Mojo Monday

Mojo Monday

Mojo Monday

Mojo Monday

Dead Sketch: Here's the Deal

  The new Sketchworks show opens this Friday and I have a whopping one sketch in it. Usually I end up submitting five or six new pieces and about an equal number of older ones and I get, on average, about two or three in. First or even second time rejections can eventually make it into a show. Some things, like robots and dying children, are timeless. Other things have a much shorter shelf life.. If they don't go the first time, they're dead.
  This one here? It's dead.:

HERE'S THE DEAL
by Walt Guthrie

(Michael Vick and his press agent stand before a table at which are seated three committee members)

COMMITTEE MEMBER #1
Really, I don't see how we can do this.

MICHAEL VICK
What are you talking about? I did my time! Man has a right to make a living.

COMMITTEE MEMBER #2
Mr. Vick. You strangled, electrocuted and tortured dogs to death, I don't know. Before we could consider you, we'd... (shrugs and throws up his hands)

MICHAEL VICK
(aggressively)
WHAT?

COMMITTEE MEMBER #2
We're going to have to hear that you you have truly changed, that you have learned that dog fighting is deeply wrong, and that you no longer embrace that lifestyle. And it can't just be a script that a press agent gives you to read.

(Michael Vick's press agent hands him a piece of paper)

MICHAEL VICK
(reading)
I have truly changed. I have learned that dog fighting is deeply wrong. I no longer embrace that lifestyle.
(agent points out something on the page)
And this is not a script that my press agent gave me to read.

COMMITTEE MEMBER #1
Wow. That was just...wow

COMMITTEE MEMBER #2
Okay. Come on up here and get your Nike endorsement deal.

(Michael Vick comes up and snatches the contract out of his hand with a sense of entitlement)

COMMITTEE MEMBER #1
Okay, next up is (looking at sheet of paper) Casey Anthony.

(Casey Anthony walks in and goes right up to the table)

COMMITTEE MEMBER #1
Ms. Anthony--

(Casey Anthony's mother, Cindy, bursts into the room and wails at Casey)

CINDY ANTHONY
WHERE'S CAYLEE?

CASEY ANTHONY
(visibly annoyed)
Mom! I'm trying to get a shoe deal here! Jeez! (rolls eyes)

CINDY ANTHONY
WHERE'S CAAAYLEE?!

CASEY ANTHONY
Mom! What do you want me to do? I'm in a committee meeting. If I could help you I would! But I can't.

CINDY ANTHONY
(deflating)
I love you.

CASEY ANTHONY
Whatever. 

COMMITTEE MEMBER #1
Ms. Anthony. You are a very well known celebrity but as a woman widely believed to have murdered her child, well, an endorsement contract might carry some downside. What do you intend to do in the coming year, to show that you a person we'd want to be associated with?  

CASEY ANTHONY
Well, I want to get pregnant again and I know what you're thinking but don't worry because I intend to totally devote the next seven or eight months of my life to raising that kid.

COMMITTEE MEMBER #2
Well, that's very commendable, Casey. But we'll going to have to hear more from you than just that.

(Michael Vick hands Casey Anthony his script)

CASEY ANTHONY
(reading script)
I have truly changed. I have learned that dog fighting is deeply wrong. I no longer embrace that lifestyle. And this is not a script that my press agent gave me to read.

COMMITTEE MEMBER #1
Wow. That was just...wow.

COMMITTEE MEMBER #2
Okay, come on up here and get your Nike endorsement deal.

(Casey takes the contract and begins to dance like she's at a party)

COMMITTEE MEMBER #1
All right. Next up is (looking at sheet of paper) Dick Cheney.

(Scowling Dick Cheney enters room with Secret service Agent)

COMMITTEE MEMBER #2
Mr. Vice-President,You have--

DICK CHENEY
Go fuck yourself! I don't explain anything to anyone.  Got that?

(Casey Anthony hands script to Dick Cheney who speed reads it)

DICK CHENEY
Fuck this shit. I'm not changing one iota. Fuck those dogs. If I want torture a dog either for national security or just because I want to bust a nut over it, that's what's going to happen. So you can suck it, Nike. You can suck it like I had that limp noodle George W suck it 24-7.

COMMITTEE MEMBER #1
Wow. Just....wow.

COMMITTEE MEMBER #2
Okay. Come up here and get your Nike endorsement deal.

DICK CHENEY
Yeah, yeah. (to secret service agent) Go get it.

(Secret service agent goes up and rips it out of Committee Member #2's hands)

DICK CHENEY
And Get one for Scooter too.

(Secret service agent swipes some more contracts off the committee's desk and comes back to where Cheney is standing)

(Cindy comes up to Casey)

CINDY ANTHONY
Now that you're done, dear. WHERE'S CAYLEE?

CASEY ANTHONY
Mom! You're embarrassing me!

CINDY ANTHONY
                               WHERE'S CAYLEE?                            

(Dick Cheney, annoyed, takes gun from his secret service agent and walks up to  Cindy Anthony and shoots her in the face)

CASEY ANTHONY
THANK you.

(Everyone stares at Cindy Anthony's dead body for a beat)

CASEY ANTHONY
You want to go party?

(Dick Cheney shrugs non-committally)

MICHAEL VICK
Let's go drown something.

CASEY ANTHONY
I'm in.

DICK CHENEY
We can swing by my compound, I got a whole set-up in my basement.

(Lights dim as they begin to walk together off stage)

COMMITTEE MEMBER #2
Okay, next up (looking at paper)...the guy in charge of beating the foreign kids who make our shoes.

Mojo Monday

Mojo Monday

"Dear God No!" sneak preview this Friday

  They grow up so fast.
  Seems like just yesterday I was having blood squibs taped to me for my two second big screen debut in the faux-70s Bigfoot vs. biker exploitation flick, "Dear God No!" Now the film is premiering (or sneak peeking or whatever) at the Plaza in Atlanta this Friday.

 

Faux movie poster for the would-be  Japanese release of Dear God No!

Mojo Monday

Mojo Monday

Mojo Monday

Mojo Monday

  I do a lot of work with Mojoworld Generator, a 3D planet generator and renderer that uses fractal geometry to create worlds with literally infinite detail. On Mondays I'll be posting some of the more interesting pics that I've rendered over the years.

Bernie Marcus Stars In Some Marcus Center PR Crap

The Marcus Autism Center has a bunch of fluffy PR videos on YouTube. Let's take a look at one.

  Here Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus takes time out from his busy schedule whining and bitching about federal regulations and unions (workers voted against unionizing the Home Depot because they knew that unions would prevent parking lot cart pushers from becoming the company vice president) to talk about the Marcus Autism Center which is, of course, named after his wallet.
  Bernie mentions two things that raise eyebrows. One, his question about how do you know when someone who is nonverbal is suffering or in pain. His answer: SPECIALISTS!
  Hmmm. Specialized in what exactly? Because the specialists you get at the Marcus Center are specialized in behaviorism, which is, by its own definition, a field completely unconcerned about what goes on inside the mind. I can use modified Skinnerian techniques to train my dog to fetch but it's not going to be that much of an aid in helping me figure out why Fluffy's feeling sad.
  Second, Bernie says that Marcus has, over the course of its existence helped over 40,000 kids.("And Growing!") Wow. So if even a tiny percentage of those kids who are not adults are willing to pay back Marcus for the great treatment they've received then the Marcus Center should be able to brings hundreds of adultautistics to testify on the center's behalf.
  Except, these adults are unknown to anyone at Marcus I've asked on the subject including Don Mueller.

  Let this miniscule or completely nonexistent set be the real testimonial for the Marcus Autism Center.

  By the way, low level Marcus employees. You need a union.
 

Galas and Kenna Valentina

From a photoshoot a couple months back:

Anyone? Mueller?...Mueller?

Before this gets any more stale, here's my write-up of my March meeting with the Marcus Center's Don Mueller:

When robots or computer animated humans get too close to looking real without completely nailing the illusion they project something called the Uncanny Valley.
  Don Mueller is the only human being that I have ever met who projects his own Uncanny Valley. I had never really noticed this effect before until I sat down with him in his office on the morning of March 16th, but once there it was impossible not to see it. There's just some little bit of humanity that people normally radiate that Mueller simply doesn't. Normally I might not mention this, but since Mueller is the Executive Director of the Marcus Center, whose whole reason for being is to, essentially, modify the behaviors of autistic children so that they can pass for normal humanity, his deficiency in this regard stands out with a particularly ironic clarity.

  The meeting had been suggested by Mueller at the end of the previous month's Atlanta Autism Consortium meeting after he objected to my questioning of a speaker. I had speculated in an earlier post that I thought the purpose of this might be to lay the groundwork for my eventual banishment from future AAC and other Marcus Center related events. That's not how it turned out and now, three months later, I'm still somewhat unsure as to the nature of Mueller's original intent.
  Attending this meeting, in addition to Mueller and myself, were Gregory Abowd, who runs the AAC meetings and my associate, Linda Styles.
  It had been my plan to actually record the conversation and then produce a transcript. But when Linda brought out a mini-cassette player and placed it on the table, Mueller made clear that he would not consent to a taping. Such would not be, he argued, conducive to building an atmosphere of trust between us. "At this point, do you really think there's any danger of that happening, Don?" is a question I thought of asking. But didn't. In the very spirit of building an edifice of trust.
  Still, recording undermines trust?
  Hmm.
  Since I began meeting with these behaviorists two years back, I have been been amazed at how the mediocrities (at best) that comprise the core of the behaviorist community continually project their own inadequacies onto others (and how frequently they do so in the name of science): Amy Wetherby claiming repetition is a danger sign in the course of delivering a painfully repetitive (by her own definition of the word) power point presentation; an ABA proponent who waxes on about the horrors of lack of eye contact who then refuses to look me in the eye even for a moment while I am asking him direct questions about his methodology; the parade of experts who claim that the people they study lack empathy or a "theory of mind" while they themselves clearly show themselves incapable of applying either to someone outside the narrowest parameters of their own comfort zones.
  How many events have I intended at the Marcus Center in which a main theme was surveillance? Children, sometimes aware they are being filmed, and sometimes obviously not; their every gesture and utterance scrutinized, and judged by a series of juries they are unaware even exist. I remember all the many times that Mueller had spoken up that recording these children without their knowledge or consent would be inconducive to building trust with that child.
  Oh wait. I got my numbers mixed up. It wasn't "many" times.
  It was actually zero.
  As always, there is one set of etiquette and ethical boundaries for those who would make the rules and another for those whom they would have live under them.
  Whatever.
  Mueller let me know that he considered my questioning of the speakers at the AAC meetings to be inappropriate. Abowd, sitting across from me, said that he did not consider this the case at all. Mueller then pointed out that there were those who had come previously to the meetings who no longer were attending because of me. I countered that I had a member of my smaller group who would no longer be attending the meetings because he could no longer stomach the barely-hidden derision of the so-called "experts." There are casualties on both sides in this war.
  I related to Mueller how, as a member of Bob Morris's group I had spent two years discussing with Bob the nature of the behaviorist. Bob believed that the behaviorists that he engaged were misguided and that, with the proper argument, they could be reasoned with. I came to believe that the behaviorists were not scientists at all. They were pseudo-scientists, cast from the same mold as astrologers and creationists. While Bob was alive, I had, out of respect for him, stayed, for the most part, out of this arena. But I had also watched the eye-rolling derision with which he was been treated by this community of "scientists." Respect, for the behaviorist, is a one way street.
  I had started coming to the AAC for one purpose. To demonstrate conclusively to my people that the behaviorists and their allies are frauds. And I believe that I have done so. Real scientists and researchers simply do not behave in the shameful and cowardly manner that the behaviorists at the AAC and other events I have attended have behaved. Who does behave this way? Con men. 
 If these really were men and women of science, how easy would it have been for them to meet my simple inquiries? After two years, how many of them have been able to answer the simplest question of all: what empirical evidence exists to classify everyone on the autistic spectrum as disordered? They base their science on this assertion.
  Mueller's organization gets rich off of it.
    Mueller asked what I'd like to see from the Marcus Center.  I did not give my standard line that I wished to see everyone who worked there live a life of regret and eventually end up cursing my name on their deathbed. Such statements, I know, are not conducive to building an edifice of trust.
  Instead, I simply stated that I wished to see it go out of business. Even this pared down statement seemed to catch him off guard for some reason. I don't know why since he had already heard me say, at that very meeting, and several other gatherings, I'm sure, that I considered behaviorists to be engaged in scientific fraud. Why would I, or anyone else, wish to see people whom they believed were engaged in fraud continue on in their fraudulent activity?
  I don't know. Perhaps Mueller simply lacks a theory of mind.
   At the end of the discussion, which ended up running about 70 minutes, it was time to sum up. I told Mueller that I intended to continue at the AAC meetings exactly as I have been. If he wanted any change, then he would have to ban me.
  And with that, Mueller coldly thanked me for coming.

Walt Guthrie

Anthony Weiner and the Charles Woods Dilemma Part One

  

What did Charles Woods get for Christmas?

  A pair of glasses and a staple gun.

  That is probably the first political joke I ever heard. Not so much a political joke, really, as a joke about a political figure. There were lots of jokes about Charles Woods on my elementary school playground while I was going to school in Alabama in the '60s. I don't recall hearing any jokes around that time about Wallace who was then governor and leading the state and the region down a truly monstrous path.

  Charles Woods did not lead anyone down a monstrous path. He was simply a monster. In the crude, simplistic, purely physical way that monsters exist to sheltered children.

  Woods had been shot down in World War II and as a result suffered extreme burns on his face and hands. With virtually no real facial features at all, he resembled Dr. Phibes from the Vincent Price movies. Amazingly, he decided to enter Alabama politics and had some success at it.

  I was a political cartoonist for the Birmingham Post-Herald for twenty years and during that time I would occasionally consider the Woods dilemma.

  An editorial cartoonist uses caricature to exaggerate the features of political figures and others into representations of their true selves, at least as seen by the cartoonist. It's an easy tool to abuse. This is, of course, highly unfair. .But politics itself is unfair.

  Still, there is a line

  It's one thing to render, through caricature, a fat senator into a bloated hog or over-emphasize the unattractive features of a homely governor. (I took particular pleasure in drawing the loathesome one-time Attorney General Charlie Graddick, who, over the years devolved in my cartoons into a doughy fish-lipped Mr. Potato head). It 's quite another to apply these same techniques to the deformed features of a burn victim!

  Even though Woods remained in the political arena through my years at the paper, I somehow never found myself in the position of having to actually caricature him so I don't know what I would have done. There were, however, some pretty butt- ugly characters who did land in my sights and I did not hold back from exploiting their physical deficiencies in the least.

  So, what, other than degree, is the difference between exploiting the natural everyday ugliness of a politician and doing the same with a Charles Woods?

  I'll attempt an answer in the next post. An answer that, I think, bears on the media reaction to the Anthony Weiner affair. 

 

Giving That Rapture Guy His Due

  So the world didn't blow up. Or get raptured. Or whatever the fuck was supposed to happen this weekend that didn't.
  There's a lot of people out there now heartily mocking Harold Camping's apocalyptic prediction and the dumb people who took it seriously. And they should.
  But, you know, Camping's stupid religion isn't stranger or more "out there" than any of the other competing faiths. At least Camping put his set of beliefs up for an actual empirical test. And now we can see it's Grade A bullshit.
  Many of the people who are now laughing at his believers owe their owe allegiances to religious institutions pushing claims that are equally or more absurd. But almost all of these institutions, even the ones with their own specific brand of End Timeism, have long ago learned the secret to keeping their lucrative fraud rolling: Don't be specific!
  Keep it all vague and murky.
  God is coming. The Promises will be fulfilled.
  "But no one can know the hour or the day." Blah blah blah.
  Just don't lose your faith. You'll be rewarded...eventually. Whatever, dude.
  It's a con that can run forever. And probably will.
  That's how it's generally done. But Camping, somehow, never got the memo. He --as opposed to,say, the Catholic Church or your local Baptist preacher--  actually did give his followers the oppurtunity to empirically test the mettle of his claims.

  How unchristian of him.

I Do What I Have To Do For "What Would You Do For a Klondike Bar?"

Matt Bartholomew practices his game face    (photos by Tom Robertson)

  Had the premier of my film at Atlanta's Plaza Theatre last night.

  By film I mean the one minute and forty second short that I originally wrote and shot for Sketchworks last month. And by premier I mean: "Hey Luke, you want to show my piece before the monthly Splatter Cinema film?" "Yeah, okay."

  So, yeah. Going on before the 1984 horror turkey "Ghoulies" isn't exactly opening at Cannes but nevertheless it does technically make me eligible for an Academy Award nomination.

The cast and crew of What Would You Do For a Klondike Bar?

  The piece, What Would You Do For a Klondike Bar?, was originally written a couple years back for Sketchworks but never made it into a show. It's a simple joke: What would you do for a Klondike Bar?" "I'd kill my wife for a Klondike Bar." "Well, here you go." Gory domestic crime follows.

  I've found that the more murder I put into a comedic script, the harder it is to get it accepted for stage. When I put on my own show last year, Crimes Against Nature, which consisted primarily of the scripts Sketchworks thought were too extreme to include in their main shows, I ended with Klondike and was pretty happy with the crowd response. So when I started shooting short films for Sketchworks last year, I put this script near the top of my list.

I demonstrate to Matt the proper way to stab Sasha Friedman (left) to death.

The important thing was that, given the deadline, this be a quick and cheap production. No using colored gels and constructing a Goblin-esque soundtrack in an attempt to mimic a Dario Argento feel. Just get in and out. We shot just a little over two hours and most of that was just rehearsal. Once the fake blood started covering actors, reshooting would be extremely difficult.

Matt after another application from Shane Morton's bloodhose

  It went more or less according to plan. Sasha Friedman, who starred in Crimes Against Nature along with George Faughnan, reprised her role as the wife and Sketchworks-regular Matt Bartholomew replaced Faughnan, who was unavailable, as the man driven to madness and murder by the temptation of a momentary pleasure. Atlanta horror jack-of-all-trades Shane Morton provided his bloodhose expertise.

  So a few days of furious editing and then a just-in-time delivery of the product for the show and...

  Denied.

 "It's just not right for the show."  Too much blood.

Fuck!

Too much blood my ass!

  

  So anyway... "Hey Luke, you want to show my piece before the monthly Splatter Cinema film?"

   "Yeah, okay."

  In this business, it's all about who you know.

Life In Atlanta

I love this town.

How Southern Incompetence Freed the Slaves

  One hundred and fifty years ago this week the first shot of the Civil War was fired at Fort Sumter.
  This is the beginning of a long sesquicentennial commemoration, so there will be plenty of time to hash over the various historical controversies in the four years to come. I would like to make just one observation at this point.
  The modern world should be grateful for the brief existence of the Southern Confederacy. Without the Confederacy, and its complete and utter political and military incompetency, the institution of slavery would probably never have been abolished. On the contrary, the slave holding states were probably just one southern-dominated Supreme Court decision away from extending the logic of the Dred Scott case in such a way that slavery would be the law of the land, south and north. The South, prior to succession, had at its disposal all the political muscle that was required to protect its interests.Only by abandoning these institutions to form the Confederate states did the South deliver up to the abolitionists the necessary political power and raw numbers that would be required to make the legislative and constitutional changes necessary to abolish slavery forever.
  Then, having put all its eggs into the lone basket of southern sovereignty, the South proceeded to wreck that as well by pursuing a military strategy that was out of sync with its resources as well as with its actual political objectives.
  The end of slavery in this nation stands as something of a miracle. The Constitution, as written by the Founding Fathers, is rigged to make the ending of the institution all but impossible. The successive political crises of the 19th century leading up to Lincoln's election make clear that the South was not prepared to give an inch on slavery and the North had neither the political muscle nor the focused will to make a sustained frontal assault on slavery, as it existed, in the South.
  Yet, in just a few years, slavery, as a legal institution, was gone.
  Only the South itself had the power to end slavery. Through its own pathetic incompetence, that's exactly what it did.
 

Amy Wetherby, Red Flags, and Female Genital Mutilation

  I'm going to discuss Amy Wetherby's talk last month at the Atlanta Autism Consortium. But before I do, I need to touch on the subject of female genital mutilation.
  Specifically female circumcision.
  Female circumcision is the removal of a girl's (and I say "girl" because it is usually performed on children) outer sexual organs including, but not limited to, the clitoris. This procedure is performed primarily in certain Islamic and African societies. By removing the primary source of physical sexual pleasure, the parents and religious leaders who engage in and sanction this practice hope that the girl will have less incentive to follow their physical desires and engage in sexual activity which would bring shame to their families. Of course this is an issue that that can be looked at from many angles but for the purposes of what is to follow let's understand the essence of what female circumcision is. It is parents, in collusion with enabling authority, and justified by ideology, attempting to suppress the natural inclinations of a child so that that child will be more likely to behave in a culturally prescribed manner. The child, for her own good, cannot be left to lure of her own essential nature.
  Now, hold that thought.

  Amy Wetherby is on the faculty of Florida State University where she is associated with something called the First Words Project, which is, as the name might suggest, another attempt to push the "diagnosis" of autism to a still ever-younger age. What Wetherby is currently working on is a test that would allow a "diagnosis" of autism straight down to the toddler level.
  Starting off her talk, Wetherby put on an impressive demonstration of her own compete intellectual mediocrity. Coming off as particularly overly-needy, she spent the first few minutes all but begging for someone to collaborate with her on some future project.  Finally, we got down to why she was here: detecting autism is in the very young. To that end, the First Words Project has developed a questionnaire for parents, sample questions of which were presented in her power point presentation. Such as: Is the child interested in objects? Does he collect things? Blah, blah, blah.
  Now this would be the point where, if I had decided to pursue my usual line of questioning, I would have popped in. One slide on the power point listed autism as consisting of entirely negative traits. One single graph used the word "deficit" at least seven times. No autistic- like trait could pass without the words "warning" or "red flag." Children who didn't get the diagnosis of autism "passed" the test.
  But, it turns out, according to Wetherby, that "diagnosing" autism at 18 months is "way harder than you can imagine." To be honest, Amy Weatherby, during her talk, came across as, at least to me, borderline stupid. So I actually would have no problem imagining that almost any project that would involve a moderate level of intellectual rigor might indeed be "way hard" for someone of Ms. Wetherby's intellectual caliber.
  Wetherby then proceeded to show a series of short videos of very young children seated with their mothers in clinical settings and asked the AAC audience to play, in essence, Find the Autism. As she showed each video, she would ask the audience questions like "Is there something different about this child?" and "Are we worried?" The audience, which was, to the best of my memory, about half filled with ABA and PBS clinicians, responded like they were sitting in for a taping of Oprah. Little gasps or soft cries of "He's not looking at his mother!" were elicited with each new video.
  Now among the "red flags" that the spectators of these cherry-picked mini-movies were supposed to look for was, of course, meeting eye gaze, but also things like whether the child was "overly focused."
  "Overly focused?"
  After the meeting I asked her about this. She told me this would include a child doing the same thing over and over in an hour period of play. So, I asked if the child playing with blocks for a full hour would count as overly focused. Her reply: It depends. If the child is working on building one thing then the answer would be yes. If the same child instead spent no more then ten minutes on any individual block construction then the answer would be no. So, I guess, "over-focused" really means "focused."
  One video moment that particularly stands out: a toddler sits at a table with his mother. A "researcher" (or whatever the woman in the video purports herself to be) puts a little wind-up spring-loaded toy in front of the child to walk across the table. The child reacts with delight. Next video: It's six months later. Same kid. The SAME toy is put in front of him. Rather than react with the same wonder to yesterday's news, the kid picks up the toy and brings it close to his face, seeming to, at least to my eyes, closely examine the toy's locomotion mechanism. Little gasps of horror from the audience.
  At this point Gregory Abowd, sitting directly in front of me, turned back to me and noted that this kid had the makings of a future engineer. His comments happened to precisely mirror my own take on the matter. In fact, for perhaps the first time, our thinking seemed to be precisely in sync.
  The two of us proceeded to push back on the interpretation that a child's display of precocious intellectual curiosity should be viewed as a "red flag" for anything. Wetherby's defense was to simply state that this sort of behavior is outside the normal "baseline" for a child in this age group.
  Barbara Dunbar at this point chimed in to agree with Wetherby. The behavior displayed by the child in the video was not in accord with what a child in that age group should be doing.
  Now the Floortime Atlanta website describes Barbara Dunbar as  a "licensed psychologist... (who) specializes in assessment and treatment of young children with developmental and learning disorders. Her focus is on working with children with autistic spectrum disorders and their families" so I guess she knows what she's talking about.
  "So," I asked her, gesturing to the child in the video, "what is he doing?"
  Dunbar could only shrug that she didn't know.
  She doesn't know what he's doing.
  But she knows he shouldn't be doing it.
  Then again, maybe, just maybe, Ms. Dunbar doesn't know what the fuck she's talking about after all.
  And so it went. Wetherby noted that they tried to gauge whether the child was engaging in repetitive behavior, another "red flag." Behavior was not counted as repetitive unless they saw it three times in a row. Well, that's simply not the definition of "repetitive," an everyday word that everyday people understand. If I write a paragraph about ABA and mention "ABA" in three successive sentences that is not necessarily repetitive. If I were to thrice-use a phrase like "primal reckoning," that most certainly would be. If there's a hard yardstick for measuring an easily understood but subjectively defined word like "repetitive" I sure would like to see it. Adding an arbitrary parameter (Why three? Why not two? Or four?) in and of itself doesn't accomplish anything. In her own talk, Wetherby used the words "red flag" so many times I gave up counting and on three completely separate occasions compared autism with cancer for the purposes of making exactly the same point. Whatever else you might say about her talk, it certainly was repetitive. That doesn't make her autistic. It just demonstrates that she's a meandering and uninteresting speaker.
  According to the FSU site, one of Ms. Wetherby's area of interests is "Diagnosis of language disorders." Perhaps this faculty member of the School of Communication Science and Disorders might consider seeking a grant to study tapes of her own sub-par power point presentation skills. It might be all around win-win for all concerned.
 
  And it just kept going. If the toddler shows interest in the wobbling of a spinning plate, look out, that's a danger sign! Now I'm no child expert like Barbara Dunbar but I would argue that a wobbling spinning plate is inherently interesting. It's a process that has a beginning, a middle, and an end with myriad variations that all stay within some very confined physical parameters. And it may be the perfect introduction for a youngster to unstable systems. A toddler repeatedly spinning a plate and observing the simultaneously chaotic and systematic way that it comes to rest is probably absorbing all manner of information about how the physics of the world he finds himself in works.
  Personally, I'd rather watch an hour of spinning plates wobble to their respective stops than listen to another five minutes of Wetherby's red flag bigotry. From what I gather from her presentation, it would seem that one of the primary symptoms of autistic "regression," which must be guarded against at all costs is simple intellectual curiosity about how things work. Well, it's easy to see how Amy Wetherby could engage in such a pathologicalization since, as demonstrated by the parade of speakers to come through the AAC, curiosity is clearly outside the "baseline" of the average behaviorist and their assorted allies.
  In the end, Amy Wetherby does what she can, for a buck, to suppress the natural inclinations of the child so that he or she will be more likely to behave in a more culturally prescribed manner. For their own good, Amy Wetherby and her kind cannot leave these children to the lure of their own essential nature.
  One may argue about exactly how slicing a young girl's clitoris off morally compares with the targeting and deliberate squashing of a young's boy's budding intellectual focus and natural curiosity about how the world works. But I think its fair say that those engaged in either practice are engaged in variations of the same tyrannical theme.
 
  Simply put, they are both monsters.

  Walt Guthrie

Danielle Trixie and Galas

 

  In the course of running this blog, I've made an amazing discovery. Based upon analyzing page hits, it would seem that pictures of Danielle Trixie are more popular than any of my opinions on the Marcus Center. Roughly 150 times more popular. I know, I know. It's weird. I have no explanation for it.

  So allow me to throw out my latest search engine bait. Danielle Trixie and Galas from a shoot last year.

My "Dear God No!" Experience. Part Four

  So after waiting around for about forty-five minutes with a tiny little bomb taped to my chest, the crew is finally ready to shoot.
  So, let's do the walk through. I'm urinating by the side of the building. (Really, Jimmy? Really? That's my one moment of acting glory in front of the camera? Pissing on the side of a building?) Finish. And as I'm zipping up and turning around. Bang! I catch a bullet in the chest.
  Wait...did the blood squib actually just go off? While we were doing the walk through? While the cameras weren't rolling?
  Squib detonator guy: "What? Oh sorry. Thought you were filming."

 Fuck!

   Director Jimmy Bickert gives me a shrug and points to the next guy to take my place. The soon-to-be immortalized "Dear God No!" IMDB credit listing for "Pissing guy" was now destined for someone other than myself.
  And my shot at stardom was gone as quickly and as capriciously as it had appeared..
  Or at least that's how it appeared at the time.

Playing Nice (At the Feb. 11 AAC Meeting)‏

Well, it seems I need to be more respectful.
  That at least appears to be the message coming from Don Mueller, executive director of the Marcus Center.
  But I'll get to that.

   I'm not going to have a lot to say about the last Atlanta Autism Consortium meeting. This is because Dr. Leslie Rubin, from the Morehouse School of Medicine, is, by far, the most boring and content-free speaker I've heard yet at a Marcus-related event. If any of you wanted to know what year CHoA moved from this building to that building or who suggested who for what position at Marcus in what year, well, this was for you. For anyone else, it was excruciating back-in-the-day inside-baseball.

  In the course of the two hour meeting I brought up exactly two points.
  The first was in response to Rubin's question about why the rates of autism diagnoses might be rising so dramatically. Rubin acknowledged that this phenomenon might be partially explained by a broadening of definitions or an increase in public interest, but then added that there had to be more to it than that. He provided no evidence that those answers might not be sufficient in and of themselves.
  I suggested that an explanation for the rise might lay with the fact that a lot more people get richer off an autism diagnosis now than in the past. Gregory Abowd offered at this point that there was nothing unusual about that and medical professionals of all stripes might have just as much financial incentive to find a false positive as a Marcus Center employee. I  was under the impression that cancers and tumors were the sort of things that actually showed up on medical scans and other physical tests. But what do I know? Although I didn't raise it at the time, I think far better counter-analogies would be not regular medical doctors but other "experts" who preyed on whipped-up social hysteria to discover hordes of previously unknown scapegoats. Medieval witchfinders and prosecutors uncovering satanic daycare sex-cults come readily to mind.

  My second point came after about the umpteenth time Rubin suggested that everyone in the room-- "researchers," parents and adults on the spectrum alike-- should devote themselves to working hand in hand toward a common goal. I observed that of the adults on the spectrum who attend the consortium meetings, the number who support more financing for either the Marcus Center or ABA in general is precisely zero. I asked, in a tone that I think reflected the non-rhetorical nature of the question, if anyone at that meeting knew if such an individual even existed. In the brief back and forth that followed no one came out and put me in my place with a simple factual refutation: "What about Joe Blow? He's had ABA and he's with us 100 percent!"
  If the therapies of the behaviorists are so effective, where are the adults who, having benefited from them, are now advocates for these same therapies? Their absence from this debate is extremely telling. Now, to my mind, there can be at least two possible reasons for this state of affairs.
  One, as stated, adults on the spectrum who have benefited from, and are now advocates for, behaviorist methodology exist only only as hypothetical constructs. At least locally.
  Two, those who work at the Marcus Center are so lazy, or disinterested in the humanity of the children who have been in their care that they make so much money off of, that they have simply failed to keep up with any of them once they have ceased to contribute income.
  In any case, pointing out the obvious --that a single solitary adult on the spectrum had never attended an AAC meeting to support the methods of the behaviorists-- was apparently simply too much for Mueller.
 It was shortly after this brief exchange that he brought up that it was incumbent upon everyone at the meeting to be respectful of everyone else. I then inquired as to the subtext of that statement. No subtext at all, Mueller assured.
  Oh yeah, except that there was.
  After the meeting I walked up to Mueller to inquire further as to the nature of the message he had intended to send with his remark.
  Turns out it was about me after all.
  Now it is true that I have suggested that the Marcus "researchers," and behaviorists in general, don't know what they're doing. I have stated explicitly that I believe that they are engaged in fraud. I also have noted that their language towards the autistic is indistinguishable from racism. But I have always done so, within the confines of the AAC, (as opposed to, say, here where I'll just come out and say that someone like James McPartland is a douchebag for his self-described abusive treatment of socially-isolated children) in what I believe to be a respectful manner. As I have previously stated, I have treated them like the scientists I know them not to be.
  Mueller suggested that he, Gregory Abowd, and myself should have a meeting. This meeting would, I gather, based upon what was said during our very brief talk, center around what subjects I may or may not be allowed to bring up in the future. The only two subjects that were brought up by myself at this meeting were 1) the Marcus Center might have a financial interest in over-diagnosing "ASD" and 2) that no adult on the spectrum has ever come to the AAC to support the methodologies of the Marcus Center or behaviorists in general. So, I gather, this is what being respectful means to Mueller: don't bring up points or ask questions that might suggest that the Marcus Center or the behaviorist community as a whole, or in part, is either incompetent or engaged in intellectual fraud. I, and my compatriots, should sit silently at the meetings while we are called every manner of derogatory name dressed up in medicalized techno-babble. We should accept every one of their crackpot theories (even the ones that contradict each other. Oh wait, that would be all of them) as they are presented and be grateful that there are people who have devoted their lives to curing us, even if they don't seem to have a clue as to who the fuck we are.
  In other words, in this equivalent of an interracial dialogue, they are free to call us "niggers," and we are to address them as "sir."
  That, I imagine, is what Mueller wants.  But maybe not.
  We're see. In any event, I've accepted Mueller's invitation for a meeting.
  I understand that it is possible that my banning from future AAC conferences will occur at this meeting. And that's fine. The continuously-stated purpose of the AAC meetings has been to bring together all voices who have an interest in issues related to the autistic spectrum. If I am banned, or have my privileges to speak or question curtailed, then it will be clear, to my people at least, that that claim is just one more fraud residing inside the walls of the Marcus Autism Center.

My "Dear God No!" Experience. Part Three

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Danielle Trixie In the Woods

  Danielle Trixie came through town on the first weekend of the year warm enough to do an outdoor shoot. Let me pander to you enough to put a couple of the shots here. And let me pander to the search engines by mentioning the word "naked" in close proximity to "Danielle Trixie."
  I'm beginning to figure out how things around here work.

My "Dear God No!" Experience. Part Two

Shane Morton takes aim in Dear God No!

  The thing to know about Shane Morton is that starring in and doing make-up and prop-work on a low budget biker vs. Bigfoot movie is just another day in the life of Shane Morton. Shane lives the kind of life an eight year old boy might plan for himself before being rudely slapped in the face with the cold fish of reality. Somehow, Shane never got that wake up call. 

  He plays in horror-themed rock bands, oversees an elaborate monthly comedy burlesque tribute to classic horror cinema at Atlanta's Plaza Theater, and exhibits and sells his own horror themed paintings at local horror art exhibitions. Last year he put together and oversaw the mammoth Atlanta Zombie Apocalypse, a complete re-imagining of what a commercial Halloween haunted house experience could be. You can find him applying his airbrush skills at the Atlanta Zombie Walk or presiding over one of the cooler floats at the Little Five Points Halloween Parade. And just last week Shane acted in and built sets for the 7 Stages' production of the first act of "House Von Dracul," a rock opera version of Bram Stoker's "Dracula."

 Waiting for the camera to roll.

  What makes all this possible is a loyal crew of like-minded hard-working genre devotees who show up again and again in Shane's projects and are inspired to go on and pursue their own. You can pick some of them out by the impressive tattoos of various Hammer and Universal horror icons that adorn significant percentages of their bodies, rendered, of course, by Shane.

Shane applies a bullethole

  Although Dear God No! is directed by Jimmy Bickert, there were a lot of familiar faces on the two days I attended the shooting.

Nick Morgan takes a long rest during a break between filming.

Screenwriter (for The Girl Next Door), Fangoria contributor and Atlanta horror perennial Philip Nutman on set where he'll eventually get shot in the chest.

    In a small film such as this everyone pitches in. Even doing things you weren't expecting to do. I showed up just intending to shoot some still shots. 

  Within the first hour I was having a small explosive taped to my chest.

My "Dear God No!" Experience. Part One

 

Shane Morton during a break in the filming of "Dear God No"

  Linda and myself spent a couple days in mid-November shooting publicity shots onset for the low budget 70s retro-exploitationer "Dear God No," a biker vs. Bigfoot movie. Shane Morton had shown me the script a few months earlier when we were working together on another project and even I had been taken aback by the grimy audacity of its envelope-pushing. There was no way I could say no to participating in a movie that had Bigfoot, bikers, machine gun-wielding strippers, Nazi experiments, and abused nuns, no matter how peripheral and insignificant that participation might end up being.

  If ever anyone is to say in the years to come "Wasn't there some weird fucked up biker-Bigfoot movie that shot here in town?" I will be able to proudly hold my head up and say "Oh yes. And I was there."

 

Danielle Trixie and Kimber Ray

A few pics of Danielle Trixie and Kimber Ray shot by Linda, Tom , and myself.

 

Find the Science, Continued

Gregory Abowd, who runs the Atlanta Autism Consortium over at Marcus is the one member of it unafraid (eager actually) to engage in debate over the legitimacy of what the behaviorists actually do. This might be because Abowd, who teaches at Georgia Tech and directs something called the Ubiquitous Computing Research Group Group, is not a behaviorist himself.

  He takes issue with my critique of the DSM IV's definition of autism in "See If You Can Find the Science" which I also sent out over the swansa list:

"I fully appreciate the skepticism with which you view this 'definition' of autism, but I think to make the discussion truly constructive, we need to consider what other options there are for describing a phenomenon that is not that well understood."

My response:

The option I propose is simple enough. Acknowledge that autism is a fuzzy category like black, white, straight, gay, conservative or any other descriptive term we use to define and categorize people in everyday conversation. When homosexuality was a "disorder" it was left to "experts" to decide just exactly what constituted a homosexual (was it acts or inclination of some mixture of both?) When homosexuality magically ceased being a DSM-defined disorder in 1973, the term, purged of its pseudo-scientific medical connotations, did not go away. People continued to use it in the non-exacting imprecise way that people use everyday language. In the end, just who is gay or who is a real Jew (or Christian) is a never-ending conversation engaged in by communities made up of those people and those who would be part of it.
  Stripping a community or society of its ability to define itself is an act of tyranny.
  It is ultimately up to the autistic community to  engage in this debate.

  And, by the way, who is it who doesn't understand this phenomenon? We on the spectrum understand it. We live with it everyday. At least we understand it as well as you have an understanding of how you think and the assorted quirks and inconsistencies that make up your life. It would be an easy, but relatively empty, exercise to define your non-autistic spectrum breed as a mere collection of deficits and disorders (non-systemic thinking, given easily to crowd psychology) in the same manner that the DSM has arbitrarily defined the autustic. But that would be to buy into the same lazy pseudo-scientific clap trap that the intellectual mediocrities at the Marcus Center and elsewhere engage in every day.

  In his reply to mine, Abowd asks that if the autistic community gets to define what they are, then do cancer patients get to define if they have cancer. Variations of this question come up all the time when you are arguing that the DSM's (any and all of its editions) definition of autism and its variations and subsets are empirically unverifiable confabulations.

My response:

Cancer simply is when cells go into uncontrolled growth. It is a clear and easily understood term. It is a condition that is subject to empirical verification.
  A discussion of how we recognize disease as disease might be a fascinating one were we to go down that path. Certainly there is a teleological aspect to it. The practitioners of the science of medicine, both past and present, are capable of conceiving of the body in it's platonically idealized form That which interferes with the various parts of the body achieving their purposeful functions is disease. This intellectual shortcut works pretty well because we, as a species, are in rough agreement as to both the nature and the desirability of possessing as fully functional a body as possible.
  The application of this same intellectual shortcut to the analysis and classification of behaviors, thoughts, inclinations, beliefs and other aspects of the mind is, on the other hand, a disaster. There is simply no reasonably objective method, nor can there be, for constructing or imagining a platonic ideal for acceptable and unacceptable manifestations of the mind. Time and time again we see that these models of normality are merely reflective of the specific values and prejudices of those constructing the models, hence the inclusion of so many sexual variations as "disordered" in the early editions of the DSM, and the gradual removal of them as the views of society towards sexual deviation has liberalized over the decades.
 

New Sketchworks Show Opens

Sketchworks' new show opens this Friday and runs for five weekends. I wrote two of the sketches and my short film "The Uninvited" will be premiering there as well. So, if you're not doing anything (And, really, it's February for God's sake. How much could you be be doing? All I do in February is stand around, shiver, stare at the calender and go "Is it still February? Fuck!") come on out.

Old Car

Just an old junker I snapped. And then photoshopped.

See If You Can Find The Science

Sometimes the simplest way to expose a fraud or pseudo-science is to simply put it out for everyone to see. 

  This is the current criteria for a diagnosis for autism from the DSM-IV. It's a simple read. Pay particular attention to the take-out menu set of instructions that kicks it all off.

 

Autistic Disorder

A. A total of six (or more) items from (1), (2), and (3), with at least two from (1), and one each from (2) and (3):

(1)  qualitative impairment in social interaction, as manifested by at least two of the following:

(a)  marked impairment in the use of multiple nonverbal behaviors such as eye-to-eye gaze, facial expression, body postures, and gestures to regulate social interaction

(b)  failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to developmental level

(c)  a lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interests, or achievements with other people (e.g., by a lack of showing, bringing, or pointing out objects of interest)

(d) lack of social or emotional reciprocity

(2)  qualitative impairments in communication as manifested by at least one of the following:

(a)  delay in, or total lack of, the development of spoken language (not accompanied by an attempt to compensate through alternative modes of communication such as gesture or mime)

(b)  in individuals with adequate speech, marked impairment in the ability to initiate or sustain a conversation with others

(c)  stereotyped and repetitive use of language or idiosyncratic language

(d) lack of varied, spontaneous make-believe play or social imitative play appropriate to developmental level

(3)  restricted repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests, and activities, as manifested by at least one of the following:

(a)  encompassing preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that is abnormal either in intensity or focus

(b)  apparently inflexible adherence to specific, nonfunctional routines or rituals

(c)  stereotyped and repetitive motor mannerisms (e.g., hand or finger flapping or twisting, or complex whole body movements)

(d) persistent preoccupation with parts of objects

B. Delays or abnormal functioning in at least one of the following areas, with onset prior to age 3 years: (1) social interaction, (2) language as used in social communication, or (3) symbolic or imaginative play.

C. The disturbance is not better accounted for by Rett’s Disorder or Childhood Disintegrative Disorder.

Now, keep in mind that this is, for all practical purposes, the official definition of autism. At least six items from three lists with at least one from two of them and two from the remainder. Oh, and also one of these other three things. And also if it's not this thing over here.

  Now, try and imagine what empirical methodology could have possibly been used to  establish such an arbitrarily precise definition of who is and is not autistic. But before you do, let me help you a bit more.

  Psychologists and behaviorists have no agreed upon theory as to what the underlying cause of this is so there's no working backwards to reverse engineer the answer. Autism is defined  as a syndrome, a collection of symptoms. But, because a central theory is lacking as to what autism is, how can the individual  symptoms eminating from that cause be determined in advance? If you don't know what, ultimately, the set is, how do you, empirically, arrive at any sort of reliable method  of determining what the members of the set are?

  What empirical method was used to establish the DSM-IV's diagnostic test for autism?

  The answer's pretty clear, isn't it?

  

Shooting "The Uninvited"

 I spent last Saturday afternoon and evening directing "The Uninvited," a short film of one of my comedy scripts for the upcoming Sketchworks show. The use of intense, unsourced, and unnatural colored light is intended to invoke the Italian horror genre of the 1970s, specifically Dario Argento, and, super-specifically, his film "Suspiria."
  Tom Robertson was gracious enough to spend his afternoon taking shots of the making of this endeavor.

Chris Gray (center) and Stephanie Northrup (in bed) go over lines while Director of Photography Matt Green (second from the right) checks the monitor.

Stephanie confronts the Grim Reaper (Chris).

Herschel Horton works the second camera.

Susan, myself, and the two Deaths (Chris and Mike Stiles) go over blocking for the next shot. 

Matt watching the action on the monitor.

I demonstrate for Chris how Death should put the moves on Stephanie.