About description

Very belatedly I’m becoming aware of the importance of image description in social media, a courtesy that allows people with sight loss to engage better, especially with image-centric platforms such as Instagram. Either one can rely on the platform’s inbuilt object recognition technology, or write a brief description of the image, which sight-impaired users will be able to access with text-to-speech software. Of course, the principle has long been used in audio-description for films, and in audio guides in art galleries and it’s certainly a good way to make such art forms more accessible, although inevitably it has its limitations; it can tell you what’s depicted but the wobbly heft of a Rubens thigh, or the wild, mad intensity of a Van Gogh yellow may be harder to put across. 

There is art, of course, where such subtleties aren’t really the point; where the whole reason for the work being there is something that can be wholly encapsulated in a paragraph. Indeed, the object itself is secondary to the idea. In fact, maybe this could be a useful rule of thumb, a sort of Turing test for art. If an image description can entirely and satisfactorily communicate a work of art to someone who can’t see said work, then that work can be categorised as a piece of conceptual art.

[image description: black-and-white photograph of a white porcelain urinal at a three-quarters angle, signed along the bottom left rim “R. MUTT 1917”, against a black background]

About subtitles

Following on from the previous post: if stupidity is going to be lauded and weaponised, there will inevitably be overt hostility towards any manifestation of knowledge or learning. I just happened across a radio report about how few showings there are of subtitled films for deaf and hard-of-hearing  cinema-goers; a representative of the cinema trade body said that if (hearing, presumably) people go into one of these showings by mistake, they often demand their money back. Let’s be clear, these aren’t foreign language films with subtitles; they’re your standard cineplex blockbusters, Disney, Marvel, whatever, that just happen to have a thin strip across the bottom with text representing the dialogue. You don’t need to read it if you can hear the soundtrack. But the very presence of stuff that *can* be read is apparently enough to ruin some people’s enjoyment.

PS: As Bong Joon-ho, the director of Parasite, says: “Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.”

PPS: Sandra Garcia in the New York Times: “For people who dislike subtitles, common complaints have been that they distract from the action onscreen, are hard to focus on, or that reading them can feel like work if a plot is complicated.”

About the Elephant Man

A new TV drama about the life of Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, has run into trouble because the actor portraying Merrick is not disabled; indeed, it’s been compared to the practice of white actors blacking up. The real-life Elephant Man probably had Proteus syndrome, a rare condition that affects fewer than one in a million people, but nobody appears to be suggesting that they need to cast a Proteus sufferer; as far as I can tell, all that matters is that the performer - unlike the actor Charlie Heaton, the one who’s actually got the gig - has some sort of disability.

I’m a little uneasy with this, mainly because it appears to set up a rigid binary divide, disabled actors on one side, non-disabled on the other, and all parts are to be allotted accordingly. That said, the actor Adam Pearson, who has called the casting of Heaton “cripping-up”, has neurofibromatosis, which was Merrick’s assumed diagnosis until the mid-1980s, so maybe he has more of a right to it than, say, an actor with Down syndrome, or a wheelchair user; although that would imply some sort of hierarchy of disabilities. And the alternative to that is a situation where characters such as Quasimodo, Long John Silver and Tiresias would be off-limits to the non-disabled, but the one-legged Silver might be played by someone with the standard complement of limbs, but deaf, or epileptic, or... take your pick.

I do get it - opportunities for actors with disabilities are already limited, so it looks like a kick in the teeth to make an able-bodied actor pretend. And, yes, there’s an equivalent situation for ethnic minorities (more of that later). But we may be getting to a situation where political sensitivity leaves some roles essentially unplayable, leaving important stories forever untold. At least Merrick’s tale has already been told, and superbly, which raises another question, of why film and TV seem insistent on remaking things less well. I’m not sure whether John Hurt’s portrayal of Merrick should now be seen as unacceptable, the disabled cousin to Olivier’s Othello, but it moved me to tears the first time I saw it and it does the same today. What do you think?



PS: In Twitterland, Archie Valparaiso brings up this comedic classic and I wonder whether it too would now be verboten:

Savant garde

Small Boo and I had a pot of tea in a hotel foyer yesterday. There were a couple of musicians on duty; piano and violin, not terribly good, but not so bad they were driving people out.

As they bumbled through 'Strangers in the Night', a boy of about eight, evidently with learning difficulties, wandered over to the piano. He began conducting the music, wild and unco-ordinated, but keeping pretty good time. The other guests looked around, slightly nervous about how to react, not wanting to be seen as voyeurs at some sort of freak show. But they soon relaxed; the kid was clearly having a whale of a time, and the pianist was enjoying the visuals as well. After a while, the boy grew tired of being Karajan, and started dancing; then he did a few unsteady handstands for his new fanbase, pausing only to lap up the applause.

The musicians took a break, and the boy edged closer to the keyboard. If this were Hollywood (I'm thinking Laura Linney for the hard-pressed, widowed mother; maybe Hugh Jackman as the playboy businessman who's redeemed by his love for the unlikely pair), he would have serenaded us with a serene Bach variation, or maybe Rachmaninov with all the squiggly bits.

But it's not Hollywood, is it? The youngster thumped the keys aimlessly and atonally for about 10 seconds, before a waitress put down the piano lid, and politely but firmly led him away.

Three pieces of BKK

1.
Sighted in a large bookshop in Bangkok: a soundproof booth, in which blind and partially sighted people can listen to audio books in the same way sighted readers can browse the shelves.

A good idea, I thought: but how do blind people know it's there?

Ah! A braille sign!

Inside the booth.

2.
The best hot chocolate in town is to be found in Angelina, on the third floor of the Central Chidlom department store. The cakes are good too. And you can see the Benetton concession from there. If you like that sort of thing.

3.
Sighted at the entrance to Soi Cowboy, one of Bangkok's three main, ahem, entertainment districts, at about 6pm, Valentine's Day. Two bargirls get out of a taxi, presumably on their way to work. The second, as she steps out, desperately tries to pull down her skirt, so as not to expose her knickers. That, of course, would be unladylike.

Repressed memory of toe-curling humiliation for the day

A few years ago, encouraged by my GP to lose a bit of flab, I entered a charity 10K race. Having, in the distant past, worked for a major running magazine, I had access to training plans for events of all distances, and sedulously applied myself to the mix of speed days, endurance days and rest days prescribed by the experts.

It was deviating from the plan that brought about my abject humiliation. One day I was scheduled to go for a bit of endurance, which usually involved walk/jogging to a grassy expanse round the back of the Purley Way, almost under the shadow of the mighty IKEA chimneys. Once there, I would do two circuits of the common at medium pace, then jog back slowly to warm down.

Possessed by an excess of enthusiasm, I decided to do three circuits, and then run back at the same pace. I realised something was wrong as I was crossing a road halfway home, when I became afflicted with stitches on both sides. I made it to the pavement, and did the most dangerous thing possible - I stopped. It was only then that I realised I hadn't really been breathing for the last couple of minutes. I stood, gasping for air, feeling the veins in my head and neck throbbing as if they wanted to escape. My legs started shaking and hurting. I felt sick, but nothing wanted to come up. I bent over, just in case.

"I must look a bloody mess," I thought. Having occasionally caught sight of myself in the mirror during my rare excursions to the gym, I knew that excessive activity usually turned my face a vibrant shade of raspberry. Sweat splashed onto the pavement as I retched saliva and tried to acquire some oxygen from somewhere, anywhere. And then I heard the tapping sound.

I'd pulled up by the left-hand fork of a T-junction, and a minibus had stopped there, waiting for a gap in the traffic. With some difficulty I got myself into a vaguely upright position and turned to look at the vehicle, to see whether it was the source of the noise. And then I realised it wasn't just any old minibus.

It was the blue bus.

It was the blue bus that belonged to the school for children with learning difficulties.

The special school.

And they were in the blue bus, tapping on the window and pointing. And they were laughing hysterically. They were pointing and laughing. At me.


And as I stood there, damp, hot, bedraggled, aching, gasping, I felt that maybe this was some sort of karmic payback for all the times I'd thoughtlessly mocked someone with words like "spaz" or "mong" or "flid" or "joey". And I was suddenly thankful that my face had already gone red.

"Did you have a good run?" asked Small Boo when I got home. I told her what had happened, hoping for a little sympathy.

Three hours later, she'd almost stopped laughing.