14:27, 23/11/2007

Question

Should I be proud or appalled that I'm 3rd in the Google rankings for the search term "soiled lingerie"?

You have been reading...

16:21, 22/11/2007

Wham bam thank you Ma'amhattan

I've just got back from a few days in New York. I love the city. I used to say it's the place cities want to be when they grow up. There's a hauteur, a grandiosity and an arrogance about it, and its architecture, its people, its culture and its planning never cease to impress me.

Many of the cultural touchpoints that influence me hail from there - the CBGBs punk years - Patti Smith, Blondie, Ramones, The Dolls, Television and the Voidoids; Warhol's rule over the city's art scene and the silver heyday of his Factory years which gave birth to the Velvet Underground; the coming of electronica with Alan Vega and Suicide and the subsequent mutation into rap and hip hop. New Yorkers say that the heart has been ripped out of the city by years of ultra conservative mayoralty but as a dumb tourist, I'm still in awe of the place and will always enjoy visiting it.

For the record, the highlights included a day spent in the beautiful Prospect Park area of Brooklyn, followed by a night in the magnificent Bowery Ballroom watching our friends Electric 6 play a great show. A trip to the Guggenheim to see a retrospective of the conceptual artist and funny man Richard Prince's work, some spectacular meals including a to-die-for brunch in Freeman's (no longer The Lower East Side's best kept secret, sadly) and some highly intense shopping compressed into the second half of our stay. My personal tally, aside from gifts and Jennie's shopping list included a rather natty pink and grey check hoody from Forever 21, leather gloves from Club Monaco, pink / black stripe Converse Chuck T high tops and a fantastic military jacket by Nicole Farhi, reduced from $500 to $150 at the brilliant but exhausting discount fashion emporium, Century 21. Oh and a funny hat.

But I didn't come here to bore you with the minutiae of my holiday (although I've probably already done that) and you can see all the photos as I post them in this photoset.

No, I wanted to write about a puzzling series of events that ran like a rather wonky backbone though our stay.

It started on the first day - we were mooching around SoHo and went into Bloomingdales to get some make-up. (I should explain that I'm with my partner, who's a bona fide lady, while I'm in my usual lank rock boy look which you're no doubt familiar with from my flickr stream, especially the Deathline photos)

So we're striding into the back of the makeup floor when we're greeted from behind by a cheery "can I help you, ladies?"

We turn around with a smile and there's a funny double take when she spots the actual gender composition of the couple she's addressing and a good humoured apology. We buy what we need and leave.

I think nothing of this. After all, I do probably present quite an androgynous profile from the rear - it's just funny.

The next incident occurs as I'm leaving Century 21 two days later. I'd been standing for a while by the Cortlandt Street exit watching people leave the store. A fair few of them had been setting off the security alarm as they left and had had to have their bags searched by the tough looking Latina security guard - there was clearly a malfunction somewhere as none of them were obviously shoplifting.

Anyway, it came my turn to leave, and sure enough, the alarm went off on my shopping bag too.

"Ma'am! May I see your shopping bag please?"

I stood confusedly looking round for the woman the security guard was addressing.

"Ma'am, your bag!"

It was me of course. I handed over the bag and she examined it, nodded and looked up at me.

"Have a nice day ma'am."

I was propelled out of the shop into the drizzle outside.

Thing is, this time, not only was I face to face with her when she addressed me, she made the mistake three times and she and I had been standing near each other for minutes beforehand exchanging occasional looks.

It happened twice again that day, once while we were buying fruit at Wholefoods Market on Union Square and a shelf-stacking woman politely asked me to move, again using the "ma'am" epithet. And again a little later when the waitress at Fanelli's Cafe on Prince Street addressed us as "ladies" when serving us.

The next morning a builder wolf-whistled me from a building site on Lafayette Street. I'm not kidding. I was the only one on the street all round.

Then I was "ma'am"-ed twice by different shop assistants at JFK airport on the way home.

Perhaps there's an epidemic of myopia on Manhattan...

OK, I'm not going to go so far as to say I'm upset by this sequence of events. However, I do feel extremely unsettled by it.

When I was a child, I was often mistaken for a girl and I took a childish pleasure in these affirmations of my own gender unease. But those childish times are behind me and all I felt when being mistook in New York was a vague discomfort.

A discomfort pervasive enough to grow into a blog post.

Sure, it seems somewhat paradoxical for someone who has a penchant for trying to create an illusory femininity about themselves to feel disquieted by these fleeting and probably trivial errors of gender perception. I also don't deny that I present a somewhat androgynous look in my day to day life.

Maybe it's that I felt so uncomfortable when confronted by the effects of my own ambiguity in real life that makes me feel such dislocation? After all, when I'm out and about in full "Miss K" mode, I've never felt like this.

So probably, I'm just disturbed by the fact that I feel disturbed by these events. How odd.

How grown up to feel regret that I'm no longer as unconventional as I think I am.

Mid-life crisis anyone?

Andi posted a very resonant perspective over at Genderfork recently which I recommend you read (both the post and the whole blog).

And for reference, this is generally how I was looking, as shot in our hotel room in NYC:

Wham Bam thank you Ma'amhattan

What a miserable old fart. Well, in my defence I did have a filthy cold the whole time I was over there.

You have been reading...

Wham bam thank you Ma'amhattan

In /musings

comments powered by Disqus

14:02, 11/11/2007

331 part 2

As the last post rather cryptically alludes, this time of the year happens to be when I notch up birthdays and anniversaries on my various passions, networks (social or otherwise) and selves. Thus I've taken to the habit of writing "self summary" posts which disambiguate my various identities (real and online) and reboot this blog for a fresh year's writing.

I have no idea whether anyone reads my weblog seriously any more. Over the last year of sporadic posting, I've probably alienated the majority of my audience by almost singlemindenly turning it into the "Deathline tour blog" rather than something about being a tranny in the 21st Century. I don't apologise for this but I appreciate that you lot might find it a bit weary!

Anyway, more about Deathline later. Here's a few notches...

October 19th was my 3rd flickrversary

I posted my first photo (this rather weird alien looking effort here →) to the site at 2.40pm on the 18th October 2004. Also there back then was my lovely friend Erika Baarova. We joined at pretty much the same time and I think we can claim to be the first pair of trannies on flickr. We founded the trannyflickr group together soon after.

Back then, flickr was a small but fast growing photo sharing community which was getting massive buzz throughout the blogosphere. Before the days of its sale to Yahoo it was a small, interesting and furiously growing community and it was great to be a part of it. Most of the amazing set of tools for managing and showing off your photos were already there, though the architecture was pretty flaky and it would quite often be "down for a massage".

I'd been reading about it and meaning to check it out since that summer but only signed up when it became apparent that it was the ideal place to host the photos for the new blog I was putting together, as well as much more interesting place to show off than networks I already belonged to like MySpace (too awful) and URNotAlone (too niche).

In many ways my flickr photo stream, especially the archive view by "date taken" is like a visual diary of my life, tranny, non-tranny, real life, Second Life. Certainly it's more quotidian and comprehensive than the contents of this blog, which takes far more effort for me to populate with new content.

You might have noticed if you habituate my flickr stream that I've been making efforts recently to make the archive more complete by uploading stuff from a huge backlog of digital photos from the last 12 or so years (an ongoing process). Please take a look, especially at the travelogue photos, some of which I'm rather proud. Pretty much all of the photos are also geotagged (except for those which show me at home, which only friends and family can locate, for obvious reasons!)

November 7th was the draGnet's 3rd blogversary

Yes, it's true, I first polluted the Internets with this vague collection of musings, perusings, amusings and scribblings and typos just over three years ago.

While it looks like I've let the blog languish a little bit, I still have big plans for it. The 2007/8 season will definitely see the completion of several long incomplete pieces of serial writing on this site, a new design and more focus on better (if less frequent) writing.

I'm going to focus more on my creative writing and also writing about my transgender nature. I think both routes bring out the best of my writing so it makes sense to focus on that side given the limitations of time. ~~You can see a selection of the writing I'm most pleased with over here.~~

There will, fingers crossed, also be a side excursion into the world of print. Quite excited about this, will let you know more as and when.

Brand draGnet has been rattling round the web since roughly 1996, the last three years as this blog. It was about a year ago that I was afforded the accolade of being one of .net Mag's top 50 British blogs.

It's so not over yet...

October 27th was the first anniversary of Deathline's first gig

One year on we've just played our 22nd gig, toured America and just completed recording our first album.

Deathline (me and Jennie's back) New Cross Inn 6 Nov 07. Photo by Miranda

This year, we hope to play more, better and bigger gigs, get some airplay and an agent and generally push on after a great and busy first year. We'e definitely writing the soundtrack for a very interesting and cool film in the next couple of months which is exciting (more of which soon).

My biggest wish is that some more of you who read this will come and see us play. We're quite good, you know?

Coming up

On December 19th, I become a year older. No I'm not going to tell you how old I am, though I will of course wave a customary hand towards my Amazon wishlist.

And on January 23rd, Kei Mars is 4 years old. Now that is old!

bye for now

You have been reading...

331 part 2

In /about