That's Entertainment

My post on arts and entertainment with a disability focus includes a dance film, naughty comics, art exhibits and the alleged "happiest place on earth."

Ballroomies

Musical Chairs

Ballroom dancing, injury and trans fabulousness fill the new movie Musical Chairs with heart, spirit and a sense of love. Susan Siedelman (director of Desperately Seeking Susan, Madonna's breakout film) brings together a diverse cast for an upbeat, sweet-natured story of a dancer whose post-injury recovery includes being coaxed into wheelchair ballroom dancing by a social dancing instructor. A group of other paraplegics join in, building up to some nice dancing and light comedy.

There are moments where the melodrama and pacing slow things down in Marty Madden's screenplay. And even the variation of disabled characters takes on archetypal depictions ("lovable misfits" as described in the synopsis), fortunately, without falling into stereotype. 

We have The Tough Girl (Angelic Zambrana), the Womanizing Hunk (the gorgeous Morgan Spector), and the World-wise Transwoman (Laverne Cox).

Musical Chairs

Our female lead, the Broken Heroine (Leah Pipes) needs love from an Able-bodied Hero (E.J. Bonilla) to fulfill her goals. There's also some predictable ethnic characterizations that are a bit dated (the Interfering Mother, played by Priscilla Lopez).

If all that sounds harsh and reductive, it's not meant to be. It's just that I've scoured a lot of disability-themed  films and books, so I'm a bit more aware of the various depictions and overused plot devices.


Musical Chairs is a sweet, likeable film, plus, it was entirely shot in New York City, which, for a low-budget feature, is an amazing accomplishment. It's wonderful that an intimate narrative movie can be so inclusive. The casting includes a few disabled actors and performers. (Bodybuilder and ballroom dancer Nick Scott is under-used and has no lines, but he's hard to miss in the dance finale.) Filmed in 2011, it's been making some festival rounds, and will hopefully be available on DVD soon.


Naughtily Nice

Nightlife #4

For more full-on gay wheelchair material, of the one-handed type, check out Dale Lazarov, Bastian Jonsson and Yann Duminil's Nightlife #4.

The PDF comic book features a sexy –and very sexual– bathhouse experience with a paraplegic hunk. While it's questionable that the quicky-splash nature of the sex scene depicted in this Greek-themed erotic no-caption tale could easily happen (how many European gay bath houses are fully accessible? Last I recall, none of them, and I did some research!), it is a fantasy, and an affirming nicely illustrated and entertaining one.  Buy it HERE.

Naughty, Not Nice
And speaking of entertainment; are you tired of waiting on lines at amusement parks? Well, if you're a rich privileged one-percenter, you can fake a disability, or hire a shill disabled person, and cut those long lines!

Raw Story exposes the insidious wealthy cheaters at Disneyland (from the excrebale NY Post's article on a book about rich people, which I won't link). Gawker has a snarky variation, with even snarkier comments, natch. The lazy media is running with this (probably exaggerated) story. Hey, once CNN's caught on, you know it's ...probably crap.

non-cheating wheelchair-using Disneyland patrons?

“My daughter waited one minute to get on ‘It’s a Small World’ — the other kids had to wait 2 1/2 hours,” one mother bragged of her scam to hire disabled people to be part of their entourage, thus ensuring a line cut. “You can’t go to Disney without a tour concierge… This is how the 1 percent does Disney.”

“It’s insider knowledge that very few have and share carefully,” social anthropologist Dr. Wednesday Martin told the Post. “Who wants a speed pass when you can use your black-market handicapped guide to circumvent the lines all together?”

Disney provides an extensive guide to their parks for people with disabilities. But is it just the smug upper crust and their hired shills who abuse it and ruin it for others? No, allegedly, other "classes" choose to be class-less and use scooters to tour the park without really needing it.

For those with class, in the Bay Area (which is really the happiest place on earth), you can get an interesting historical perspective at beautiful art exhibits at the De Young Museum, and a related lecture.

Rembrandt's "Beggar with Wooden Leg"

Rembrant's Beggars and Representation of Disability and Poverty will be presented at the de Young Museum by Susan Schweik, who teaches disability studies at UC Berkeley. She's also the author of The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Rembrandt's Century, this talk discusses Rembrandt van Rijn's depiction of beggars, placing it in the context of visual representations of poverty and disability both historical and contemporary.

Gee, I wonder if they'd be worthy of the one-percent moms' hiring practices?

For more subjective artistic representation by disabled artists, if you're in Chicago, you're in luck. Bodies of Work Festival takes place from May 15-25. Here is their Facebook page.  Here's a short TV spot about the festival.

 

Student Bodies

May 4. 

It's a day I avoid thinking about, a day somewhere in between the May Day protests that usually end up at nearby Civic Center Plaza, with resultant noisy media helicopters overhead, and Cinco de Mayo, with its accordant bar party invites.

But as someone who grew up in Ohio, and attended Kent State University, May 4 is a haunting morbid anniversary, historic proof of just how awful America can be.

These days, you can Google "campus shooting" and see dozens of horrifying events documents in thousands of news stories. Deranged students have been the culprits, usually.

But back in 1970, at the peak of U.S. anti-war protests, after several days of increasingly crowded student rallies, Ohio Governor Rhodes called out the National Guard, and after a tense stand-off, 60 shots were fired, four students were dead and nine others injured.

Amp-lified

I almost became an amputee at age six, and it was pretty much my own fault.

Jim & Paul (lower seat) take a little thrill ride.

Riding in a small Ferris wheel at a small town county fair in Central Ohio, some time in the late 1960s, my brother and I, in cute nearly matching outfits, rode a few loops on what I see now, from these old family photos, was a shoddy, poorly-built amusement park ride.

Only moments after these photos were taken (by my dad, probably), my brother and I began to mug and swing ourselves in the seat. Maybe the ride was not moving (my brother recalls that detail), but somehow my little boy leg got caught in the exposed hinge mechanism of the ride.

My sharp shriek of terror and pain halted the operator from possibly restarting the ride, and possibly cutting off or mangling my foot (or knee? It's a bit of a blur to me).

Livin' in the Eighties

Brits celebrate the death of Margaret Thatcher

The death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher serves as the final nail in the coffin of the 1980s. While politicians, including our own duplicitous president, chose to commemorate Thatcher's "strength" and power, others, including British citizens who survived her  establishment, know from their life experience, that the decade was one of hardship, capitalist corruption, and utter cruelty.

Incremental, Incidental

Magnet SF

There are lots of ways to promote your books, and literacy in general. An author often has to do the bulk of promotion on his/her own. This is even when they have a deal with a major publisher. Sometimes, an event just happens without one's own doing.

This month, I'm honored to have Every Time I Think of You chosen as the book for Magnet's Book Club. 

Magnet is the San Francisco men's health center that does HIV and STD testing. They also host monthly art exhibits and readings, like Smack Dab, the (usually) monthly open mic event cohosted by author-colleagues Larry-bob Roberts and Kirk Read.

Coupledom

As the Supreme Court hearings on the unconstitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8 are debated online, on radio, and this evening, on one of KRON4's alternative channels, I've been alternating between Facebook and its sea of red equal sign profile images, with hundreds of creative variations.

I just finished a chapter where Reid listens to Everett use his amazing debate skills on another issue relevant to the setting of the sequel, the early 1980s.  I'm wondering if he would have have considered debating gay marriage rights, if they could even imagine this situation, where hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets in multiple cities, and the multiple aspects of these lawsuits are beguiling, if not confusing.

AXIS-tence

A wheelchair-using BART commuter in the early 1970s

My weekend was full of East Bay arts, all of which ended up being, in some ways, connected. For those of you not in the San Francisco area, East Bay is the Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island of the Bay Area.

Some people in San Francisco may dismiss the East Bay, make "bridge and tunnel" jokes. I ride BART a lot, and while a few unpleasant events have happened to me, none of them were serious. The few very violent events - shootings by criminals and BART police have been covered by other media quite extensively. But personally, I can honestly say that it's a pretty amazingly efficient commuting experience.

One of the things I recently learned while researching the sequel to Every Time I Think of You, a novel that includes a disabled gay main character, is that Bay Area Rapid Transit was one of the first mass transit systems that made platforms and elevators and train cars accessible to wheelchair users.

Lady Gaga's Crip Chic

Lady Gaga once again exploits disability as a pose, so I'm going to exploit her. It's been said that the 'virality' of a good blog post includes catchy words that will generate lots of clicks, or in the case of Lady Gaga, random clicks that have nothing to do with anything.

How to Succeed in the Book Business While Really Really Trying

Every now and then I get a request from a fledgling (or even successful) author colleague asking for tips on the book business. To me, that's almost like asking a kid riding a Big Wheel for pointers on competing in the Daytona 500.

They also ask to "pick my brain" which sounds painful. It's not, really. 

But the prerequisite to any such talk is that you read one or several of Dan Poynter's books on self-publishing. It's as useful a handbook as my Wolf Cub Scout books were when I was a kid.

Pretty much everything you need to know is in Poynter's books, from developing a book that sells (if that is your goal) to marketing a "difficult" title that may be limited to a subgenre.

By "subgenre," I mean a book that's a genre within a genre, of course.  Take PINS, for example: gay + sports. While my subsequent three books were produced via Print-On-Demand (POD), PINS was done the old-fashioned way.

It's a long involved tale, some of which I'll be explaining within a few brief minutes at an author panel that's part of Word Week. The Noe Valley Book Festival is like a mini-LitQuake. Panels, readings, and a Saturday gathering of many authors selling and signing their books are part of it. It's mostly for Noe Valley area writers, but I got in because I'm nice.