Girly magic
Femininity is a quality that I obviously personally identify with. Part of what I try and achieve with my photos is some sort of illusory feminine archetype; a sort of construct I carry in my head built up from layers of images that have importance for me - images of my personal icons.
They're all pretty obvious ones really. I don't claim any dramatically original iconography. Y'know, Debbie Harry, Grace Kelly, Nico, Milla Jovovitch, Diana RIgg, Dita Von Teese, Devon Aoki (which is like cradle snatching I know).
I've a method for achieving the illusion. For me, it's nothing to do with padding, curves and physiology. It's more to do with angles.
A tilt of the head; the angle the elbow makes with my torso, the jut of a hipbone, a flick of the wrist. It's very subtle, but you put three or four things together with a blank or otherwise enigmatically formed face, an outfit and an attitude, and suddenly, she's there.
Well actually, put a mirror or an audience in front of me and she's there...
It's performance.
View from the frontline
My friend Tori yesterday sent me a new piece she wrote for Eros Guide called The Art of Femme, which is what got me thinking about this. Tori's a fait accompli in the realms of the behaviorology of "the feminine". For her, it's naturalised behaviour.
She's an A++ student: she makes it sound military - survival drill behind enemy lines, which I guess ties in with my gender battlefield thesis.
(Tori's a non-operative transsexual. She's also a Pony Girl, which makes things complicated; two genders to juggle, and two species. She reminds me in a way of my friend Torley Linden, in her leaps of character, intuition and focus.)
Tori's point is that achieving the feminine illusion is a matter of attitude. FInding the switch in your brain that allows you to relax into a different identity. Angles are also important to her - as wrongly formed angles betray the tension that shows that the mental switch isn't happening.
But her main message is don't feel insecure, feel free to find your illusion where you find it:
"Now, you can achieve fast results and explore your femininity like a true weekend warrior or you can go for broke like I did. (and I do mean broke). My advice is, don't obsess! There IS something to be said for versatility ... The beauty of being a woman is that you can be varying degrees of femininity without prejudice. I think that it is this very freedom that attracts so many born outside of it. As it is, I have concluded that gender is fluid from both sides of the coin and the middle is a completely valid place to be. After all, why limit yourself?"
- from "The Art of Femme" by Tori McCabre
The ugly side of feminine beauty
The flipside is this disturbing site, which purports to be an educational site that aims to promote feminine beauty. (via Jene on the tgclubhouse list)
The author, clearly a nutter, writes to attack the supposedly masculine nature of today's standards of feminine beauty. He spouts a bunch of pseudo-scientific theories, with skeletal and skull measurement methods that are uncomfortably reminiscent of Nazi use of craniology to postulate their master race.
It's an interesting site to browse through, but it makes me feel dirty because it's thesis is so wrong even if you agree with some of its observations.
Notes:
Originally written 18 July 2006 on draGnet 4.0.
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pest control
I was in a shockingly foul, some would say poisonous, mood yesterday so I decided to play makeover with my face to cheer myself up.
Make-up by MAC, moody sneer, model's own. Enjoy the week of work.
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London, Summer 2008
These new flickr slideshows are reather neat eh? Especially cool is the ability to embed them and take them fullscreen like a YouTube video. here are a bunch of cameraphone mobloggy shots I've been taking over the summer. Murky though it was...
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Cartoon K lived on draGnet 2.0
I drew these illustrated self-portraits for the second version of my website back in 1997-8. "They're rather nice", I thought, going though an old hard disk, "I should publish them again."
And so I did.
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The Death of the Line
This was a really good gig, probably one of our best. Despite a technical glitch on our first song, Tesko Disko, the rest of the set really ripped through and we could tell it was good from the reaction from the packed out audience at the Vibe Bar. Thanks go to the excellent sound man, Ian, and all the Pushing Pussy girls who promoted the night really well, especially Sara who was just so fucking nice! And our new manager Miranda, who sorted it all out for us.
Big thanks to everyone who came as well. Super turnout!
The night ended on a slightly surreal note when we found ourselves drunkenly interviewed outside after the gig by Playboy TV South America who were filming us for a documentary about the British music scene. Look out for us, Argentinian fans!
The great photos are by my friend Jamie, and Twinkle, who is one of the promoters. This is a great monthly night, highly recommended!
Set:
Tesko Disko (aborted) / Lacka Lacka Firecracka / Labradoodle / Funtime / 17 / Have the Dust / Region Hack / 7-1 Regime
Where to find Deathline
» MySpace
» last.fm
» Facebook
» Rock Noir EP (FREE download)
» Original lo-fi version of "I Cannot See" at Artrocker.com (FREE download)
» Deathline's home in Second Life
Bang! You're dead.
DLxxx
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Pushing Pussy this Tues 19/8
My current band, "21st Century Sonny and Cher" electro rock noir duo Deathline headline Pushing Pussy records' free night of girl-fronted bands at the Vibe Bar on Brick Lane.
Support comes from piratical popsters Dolly Roger and Comanechi-esque drums and guitar duo Lot Lizards. This is going to be a fantastic night, so please, if you come to one gig of ours this summer, make it this one and let's get the joint jumping! See you there!
Further details at the Deathline news page.
Where to find Deathline
» MySpace
» last.fm
» Facebook
» Rock Noir EP (FREE download)
» Original lo-fi version of "I Cannot See" at Artrocker.com (FREE download)
» Deathline's home in Second Life
Bang! You're dead.
DLxxx
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Trip to Mars (5): Mourning Stars
These hybridised succulents have proven surprisingly resilient. The "mourning" of the name refers to the 400 Martian days and nights that pioneer terraformer Ochen Kazilawe spent grieving for his partner Jack O'Flynn, the first dead of the new Mars,
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Trip to Mars (4): Signs of Life
The tidal pools bordering the lagoons that remain of the Martian Equatorial Ocean still harbour hardy traces of plant and invertebrate life.
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Caroline's story
I remember the early eighties... A funny time, everything changing. But boys still liked their Raleigh Choppers, Doctor Who on a Saturday afternoon. Marmite soldiers for tea, imagining that they were James Bond, licensed to rescue the beautiful screaming girl from the vile clutches of the villain.
Unless, of course they were the sort of boy who wanted to be the one doing the screaming...
The sort of boy who wanted to be glamourous, gorgeous and, hopefully, gagged and bound, waiting to be whisked away in the nick of time by a handsome man in a safari suit and an improbable foreign location. You see, some boys wanted to be Bond girls...
Boys like Barry Cossey, cruelly bullied at school in Norfolk in the sixties. Barry knew something was wrong and left home in his teens to become Caroline. She took the stage name Tula along with the hormones and went to find her fortune as a showgirl in the seamier quarters of London and Paris.
Tula was the archetype of the early seventies showgirl: tall, skinny, exotically androgynous, with hormonally assisted curves and a surgically augmented bust, the face of an angel. And a little bit extra, which she hid with a cruelly tight customised G-string until she could have the surgery, at the Charing Cross Hospital in London, 1974.
Post-op, Caroline's career took off. No longer a topless burlesque dancer, she became a highly sought-after glamour model and commercials actress, in an age when her lanky, Jerry Hall-esque looks were the height of fashion.
She featured in a famous campaign for Smirnoff Vodka in the UK, whose tagline "Well, they said anything could happen" takes on a weird resonance in the light of her checquered history. She was a cheesecake hostess on TV quiz show 3-2-1 and went out with sportscaster and national institution Desmond Lynam.
In short, she lived it up! Who wouldn't, having been liberated into a body she felt that she had been cheated of for the first decade and a half of her life: "Now that I could enjoy sex as a woman, I'm afraid I went a little wild. Fortunately, that was all before AIDS," Cossey told Playboy in 1991.
The pinnacle, and a step onto a bigger stage, she hoped, came in 1980 when she was cast in the Bond film For Your Eyes Only. The boy from the fens had become a Bond girl.
Then her world fell apart.
The Sunday tabloid rag The News of the World (known idiomatically as "The News of The Screws" in Britain) outed Caroline soon after the release of the film. She was devastated - any opportunity for a normal, successful life as a glamour model and actress wrenched away from her in one weekend.
An unpleasant period of her life now began. She became the perfect target for a peculiarly British sort of prurience - fascinated by a "bloke who got his tits out for the lads". The country had never seen anything like her. She was hounded by the press, persecuted by tabloid journalists and photographers asking unbelievably ignorant questions.
In the first of many brave steps, Caroline made the decision to take it head on. The result was the publication of her 1982 book, Tula: I am a Woman, which sought in straightforward terms to defuse the situation by telling the story in full, from her point of view.
If anything, the press coverage intensified, but now it was largely sympathetic pieces in organs like The Sunday Times. Eventually, Tula was able to return to modelling. Inevitably, many of the jobs, such as the well known Sauza Tequila ad, now focused on the issue, not the person. And a career on a bigger stage was now irretrievably gone.
Eventually, she was able to pick up the threads of her life. On a skiwear shoot in Italy, Caroline met an Italian advertising executive, Count Glauco Lasinio, who had read and been impressed by I Am A Woman. Caroline recalls that "he was the first man I'd been out with who knew from the beginning all about my past. Eventually, we fell in love, and to my surprise, he asked me to marry him".
British law regarding transsexuals is farcical. The law regards gender reassignment as merely a cosmetic procedure, and the changes in legal status allowed are accordingly cosmetic. Caroline was allowed to be called female on her passport, and... that was about it. To all intents and purposes, in the eye of the law, she was and is still male. It says so on her birth certificate. It is illegal for her to use a women's lavatory. If she were convicted of a crime, she would go to a men's jail. Obviously, she was not allowed to marry another man.
Again, Caroline would not take this lying down. In 1983, she began legal proceedings against the British government to get the legal status of transsexuals changed. The process was to drag on for seven years and go through successively higher levels of the judiciary until it reached the European High Court in Strasbourg in 1989.
During this period, she campaigned tirelessly for transsexuals' rights, appearing countless times in the media. Her ties with the Count suffered and they separated. In 1985, she met Elias Fattal, a Jewish businessman. A professional relationship soon became personal, and in 1988, they were engaged.
On May 21, 1989, Caroline and Elias married, at a synagogue in St. John's Wood, London. The European High Court had ruled in her favour a fortnight before, so she was now legally allowed to marry, although the government had immediately lodged an appeal, scheduled for the subsequent year. On their return from a blissful honeymoon in the Caribbean, Caroline discovered once again that what fortune and commitment create can be dashed in a day by the tabloid news.
The News of the World had done it again. Caroline's mother and sister were waiting for her at the airport on their return from the honeymoon with the bad news. Elias' family were orthodox Jews, and they immediately summoned him to account for his marriage to Caroline who had already been obliged to convert to Judaism to prevent Elias from marrying a Gentile. Soon, she had lost him back to his family. Now she received death threats. Her car was sabotaged.
At the lowest ebb of her life, she again attempted to cope by writing, publishing her second book, My Story, in 1990. Again, she was in the public eye as the British government's appeal against the Strasbourg ruling came to court. This time, the court found in the government's favour. The year of transsexual enfranchisement was over.
Caroline continued to campaign for transsexual rights, and appeared in a much-publicised centrefold for Playboy in 1991 in return for their agreement to publish a full and frank account of her struggle and her life.
And there is a happy ending. Now settled in the Southern USA, Caroline is happily married to David and continues to receive the love and support of her family. She's said that she sometimes wishes that she'd led a more private existence, but I think the transgendered Bond girl has found some measure of peace in her turbulent life.
Let's hope her dreams finally stay true...
Notes:
This piece was originally written in 2000 for the pre-blog version of the draGnet (v3). It was later re-presented (on September 8th 2005, fact fans) on draGnet 4.0, and I'm republishing it again because many people still come to my site searching for it and I think it's a decent bit of writing. It's also been ripped off on a couple of sites, so I wanted to reclaim it in some way.
Caroline Cossey (aka "Tula") was my first transgender role model. As a young schoolboy, I was enraptured by the story of the boy who became a beautiful and glamorous model and actress. I bought her wonderful book I Am a Woman and still dip back into it today.
Caroline is not just a pretty face but has tirelessly used her looks and profile to campaign on behalf of transgendered people. Her work in the nineties cartainly contributed to the widening of civil rights to transsexuals in the UK's 2003/4 Gender Recognition Bill. She's still a hero of mine and wherever she is enjoying a quiet, married middle age, I wish her nothing but the best.
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Moog story
Moog walked into the bar to meet his old friend Carlos. They'd for some time now been meeting on the odd occasion to discuss things - nothing world-shaking, though they would probably admit that deep inside they both wished to leave something of note to the world. They were still young. There was time.
Carlos was already there. There was a table that they liked to sit at. It was the nearest booth to the bar and it allowed Carlos, a bit of a bird dogger, to flirt with the pretty Estonian barmaid who'd started there that summer - probably a result of the opening up of the EU to those former Soviet republics. Moog, who was shyer than Carlos, would sit with his back to the bar and write his notes, hunched over in his dark linen jacket.
Today, Carlos seemed more animated than usual. He was good-looking and wrapped his innate shyness in an outwardly gregarious nature. Moog knew that Carlos was potentially one of life's talents. He had, though, an unfocused and restless nature that prevented him from choosing between his music and his writing. Moog himself felt a little bit in Carlos' shadow. He was perhaps Mole to Carlos' more expressive Ratty. Perhaps they needed a Toad in their life.
Moog nodded at Carlos to enquire whether he needed a drink. Carlos shook his dark curls, nodding at the half consumed glass (large) of Merlot in front of him. So fond of that particular grape was he that the bar's owner had taken to calling Carlos "Mr Merlot". Moog picked up his pint of London Pride and deposited himself on the bench seat, putting his dogeared "red and black" notebook down in front of him and slightly to his right.
"You know that story you told me last time?" said Carlos, leaning forward, "about the monk who cooked still births in his black magic rituals?" Moog nodded, wondering where Carlos tangential conversational skills would take them next. "How he'd use the untapped energy of the unborn child spirits to perform his spells?"
Moog nodded. In his head he was building a machine for catching those small flies that gather around the centre of your living room when you first open the windows in early summer.
Carlos went on, "I was thinking. Maybe every time we make decisions in life, whenever we change direction, a version of us dies, or goes into that same nether spirit world where those energetic foetuses live..."
He paused, taking a sip of his wine. "What if we could dip into the energy of those lost versions in some way, to enable us to live our chosen life with more vigour? Wouldn't that be... interesting?" He smiled.
Moog finished his pint. He had always been a fast drinker. "I don't think so Carlos," he replied in his quiet voice, "that sort of bargain never works out in the end for the recipient. You buy back that kind of balance and something huge will drop off the other end of your account. There's no such thing as a free lunch, as they say."
Carlos nodded. lighting a cigarette. He offered one to Moog, who shook his head, then changed his mind and took one. Carlos lit both with a flick of his golden Zippo lighter. "I don't know, Moog," he went on, exhaling a blue plume of smoke into the yellowish light of the pub, "I just feel that there's a huge well of energy building in me. My life's about to split. A big change is coming and I want to make sure it's going to finally place me on the path I want to take in the world. Maybe the energy of such a huge fork means that you get both halves to keep with you..."
Moog was already drifting off, seeing the complex internal mechanics of a new type of water-fuelled pulse engine in the curls of smoke drifting above them.
He looked up again, the light glinting on his pebbly spectacles. He gave one of his rare, shy smiles, "Carlos, you have more than enough energy to take you though any decision you seek to make in life." He inclined his head down at their empty glasses. "Another?" Carlos nodded and Moog rose, folded up ten pound note in hand. "Just make sure you don't make the mistake of thinking that life changing decisions are in some way revocable. You take one step down a chosen road, there's no going back. You retrace the path, you're on a brand new road that, while it might look like you're walking back towards a recognisable place, in fact takes you somewhere different and unknown."
Moog rose to go to the bar, leaving Carlos stubbing out his cigarette. Almost inaudibly, he added under his breath, "though I fear perhaps that I may already have made a similar mistake..."
Notes:
This story about incipient change was written 23 August 2005 on draGnet 4.0, just after the death of Dr. Robert Moog, though the characters depicted bear no relation to the two inspirational people cited below...
- Dr. Robert A. Moog (May 23 1934 - Aug 21 2005)
This story is dedicated to his memory - Wendy Carlos (born Walter Carlos, Nov 14 1939)
electronic music pioneer, trranssexual woman, friend and colleague of Bob Moog
This concludes the Transformer cycle
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The Monochrome Set
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Vintage titillation
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moth-existence/fear/hope
At art college my friends used to call me "Joe Western". It was a joke, implying that despite my overtly "Oriental" Asian looks, I behaved and sounded overtly Western. Well, of course I would. I was, if not actually born in this dank and grey Autumn of a country, at least raised and educated here.
Ever since I arrived in Britain at the age of four, I've had constant reminders of my displaced cultural identity. In the estate in Windsor where we first lived after making the tumultuous journey from Tokyo, there was a bunch of boys around my age who started coming round to check out the new kid. My mum would give them orange squash and biscuits and we'd play, but mostly they were gawping at us I think. Windsor and Slough have a large subcontinental Asian population but I think the arrival of a family of the Far Eastern variety in their midst was almost as seismic for them as it was for me.
The estate kids had trouble with my name. Soon, I became "Colin", which I wasn't that fond of I recall. Later at school, I was saddled with the nickname "Kevin". Then later came "Joe Western".
Other signs of my cultural displacement weren't so innocuous. I'd routinely be terrorised by racism when I was growing up. That corridor of towns in the South West of London - Feltham, Staines, Egham, were home to skinhead types, and one of the most terrifying things for me as a youngster was being stuck in a train carriage with a bunch of drunken DM booted, flight jacketed skins, with glue-glazed eyes, shiny snotty noses who would leer ignorantly at me and start having a go, telling me to "fuck off back to China" and worse. I'd often stay on platform and avoid getting on trains if I spied these poisonous gangs already aboard.
My not infrequent visits back to Japan have been no easier. This is where being "Joe Western" kicks the other way. My grasp of the Japanese anguage is pretty weak. The longer I stay away, the weaker it gets.
At the moment, over ten years since my last visit, I have a barely primary school ability. You can imagine the problems. I look like I fit in but my levels of expression and comprehension are those of a five year old. I'm technically illiterate in my mother tongue.
I'm also prodigiously lazy at trying to learn, and because of my advancing years, it's probably too late to become proficient in the language. So in Japan I feel even less at home.
The upshot is that I feel stuck between my two homelands. Not feeling at home in either, I'm in a state of constant transition in between the two states.
Sounds familiar doesn't it?
I sometimes imagine my epitaph should read "he never could make his bloody mind up!", above a grave in which is interred a half cremated, half buried me.
All my life, my identity has felt stuck in between two states - my cultural identity caught between East and West, my gender identity in similar state of indecision.
My warped gender identity was forming at the same time as I was growing up in between countries. I was a very pretty child and shopkeepers would often mistake me for a girl, which I absolutely loved. As I grew, teachers and schoolfriends would point out regularly how girly I appeared and of course this fed into my emerging chrysalis self-image like a butterfly's wings protruding from hard chitin. I'd only realise later that I was a different kind of Lepidopteran.
So it's little wonder I'm such a nightmarish flitter. I like to say that I "love change". I'm always embracing the new, and changing focus on what I do. I think it goes hand in hand with my transgendered nature and my cross cultural character.
I like to say it, but perhaps it's more true to say "I hate decision" than "I embrace change". Because my life has been spent fleeing conventional identity and stability, I feel like I can't decide on anything sometimes. Ah well. It leads to an interesting life if nothing else.
I used to say that I live an exciting and alternative sort of "third way" existence. This is patently rubbish. What I do is flit around the periphery of several bright lights like a bewildered moth, never alighting on one long enough to burn up. A shady sort of night time creature that you only glimpse in frenzied, flickring fluttering moments, flash frozen in photos or performing briefly onstage.
Clearly that's the type of winged creature emerged from the pupa. Rather than the fully transitioned and lovely butterfly; that Lost Girl that might have been...
Perhaps that's why I'm so frightened of moths. The glimpse perhaps of a truth too unbearable to stand. And a premonition that if I ever achieve anything, the flame will instantly consume me and leave me charred into a pile of powdery remains.
Actually that doesn't sound too bad.
My name is Miss K. I am transgendered.
Notes:
Originally written 22 October 2006 on draGnet 4.0, shortly after The Lost Girl. Both articles were very important for me in forming the foundation of (especially the final chapters of) Transformer.
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I'm a Musician, writer, photographer, designer, transgendered z-list celebrity. Insomniac's boyfriend. Tragic glamour and sleepless nights are my fellow travellers. Skinny jeans and pointy shoes are my mode-us operandi. I like cats. Especially the ones who talk. Oh, and David Lynch.
