OVO

The Skin Horse
1982
Written by Nigel Evans and Nabil Shaban
Featuring Nabil Shaban with Nick Finden, Tony Gerrard, Tina Leslie, Kathleen Venner

Documentaries on the disabled can be difficult to watch. Not in the sense of such films being ugly. Documentaries on the disabled can be difficult to watch because one simply can’t find them. Frederick Wiseman shot Titicut Follies in 1967. The film depicts the lives of inmates at the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Their lives were made up of being bullied, forced feed, sprayed with a high-pressure water hose and confined in unlit windowless rooms. In 1968 the film was removed from distribution and all copies were ordered destroyed by Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Harry Kalus.  Judge Kalus said he acted in the interest of the privacy of the inmates. The following year in that the film was allowed to be shown but only to health care professionals. Wiseman appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, which declined to review the case. According to Wikipedia, “the dispute marked the first known instance in the history of the American film industry that a film was banned from general distribution for reasons other than obscenity, immorality or national security.” Superior Court Judge Andrew Meyer lifted the ban on the film in 1991, on the condition “a brief explanation shall be included in the film that changes and improvements have taken place at Massachusetts Correctional Institution Bridgewater since 1966.” Today you can buy a copy of Titicut Follies from Zipporah Films, Inc.

No such luck for The Skin Horse. Channel 4 (formerly Central Television) commissioned the 1982 film but does not sell it. No one sells it, not legally. Worldcat does not list it as existing in the interlibrary loan system.  Exactly one private library has it in their collection. If you are exceptionally fortunate you may have seen it one of the few times it has been broadcast on television. The documentary isn’t banned, it is merely unavailable.

The Skin Horse is a documentary by and about disabled people and their sex lives. Not their secret longing and private thoughts, although these are part of the film. This is a documentary about sex, sex among the disabled, sex between the disabled and the able.

Co-author and narrator Nabil Shaban does not skirt around the issue. The Skin Horse is an adult film, made by and for adults able to speak most clearly about themselves. Perhaps mere suggestiveness would not have succeeded in this film. Perhaps like the Last Poets or Valarie Solanas, the time for subtlty ended long ago for Shaban. When a person is just a little different from the norm, suggestiveness and being coy are more common. When we find a birthmark or personality quirk in a partner it stands out for a moment and then is gone. When one or one’s partner isn’t even considered fully human by some people, the time to beat around the bush ends. The average life span of the disabled is shorter than that of the non-disabled. The average screen time of the disabled is measured in minutes-per-decade compared to the screen time of the non-disabled. A wink and a nod just isn’t going to cut it. These are stories told once, and there’s no follow-up special presentation later on. The Skin Horse is honest in a way most sex documentaries only aspire to be honest.

The honesty begins with a discussion of beauty.  In antiquity philosophers claimed physical beauty was a virtue, like honesty or courage. Deviation from the form was either a punishment or a moral weakness. The etymology of the word monster is that of a beast sent by the gods as a warning. In the 21st Century other theories of beauty predominate. The Skin Horse speaks of four theories of beauty.  All quotes are from The Skin Horse.

Is beauty like the sun, radiating from a center and growing cold with distance? Some sections of The Skin Horse support this classic idea. Nabil: “Most disabled or deformed people I met at special school, sheltered workshop or crip college couldn’t wait to go to bed with an able-bodied person. I know that to be true of me.”

Is beauty is in the eye of the beholder? Perhaps disability does not matter. Those who are left handed tend towards mental illness, higher rates of suicide and imprisonment and shorter life spans. But being left handed is not seen as a disability. Nor are glasses on a person with a slight vision problem. Perhaps what we see as beauty or as a disability is arbitrary, a frame of reference we are free to modify or reject. This was the thinking behind the founding of the Outsiders in 1979. The Outsiders “is a vibrant social and peer support network of disabled people. We are many different things to our many members. [...] Whenever possible, Outsiders works together with other groups to campaign for the acceptance of disabled people as sexual partners.” The Skin Horse includes interviews with a founder of The Outsiders: “If I’d thought about it before I started I don’t think I would have ever dared to do it because I never really thought it would work.  Everyone said it wouldn’t work. But actually, however disabled you are you are still able to love somebody and be loved. So the most amazing marriages and… parings… have taken place. Dispite the fact that they might not only be disabled but also homosexual. Goodness knows, they’re just like anybody else.” The Skin Horse also includes interviews with a member of Outsiders, Jack: “Everyone’s got ability and disability.”

Is beauty a spiritual force? Is beauty to the body as the mind is to the brain? Perhaps beauty and disability are not part of us at all, but a shadow cast by an inner light. Most of the speakers in The Skin Horse hold this theory of beauty. Nabil is a keen researcher into the paranormal, psychic powers, UFOs and utopian politics. Open the gates to a single taboo and the rest come marching in. Nabil: “From childhood we learn that there is always more than meets the eye, that external appearances are misleading, that what exists within us all is always greater than the sum of the parts. [...] To admit love is to admit there is more to appearances. And to admit that we all have to work much harder at being human. We have to consider not only the body but also the soul.” Another man speaks of sex as a spiritual experience rather than a physical one: “I know the joy, the contentment, the feeling of spirituality, the utter relief from the limitations of my body which comes from sex. Just calling it sex is a very limiting word. It’s far more than people think with just one word. My body is very limiting but in sex I feel complete freedom.” Tina Leslie talks about the difference between her body and her self. “Sometimes I eat in front of a mirror to see the mask as other people see me. And try to see their feelings.  But this is what they see. It’s got nothing to do with me, the real me, a lover sees that, the real me. But I still never quite, quite believe it. But my god, I’d rather this than some celibate martyrdom. [...] Some people see me as an ugly thing. They can’t see me as a being, and as a sexual person, never. Christ, I don’t mind being seen like that. What’s the point of militant feminism? I like men. I don’t want to take refuge in something disabled women use as an excuse suppress their sexuality.”

Is beauty a fetish? Are some beautiful because they are different? Thousands of gigabytes of disability pornography are shuttled about the globe every day, lending some weight to this theory. Nearly thirty years earlier, The Skin Horse made the connection between acceptable fetishes (weight lifters and surgical beauty queens) and unacceptable fetishes (in a word, freaks). Nabil: “Perfection becomes an imperfection, a curiosity, a handicap, and the handicap when taken to its physical extremes becomes an end in itself. Hence, King Size [magazine]. Jonny the Wad. Chesty Morgan. King Dong. Big Bum. And all those freaks we have learned to love and loathe. And some people lust after.” Freaks have their place, but it is a well proscribed place. Nabil: “In the world of sexuality, there are three genders: female, male and disabled. And what is more, traditionally, in the disabled group, we are categorized into monsters or children. Children, eh? So we’re either monsters or children. We’re either abused or patronized. We’re either a fetish or sexless. Never in between. [...] It seem we need freaks not only to reassure ourselves of our own normality but more importantly to help us rediscover something. Perhaps that’s why we create our own freaks in myths, legends, fairy stories, literature and films. Perhaps that’s why we impart a certain humanity in them, and allow them to love and be loved. But of course only in fiction.” Here The Skin Horse shows some of the approved and fictional couplings between able bodied persons and freaks, such as Leda and swan, a maid and a minotaur, Kala and Charleton Heston.

If the disabled are (or would like to be) similar to anyone else in their sex lives, are they similar in their loneliness? One man in The Skin Horse says so: “The problem of exploring one’s own sexuality is a problem that everyone has.”  But no matter how we sees ourselves, the challenge in starting and maintaining a relationship (or getting laid) is in how others see us.  One woman in The Skin Horse describes her everyday life at the home for incurables for the past 34 years: “Washed, dressed, put in my chair. [...] Sometimes I ache for the human contact that I’ve been denied. For a new face that isn’t a nurse or another incurable. [...] It’s this sense of waste that I resent most of all. It’s as if people like me are somehow supposed to live our lives beyond frustration. As if part of accepting our lot should include the complete denial of any emotional life at all.” Hey! you’ve got to hide your love away…

Getting off for the disabled can mean breaking laws as well as breaking taboo. One man talks about when his personal assistant brought him to a prostitute: “She was really sort of a bit freaked out by the fact that this guy carried me up the stairs and plunked me on the bed and said ‘there he is.’ I stayed there for about three or four hours. One hears so many terrible things said about prostitutes and I believe it’s still illegal and all that but in that case in point the lady who I saw fulfilled a very useful purpose and I’m eternally grateful to her. [...] The events leading on from [hiring a prostitute] did make me much more relaxed and more self confident in myself as a sexy person, to meet other people, to make relationships, and I suppose over the last few years that has been growing and it’s still growing.”

The men and women in The Skin Horse are largely still with us.  Comedian Tony Gerrard continues to perform. The Outsiders still exists, and is the only place I’ve found that has The Skin Horse in its library. The Skin Horse was where I first learned of Nabil Shaban, and I hope that this review can draw more attention to this singular work. But Shaban has done much more, prior to and since The Skin Horse. He has many stage, film and television credits to his name, some of which are listed below. He was part of the CRASS Collective and in 1980 co-founded the Graeae Theater. Shaban is an artist, an author, an animator, a director, an actor and a musician. He is a father.  How uncomfortable he must feel to know he’s been such a positive influence on my life and the lives of so many others.  Sorry, friend, you’re a hero.

Shaban offers many of his works online at YouTube and elsewhere. If I Decide to Commit Suicide, You Need Hands and The Fifth Gospel include Tina Leslie, also seen in The Skin Horse. If I Decide to Commit Suicide is a video for Shaban’s poem of the same name. It quotes from Eraserhead by David Lynch, just as The Skin Horse quotes from Lynch’s Elephant Man. You Need Hands is a dark music video. The Fifth Gospel describes Christianity as ‘body fascist’ and shows Shaban and Leslie being patronized during a trip to the non-healing fountains of Lourdes. Morticia is available as a video on demand from amazon.com. Morticia is about a girl who wants to become a vampire. A third party has posted The Strangest Viking online. This is a documentary narrated by Shaban on Ivar the Boneless, a viking who conquered much of England. An excerpt from The Alien Who Lived in the Sheds is online. In The Alien Who Lived in the Sheds, Shaban shows that for all his fire and thunder he can make fun of himself. Shaban is a believer in the paranormal, but is aware of how such beliefs can look to non-believers. Shaban is an advocate of the outsider, but it not immune from gawking when he meets a fellow outsider. Shaban is his body, but his body is also a source of pain. Alien includes a film within a film, and this film is again one of his poems set to music and video. For all his success in the theater, Shaban has experienced one significant setback. He secured money for a production of his play The First to Go when England joined the war against Iraq. The First to Go is a play about the fate of the disabled under the T4 program in wartime Germany. Shaban returned the government’s ‘blood money’ in protest and the play has yet to find another backer.

Nabil Shaban has successfully scattered the ash circle that kept able and disabled actors apart. He is a man who can be judged on his talents.  Shaban recently turned fifty and has many years of innovation and experimentation ahead of him. Thank you to Nabil Shaban for opening many doors, taking many risks and thumbing your nose at heresy.

Nabil Shaban (selected works)

Stage:

• Godspell (1987)
• The Emperor (1987)
• Hamlet (1988)
• Iranian Nights (1989)
• Measure for Measure (1990)
• Imagine Drowning (1991)
• Fleshfly (1996)
• DARE (1997) [vimeo] [youtube 1][youtube 2][youtube 3]
• Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1998) [wikipedia]
• The Little Lamp (1999)
• Portadown Blues (2000)
• I am the Walrus (2001)
• Knocknashee (2002)
• Jasmine Road (2003)
• Threepenny Opera (2005) [youtube][dailymotion]
• One Hour Before Sunrise (2006)
• Endgame (2007) [youtube]
• The First to Go (2008)
• Marat/Sade (?)

Film:

• Born of Fire (1983) [imbd]
• If I Decide to Commit Suicide (1990) [vimeo] [youtube][dailymotion]
• City of Joy (1992) [imbd] [wikipedia]
• Wittgenstein (1993) [imbd] [wikipedia] [youtube]
• Skallagrigg (1994) [imbd][wikipedia][youtube]
• Another World (1995) [amazon]
• Gaias Born (1998) [imbd]
• Children of Men (2006) [imbd] [wikipedia][youtube]
• Crip Triptych (2006) [youtube 1][youtube 2][youtube 3][youtube 4][youtube 5]
• Trouble Sleeping (2008) [imbd]
• Morticia (2009) [imbd][youtube][amazon]

Television:

• Walter (1982) [imbd] [wikipedia] [channel 4]
• Walter and June (1983) [imbd] [wikipedia] [channel 4]
• The Skin Horse (1983) [imbd]
• Dr. Who, Vengeance on Varos (1985) [imbd] [wikipedia]
• Dr. Who, Trial of a Time Lord (1986) [imbd] [wikipedia]
• Blue Peter (1986) [imbd]
• Raspberry Ripple (1986) [imbd]
• Billy’s Christmas Angel (1986) [imbd]
• The Fifth Gospel (1990) [youtube][dailymotion]
• Deptford Graffiti (1991) [imbd] [youtube]
• Inmates (1992)
• Age of Treason (1993) [imbd]
• Slave of Dreams (1995) [imbd] [wikipedia]
• Sorry About Last Night (1995) [imbd]
• Supercrips and Rejects (1996)
• The Alien Who Lived in the Sheds (1997) [imbd][youtube 1] [youtube 2]
• The Strangest Viking (2003) [imbd] [wikipedia][youtube 1][youtube 2][youtube 3][youtube 4][youtube 5][channel 4] [guardian]
• The Story of Dr. Who (2003) [imbd]

Radio

• The Ramayana (1994)
• Treasure Island (1995)

Books:

• DARE (2002)
• Dreams My Father Sold Me (2005)[amazon]
• The First to Go (2007) [vimeo] [youtube 1][youtube 2][youtube 3][youtube 4][dailymotion 1][dailymotion 2][dailymotion 3][amazon]
• The Ripper Code (2008) [amazon][dailymotion]

Internet:

• itunes: From Little Acorns
• dailymotion: [ScabNabs]
• facebook: [Nabil Shaban]
• geocities: [archive]
• media muppet: [Nabil Shaban]
• twin vision: [Nabil Shaban]
• vimeo: [Nabil Shaban]
• webby talents: [ScabNabs]
• youtube: [ScabNabs][DoctorNabsTalkPSI]

Trevor Blake is a sign language interpreter who lives in Portland, Oregon USA.

Yael Ruth Dragwyla is a writer; a ceremonial magickian, and sometimes editor of various alternative press publications.

OVO: What are some of the varieties of non-physical travel?

YRD: The two principal kinds are the out of body (OBE) stuff, where you literally leave your body and go elsewhere, and bilocation, where your mind is in two places at the same time whether or not you manifest physically in two places at the same time. I’ve found by experience and I’ve seen this reported in the literature that sometimes you’re thinking very hard about a place, you’ll be sitting in your living room thinking about a place and people will see you walking down the street in he place that you’re drinking about. They’ll say ‘Hi’ and you just disappear. You’ve bilocated into that city because you were thinking so hard about something.  You my actually have a physical appearance if you don’t have a physical weight or anything there. Your mind is definitely there as well as in your own body, so you’re not unconscious. With out of the body stuff, you actually leave your body. I bilocate routinely when I’m doing a magickal ritual.

OVO: Is this something that anyone could experience?

YRD: Anybody can experience it and I think at least a few times in your life everybody experiences it. If you’ve ever had a dream where you’re walking along an you suddenly stumble and there’s a bad jolt as if you’ve fallen on your face and you wake up, usually that means you’ve fallen back into your body after an OBE dream. Everybody’s had at least a couple of those. Everybody’s had an experience where you’re sitting in a chair and thinking about a place and suddenly it seems almost as if you were there. Everyone almost bilocates all the time but to do it effectively an exactly the way you want to without any hitches (or come close to go anyway), special training of stuff that is already in everybody is needed. People who have been in bad accidents or who were seriously traumatized on a chronic basis as children, a lot of the filters in their brain that are normally present for the rest of us aren’t there and they will tend to have these experiences more often. Therefore they’re the ones most likely to need the training. But this is something we all do at some point.

OVO: What does the training involve?

YRD: One of the things you can do is get the traditional crystal ball or bowl of water, and you gaze into it long enough that your mind gets bored with thinking about things and gives it up while you continue to stare into this thing. You start seeing pictures, pictures in your mind’s eye. When that starts happening you can train the pictures into being where you want them to be. If you keep doing this for quite a while you’ll find yourself projecting your mind at least partially to this other place. If you’re projecting into this bowl of water and you’re in, say, Los Angeles, and you’re thinking about London, you’ll start to bilocate into London. How far you’ll get with that I don’t know. There are all sorts of books on the subject. Another technique is to get a poster of a place you’d very much like to visit and you keep it on your wall. Five minutes a day you meditate on it and pretty soon you’ll be going there in your dreams.

OVO: What is the relation between something like bilocation and modern electronic media, which has some of the same effects as those attributed to bilocation?

YRD: With modern electronic media you have to have all that junk, whereas with bilocation you can do that spontaneously and all you need is your own head. Bilocation can produce more real manifest effects and do it in a real world way than electronics. Electronics is always planted and less complex than real life is. You don’t get get to touch and smell things on TV, you just see them. With bilocation all sorts of real life things am come across. If you actually get an out of the body experience you can pick up everything from music to smells to the way something feels when you rub your hand over it.

OVO:: What about the difference between out of the body experiences and bilocation and the like and psychosis or madness? How can you tell the difference?

YRD: Psychosis is when you loose control. If you can’t stop doing it its madness. It’s as if your body were in full panic mode and everything was frightening whether it should have been or not or your thoughts endlessly drift. The person who is psychotic is in bad shape, because they’re not fully in control of themselves, their thoughts run on in ways they can’t control. They can’t maintain control over their emotions so they drift in a psychological wind. But with these properties of bilocation and OBEs, when you do them spontaneously, if you’re sound and sane you get back home again without any problems. If on top of that you have training in how to utilize these things you get there and come back and you’ve achieved something along the way, you have control over this process.

OVO: What is a way for someone to test the reality of it if someone thinks they can bilocate?

YRD: If you think you’re in a city and you’ve never been there before, try to go to a corner where there’s a street sign. Get the names of the streets, addresses, if possible names off mail boxes. When you’re awake again write all this down as quickly as possible so you don’t forget and go to a library and look it up on a map. If you can, stop and talk to somebody. Say ‘hello’ and engage them in a conversation, in which you ask them about their city. Say you’re a stranger. If they’re speaking in a foreign language that you don’t understand that’s a pretty good test of it.

OVO: Do you know of examples of that happening?

YRD: I’ve read of it in the literature. Beyond that it’s by guess and by god.

One of the things that is very hard to do in dreams and in astral projection is to look at your own hands. I’ve tried it. Raise your own hands in front of your face and look at them. If you can’t do that or if you have trouble even putting the thoughts together to do that, that may be something that tells you that you’re astral-traveling rather than in a normal waking state. If you can think about doing it you’re not in a normal dream. I’d like someday to found my own university of esoteric sciences – for real, such that eventually it would produce graduates who simultaneously have a degree in some esoteric field, like say alchemy, and at the same time in something that would get them a job, a top-level job, working, say, for the government, or cities, or environmental protection. In Kipling’s book Kim the main character says “I thank Allah for both sides of my head.” This culture does not educate both sides of the head as they did in medieval times when they had the Curriculum. The point of the Curriculum was the well-rounded man. We need to do that again but we can’t go back to the medieval way of looking at the world. We know better, so we have to go forward, to a spiritual literacy that is up-to-date with all our experiences, good and bad, in the Twentieth Century. That’s what I want to start some day, real education. Not new age bullshit but education for both sides of the head in a way that is appropriate to the late Twentieth Century and the early Twenty-First.

(from OVO 13 TRAVEL January 1992)

OVO: What was the day of your first car accident?

JM: It was Tuesday, August 5th, 1986.

OVO: What happened?

JM: I was in South Carolina, staying at Polly’s Island with my mother for a week. My boyfriend had gone down with me. We were going to Murtle Beach; he was going to go to a skateboard park. We’d taken his mother’s station wagon. I was driving because he was getting his skateboard ready or something. It was a highway like Alcoa Highway [Knoxville, Tennessee], with a lot of dangerous intersections. I was going about 50 miles an hour when we came upon an intersection where there was a big Bronco and an old Pontiac. The Bronco pulled out and cleared the intersection in front of us. The woman in the Pontiac pulled up to the intersection, did not stop, and pulled onto the highway right in front of us. We hit her. The front left of her car and the front right our car collided. We ended up in the median, in the ditch. I was wearing the lap part of my seat but not the shoulder harness, and my face flew into the steering wheel. I knocked out seven bottom teeth. My boyfriend was not wearing his seat belt. He hit the windshield with his head and cut his head up badly. When we impacted with her I hit my mouth and I slung my body against the door. I had glass in my face from the windshield. Her window was down and we could see her. We were conscious and she was conscious. My boyfriend rolled down his window and leaned his head out the window and said “you okay?” She said yes, that she was okay. We sat in the car for… seconds. A woman came up to his window and asked “Do you want me to call an ambulance?” We said yes. We went to the hospital. I stayed the night but I don’t think he did. I had surgery the next day. I’d sprained my arm, my back and my neck, and I’d knocked my teeth out.

OVO: How did that change you?

JM: It made me a much better driver. I don’t trust anybody anymore. I don’t think anybody knows what they’re doing. As far as when anybody gets behind the wheel I don’t think people have their right minds. This woman that hit us had been driving for five years. She was 65. She got her license when she was 60 and she didn’t know what she was doing. I don’t take for granted that people are going to stop at stop signs. I slow down all the time. The biggest change in me is that I’m a horrible passenger. I get antsy when I have to sit in the passenger seat and I tell people what to do. I tell people to slow down. I’ve learned not to feel bad about telling people when I’m uncomfortable. I’ve been in a car with people who were going to fast and I’ve said you’ve got to slow down or I‘m getting out of the car. Because I know that you can die and that’s changed my life completely. Facing what I thought was my own death. I thought I was going to die.

(from OVO 13 TRAVEL January 1992)

1982 (age 16): I find Factsheet Five and by way of that magazine I find Kerry Thornley. By way of Kerry and Factsheet Five I find many anarchist periodicals and pen pals.  Anarchism seems smart, strong, right.  Looking back, I used the word to describe what I liked and wanted and what was ‘mine.’  It’s something about the sovereignty of the individual, or you can’t tell me what to do, or something in between.  Somewhere in the back of my mind I think that these ideas are so good that the only reason they aren’t in practice now everywhere is that they haven’t been tried.  Or perhaps tried just right.  Or perhaps the ideas aren’t widely distributed, and if people only knew about anarchism they would sign on.

1987: I find an anarchist poster on the campus of the University of Tennessee and by way of the poster I find The Alternative, an anarchist group in Knoxville.  We talk and do things, but anarchism does not flow out from us like a river.  And while we’re all on the same team against a much larger and more powerful team, we certainly do bicker.

1987: I published Letter from the Graveyard Shift by Gerry Reith in my zine OVO. Early questioning

1988-1989: I attend anarchist events in many cities.  I meet with anarchists in the South and on the East Coast.  I am a guest lecturer on anarchism at the University of Tennessee.  The same imp of the perverse that led me to read about anarchism pricks up his ears when he hears a friend say how concerned he is that another friend is reading Ayn Rand.  Not that the friend is signing on as a true believer, but that the books themselves are wicked.  Noted.

1991: I write “Anarchist: Think for Yourself,” published in the book Anarchy and the End of History.  A high point in nine years of letters, essays and art published in anarchist magazines around the world. Factsheet Five continues to create contacts for me, including an unsolicited letter from George Walford in England.  I correspond with George until his death in 1994.

1992 (age 26): I move to Portland, Oregon and find radical bookstore Laughing Horse Books.  Make a friend who volunteers there.

1993: From a letter by George Walford: “You remark the scarcity of ‘real live human being stories’ in anarchist literature. Very perceptive. But it’s not an accident. Anarchism is not about people as we meet them, it’s about abstruse principles and theories (and, even more, about the resistance these encounter). The real human stories appear in the literature at the other end of the range, in the popular romances, thrillers, love-songs and — perhaps most of all — in tabloid newspaper stories, which go to extreme lengths to personalise (humanise) political events.  Your own view of anarchism has it that people should be free to do what they want. The overwhelming majority of those who have encountered anarchism have shown very clearly that they do not want to do what anarchists want them to do. They prefer to do what they are doing now. We have no reason to expect the others, when they meet anarchism, to respond differently. Can your anarchism accept this? Or do you feel bound to impose (however gently and rationally) your ideas of what it is good for them to do? The dilemma of orthodox anarchism cannot be escaped by ‘practical living anarchy’ within present society. We cannot live without taking part in society, paying taxes and supporting capitalism by our consumption, and orthodox anarchism condemns all of this. The attempt to live the anarchist life is a living demonstration of the arid, empty, abstract unreality of orthodox anarchism; it cannot be put into practice, it is virtually nothing but theory.”

1994: My friend from Laughing Horse Books and I attend a meeting.  The meeting is made up of people who want to start an anarchist bookstore in Portland.  The bookstore is to be called 223.  I offer to help write the mission statement, including a definition of anarchism. Not trying to define a thing into existence, not trying to exclude, not trying to control, just trying to clarify our goals and means and provide a base to start from.  Having a definition of anarchism is discouraged, as it will be divisive and we all know what we mean anyway.  Anarchism is smart, strong, right.  I notice that in twelve years of being around anarchists, most of us are under thirty.  Where are the older anarchists in a movement that started in the 19th Century?  And what has anarchism done… ever?  I work on a definition for myself, looking for the first time with any degree of seriousness into the history and accomplishments of anarchism for source material.

1994: From a letter by George Walford, responding to my essay in Anarchy and the End of History: “I have to say one or two things about the content. You ask one of the crucial questions: ‘if anarchy is so great, how come we’re not all anarchists?’ You ask it, but you don’t answer it, sliding off into discussing whether individuals can live as anarchists — also important, and certainly connected, but not the same question. Your omission is not surprising, for that question cannot be answered within the orthodox anarchism which your article accepts. The position is in fact even worse for anarchism than that sounds, because that is only half the problem, the other half being that some people, few but enough to form a movement, have become anarchists. A differential explanation is needed, and significant, enduring, social distinctions between groups of people orthodox anarchism cannot accept. Third (this one we’ve had before), your first new para on p.128, the one beginning: ‘Just as …’ in which you blame the personal inadequacies of individual anarchists for the failure of anarchy. This does not stand up any better than blaming individual supporters of capitalism for the failures of that system. In each case the failure is sufficiently constant and widespread to indicate a structural source, something built into the position. The only way to get past that sort of difficulty is to move on to another position. Examples of anarchist successes will be springing to your mind, but if you examine them you will find that (so far as they are successes in any field other than theory and argument) they are not distinctively anarchist. This of course links up with the first problem raised above. They both arise because orthodox anarchism, far from being “so great” is extremely limited. Not only can anarchy not be practiced under the state, it can’t even be thought out as an independent social system, in any concrete way, without running into contradictions that, appearing in practice, would wreck the new world.”

1994: I define anarchism as the belief it is possible and desirable to maintain the world’s population at the current standard of living without government and without a period of transition from the present to an anarchist world.  The moment I put the definition on paper, I ask myself if that is what I believe and I answer myself no I do not.  Thus I am not an anarchist.  I go to my anarchist friends to see if they can find an error in my thinking – they run away from that conversation, and my doubts are not lessened for it.

1994: I read extensively in the works of George Walford and his peers.  The idea of the ‘mass rationality assumption’ hits home.  People project their values on others, and this includes intellectuals.  Intellectuals think that most people would prefer to solve problems with intellect, and most people are capable of solving problems with intellect.  Neither are true.  Intellect and reason aren’t forbidden to most people, they just aren’t valued as much as convention and passion.  Assuming otherwise is what keeps intellectuals in the political minority.

1995: One of George Walford’s best critics, David McDonagh, writes me.  David proceeds to poke holes in my thinking from that point onward.  Looking into what David considers good thinking, I am introduced to the works of Sir Karl Popper.  Popper’s book Conjectures and Refutations causes the bottom to drop out of everything I knew about science, rationality, history and politics.  What a rotten foundation it was. David also directs me to “The Impossibility of Economic Calculation under Socialism” by David Steele.  This essay kicks the chair out from under socialist economics.  I start reading about economics.  What a fool I’d been, thinking I’d understood it before.

1996: Feeling free of anarchism and a little burned by what I now see was my own hooded thinking, I call up the imp of the perverse to see what other forbidden ideas might be out there.  Ayn Rand is suggested, and I read her works.  Having already shed one hood I’m less inclined to put another one on, and I do not become an Objectivist.  But moving through Objectivism brings libertarian thinking to my attention.  It’s something about the sovereignty of the individual… but I’ve walked down that path already and don’t sign on as a libertarian either.

2001 (age 35): September 11th.  I’m at work at a homeless shelter.  The base nature of much of humanity stops being abstract and my appreciation for individuals who are basically decent increases.  The idea that we can all just get along stops scratching on its coffin lid.  The need for having hard men on the payroll to keep away other hard men makes sense.  I support the State, the army, the police as better than the alternative.

2005: The imp of the perverse continues to slip books into my hand, emboldened by the importance I place on reading one’s critics gained by my reading of Popper.  Nothing seems more important than finding critics who will point out errors in my thinking – friends who think like I do never will. I read extensively about right wing politics and pay more attention to mainstream politics.   All houses poxed long ago.  That being said, when a fact or idea rings true I don’t turn up my nose if the source is otherwise unpleasant.

2010: What am I now?  I try to be a good person and keep out of harm’s way.  I hammer at the chains of religion and theocracy.  My atheist efforts are small, but I’ve seen small changes from them and that is satisfying.  I think humanity’s best hope is the open society described by Sir Karl Popper.  I lean towards the free market and small government and the sovereignty of the individual, but I don’t see these as flawless or always appropriate.  Whatever I am, I’m definitely not an anarchist.

I have raised my happiness set point (among other things) [...]. Some of the details are lost to memory, but below, I reconstruct for your analysis what I can of the process. It contains lots of gooey self-disclosure; skip if that’s not your thing. In summary: I decided that I had to and wanted to become happier; I re-labeled my moods and approached their management accordingly; and I consistently treated my mood maintenance and its support behaviors (including discovering new techniques) as immensely important. The steps in more detail:

1. I came to understand the necessity of becoming happier. Being unhappy was not just unpleasant. It was dangerous. [...]
2. I re-labeled my moods, so that identifying them in the moment prompted the right actions. When a given point on the unhappy-happy spectrum – let’s call it “2″ on a scale of 1 to 10 – was labeled “normal” or “set point”, then when I was feeling “2″, I didn’t assume that meant anything; that was the default state. That left me feeling “2″ a lot of the time, and when things went wrong, I dipped lower, and I waited for things outside of myself to go right before I went higher. The problem was that “2″ was not a good place to be spending most of my time. [...]
3. I treated my own mood as manageable. Thinking of it as a thing that attacked me with no rhyme or reason – treating a bout of depression like a cold – didn’t just cost me the opportunity to fight it, but also made the entire situation seem more out-of-control and hopeless. [...]

Article continues, at the always remarkable Less Wrong.

On 2 March 1982, author Philip K. Dick died.  It was in 1982 that a friend recommended I read Valis, which I enjoyed enough to read all the rest of PKD’s books.  Eventually I collected around 70 titles by and about PKD.  This was after the film Blade Runner but before Total Recall, which started a wave of interest in his work.  Most of the PKD books I had were first editions I’d bought for next to nothing.

Among the books was Divine Invasions, a biography by Lawrence Sutin.  I read Divine Invasions around 1994.  A detail in this book (confirmed by Search for Philip K. Dick, 1928-1982 by Anne Dick) inspired me to box up all my PKD books and sell them at a loss just to get them out of my house.  PKD loved to get married but didn’t like staying married.  To get one of his wives out of the way, he drugged her then had her committed to a mental hospital.  That freed him up for the next marriage.  This fact overshadowed all the enjoyment I had taken from his books.

This fact hasn’t lost its impact for me, but in 2010 I can also remember my enjoyment of his books.  What puzzles me is something that puzzles me about author H. P. Lovecraft.  Why is PKD forgiven for acts that other authors would not be forgiven for?  It isn’t hidden that PKD did this – why are forward-thinking fans accommodating to him for this while being up in arms over much less from other authors?  Readers (especially those on the left) will rail night and day against an author that uses certain words, or was once a member of a certain group, but who harmed no one.  PKD harmed someone, but, well, he’s so cosmic!

Today (25 November) was a special day in the life of Yukio Mishima.  Men, take upon your shoulders now the portable shrine…

When l was small l would watch the young men parade the portable shrine through the streets at the local shrine festival. They were intoxicated with their task, and their expressions were of an indescribable abandon, their faces averted; some of them even rested the backs of their necks against the shafts of the shrine they shouldered, so that their eyes gazed up at the heavens. And my mind was much troubled by the riddle of what it was that those eyes reflected. As to the nature of the intoxicating vision that I detected in all this violent physical stress, my imagination provided no clue. For many a month, therefore, the enigma continued to occupy my mind; it was only much later, after I had begun to learn the language of the flesh, that I undertook to help in shouldering a portable shrine, and was at last able to solve the puzzle that had plagued me since infancy. They were simply looking at the sky. In their eyes there was no vision: only the reflection of the blue and absolute skies of early autumn. Those blue skies, though, were unusual skies such as I might never see again in my life: one moment strung up high aloft, the next plunged to the depths; constantly shifting, a strange compound of lucidity and madness. I promptly set down what I had discovered in a short essay, so important did my experience seem to me. In short, I had found myself at a point where there were no grounds for doubting that the sky that my own poetic intuition had shown me, and the sky revealed to the eyes of those ordinary young men of the neighborhood, were identical. That moment for which I had been waiting so long was a blessing that the sun and the steel had conferred on me. – Mishima, Sun and Steel.

Wikipedia: Yukio Mishima.
Yukio Mishima Museum.
Wax figure of Mishima (where is it now?).
Yukokio (The Rite of Love and Death), a 1966 film by Mishima.
Mishima conducting the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony.
Eirei No Koe (Voices of the Heroic Dead), an LP by Mishima.
Justin Raimondo: Mishima – Paleocon as Samurai.
Stephen Mansfield: A Life Less Ordinary.
… and more.

OVO triumphus for Yukio Mishima for 2008.

Radley Balko, How to Get Ahead in Law:

Last June, District Attorney David Capeless of Berkshire County, Massachusetts, announced that he was dropping all charges against 44-year-old Bernard Baran, a man who has spent half his life behind bars on child molestation charges that the state no longer has the confidence to retry. Baran was convicted in January 1985 of molesting six children at a pre-kindergarten day care facility in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He was released on bond in 2006 after an appeals court determined that his trial attorney had been incompetent and that the prosecution may have withheld key exculpatory evidence. Baran says that during his jail term he was raped and beaten more than 30 times, necessitating six different transfers to new correctional institutions. Such is the cost the prison system exacts on an openly gay man convicted of molesting children. Baran was one of the first people in the country to be prosecuted in the day care sex abuse panic of the 1980s, a bizarre nationwide hysteria fed by homophobia, fears of Satanism, and a wing of child psychology that used unproven interrogation techniques that critics say caused children to recount sexual incidents that never took place. In this case, prosecutor Daniel Ford, now a judge on the Massachusetts Superior Court, showed the grand jury that indicted Baran an edited video interview with the children. According to court documents, the video shows several kids alleging that Baran had sexually abused them. Edited out was footage in which some of the children denied any abuse by Baran, interviewees accused other members of the day care faculty of abuse or of witnessing abuse, and, most important, interrogators asked the same questions over and over – even after repeated denials – until a child gave them an affirmative answer. Some children were even given rewards for their answers. [...] In upholding the ruling that granted Baran a new trial, the appeals court added in a footnote that if the state wanted to retry him, Baran could file a motion for a hearing on Ford’s alleged misconduct. By dropping the charges, the D.A. avoided that hearing. “In my opinion,” says Boston civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate, “ the possibility of an embarrassing hearing into misconduct by a former prosecutor and now sitting Superior Court judge was the main reason, if not the reason, they decided to drop the charges. The appeals court opinion cut a bit too close to the bone for them.” So while Bernard Baran is free after 22 years of incarceration, there are no plans to look into the actions of the prosecutor, now a sitting judge, responsible for his conviction. Ford’s career trajectory indicates the backward incentive structure that prosecutors face: Convictions produce rewards, while abuse rarely comes with a penalty.

Religious Tolerance, The Baran Sexual Abuse Case:

The Bernard Baran indictment appears to have many factors in common with dozens of ritual abuse cases which surfaced during the 1980s and early 1990s. Bernard is a homosexual. That has proven to be a tremendous personal liability, because of the high level of homophobia in American society. On 1983-AUG-1, Bernard Baran was hired as a teacher’s aide by the West Side Early Childhood Development Center (ECDC) in Pittsfield, MA. Pittsfield is located near the extreme western border of Massachusetts, very close to the state of New York. The uncle of one of Baran’s students complained to the ECDC that he did not want a homosexual teaching his nephew. Shortly after this complaint, he and his sister-in-law called police and said that the boy had accused Baran of molesting him. On 1984-OCT-6, Baran was charged with sexually assaulting two three-year-old children at ECDC. The number of charges reached nine after most of the 160 children at the ECDC were interviewed. Baran was 19 years of age at the time. On 1985-JAN-30, he received a sentenced of 3 concurrent life terms. Because of his age and slight build, he was easy pray for other inmates. “During his first four years, he was raped and physically assaulted 30-40 times. He has suffered serious eye injuries and many broken bones. [...] In all probability, he is innocent. In fact, the criminal acts for which he was charged probably never happened. However, the children (now in their twenties) probably retain “memories” of the abuse that were implanted in their minds as a result of improper interview techniques.

Articles continue at links.  See also the Free Baran archive.  I lived in a small town as a teenager in the 1980s.  I read books, including books on taboo subjects.  I played role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons.  I listened to music that wasn’t to be found on the radio.  I was very aware that a satanic panic was occurring in the United States, and that I could be caught up in it for my interests.  I could be accused of the kind of nonsense that Baran was caught up in.  I found two strategies that worked well in keeping myself safe.  Those strategies were knowing when to be public about my interests and when to be private.  Being public (including publishing OVO) meant that any argument I was a secret agent for evil would be weak.  Being private meant that what the do-gooders didn’t need to know about they never knew about.  But it was my dumb luck that the do-gooders didn’t try especially hard.  Now I’m an adult and it turns out reading those books, playing those games and listening to that music didn’t do me or anyone else any particular harm.  Turns out the good guys were the bad guys and the bad guys were innocent.  I’m the one who stuck by my guns.  The judges and therapists and police and teachers and clergy who made bank on the satanic panic are the ones who tucked tail and shuffled into an underground tunnel.   I don’t deserve any particular reward for what I did.  But were this a just world, they would be held accountable for what they did.  Bernard Baran spent half his life in prison to satisfy the blood lust of those who serve an invisible monster that lives in the sky.  And that’s one of the reasons I’m public about my interest in the withering away of religion under the twin suns of scorn and reason.

John Dolan, Lord Byron the eXile’s Patron Saint (via):

[Lord Byron] chose to be noisily “immoral” not because he was any worse (or any better) than the average aristocrat of his time but as a weapon against the moralism of Wordsworth. I don’t mean “moralism” in a normative sense – God no. I remember sifting through the elderly Wordsworth’s letters looking for any comment at all on the Great Famine which was extirpating the Irish, and finding only one remark, in which the great moralist earnestly prays that England will not weaken, ie provide any aid whatsoever. It’s one of the curiosities of English literary history that you’ll never find the least particle of compassion for the Irish in “moral” poets like Wordsworth. Only the “mad, bad and dangerous” Byron mentioned the slaughter of 1798, attacking the PM, Castlereagh, for “dabbling [his] sleek young hands in Erin’s gore” and, as Pope would have recommended, delivering an extra kick to his enemy’s corpse in this epitaph: “Posterity will never survey a nobler grave than this: here lie the bones of Castlereagh: stop, traveler, and piss.”

Wikipedia, Theo van Gogh:

Theodoor “Theo” van Gogh was a Dutch film director, film producer, columnist, author and actor. He was the great-grandson of Theo van Gogh, who was the brother of artist Vincent van Gogh. Van Gogh worked with writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali to produce the film Submission, which analyzed the treatment of women in Islam. Some claimed the film was critical of Islam. On 2 November 2004 he was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch Muslim. The last film he completed before his death, 06/05, is a fictional version of the assassination of politician Pim Fortuyn.

Wikipedia, Pim Fortuyn:

Wilhelmus Simon Petrus “Pim” Fortuyn was a charismatic Dutch politician, author, columnist, public servant, sociologist and professor who formed his own party, Pim Fortuyn List (Lijst Pim Fortuyn or LPF). He was assassinated during the 2002 Dutch national election campaign by militant animal rights activist Volkert van der Graaf, who claimed in court he had murdered Fortuyn to stop him from exploiting Muslims as “scapegoats” and targeting “the weak parts of society to score points” in seeking political power.

Wikipedia, Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Dutch intellectual, feminist activist, writer, and politician. She is the estranged daughter of the Somali scholar, politician, and revolutionary opposition leader Hirsi Magan Isse. She is a prominent critic of Islam, and her screenplay for Theo Van Gogh’s movie Submission led to death threats. Since van Gogh’s assassination by a Muslim extremist in 2004, she has lived in seclusion under the protection of Dutch authorities. When she was eight, her family left Somalia for Saudi Arabia, then Ethiopia, and eventually settled in Kenya. She sought and obtained political asylum in the Netherlands in 1992, under circumstances that later became the center of a political controversy. In 2003 she was elected a member of the House of Representatives (the lower house of the Dutch parliament), representing the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). A political crisis surrounding the potential stripping of her Dutch citizenship led to her resignation from the parliament, and led indirectly to the fall of the second Balkenende cabinet. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia. Her father, Hirsi Magan Isse, was a prominent member of the Somali Salvation Democratic Front and a leading figure in the Somalian Revolution. Shortly after she was born, her father was imprisoned due to his opposition to Somalia’s Siad Barre government. Hirsi Ali’s father had studied abroad and was opposed to female genital cutting, but while he was imprisoned, Hirsi Ali’s grandmother had the traditional procedure performed on five-year-old Hirsi Ali.

Wikipedia, Religious Views on Female Genital Cutting:

Muslim scholars have often been divided on whether it should be considered as a non-religious traditional custom, or whether it should be specifically condemned by religious authorities.

Today is the anniversary of the death of Theo van Gogh, who was murdered for a film written by Ayaan Ali and who had just finished a film on Pim Fortyun.  Two ways of problem solving are on display here.  In one, people write scripts, make films and are elected to public office.  In the other, you kill people.  One is the way of the West, and one is the way of the Muslim world.  Which way do you favor?  If you’re having trouble deciding, look at the primary evidence.  Start by watching the film Submission.  Then look at this photograph of Theo van Gogh’s body, shot multiple times, head nearly cut off, stabbed repeatedly, with Muslim prayers pinned to his chest by his murderer’s knives.  Consider whether you think scholars should have nuanced debates on the merits of forced clitoridectomies for girls or… not.  I hope these comparisons brings you mental and moral clarity.

They don’t let pussies go to the moon.

Neil Armstrong: One Badass Mother Fucker. | MetaFilter

The Dreadlock Recollections by Kerry Wendell Thornley
140 pages, 8.5 x 11, $15.00 in print or $1.99 for Kindle
Confession / satire by the mind-controlled assassin of John F. Kennedy.

In early November of 1963, Slim and I arrived at the little house in Harahan, Louisiana, and Brother-in-law said to me, as soon as I sat down, “Kerry, give me some ideas about assassinating John F. Kennedy.” I was more than happy to oblige; for years I had been saving up ideas about how to murder the President. I’d spoken of assassinating Kennedy to anyone who would listen to me ever since my arrival in New Orleans.

[Free] [Print] [Kindle]

OVO is a collection of new works in the public domain edited and published by Trevor Blake since 1987. New issues are in progress.

Over 37 years ago Juliane Koepcke survived a two mile free fall, landing virtually unscathed in the middle of the rainforest. But that wasn’t the end of her ordeal. She spent ten days in the juggle before finding rescue.

Yeah I’m free, free fallin’ | MetaFilter

Tales From A Jehovah’s Witness Upbringing.

I’m Perfect, You’re Doomed, by Kyria Abrahams

Today is the seventh of June, the anniversary of the death of Alan Turing.

Wikipedia: Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS was a British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist. Turing is often considered to be the father of modern computer science. He provided an influential formalisation of the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine. Of his role in the modern computer, Time Magazine in naming Turing one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century, states: “The fact remains that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine.” [...] During the Second World War, Turing worked at Bletchley Park, Britain’s codebreaking centre, and was for a time head of Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including the method of the bombe, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. Near the end of his life Turing became interested in chemistry. He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis[2] and he predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction, which were first observed in the 1960s. [...]

Homosexual acts were illegal in the United Kingdom and regarded as a mental illness and subject to criminal sanctions. In 1952, Arnold Murray, a 19-year-old recent acquaintance of Turing’s, helped an accomplice to break into Turing’s house, and Turing reported the crime to the police. As a result of the police investigation, Turing acknowledged a sexual relationship with Murray, and Turing and Murray were charged with gross indecency under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, the same crime Oscar Wilde had been convicted of more than fifty years before. Turing was given a choice between imprisonment and probation, conditional on his undergoing hormonal treatment designed to reduce libido. To avoid jail, he accepted chemical castration via estrogen hormone injections which lasted for a year. His conviction led to a removal of his security clearance and prevented him from continuing consultancy for GCHQ on cryptographic matters. At the time, there was acute public anxiety about spies and homosexual entrapment by Soviet agents, possibly due to the recent exposure of the first two members of the Cambridge Five, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, as KGB double agents. Turing was never accused of espionage but, as with all who had worked at Bletchley Park, could not discuss his war work.

On 8 June 1954, Turing’s cleaner found him dead; the previous day, he had died of cyanide poisoning, apparently from a cyanide-laced apple he left half-eaten beside his bed. The apple itself was never tested for contamination with cyanide, but a post-mortem established that the cause of death was cyanide poisoning. Most believe that his death was intentional, and the death was ruled a suicide. His mother, however, strenuously argued that the ingestion was accidental due to his careless storage of laboratory chemicals. Biographer Andrew Hodges suggests that Turing may have killed himself in this ambiguous way quite deliberately, to give his mother some plausible deniability. Others suggest that Turing was re-enacting a scene from Snow White, his favourite fairy tale.

Turing was also a world-class runner.

Alan Turing Scrapbook: His best time [for a Marathon] of 2 hours, 46 minutes, 3 seconds, was only 11 minutes slower than the winner in the 1948 Olympic Games. In a 1948 cross-country race he finished ahead of Tom Richards who was to win the silver medal in the Olympics. [...] I asked him one day why he punished himself so much in training. He told me, ” I have such a stressful job that the only way I can get it out of my mind is by running hard.” ‘

I recommend the book Alan Turing: the Enigma by Andrew Hodges to learn more about this hero of the modern age. He saved England and chose death over becoming less of a man. – Trevor.

“Religions are like fireflies. They require darkness in order to shine.”

The Infidels – Arthur Schopenhauer

First published Thu Nov 13, 1997; substantive revision Mon Feb 9, 2009. Karl Popper is generally regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century. He

Karl Popper (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

was assassinated 6 May 2002 Dutch national election campaign by militant animal rights activist Volkert van der Graaf, who claimed in court he had murdered Fortuyn to stop him from exploiting Muslims as “scapegoats”

Pim Fortuyn – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tamara de Lempicka

Art Decadence? | MetaFilter

The Turin-born Rita Levi Montalcini recounted how the anti-Jewish laws of the 1930s under Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime forced her to quit university and do research in an improvised laboratory in her bedroom at home. [As seen in 'Death by Design.']

Italian scientist, turning 100, still works

The author JG Ballard, famed for novels such as Crash and Empire of the Sun, has died aged 78 after a long illness.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Cult author JG Ballard dies at 78