Warning this is not a review. This started as a review. There was an event. Time. Place. Art the dominant subject. I was there to review. Then something happened. I was captured by an idea. I ran amok with it. I got some of it right. I got some of it wrong. I'm still adventuring. Here is the start of the story. ON 10th February i attended a Private View. Flo Brooks exhibition Heaving The Lead Cecil Sharp House Flo Brooks describes liminality as ‘an unstable,...

Comments: 0

I met Neale a good 30 years ago, I was runing a community darkroom. He came in and said he wanted to be the best photographer in the world and he wanted me to teach him all I knew. That took about 6 weeks and he was soon better than me. I continued to give him space and time. He became stylised and constantly went in search of beauty. Our ideas on that were very different. A tory recession hit the country and the darkroom closed. We went our separate ways but we stayed in touch and...

Comments: 9

 Following on from today’s ruling (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-30376446 ) I was moved to do something arty, but nothing would come and then I remembered Paul Simon’s 'Mother and Child Reunion' and wondered what it said. Seemed to me if I changed very few words I could come up with something portentous. No I would not give you false hope On this strange and mournful day But the mother and wheelchair user reunion Is only a bus stop away Oh, little crippie...

Comments: 2

Remember how you hear a political song that has ideas that stay with you forever. No Sell Out does that for me. Credited to Keith Le Blanc of Tackhead and probably featuring all group members No Sell Out is a collage of recordings featuring Malcolm X, I use a quote in the first line. I love that line and have played with it often. Changing it, paraphrasing it, extending it, turning it into something else entirely. Its something I sometimes call on. So, its there, ready for use. And so it...

Comments: 0

Advocacy awareness class. Something is missing from everyone's learning. I could save them. Tell them how the circle of oppression goes on and what it does to you but its not my call so I spend time with memories of special school surfacing.... Mrs Mack She’s on smack She is very nasty Childhood peeps by in rhyme attacking teachers. I am alone here. Undefeated. Thank U Very Much for Mrs Cheetham Thank U Very Much Thank U very very much One more day to go One more day in sorrow Skool...

Comments: 2

I hadn't planned to put this picture up as a part of the series but something nagged away at me and I couldn't think what it was. Then I saw him and something else nagged at me. I couldn't remember his name. I slept badly last night. How could I not remember his name. There are people in these photos whose name I don't know and it worries me not a jot but something bugged me out here. I woke up. I've got it. He shares my name. He died. We went to his funeral to see off a DAN...

Comments: 0

A wheelchair user sits by a poster reading ‘Dignity Not Death’ Beneath the headline there is a list. Only a part of it can be seen. It reads: ‘My home is inaccessible I do not get the support I need I have no form of transport I have no aid to communication I have no aids to daily living’ What does the rest of the poster say? Add what you lack. Complete the poster by saying where your dignity is put at risk. Tell me what you want. Charlie Farley Falconer thought you...

Comments: 2

Posting this picture reminds me of a story someone once told me. I do not swear to its exactness. It's an old tale. Relates to a working man, a stong, silent, family type. Leaving home one morning he just collapsed on the doorstep of his home. HIs wife heard him fall and rushed to him. He was struggling that much was clear and things looked bleak so she left him at once, went inside and dialled 999, before returning to his side. The paramedics turned up first by bike and then an ambulance...

Comments: 3

Song Number 1

Heard today under a slightly different lens John Grant's Glacier

Please leave Song Number 2 et al in the comment lists below

Comments: 9

Thanks to Dennis Queen for telling me where I could the picture I was looking for in Picture from a Not Dead Yet Movement Again this comes from the action against Lord Joffe's bill not Lord Falconer's. I suppose if you replace a spade with a spade it still goes by the same name - 'Lord Of Death'. Great title sir. Back in the day, we all knew the Lords of Death would be back. Flocking rook like in a parliamentree, espousing blinkered wisdom like owls caught in daylight. Birds of...

Comments: 0

Way back in time  a fellow named Lord Joffe tried to get the Assisted Dying Bill through parliament. The Disabled People's Direct Action Network (DAN) mobilised and put on a show which the majority of the Lords supported. I remember taking a shot of an activist from Birmingham (Paul? if memory serves). He was holding a placard reading 'Lords of Death'. I looked for it. It felt apposite. Timely and with shades of Doctor Who. A science fiction skit perhaps wherein the elderly,...

Comments: 1

Saturday Night, Peter's Bistro in Devizes and an unlikely meeting across tables forming a friendship. I retained these details in my head as it seemed to say something about engagement (my current area of work at Merton Centre for Independent Living). I didn't realise it would take this form. Neither did i realise i would be experiencing this on the day the Battle of Westminster raged. He Was - I Was He was a Royal Marine, fought in the Falklands I was into peace and love, didn’t...

Comments: 1

This blog first appeared today on Merton Centre for Independent Living's Inclusion Blog where I explore issues around engagement and reveal what our members are saying and getting involved in. It can be found here:  But it felt too good and arty to just stay there so her it is. We do this. We do that. We sell the brand. The blind man sat and got pounced on by the organisational evangelists with their we do this, we do that, we sell the brand mantras. We sing. We jump. We swim. The...

Comments: 0

Dear Dan I'm home now, sorting through some old photos. I come across several from the time i knew you. I loved you for the good and bad things that you were to me. I adored the conceit of spelling your name in capitals and the statements that you said it made about you. You said you were Direct, that you took Action and that you Network. You could have been any old DAN but you weren't. You said you were the Disabled People's DAN and they were  like you. They were direct,...

Comments: 2

I think of this picture often. It has entered my personal mythology. I turned it into a story.but looking at it now I can see that I tell the story wrongly. In my mind I see a toilet entrance and three signs. One saying gentlemen this way, ladies that and disabled people yet another. I think my story tells it better. I am narrating a tale of language and exclusion. Segregation. 'No whites, no cats, no english'. The ridiculousness of it all. But a Nat King Cole Documentary is being shown...

Comments: 6

I have barely taken to the streets to Save The ILF. I’ve done a little but maybe not enough. It’s not apathy. I always had something else to do.  I campaigned for independent living before I even knew a fund that supports independent living was at risk. I chanted Free Our People with the best of them. It was more a case of redirecting my energies. I advocated for direct payments. I found employment with Merton Centre for Independent Living. I was committed but further away from...

Comments: 6

I have a photo to go with this blog and i will put it up one day. Its simply a sign reading Black Out. It promotes a drapery company, specialising in what must be very effective blinds. I took it one day when walking away from a public meeting. I understand how close it is to reading blacks out and as uncomfortable as that reading is it seems to sum up much of the tone of the meeting. And yet... this was a public meeting about public transport and in particular buses. The room seemed...

Comments: 0

When I'm not blogging for DAO, which happens to be most of the time, I have a day job. Get this. Engagement and Development Worker for Merton Centre for Independent Living (MCIL). One of my responsibilities is to engage with the wider community and in particular with hard to reach groups. The LGBT community is not one that I am charged with finding,meeting and relating with but MCIL know that i'm putting my feelers out. In some ways this young, hungry organisation was ahead of...

Comments: 0

"You are too single minded about this disability stuff. You have a life outside of it. You need to leave it at work and appreciate all those other things that you have". This is a criticism I have to put up with from time to time. There is some truth in it. But, i'm not so bad as people make out. I can put my work away. I can distinguish between my work and my life. I see where they meet, interact, and where I can find peaceful seclusion. Its also an interesting question because...

Comments: 1

I've just caught up with Katherine Arianiello's latest blog on DAO, Wot a laff, It surely can't be the first time a committed disability artist has played with identity by assuming the role of a normal person with the disadvantages that brings, Indeed, how many of us have done this on a daily basis - myself included. Mainstreaming. Being the supercrip. Letting normal society put on us with their interminable list of aches and pains and other uninspired melodramas, Oh! the boredom of...

Comments: 1

I attended a book launch for the first time last night. Bob Stanley of St Etienne, and regular music columnist in the nationals, has just had ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah – The Modern Story of Pop’, published. I went for a number of reasons. The launch was local, at Fab Records, Bob is a neighbour, I’m reading the book and its great, but mostly because one day we stopped in the drive way and had a chat about the communication difficulties we share. So, I wanted to support him and I...

Comments: 0

Pulled into Oxford Services last night on my way home from me mother's. Through the second set of automatic doors stood a chugger, clanging a red bucket for Pudsey. I blanked them to the extent that their size, race and gender became a blue. I had no idea who they were. Entering the loo I was invited to spend a penny for pudsey. I could see that others had. Pennies piled brownly in a thick perspex casing. I am always tempted to break it, vandalise the promo poster, run off with the...

Comments: 1

A funny thing happened the day we rested 20 or so disabled activists camped in Deans Yard, Westminster, to hear statements about the abolition of the Independent Living Fund (ILF) on the occasion of its 25th birthday. Then we made our way to the Department of Work and Pensions to sing Happy Birthday to the ILF, chant 'Free Our People', share cake and watch socialist magician, Ian Saville, make the letters ILF disappear in front of our very eyes. According to Ian, I is for Independence...

Comments: 0

I am interested in community gigs and caught up with Spiers & Boden in my own back yard at Cecil Sharpe House in Camden Town - hoping to learn about making connections. 

Spiers and Boden, long established folk duo, founder members of great festival band Bellowhead, are in town. They will play twice today in the same but changing venue of Cecil Sharp House – the home of English folk music. First a ceilidh. Then a concert.
 
The floor is cleared for the dancers. These people...

Comments: 0

I wouldn't normally tell jokes on my blog here but i wrote this one and its a favourite that's pulled out from appropriate time time to appropriate time - like only this morning someone was telling me what they had to eat last night which was very opportune as my reply quickly came: Linda McCartney Pies. I'd have thought they'd have gone off by now I am a proud vegetarian myself but i don't wallow in its promotion and i do believe in convenience so if you ever do invite me...

Comments: 0