Everything about this character’s image rubbed me the wrong way. His own caretakers lock him away and Maggie Smith’s character scolds Mary for even being with him. When he becomes hysterical, they tie him down to the bed. Re-watching this movie even for the purposes of analysis was extremely hard, though I did. It is a clear case of “curing” a disabled character for “love” by magic. After Colin starts having fun in the garden, he discovers that in fact he can walk. Then, they contact his father via “magic spell”. Yes, I know. It’s meant to symbolize the beauty of “natural” life vs. the isolation of modern times. Why prove it supernaturally? Why can’t Colin just be disabled? And it’s just so darn sappy in its message. For example, after Colin walks, his father decides he loves him, AND the kicker, MARY LOVES HIM TOO. The message is clear: if you are disabled, no one will love you.

   If you’re cured though, and have the right attitude and the right body…then you can be loved! Surely, Colin’s disability was all in his mind, and had nothing to do with his intense mistreatment by those around him. No, all he needed was a little girl to show him how to have fun. It’s not like he’d never tried walking before. I apologize for my tone, but it is really difficult to watch if you have a disability. The clear implication is that a disabled life is not worth living or somehow the cause of Colin’s hysteria. Besides the fact, (and I know it’s an old book, but that doesn’t excuse it!) that the movie maintains the “You can do it…” attitude towards physiology, it also has one of those scenes where Colin hobbles over and hugs his able-bodied buddies. Such scenes were dated by 1993, one would hope, but there is a strong presumption of able-bodiedness, as Dickon and Mary watch Colin hobble; wide-eyed and smiling like goons.

    Suffice it to say, I hated this movie and its able-bodied presumptions even as a kid.Worst disability portrayal ever. But, come to find out, the movie even engages in casual racism against Indian natives, and passes off British imperial aristocracy as just part of the charm of the movie. Of course the Yorkshire girl is happy to be a maid! Of course, Mary launches into a tirade when she dare presume she’d be an Indian native. I know it’s done for sentimental purposes, ostensibly…but re-watching was a real eye-opener into how offensive this film really was (and is.) to me.

    Magic is something I have nothing against. But, only when it inspires me! This film is selling magic that isn’t really there. In fact, it’s quite nasty. And yet, it hopes to cover up its inhumanity with a pretty garden. I said I’d watch this movie because of the deep impact it had on me as a child. Now, as an adult it still has…perhaps even deeper impact. This was 1993...and attitudes like this exist. And they persist! Having seen such attitudes up close, still makes me think of Colin. But, you know? In a sense, this film is refreshing. It shows me exactly what kind of negativity I’ve been up against: The presumption that the aristocracy knows best, and a disabled life is not worth living. I’m proud to work with organizations like VSA to prove that wholly wrong. Thanks VSA Ohio! Keep up the fight for disability rights!