13:26, 12/11/2006

Disambiguation part 3

Well hello and welcome to my weblog. My second blogversary has just passed and it's become customary (at least around these parts) to write a post of reintroduction at this time of year; a sort of verbiage-laden reboot. Some of you will know all this, some of you won't.

So this is the weblog of a music-playing, website-designing, Second Life-living, cat-loving, Davids Lynch and Bowie-worshipping, Murakami-reading, Warhol-obsessed, Doctor Who-nerdy, Comics-drawing, Spurs-following, booze-friendly transgendered z-list celebrity.

Yes, that sounds simple, I know, but I play so many different personae that even I get somewhat lost sometimes, so I thought it would be good to give you a sort of spotter's guide to the multiple personae of K. Remember, we're all the same person. It's just that some of the hats we wear are more fabulous than others.

Exhibit 1: Miss K

What About Us
"What About Us" - self portrait, Sept 25th 2006

You know about this one. She comes onto this weblog every other day or so and spouts some kind of rubbish that some people seem to enjoy reading.

Miss K's been alive pretty much as long as I remember, though she was only named as such when I joined Six Inch Killaz, the somewhat notorious transgendered punk band that flickered moderately brightly in the mid-to-late nineties before self-destructing spectacularly in a cocktail of drugs, booze, apathy and cheap makeup.

I'm part of the way through writing up my recollections of the Six Inch Killaz years right here on this journal. Even if I say so myself, it's a hell of a good read. Treat yourself.

The Killaz in pre self-destructive days
Six Inch Killaz, April 1996. Photo by Pearl.

Apart from the musical past, I have some renown as an online tranny of rather long standing. The draGnet has actually been going for a rather embarrassingly long time, first opening it's rudimentary HTML doors back in 1995. As I mentioned, this is the beginning of year 3 of its incarnation as a weblog.

Before that, it was a fairly standard (if nicely designed) jumble of photos, stories and links. One day I might make it available again, if it's not too embarrassing.

(Actually scratch that, I just looked, and it's way too embarrassing!)

The draGnet weblog has been successful (for me at least) as it is a great outlet for the thoughts that used previously to buzz emptily around my cranium before fizzling out. The blog is a spirit trap for my ideas and musings; things that would have got lost before I started writing regularly.

Why make it public, you ask? When a private journal would serve as well? Well, of course there's an element of narcissism present in most things a tranny gets up to, but also, you the dear audience I cherish so much are fantastic to bounce things off. That's why I have the comments almost always enabled despite the regular and irritating comment spam attacks.

So this weblog isn't just about make up tips and gong out (in fact it's hardly about that at all). It's about all of me. Like this post. See? It's all circular.

The same can be said of my Flickr photostream, which I use to host the photo bandwidth of this blog. it's mostly not photos of me (although all those pictures are there too), but photos of my life in general. this is important to me. I am a transgendered person, but that's not all that defines me. All my online and offline presence attempt to define the entirety of myself, warts and all.

And by the way, I was the first tranny on Flickr, along with my good friend Erika. And we formed its first tranny group, Trannyflickr, together back in 2004, just before the start of this weblog. If you haven't already, come and join in. It's good fun.

This blog and its related artefacts is a place where I'm starting to grow old now. And I feel comfortable doing that. I hope you'll stay for the ride.

Exhibit 2: Kaoru

Camber Sands, self portrait, Sept 29th 2006

On the other hand, here's the bugger who's been the host body to Miss K since year dot. Handsome if weird looking chap isn't he?

If you like, this is the more professional face of my character. Incredible but true. So apart from giving birth to the author of this blog, what do I do.

Well, predictably, music comes high on the list. I've been in two notable (and several unmentionable) bands in my time.

Currently, I'm plowing a dark and rocking furrow with my best friend Jennie, in Deathline, a band we started earlier this year. We're two gigs in and it's going really well so far. And I will make no apology in continuing to bore the socks off everyone with the ongoing story of Deathline on these very pages.

And if I ask you to come to our gigs, it's not just hollow requests. We literally live and die by the amount of audience we can attract in the early days. So please swell our friendspace on MySpace and our audience on live nights!

DEATHLINE
Deathline photographed May 2006 by Johanna Mostert

Previous to Deathline, Jennie and I were both in Electric Shocks. We were moderately successful - our album, Wild Dog Setting penetrated the lower reaches of the indie charts and our single Trouble Gun was played a couple of times on John Peel's last shows (which was almost a religious moment for me).

Before it fizzled out, The Shocks was great fun. We played a lot of gigs, notably supporting The Darkness in Amsterdam, Electric Six in Coventry and Birmingham. These were to four figure crowds. Amazing experiences.

It was when bands that supported us like Bloc Party and our friends Art Brut started overtaking us that we realised it wasn't going to happen for us. The Shocks folded in late 2005. Amoeba-like, we split in two, the others going off to form the fantastic Animal Maths.

Here's the Shocks in our prime. The video for Trouble Gun:

Electric Shocks - Trouble Gun

Film-making is one of the things I do professionally. I directed the above video and my style can basically be described as "low tech". I started off as an experimental film maker at Goldsmiths in the 90's, splicing Super-8 and scraping cash together to buy bin ends of 16mm stock for my work.

The rough aesthetic still survives today, when, like everyone else, I shoot on broadcast quality DVCAM and edit using Final Cut Pro. My work still feels like it's been slashed together for 20p on a hand cranked Bolex camera. Luckily my commercial clients seem to like that. I do mainly corporate video, which I can't show here (not that you'd want to see it). in fact we're shooting one next week for a chain of estate agents in South West London. Yes, my life really is that glamorous.

We've also started making little comedy shorts for the Internet for one of our clients. You know, viral type stuff. You can see a few here.

But my main line of work is web design and development - the video stuff is like light relief. My company, which I own with four other partners is called The Guild, and we have a really crap website, which I need to redesign very very badly. In a way we're the victims of our own success. We're usually so busy that we don't have time to think of niceties like making our website look good, or hiring people to help us be less busy. Ack!

We're quite proud of our recently completed redesign of the British Film Institute website. that's almost all my own work. It was hell, but rewarding when you see it there.

One of the areas we're growing into is offering professional design and development services in Second Life. We've been consulting and building for Languagelab.com, an unique and exciting new language learning school n SL. I did their corporate identity, which I'm rather proud of. We're also talking to another client about a major inworld build which is going to be very cool. Our key strength is in integrating SL with commercial strength web-based back end systems, btw, if you need to go and talk to your CTO about us :)

But really Second Life, as you all glaze over, is where it really comes together...

Exhibit 3: Kei Mars

Gassing with Kisa
Kei Mars, gassing with Kisa in Second Life

Kei Mars is my public identity in SL. She's also the Guild's main representative in Second Life. She's the conduit that links Kaoru and Miss K. It also means that many of our clients know about Miss K, and if they don't they can find out pretty easily.

It's not been a problem really. We just get on with it. I've always been open about my other side in professional situations and it's not harmed me. I'm creative and weird. People expect something like this.

Kei is pretty old for a SL resident. I've been knocking on in SL for going on three years, since very early 2004. Since then, I've seen the population grow from about 20k to approaching 1.5 million. Second Life is growing fast and I'm glad to have got into it when I did.

Tesla LindenIn fact, I liked it so much I went to work for them for a while. For about six months, I was Tesla Linden one of the fantastic Liaison cadre who provide front line support and help inworld. It was a sometimes gruelling but unforgettable experience and vital for me as it gave me a real understanding of Second Life, end to end.

My last day as Tesla was very emotional. Torley has posted some nice pictures here.

I'll write more about my Linden experiences in future, though I will dish no dirt. Please don't ask me for any.

Now the full circularity of my various lives is coming even more full circle as Deathline prepare to make their first appearance inworld.

So really, what I thought was three different people was just me all along.

Disambiguation my ass. Bye for now! xx

PS. *cough* birthday *cough* 19 Dec. *cough* Amazon wishlist.. *cough* *cough*.

Sorry. i have a cold.

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