We all have our personal monsters…
Sometimes we just need to face them…
And in facing them we find out how frail, vulnerable,
and frightened our “monsters” really are…
Let’s go for a walk and a chat, shall we, my little monster and me?
http://helensartblog.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/ink-sketch-facing-my-monster/
by Eddie Rodriguez / Cracked.com
In real life, people don’t suffer freaky events like getting struck by lightning or getting part of their brain removed and then suddenly find themselves with new superpowers, like heat vision or flight. However, people do apparently suffer freaky events and then gain the ability to do art.
It’s a poorly understood phenomenon, but according to the experts who’ve studied them, these people aren’t just messing with us.
Quick: Picture in your mind what your neighborhood looked like when you were 4 years old. Even better, try to draw a picture of it, in fine detail. Hell, most of us couldn’t do the latter with a room we saw five minutes ago. To unlock that ability, apparently all we need is a severe, life-threatening fever to jar it loose.
When 30-something Italian immigrant Franco Magnani arrived in San Francisco in the 1960s, he came down with just such a fever — to the point that he sometimes became delirious and had seizures. In the aftermath, Magnani started having insanely vivid dreams/memories about his childhood hometown of Pontito, Italy. The man hadn’t visited the place in more than 30 years, but his dreams were intense and filled with detail, as if his seizures had somehow surfaced a bunch of old image files off his brain’s hard drive, perfectly intact.
Magnani became so engulfed by the memories that he started to draw and eventually paint them. If the below paintings look like random pictures of streets and alleys you could see on anybody’s wall, you have to see them next to a photo of the real scene to understand why they’re remarkable. The photo is on the left. The painting on the right was painted from a three-decade-old memory from early childhood:
Can we call “Photoshop” on a painting?
Again, Magnani did not have that photo to work from – that was taken later, probably by somebody trying to find out if he was full of shit. And keep in mind, painting at all was totally out of character for him, given that he had been a cook in Italy and a woodworker when he came to San Francisco. Yet even though he’d never so much as held a brush in his life, he was suddenly overcome with an urge to paint these scenes, with as much detail as his memory provided him. Yes, there are variations in the pics — for instance when he paints the view from his old bedroom window, he’s remembering it being zoomed out a bit:
Via Exploratorium.edu
Photo, again on the left.
What you’re seeing is the product of what had become an obsession. According to one of his friends, Magnani was known to leave his favorite bar mid-drink if he got a memory that he wanted to paint. Later, when word of Magnani’s story got out, doctors said that what he had was probably “temporal lobe epilepsy,” which is known to sometimes create an obsessive personality in sufferers.
Via Francomagnani.com
Photo on left.
When Magnani’s work was eventually shown in art galleries, it was put up next to photo comparisons of Pontito taken from the same angles as his paintings. You can see the result for yourself.
And to think, all he had to do was have himself a fever and a couple of seizures. We’re betting any aspiring artist will take that deal over three years of putting up with stuck-up assholes at art schools.
Read more: 6 People Who Gained Amazing Skills from Brain Injuries | Cracked.com http://www.cracked.com/article_19504_6-people-who-gained-amazing-skills-from-brain-injuries.html#ixzz1f7lIVi6r
Steve Pieters is one of the few surviving individuals with AIDS since 1982. He is also a minister, a therapist, and a member of the Los Angeles Gay Men’s Chorus.
In November of 1985 Steve was interviewed by Tammy Faye Bakker of PTL Ministries; at the time a worldwide network for Christian broadcasting. It was a groundbreaking interview reaching millions who otherwise might never have heard his story, and that of many gay religious people like him – dealing with a life threatening illness in the face of societal indifference and, often, outright rejection, while reconciling what it means to be gay man of faith.
Tammy Faye Bakker received a great deal of criticism for doing this interview. Her reply was succinctly summed up in this way, “I believe Jesus loves all of us, and so should I.”
Below is Part 1 of this amazing interview.
To view Part 2 and Part 3 please go to the YouTube playlist link:
http://www.youtube.com/user/helenofirvine#g/c/F72AEC859D5EE680
by Susan Carpenter / LA Times
“I Am J” by Cris Beam; Little, Brown (326 pages, $16.99, ages 14 and up)
When individuals identify with the opposite gender instead of their biological sex, it is often misunderstood, vilified or worse.
Although transsexualism is often confused with homosexuality, it is really about being born with body parts that don’t match an individual’s gender perspective. It is a situation that sometimes leads to gender reassignment surgery. Invariably, it’s fraught with conflict, as transsexual individuals wrestle with their self identity and struggle to fit into a society that prefers clear-cut gender roles.
The new young adult novel “I Am J” by Cris Beam is a wonderful addition to the few novels that have dared to tackle a subject that has long lived in the cultural margins. Transsexualism is a natural if unusual subject for young-adult literature, geared as it is to teen readers whose bodies are already forcing them to think about budding sexuality. “I Am J” is a tender, surprisingly relatable story that is at its core about a girl who is struggling to figure out who she is.
Her life is just more complicated than it is for most 17-year-old New Yorkers. The only daughter of a Jewish father and Puerto Rican mom whose dreams for her include college, “a white dress and a three-tiered cake,” J was named Jenifer by her parents, but she knew from age 3 that she was really a “he.”
“He had been surprised whenever anyone thought he was a girl,” Beam writes. “He was clearly a boy; everybody else was just wearing the wrong glasses.”
Referred to as “he” throughout the book, J wears multiple shirts to disguise the breasts that “pushed forth from his ribs like animals, fisting their way up from beneath.” He suppresses his appetite hoping it will stop his period. But nothing works to deny his biology as effectively as his mind. His brain is male. It’s only his body that isn’t.
J hasn’t told anyone he is trans. The unfortunate side effect of that decision is that everyone who knows him knows him as a girl and thinks he is lesbian because he is romantically interested in women and dresses like a guy.
An altercation with his best friend prompts J to skip school. Confronted by his mother over the truancy, J then runs away from home. Both, it turns out, are positive steps toward reconciling the realities of his female physicality with his self-identification as a male. He meets a woman he suspects was once a man who tells him about a shelter for homeless youth. That shelter helps enroll him in a school for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender teens and gets him counseling so he can begin the process of physically transitioning his gender, including testosterone injections. J’s desire for the substance he calls “T” is “made from equal parts shame and need.”
J is ashamed to tell his parents he is transsexual or to take more active steps to become more male. He fears he will be disowned by a mother and father who have made no secret of the financial sacrifices they have made for him throughout his life. When he finally does reveal his transgender status to his mother, she says he is selfish, but she arranges for J to stay with a friend because she doesn’t think J’s working-class dad would be as understanding as she is.
Beam wrote 2008′s “Transparent,” a nonfiction book for adults about transgender teenagers. In her author’s note at the end of this book, she said she wrote “I Am J” to speak to transsexuals, not about them, in a manner that voiced their emotional, rather than historical, truths. Beam said she was inspired by volunteering at a continuation high school in Los Angeles called Emphasizing Adolescent Gay/Lesbian Educational Services, also known as EAGLES, and the teenage transsexual daughter she adopted as a result.
Beam’s deep understanding of the emotional truths of transsexualism is clear. She writes with such intimacy and affection for the subject that, on some levels, reading “I Am J” feels voyeuristic. It is certainly eye-opening as to the gender-bending social order within the LGBT community and the challenges of transsexual individuals, such as which public bathroom to use.
“What was a person anyway? The sum of the parts? Some of the parts?” J asks himself. “Was a person just the things he said he was, or also the things he denied?” These are some of the larger questions “I Am J” raises in an empathic story that humanizes what has long been demonized.
(c) Copyright 2011 – Los Angeles Times
Read more: http://www.kansascity.com/2011/03/09/2710196/a-teenager-struggles-with-gender.html#ixzz1GGyrx4cv
Harriet Walker: Women are just not taken seriously enough. What hope do we have of getting into boardrooms when the focus is so much on our bodies?
Pity the women – those poor hapless fruitloops who got themselves born into the wrong body. The body that bends weak minds to its own devious impulses; the body that finds more comfort in bed than in bench presses; the body that has within it the miraculous capacity to produce life and little people.
Scorn them too, for their inability to make it on their own: for their perennial reliance on handouts and sympathy from the lads and the law-makers. They just can’t help it: any endeavour they turn their little minds to goes sour or explodes in their faces, singeing so many false eyelashes and peroxide coifs.
This week has seen some of the most vast and varied comments about women and their status, all of them pointing to one thing: that we cannot get it right, no matter what. There were shrieks of disapproval at the suggestion that Cheryl Cole, Our Lady of Glamour, Domestic Tragedy and Tropical Diseases, might have put on some weight. This would not be an issue – because it’s trendy to decry women for being too thin as well, don’t forget – but it’s made Cheryl’s lovely little face go all puffy and funny. For shame Chezza! It’s your job to keep that phiz in good nick; what else do you do to occupy your time?
Then there’s model Irina Shayk, this month’s cover star of Sports Illustrated, whose undulating surfaces cause men and women alike to go a bit dizzy, except eeeek! as one tabloid points out, she’s only gone and left the house without shaving her legs. How disgusting, the golden glint of follicles on her otherwise flawless and mile-high legs. Honestly, it’s enough to put you right off gawping at her breasts.
Women, eh? They get all these opportunities and they still mess it up. That’s why the Government is seeking to help them get jobs and fit in with normal people. We all know it’s dangerous having dissatisfied minorities in our midst – not that you have anything to fear from women. They couldn’t organise a Tupperware party in a suburban living room. Or they could, but they’re either too weak from hunger to bother, or so fat that they don’t need Tupperware in the first place. What leftovers?
“Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires courage.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
