Musician Jerome Ellis on This American Life

[kestrell]

I heard a piece of music by Ellis during the Alt-Text as Poetry workshop in which I participated yesterday, and one of the instructors mentioned this performance.
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Time Bandit This American Life
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/713/made-to-be-broken/act-one-10

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

I have not — could be fun to watch together

I did read this essay “The Royal Treatment: Temporality and Technology in The King's Speech” by Jared S. Richman from Disability Studies Quarterly.

Abstract:

This essay examines the intersections of class, technology, and disability manifest within The King's Speech. It argues that the film obfuscates modern scientific and critical understanding of communication disorders by rendering stuttering as a moral failure rather than by attempting to understand it as a socially constructed condition contingent upon established societal and temporal norms. The essay identifies the social codes enforcing correct and eloquent speech that create a political and social climate for "compulsory fluency"—the socially imperative verbal facility promoted as necessary to participate in public life. Crucially and somewhat ironically, with its emphasis on the nobility of the title character, the film sublimates an inherent tension between media technology and the lingering social stigma surrounding disability. The King's Speech thus situates compulsory fluency as an essential component of modern kingship. By reading the film's strategic deployment of radio technology alongside its troubled representation of class and his fraught invocation of Shakespeare's Hamlet, the essay reads attitudes towards vocal disability within the context of royalty, patriarchy, and national identity. Ultimately, the essay locates The King's Speech as a film whose image of modern kingship grounds itself upon a notion of imperial authority as technologically constructed but ultimately disabled by a national fantasy of historical wholeness in the fabricated kinship between a monarch and his people.

https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/7258/5810

[kestrell]

Well, that's what I was afraid of but, on the other hand, the history of media tech is one of my pet subjects, and it would be interesting to compare/contrast the image of kingship in that movie with the image of Bidan as president in a democracy where disability rights were definitely part of his platform and his public speech.

Samuel Jackson has also discussed how he got into acting because he had a stutter, which he reenacts in the movie The Kingsmen, but it's also kind of ew, because he is the meglomaniac villain and his henchwoman is an Asian assassin with prosthetic feet, so it's doubly ew.

[jesse_the_k]