Tag: celesteh

American Politics: Why the Continuing Democrat Contest is a Good Thing

People say it’s bad. Pick up a newspaper, that says it’s bad. turn on a TV, that says it’s bad. But seriously folks, when is the last time the mass media said anything even remotely accurate about progressives in America? (I hear crickets chirping).
First of all, why not ask the voters in states with late primaries? I bet they’re not unhappy to be making important votes. I bet they’re pleased as heck. For years, everybody only cares about New Hampshire. Now, suddenly, somebody is paying attention to them! More democracy is good! Let the late voters have their say.
Secondly, Clinton and Obama are vying for the Democratic vote. If the Democratic nominee were already selected, ze would be vying for the mythical swing voter. Or worse, Republican voters. Instead, the Democratic candidates are forced to talk about issues that actually matter to their party. They have to define themselves in opposition to each other, not just as slightly less-bad Republicans.
There are more Democrats than Republicans in America. If you look at party registration, you can see that. If you go out as a pollster and start asking people, “Are you a Republican or a Democrat?” the gap gets really wide, more than 10%. Most people don’t vote. A huge number of eligible voters aren’t registered. But, even unregistered, they consider them selves to be Democrats. It’s sad. Why don’t they vote? Well, in a normal election cycle, their issues are completely ignored in the mad rush for swing voters. Why should they vote if they get offered nothing?
So, suddenly, the left exists. The left’s issues exist. The majority of people in America suddenly exist. Clinton and Obama are forced to talk about issues important to the left. And as this drags on, they become associated with their pledges to the left. They can’t just suddenly forget about us. We made them address the Pentagon’s illegal domestic disinformation campaign to sell the war. Every issues that they address, which McCain ignores, that’s an issue that they well might have stayed silent on. And maybe they force him to address it. The political discourse in America is being pulled in a direction which appeals to Democrats.
I hope this goes all the way up to the convention. I hope they have to keep paying attention to the party they represent all the way through it, through November, through two terms in office. Progressive issues matter! Progressive issues are vital to the health of the country and the planet.
Of course, I write all this from a distant land, where I don’t get inundated with it. But every time I see the candidates jockeying for progressive votes I smile. And then I change the channel.

Edit

Nevermind. Arg. This is why I don’t pay attention. And moved across an ocean.

Direct to Consumer

Well, I’ve been doing this commission project for over a year now. There were a few months of it that I wasn’t pushing it very actively. Most of the people who got commissions from me, though, were people with whom I already had a connection. This is not surprising. You wouldn’t buy a CD from a band that you’d never heard, so why would you buy a commission from somebody whose music you didn’t know at all.
Still, I wanted to get the idea of the project farther out. I think the best way to spread is organically, by word of mouth and via social networking. But the idea of direct-to-consumer advertising is also compelling. So I approached the writer of the Comics Curmudgeon, which is rated as one of the top 100 American blogs. His blog has nothing to do with music. I asked him if I could trade a week long banner ad for a commission. Josh was extremely enthusiastic about the idea, so I made a one minute piece for him.
So far, everybody that’s gotten a piece has been happy with it, Josh included. I think that people are more likely to like a piece of music that they feel a connection to. Personally, I’m more likely to think positively of music written by bands I already like or by my friends. Everybody has that. This seems to be especially true for people who commission pieces. In this case, Josh was happy enough that he dedicated a blog post in which he recommended me and embedded a YouTube video I made of the piece.
It’s been a couple of weeks and the banner ad has timed out. The number of people watching the video has slowed to a trickle. I don’t know how many thousands of people saw the post, or subsequently subscribed to my podcast, but I know that more than 3800 watched the video, which is a fantastic reach for me. I got zero new commissions.
This is exactly why my career in marketing was so short (no really). While it’s true that I want to reach everybody, a one-off ad in a totally unrelated medium is not the way to do it. So my failure to get any new commissions is not necessarily an indication that the project is doomed. Most people have to hear about something three times before it clicks. Commissioning music is a totally new idea to many people. So if I want to get people to understand the idea, I need to make certain they hear about it multiple times. This effort was, therefore, much too small to work. However, there’s another problem in that I can’t do 100 commissions in a week. I can do maybe three. If four thousand people suddenly understood what I was up to and thought it was cool, if less than 1% of them tried to commission me, I’d be swamped.
However, one thing that I learned when I worked in marketing is that competition is correlated with growth of the category. For example, if there was just one time of sugary, fizzy water, the manufacturer might have to explain to people why they would want to drink such a thing (I, for one, am unconvinced it’s a good idea). However, having multiple pop companies means that more people have heard of pop and the overall demand is higher. Is this cause or effect? Who knows. However, in the case of commissioning music, every other composer who starts doing this is also letting people know that such a category of goods exists. So I want more people to start doing this. I can’t say for certain that it’s going to work, but the startup costs are low.
I wonder, also, if I should retreat to a lower cost. At a time when people are losing their houses and the price of food is rising, commissioning noise music is definitely going to seem like a luxury.
Finally, while my advertisement experiment failed to gather me any new business, I’m still quite pleased with the number of ears that I reached. A number of them probably considered it to be a novelty, but that’s the path musical genres take to reach popular acceptance. One small step for noise music, one giant leap for my hit counter.

Naked Image

When I was last at the Tate Modern, I saw some video by Francesca Woodman from the 1970’s. She had a piece where she had stretched butcher paper in front of the large window of her loft. Light was shining through the window and through the paper. She stood naked behind the paper, so that her silhouette was visible and drew on the paper from behind. Then she tore the paper in a kind of provocative way, revealing increasing sexualized parts of her own body, until finally she stepped through it, tearing it all away and walking off frame.
I’ve been thinking about this piece a lot. I was first drawn to it because of the attractiveness of the artist, but the viewer is being asked to consider several things. By drawing on the paper, I think she was trying to create an idea of it as a canvas. We have a cultural idea that artists express themselves in a pure, cerebral form through their art. The canvas becomes almost an extension of self – but specifically, a very dualist kind of self. The canvas is not about the body, but about the mind.
Hélène Cixous argues that all binary oppositions eventually come back to gender. So when we put mind and body into opposition, immediately, we assign one of them to male. And, indeed, historically (and currently, alas) men are mind and women are body. These oppositions are also an implicit comparison, so the mind is more noble and pure than the body. The (male) artist is thus a triumph of masculinity. He expresses the true, the valuable and the pure of himself through his canvas. But if this is implicitly masculine, then women have greatly reduced access. They’re not artists, they’re women artists and that’s something different. Their body is thus always made visible, not just because it’s a site of difference, but because women are presumed to entirely be of and about the body.
By allowing light to filter around her naked body and through the canvas, Woodman makes this explicit in her work. The strip-tease aspect of her tearing makes a connection to sex and femininity even more explicit and invites a feminist analysis. Her drawings are torn to bits to reveal her body / herself, which / who then leaves. She breaks down the mind/body dichotomy, and, in so doing, her work is placed in the male gaze, which is not a site of empowerment. But she remains in control. There is no operator behind the camera. She controls what we see and when we see it, as much as she can, since the paper tears in unpredictable ways. By working within the male gaze, she makes it visible to the viewer.
I was also drawn to the aesthetics of the piece. It’s shot in her home. The attachment of the paper is ad hoc. The video is actually a series of takes. She tried this multiple times and put several of them on the finished tape. I like the experimental nature of it. I like that it’s about process. I think the aspect of it being in her home, which is an intimate setting (I mean that the way that small chamber music venues are described as intimate). She lets us into her life in a small way to make a statement about herself, her art and art in general.
I also admire her courage. There’s no metaphor for being naked on camera because it is the metaphor. She is actually uncovered, but never uncomfortable. It’s amazing.
So as I begin to think about making little films, I keep thinking of hers. I also think of her relationship to her body and the camera. I’ve spent most of my life striving to remain covered, living in my head. I don’t think I have the “wrong body,” but I think my identity was at odds with aspects of my body – not even in a way that I’ve been fully aware of. Which is to say, being naked on camera is not something I would ever have considered in a million years. No. No. No. What are you kidding? It’s another door that was closed – right next to all the doors that disallow crossdressing. These doors are starting to open for me. (Note that they should never have been closed in the first place.)
I’m working on a video of me giving myself a shot. It is uncovering. I thought of her video for courage to continue. My nakedness, though, is metaphorical. Do I want to put out there a picture of me in my bed room? Hesitating? Pausing? Failing?
Why do I want to do it? I have no idea. I try to get things out of my head sometimes and if you that with art, then how you do it is by putting it in other people’s heads. What does it feel like to have your identity hinge on an injection when you have a fear of needles? Well, here’s one answer.
I’m considering doing a piece with a bunch of still photos, slowly fading from one to another. In them I would be in the same location, in the same pose. I would start wearing a suit, hat and jacket and in each picture, remove one item until I was wearing nothing. (Why do I want to do it? I have no idea.)
I pass when I’m clothed. People see me as a man, which is what I want. But I’ve only done hormones and only for a few months. My body is ambiguous. Not even as ambiguous as I would like. It would be a stripping away of identity and of self. (Why do I want to do it? I have no idea.)
What is sex? What is gender? They’re both culturally constructed. My very body is queer now. I call all of these oppositions into question just by existing. My queer self is inscribed on my person, on my physical being.
I don’t want to be a shock value, though. I don’t want to be daytime TV. I don’t want to be a women’s glossy mag. I don’t want to be a bad joke. I want to be a person, clothed or unclothed. Woodman was dealing with the same sort of issues in her work, about how her image is transmitted and received. She can’t control what the perceiver thinks. Somebody like me could come up to it and think , “ooh, hot woman.” But if that person engages the work, they walk away with more than that. She does with pacing, timing, repetition of the same scenario. She’s got some advantage over me in that we, as a culture, acknowledge that cisgender women’s bodies exist.
So, I don’t know if it’s a good idea. I’m looking for thoughts.

Sharp

If you’re wondering about that photo shoot magazine business, well, they haven’t paid me yet, so I’m going to wait to mock them. But I got my T shot finally on Monday (and I feel so much better).
On Monday, I showed up to my doctor’s surgery and after asking the receptionist if I could speak with a nurse, I asked her if, as a favor, she could please change me from “Miss Celeste” in the NHS system to “Mr.” They have to use my legal name, fine. But titles aren’t legal. And every time I got something addressed to “Miss Celeste” I felt like they had tied a pink bow around my neck. “Mr” would help. A lot.
The receptionist looked at her computer. “Is your real name ‘Celeste’?”
“uh. yeah.”
“Are you from the states? Are you American?”
“yes . . .”
“Oh! Well, over here ‘Celeste’ is usually a girls name! That’s probably what’s caused the confusion.”
I did not start laughing. I said, “My mom was a big Johnny Cash fan.” Which is true, but I wasn’t exactly a boy named Sue. I went to sit down and out of the corner of my eye, I saw the receptionist get more and more confused looking until she went into the back. And then my name came up.
The surgery has a sort of an announcement system. “Would so-and-so please go to room 15?” I couldn’t tell if they said “Miss Hutchins” or “Les Hutchins” or what. They pronounce “Les” like “Lez”, not like “less.” And “Liz” is also a name, which sounds very very much like Les. It’s confusing. But my last name was clear, so I went to the room.
The nurse showed me how to open the ampoules. They’re made entirely of glass. You have to snap them open and be careful not to cut yourself. But they snap cleanly. She told me not to worry about bits of glass getting into the T. I asked her if she could just do the shot for me, since she’d opened the container.
She agreed and I asked for it in my bum. It’s a good idea to rotate injection sites, because of scar tissue and whatnot. Since I use my legs, I thought I’d ask her to do someplace that I can’t reach. She was anxious that I not lower my trousers in front of the window, but then she just pushed the needle in. No gloves. No hand washing for her. No antiseptics for me. Not even a quick jab with the needle. It just went right through my unsterilized skin. I’m surprised the British aren’t ultra-cautious about this, like they are about everything else Is it just her? I guess I don’t need to be too paranoid about that part then.
I asked if I could just have a few needles instead of buying a hundred, so she gave me some (yay) and then asked me how I dispose of them after using them. I explained that I put the cover back over them and put them back in the little plastic pouch they came in, so nobody would get stabbed, and threw them away. “Oh no, you’ll go to hell for that!” she said.
My friend has a joke he loves: There are Jews in hell for eating bacon. There are Catholics in hell for eating steak on Good Friday. And there are Anglicans in hell for eating the meat course with the salad fork.
I won’t go to hell for being all kinds of queer, I’ll go to hell for not following proper safety protocol with used sharps. She told me I need a sharps container and wrote me a prescription to get one from the pharmacy. When I saw the name on the scrip, I knew my conversation with the receptionist had not been in vain. It’s written for “Miss Les.”

Sound and Fury

I went to a noise show tonight. It was really really fucking loud. That was probably the primary adjective: loud. It was brilliant. I mean, most of my classmates did not fully agree with this assessment, but I think there’s a certain value to just hearing really fucking loud noise once in a while.
Also, there was a full room of people in the audience. A whole bunch of people turned out to hear really fucking loud noise. And there was a table selling records. I talked to the record people. There’s a local record company that just does noise music and dark ambient. Brilliant. I decided to purchase a record with the headline act on it. (It’s less fucking loud on my home system, but it would still be a wall ‘o noise.)
The record table was lit by candle light. The kind in those red glass containers you see at nightclubs and cabarets. I got the wrong CD. I didn’t notice until I got home. So I was slightly disappointed, but still popped it into my computer to put it into my itunes library. I started typing in the track names. “iii. is it wrong to love a transexual”
. . .
You know, I was in a really good mood. I had a couple of pints of beer. I hung out with people. I had some really good chips. I heard fucking loud noise.
. . .
It’s like somebody hit the pause button on my enthusiasm. I stopped breathing for a minute. I typed in the rest of the track names. And then I hit eject.
so if anybody wants a CD of dark ambient or noise, it could be yours. Unless I drop it in the trash first. I don’t think I have the energy to try to get a refund from the record company. Alas, I’ve had this conversation before.
It’s always, like, I’m excited about something and then all of the sudden, wham.
I was reading a scifi webzine. And wham. I spoke up. The editor literally told me not to worry my pretty face. The writer gave me a little lecture on what “passing” means, as if, possibly, I might not know (where would minorities be without white straight men informing of us of our own subculture?). And then explained he couldn’t transphobic because he’d had a transgender girlfriend once. Just like I could never possibly write or say anything racist because of my girlfriend. And why no straight guy could ever possibly be sexist.
I feel like the ur-queer lately. Somebody says something about gay men, and hey, I’m a queer man. Somebody says something about lesbians, and I was a lesbian. Somebody says something about about women, and I was a woman. I’m noticing sexism more than I used to. The scifi story I worried my little head about . . .. I got as far as a minor character sketch in which the main baddie was shown to be bad because he owned a woman that he used for sex. Your worst nightmare is just an aside.
Sci-fi can be dystopian. My favorites are. Sci-fi can contain slurs. Again, Man in a High Castle is slur-filled and completely dystopian. And it’s fantastic. But they’re not asides. If you’re going to have the third person narrator use a slur that’s currently in common usage and just throw in as an aside human trafficking, well, it’s fair to assume that the writer hasn’t really thought things out.
But, being ur-queer isn’t not all negative. I feel solidarity with everybody too. I feel like I can kind of fit in with any group of people. Well, as much as an Esperanto-speaking transsexual is ever going to fit in, if you know what I mean. I feel more at ease around people than I’ve ever felt. It’s a weird transition, to being much, much happier and at ease and, at the same time, a gigantic target for hate. So alien other as to not really even be a person anymore. And yet, I can go to the pub, have a pint and chat with anybody.
I need to toughen up and not let the little shit get to me. And I need to be prepared for it coming from any direction at any time from any one under any circumstance.
It’s a lot to get used to.

Feeling Sleepy

When last I posed about my adventures with the NHS, I had just gotten a prescription from a completely uncertain doctor. She had no idea if she’d written me the right amount of the right type of T nor whether or not I should have to pay for it. She didn’t even know what kind of needles I would need. She went to ask a nurse but couldn’t find one. She promised me a referral to an endocrinologist, so that somebody with experience could be checking on things. I agreed this was for the best.
If I had stayed in the states, I would have 10 weeks of testosterone left on my initial prescription, so as long as I’m getting an equivalent amount to what I was first prescribed, it’s ok that nobody has checked up on me yet. And I went asking around on the internet and the doctor had, indeed, given me an equivalent amount. So I took my prescription note to the chemist (British word for “pharmacy”) to get it filled, the day before I was due for my shot. They had to order it.
I find injecting to be stressful as hell, so I didn’t actually hurry to pick it up the next day. I arrived on Friday, a day late, to get my T. The pharmacist gave me 3 ampoules and 30 needles! But they were insulin needles. They only held 1 CC and the needle part was about half the length needed for intramuscular injections. And, I mean, I like to have spare needles, so I can practice on oranges a few times before I stab myself, but ten per shot is a little excessive. Ten per shot of totally the wrong needle is beyond useless. The pharmacist (chemist?) said he could order 2 CC needles for me . . . in a case of 100 for £20. That’s a fairly major investment on my part, not just economically. If I stay on the same kind of T, instead of switching to the once every three week formulation most frequently used by European ftms, that’s enough needles to last me 4 years. If I practice with an orange every time, that’s 2 years worth of needles. I was kind of hoping to switch from injecting to some other form, like a patch or implant or whatever. That’s a hell of a lot of needles. He promised to order them. They would arrive on Saturday. Two days late for my shot.
I got home and found I had one needle left from before. yay. Obviously, I’d prefer to have an extra (one time I took the cover off of a needle and promptly gouged into my thumb. So much for that needle.), but if I only have one, then I only have one. I watched a youtube video about how to DIY it, just to double check that I’m doing it right (more or less, I’m fine) and I put on some Steve Reich phasing music to feel happy and relaxed. I did the prep. Wash my hands. Figure out where I’m going to stab myself (left leg). Clean it. Clean the top of the ampoule before . . wha? What’s this? It’s made entirely of hard plastic. Where do I stab it? How do I get the T out of this thing?
I looked at the clock. 17:15. I looked at the web page for my Doctor’s Surgery (British word for “office”). Oh christ, they’re closed until Monday morning.
I was already a day late.
I don’t know how to describe what this feels like. People who have taken the pill or whatever can probably relate, on some level, since they’re messing around with their hormones also. The goal of the T dose taken by an FTM is to cause masculinization, but also to overwhelm his ovaries so they just give up. It’s early menopause. Which is fine, because he’s got new artificial hormones to keep him going. It’s better living through chemistry! Except that’s only as good as the pipeline coming to you.
When I started T, I still had a fair amount of anxiety, so I’d never typed the name of my drug into google. I thought reading the information might freak me out, since, you know, I got freaked out kind of easily. Oh my god, this is the most sought after steroid for weightlifters. There are body builders who take more every day than I take in two weeks. Well, I guess I don’t need to worry about dying of an overdose or something. They all report the same effect I did. More energy. More stamina. Easier to make muscles. All this physical energy and strength.
Missing a dose for several days, though, isn’t just going back to baselines levels. My baselines hormone levels have been shut down. It’s going to zero. Not only am I below the normal male range, I’m below the normal female range. I’m at nothing. I feel like. I don’t know. I want to take a nap. A really really long nap.
I feel like I’m underwater, somehow. You know how it sounds when you’ve got your head underwater and somebody’s shouting at you? You can hear it, but it sounds strange and distorted and barely understandable. I feel like that sounds.
I can get through a few days of this with tea (caffeine is a little like T. (if only there was T tea)) and chocolate. In Harry Potter, you recover from dementors by eating chocolate. It sort of revives you from having stared into the abyss. That’s the most true part of those books. But, now, I dunno. I got nothing. I don’t want to eat. I don’t want to walk around. I don’t want to make music. I don’t want to make tea. I don’t want to eat the chocolate sitting by my bed. I just want to sleep. And not, like, with a longing, just like a default. It’s like staring in the abyss, but the nothing staring back at you isn’t infinitely horrifying in it’s emptiness. It’s not horrifying at all. It’s like the abyss is made up of shuffle board courts and corporate team meetings and sandwiches made of wonder bread and waiting rooms and BBC Gardening shows. It’s not dread, it’s complete numbness. The mummy’s curse causes dread. But being a mummy is all white bandages and laying in a box and nothing ever happening, just a really long nap.
A half hour goes by and I haven’t even noticed. I could stare at the wall for days.
Of course, some part of my body has noticed this state of affairs and is rousing itself to action. It’s kicking at my ovaries telling them to wake the hell up and do something about this. I really don’t want them to wake up. stay asleep. Stay asleep. It’s only another day. I’d rather be a eunuch.
Is it bad for me to oscillate like this? How the hell should I know? Probably it’s not good. It doesn’t seem like it could be. When I made a list of pros and cons, this possibility was at the top of the con column. I’m tethered to doctors and prescriptions and chemists and needles and and and. Not that being anxious all the time constituted total freedom.
I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining. I’ll get through this. I don’t regret my decision. Not that I have the energy for regret.
I want to go abroad this summer for a few weeks. I don’t see how I can work that out and my prescription at the same time. Especially since the referral that came was for a shrink. I have to jump through some hoops in May and probably June. There must be a way, obviously. I’m sure I’ll work it out. And it’s not like I don’t have a fuckload of options. When I go to play a gig in the states in July, there’s 10 weeks of T I’ve still got prescribed to me. I’d rather not have to fork over the $$ for it, but I know it’s there if I get stuck.

It’s Alive!!

Remember, back in 2004 – 2005 I was working on the SuperCollider tutorial of doom? It was going to be my thesis, but, alas, it was not meant to be.

It turns out that writing tutorial chapters is actually a great way to procrastinate. It sort of feels like I’m working on music, but without actually making any sound (alas, this has a lot in common with certain pieces I’m writing). So the project is alive right now.
If you are interested in alpha-testing these chapters as I write them, please leave a comment. The intended audience is people who have never programmed before (and MAX users). If you have never before used SuperCollider in your life, I have the tutorial for you! Or, if you’ve tried and become confused. Or if you just want to see a different way of approaching the language.
Alas, most music professors have never taught (or taken) a regular computer science class. My goal is to convey all the important CS concepts, but in a way that’s immediately useful to musicians. Hopefully, if you follow the tutorial, at the end you’ll not only be able to make some cool sounds in SuperCollider, but you’ll be able to quickly grasp other object oriented languages, like Java (which is actually a very useful second language for SC programmers who want to add visual components to their work).
I’m re-writing them to be more sound focussed than last time. I’m starting users with Pbinds, which are a way of handling note creation and timing and are fast and easy despite being kind of weird. So I need n00bs. Pass it on.

A Fab Photo Shoot

My Alarm went off at 6:30 am. I probably should have gone to bed earlier. Three hours sleep, then photos? Alas. I drug myself to the train station and started poking at the ticket machine. Brits and Americans actually use language in completely different ways. So the words were English, but the machine was not communicating with me. The ticket guy called me over and asked where I was going. I said London. He looked at the clock, furrowed his brow and asked if I had a discount card. I do not. “Ok, mate, it’s rush hour, so that’s going to be £123.” (For you ‘Merikans, that’s $250) For a two hour train ride. I asked for a receipt.
I was instructed, upon arrival in Lodon to get a black cab, which took me to the photo location. They offered me coffee, so I drank a cup. It was in Hackney, which is apparently a hip London neighborhood. The studio was carefully designed to look as if it was an extremely hip loft that somebody actually lived in. There was shampoo in the shower. More or less the normal furniture. I thought maybe someone did until I opened the refrigerator. If somebody lives there, they never eat there.
All the people working at the shoot were women. There was a makeup person, who described what she did as “grooming.” There was the producer from the magazine. There was the photographer and her assistant. And there were three of us to be photographed. The guy who arrived ahead of me was hung over, or possibly not. The groomer started plucking his eyebrows and he got mysteriously ill. So it was my turn to be groomed
She brushed foundation on and then some sort of powder making me look very orange. She dabbed stuff overly my freshly formed acne (when i saw a crop of zits break out two days ago, I knew the shoot would definitely go forward). And she carefully removed the dark rings under my eyes. I applied my own lip balm. The orangey stuff went on my neck too and even my ears. It was bearable. My eyebrows, which have been kind of filling in between them lately, were untouched. I closed my eyes and thought of Lee Adama. He does all these pouty pin up shots. If makeup is his ticket to being fetishized by millions of het and bi women, well, I can do it too. “When I open my eyes, I will look like Lee Adama”
I opened my eyes and I still looked like me, which is just as good. I had a cup of coffee. There was a bag of clothes for us to wear, but the bag was missing. The producer was madly on the phone, trying to find them. I drank another cup of coffee and chatted with the groomer about Yosemite. Finally, they had me put on some jeans and a bright purple flannel shirt. They blocked out where we would sit and took some test shots, emailed them back to the magazine and then wait for a go-ahead. I had a cup of coffee and chatted with the other two guys, who were also low brass players and uni students. The eyebrow bloke is a conservatory pianist.
They deiced I should wear my own shirt, so I changed. Then there was some other delay, so I had a cup of coffee. Finally, they had us groomed, dressed and blocked and had official approval, so they started taking the pictures. The producer came around periodically and tugged at our shirts, to keep them from getting bunched from us being in the awkward “relaxed” poses they put us in. The groomer dabbed more orange crap on us. The photographer alternately ordered us to smile or be serious. The assistant sat at her mac and made sure the photos looked ok on the screen. This sort of click click fuss fuss, “your serious look is a little too much like an axe murderer” went on for quite a while. Then they had us do individual shots. I was on second, so I waited and drank a cup of coffee. Afterwards, I changed into my own clothes, wiped off the makeup and got some of the lunch they had catered. It was the weirdest thing, but my hands were kind of shaking when I was trying to spoon up some rice.
Today, somebody called to read back my quotes to me to make sure they were factually ok. The questions the writer asked were really broad and I had just read the New York Times Magazine article on ftms, so obviously something on such an important topic would be many pages in this glossy mag. Also, it’s easier to blah blah blah about yourself than to write music and it’s cheaper than therapy, all of which meant that I sent her ten pages. Yeah, I’m so fascinating. She said she wanted really specific examples, so I cut and paste a bunch of stuff from my blog, where I recounted conversations I had and stuff. When the assistant read back my part, it was down to a single paragraph. That poor writer must have felt like she was drowning in my blahblahblah. Which would explain why, out of maybe 3 or 4 factual claims, one was substantially wrong and one was minorly wrong. So their fact checking necessary and good. The story will be out next Tuesday.

When in London . . .

After the photo thing, I walked to the Tate Modern. It’s big and free. They have a lot of stuff. I think it’s one of the best. But it’s still, you know, a modern art museum. Signed urinals. Bike wheel on stool. check. check. check. I heard some posh guy explaining to his female companion that judging modern art is entirely subjective. I wish I wrote down what he said. He thought that works had no “craft” component and that you wouldn’t talk about execution or even context, since they weren’t representational. Right. Well, call me when art has no craft or context and I’ll get back to you. He sounded so very sure of himself, though, that I thought I was overhearing art students are first. Ironically, part of what I love about the Tate is the excellent program notes and strong efforts towards arts education within the museum. It’s possibly the best modern art museum in Europe. But, alas, it’s still a modern art museum and I’ve been to way too many of them. After about an hour, I walked to my friend Paula’s flat.
London is so gigantic. Every time I go, I want to move there. There’s just all kinds of stuff. Going on. Everywhere. It’s way bigger than Paris, it’s more like NYC. And I don’t think I can afford to live in central London any more than I can afford to live in Manhattan below 176478921649 street. Not to mention the weekly train fare to school.
I got to Paula’s and her best friend was there. He stays over one night a week. Like her, he’s a crit theororist. And he loves sci-fi. He started talking about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and specifically the Doctor Who episode Genesis of the Daleks. ZOMG! The music on that episode is so so so so so good. There’s this prepared piano leitmotif. When I talk about incidental music on the original Doctor Who and how good it was, I’m usually thinking about that episode. I think I’ve even blogged about it. Anyway, we got on all right. (I want to conspire a way to surround myself constantly with queer, crit theory sci fi geeks.)
Paula popped open a bottle of sparkling wine and we decided to order food delivered because that would be faster. The food arrived about two hours later after we’d been drinking sparkling wine with no food. It was around this time that I decided maybe I should look at a train schedule. And then I called up my dog sitter, Um, gosh, I’m really sorry. No, it’s ok if she goes without food for one night. Gosh. Sorry.
Paula’s kittens slept curled next to my feet. So cute!
And the nice thing about a a £123 ticket is that the return doesn’t need to be the same day. Huzzah.
I’ll post a scan of the magazine a week from Tuesday, when it’s no longer the current issue.

Poster Event?

My university is doing a post conference thing. The want postgrads to make posters explaining their research and then present them at a gathering. Several of these have gone on since I’ve been enrolled. The university will actually cover the printing costs of the poster and they give prizes to the best ones. There’s no admission fee. So this might be a drain on time, but not on finances.

I’ve been ignoring all of them. I’m a composer. I write music. What would my poster say? “Using Joysticks in Suggestive Manners in Musical Performance”? On the other hand, the sheer number of these things seems to indicate that they’re somehow vital to the British academic experience. I have a feeling I need some of this on my CV also, if I want to go on in academia. I need to present some stuff, maybe write an article, do a TAship, etc.
If I were, say, writing code to talk to haptic devices or working on developing the monome (there’s a group coming soon to London to do this. w00t.), then I think I would know what to do. But mostly, I sort of cut up samples and manipulate them. Is that research? I mean, I wrote the code to do all the manipulation, but I did most of it at Wesleyan. And it’s not like I invented any of the ideas I use. SuperCollider has a real DIY ethic, which is one reason I wrote the code myself. The other is because bugs and artifacts don’t necessarily sound bad, but they do tend to sound characteristic and recognizable. I don’t want to sound like GRM Tools, I want to sound like my own set of bugs. Anyway, I know many composers are very mathematically rigorous and thus can appear more researchy, but I’m not. Mathematical rigor in composition is good for some composers in that it gives them direction and sort of scoots them along, but it usually doesn’t result in a perceptible difference of output. It’s fake science, and again, that’s fine if it motivates.
I’m doing this commissioning thing (still), but it doesn’t seem like research? I have a hypothesis, but no controls and the “experiment” is vaguely defined and it’s difficult to draw conclusions. (“The music industry is doomed, so we should try this other model. I already know most of the people who went for it. So, um, give it a try?”). There’s the social networking thing, but it’s still vaporware and not exactly part of my academic program here.
So my point is that I think maybe I should, for the sake of the experience, do a poster, but I’m not finding applicable examples on the internets. And, actually, I see a lot of calls for things go by that I think I might have something to add to, but am not sure where to start. Anyway, anybody got examples of composer posters? I found a couple of interesting links of poster design, but they don’t address content: How to Make a Great Poster and Nasa’s Basics of Poster Design

Socialization and Narratives

Socialization is the name for a training process in which the subject is taught their place in the world and how to get along within it. I had to socialize my dog. Now she knows not to run over to children and sniff them enthusiastically and not to panic when a loud motorcycle goes by and to stay quiet and inconspicuous at cafés. She’s a good dog.
We also do this to kids. The effects on kids is a bit more subtle than the effects on dogs. My dog has internalized her training to the point where I don’t need to pay too much attention to her, I can trust that she’s doing the right thing. I’ve given her a bunch of commands and corrections and now she just knows the drill. But I don’t think she puts these in a lager context of categorization. She doesn’t think about how there might be different sets of rules for people and dogs, she just knows what she’s supposed to do. This is a fundamental difference between dogs and people, I think.
Because when people are getting socialized, a big part of it is teaching the categories. This is how girls sit properly. This is how boys sit properly. You are a girl. He is a boy. You sit like this. He sits like that. And that’s how we learn manners, by which I mean limitations. And since girls are generally given more limitations than boys, we call that “female socialization,” something which can be considered extremely important in gender theory.
Everybody learns that girls have more limitations. There’s a question as to how it’s internalized. If you believe yourself not to be a girl, this will be something that applies to other people. If you believe yourself to be a girl, then you lower your expectations and diminish your horizons. This sucks, by the way. We should get rid of it.
It’s also very external, though. Even if you know in your heart that you’re meant to go do boy things and these rules were not made for you, if other people see you as a girl, then you’re going to run into limitations. When patriarchy tells you that you can’t possibly succeed in math or technology (because you’re a girl), they don’t both to first find out if you really ID as a girl, they just say you suck.
When patriarchy gives encouragement to the schemes and dreams of boys, they don’t bother trying to figure out which girls might turn out to be boys, they just tell everyone they think is a girl to dream smaller.
When patriarchy constructs gender as a binary of winner/loser, good/bad, male/female (to paraphrase Helène Cixous), they don’t excuse people who don’t fit on their assigned side. Hell, they batter them down harder. Butch girls and women actually face increased sexism, not decreased, according to study data. And oh my god, do femme boys face abuse.
This was my childhood experience of being perceived as female: being told that I’m weaker and more feminine and therefore less. So I tried harder, which, alas, did not help.
This is not why I’m transitioning. This is why I held off for so many years. If all of femininity is weakness and limitation, then obviously, I must not really be trans, I must just want to escape smaller horizons. That’s what I told myself.
It occurred to me a few days ago that there’s got to be more to it than that. If that’s all there is to womanhood, why would anybody do it? Mtfs fight to be women. Compared to the population of cisgender women, there aren’t very many ftms. There must be something positive about womanhood. Cisgender women must find something fulfilling in it or they would quit. Socialization is subtle and powerful, but it’s not magic.
And I remember Sara telling me how she was confused by my wanting to be a boy because it’s so great to be a girl. Huh. Really? So I posted a question on the internets. What’s so great about it? There must be something good. I drew strength from solidarity with other dykes and women (well, the women who weren’t normative at me). But that’s not very much positive in the face of a whole lot of negative. What did I miss?
It’s a tough question, but I got answers. Many of them were about solidarity and talked about relationships, but not specific to the gender of the subject, only the object. But some, like “not shaving or shaving one’s legs skipping the make-up or wearing it wearing jeans or a skirt or nothing at all” all hint at a freedom to optionally express femininity. And “breasts” which indicates a physical state of secondary sex characteristics. And, I’m going to guess that the major positives are these: socially allowable femininity and a body that conforms to your identity. Which is logical. What else could it possibly be?
This femininity is socially allowable because it’s inhabited by female bodies. Feminine men face even more reprimand then masculine women. And of course, there’s the body – which is what transition changes. The mind stays the same. And this is part of what makes my friends’ sense of loss confusing. Because we profess to care more about what’s in people’s minds than their body. And we do, probably. So it’s losing somebody from your team who is going to play for a different team.
But even the body isn’t all that changed. Small differences in muscles and weight. Hair growing. Squarer chin. Lower voice. It’s all very subtle. A UK glossy magazine was trying to do a story on ftms, including me, but it’s going to die, I think. The editor wants before and after shots – something dramatic. But there’s nothing to give her. I was masculine before and I’m masculine now. But there’s a narrative she wants to confirm: one of a rigid binary. It can’t possible be safe and easy to slip across a porous border to inhabit a more livable side. Transition must be medically dangerous and a last resort, preceded by uncontrollable sobbing. Changes must be dramatic and reinforce the idea of a high fence.
But the real story is so much more subtle. One of my friends, who is sad about this told me that I had been the most androgynous person she’d ever met. But in the present, I’m just masculine and male and not androgynous at all. I haven’t changed. Only these subtle tings with square jaws,muscles and vocal pitch have changed. I was never androgynous. My body was suffused with social baggage. It whispered lies about me. The only thing androgynous was my deafness to it’s imperatives. I’m tall and slender. There’s some irony that women are conditioned to long for what I had and didn’t want. Skinny limbs. Long eyelashes. My grandmother always said I could have been a model. All I would have needed was a whole new personality.
It’s easier now, when I look in the mirror and the image reflected back at me doesn’t call me a liar. I’ve always been masculine, but now it’s easier to inhabit and embody. I don’t have to fight for my identity and the superficial tokens to represent it, like hair and clothes. I don’t have to fight the social message me body transmits. I don’t have to compensate and hide. All of this and some facial hair too. It feels like everything has changed. But on the other hand, it feels like nothing has changed. On a real level, nothing has. I write music. I go to school. I walk my dog. My life is the same except that it’s not.
When I was a youth, I asked the scout leader if I could join the Cub Scouts. I know they didn’t have any girls, but the boy scout activities seemed more like what I was looking for than did the girl scouts. The scout leader laughed. When I was a couple years older, my church youth group sent two representatives to ask if girls could be altar servers. The priest laughed at them and they came back and shared the news with the rest of us. When I was 14, I asked the football coach if I could try out for the team. It seemed like fun and I knew that girls could sometimes be kickers or in other non-tackled positions. He laughed.
And now I’m a part of this group that spent so much time laughing at me. I don’t know how much I internalized female socialization. I was always convinced that these limitations should not apply to me because I didn’t want them. But they did limit me. I got hairdryers for gifts when my brother got tools.
I’m going the end of next month to something called ETC in Amsterdam. It’s a gathering for women and gender minorities. I feel kind of awkward about going to be in a women’s space, even as I insist that I’m basically unchanged from when I went last year. I think the point of these kinds of spaces is solidarity. Everybody there has been on the losing side of Cixous’ binary. We’ve all all been perceived as the other. The non-man, non-default, alien – the losing side of the binary. That’s what we’re combatting and that experience itself is what qualifies people for membership. To me it seems obvious that these kinds of spaces would be open to transgender people.
If I don’t feel like I fit in, well, there’s the dramatic change that the glossy magazine wants and the loss for my old friends grieve and part of the awesomeness of being girl slipped away. And maybe then I’ll see that the binary is as hard to cross as they say. But I think it will be ok. I don’t want to dream smaller.