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?