throwing shoes

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from chicago we went to new york. quinn was waiting for me at the airport.
quinn is 13 now and her schoolmates think obama is a rockstar, he is
so popular that they graffiti his name. quinn wanted to go to the inauguration.
flying into d.c. you could feel the excitment sitting on the plane.
i was sitting next to some singer guy who was asked for autographs.
he was a very good looking black man wearing a ramones t-shirt.
i struck up conversation by saying that the ramones were the first concert i went to
without my parents. he said that he just liked the presidential seal. i never found out who the
guy was but he did tell me that he was performing at the inauguration.

we packed as tight as we could onto the subway. it was the last train. more people showed up than could fit into the train. many were wearing gowns and tux's .
already i could only see smiles, richpoorblackwhiteasianyoungold.
only smiles in an over crowded train that didn't pull out for over a half hour at each stop. they
didn't know what to do with too many people trying to shove on.
then the escalator was out of service, every one had to climb up the length of 10 stories to get out
of the subway.

washington square had an inflatable Bush and a pickup full of shoes to throw at it.









the streams of people were coming from all directions.
many roads were shut down by the military. i counted 13 starbucks
along the road we walked to the "mall"



we were at the fence to the white house and someone
threw shoes over the fence and was immediately taken away.



during the inauguration when bush and Cheney took the platform
a wave of 2 million "fuckyou"s and "boo"s and some shoes were thrown. a pair of tevas landed next to me. later i didn't hear any of that on the replay of the event on t.v. only a faint sing along
of "na na na good bye"








the networks were all there
in little glass boxes. people
loved them and crowded around
the sweeping cameras on cranes.
there were so many different people there, they didn't come to this festival to take drugs and hook up. they didn't come
to the festival to ride bikes naked with fun fur hats even. they came to see it happen, i could
have hugged any one of the millions of people and it woulda been o.k. no problems . one of the things to take away from the
whole experience was that the media loved to talk about michelle
obamas dress but that was the last thing on anyones mind.

twelve below

when we got to chicago we learned that the same airline we took had landed a plane
in the hudson river in n.y. we would have been on that plane if we decided to fly straight to the
east coast instead of stopping in chicago first. i was very jealous. daves sister thought we
were on the river plane and called us worried. we saw the news while at a breakfast diner
in chicago called the egg palace. here is a picture of the palace:





ah, beautiful.
the owner gave me free coffee and told me how she can read
auras. she talked about disturbed teens giving her napkin art
in exchange for free food. she excitedly pulled out the pile of napkin art and droped it all on the floor:




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she was concerned tht kids don't have the right
place to talk about their most secret thoughts.
she showed me her favorite drawings

back to the bus;
in four days from now im flying out to albion/ chicago to visit the
bus.
my loose plan is to get the bus back to california by june.
if i can have a home coming show on june 12 th i would be very happy.
here is a collection of movies of bus shows taken on a broken camera phone last year;
i strung them together, it reminds me of a seven inch record my old band
put out called "so jesus was at the last supper..."
it was recorded on a tape player who's batteries slowly died by the end of the recording.
the result was a long song that slowly sped up and got very blown out and noisy.
ah, happy accidents are the rule.

ed roberts

    a small woman named tracy gave me her old wheelchair once she got her new one.

i repaired it with some effort, (electronics are so much harder to fix now than five years ago)

 i took the wheel chair to my brothers house for our family's christmas gathering thinking

the chair would be used by my 90 year old grandma to keep up with us when we take our traditional after diner walk. she's slowing down alot.

               unfortunately, something like a wheelchair holds such a huge stigma,.

even in my own family.

i forget this. my grandma felt like it was putting her in an awkward situation. 

she said to my mom, 

"why  do you keep forcing things on me?"

my poor mom had nothing to do with the chair, it was my idea.

   the chair did get used however, grandma stayed at the house while

 the kids got turns driving it along our xmas walk.

my sister said things like 

"leave it to john to bring something like this.."

her two kids were loving it, making it go in circles around us, giving eachother rides.

we went about two miles and they never lost interest.  

 i couldn't grasp the tone of random comments from the adults.  it was almost

unconscious, but the implications were that they were disturbed seeing their kids in a wheel chair.   i didn't understand this at the time.

i only saw the kids joy and felt a validation of sorts.

 Visibility:

if we all had the chance to ride a wheelchair it would loose much of the association

of "sick"

replaced with a visceral expericence of "fun" 

or at least  "moves me around ", "small electric car",  "ooh, robot.."

 instead, so much of the imagery of a wheel chair is used to provoke sympathy or imply tragedy.

  the more direct variety of personal experiences we have daily, the more broad our definitions become.

     ED Roberts:

lived with a high level of physical disability.

and he liked girls.

  i  knew him in the 90's at the end of his life.

his legacy is much larger than i could have guessed. he is know as 

"the father of independent living"

     i ended up in Copenhagen once,

there was a world wide conference on  disability there.

 not only was i the only one from berkeley, but i was the only american,

as well as the only person who spoke english as a first language,

strangely the confrence was held in english. 

   i was there originally to be the attendant for a japanese man however it turned out that i was put on the spot

most of the time;

"you knew ed roberts?"  (imagine every accent of the world)

 ed was a star there.

ed wrote the american act on disability, the first curb cut, made

all public buildings mandatorily accessible, 

i was shown a dutch book where he was a prominet figure, it also had  pictures of him on stage nude with other disabled naked people and sexy able bodied girls.

there is a logical trajectory here;

    "visibility"

the basis for eds philosophy.

 

   ed was a u.c. student 20 years before me;

"We've tried cripples before and it didn't work", said the university. they reluctantly admitted ed in 1962 and arranged for him to live in the campus medical facility. 

his brother, also a student, served as an on campus pa. often pushing ed from class to class in an  old manual wheelchair.

    ed was accustomed to rejection, 

a year earlier in '61 the state vocational rehabilitation agency refused to serve him as he was considered too severely disabled and labeled "unemployable".

that decision was later overturned. one of the many ironies of eds life was that fourteen years later in 1975 governor jerry brown appointed ed as state director of the same agency 

that deemed him too severely disabled to ever work.

    ed believed that if you see people with a disability in daily life;  going to the store, school, working, an association would form,

  society would have the chance to normalize adaptive tools like wheelchairs, canes, walkers, dogs, etc. stigmas would be lessened with real life example.

         an extension of this would be sex;

if you see some one with a disability having sexual relations the association would stick.

disability doesn't mean you can't be sexy.  ergo the performance art with naked girls.

see,                   

 http://www.sinsinvalid.org

    over the past few months i have been taking a picture every day.

my new office is going to be built right above the ashby bart parking-lot.  it will be

a huge mall housing many disability related groups. 

a "one stop shop for those with disabilities" 

i feel  it's ironic that it is going to be named the "  Ed Roberts campus"

i maybe alone in this opinion however i think he would be against the project of essentialy making an institute of many groups of working disability projects under one roof. ed hated institutions.

this campus is taking these nonprofit and businesses away from more public, integrated spaces. 

 i have been photographing the construction of this place for a timelapse animation.

im not sure what to do with that afterwords but i would like to 

get the spirit of visibility across.

 naked ladies always help with that.

"john, would you mind picking up a wheel chair at sanpablo and alcatraz, there is a
berkeley cop there waiting for you."


"sure, what is the clients name? is she wanting me to bring her chair to the hospital?"

"no, i am not sure, she lives in alameda some where but the chair is broken, maybe
you can just hold on to it for a while?"

"well, i guess i could, she has our number obviously, right?"

"ill make sure she does. "

when i was 15 i got taken to the Musée Mécanique.
i was changed forever by -...

my mom did a pretty good job of making
carousels the most exciting thing to see. she was so infatuated
with them that in our kitchen there were wood carving
peels on the linoleum getting stuck to my socks and swept into the carpeted living room from a wooden horse that she was cutting out of maple.
chiseling away at a wooden horse after diner in the kitchen.
she would talk about how beautiful carousel music,lights, the ride slowing down
at the end....she was like a little girl with her excited voice chipping away at the heavy wood.
we would get taken to see carousels like they were great works of art or scientific monuments
in the musee was a little carnival scene made entirely of toothpicks.
hundreds of toothpicks glued together making a Ferris wheel, people holding baloons, clowns
and a moving carousel. even the horses would go up and down, the mechanisms made all
out of toothpicks. it had to have taken years of work. the little typed out card simply stated
that it was made by a prisoner at the turn of the century.
i was 15 , totally emotional charged by this idea. it was such an investment, it had to
be made by a wonderful person, but here it said that he was a criminal. how could any one but
the most pure of heart devote so much of himself to such a machine? the man was obviously
totally obsessed with this innocent vision. so soft and child like, yet with the mechanical ingenuity to pull off a functioning clock like machine with his only resource; toothpicks and glue.
how was it possible he was in prison for some horrible crime?
it must have given him grief to no end. a painstaking, soft task in an unflinching
hostile hard environment, im sure he assumed that his creation would be crushed maliciously by
guard or inmate. the duplicity of criminal and gentile artist created a object that lasted over a
hundred years and left my 15 year old self tearing up in a museum. would he have allowed himself to create anything to such an effect had he not been committed?

my mom never finished the carousel horse. she got pretty far but got in a bad motorcycle
accident. she was driving her motorcycle to a P.t.a. meeting when the principal of the school
ran a stop sign and broke her back/arm/ankle. she was in a wheel chair for years and
was told she wouldn't be able to walk around any more.
i moved out a year later to go to collage. i think the horse is still in storage some where.

feeding him lunch

for 17 years now i have been working with disabled people in berkeley.
i have been around for so long in this field that i have filled almost every role there is
from working with the city to get funding, being on the board of directors, to the terrifying
time spent in the hospital with a broken neck and laying in bed in nonstop pain thinking i will be disabled the rest of my life for saving some one else.
the way i see people is totally enriched by my job. i love it. its blood shit and piss and degrading.
its asking for money. its saving someones life and not getting any thanks. its also being with
people while they die or just go bye bye in spirit. as well as getting overwhelmed with gratitude for
itching a nose or plugging in a lamp.
today it was all about class issues;
j.d. is recent to being disabled. he has power issues around this and i know that he wants me to
be invisible while i feed him his sandwich. he is talking to two girls on campus and they are
mustering up awkward small talk about their teachers and dissing on fellow students.
totally ignoring my presence. i don't mind and i wipe his mouth. give him a drink and
pull out the other half of his bologna sandwich, not untill they are arguing about a dumb
half unit class that they need to fufill some credit.
i spoke my first words of the hour. " i took a half unit of ballroom dancing."
in that sentence i
1. made myself exsist
2. let them know that i too was a student at this university before them
3. made light of the whole serious dilema by suggesting the non academic "ballroom dancing"

they laughed, they started to look at me -something real happened in the supperficial awkward
meeting they were in.

however it is breaking the power that j.d. had in keeping me as his tool.
in a progressive town like berkeley this is thought of as "bad"
but in the context of a disabled person getting his needs met i am just getting paid to attend.

to me its a significant metaphor; physically i have all the power. socially i am just a tool.
just like larger groups of repressed people who are being used. its not so obvious right away.
it was easy for those girls to treat me like that, like i wasn't there. untill i opened my mouth
but that inadvertantly took j.d.s power.