Book Review

Neil Marcus has been a part of the advocacy for disability rights and self expression for over thirty years. Many students and instructors in disability studies programs have met him in some form, perhaps through his film "Storm Warning," his iconic poem "Disability Country," his appearances at performance events or his collaboration in 2010 with Petra Kuppers to produce the book Disabled Poetics: A Love Story. Marcus' latest endeavor in print Special Effects: Advances in Neurology is actually a return to the past.

Special Effects (2011, Totally Disabled Productions) is actually a collage of material centered mainly around issues of Marcus periodical of the same name, published during the 1980's. Interspersed with cuts from these issue are letters, drawings, newspaper headlines, pictures, advertisements all related in some way to disability. In Marcus words:

The tools of my Art.My brain.A zerox machine.marazines.razor blade.scotch tape. Paper cutter.black felt pen.stamps and envelopes (so I can mail it out) a Typewriter.good eieas.people to talk to.A desk.A floo.and a mailbox c/o neil marcus SPECIAL EFFECTS 2550 dana st Berkeley, ca 94704*

Special Effects functions as a record both of Marcus' own awaking as an individual situated in a society that has witnessed the first stirrings of disability rights in the Independent Living movement and the passage of ADA, and of national attitudes towards disability in society. Moving to Berkeley, the cauldron of disability rights activity, to attend college in the early 1970's Marcus was perfectly situated to observe, take part in and write about these changes. What marks Marcus' work as exceptional is the attitude that he takes towards his work and towards life and, despite a liberal dose of tongue-in-cheek, an unflinching joie de vivre.

Growing up in Ojai, California Marcus often felt embarrassed to go out in public and "about having a disability and 'being different.' I didn't want people to wonder about me or if- stare or treat me differently. I felt better being put of public view. I didn't know any other disabled people and didn't see any alternatives" but when he was seventeen "I thought it best for me to strike out on my own and let the world see ne. I knew I didn't want to feel alone and isolated all of my life…"what I learned from coming out of the closet was that I really had no business being in the closet in the first place."

Today, looking today at such collections such as Victoria Lewis' Beyond Victims and Villains, Kenny Fries' Staring Back or most recently, Bartlett, Black and Northen's Beauty is a Verb, it is easy to forget that when Marcus began his newsletters, the concept of disability culture and disability art was almost non-existent. To most appearances, Marcus faced a tabula rasa. A 1984 interview included in the book gives some sense of what he was up against.

INTERVIEWER: What is this 'disabled art" you talk and write about?

Neil: Its not what you might think it is. It is art that when I look at it reminds me of my culture the culture that I come from, the diabled,physically different,handicapped on. And it doesn't look like a present day hospital nor is it flowers and kittens.Disabled art shows how vibrant life, in all its forms,is. It is soaring,realistic,inspiring,and very normal.I Take that back about the cats and hospitals. They can be vibrant too.

INTERVIWER: In not sure i understand.

Neil; How many wheelchair operas have you seen? Heard any speech impaired radiox announcers? Blind mechanics? Spastic waiters? They are all a part of all of us and they are going to emerge from my art. Disabled art is a new concept.

Special Effects, then, represents Marcus' search for what constitutes disability culture and art. He incorporates headlines ("For Paraplegic, Acting in a Film is the Easy Part"), news articles (mostly truncated), original art, letters, mimeographed photographs, poems. One interesting example is a line of mimeographed leaves that appear to be from a botany text. Beneath, the leaves are the labels indicating their shapes: spatulate, elliptical, palmately lobed. The text is tells the anecdote of a scholar leading friends through the forest. The friends were pointing out to the scholar the great beauty of the forest with its many varied textures and shapes in the leaves and trees. "'Yes," said the scholar 'I see this most wonderous collection of antastic shapes, each so different and so specially unique.BUT be careful how you name them friends, lest the label become more a focus than the beauty.'" Beneath the text the row of leaves reappears but it is cut across the top and bottom. Beneath it are labels such as invalid, retarded, spastic, and dystonic.

Although Special Effects more or less covers the decade of the 1980's, there is no linear narrative per se. It is not a book that one reads sequentially cover to cover. The value comes both from the collage like effect of what the author has pulled together and from individual pieces within this collage that arrest the attention of various individuals for no predictable reason. For example, who has heard of the Moonwalker Club?

first one started in Georgia. I guess you could say, amerces first disabled club. it caught on fast. i mean isn't it EVERYBODYS dream to fly through the air suspended on rubber ropes hung from the roofbeams. A disabled guy thought it up.he was in a chair and he wanted so bad to dance . in the nightclubs. One day he and some friends got there early before opening and he talked the owner into lettin him fool around. and this is what he came up with.

It is bits like this that are likely to engage readers and send them leafing through the book for more shards that contribute, in their totality, to building the disability culture that Marcus speaks of. It is not through any through argumentation but through the accretion of all the instances of disability culture around us, that Marcus is able to build his case. And after all, isn't that the way art is supposed to work? Special Effects: Advances in Neurology is available through Publications Studio.