Category: art

Thoughts on disability representation and images

Posted on by Liz Henry

I was thinking this morning about the problems of making images that somehow represent concepts of “disability” in general, activism around disability justice and solidarity, or just wheelchair stuff.

You may recognize the problem. It is a challenge to find cool disability related stuff. If you want 9000 boring variations on the blue disability parking / bathroom symbol, great. But we need to go way beyond that!

In addition to running a nonprofit (Grassroots Open Assistive Tech) and creating logos and cover images for my small press zines, I love stickers and posters and all that stuff. In my backpack and in the side pocket of my powerchair, I carry a little pouch of stickers to give away to people. Some are for my own projects, some are random, some tech related, some fun cartoons or animals for kids. And I like to have cool queer, trans, and disability related stickers to share too!

To that end I regularly go trawling through Etsy doing keyword searches like “wheelchair + punk” and see what pops up. “Cripplepunk” is remarkably fruitful! I especially love the dynamic, queer coded pastel knuckle tattoo-ed manual chair “crip punk” sticker from ChaosCripples, and really want that on a tshirt or an iron on patch!

head on, fists forward, art on a sticker, of a wheelchair user with knuckle tattoos spelling crip punk

This one is nice too! “Mobility Aids Are Freedom” from SnailTrailStickers!

art on a sticker of a rollator, wheelchair, crutch and cane, that says Mobility Aids Are Freedom

If you go do some image searches for “wheelchair user” most of what you find will be kind of boring. “wheelchair user punk” used to bring up ALMOST NOTHING but lately, has been kind of good! Some kind of cultural shift (and maybe a technical shift as well) happened for that to be the case.

It’s not like we haven’t been around! Witness this pic of me from around 1993 taken by my sister! There was a version of this pic also photoshopped by her to make it look like the wheels are on fire. Note my amazing, youthful wheelchair-given triceps! Anyway I was a punk in a wheelchair and I would have really loved to see any kind of representation at all.
photo of young liz in a cambered sporty red quickie in 1993, leather hat and gloves, also huge muscles wow

My own drawing skills are OK but have a finicky, scritchy, lynda barryeqsue aesthetic that is not always what I want in a sticker. So I had a try at AI generating images a while back and came up with the seed of the Burn This Press logo I’ve been using on the back of some tiny zines. I lost the prompt but it was something like “nonbinary genderqueer punk, doing a wheelie in a modern dynamic sports wheelchair with electric sparks flying out” (developed over many iterations of bad prompts with bad results). I got something close to the current BTP logo which I then got my sister to re-drew a bit for clean up, and then I did more edits to mess with the hair, neck, lap, leg position, and so on.

Have a look at the Etsy and other online shops where people are making this kind of cool art! Buy their stuff and support them!

I surely have blogged before to lightly mock the wheelchair users we see in murals. They are in a terrible hospital chair, pushed by someone helpful, and everyone is looking up slightly with a beatific smile for maximum Inspo. Barf me out!

(edit: I can’t find that post, maybe it’s in draft somewhere, but here’s an example from the mural by where the J and N Muni trains stop at Church and Duboce. Note the ridiculously transcendent facial expression of this lady despite that she is riding the world’s crappiest wheelchair)

(further edit, i am only mildly cranky about this and like to make fun of things and it is a pet peeve, don’t get me wrong, i also appreciate ANY sort of representation for disabled folks and wheelchair users in particular, because it’s so damn rare)

(Also also, as the CEO of Digression, adding that I can wrench my mind from irritation that the one wheely person in this giant, pretty good and weird mural, is in a crappy chair being pushed, and direct it to the actually good fact that the care worker can also use a representational shout-out? though this is a struggle because what I personally want is a wheelchair user who “looks cool”)

detail from a mural showing a wheelchair user looking oddly ecstatic

Another problem with disability activism images is trying to represent as nebulous and huge of a concept of disability in one image. Using a wheelchair as this symbol is super lame! j/k!!!
This is how you end up with somewhat awkwardly drawn cartoon people where one is in a wheelchair, someone has a white cane, there’s an older person, somehow they try to work Deafness into it, they will be several different races, someone is in a sari and someone in a headscarf, and so on. Usually they are standing awkwardly around together as if posing for a stock photo! Maybe with protest signs if you are lucky but more often they aren’t doing anything other than Representing. I love this, and it is SO HARD TO DO in a way that looks good, and has some actual solidarity and joy in it rather than coming off as totally cheeseball!

(NOTE: I HAVE POSED FOR THIS PHOTO OFTEN – on request – feel free to put me in your pic – yes, if I work at your company or speak at your event, I absolutely will be in the front row or in your web site photo about Diversity – fuck yeah (but maybe with a little eyeroll))

I think these images, while lovely and well meaning and managing to do Representation, can come off as kind of bad art, or maybe we can be less snobby and call it folk art style, but I wish for artists who can draw the anatomy of human beings more competently than I can, to have at it on stickers, murals, tshirts, posters, logos, you name it. I want some cool socialist realist art of this Representation Group! Some art nouveau dandy versions ! Be in a park! Go to a music show! Be playing dungeons and dragons! Be doing something, omg.

Really the main problem is that none of these Group Photo Representation images, no matter how nice, work super well as logos as they are complicated and you have to draw a lot of bodies and faces and a background. When they are the best (to my mind) they become much more like narratives than logos! And that is good actually! That means they are MORE TRUE.

Here’s a pretty good one I found while writing this article from a report called “Resourcing Disability Justice: Our Feminist Journey Toward Centering Disability Justice“! These disabled people are having an ecstatic experience while feministly weaving together, and also representing some kind of super punk-ass rhizomatic concept, in space, on top of a damn rainbow! You see that it is trying to solve all the problems I describe in this single image. It is OVERCLOCKED. Really quite a challenge. Actually, my deep respect to everyone who has tried to meet this challenge, and a shout out to this artist, Abi Stevens!

(Note this report title is ALSO doing the most! “Toward” implies a proper humility, in that you are not done, or objective, or definitive, you are adding your little yawp to the collective chorus over time! We aren’t even defining or creating, we are Centering it. It’s also so disability justice that it has to say it TWICE.)

group of disabled women and girls in outer space, on a rainbow, weaving something collectively and joyfully

Another option is to have something kind of abstract – but what ?! I like ADAPT’s burst chain, in this category! There are many that are just like, a shape, or some shapes together, for maximum safety and boringness and when I see those I always imagine the ten painful committee meetings that produced them via painful hashing through everything else I just described. Thus, you may imagine me for years muttering “Oh, look, a SHAPE” and snorting to myself, whenever I encounter these logos, a mutter and snort that should be taken to convey the entire contents of this blog post, but 30 years of it.

For GOAT I worked both with poking some AI generators and also paying a friend who is a graphic designer to walk through a bunch of these concepts. Rather than human figures I thought it might be nice to have cute, colorful little icons of tech things. That way we get the variety of cross disability solidarity and the idea of tech stuff. The DIY vibe that I was going for is like the whole earth catalogue, sierra club how-to, 70s-ass hand drawn illustrations you might have in a step by step DIY instruction. So, my human designer drew me a whole set of icons, and I am combining and using them in different ways. There isn’t really a canonical “logo” yet but maybe one will evolve as I play with these images! I went with a tablet or ipad looking thing for AAC, a stylized ear with hearing aid and sound waves, and so on. The gear and tools, rather than the people.

colorful hand drawn icons of a powerchair, wrench and screwdriver crossed, spool of thread and needle, robot hand shaking a human hand

I was also going to say a word about stickers and patches and posters. They are usually very hand made and “folk art” feeling, they may or may not have “good” production values ie they may look a bit shitty or like they were created by raccoons in a back alley. That is fine actually. But what we want in our punk stickers etc. is a clear message that is legible to both our in group (other punks) and maybe to a lesser degree to our out groups (especially if we are telling them to fuck off). There’s a lot more I could say about that!

And the point of having these cool ass stickers to give to people is to bring joy to them unexpectedly – there is something so nice about, another disabled person complimenting my stickers a little bit wistfully and then I pull out a whole sheaf of stickers they can pick through & take! People really light up! Of course it is always interesting to see what they will choose when offered a wide selection! Bringing this tiny bit of happiness and crip joy to random strangers is also useful activism to do in daily practice.

BART Basel 2024

Posted on by Liz Henry

There were so many amazing scenes at BART Basel this year – Francois and the decaying golden banana, the woman with the woven toilet paper roll mobile sculpture, the trumpeter in Glen Park station – the piñatas – the guy with the fake butt – the fashionista with the beanie baby pug and bodyguards – Penelope, the girl with the spray bottle of water spraying her grandma’s raincoat – Too many to list!

At BART Basel, the crew sets up a pedestal with a glass cover, a red carpet, a backdrop, and a small but effective PA system and microphone. People come up to present their art; after 20 minutes or so the entire set-up and crowd gets onto the train to go to another station and hold another event!

a lady holding up a woven sculpture in a huge crowd in the train station

We started at Embarcadero, then moved to Civic Center, then to Glen Park, which is probably my favorite station architecture. The crowd was huge – and splendidly dressed!

I exhibited and read my short poem Take the 49, which is about the wrong transit system, so now I really need to write a poem about BART and read it on the bus.

liz holding up a tiny zine; another copy is in a glass case beside them

This year I made two tiny zines – Take the 49 and Copies, both under Burn This Press. They came out super cute!

two tiny colorful zines

a zine open to show a poem about the bus

The 49 poem does a lot in a small space. Late at night, that bus tends to go very fast down a major street that in the daytime is crowded and slow. I was going for the feeling of speed and joy, a little recklessness, the feeling of bumping over streets and pavements in bus but also in my wheelchair, being like those metal rolls in old music boxes, because often I’m coming home from a musical event at night on the bus, the music is still playing in my head, and i’m in a state where every sound of the city at night is like music & it all combines beautifully. One night a driver really did tell me a story about his old job painting the bridge and how at least the bus is warm – he was waxing a bit poetic about it all – and it was – as the kids say – “a mood”. While I don’t remember why we were chatting, we had a nice connection, but I don’t really remember what he looked like. I hope he sees the poem some day!

My outfit for BART Basel was in BART colors, silver/white and blue. I had a moment where I showed a group of people my belt buckle and handmade train-track belt, and there was an audible collective gasp. Very gratifying!

a brass belt buckle shaped like the front of a bart train, on a blue belt

You can admire more photos of BART Basel in my Flickr album or in this larger collection of BART Basel photos by many people!

And, if you love transit systems so much that you want to read a ridiculous, sweet story about BART and SFO as cozy roommates, here’s a link to Next Stop, San Francisco, which I wrote in response to the tweets from SFO and BART’s accounts during the protests against anti-immigrant/ anti-muslim ban policies in 2017.

The event was so much fun. I loved seeing everyone’s art, or (in)significant objects framed as art, and the joy of the crowd, who were in “eclectic dress” as described on the invitation.

Its organizer, Danielle Baskin, has done so many hilarious cool projects over the years. I appreciate her and the whole crew who made BART Basel a thing – not just a thing, but a tradition!

Legion of Honor 100th anniversary festival

Posted on by Liz Henry

There was so much cake! A marching band! Sketching in the galleries! Ballerinas and an organ player! Printmaking and free art stuff and activities in a sort of swirling all day chaos. I spent all day at the Legion of Honor and had a great time.

a ballerina in mid step in a marble hall art gallery with marble rodin statues

It was heartening to show off this gorgeous corner of San Francisco and a day of amazing culture to my parents, who have moved here from Texas! My sister and I hauled them around the museum  – we went through the Mary Cassatt special exhibit and both gift shops – and to the lawn where we had our sandwiches and cookies we brought from home & then attacked the aftermath of the Cake Picnic.

I hadn’t realized that to get into the Cake Picnic proper, you had to bring an entire cake! Per person! (or maybe a small group?) I have to share photos of the before and after. There were hundreds of different cakes. After the main crew of cake-bringers were done, they unleashed the rest of us onto the remains strewn across the labyrinth of long tables covered in white tablecloths. The mess of plundered cake plates looked almost as beautiful and colorful as the “before” tables. dozens of differentcakes on tables on a lawn

My favorite thing about this was watching people wander through the devastation and the emotions playing across their faces. First, being overwhelmed and confused  – then desire, even greed and lust, warring with a sense of the forbidden – and the moment of decision where people just said Oh fuck it and dove right into the smeary cake stands to get a glob of icing and crumbs. It was so beautiful.  That is how you know the cake picnic was art. It made people FEEL very intensely! The absurd abundance, the variety, the love and intent behind making something so delicious, unnecessary, and flamboyant – and the collectiveness of everyone bringing cakes!

a long table covered in the remains of many many different cakes. a man leans over and puts a finger into one in the distance

(There were forks over by the statue of El Cid, but by the time I realized that it was far too late for me, personally.)

We all laid on the lawn on my picnic blanket and my dad commented after a while that he hadn’t sat on grass for probably 20 years. “No fire ants here!”  Maybe he will warm to California!!!

I made prints from someone’s lovely art  – a poster of Alma Spreckels and another of a scene from the movie Vertigo – And got a free embroidered patch of the  statue of the Thinker – And then somehow a free magnet of the museum building which is now on my fridge.

a screen print of the legion of honor building with its many columns and an old fashioned car

The Mary Cassatt exhibit was great especially for seeing the parts showing her drypoint and aquatint process and experiments. I will be back to see that entire exhibit a few times!

Have a pic of my sister and I sticking our tongues out in excitement at our feelings of identifying with the lady reading a book:

liz and sister grinning, sticking out tongues cheerfully while liz points at famous Cassat painting of a lady with a book

It is always thrilling to see the real paintings of art that I have only seen in books or online before. You can get right up and see the brush strokes and the tiny lines of the canvas showing through which makes it seem so, almost holy, and real, and created, and I feel a shivery feeling of connection with people long dead!

(Though honestly when I think about it, which i often do, i also feel that way about every object i’m looking at, like, a random brick or whatever. Or – riding the bus past SF’s cute little houses – I look at the ornamental moldings or features of the houses, like the plaster shield things, and think about the decisions and aesthetic sense of the builders, carpenters, or house owners who might have wanted them.)

I had a good time trying to sketch in the upper gallery. It was set up so you could get a card to sketch on, printed with a border like a gold picture frame. You then could choose 5 pencils from their boxes sorted by color, and there were stools you could also borrow to sit on for sketching. Here is the painting I tried to copy,

rough sketch of lady in neck ruffle dressoil painting of a lady in a low cut dress with a huge neck ruffle

While I have never been able to really do faces and also never had any art classes I do love to draw and manage to do it expressively – there were some years where I drew comics and loved it but I was so slow at it that it was sometimes frustrating. Someday I’d like to take art classes and do a live drawing, contour drawing, all that kind of thing!   But words come more naturally to me and are my first love.

I tried to get one of the free wheelchair van Waymos, but none were around. My sister drove our parents back to the East Bay.  I ended up barrelling to Geary down the huge hill, which I love anyway — it is not like I go faster downhill in a powerchair, which limits my speed, but it feels extra joyous anyway on that particular hill and it’s a gorgeous landscape. I recall thinking, Huh a guy in a flat cap , looks a little like Horehound – but I raced past without even looking somehow and then we realized at the bus stop on Geary that we knew each other. It was nice riding the bus and chatting with Horehound (one of my favorite poets in the bay area – along with Steve Artnsen, Juba Kalamka, and Daphne Gottlieb, and Diamond Dave –  and some person named maybe “King” of indeterminate gender who read a brilliant poem about pouring milk into their cereal, while crouched on a stump in Holly Park earlier this year – and i’d like to meet more poets!!! I hope next year I will go to more open mics! )   A good end to a glorious day of connection with other people, strangers, my own family, and a fabulous poet acquaintance who I should go email right now so we can exchange information about various readings coming up.

Skibidi Megalon

Posted on by Liz

I went off to see Megalopolis excitedly knowing that a lot of people think it sucked, because even if it sucked I figured it would have some interesting thing to say about “the Future” and would also be something of a spectacle, part “neo Rome” and part art deco. But mostly, I am one of those people who often think about the Roman Empire! Danny, Mikayla and I escaped from the heat of this week at the Alamo Drafthouse, buckled up and ready for THE FUTURE.

It was ridiculous from the beginning. The signifying lesbians in the club (Girls licking each other performatively = Decadence!) The strange attempts to convey SCIENCE, the power hungry vamp, things that were like, vaguely Roman (?) And then the power to STOP TIME.

I complained to Danny that they did not lean in at all to the time stop power or any of the magic. “It’s because it’s meant to be ART – it’s like the power of ART!” OK fine…. it would be nice if the ART contained more artiness.

Aubrey Plaza leaned in hard to her part of the money and power hungry vamp “Wow Platinum” and I thought Adam Driver also did as good as could be done with his weird caricature of a Tortured Genius. They just played it as hard and cartoony as they could.

Things I liked: the trippy montages were embarrassing and pretty good at the same time. The dumb Megalon substance, never explained, that makes a beautiful 1920s World’s Fair park thing in the razed (and satellite-bombed) former slums. TBH I also liked the decadent performative-for-the-male-gaze lesbian gaggle. (I think it was Mikayla who pointed out that the first time they appeared it was like, oh they’re symbolizing decadent empire – but the 2nd and 3rd and 4th times you start thinking maybe Francis Ford Coppola just likes watching cute girls lick each other.)
The science startup montage in the office in the art deco skyscraper penthouse was so ridiculous it was good, at least at making me laugh, as they did a sort of trust exercise and spinned dramatically in spinny chairs while bouncing a basketball and unrolling scrolls on a drafting table. Maybe… maybe… the city planning aspect (while dumb as hell) kind of connects to how Rome would do very deliberate city planning??!

Every time Adam Driver referred to his Nobel Prize (often holding it up in its little case!) was a riot.

Another good laugh – when Adam Driver is partying because he’s upset (I can’t remember why – because his mom is nuts maybe?) And Julia mutters into her bracelet/smartwatch: “10:17pm. Drunk AND high.” The Caesar/Driver being drunk AND high montage is so silly! I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what it’s like to be drunk AND high!!!!

Best, was when we got permission to laugh harder at the vestal virgin in her post-scandal, hellfire joan jett haircut & eyeliner phase. OMFG best scene of the whole movie.

I loved being in a theater with other people who were also bursting into laughter and kind of groaning during the Serious moments. It was irresistible to me during the last half of the movie to attribute everything to Marcus Aurelius. All the quotes made me kind of hit my head and groan. It was all so sophomoric! Even the things I kind of liked I also didn’t like! Or I thought they were badly done in some way.

BUT then I was thinking, well, it is not a “good movie” by what we expect to be happening in a good movie, or in its narrative style fitting what we think is good, but that doesn’t make it invalid artistically! No one is (now) telling Herman Melville to “show don’t tell” so maybe I can kind of treat these plonking philosophical bits and the entire speech from Hamlet as Melville-ish digressions. But did it achieve those digressive glories? No. Not quite enough for me.

Things that made me go hmmmmm:
– The basic horrible elitism and “great man” theory infusing it all.
– The mob scenes are all about “the people” being manipulated and used by a few unscrupulous elites. It chilled me to the bone to have “power to the people” be shown in that way by someone who was around for the civil rights movement. It felt deeply racist and also like a racist dog whistle. We can see it as FFC’s commentary on Rome I guess. But none of the Rome stuff went that deep. “The people” don’t have any agency or politics or thoughts or even art (the whole fucking theme of the movie presumably, “Art”)
– None of our (in the U.S.) actual cultural connection to Rome and the various myths of Rome were really touched on. Coppola’s take on Rome and Caesar and everything felt like it came from having read some very outdated historian’s fusty 1890s perspective on the OG sources.
– The hideous sexism. Does anyone go, hey, does Julia also have this magic time stop power since she sees you do it and sees through it? No. no one asks. She is just there to be a muse and to BELIEVE IN HER MAN, who is a GENIUS.
– The more hideous sexism of the mayor being like “can’t you just be daddy’s little girl?” and trying to cockblock her whole relationship
– His original animosity towards Caesar/Driver very much unexplained. Why did he hide his dead wife’s body etc? What??
– Though I guess Julia does have the power with her one year of medical school to surgically reconstruct an entire eyeball and brain and face with Megalon ™. (But maybe just by girlishly Believing. Unclear.)
– that bit at the end where they are entering the world’s fair ass looking park where apparently inventing shiny escalators has solved all world problems, but the same mob who was grimy and looking through a chain link and barbed wire fence a few moments ago is now dressed in their best holiday party gear. Are they stepping merrily into the world’s fair? no! they are looking UP at the platform of famous pop star/politician elites step onto the shiny escalator in the sparsely populated theme park.
– just a nitpick, but if Adam Driver didn’t know his dead wife was preggers when she died, how?! since she was VERY pregnant including maybe an entire baby growing inside each enormous boob

I also thought, maybe this would have been a better movie if it had been made when he first thought of it! I don’t regret seeing it and I kind of like it better the further I get from being in the actual theater watching it and hitting my head groaning or shrieking with laughter. it did make an impression!

Maybe it wasn’t for ME… maybe it was for that 14 year old who is only starting to think about history and art, and looking for something to hook those thoughts on!

Well, anyway, I still love art deco curvey futurism.

But you don’t get to a place where the future is better and art is healing and the ecological interconnectedness of the Earth is respected, by looking to a Lone Genius Science Man to invent a magical substance that fixes everything and then having a bazillionaire donate a lot of money to fund it! And anyone sensible would know that because they would have thought about something that wasn’t the shallowest possible sophomoric Boomer-assed, Fountainhead-brainrotted, literary canon! They might have READ SOME SCIENCE FICTION which is literally a whole genre of people writing about the Future! Maybe even some feminist science fiction which deliberately writes about collective action, people’s relationships, people actually caring for each other day to day instead of giving an occasional speech about Love while totally forgetting birth control might exist, ETCETERA. The Earth / planet not even mentioned till the very last frame of the movie – I guess there were ecological problems (that weren’t fueled or caused by corporate/elite greed??????????????) that are all solved by MEGALON. Whew!

There is my review!

I definitely enjoyed the movie!

Weird SF and a kids’ book binge

Posted on by Liz

I did a lot of trying to say no to things and step down from things I wasn’t doing (well enough, or in some cases, at all) which was kind of my therapy homework and which was very difficult. Why is focusing so difficult? Why can’t we live 6 lives at once??? Why am I getting older and more tired? It just has to be.

More centrally (the therapy part I suppose) What if I didn’t feel like I was somehow failing all the time and disappointing people? I think last time I said this in semi-public a little group of my friends stared at me silently, looked around the table at each other and then one of them as spokesperson explained that when I said things like that with all the things I actually do manage to accomplish, I was insulting them. Like if I thought that harshly of myself, when I had a job, was in grad school, had a toddler, and was still also doing extra projects, then… how was I judging them? Years later I still think of this (thanks elaine) and how helpful it was at giving me a kick in the ass. (Not an instant fix obviously, but a useful insight)

Dealing lots with architects/contractors. There is some little thing every day and a bigger meeting once a week. Construction continues under our house. Someday, someday! we will live in that bit of house, it will all have wheelchair access, I will have a REAL BATH and soak and read in the tub, without the noise of power tools, and I will get to fix up the garden again to enjoy it.

Last week and this week, I’m focusing in on work for DIFxTech and on GOAT. I even got a little help from M. in discussing how to catalogue and tag some of the GOAT archive – how useful to have another librarian in the family! And both kids were here last week and are now back at school while Danny is in Europe till the end of the week.

Annoyingly I not only got a cold (not Covid thankfully) but also got my period for the 2nd time in the past year, resetting my menopause clock so I will still be officially “perimenopause” till at least next January. Mother of God, I was so fucking pissed, it was so great to have it over with, but no. Fuck!!

I took a sewing lesson in the Mission, making a striped velvet zippered throw pillow with fabric that reminded me of one of my grandmother’s couches that had similar colors and how I would lie on it and pet the velvet one way & then the other. Got my sewing machine out resolving to practice on it on some scraps but then realized the pedal was missing which led me to clean out the entire row of cabinets.

Will I actually learn to sew and finally complete the blue jean blanket of my dreams – modeled after that crazy quilt bed cover I slept under once in the 90s at Harry and Daffodil’s house, made of I think Daff’s former lover’s favorite jeans, with all the pockets and rips on top and the underneath soft with the texture of the inside-out frayed bits. It was comfy and comforting and so bittersweet to think of his love for this dead young man and all the ways the radical faerie & other community had come together & was grieving so hard. I have forgotten his name but not the love that whoever made the quilt had for him. I think he must have been an amazing person.

In reading this week and last:

Loved the Christopher Rowe books and short stories, tons of Weird Kentucky, the wonderful Navigating Fox, and I hope maybe there could be more about the detective dog. (Maybe a prequel so we also get the crow friend?)

I also loved Tuf Voyaging, which somehow I have never read. It’s a great read that comes off like light space opera, but which is actually kind of a complicated moral fable. The Portmaster was so interesting – like Martin trying to write in a super valid critique of his too powerful main character and what power does to him – I am always saying this so I warmed to it. It was like seeing him in dialogue with the ghostly hand of feminist science fiction, so I enjoyed that. Plus of course I warmed to the (too powerful) nerd hero and his cats and his (too powerful) spacecraft (as the youth say, he is “a bit acoustic” in a charming way.) Having the down to earth feministsf Portmaster tell him off repeatedly did not stop the OP MC one bit. But she wasn’t treated badly in the story, and she gets some kittens, and she had her own problematic behaviors; I liked how Martin treated her as a character.

Damiano by R.A. MacAvoy. Readble but not my favorite, a little too fetishy of a certain type of anguished christian man that just annoys me. I did like the witch Sara from Fennland for a moment, and then didn’t again (bad boyfriend, whinges too much about age) I also don’t think much of Damiano. Oops I accidentally slaughtered more people with my magic ™ waah waah oh my little doggie is so pure oh also my literal angel who i definitely don’t lust after, wahh wahh but also women are purty. Goth cosplay and a broken lute! The end. (Sorry everyone.)

Very, very, very annoyed by Rome of One’s Own, which I feared was going to annoy me. I had some hope it might be a nice overview, since “forgotten” women of history of basically anywhere and when is one of my very favorite things to read. Maybe I would learn something about women of ancient Rome. BUT NO. It’s so, so bad y’all. The most annoying kind of “history” book.

I want to just blast it with my scorn for a moment but let me set a background first. At best, the book is trying to explain that historical interpretation can change over time. But it fails to make that clear and usually ignores the historical context of it sources. Instead it messily conflates truth, what the authors of those sources (Livy, Ovid, or whoever) thought was true, what later generations thought, or may have thought, was true and how they interpreted a story about a particular woman, and then what the book’s author and apparently, her (British, women) readers will read into that story. Often kind of (and only kind of!) attributing agency, empowerment, or historical importance to the woman in the story.

If you want an example of this done incredibly well, I love how Margaret Reynolds approaches it in The Sappho Companion.

Rome of One’s Own did not do it well. It was like I was nonconsensually shunted into a wine o’clock mumsnet party who were all incoherently yelling “You go, girl!”

Please just go read some primary sources! OMFG!

There could have been a fine book here that clearly outlined, here’s some things that particular writers said about particular women who may or may not have been semi-mythical, and exactly when that was, and what else was going on, and then, what other people in England/Great Britain then said about those women in subsequent centuries and how they reinterpreted things in their own context! And then you could add your own Liberated Ladies perspective onto that but make it clear what you are DOING. you could write a popular audience history book that lays some coherent groundwork and is still readable!

And, only talking about what Livy and Ovid and like 3 other dudes said about some mythical women of Rome’s founding, does a huge disservice to all the cool history of regular people and women’s daily lives that we can look at from the past… century that puts it into actual context including with archeological sources!

Here is where I should recommend something better as an antidote and I do have examples but the first thing that comes to mind is Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s “Women’s Work” and of course Prehistoric Textiles. (Way too broad in scope, not actually Rome, but gives you actual information! that! is! organized!)

I then bounced hard off a detective thriller, Zero Day. It started OK promising a married pen testing duo and a competent hacker heroine and then went quickly to some places I did not want to go: a background of what sounds like violent/life threatening/maybe rapey abuse by her cop ex boyfriend, and her nice hacker husband murdered by chapter 2. I can’t read that shit while D. is out of town! Fuck no!

Not to mention, after the murder, she gets a mysterious email saying that there is a mysterious 1 million dollar life insurance policy and she CLICKS THE PDF IN THE EMAIL.

Nope nope nope! Must we?! NOT going to finish that one. If there is a less violent novel by Ruth Ware, with less dwelling on women’s fear, trauma, and fucking up, please let me know.

To clear my mind of all that, I went on a Project Gutenberg spree and downloaded a lot of dumb Angela Brazil books (The Jolliest Term on Record; Madcap of the School), an equally ridiculous Cherry Ames book, and Clematis by Bertha Browning Cobb which is a lovely book about a neglected orphan and her beloved kitten. And some things off the 19th century list of classic kids’ books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_children%27s_classic_books that I haven’t read.

So in short, BRB, gonna play some jolly field hockey with my chums and then go back to my digs for tea and spiffing rock cake (wtf is that, i’m still not sure but it does not sound nice). Why is diggings, or digs, school slang for where you live? mining and miners? archaeology? something else?)

Awesome Foundation Disability, 69th winner

Posted on by Liz

The 69th winner of the Awesome Foundation Disability grant is Jessica Elaine Blinkhorn with the project SPANKBOX!

NICE!!

SPANKBOX is a photographic installation that depicts individuals with physical disabilities in hypersexualized poses and situations. SPANKBOX puts the power back in the hands of those with physical disabilities by granting the audience permission to look, fantasize, and question disability and sexuality in a safe environment. It also allows people to see themselves for who they really are by answering the questions presented by those whose images hang in the SPANKBOX gallery.

And the part I really love is, after the question period of the exhibit:

During the performance portion of the installation, audience members will have their words read back to them to assist the viewer with realizing their internalized prejudices and exclusionary practices.

Both celebratory and confrontational! I’m so curious how this will go! And I hope the travelling exhibition will make its way to San Francisco! They have a further fundraiser going to help with future touring.

Hard to believe it’s been five years of Awesome Foundation Disability. I have learned a lot from reading the grant proposals every month. I hope that these microgrants with a low barrier to entry help change the lives and give all these creators, inventors, teachers, artists, and others a real boost!

How to make a coronavirus piñata

Posted on by Liz

I bet you would like to BEAT COVID-19. And here is one way! Make your own coronavirus piñata and (safely socially distanced, masked, outdoors) hit the piñata until it is DEFEATED!

All the diagrams of the shape of the virus that I’ve seen have a round shape with at least 3 different sizes of “protein spikes” coming out from the middle, with each kind being a different height. Each spike has an extra bit on top like a flat top or a sort of flower shape. This is not too hard to make, but doing the “protein spikes” was a little bit of a challenge.

Here’s one model I looked at, from the CDC:

coronavirus diagram

Here’s how I made a coronavirus piñata, in some detail! I am putting in all the details, because, while I grew up making piñatas I realize a lot of people did not or they bought their piñatas from a store. It’s so much fun to make them because the multi-day process builds up anticipation.

Make a standard piñata shell over a large balloon.

(You can also use a plastic or paper grocery bag stuffed with paper or other bags to make the shape – the important thing is, you have to be able to pull all that stuff OUT of a small hole.)

You will need:

  • about 3-4 days
  • a round balloon
  • flour
  • water
  • a bowl
  • a newspaper
  • some twine or strong cord
  • somewhere to work
  • black paint
  • regular school glue
  • thick cardstock or thin cardboard, two or three pieces
  • paintbrush (or your fingers)
  • scissors
  • red, orange, and yellow rolls crepe paper (or colors of your choice)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees NOOOOOOO I’m joking. Never put your piñata in the oven. It will catch on fire. Very bad idea!

Mix a bowl of warm water and some flour to make a thin, soupy paste, beating out all the lumps. Tear some newspaper into long strips a little less wide than the space between two fingers (so that you can efficiently use your fingers to strip the paste from the newspaper).

Set up a place where you can make a mess. It helps to have either a place to hang the balloon on the cord from somewhere that puts the balloon at your working level, or, you can perch the balloon on a tray or on top of a cooking pot.

Tie the cord to the end of the balloon, leaving a long piece to hang the piñata, and about 6 inches or so on the shorter end, to build into your paper mache base.

This is going to make a big mess!

Now, take a strip of newspaper, carefully dip it into the flour and water, and use your fingers like a squeegee to strip excess paste from the newspaper. This takes a delicate touch because when the paper gets wet, it will break easily. Now lay the paper across your balloon. Repeat this until the balloon is covered with 1 layer of paper. Leave a hole near the top to put in the candy, decorations, and prizes!

Hang the piñata to dry. If you have a space heater you can put it nearby. Otherwise, it will take at least a day to dry out.

unpainted wet pinata

Wash your bowl and work surface quickly so the paste doesn’t dry into glue!

Once the shell is dry I do recommend you add one more layer. Unless your piñata is for very small children – in that case one layer might be okay.

Repeat everything to add another layer of paper!

Hang the piñata to dry again. (And, now, you can pop the balloon if it hasn’t popped already!

It does not matter if your piñata is not perfect, or it’s lumpy, or a weird shape. It will still look amazing once you cover it with paper, and you are going to break it anyway!! Don’t worry!

Look how ugly it is! But we have no worries.

lumpy looking pinata base

(I am leaving out the part where I hung the piñata outside in the sun to dry, then forgot about it. Raccoons came in the night and slashed it open, so I had to add some repairs and dry the shell again before I painted it. I recommend you skip the step with the raccoons. Again – do not worry about any little imperfections, such as a raccoon invasion, or that your virus is not a perfect sphere.)

Now you have some choices. Normally I would wrap the piñata around and around in overlapping layers of frilly crepe paper, but for this coronavirus effect, I painted the balloon shell instead. I thought black would hide any imperfections in the shape and would make the color of the protein spikes stand out more beautifully! I used washable tempera paint that cost about 3 dollars for a 16 oz container. The paint dried in a couple of hours when I hung the piñata near a space heater. Otherwise, expect it to dry overnight.

Now you are ready for the decorations!

Take your roll of crepe paper, and stick the scissors into it so that you are cutting a fringe about 1/3 of the way through several layers of paper at once. This next picture shows what that looks like, with a sneak preview of making it into a tall spike shape!

crepe-paper-spike

You can’t cut too many layers at once, just cut a few, then make some decorations, then when the fringed part ends, cut some more fringe into the roll.

To make the spikes, I had two requirements. One, they have to be strong enough hold the “flower” fringes of paper up high at two different heights. And two, I have to be able to attach them firmly to the piñata base. But how to do this? (Tape will not work!)

I happened to have thick colored cardstock in bright yellow and orange, the same color as the crepe paper I bought. But, my original plan was to use plain white cardstock or strips of a thick cardboard box, painted black. Construction paper might work if you roll it into a tube with several layers. Another idea, you could use paper or plastic straws.

So, using my cardstock (#60 thickness I happen to know) I cut out rectangles and taped them into small tubes about the size of a drinking straw. Then, cut the base of the tube 3 times to give 3 flanges to glue onto the piñata. If you look back at the photo above you can see the tube and two visible flanges.

Then, I wrapped the fringed crepe paper around the other half of the tube and taped it into place. Spread out the fringe to make the flat, carnation-like top of the protein spike for our virus!

Then glue the spike onto the piñata and hold it for a moment for the glue to stick. This took a couple of hours to make all the tall spikes, then the medium spikes.

Here is a picture of this phase of construction. In it, you can see that my shape is not perfect, the paper is very lumpy, and the paint job is not very good. None of those things mattered – You are not building something perfect; you are building a PARTY.

pinata construction phase

The most numerous spikes are the short red ones, much less work. For those I just used the base of the crepe paper, cut into flanges, and glued them directly to the piñata base.

Things got tricky because the glue does not hold quickly enough to stop the taller spikes from falling off, unless they are at the top of the sphere. So I had to keep turning the piñata and carefully propping it up, without squashing the spikes.

pinata half finished

Maybe you will think of a better way to do that! Or maybe you will have better glue!

But, while I am working on it, it’s so peaceful and meditative. I’m thinking of the vision of the finished object, and also thinking with love of the event and the people I will host and how they will be astonished by the ridiculousness of this project and the ephemeral nature of ritual celebration and destruction ! We will BEAT the CORONAVIRUS! Together! With joy and love!! And from it, somehow, we will extract ABUNDANT GOOD THINGS even if those things, when not metaphors, are little bottles of hand sanitizer and chocolate bars and “crispy fruit” packets from Big Lots!

It reminds me of my favorite poem by María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira about ephemeral things!

You must put all of that love into your piñata making. It is very important!

Back to construction: I think you could go faster by having one layer of the spikes be nearly flat to the surface, then the crepe-paper height layer, then only one layer of “tall” spikes on straws or other tubes. But, your finished product might lack a little bit of panache.

Once you’re done gluing, let your spikes dry for some hours. Then carefully stuff the piñata with candy or prizes and some crumpled remains of the crepe paper as filler.

Oh! It’s almost done now!! But after taking this photo I added more spikes because I noticed a big empty spot!!

me with pinata

Look how beautiful it is when finished, despite its asymmetry, my sloppy paint job, and the raccoons! So festive! (At least, it is beautiful to me, after so many hours.)

finished pinata

Hang it up, play some music, and take turns ceremoniously beating it with a stick!

youth with pinata

It turned out that the pieces of the broken piñata were the perfect shape to make attractive hats.

milo with pinata hat

liz with hat

Have a good time! And if you make your own covid-19 piñata please show me the pictures!

P.S. HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my FABULOUS SON!!!!! <3

Festival of the battling bugs

Posted on by Liz

My dad has been uploading photos from his mother’s albums and there is an interesting page of a religious festival in San Francisco de Yare in Venezuela. I vaguely remember him telling me stories about that or something similar and we made terrifying paper maché masks for some occasion (Maybe just for something fun to do).

A photo from my dad’s slides that I digitized some years ago:
devil dancer

And here are some of the pics with captions from my grandma’s album.
dancing devils festival

I believe we should have not only fabulous monuments to the Internet and other technical achievements but we should have amazing festivals. As I read out the description of the devils approaching the church, singing décimas and then kneeling in submission, Danny suggested a ceremonial Battle of the Bugs. Noisebridge could host a giant parade where we enact open source bugs (the demons) and the developers defeating them. I can picture different contingents acting out their particular dramas. I bet it would be easy to get companies as well as open source projects to participate.

I just love secular festivals and while I would not advocate stealing anything specific from this Venezuelan folkloric tradition it would be very cool to create some new festivals that are more like a giant participatory play, with dramas enacted, than a parade where we just walk around.

Suddenly imagining the Internet Drama play of the Content Moderators. Wow! It would be amazing!!!!

Art expedition

Posted on by Liz

The other day I took the afternoon off and went on an expedition with friends for Tara’s birthday. We went to the Museum of Craft and Design first – two exhibitions, one of large pieces that kind of explored different materials, and the other of ceramic sculptures by Wanxin Zhang. I liked both exhibits. In the first I especially felt happy looking at the giant mat of tangled pink thread by Mi-Kyoung Lee. It was so viscerally soft and fluffy and I thought about how you’d make it and the skill to spread it evenly and get an interesting texture. I could practically feel the process in my hands. The coral-like ceramic extrusions with light behind them were also pleasing – going back and forth and seeing how they changed depending on perspective.

The ceramic sculptures were great. Tara remarked that she doesn’t usually like representations of women made by male artists but these were great. I agreed – he not only avoided the usual annoyances but had something interesting to say in the sculptures. The female figures were profound. Here’s one called Mulan (Pussy Hat II),

mulan ceramic sculpture

I liked studying the textures of the ceramic & how they were finished in some places and then became rough and slabby and thumbed-looking.

The museum curator or docent giving us a tour mentioned that the sculptor often creates people in this pose with their hands somewhat held away form the body but at their sides and that it is homage to the Tank Man of Tiananmen Square as he carried his grocery bags. Once she pointed that out I really saw and felt it! Wow.

We had ice cream, then went to the Minnesota Street Project galleries which are spacious & beautiful. They were setting up a very fancy looking catered dinner in the central space and as we rolled around to all the galleries (keeping in mind we were hot, disheveled, and all 4 in powerchairs and I had my boots off, attractive pedicure in the breeze… perhaps a bit disreputable) we realized that the fancy dinner was for Christie’s which had some sort of special event coming up with the world’s fucking fanciest paintings, which I admired (Renoir, Monet, other fancypants stuff) Also caught a whole gallery of amazing photos by Louis Stettner and a Ferlinghetti exhibit which were mostly trash (but, fine, homage to the beats and hippies…. ok) The only good Ferlinghetti painting was 20K but… weirdly i could have more or less afforded some of the Stettner photos. Then I thought about, if I were going to buy something amazing yet might possibly be able to “afford” it, what would it be? (Answer: Something by Francesca Woodman and/or Sandow Birk.) Fortunately our cyborg bohemianism was welcomed by the fancypants gallery people and I did not (despite great temptation) steal any of the flower arrangements from the catering carts.

It was so lovely spending the day with friends despite that we all nearly died of heatstroke and the bad pavements of the Dogpatch.

crip crew