23:19, 24/11/2008

Genderforked

I've had the privilege to be asked to do a short interview on Sarah Dopp's remarkable weblog about gender variance, Genderfork, which I can assure you is one of the few that I visit on a daily basis.

Please go on over and have a look around. You won't regret it.

On a completely unrelated note, I'm shortly going (as Deathline with my bandmate Jennie) to start writing review pieces on the excellent Artrocker.com. If you're at all interested in new music, I really heartily recommend the website. It's full of fantastic new bands, and loads and loads of exclusive free downloads to whack into your MP3 player.

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10:20, 22/11/2008

Duck Threading: Coda

Errol Flynn, the Mullet years
↑ Errol Flynn, The Mullet Years

So apparently, Errol Flynn, living in magnificent, coddled stardom in the Hollywood hills, developed some bizarre ways of passing the time in those long, perfumed, barbiturate-hazed afternoons in between movies.

Ducks can't resist a bit of fat. It's well known. Put some lard in front of them, a piece of dripping, bacon rind, even a manky old knuckle of gristle, and they'll waddle over; quick as a flash, they wolf it down. The kicker is that the waterfowl digestive system is ill equipped to cope with the richness of an animal lipid diet. The fatty matter passes right through, and quickly.

Flynn, in his state of filmstar ennui, was quick to exploit this deficiency of barbary gut function. Gathering a pen of pretty mallard, he would throw in a lump of fat on a string. In a blink, duck one gobbles it up. Here's the science part. Nature soon takes its course and the deposit in question is hanging, on its string, out of the unfortunate bird's puckered anus. Can it be long before another victim takes the bait? No sir.

Well, before you know it, you have a trainable string of ducks. A duck thread. An aquatic avian daisy chain. Why Flynn, star of such Golden Era classics as The Adventures of Robin Hood and They Died with Their Boots On, would routinely perform these, let's face it, cruel acts, is a matter of some conjecture among film historians and animal husbandrists.

Of course, a well-trained string of ducks might be immensely useful. They could be used to fly up in unison and retrieve a cricket ball from your roof, passing it beak to beak down the chain into your butler's waiting hands. Perhaps later, in a fit of pique, you might hit the ball down one of Los Angeles' many storm drains. No problem. Ducks on a string? Retrieving's their thing! My favourite theory is that Flynn used to like to go up to a high point, say, the Hollywood sign, and fly the ducks like a huge, articulated living kite. Imagine the fun.

However, the training aspect raises a somewhat sombre and distressing question. If a duck in the middle of the thread, say duck 6, were to die (through scurvy, or duck gout, or though having his neck wrung for being less obedient and trainable than its fellows), how was it disposed of? Was it left to rot and fall off naturally? I don't like this hypothesis because it's gross. Some have suggested that Flynn would simply snip out that section of line and tie it back together. This solution seems inelegant and not in keeping with the otherwise simple and beautiful nature of the endeavour. My (unproven) hypothesis is that Flynn, not content with being a pioneer in the art of duck threading, was also an early exponent of the science of Cybernetics. Should one of the ducks die, or show signs of illness, he would gradually replace its sick and morbid components with plastic and metal articulations, ball bearing gimbals, miniature servo motors, and small valve-based force feedback governors.

It's not inconceivable then to imagine Flynn's waterborne deathbed: The sound of waves outside, the bobbing of a gentle swell, the cool hand of his underage partner, Beverly, on his brow, and the grinding and clicking of seventeen mechanised ducks on a string, jostling irritatingly in the master cabin of a fading matinée idol's 70 foot yacht, berthed in sunny Vancouver Sound.

Notes:

Based on a post gig hotel bar conversation in Berlin with my ex Electric Shocks bandmate, Dan.

Originally published on draGnet 4.0, 14 February 2005.

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14:29, 09/11/2008

Things I have learnt

As you get older, people say you get wiser. I think that's an euphemism for saying that you get more set in your ways, less fluid. As the number of brain cells in commission decreases with the punishments that the advance of the years deals you: the random wear and tear, the sleepless nights, the booze and other substances, the noise of playing one too many gig through shitty borrowed equipment and undermaintained monitors, your brain shuts down the pathways of improvisation and you learn to do things in certain ways, to think in straight lines. That's wisdom, I think. Simply a shortcut for learnt behaviour.

So what have I learnt recently as I approach another birthday, another turning of the page? What astonishing nuggets of wisdom can I impart on you unsuspecting unfortunates this autumn day?

1. People see what they want to see (but idiots are idiots)

Go Away
↑ "Go away", 9/11/08

I was at a very interesting handmade books fair yesterday in an old social club in Somers Town, a working people's enclave sandwiched between Euston and St.Pancras stations. There were a lot of cool people there selling lots of very beautiful stuff. I bought a couple of limited edition works and an amusing pin badge that says "Go Away" on it.

About to walk into the venue, we were surprised by some very loud shouting across the street and looked across the street to see a group of lads in their twenties, in regulation casual clothing, cropped hair, eyes dulled by cheap lager and slowness of wit. They were yelling animatedly at each other, very noisy, their voices betraying that they were down for the day, the weekend, whatever, from somewhere in Manchester or elsewhere in Lancashire.

The wisdom of the years put us into alert mode. There was an abandon to their swagger that spoke of heightened aggression, pack behaviour, incipient violence, mistrust of the unlike. You know, all the stuff we, the middle class, fear when walking around deserted council estates alone and suddenly become confronted with a group of kids. Usually unfounded.

We entered the warm, rather smelly embrace of the working men's hall and were surrounded by chattering creatives and student craftspeople. A different world, really. Sort of a sanctuary.

Then Kate breathed, "oh, they're coming inside." The atmosphere changed a bit. It was strange. Like a foreign body entering the bloodstream, they didn't belong, drawn in by the crowds and chatter. The room reconfigured around them. They were the loudest thing in there, albeit in an already loud and crowded hall. A wary space soon opened up around them. The artschool kids and the political cartoonists and textile printers studiously avoided interacting with them.

The predominant type of men in the hall were mainly spindly indie kid types, the sort you'd break in two by just looking at their floppy fringes and skinny jeans. The girls were pretty and arty and of course the northern lads targeted them, trying to engage them in conversation by the cunning ploy of making truly and horribly lewd and foul sexual propositions. One unsuspecting girl with a blonde and pink bob actually started talking to them, unaware of what was going on, and was suddenly surrounded by them. She took a while to escape their ring of filthy focus, tension on her bravely smiling face.

Then, while I was nearby, their dull eyed ringleader glanced in my direction, looked me up and down, and said loudly and very clearly to the others:

"is that a fucking man or a woman or what?"

I could, I suppose have congratulated him for spotting the unknown other in the room, the "or what", betraying his confusion. I was actually surprised to be honest. I mean, I know I present quite an androgynous appearance, with my long hair and my neutral clothes, my plucked brows and my general stance. I guess I do confuse matters. But really, I thought I looked quite butch yesterday with a military jacket, big boots and stubble.

I wrote previously about the confusion and ambivalance I feel at being "ma'am"-ed. It happens a lot and I guess what I dislike about it is the sense that I'm surrounded suddenly by a spreading ring of ripples of wrongness that emanate from the person who's called me "madam", or "miss" or "young lady". It's funny writing about it but at the time it feels wrong, because it feels so wrong to the beholder. It's deeply uncomfortable but usually shrugged off with a smile, or even an apology on their part.

This was different really. I mean I've been in plenty of situations before in full drag being verbally challenged, laughed at or even abused in the street. But this was worse. It was a nailbomb waiting to go off in a cramped space. I just knew I was something these lads would not be able to deal with without recourse to something bad. I walked away to the opposite end of the hall.

I was lucky I suppose, that the others in the group were too busy leering at the women to even notice their leader's comment. Soon afterwards, like a foreign body being rejected, they tired of being the unwanted party and left the hall.

Perhaps I'm overdramatising. But the demons we fear are within ourselves, and manifested in the actions of others, and at that exact point in time, my demons filled me with fear of violence. The armour of my self confidence in my shifting gender role is a thin one and easily torn. I wish it wasn't true.

So what it it I learned? Well, like I said, sometimes people see what they want to see. The drunk young man from the north saw something he couldn't quite work out. Something that didn't fit the binary certainties of his world. I saw the same. A group of lads who could turn on me like a pack of hyaenas and who felt alien to my eyes, especially in the surroundings into which they'd injected themselves.

Perhaps if we'd talked it might have been different. We might have been able to understand each other, find some common ground, and come up with something approaching civility. But why bother? If there's something else I've learnt over the years, an intolerant idiot is just that. You can smell shit a mile off. You just learn to walk round it, cos it's better than having to wash it off your boot.

(Of couse, what I should have done when he slurred "is that a fucking man or a woman or what?", was arch an eyebrow and reply, "yes". But then I'm no fan of hospital food...)

2. I am not a transvestite

DSC00035 natural's not in it DSC00075
↑ Self portraits, 2007-8

Here's something else I'm starting to realise. This one comes as a bit of a surprise to me too, though actually maybe not. You'd get an inkling if you've perused my flickr photos of late.

(And this may be again, be the incoherence of approaching senility, or indeed, the very simplification, mistaken for wisdom, that I mentioned at the outset of this rambling piece)

Anyway, what I think I'm realising is that my thing, as it were, is changing or has changed over the years and has now become something very simple, from being something potentially horribly complex.

I've lost you. Wait, let me break it down. See, it went a little like this:

  1. Back in my late teens and twenties, I was convinced I was a woman. that I was meant to transition and become, in my estimation, female. I began the psychological and medical process of transition, many of you will know, and espcially during my time in Six Inch Killaz, I was convinced I was on that path.

  2. Sometime in my late twenties I realised it wasn't true and that if I followed such things through it would lead to worse pain. I really didn't loathe being male enough. I enjoyed changing my aspect and keeping feet in both camps. I stopped thinking of myself as a transsexual and considered myself instead a transvestite. A bloody good one!

  3. Now, I don't think I'm even that anymore. I try and keep my appearance ambivalent. If I wear makeup it's to soften my male features so I look something in-between. I rarely dress in female clothes now, nor can my regular mode of dress be considered strictly masculine. What I feel I've found is a comfortable, androgynous groove that I can rattle happily along in for the rest of my life, expressing neither extreme of gender very much.

So I guess my wisdom is now that of an androgynous genetic male drawing slowly into the harbour of middle age. I like it. It fits me well and I truly feel more settled in my gender anxiety than I've been ever in my life.

See, I am transgendered, but I've found a commute within that complex city of ideas, identity and emotions that I feel is my own. It's good.

So to answer my potential persecutor of yesterday's question:

"is that (a) a fucking man or (b) a woman or what??"

The answer is: (c) I am an "or what?"

Now try saying that last bit in Jonathan Ross' voice. It sounds weird...

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