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 foundation 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. Welcome in 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 supress their sexuality.” Nabil: “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.”

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 minautor, 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 lonliness? 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. 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 is, 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:

• dailymotion: [ScabNabs]
• facebook: [Nabil Shaban]
• geocities: [archive]
• media muppet: [Nabil Shaban]
• vimeo: [Nabil Shaban]
• webby talents: [ScabNabs]
• youtube: [ScabNabs][DoctorNabsTalkPSI]

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

The following is an account by James Scianna of some of his experiences after temporarily ceasing to take powerful anti-psychotic and antidepressants after eight years of taking these drugs.

I go to this Vietnamese public health office, or at least when I get there it is run by a Vietnamese woman. I go in there and I guess there’s some conversation done in some curt professional manner on her part and it sort of defines the situation. I get the feeling that she’s talking down to me because I’m not of her race. I’m going there to get some special cockroach spray for the apartment that they are supposed to have there (I called them before I went). Anyway, she checks on this and I find out they don’t have it there in stock.  Then she starts talking about how I owe them / her seventy-five cents for some sort of “consultation fee” from the phone call I made, which pisses me off since they didn’t have what I wanted. I think I pay this. Then, as if that weren’t enough, she starts talking about how I owe her a pen since the last time I was there I took her pen. This becomes too much for me and an argument ensues, again, not heated but very curt, mature and professional, like that which often occurs between a customer and proprietor.  Anyway, I leave in a huff.

At this point what I am feeling is that for some reason the woman, because I am not of her race, looks down on me and is fucking with my head, trying to get one over on me, pushing me into a confrontation with her.  She’s playing on my own secret tendency to look down on Vietnamese people. The effect on me is one of frustration and of guilt. Although I know I didn’t steal her pen, I feel guilty as if I did. Perhaps I just forgot to return her pen to her accidentally. I don’t know, I’m not sure. Still, I feel guilty about this. I feel as if I’m definitely in the wrong and yet feel as if I should feel that I’m in the right. I’m frustrated.

As I’m walking home I notice that I’m at the curve of the road by the Main Public library at the intersection of Market and West San Carlos but the place is like a ghetto instead of a thriving hub of civic activity, what with with library, the civic center, the convention center and Fairmont Hotel all in that area.

A screaming, crying, half-naked Black kid comes running out of one slum yelling something about her father trying to tattoo her. I’m concernedly asking her and the brother who comes to fetch her if she is all right even though I know that there is nothing I can do if she isn’t all right, which is most probably the case.

I feel a sense of token concern over this. Again, we get a minority that l secretly look down upon. Whereas before I was not responsible for the situation, and yet I felt responsible, I felt as if I should feel responsible and wanted the other person to feel I had nothing to do with what she had accused me of. In this case, it was the flip side: Even though I was not responsible for this young child’s situation, didn’t have anything to do with it and, indeed, I didn’t want to deal with it, I wanted the people involved to think that I could do something about it, a token show of concern. “Are you all right?” What was I going to do if they weren’t?  Nothing?

As I’m walking along I walk by a short cyclone fence of a house. On the inside of the fence, hanging on itby the neck, is the desiccated carcass of a tiny little kitten. Immediately I understand that another abusive father is at work here, that the cat of some poor family has had a whole litter of unwanted kittens and the father is abusing, killing and neglecting them so that they die and he doesn’t have to deal with them.

Two of these starved, half-dead yet amazingly strong and eager little unwanted things come up to me and start grabbing onto my ankles and legs with ferocious tenacity, saying (non-verbally) “Pleasel Save us! Take us home! Feed us! Please! Love us!” It frightens me, the intensity of their need to be rescued from this, hellish kitty concentration camp and yet I’m concerned that they are going to get run over by a car outside of the fence where they are. I pick one of them up to throw it inside of this malevolent sanctuary and it digs its claws into my hands, unwilling to let go at any cost. I throw it in anyway.

I am hurt physically and psychologically by this whole scene. The kittens are repulsive to me. I want to be rid of them, of the sight of them. I am appalled by their horrible existence and their ferocious desperation. I can’t do anything about their pain. I literally throw them back into their situation. My feeling at this point is like there is a great weight on my shoulders, the weight of the world, the world’s pain, even though it is typified in two isolated incidents. I feel I’m living in a terrible world. I keep thinking how appalled my sister would be at these kitten’s plight. This is the third instance in which I feel guilty about something I have no power over. About something I haven’t done and can’t do anything about.

I notice a roach in the room. Then another. Then another. Like that movie Creepshow, “They’re Creeping Up on You.” I’m pissed because I can’t get the roach spray that’s going to solve my problems. So I get a can of Raid out and start spraying every square inch of the place with a heavy foam of the diluted poison. Spraying it directly onto roaches as I find each one. Until, when spraying under the bed, I come upon the queen cockroach herself. No matter how hard and how much I spray her, though, she doesn’t die. She becomes bigger and bigger.

She comes out from under the bed and she’s like a huge queen ant and by now she’s agent the size of a schnauzer. I’m spraying the Raid at her like she’s some sort of monster in some B horror movie, but it’s horribly real. The Raid comes out in a long foamy stream, an endless supply of the stuff directed at her insecticide head. She just laps it up like a dog drinking from a water lose.

Again, there is the deep feeling of revulsion and horror. I want to run screaming from the place but realize that I have no place to run to. The queen cockroach is insistent. She gets bigger and bigger after she crawls from beneath my bed.

I put myself in the cockroach’s place, and speak with her “voice:” “I am a monster. I am hideous. I am loathsome. I am disgusting. I hide in the dark, buried underneath an altar on which are sacrificed all my secret dreams and lurid fantasies. And yet, when I am seen and noticed I shall not be denied. I am not evil.  I do not want to cause Jim pain. I cannot help what I am. I am what I am. I need to be loved.”

I find myself watching some sort of special Donahue show on schizophrenics, but it’s being hosted by a bearded Johnathan Winters (who was diagnosed “schizophrenic,” or at least so I’ve heard). As he goes through the panel, introducing each schizophrenic to the studio audience, he asks them: “Are you on any medication right now?” And yet, these people aren’t like the mentally ill people I know. They’re cute, they’re funny, they’re amusing, like characters off of a situation comedy. One guy is an annoying lawyer from the movie The Onion Fields (at least he looks like him). Another woman on the panel, thin, slightly older, red hair, interrupts Winters’ monologue by saying “Excuse me, sir; excuse me, sir,” over and over. Again, the audience is amused.

I know that it’s all bullshit. It’s not real. Mentally ill people tend to be shuffling, confusing, confused, unwanted souls tucked away in the cellars of society.  They are not television personalities who delight millions with their eccentric antics and bizarre behavior. And yet, I am not indignant at this realization. If anything, it is an afterthought I’m caught up in the illusion. It’s a great show. It’s great stuff. Real good television. I wish I were taping it to add to my collection. I am entertained.

As the lady on the panel is saying “Excuse me, sir,” we see a three-dimentional, real time computer animated representation of their talking heads, and of her  saying “Excuse me, sir” over and over while she’s saying it. The point of view of the computer animation sweeps over these heads, focusing on one, lifting,  panning over the panel, all to electronic music. I think it is a fine technical job. Then in this real-time cartoon, we see the heads being disassembled like  blocks of wood. Like some sort of puzzle. Sections of the scalp and face spontaneously disappear until the skull is revealed, then sections of the cranium, portions of the jaw, geometrically bisected portions of static gray matter. We see the entire interior structure of their heads. Then the whole thing happens in reverse and we’re back to the real show.

It’s all fascinating to me. How in the world do they do that? I don’t care. It just looks great, sounds great. I’m caught up in the mastery of the technical wizardry. This show is great!

The schizos are involved in some sort of sketch. One woman (perhaps the same one) is not satisfied with her performance and keeps wanting to start it over.  They try to explain to her that it is a live show and that she should just go through with it. The audience is amused by this. I realize that is just a show that has been on before. It is a re-run. Its all just so much bullshit. But high-quality bullshit.

I wake up. But I don’t really wake up, I’m still dreaming, having woke up from a dream within a dream. My sense of “reality” is undermined as it teeters on the edge, the blink between joy and madness. For some reason, I’m ecstatic in my disillusionment. What the hell does it matter? Christ, I might as well be happy. And I am, I’m joyous; content in my confusion. Am I mad? The thought doesn’t even occur to me as I’m swept away in spirited rapture.

The phone rings and it is a friend of mine, Mike. I talk to him some and I realize that I’m excited and talking very weird and I start to sense that he’s going  to start feeling that I’m mentally ill and start talking down to me or patronizing me. This particular friend works with autistic children and tends to condescend to me at times, like I’m one of his clients.

He asks me if I went to this Vietnamese place to get the roach spray and I tell him yes, I did, but they didn’t have it. I anticipate that he thinks this is too easy, that I’m lying about it. He says something and I say; “Mike, are you accusing me of lying to you?l” My heart trembles and hitches with frustration and fearful indignation in its heaving rib cage as I anticipate the imminent professional rebuke.

“Well,” he insists, “are you?”

Demanding voice echoes in my ears. A maddening drone.

“Are you? Are you? Are you?”

I am paralyzed in my fear. My back is pressed hard against an unyielding wall. A million angry beehives explode between my temples drowning everything out except his pounding query. I close my blind eyes tight against the undeniable assault as it screams in my scrambled brain.

My eyes snap open in wide terror, glistening like moist eggshells. My mouth stretches into an exaggerated pain-rictus howling a silent scream.

White out.

Black out.

The wall behind me is a soap bubble. I slide through it effortlessly and tumble unoriented, wildly, spinning out of control through a sunblasted expanse of spinning thick-blue atmosphere and silver-white clouds of hairswept coolness. The uncatchable sun orbits me insanely as my head and feet exchange places over and over. I can’t tell if I’m falling up or down.

“Are you? Are you? Are you?”

I spread my arms wide and the rushing wind catches me with a silent hand, deep in my chest, pulling me back and up, swinging me in wild looping arcs.

“Yes… yes… yes… yes… I’m lying to you, Mike. I’m lying to you. I’m lying to you, Mike. I’m lying to you. I’m lying! I’m lying!”

Untamed laughter explodes from my forehead like furiously convulsing feral spirit. My laughter screams. It tears at me gloriously, ripping me apart. My laughter becomes the sky I’m falling in. It sustains me. Pulls me in whatever direction I choose. It echoes endlessly. I twist and dance like a flame.

I awake tangled in damp sheets. I awake laughing, my face slick with tears. I awake fist stabbed into the clumsy pillow.

I awake.

(from OVO 12 SCIENCE November 1991)

Disability rally, Portland Oregon USA 15 July 2010.  More photographs.

From Protest the Cuts:

[Oregon Governor Kulongowski] passed these budget proposals with only 5 days for review, no modifications, and no opportunity for public response. The following cuts to human services started immediately on July 1:

* Elimination of meals programs for low-income seniors and people with disabilities (ie. Meals on Wheels)
* Elimination of in-home personal care services for low-income seniors and people with disabilities on Medicaid (i.e. help with bathing, eating, dressing, using the restroom, etc.)
* Reduce in-home services in the Medicaid system by 75% (i.e. meal preparation, chores, etc)
* Complete elimination of Oregon Project Independence
* Further cuts to community and county providers who are administering the state’s programs to serve these individuals.

Disability Rights advocates question whether the Governor’s decision stands in violation to the 11 year old Olmstead vs. State of Georgia Supreme Court ruling that affirmed the rights of individuals with disabilities to live in the least restrictive environment. Furthermore, the ‘integration mandate’ of the Americans with Disabilities Act requires public agencies to provide services “in the most integrated setting appropriate to the needs of qualified individuals with disabilities.”

The Governor’s decision almost certainly stands to adversely affect the lives of seniors, and adults with developmental and physical disabilities, resulting in potential declines in basic quality of life for all concerned. The elimination of Project Independence and further cuts to home health care and DHS services will also cause in thousands of caregivers and state employees to lose their jobs.

Lastly, the long-term effects of the loss of vital human services could result in greater expense to the state as sources estimate it costs about $2,000 a day to house a person in an assisted living facility as opposed to $200 per week to provide an in-home caregiver.

Please join us at 12 o’clock noon on Thursday July 15, 2010 for the first rally to protest these cuts. Meet us at Pioneer Square in downtown Portland.

Barry A. Hazle Jr. served a year in prison on a drug charge. After he got out, his parole agent sent him back for being an atheist. Now, the 41-year-old Redding computer technician has won a ruling from a Sacramento federal judge against the state and stands to collect damages for having his constitutional rights violated. Even before U.S. District Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr. decided in his favor last week, California corrections officials had issued a new policy protecting the rights of atheist parolees. “This has been a long and painful process for me,” Hazle said in a statement through his attorney this week. “The judge’s ruling can’t give me back my lost freedom, but it begins to restore my faith in our judicial system.”

Hazle’s fight with the state over religion began Feb. 27, 2007, when he was paroled from the California Rehabilitation Center, Norco, where he did a year for drug possession. As a condition of his release, Hazle was ordered to attend a 90-day, inpatient drug treatment program. He agreed to the program but even before his release told prison officials he wanted to be sent to a “treatment facility that did not contain religious components,” federal court papers state. Instead, he was assigned to the Empire Recovery Center in Redding, a 12-step program pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous and featuring a strong religious overtone, utilizing references to God and “a higher power.”

When Hazle asked to be moved to a program that was not faith-based, he was told – wrongly, as it turned out – there was none in Northern California. His parole agent, Mitch Crofoot, instructed him that “he should continue to participate in the Empire program or he would be returned to prison,” court papers state. Hazle kept attending but also persisted in objecting to the arrangement, presenting Crofoot with a written appeal on April 3, 2007. Three days later, according to court papers, Empire workers told the parole agent that Hazle had “been disruptive, though in a congenial way.” That same day Crofoot called Hazle out of an Empire treatment class, arrested him on a parole violation for not participating in the very program he was attending, and booked him into the Shasta County jail. Soon thereafter Hazle was returned to prison, where he spent more than three months.

Article continues. It is good that Mr. Hazle has a restored faith in our judicial system.  Articles like this only serve to lessen my faith.  Prohibition has cost the USA more in money and lives than it could have ever saved.  Alcoholics Anonymous is a fine program for those who volunteer for it in the same way that a religious group or a sports team or a community college class or getting out for a walk now and then can be helpful for someone seeking change in their life.  But the State has no business compelling anyone to join AA.  AA does not have consistent evidence that they are any more helpful than other treatments or no treatment at all, and so the State should seek groups that have a better record of positive outcomes.  AA is a religious group, and so the State should not refer people to it.  Mr. Hazle might consider moving to San Francisco, where an appeals court found State-mandated attendance at AA unconstitutional.  Why does the State send people to AA? Because as a volunteer organization, it is free.  So is getting out for a walk now and then, and you don’t have to offer prayers to a serene invisible monster that lives in the sky to get some good out of it.  State-mandated AA is a form of theater that has the appearance of helping people but is actually a fake solution to a fake problem – the fake problem of prohibition.

I have a proposal for Western women – the American variety in particular. Given that you have a “wealth of life” relative to men in your societies and to women in less-developed countries, perhaps you should redistribute some of that longevity. Cut a couple years off of your lives so that a woman in Sierra Leone or Bhutan can live a few more. The World Health Organization (WHO) recently released a study showing that women around the world are in need of health care. Numerous articles and blog posts have been written decrying the shameful state of women’s health. This is a problem because women tend to live longer than men in regular conditions; a reversal of that trend is cause for action. Granted, many female deaths are the result of male aggression towards women; steps should be made to prevent these atrocities. Regardless, the WHO and feminists seek to shore up medical care differences despite seemingly gynocentric health coverage. My recommendation seeks to minimize the gap strictly between health care opportunities in developed and under-developed countries. [...]

Assuming those underdeveloped nations have increasing marginal returns to health care expenditures vis a vis Western society (an extra dollar spent on health care for women of underdeveloped nations creates more “health” and adds more benefit than an extra dollar spent on healthier Western women), wouldn’t it make sense – from an egalitarian and utilitarian viewpoint – to redistribute health care overseas? I mean, its only right. So I say unto you, Western women, stop hoarding all of the breast exams, PAP smears, disease treatments, birth control devices, and tampons. After all, you only came by those luxuries by luck or by birth. Let’s start a drive. Next year, instead of getting your annual breast exam, donate the money to the Red Cross or some other international health organization with the designation that it pay for a breast exam for a less fortunate woman in another country. Encourage American doctors’ offices to send their sonogram machines to remote parts of Africa telling its patients that, despite the danger created for their child, African mothers and children will have better access to health care.

Article continues.

This blog will be videos of people treating me bizarrely. My video camera is mounted to my wheelchair (very discreetly) and I basically just press record whenever I go out and then edit the good stuff for you!

The Deal with Disability

depression seems more like the vertebrate eye—an intricate, highly organized piece of machinery that performs a specific function.

Depression’s Evolutionary Roots: Scientific American

November 1987. Twenty-four pages, 4.25 inches by 3.6 inches. Black and white photocopy inside envelope with stencil and hand made stamp exterior, stencil art on page torn from first edition of Queer by W. S. Burroughs. Copy art, BBS, surrealism, Neoism, Lunalogue by Cunnichant Night Owl.

[01] Cover. Scratched photocopy.
[02] Statement. First mention of OVO in electronic form.
[03] Introduction. This issue was made for distribution at an anarchist event in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1987. My goal was to introduce surrealism to anarchists.  This was part of my trajectory through anarchism.
[04][05][06][07][08][09][10] Art Poetique. Andre Breton and Jean Schuster.  One of my favorite surrealist poems.  “I have seen neither majesty in a king nor ministry in a priest. I have attracted attention to the mockery of the sceptre, the slime of the sandal. I have attacked things broadside.”  That notion has certainly held true, decades later.
[11] More About OVO. Text files for Commodore computers announced. Among them was ‘A Call to Heresy,’ a collection of contradictions and absurdities from the Christian Bible. In the late 1980s I uploaded that file to a local BBS. In the decade that followed the essay appeared on a disk distributed by Palm Computers, on many Web pages, inspired the name of an Internet domain in Hong Kong and at least one Web page criticizing it. I produced but never distributed music on the Commodore.  My simple animation work on the Amiga was used on two videotapes; Arise! by the SubGenius Foundation (later distributed by Blockbuster Video) and The Popular Reality Videotape.
[12] Collage. I was around 21 in these photographs. Nearly all of the hundreds of cassette letters I recorded were made while driving, and the photograph was made while recording. The double exposure in the lower photograph was an interesting accident achieved by being an unskilled photographer with a low quality disc camera. This was not a digital camera that used a disc, but a cheap camera that used a now obsolete format of film that was disc shaped.
[13] Cut-up text from Queer by William S. Burroughs. This issue of OVO was distributed in a sealed envelope with a spray paint stencil cover and a page from a first edition copy of Queer that was also decorated with a spray paint stencil.
[14][15][16][17] Operation Negation by Karen Elliot. I received this text and ‘Give Up Art, Save the Starving’ by Karen Elliot (published in OVO 14 SUFFERING) at different times and in different states.  Karen Elliot was a name shared by many people around the world.  Years later the particular Karen Elliot who wrote those two essays revealed herself to me. The Art Strike was described by Stewart Home the next year in chapter 16 his recommended book The Assault on Culture.
[18] Collage.
[19][20][21] Lunalogue by Cunnichant Night Owl. Drawings by a high school friend. I first heard of what would be known as AIDS in 1981, when Judith Hooper wrote an article in OMNI about a mysterious ‘decreased resistance’ to disease among gay men. In 1987, when OVO 3 was published, I did not know anyone like the people described in this story. I published it because I could tell Cunnichant Night Owl was describing something important. She disappeared from my mailbox soon after. Who she was, how she found me, why she wrote me and what happened to her are all mysteries.
[22] text by Andre Breton.
[23] Back cover.

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

OVO 18 Money (April 2008)
OVO 17 The Dreadlock Recollections (January 2007)
OVO 16 AntiChrist (January 2006)
OVO 15 Sperm (February 2005)
OVO 14 Suffering (March 1992)
OVO 13 Travel (January 1992)
OVO 12 Science (November 1991)
OVO 11 Control (September 1991)
OVO 10 Mayhem (July 1991)
OVO 9 (July 1991)
OVO 8 (May 1991)
OVO 7 Information (October 1989)
OVO 6 (Infinite)
OVO 5 (November 1988)
OVO 4 (May 1988)
OVO 3 (November 1987)
OVO 2 (July 1987)
OVO 1 (1987)

… and may be downloaded here.

45% of medical treatments “unknown effectiveness” according to British Medical Journal?

Overcoming Bias : Meds To Cut

The non-existent impostor experiment

Rosenhan experiment – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

THE NORMAL ARE NOT DETECTABLY SANE Despite their public “show” of sanity, the pseudopatients were never detected.

On Being Sane In Insane Places

spasmodic dysphonia

Speechless: Dilbert Creator’s Struggle to Regain His Voice

“I don’t think I’ve got a disability. I like being me.”

The curious incident of the straight-A student with Asperger’s syndrome | Life and style | The Guardian

Persons with disabilities, educators and medical professionals are adopting the Ergodex technology to help with a variety of disabilities that affect computer use.

Assistive Technology and the DX1

Skipper is a powerful accessibility package for Linux which enables severely physically disabled people with many different conditions to make full use of applications that normally require good mouse and keyboard control.

SourceForge.net: The Skipper Accessibility Project

Dasher is an information-efficient text-entry interface, driven by natural continuous pointing gestures. Dasher is a competitive text-entry system wherever a full-size keyboard cannot be used. Dasher (versions 3 and above) is available for general use under the conditions of the GNU General Public Licence.

Inference Group: Dasher Project

ideas, devices, methods and custom uses for ‘everyday stuff’ that could be used to adapt, build, kludge, hack or make things work for people living with disability, as well as links and opinion on useful existing devices.

lifekludger – disability : technology : life » Touch

Some comics about mental illness by Darryl Cunningham. | MetaFilter

At Psychoanalyst TV, we aggregate psychology and neuroscience videos, and put them on our own TV channels.

Psychoanalyst TV

The Fire of the Mind Agitates the Atmosphere [no kidding]

Louis Wain; the man who drew cats