#WeAreBaltimore, research, airports and the clap...

First of all, if you don't understand why an American President saying "No human would want to live there" about an American city is insensitive and racist, I can't help you. Not sure I'd even want to, but I think it's outside my powers anyway. He's not pointing out flaws to be constructive or instructive...he's just not happy without some stupid slap-fight.

Longtime readers know how much of an influence David Simon is for me, both as a writer and a dabbler in the spoken expletive, but you may not know about the time that I tried to find a rich history in my own city that I might one day...help vocalize its underclass(besides me and my own stuff, which, because it's mine, I always discount.) So I go trooping to my public library to find that we were both the foremost place to catch and treat sexually transmitted infections in WWII. It was a leader in air-conditioning research(of all of it, this felt obvious) and it fought FDR tooth and toenail over putting in an airport cause they thought aviation was a fad.(FDR won, cause Phoenix was just starting to get hung up on highways.) In the early 2000s, we had the highest cable-tv penetration in the country.  Maybe we just like TV, maybe it's because it's dead here.

It's not surprising then, that there are no ballads or tone-poems, urban or otherwise, about "my" city, which mostly seems like a place to be from till I want a taco. Whatever will power my art, it seems it won't be the power of place, unless it's the negative power of having to stay somewhere for the forseeable future when you've never been a part of it.

Things That May Be Bigger Posts One Day...

- As a disabled person, it can be difficult to read 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation" but not because it is a dark and twisted send-up of a chick-lit genre that, much as I sincerely enjoy the best it has to offer, can be ripe for parody. The problem for a disabled reader is that the hibernation undertaken by the unnamed main character strikes me as kind of a disgusting version of the way the worst ableists think we live all the time: cut off from the world, with simple needs that someone else pays for and enabled by unscrupulous and flaky doctors. It is still funny, though, but probably more disruptive for me than for an able-bodied reader.It is still strange to me to experience art differently on a disability culture basis, since my family tried to teach me that I was like every other white girl, just one that sits all day or something.

-I think Adam McKay should adapt and direct an adaptation of "Confessions of A Union Buster" and that the older actor from "Veep" with the reading glasses could play the part of the union buster..

Kudos to Bruce Darling from Adapt for the sincere apology after his remarks concerning the treatment of folks at the border and disabled people. In some ways, I think I know what he might have been getting at in two ways; I think many disabled people, myself included, feel that we have a somewhat abridged citizenship, or at least unfair limitations on our "pursuit of happiness". I also think that if the people rounded up had been disabled people and the camps dressed up to have some vocational and training "purpose" the outcry would be much smaller and more ambivalent. America wants a firm hand on disabled people, even as it likes to pretend its collective attitude is all hugs at the Special Olympics.
HOWEVER, it was absolutely wrong to imply that we shouldn't fight on both fronts(and, indeed, there are disabled migrants and we shouldn't lose sight of them)
The whole movement yelled at Bruce yesterday, and he deserved it, but I hope he gets the chance to learn from his mistakes.