Like The World's Longest Nano...

 since I lost it in 2007, but my novel "Such A Great Body" is finished today.

Taking my kinkos moment....

Bohemian Crip Watches Movies: Licorice Pizza

Most other reviewers liked it, too.

These days, it feels unusual to think a movie is great…indeed, sometimes cultural changes make me rethink some old favorites. That’s why it was so refreshing to love “Licorice Pizza” at a time when I was beginning to think I couldn’t love a new movie, or indeed, much else about this covidious era. It would seem so easy just to forget to add things and hide out with “Rockford Files” repeats.

Indeed, the movie does feel like my memories of the seventies, which of course, time and being a small child(I was only six at decade’s end) have given the stretched out and somewhat dreamlike quality of a photo your family has made up a family legend about.

Most refreshing were the performances from the two leads, both getting introduced with this film.

Not much to take about in the usual terms of a Bohemian Crip review, but it will always seem like science fiction to see people bounding into cars or racing up stairs.

 

This Woke Me Up Last Night...

 taking a chance that it's not garbage,

The caller told me,

she thought she would quit.

Dirty money took the joy out of it.

"I put all my hopes in that someone would win."

"I don't want to get hurt again"

Aside from reminding her

most life is pain,

assuring she won't take my calls again,

while my fingers kept up their

usual pace...

my mind was in a questioning space.

If I looked at politics and 

decided I quit,

what would I do, instead of it?

When was my time?
Where is my place?
Should I just find a handicapped space?

my bridges are burned if they ever existed

(I *told* you that bill was tight-fisted)

My ceiling's not glass,

it's probably titanium,

leaving a mark upon my cranium.

my past was too tame,

my future's probably not pleasant,

my only choice,

is to fight in the present!!

I think means-testing is...

 state-sanctioned abuse of poor people that sounds sensible if you identify with the kind of rich people that set it up rather than the people who get it imposed on them.

I may have to accept it, but I'll never cheer it on.

Living it is so different from thinking it up.

It's Alive(ish)

 23 people showed up for the PDA disability committee yesterday, and after a momentary failure of nerve, I signed up to be on the Advisory Committee of same.

It's a beginning.

I think it may be something of a challenge to coordinate the access needs of so many different disabilities on kind of a shoestring budget.  I can imagine a few long-time readers thinking  "Well, you do yours...how hard can it be?" but it's different. The way I've learned to "deal with" lapses in access in general is to try to accept there are parts of the job/recreational activity/ whatever that I won't be able to manage. I doubt very much I'd get into another big access fight over "just me", but that's why I've never been able to be a mentor for young advocates.(These people, to their credit, seem disinclined to fake it, but that kind of makes me wonder how we will get on, interpersonally.(Also, have I given up too fast? Not that, of all the things I haven't gotten to do enough of on this planet, wrangling, usually only with partial success, for some kind of wheelchair access, is one of them.. But, as with many things in this life, meeting some assertive strangers made me wonder if I could have gotten farther by pushing harder, at least, sometimes.)

Some of the new people's access needs involve communications, which is an area about which I'm under-informed, but we may not be able to have meetings without addressing it because I don't want to have meetings where people don't understand stuff.

BUFFY

I fight evil, but I don't really win. I'm like the boy who stuck his finger in the duck.

Wish us luck, America.

Green monsters, the dating mines, and other stories...

 

-          After something of a delay, your Bohemian Crip has contacted a potential date for Xav. This one is a poet, which might be nice if we all hang out(especially given that our subject areas don’t overlap sufficiently for the green-eyed monster to be a fifth wheel on that occasion…mostly, I’m joking, maybe the anthology gave me some confidence, even through the frustrations of getting it out there—I can only hope.)

-          --While speaking of green monsters, I can only say I somewhat regret getting outside my comfort zone to watch “The Color of Water”. It just had a bunch of stuff in it that I don’t care about, up to and including the photogenic female lead’s disability that was enough to hold her back a little, but that doesn’t impede either communication or the camera’s urge to male-gaze all over her milky-white body(Shades of the little details community in livejournal, back when.  I’m probably exaggerating, but it does feel like half the questions on there were about creating an injury that, say, holds back the action without making anything gross happen to the injured person. I hope someone as talented as Del Toro, even if I don't share his vision, isn't literally doing the big-money version of that!

-          Octavia Spencer deserved her award, though.
Is it me, or are movies getting increasingly hostile about day-to-day life?(Not that I think we should go full-on Capra and say only working people know what’s what, but… movies are too big, these days, I think.)

 

Reaching In The Lost And Found...

 

I’ve stepped away from “Twist” for a week or two to finish writing a lighter MS that I’d promised a friend as a gift in 2007 but stopped writing because I felt the topic(A disabled woman writer using a blocked, rugged-type writer—with at least some of the roguish, dog-like qualities that might imply to be the face of her book) had been covered, in a sense by real life with the JT LeRoy and James Frey scandals.   And it’s true that I don’t really feel that John’s book really being Carla’s can be a Major Reveal anymore as it might have been two or three operating systems ago when I started pecking out “CHAPTER ONE” but as much as I’d like to claim some kind of rigorous adoption of the crime-novel ethos over froth, I plainly and simply had lost eighty pages of my work. Which  I might never have found again if an epistolary relationship hadn’t covered fifteen years of ground. Which is why I wanted him to have a novel in the first place.
It feels weird to go over my old stuff after so long…in some ways I’m not even sure I could recapture  my old “reaching hard to be hopeful” tone, although I guess things aren’t yet bad enough that I’m feeling 2007 as some halcyon period or anything, but the words are kind of pouring out anyway…that feels good, even just as a break from the talking heads on the TV(Still love you, Chris Hayes)

Sometimes I remember the moment an idea came in my head and even what that day was like, and other things are more like “Wow, that chick’s funny,” before I remember that I am she and we are we together…sometimes it’s like fanfiction of myself(but let’s not focus on my social life)