cripple road dog

hey friends,

welcome back. it’s an october monday and the winds are swirling out there. my cat is staring out the window dirty from where the AC got yanked out a couple weeks ago to where the leaves are finally turning yellow and falling. it’s diwali and I’m a little melancholy, from a variety of factors but also maybe from remembering in my body what new year’s was like last year, gearing up for trump 2.0, and being like, soon it will be a year of this shit. mrrph.

I guess technically I don’t “have to” write another post this month due to metrics I set myself because I posted the crips for e sims 2 year post, but i wanted to.

show is up for another two weeks closing on halloween. you can see in person in toronto or you can go here and here to book a times to see it virtually. there’s only 3-4 more days of those open, so please do book one if you want to see it. also please write about it if you feel so inclined, you don’t have to be a fancy art reviewer, I’d love to see disabled and otherwise folks recording their encounters and impressions of the show. the show is not just me being like look how cool I am, it’s an attempt at one reflective archive of DJ artwork through time. please be archive4archive. the audience is half of the show, makes the show.

I’m getting a hip replacement in two weeks so after a year of much activity and a fair amount recent travel. I’m heading into chrysalis time right now. doing lots of pre-surgery prep, both the buying a walker and getting my scrips kind and also spiritually preparing for this huge bodily transition. so you might see less of me for a minute, but also likelihood is I’ll be home healing and receiving this ceramic replacement for where my stage five avascular necrosis melted the top of my femur for some weeks, so may be bored and fucking around on the internet. we’ll see.

bone magic. i asked my surgeon if I could get my bone after they cut what’s left of it out, and he laughed and then said no, really, he’d get really sued by penn. I can maybe get a photograph, maybe I’ll be really lucky and can stick it in my pocket quick. what a thing, to choose to alter tissue that has always been yours and not get to keep it.

somatic shit. sometimes bones just die and no one knows why. on the other hand, I always associated my hip trauma with my CSA. my sliding scale naturopath said, yeah, maybe all you carried for all these years, maybe you worked a lot of it out, maybe your hip carried that trauma really, really hardbody and worked real hard and is now done, and now the surgeon gets to go in and clean what died out and scaffold you back out stronger. ( one thing- the thing about getting to get older while disabled and not die is that there really is debility. )

it’s wild to be trying to trust the medical industrial complex when it kills people, and when I have a long history of evading and avoiding it for most of my life, and was raised by my mother especially to lie to and evade doctors at every opportunity. walking into the beast, who we have to interact with to get things we need. someone asked why I was afraid of dying when this surgery has such a high success rate and I said: because friends have died after surgery, because I don’t trust the system in general not to do an oops. I don’t trust the system in general not to kill or wreck us when it says it’s saving us.

I’ve also had friends who died out of delayed or denied surgery, and friends who lived due to surgery. so there’s that. I have medicaid for now, let’s get it while we can.

it’s also about the intimate geography of your body. i know and love my limp, know the feel of my femoral head moving around in my pelvis and how i can shove it back into place by clenching my ass. so much total hip replacement media is about, let’s get you back to normal! no cane after a week! “gait retraining” what the fuck. i love my cane and don’t plan on breaking up with her. I don’t want to be fixed into non disability which, good news isn’t possible. still.

I have two pieces in this book. one co-written with Jane Shi to newer/other disability justice organizers about when everything is falling apart. one solo that’s about what happens when people you love and/or maybe were angry at in movement die by suicide. that one’s extra risky and tender, handle with care. check it out if you so inclined.

I got to go see The Next TiMes on closing night of the NYC premier- I was texting Alice like, good luck with the show, and she was like um the last one is tonight. see it if you can when it tours and goes virtual. two decades of getting to see disabled artwork and the art is the thing, but it’s also equally getting to do a sociological survey every time of- what’s the crowd like, the vibe? what are the new developements in the culture of crip nightclubbing this time?

this one was the kiss of intergen. there’s crip queers in their 20s who came up right into DJ and crips in their 60s or 70s who predated it and sometimes look askance and begrudging at it. whites but a panapoly of Black and brown disability too. snazzy dressers. rollerators everywhere. everyone lined up for the access elevator. running into folks you only see IRL every few years. acccess signage saying this is an aisle seat, if you need it for an easier transfer it’s yours! a double sensory room with- finally! I have wanted this for years- one room where you could view the show on a screen with headphones in and captions, but not surrounded by a hundred plus people while you did it. nonalc apricot toasting champagne. a venmo with the next tips written on it by the bartender. everyone masked, hot masks with good colors for free. sensory kits with stim toys passed around. people looking tired as hell like they’d been fighting five wars and people jubilant with good news. sometimes people were both.

embroidered touchable mel baggs quote pillow on the sensory room altar, by Alex Salerno (full text and image description of work here.)

this was the first time I got to experience the poetic audio description I and others have done for KL shows live in Audimance, and while the bluetooth glitched a bit on my headphones lending a delay, it was really something to get to spatially play with the tracks. you can make your own mix!!

Rachel started the show by saying, I come to you from a lineage of disability, my mother helped me through my chasm, she wasn’t able to be here but… and I got choked up feeling lineage, in these next times.

from the KL website:

This work is designed to be experienced in any version or combination of sound, sight, and vibration. Access is both intrinsic to the performed work and flexibly provided according to audience member choice.

Performances will include ASL interpretation pre- and post-performance; there is no spoken text. Artistic music and sound captions will be available via CART, streamtext, and your own personal device. A dedicated haptic experience will be available at some seats. We work with all venues to create expanded accessible seating. Audio Description will be available through Audimance, with multiple content and experience options. Orientation and assistance with the app will be available pre-show at the venue, along with a tactile experience of set, prop, and costumes.

There are no strobe lighting effects. There are moving lights and animated projections. Some sections include mirrored props and scenic elements which can create a sparkling or reflective effect.

Audience members are welcome to exit and reenter the space at any time during performances. Quiet space and sensory kits will be available before, during, and after all performances.

Installation elements, if present, will include visual, auditory, tactile, and haptic interactivity.”

I didn’t leave the u.s. since trump got elected again. I almost went in July when I was in Detroit, but had a really bad feeling and realized after some card pulls and talks with friends that, right- I needed to tighten up my digital and personal security before i did a trip that involved crossing back into the state(s). that was partially it, partially I had other things going on, including being committed to here, but partially mostly also, it was about a below the surface knowing of, if I get a break from this bullshit. even a little bit, it’s going to be hard to come back to it. the united statesian mega doom cloud. nowhere is utopia, least of all canada, but almost every place is abetter than here. I feel like I, we, have got by in the 10 months we’ve been in this recent iteration by…. head down, head up, enduring it, discipline, disassociation. joy yes but also a certain endurance shut down. i knew it would feel like a cleaned wound sharp to be someplace where the ambient doom cloud pierced with shrieks wasn’t.

but I had the show in Toronto so I oiled up the car (the jiffy lube and the protective oil way both) and set forth.

crossing into canada was fine because I have the priv of dual citizenship. my early 20s self was very smart when they looked around and read the signs. the border guard was a punjabi femme in her 30s with ironed straight hair and matte brick red lipstick, what’s all that stuff in the back? a medical kit, water, emergency car supplies- i live in the u.s. I don’t trust anything. well, that’s smart, given what’s going on. welcome back! my friend texted, how does it feel after i texted the got through safety text, i was like, there’s no lights on most canadian highways and people drive the speed limit, which is fiftyfive. my allostatic load unclenched 30 percent.

there’s a grief broken bone ache when what you’ve had to get used to living with gets to thaw. there’s also a storm everywhere, the weather patterns are just different.

scene report southern ontario: canadian flags everywhere including in every aisle of the grocery store, but also on every other house. about not wanting to be invaded by the u.s. but also a visibility resurgence of the same old white settler canadian racism. I got screamed at by racist white people twice in my old neighborhood in toronto, something that hadn’t happened in decades of living there and wouldn’t have for all the decades this was a nice regular Black and brown working neighborhood. a certain unhinged white uptight incel rage ready to pop at any moment vibe not dissimilar to the united statesian version but with its own upper canada anglican passive aggressive flare. I told friends, I felt safer in the states because it feels like the lines are clearer even if they’re more horrible. i felt safer in canada because the risk of getting shot is less. everyone i know in toronto looked harried, hassled. i work so much it’s sad, a friend said. everything is expensive and the vibes are tight.

there were also stars and vegetables that taste like food in the grocery store. smaller cities felt better? the everyday chll of my family’s local rec center where we took ther kid for five dollar karate lessons.

and there was being there to help make a disabled art show that was different than most I’ve seen the u.s.. not the completely self funded DIY outside kins, or the shmancy funded from foundations/ universities in some way kind , out of necessity because access costs money.

this was something different: not total crusty and not funded by academia or the ford foundation either, but a nice community art space gallery that wasn’t High Art World (but in the 401 richmond building so nice enough) with enough federal arts grant money to pay for the ASL video vlog translation of the exhibition statement, to get snacks from the palestinian bakery, to pay people not-rolling-in-it money, but something, to be on panels to talk about working class crip art then and now and for me to come. some place staffed by mostly disabled Asian and Indigenous folks, who wanted to create a welcoming home for the disabled work, who wanted to honor the work not in a, you made it into institutionality congrats yr real way. but in a something completely different way.

a different, working cultural worker disabled way of holding the work.

here’s the videos of the two panels, the first is me and Zavisha sharing tall tales of when we met in the 90s and 2001, the second is me, Annanda DeSilva, Wy Joung Kou, and Gem Hall talking disabled art now, and flashing back to when they all met me because I was the teaching artist in various youth art programs and was generous with the tokens and the snacks.

there’s a through line in both , about disabled and mad and ND art then (and now) happening and flourishing outside of any space that would’ve said, This Is A Disabled Youth Art Program- because we were evading capture and diagnosis and being under a microscope- and instead happening with us just being fucked up and big feelings at a table.

it’s also a privilege, a thing not taken for granted, to be disabled and get to move around.

a lot of the time the process of getting all my shit into the bags, down the stairs and into the car is harder than the actual drive. in fact this was the hardest part of this one and I ended up sitting defeated looking at the bags and then texting my friend for help with both the physical and the mental load of dragging all this shit down the stairs and out of my home the safe place.

Sometimes the drive feels like razor blades into raw meat into lot of little hot pieces of gravel in my hip, or an overall bodily moaning and well fuck, I guess we just have to, grit our teeth and do it. But a lot of the time in this current body, my car really is a big trak chair with storage and a battery that only runs out every five or six hours of highway drving or so (gas.) driving is great. five hundred miles is not nothing but goes swiftly.

cripple road dogging also involves things like screaming voice memos into my phone one handed while driving 90 MPH with the other (only on straightaway, smaller roads where no one is on the highway, I promise. Maybe) and allowing myself to stop and take breathers. Shoving hippie slim jims and rice cakes in my mouth. I have way stations and crash spots, hideaways and land I need to visit. my childhood dream came through come true.

on one of the voice memo exchanges to my friend s, bemoaning my first three days in west end toronto which finally, I have to admit, has bitten the bullet of not just coffee shop gentro but giant development 34 story condo no parking death star, she says, you’ve always been diasporic. People envy that. You have homes where you can be roommates with people all over. You weave network back and forth. bring the news.

indeed. Though there’s been stretches of time where I have been grounded I have also done that service- gotten on planes, trains, megabusses and my car and gone places to talk and meet. I’ve had the opportunity that kind of life gives you, of getting to see your friends and maintaining family all over. There’s also a Rom proverb my friend keeps reminding me of that says, a rabbit with only one hole gets shot. That part. I

I know I’ve gone off here and elsewhere about leaning into a monastic life, about being home rooted, about privacy and turning inward as pandemic fascist time strategies. that’s all real. and i also don’t want to give up the improbably cripple universal, the highwire act that gets you to get to be everywhere you can get to, all the ways you hustle and finagle your way down the stairs and out the window to get there. I don’t want to give up the right to mobility, the bliss of the road and the wind in my hair through the window. the getting to be a web weaver, to get the fuck out of dodge, to see what people and our people are doing different places, to carry the news there and the news home.

our people travelled disabled just like I have been living with chronic pain all my adult life but been a sick slow walker, a crip dancer who closed down the club.

as the clampdown continues, let us find a way to not cede any of our territories and remember the old ways of doing so.

there’s more, but that’s it for now. see you on the flip and in the whirlwind.

til next,

L

ps: missing and mourning D’Angelo, this is my friend DuiJi Mshinda‘s digital altar for him. find one of my favorite recent recordings of his here.