One gay day in July (2011)

Walter Quan's delightful rainbow sushi candles! divine!

Sometimes it’s nice not to be a cancer patient. Some days it’s great not to be on chemo. To have some energy, to go out! To do just what I want, just what I like. Go where I want, eat what I want, see who I like. My motto these days, go late, come home early.

The day started a little oddly with me making a hole in the wall during a sharp turn of my chairiot in the hallway. Then my prayer beads bracelet broke as I was trying to get off the bus on Commercial. The bus driver and passengers helped me pick them up and I stowed them safely away in my bag. Uncharacteristically for me I refused to consider either of these misfortunes as omens of anything. The sun was finally shining and I was determined to have a good day.

Soon I was licking a pina colada popsicle at the Dyke March Concert. I saw, U, and V. C and J, L, B, C. I had a great time catching up with everyone in the sun amongst the rainbow festivities. Enjoying the music and the inimitable Morgan Brayton as the ever present effervescent MC. Eating a Sweet Cherubim’s tofu rice samosa I wended my way past blooming flower gardens back to Commercial drive. Where I bumped into M and N. I called out to Y from my poetry class and we walked down Commercial drive and took the bus in to town, chatting animatedly about writing all the way.

I got off at Oppenheimer Park and went to the centre of all things Japanese, the Powell St Festival craft market where hundreds of people were enjoying the day. Browsing amongst the tents, I was taken by the variety and quality of the wares. I wanted to buy everything! Settling for a range of beautiful cards, layers of fabric, paper, pressed flowers, burgundy and pink. One with the word ‘laugh’ written in gold in the centre of a ring of tiny blossoms. A blue and gold fridge magnet with the symbol for ‘dream’ on it. Some copies of Ricepaper literary journal, always a good read. A small green pottery bowl for A, and the best from W from BC Arts Council who has managed to combine 3 of my favourite things, sushi, art and rainbow pride. In the exquisitely subversive gay pride colored centres rolled beeswax candle sushi. Divine! He was cheerfully crocheting a purple eggplant at the time I dropped by! So fun!

After another short bus ride, I rolled up Seymour St to where my friends G and D, are staying while their flooded apartment is repaired. Bearing a gift of a blue and gold fridge magnet with the symbol for ‘friend’. D and I had a refreshing swim in the outdoor seawater pool with a vista of the city skylines, me mostly just floating, relaxing. D gives me a lemon meringue from today’s farmers market, to take home and share with A, so sweet and thoughtful. She’s off at a gathering dancing the light fantastic with Lucie Blue Tremblay.

To my final festival of the day on my way home at Canada Place, next to the seabus, with a view of the breathtaking blue on the horizon Northshore Mountains across the inlet. The Public Dreams Society Illuminaires lantern festival. Cute to see the children in their fairy costumes carrying homemade lanterns. Alas my camera ran out of batteries at the pool so no more photos of things and people seen and heard. ( But here is some one else's photos ( : ) Like the giant heron lantern to be carried by several people. Meandering amongst the crowds munching a Sweet Cherubim’s aptly named chocolate bliss ball. Saw J from A’s choir running past, late, with green glitter lipstick and a drum, and D and D stopped to chat. Grooving with the festive mood I had my photo taken at a booth with dressup clothes, in an decorated ‘alladins’ type hat. Time to head home. All on accessible public transit. Grateful ( ;

Perhaps today reminded me of a summer’s day in early February in NZ. When we would go me, and A, and J and J, to The Big Gay Out, in Point Chevalier park, and bump into people we knew. Later we would pile into a car with my manual collapsible wheelchair and J’s walker and go to the Chinese New Year Lantern Festival that always seemed to be on the same day. J’s daughter, J, would be so good about pushing my wheelchair, and we would find good food to eat, and wander in wonder amongst the lanterns hanging in the trees. The young, the old, and the crip, the queer, like the strange little family that we are, and have the best day ever.

humerus

after the cancer

ate in to

her left humerus

she lost her

sense of humour

she had avoided

operations

node removals

as a writer

never sure

she could give up

the use of her left arm

for any length of time

6 weeks, 6 months, a year

what now?

destined to become

a one armed bandito

tip tap typing

alone?

she thought often of Frida

the operations, amputations,

corsets, perambulations,

angles of beds, mirror, paints

being transported to her exhibition

triumphant in a small bed

don’t speak to me

about radiation poisoning

afraid it may reach you

from Japan

put the iodine back on the shelf

send your money to the red cross

who will surely help the survivors

 

my head throbs

skin burns hot and cold

bones ache

insides shake

this is radiation ‘treatment’

to save, salve,

salvage, stave, stove

my spinacular molecules

i pray for the people of Japan

new zealand

living and dead

offer a moment

of peace

yesterday

today

tomorrow

into the uncertainty

of our

future.

Barbara Hammer and eating popcorn

The day started out ordinarily enough. All I was trying to accomplish was to record my writing classes  from the yearly schedule in to my Georgia O'Keefe (1887-1986) paintings datebook. Which took several hours of meticulous careful work - interrupted  by many phone calls. The home care nurse to change their calls to monthly instead of weekly - given that I am nearly better I expect this is a good idea. The technician to tell me they don't have any extra-tall seat backs in stock right now for the electric chairiot ....hmmmm. To try to get a yearly bus pass for me and the chairiot instead of special transportation subsidy - it's too complicated to explain, call back in March. My GP to tell me she is on it with the bone density tests, but despite recent boney events, she is worried I don't qualify, there is not a box to tick for me - even if treatments leave me with the bones of a 60 year old. A different nurse to make a time for a monthly injection - the one that leaves me with the bones of a 60 year old. The new supervisor, of the home care workers came by in person to meet me. Now don't get me wrong I am mighty grateful for health care and whatever kind of assistance I receive, and the people who give it. I just never realized how complicated my life is in one day! 

barbara hammer with camera  as younger and older woman

Come evening time, things got way more fun! I went with  two friends (the same two as from the chairiot coast adventure) to the movies! We were going to see the Barbara Hammer (1939 - ) touring retrospective show Making movies out of sex and life. I saw some of her movies in the 1980's in Aotearoa. The fact she has been making experimental films - some 80 in 40 years is remarkable  reason enough to get dressed up on a winter night and head out in to the sleet. I had tried quite hard online the night before to find out how to buy tickets in advance with no success. All information said tickets at the door, doors open at 6pm. I wasn't taking any chances, we were there at 6pm on the dot. There were already 20 or so people waiting in the freezing cold of the ticket line up. The show was sold out in advance, the ticket booth was not open and would not be open until 6.45pm, no we could not go inside in the meantime. Things looked grim. It was starting to snow.

We did not have any of the mysteriously reserved tickets, nor the yellow arm bands of the many participating organizations. My charming companion miss brain face stuck close by one of the organizers of a group she has participated in, stuck like glue. Miraculously one arm band appeared   - we each insisted the other should go in, and then two spare yellow arm bands materialized, very very grateful! Alas no more could be found, our faithful companion was sick of standing around in the cold, and had been wanting to see the movie The King's Speech for some time, she would just make a 7pm screening at a nearby cinema. She graciously departed for it post haste.

barbara hammer smiling

 I schmoozed a little on my way in to the theatre, my companion, miss 80, thoughtfully found us seats at the back just in from the aisle. While I was off chatting with a friend, my companion discovered the black jacket on the seat next to us belonged to none other than the filmmaker herself, Mz Barbara Hammer. They chatted and became instant buddies. I was very excited to meet her, we talked some about filmmaking, our common history of cancer, the Guerrilla Grrls and having your career pick up when you are 80! (She is 71). She was so down to earth and approachable. How typical of a filmmaker to sit at the back -  you can observe unnoticed your audience's reaction to your work - which is always fascinating to see. 

After introductions, we watched Dyketactics (1974), No No Nooky TV (1981), SYNC TOUCH (1987), and A Horse is not a metaphor (2008), the latter about her journey with ovarion cancer.  There were times I wanted to take both her, and my companion's hands, knowing what each had been through as survivor, and witness, but I was too shy. At the end of the show before Mz Hammer was called down the front for an illuminating Q and A, she turned to us and said, 'I bequeath you my popcorn'. If I had been a different kind of person I would have kept it and sold it on e-bay. But I am not, and so I did as she had intended in giving it to us, and ate it!

Hammer! book cover

Barbara Hammer is a great public speaker, warm, almost theatrical. I was very interested in her decision on noticing her early work was picked up by lesbian audiences but not mainstream art houses, to make work not focused on lesbians and women in her mid career work - and it was then picked up by galleries. Her later work bringing it all back in to focus. She answered audience questions with honesty and gusto. Finished by reading from her recently published memoir Hammer! Making movies out of sex and life, a beautiful piece to her partner, in the lyrical repetitive style of Gertrude Stein. Alas all her books were sold out in the foyer, so words about that remain for another day.

of Desires book cover

Our faithful companion arrived to transport us home through the falling snow, having thoroughly enjoyed her movie The King's Speech, it made her weep and learn much. On the way home we picked up the mail, which included a debut book of poetry from my dear gay compatriot Billy Darlington. We were all a little giggly from the evenings wondrous events, so we ate pancakes and honey with lemon, when that was not enough we moved on to fruitcake with sherry and read aloud from Billy Darlington's book of Desires, appropriately enough starting with the erotic poem 0359.

Ellen Galford and The Fires of Bride

book cover with Celtic knotwork

For writing class we had to write about a work of a writer we like.  I  chose Ellen Galford’s The Fires of Bride for its no-nonsense style, which evokes both a down to earth pragmatism, and an as given magical realism, whether she is writing about kippers or ghosts. Galford (1947 - )writes with a sensory physicality in the present tense: to describe recent remote rural Scotland, an ancient nunnery, pagan or Viking times, with an immediacy that transports you there. Her approach is to use small practical details to create a sense of place, time, and character. She is very good at writing from a range of characters point of view in terms of their language and attitudes. Whether that be a stroppy sculptor Maria, playful blind weaver Isa, or a career driven archaeologist. Something I need to work at – getting inside different characters heads and voices. Ellen Galford's approach makes a range of cultures accessible, fun, and funny, so that you want to go there.

One of the characters Mhairi, is a nun in a scriptorium some centuries ago, learning the illustrated arts of writing as a pictorial calligrapher. To me it is a metaphor about writing generally. In part it says ‘there are 17 different shades of blue’ and then she goes on to describe some of them from calligrapher Mhairi’s point of view. This challenges me to think how I could describe each one, and how to create mood by precise creative distinctiveness, choosing each word carefully.

Galford’s narrative of Mhairi’s apprenticeship as a calligrapher under the tutelage of the stern Bloduedd who for a year only lets Mhairi trace letters others have formed, is a metaphor for me of writing as a hard task master. To begin with you may copy the forms of others, say in poetry using rhyming couplets and writing on topics dictated by teachers. As you gain confidence you may develop your own form, style, rhythm, and narrative. Writing, like all arts may require a period of apprenticeship, it continues to require discipline, dedication, creativity, patience.

In one section Mhairi collects flowers, berries and shells to make the colors for her illustrations, burns her hand on the acid of a red berry while preparing it, which leaves a scar. Hints at the power of writing to change you, not just mentally, emotionally, or spiritually, but also physically. It changes your muscles, how you hold your body, how you sit, how you read. 

As testament of the power of a book to change us, over twenty years ago the Scriptorium in which this scene is set became a kind of magical place referred to among other writers who had read the book. In honour of me going to writers school this year, a fellow writer from far away, had a sign made for my room and mailed it to me, it says: Scriptorium.

In the late 1980’s when we read Fires of Bride, a roommate made a beautiful painted coat based on one of the other main characters in the book – Catriona, a GP who paid her way through medical school by working as a fortune teller. Fires of Bride is full of such  wondrous contradictions which appeal to me. I still have this coat.

So intrigued was I by the remote Scottish Isles where this book was set, I once traveled there just to be amongst the standing stones, the people, the Gaelic, the heaving north sea, and the windswept landscape.  

I can aspire to writing words that could evoke: creative imaginative spaces; artwork; or journeys in others; and speak to the future. 

standing stone circle isle of lewis

   

Happy New Year!

I celebrated the end of 3 months in a hospital bed by taking off in an electrified vehicle! New years even went like this: I had to go in my manual wheelchair to have some blood tests, it's a regular event. Breaks the monotony of the past months at home in an electric hospital bed, staring out the window and dreaming about the future. 

It seemed like 30 people arrived in the waiting room and took their number form the line-up ticket dispenser right after I arrived, glad I had avoided the news eve rush. When I was done and they had stuck the plaster on the puncture in my arm I wheeled the few feet in to the waiting room to free up clinic room 2.  Perhaps from the exertion of getting there, my veins were really pumped. I was about to press down on the plaster for the required 2 minutes when I saw blood coming through the tiny holes in the plaster and and dripping down my arm. Two staff rushed to patch me up so as not to alarm the other patients. I really don't like the sight of blood, especially my own, makes me kind of squeamish and nauseous, prone to fainting. 

Which may be why I was vomiting down the toilet at home when the guy called to say he could drop off the electric wheelchair after all. I hadn't been throwing up with any regularity since the early days of this recent medical adventure, when I stopped taking the morphine. He was still working when so many people had taken the afternoon off.

I got cleaned up and 20 minutes later I had my new wheels; electric, tilt, chair; nice!  To match, and get me out of, my electric tilt bed! All rented of course, but hey, its' progress. As my friend joke with me recently, it's all about the gadgets with you.

To familiarize myself with my electrified human transportation, did I take a trip to the local shops? No! I grabbed my already-packed-for-the-weekend-just-in-case backpack, took 3 buses and a ferry and went to visit friends! I had a bit of a wait at the ferry terminal for the last bus to my destination. I reclined back in the chair in comfort as dusk fell over a panorama of snow capped mountains. A family of otters swam by.  The arms open wide welcome I got from my friends as I arrived off the bus in the glow of the one street lamp was definitely worth the trip! They had worked with others in the co-operative community to line the path between the houses with lights. Paper bags with pebbles and tea lights in them glowed all the way up the hill in welcome. 

I had a rest, snacks were put put, people dropped by. When midnight arrived I played my thumb piano, and our host distributed musical instruments to the willing. Some one played a harmonica, rather well, there were shakers and drums. We all joyfully, musically, noisily rang in the new year, complete with auld lang syne. 

After a sleep, the next morning, a pancake breakfast materialized in the common room, off the guest suite I was staying in. Thanks to a fellow disability artist who cooks up the feast with a compadre every year. Pajamas were expected attire, so all I had to do was splash water on my face, hope in my chairiot (more about that later) drop in my donation, and wheel up to the pancakes! 

Post breakfast, I was so excited to be up and about in the morning and on a sunny day, I bundled up and cajoled my sleepy ambulatory companions to go for a walk. I zoomed down the road to the beach yelling 'I'm walking, I'm walking!" Although clearly I was not. I was however going somewhere with no effort just for the fun of it, which obviously to me means taking a stroll. There were eagles in the tree tops, a beach full of ice covered logs, loons on the silken blue water, and clear sky's. 

I did get stuck in a freshly graveled area of the path. The wheels dug in, spun, finally the chairiot stopped and the spanner light flashed. My friends went to find help, wood to put under the wheels; and brute force - I was concerned for their backs, the chairiot is REALLY heavy. By the time the first helper arrived I had freed the chairiot from the deep gravel and was back on firm ground. Having used a combination of patience, determination, and ingenuity.

Chairiot - chariot is self-explanatory, this is a big sturdy regal vehicle, quite dignified.  Wheelchairs used to be made of wicker chairs, with big wheels and were called bath chairs. 

I am going to school next week -writing school. I spent the new years eve ferry ride over chatting with a fellow artist I know who has also recently returned to school. As is one of the new years eve neighbors who dropped by, about to be. We are all excited, hopeful, eager to learn.

After months feeling stuck in bed and thinking like I may not be able to go anywhere, to a rural weekend adventure, telling tales about remote Scottish Isles we had been to. I feel much more ready to face 2011!

Luminousity of the week

I have been going to a meditation once a week lately, at  a local library. This week we arrived to find a huge mural covering two walls of the cosy meeting room, which was formerly minimalist austere. By the artist who did this painting - Dana Irving. Some one described it as Emily Carr meets Dr Seuss! The mural is of a wooded scene with a river, trees, this same luminous gold light, the red of tree trunks. It has local creatures raccoons, ladybugs, eagle, crow, squirrels. It's stunning, and has such a fantastic upbeat energy about it. I definitely felt like I had stepped in to a  fantastical red/green/gold world...

                                   wonder 
                                   mural
                                   green trees

                                   red trunks

                                   gold light

                                   listen

                                   teacher 

                                   red and gold 

                                   robed 

                                   orange tea

                                   yellow cup

                                   shirt striped  

                                   yellow, green, blue 

                                   red wheelchair 

                                   eye returning 

                                   to  fellow

                                   meditators pen 

                                   red 

                                   and yellow
                                   next day
                                   hummingbird 
                                   at my window
                                   red
                                   and gold 

                                 

killing us softly - something in the water?

The Tyee — Disabled again on BC Liberals' Hit List

"There are a number of initiatives that are undertaken in the budget to make sure that we continue to put low-income people on the top of the list." 

-- Premier Gordon Campbell, March 5 2010 (Yeah right Gordo!)


'The poor and the disabled are definitely at the top of the B.C. Liberal government's list -- the hit list for more suffering, that is. The poor and people with HIV and chronic illnesses whacked with more cuts to income and health support'. By Bill Tieleman, 9 Mar 2010, TheTyee.ca

Yes the 'Liberal' provincial government is at it again, announcing last month a further slate of cuts to products and services for people with disabilities, which include no longer funding products like orthotics, glucose monitors, bottled water. Changing eligibility to: dental and medical services; provision, replacement and repair of motorized scooters; nutritional supplements, etc. See more info here.

 The Liberal government seems to have a very short memory, they might have forgotten but we haven't, the 12 people who took their own lives; when their government decided to review everyone receiving disability benefits and make them 're-prove' their disability in 2002 by filling in a 23 page form in conjunction with a GP.  In a province where historically many thousands of people don't even have access to a GP.   Heroes exhibition artist Cleo Pawson hasn't forgotton either, she talks about it (at minute 7.40) along with her art in this interview on Redeye. The government spent millions on the review and saved practically nothing. The form was sent to 18, 750 people, only 47 people were found to not qualify anymore. Ironically it turned out Cleo was more disabled not less disabled,  and subsequently got more assistance that she needed. Photo of  a beaded work she started at the time, which took 6 years to complete. It is stunning, and so detailed.

BC Coalition of People with Disabilities will keep you up to date with BC governments shenanigans. The creepy part is the BC Government does remember. I heard on the grapevine recently, they gave some funding to a small disability arts festival a few years back, and the idea was the provgov would invite people on benefits to come. In the end the provgov decided not to, as they realized, people on disability benefits getting an unexpected envelope in the mail, would FREAK OUT, and think it was something bad again like the benefit review debacle.  

Neither have we forgotten about the 7 people who died, and the hundreds who were made sick, when ecoli contaminated the municipal water supply  in Walkerton Ontario in 2000. That's the reason why people who are immune compromised, don't drink tap water, if the water becomes contaminated, and it will from time to time, they will not just get sick, they are at a risk of dying. Now there were only 4, 800 people living in Walkerton at the time, so those 7 people who died represent more than 1 in 1000.  There are over 2 million people living in metro Vancouver - half of the province's population, which means if our water supply becomes contaminated as it did in 2006 and we are advised not to drink tap water, over 2000 people could die. Which is just over 2/3 of the number who died in the 911 attacks.  I hope when that happens, and it's not a matter of if, but when, that the their loved ones take a class action suit against the  provincial government .

For the record here is a quote from a current document from a Medical Office for a Metro Vancouver municipality: 

'Advisory Re: Drinking Water & Persons Who Are Immunocompromised. The Provincial Health Officer advises all British Columbians with compromised immune systems (such as HIV, organ or bone transplants, chemotherapy or medications that suppress the immune system) to avoid drinking water from any surface water source unless it has been boiled, filtered or distilled.  North Shore, Greater Vancouver and, in fact, nearly all British Columbia water sources are surface water sources (lakes, rivers, streams).' 

Lets not forget the provincial and federal government's failure to provide clean water to many First Nations reserves in Canada, you can keep up to date with progress on that front at Rez Water. Or that half the worlds population is made sick by diseases found in dirty water, that at least 5 million people worldwide die every year from lack of access to clean water.

So lets recap, the provincial government says if you are immune compromised DO NOT drink tap water. They used to pay for you to get purified water, but now they have decided, you can pay for it yourself, out of your insufficient funds, or die. 

For the environmental record, while we are all trying to stop drinking tiny bottles of bottled water which when discarded then pollute the environment. Everyone I know who gets bottled water for health reasons, has a couple 20 litre bottles which they get refilled  ( :

The really sad part is these recent cuts are on top of everything which has been cut by the Liberal provincial government of  B.C, in the past 8 years: Legal Aid, funding to Women's Centres, funding to Seniors Services in the community, daycare subsidies, the BC Human Rights Commission, 50% Arts funding, the list goes on. Stop Arts Cuts on Facebook. You can see just how badly BC is doing in securing the rights of First Nations/women.  So badly the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women wants Canada to report back on how it has improved the situation for women on welfare,  and First Nations women  facing violence in 1 year.

Here's a nice little ditty a timely reminder of the cost of the Olympics - like cutting the budget of the office which investigates the deaths of children. Yep just one of the many places that 8 billion dollars came from.  http://geoffberner.com/Olympicstheme/

Fortunately some people and organizations do give a damn, about making BC a better place to live, and will be demonstrating so on April 10th 2010.

Instrucciones para recortar el cabello en casa – how to cut an androgynous persons hair

Lets talk about Spanish, and hair cutting, and androgyny. It was a couple weeks before I would be attending a number of arts events and I needed a half decent haircut. Okay I hadn’t had my hair cut all winter since a traumatic incident last time.

It’s not easy getting your hair cut if you are androgynous. Although you would think the invention of the unisex hair salon and unisex haircut in the 1980’s would have solved all that. But no, no matter what I say, ‘flat top’, ‘buzz cut’ - thinking singer Grace Jones, they say ‘like a man’ and I sigh and give up and say ‘yes’. It still gets cut short in some head-hugging hair facing forward definitely feminine with little curls by your ear and a wispy fringe like model ‘Twiggy’ kind of way. Sigh. Instead of some clean cut, partly sticking up on top, stylish kind of way. The thing is I don’t want my hair cut in a particularly masculine or feminine way, I want it cut like me, what I look like. But there are not words for that, the androgynous haircut.

 The best haircuts I ever had were at a Men's Hairdressers on Lambton Quay, Wellington; in 3 Lamps Plaza, Ponsonby Auckland; Kaua’I, Hawaii, and up the Sunshine Coast. Haircutting is a service industry, where immigrants, refugees and visible minorities  are over-  represented. It’s partly about what kind of work is (and isn’t) made available, or starting your own business I think. Or perhaps cultural rituals around hair, or maybe coz no one else knows how to cut their hair either? Some hairdressers say they like being around people, well you know like for 20 minutes at a time. At a Men’s Hairdresser at 3 Lamps Plaza, Ponsonby the woman and younger man were from Iraq, and they knew their local clientele (him perhaps personally), how to cut gay peoples hair, men and women. In the beauty shop which also did enamel fingernails, in a tiny strip mall next to an industrial part of the highway in Kaua’i, the woman hairdresser was Asian Hawaiian. I gradually told her bit by bit, you know trying it out, to see what her reaction was, that when I got back I was going to be best man at a wedding and would be wearing a suit. She gave me the best haircut ever!  Up the Sunshine Coast, a neighbor cut hair, she was originally from Greece and liked to talk about her trips back there. She had such a lovely way about her. Maybe coz she was such a good conversationalist you hardly even noticed her cutting your hair, all you could see was the azure seas of Greece, and then voila it was time to shake out the plastic cape. At a Men's Hairdresser on Lambton Quay, the woman was originally from England I think, or her family were, it was a government town, she asked you how your work was going, told you about her sons sports events. Her salon was right handy to me, I got my hair cut often,  and was happy. Oh yeah and there was that cute wee pixie of a lesbian who was raised by dykes and worked at some swanky downtown gay frufru hairdressers in the ‘couv, who could make you look and feel fabulous! But that was many years ago, and then she moved salons, and we lost track of her, and we couldn’t afford it anyway. Before that I'd come from getting my hair cut for $5- $10 at the Peoples Centre. Where the cuts were okay, more perfunctory, completed with good natured humour by an irrepressible sleep deprived young Russian woman, who was in night school studying physics.


My friend T had such a traumatic haircutting experience she didn’t get her hair cut for 2 years, which is saying something for a butch who looks good with a buzz cut! I don’t know exactly what happened, I think the hairdresser saw the lesbian symbol tattooed on the back of neck, and things went downhill from there. She arrived at my place with hair down to her shoulders, asking for an intervention! She was real sick of her cult-like government workplace too – if you called in sick, then didn’t answer your phone later, managers came to your house! So I typed her arts based resume while I was at it, as part of my comprehensive complimentary make over service! Took her in to the lovely woman at the Men's Hairdressers, who I had already primed with the story my friend was recovering from a bad hair cutting experience. The Hairdresser chatted away to us about how my friends holiday was going, she looked at my friend’s girlfriends short haircut a few times, and modeled it partly on that. Turned out just fine!

I am ashamed to confess I privately thought my friend was being a bit of a baby about the whole haircutting incident, until, I had my own bad experience recently. I’ve been to this place a few times, Iranian women work there, I have had some good hair cuts there, but lately I keep getting this woman who says ‘oh I remember you’, points to a picture of a man with a curly flat top haircut, I say ‘yes’ and away she goes. It would be fine if she would just stop cutting half way through, it looks good. But for some reason no matter what I say she keeps going and it gets shorter and shorter. Until she might as was well have taken the clippers and run them over my head with a number 3 blade until I look like the fuzzy egg I do, at the end anyway! Don't get me wrong I have spent many a year with just such a haircut, and I did it myself, but theres good #3's and theres bad #3's! Maybe that's the difference between a haircut and a  hairstyle, I was here for the latter. For goodness sake it’s the middle of winter! I go home, cry, put on a hat, won’t come out of my room for a day and leave the hat on when in public for 2 weeks! Until it grows a little. I’m not all that fond of having anyone touch my head anyway. Often after the creative concept negotiations, and they get going I shut my eyes and go off in to a meditative trance just to cope. Kind of like being at the dentist. Hairdressing is a act and conversation  across culture, language, gender and sexuality, some things get lost in translation. I suspect though for me the concept that androgyny is something to be accentuated, (if you've got it flaunt it!) desired, desirable, may be biggest loss in translation.

No more! So I decided to return to my late teens early 20’s practice and cut my own hair! I have some clippers, so I got them out, plugged them in, oiled them, and away I went. Well not quite, this time I proceeded with caution, I was laughing picturing some of the less than great youthful haircuts I gave myself! So for the first time I got out the instructions. It said ‘Instrucciones para recortar el cabello en casa’ you know which got Para Graphia’s attention what with the word PARA being in there!

On the English version of the instructions it said: ‘Home Hair trimming instructions’. There were pictures too, with hair trimming tips, what process to follow, the order, and how to do a crew cut, puurrffect! I followed the instructions, I remembered how to cut hair. I laughed some more remembering the good and bad haircuts I gave some of my male fellow students at Uni who asked me to cut their hair and paid me in chocolate. I know how to cut MY hair, I’m real good at cutting straight up to the ears with the scissors, I used the clippers on the sides and the back, but not cutting too high up, and not too close, the largest blade, number 7. Which was good, its too hard to cut the back of your hair using scissors, directions become very confusing in the mirror. I cut the top with scissors, using the trim along your index finger method paying special attention to that tricky crown area. Otherwise one week after my haircut I start to look like a parrot! I really like my haircut! It still sticks up, there’s a bit if a wave to it.

So about those Spanish instructions: ‘Instrucciones para recortar el cabello en casa’, according to Bablefish online translation http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_txt it means ‘Instructions to trim the hair in house’ which if you re-translate back to Spanish is ‘Instrucciones de ajustar el pelo en casa’ again to English ‘Instructions to fit the hair in house’ back again to Spanish ‘Instrucciones de caber el pelo en casa’. That’s about where it ends.

Unless you think it wise to rely on free online translations such as Babelfish – and I personally don’t - as opposed to say online Dictionaries which seem much more reliable in their translation, of words, if not always sentences. Part of the fun of Babelfish is translating and retranslating a phrase between languages as it gets further and further away from the original sentence to something ludicrous, fantastical or nonsensical which may make you howl with laughter. But it’s only really funny for about a day and then you get bored. Unlike human translators, computers do not cope well with idioms, colloquialisms and contractions. Which is how the drift away from the original occurs, and because languages may construct sentences so differently, while computers translate literally. No not literary! But that might be useful……

According to this online dictionary http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/para

para [pah’-rah] is a preposition
Which can mean alternately: For, to, in order to (finalidad), toward, wherefore, to the end that.

It’s also where I discovered the fixings for this little bilingual lost in translation found poem on the nourishment of words:

es para ti                                         it's for you
¿Para qué                                      why
Leer para sí                                    to read to oneself
Para siempre                                 for ever
comida para llevar                        food to go
Hay que comer para vivir             It's necessary to eat in order live
   
I realize now that the people who might know how to cut my hair - the boyish looking girl, may be women who work in men’s hairdressers. Las mujeres que trabajan en peluquerías de hombresso! If you know any let me know? Otherwise too much seems to be lost in translation.

  According to Babelfish ‘Home hair trimming instructions’ in Spanish is ‘Instrucciones caseras del ajuste del pelo’ which I can not comment on the accuracy of, but perhaps some one will? I say we need instructions:  Cómo cortar un pelo andrógino de las personas - how to cut an androgynous persons hair. Or like painter Frida Khalo, I will have to resort to cutting my own hair.

Revolving word cloud

Highlights of the week. I get to hang out with women as fabulous as this! The acerbic wit, insight, and mischievous eye twinkling smile of brilliant activist academic and Out from Under co-curator, Catherine Frazee. Along with her partner Pat, and fellow co-curators. I attended the exhibition opening on International Women's Day, and a small group of us went to eat together after, what a wonderful way to spend the day! A few days later I am stunned as always by the sheer power, and beauty of Afuwa Granger's paintings in the Heroes exhibition. The range of artistic mediums, the scope of subject matter, the ingenuity of form, the painful beauty of many pieces. On Friday I join with others in being made breathless by the mesmerizing, electrifying, non-stop mental gymnastics, laugh so hard you cry performance of Jan Derbyshire in Funny in the head!

Yesterday, a meeting, at which we all are at different times and combinations of, to muse on  the importance of art making people uncomfortable, racism in the disability and media communities, translating disability  issues within the disability communities to wider communities....

The image, I can not shake from the Out from Under exhibition, is the baby's bassinet in which there is a thick report of a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the suspicious deaths  of 36 disabled  infants at the The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. As many as 43 died from lethal drug overdoses it was revealed in 1981. As always I am reminded that history (including to the present day)  seeks to exterminate, medicalize, pharmaceuticalize, neutralize, neuter, confine, conform, control women as gifted as these, who bodies and/or minds do not conform to 'the norm'. I am grateful. For their existence, for their resilience, for their brilliance. Their artistry, their analysis, and for the time we have together.

In honour of the ideas these women liberate daily into the atmosphere, which are circulating in my brains word cloud; and on my way to trying to find out how to embed articles; I discovered the wonderful revolving word cloud application. Which circulates Blog Post Labels like their very own evolving, revolving,  revolutionary planet. Enjoy! If you move the mouse over the words you can make them change direction, and speed. If you just must have it, you can get your very own here.  

No sugar-coating for disability exhibit www.vancouversun.com

For disability rights activist Catherine Frazee, the personal overlaps with the political even when she doesn't intend it........

Out from Under | Disability, History and Things to Remember ofu.ryerson.ca

This virtual museum of activist disability history pays tribute to a proud legacy of resistance and survival. Click on the images below to enter the exhibits, or browse the menu at left for a range of ...

One of Afuwa Granger's  3 luminous paintings in the

Heroes Exhibition
The text with the above image says: There is poetry hidden in my paintings/ ink and paint/ give form to marks/ carried by my ancestors/ they resist erasure/ Guyana petroglyphs/ enmesh personal/ physical history/ with/ visible present.

Jan Derbyshire gets a little funny in her head | Theatre

www.gayvancouver.net

Vancouver Lesbian Jan Derbyshire presents her one woman show Funny in the Head on March 12th as part of the Kickstart Disability Arts and Culture Festival.

KICKSTART FESTIVAL 2010 MARCH ८ - २७ - disability arts and culture

Art Exhibitions, Theatre, Dance, Music, Workshops.

SMELT LIKE BURNT TOAST TO ME

I had a meeting in the afternoon. When I sat down on the bus I could smell burnt toast. Which worried me a little. I heard if you are having a stroke sometimes you can smell burnt toast. When there isn't any there. I glanced around the bus for toast, but couldn't locate any. I looked out the window to see if my vision was blurry. It was. Turns out they hadn't cleaned the windows for about three weeks.

I had stroke on the brain, I'm a bit young for it, although you can have one at any time, even children! My friend who is more of an age, got her words all jumbled the other day, while we were at the beach eating chips. So I started my are you having a stroke quiz. How many fingers am I holding up? Follow my finger with your eyes. Say 'the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog'. Okay that one's cheating thats a typing exercise to get you to use as many as fingers and letters as possible. She got as far as 'the quick brain face'. Hmmm, are you feeling peculiar? The things that were coming out of her mouth were so nonsensical neither of us could look at each other without both laughing until we cried. Okay focus, she said quite distinctly, 'I am a lunatic going somewhere to cannibal-apple'. Close but no cigar. Coincidently in written form this particular symptom is called Paragraphia. She returned to 'normal' in a few minutes. Maybe a TIA - transient ischemic attack. Lasts 1 - 5 minutes, a 'mini stroke', causes no lasting damage, unless you have a lot of them or go on to have a stroke. I'm keeping an eye on her.

It's been windy lately, but not too cold. I've taken to wearing my favourite long woolly cardigan out of doors, instead of just in the privacy of my own home. A spinal injury last year has caused me to add a lumbar roll of late to my accessories. The one with the waist strap so I don't leave it behind on the bus. I caught sight of myself reflected in the window of the bank on the way home from the bus stop. In my woolly hat and all I looked like a scarecrow, with a piece of string tied around my waist. All I needed was my gumboots and a net, and I was good to go - whitebaiting that is! Toast and fritters anyone?

I had to smarten up if I was going to make it out to the arts organization AGM tonight. Miss b-f now fully recovered helped me work out a more suitable outfit with a better shirt, a long coat, and an attache case to invest my lumbar roll when not in use. Which was quite a lot of the time, because the chairs at the AGM were the folding kind which don't even have a back part where your lumbar spine is! That didn't stop me discussing dessert recipes with my fellow artist, and eating a lot of the homemade vegetarian pizza. I brought Miss b-f home two pieces of the leftover pizza, all the way on the bus, between two plates.

But to the person eating burnt toast on the bus. Cut it out! I nearly had a stroke!

GUERRILLA GIRLS – having a career after 80

I have just realized, the women writers/artists I have written about so far, Jane Rule, Janet Frame (and Jacquie Sturm), Renee, Marta Beckett were all born between 1924, and 1931, they all had pretty impressive careers, but in reference to being a woman artist and having your career pick up after you are 80 years old...A link to the Guerrilla Girls art activists. Women on a mission, with history, actions, and merch. I did get to see them perform in Canada in 2000 and have my picture taken with them and everything, they were fabulous! They were in Montreal recently for December 6 2009.

CREATIVE WRITING 101 – writers born or formed?

In 1997 I wrote I wanted to perfect the art of writing humorous absurd tragedies about important things where nothing really happened! I think that is still a good aim, and I may be well on my way towards it.

I took a creative writing class that year, in response to my short story submitted for grading, the tutor exhorted me to publish, and wrote amongst other things that my writing had clarity and vividness, was powerful and moving, containing a dark intelligence. I am not immune to such flattery, but me and my creative collaborators of the time, T and, A, did have a lot of fun with it, spending some time debating if we should have an art competition amongst ourselves to see who could create the best image of what my dark intelligence might look like! In the end we didn't, but included above are two images of me drawn around that time by minimalist extraordinaire T, during a session in which we each drew portraits of each other in a set number of lines, in this case 5, and 7. Which illustrates what I might have looked like at the time my dark intelligence may have been in evidence! Yes I still have these things, in journals full of: writing, cards for exhibitions, tickets to movies and plays, photos, leaves, feathers, drawings - mine and others.

Before email, when living at a distance we perfected a way of sharing our writing via the telephone answering service for free. Each of us had voice mail with the same telephone company, which had only one access number for the whole country. We recorded our stories in a series of 3 minute messages on our own voice mail. Then T and A, would call up the system, enter my voice mail number and passcode and listen to the story of the day or week. I could do the same with them, erasing the messages as we went, and leaving messages in response to the stories for instant feedback.

A good 12 years earlier, I was 18, in my first year at university living on campus in the halls of residence, in small wooden room on the second floor, cluttered with posters on the wall, a purple plastic cup and saucer upside down on the ceiling impersonating a light fixture, it was the 1980's so there was some lime green and pink chiffon which were in vogue thanks to Cyndi Lauper. During a one week break from classes, I took all this down from the walls, and put up 7 of my photos of nature, one for each day of the week, along with literary quotes relating to the images under each photo. I had not quite exited christianity at this point so I believe the quotes were from the bible, the poetic parts, song of solomon, pslams, proverbs perhaps, lay me down in cool water etc.

I dragged the single bed in to the middle of the room on a diagonal, and put the desk and chair beside it, I put everything else away in the capacious built-in wooden wardrobe. I bought a hard covered journal with blank unlined crisp pages. Out the window I could hear performances of Shakespeare's A midsummers nights dream, being staged in the open-air by the university drama club. I am not a fan of Shakespeare, but it did make for a nice backdrop. For one week I wrote in to the book, the poems I had written since I was 15, from the loose leaf pages they were recorded on. Now that I would not return to my family's home, and it was safe to do so, where previously such poems had been hidden in a plastic bag in a box, on shelf, deep in the wardrobe. My mother concerned perhaps by my unexplained absence, upon driving up to visit one day looked nervously around my room, and asked if i had become a nun. No not disciple, disciplined. Which brings me to the present day, 27 years and 15 or so journals of writing later. Five of these journals are already deposited with an Archive, and the rest will be one day too, but like Janet Frame, no one gets to read them until I am long gone!

I have a high school English teacher to thank for my earliest literary encouragement. Mrs D, where are you? I had the pleasure of being in her class for two years, she really did love writing. I was one of few who actually enjoyed being left with creative writing assignments, on rainy days, when she had to leave the classroom. While my classmates gossiped, ate, threw things, I moved my desk to face the wall at the back of the class, far as I could get from the hub bub, and wrote. Whatever came into my mind, it was such a relief, creative expression, the release from strictly structured lessons. My work was always met by Mrs D with useful pointers, encouraging comments and humorous retorts to my sometimes satirical writing about the class.

She was amused by my audacity and gave me credit for originality at least on a set assignment in small groups to read part of a Shakespeare play, it may have been Macbeth. I rewrote the lines in the language, accent, slang of the present day I heard on television sitcoms. Each character in a different voice, Cockney, African American, Jewish, New York Italian, stereotyped renderings I know, and talked my group in to performing it thus, Shakespeare updated. We also had to study Aeschylus' Agamemnon, which was a bit to close to home and caused me to have a small nervous breakdown.

I wrote studious book reviews about the life of Ghandi and such like. It may have been Mrs D who was instrumental in having eight of my poems published (anonymously) in the school magazine in my final year. I will always be grateful for her literary nurturing, and recognition of possibilities, that writing had it's own value.

AMARGOSA: MARTA BECKETT – a state of mind

Sigh, feeling all dreamy and peaceful and quietly inspired, watched one of my favourite movies again the other day, AMARGOSA. Came out in 2000, about the then 76 year old, painter, dancer, actor, musician and theatre restorer Marta Becket (1925- ). At the age of 42, in 1967 she left the bright lights of dancing in a chorus line on Broadway in New York behind and moved to the desert in Death Vally Junction, California. Where she restored and painted murals on the walls and ceilings of an old run down theatre for six years, which became the Amargosa Opera House and Hotel. The murals of people's who had previously lived in Amargosa, provided her with an audience while she composed her, often humorous, dance, ballet and theatre performances, working much of the time alone. The walls, and Marta couldn't be more alive!

She seems so true to herself and her artistic vision, has such a clear way of both understanding and describing these. Singular in her dedication, disciplined, quirky flamboyant, and funny. Marta tells a story of seeing a play set in a senior citizens home, which had a special chair and when when each person sat in the chair they would tell their dreams, and the others would listen intently. She says 'Somehow people laugh at old persons dreams, they even laugh at dreams, until they come true, then they don’t laugh anymore.'

Amargosa is beautifully shot and musically scored, it opens with the spine tingling scene of the sun slowly rising over the mountains in the desert,the wild horses who live there, Marta walking, and these words:

'It begins with a distant notion, a plaintive whisper of the heart, it comes in the flash of an epiphany, or through a deeper unexplainable longing. It is the recognition of conception, the understanding that a new idea has been formed. It is embracing the dreamscape which is imagination, and having the courage to go there. For those who accept a life of self exploration through willfull acts of creation, the journey offers the ecstasy of all that is possible along with the agony of unattainable perfection. It is a solitary road in to the unknown self, and offers no destination but the journey. But for those who follow it does lead somewhere, and such a life will never be uninteresting. One such road led a woman from the urban confusion of a broken childhood, across the flatirons of midlife, to a deserted crossroads in the badlands of an uncertain future. But it is here, amongst the rubble of another time, in a place abandoned by hard men and harder gods. She makes the path by walking, in a state of mind, called Amargosa'.

Sigh.......