Leave Bjork Alone!!!! Just Leave her alone!

I've been blogging for about nine months now. I've written about such hot-button topics as race, class, religion, homophobia, and the sorry state of public schools in our country and left it open for anyone to read and comment on. And there's only ONE posting that got any nasty comments: The posting in which I said I knew I should like her, but listening to Bjork made me feel like sticking a fork in my ear. Two ANNONYMOUS (too scared to take on a fifty-year-old mom cyberface to cyberface?) Bjork advocates left deep, thoughtful comments. e,g.: "Don't listen to Bjork. It might destroy the one brain cell in your head!"

Here's the thing: IT WAS A JOKE!!! And a self depricating on at that! I know she's a genius; I know she's using her howls and shrieks to experiment sonically and expand all kinds of artistic envelopes. And anyone who could name a band "Snot and Spit" has my undying admiration as a true punk (as opposed to, say, these cute little emo boys with their eyeliner and their pretend-punk posing). But just as her partner, Mathew Barney, makes art that I accept is brilliant but that doesn't speak to me, so her music leaves me cold. And for God's sake
IT WAS A JOKE!!!!!!
So come on, lighten up you annonymous (and apparently cowardly) Bjork lovers.

An Asian girl walks into a cafeteria.....

Here's a funny little thing that happened, in the usually unfunny arena of racial assumptions.

So Twin 1, was in line at the school cafeteria, and a kid who didn't know her looked at her and said, "Hey, does your mother make you home-cooked Chinese meals?" Twin 1 said, simply, "Yes." Because she does have a mother that makes her Chinese food. (Then the other kid added idiocy to ignorance and said, "Oh well can you save me a plate?" To which Twin 1 replied - after giving the kid that extra-specially withering die-now glare which she usually reserves only for her parents- "No." And walked away.)

What I love about this is, that the kid's ignorant assumption that this cute Asian girl had an industrious little Chinese immigrant mommy at home cooking away, leapt, with glorious obliviousness, over all the cultural/ethnic complications of our family (white mom born and raised in Asia and who is not US-identified, raising twins born in Vietnam but ethnically Cambodian, adopted at six months, who have no memory of Asia, and are very US identified) and landed squarely on the one question Twin 1 could answer simply and honestly: Does your mom cook chinese food? She told me about it when she got home and the teens and I actually shared a giggle over it. Thank you nitwit stranger!

Van Gough, me, and the angel of the possible

When I was a kid I believed adamantly that I couldn't "really" draw. (See my earlier post on this, "Comfort," if you like.) Which is not to say that I didn't draw. I drew constantly, copying comics, illustrations, photos, anything. My mother would look over my shoulder and say, "That's wonderful! You're so talented." And my response was always, (in a dismissive, frustrated wail) "I'm NOT talented! It's just copying!" In art class, I always felt in awe of people who could pull an image out of thin air and put it on the page before them. That was real talent. Still, I kept up my inadequate copying and, eventually, began copying in "pleine aire" from the world around me.

So I was reading, in the New York Times this morning, about a new Van Gough exhibit at the Morgan Library. The article says, "He [Van Gough] writes, as if about a disability, that he can make art only from real models, things in the world. He says, '...I have such a fear of separating myself from what's possible."

I read that and thought, "I know that fear! That's my fear." I grapple with it still. I've written a children's book that I want to illustrate myself. I even have a publisher that will look at it. But children's illustration seems so firmly set in the realm of the imaginary, seems so much the province of those amazing people who pull pictures out of empty air, that I don't know where to start. I'm a person of very few fears. I've swum after highly poisonous sea snakes just to see where they hid. On my first day of first grade, my school bus was turned back by a guerilla armed with a machine gun, and I thought it was a great lark. I've had dysentery and most of the parasites known to man and felt that they were more than worth the great joy of going barefoot and eating street food during my childhood in Asia. But I am truely afraid to set pencil to paper - to try and make this little picture-book world come into being because I'm afraid I will have to leave behind my inspiration, my lifelong crutch, my angel of joy, the visual world before me.

Van Gough, speaking of Rembrandt's self portraits, wrote, "Rembrandt, behind this old man who bears a resemblance to himself, paints a supernatural angel with a da Vinci smile." Yet "Rembrandt invented nothing, and that angel and that strange Christ - he knew them, felt them there." I've had glimpses of that angel, or one of her lesser followers, when I draw. And having seen her can never stop looking for her. Van Gough wrote, "I adore the true, the possible." I guess I'll just have to find a way to bring that angel of the true, the possible, with me into the pages of my children's book. Wish me luck.

Street Art

Just in case you can't read it, the text on the sign reads, "Try this tasty combo of free-range rodent, Tainted tomato, Savory Salmonella Sauce, and lettuce." Yum. But I prefer my rodent cage-bred. Makes 'em less stringy.

To see more of this artist's work visit vinchen

Mattel

Yesterday Mattel apologized to their Chinese manufacturers for making them look bad to American consumers. You might remember that Mattel had a tiny problem with the toys that were being made for them in China being painted with lead paint? So now they're saying they're sorry they told us and made the Chinese lose face.

I have a daughter just young enough to think that Toys R Us is the most enchanting place in the world. So I've just decided I'm boycotting Mattel this Christmas. Care to join me?

Some unfinished business

After a restorative dip into frivolity, I'm ready to post, one last time, about the whole school district battle. First of all, I want to thank all of you who read, listened, and cheered us on from these, and other, sidelines. It meant a lot to have sympathy and stick-it-to-the-bastards support along the way. You know who you are, and I hope you know it helped. Now, on to business.

Chances are that anyone reading this already knows, or will know soon, a family like ours - a family trying to persuade an unwilling public-school bureacracy to agree to a private placement for their autistic child. (When Charlotte was diagnosed the statistics said that one in every ten thousand children would be autistic. Now it's one in one hundred fifty!) So here are the things we did that led to us getting what we wanted out of them, and please pass this on to anyone who you think might need it:

1. Hire a lawyer with passion for the work and a fire in her belly. ( Many thanks to our attorney, Pamela Berger!)

2.Find an "approved private school" that you want your child to go to. "Approved" means that the feds will, at some point, begin to pay 60% of the tuition.

3.Make sure it's a school that you're REALLY enthusiatic about. This will make it easier, when the district says no, to....

4.Scrimp, save, borrow against your future to pay the more-expensive-than-Harvard tuition yourself and make it clear to the district that you are willing to go farther down this road than they are. Because one thing you have on your side, that they don't, is the determination that only love can give you. It's just a job to them. To you, it's your sweet baby's life and future on the line. I didn't have much certainty about how all this would go, but I did know with unshakeable clarity that only over my dead body would my daughter ever set foot into that dreadful public-school autistic support classroom.

5.Hurt them where they'll feel it - right on their bottom line. The school district is legally required to bus your child to any school within ten miles of your house. It costs them an astonishing amount of money to bus special-needs kids. Because of the special busses and aids necessary, our district would have had to pay $36,000 a year to bus our daughter to her school! The bussing alone was 2/3 of the tuition. Then tell them if they'll pay tuition, you'll waive bussing and drive her to school. They'll add things up and realize that once the federal aid money kicks in, their costs will be relatively modest. And if they don't go to court they'll save even more money. Court cases are expensive. They're all about that bottom line.

6.Go over the heads of the special-ed people. The school board is the boss of everyone (in theory anyway), so I spoke to, and wrote gracious, rational, yet passionate letters to, the president and vice president of the school board, laying out why our daughter desperately needed this placement. I made them see her as a person rather than as a precident (and I reminded them how much bussing and attorneys would cost the district).

7.And that's, finally, what did it. The school board "talked it over" and overruled the head of special ed. Two days later we got a letter saying that if we would waive bussing, they'd pay the tuition.

And God shined down his light, and the angels sang because that day one of their own on Earth, my baby, found the way before her smoother and her heavy load lightened.

PS - After it was all over, I took flowers to the president and vp of the school board.

Middle-aged woman's nightmare

I had a nightmare last night, and it tells me - as much as the box of Clairol in my bathroom cabinet, the tri focals on my face - that I'm middle aged. I dreamed I had gone on a trip and not packed enough/appropriate clothes (OK, that's many women's nightmare) so I had to go to a store to buy a fancy dress. The proprietress of the store kept bringing out hideous sequined old-lady dresses for me to try on - the kind of dresses I remember Dr. Ruth wearing in the 80's. Occasionally the woman would bring out something pretty and, of course, it would be four sizes too small (the size I was wearing in the 80's!). There was one particularly stylish skirt she brought out. I held it up to my waist and it was like holding up a little girl's skirt against my cartoonish largeness.

How pitiful is that? Even in my dreams, now, I can't be lithe and lovely.