Masonic Boom

Men In Music

2011-11-15T16:00:00.000Z

OMG you guys, I have only just discovered, this is totally a thing! Did you know this exciting and totally new development in music that I've only just recently become aware of? Men! that is, the people with Y chromosomes (usually) and external genitals (mostly), that make up about 49% of the human race? They totally make music! You might not know it from reading the articles on this blog, or the best of lists as routinely voted by our readers, but they do!!!!

I'm writing this article because, I was putting together my end of year list, like all of us music critics start to do around the beginning of November (even though it will make us miss all the pop albums released in mid December to capitalise on Xmas sales) and oh, I've been having so much fun getting out all the records I've been loving all year long, rediscovering some that came out earlier this year that I'd almost forgotten about (Subeena! Deniz Kurtel! Barbara Panther!) and shuffling the consensus critical darlings to try and figure out what order my top 3 should go (Katy B over PJ Harvey? Or St Vincent above both?) and what underrated gems I should personally stake my critical reputation on stanning for (Drugstore? Planningtorock? Zavoloka?)

And then it struck me! My list! That is nine ladies already!

I don't want people to think that I am some kind of biased! (Even though I totally do listen to almost exclusively female artists because: PERSONAL TASTE! Sacrosanct! Even when "personal taste" is just code for "I only like artists that look like me.") I'd better find a male artist to stick at the bottom of my top 10 to prove that I am totally not a misandrist at all, ever. (And, of course, ~only~ 1, because to include more than 10% total males in any cultural evaluation would totally be patronising tokenism. Of the absolutely worst kind.)

Men! They have actually made some music this year! Unlike all those other years! In fact, I might even suggest that 2011 might indeed be called The Year Of The Man in rock music, because I have found not one, but THREE examples of records, made by men, that I might want to include in my top ten.

THE RADIOHEADS - King of Limbs

The Radioheads are massive in the Man community. This is like their 8 millionth album or something! Dudes just cannot get enough of this band, they are apparently fucking huge. Of course, I can't really be bothered to sift through all that shit so I just flicked through the Best Of compilation, because, what with the whole "always singing about Man Issues" business I can't really relate to or even bring myself to care about and all, but I am reliably informed that this band are the go-to boys when you want representation of the issues affecting young, heterosexual, cis, white men in the Western Hemisphere today.

AZARI & iii - s/t

It took me literally about six months to discover that their name isn't pronounced "Azari and Ai Ai Ai" it's pronounced "Azari and Third." That is fucking clever. So clever, in fact, I cannot believe that an actual man came up with it. But, you know, those men, they are so good with words because I read in a book once that men are the more verbal gender, as Proven By Science, so of course we should always talk about their name, and their lyrics and you know, man-friendly stuff like that, because we know that technical stuff is hard for them and I don't like to think about them doing it because it makes me feel bad. And also their clothes! (check out those shorts! so hott and totally intended for the benefit my Gaze and no other reason at all ever)

Active Child - You Are All I See

Dude plays a HARP! Look at that! I mean, how many dudes do you know that play the harp? Everybody knows that the Harp is a Lady Instrument, but this dude, he is SO GOOD, he totally plays harp LIKE A LADY. And that is the highest compliment I can pay a man.

So this is the Man Scene in music today. Dudes! Totally making music, all by themselves and everything. They were all delighted to be included and talk about their roles in The Man Scene for this article because they sensibly realised that if they don't go along with these gunnysacking male roundup articles, they won't get coverage on their own, or included with other artists closer to their genres. Because genre and gender? They are totally the same thing, look they even have the same letters. Genre/Gender. Do you see what I did there? Anyway, I interviewed all these man-bands for my Men In Music article, and we talked about how much they have in common! Coz they all do kinda sound alike to me, because their singers (never mind the music, I'm going to concentrate on the singing because I'm threatened to think of men doing technical stuff like producing music) - get this - they all sing in a totally new and exciting man-way - that's right! All three artists are really well known for their use of the male falsetto. And this makes them totally non-threatening to us ladies! And relate to them with their lady-sounding voices and their lady-friendly style. It's totally cool, it's officially OK for ladies to like these bands without compromising our Femininity.

And just to show you that I know something about the history of man-music, I'm going to compare them to the only other man who I've ever bothered listening to, because he was admitted to the canon back in the 60s and I don't have to put too much effort into finding any other icons of masculinity in rock. (Despite the previous 20 years worth of one magazine article every year about "Men In Rock" and things like Man Fest and all those organisations dedicated to promoting meninrock.org) Anyway, to me, they TOTALLY SOUND LIKE HIM, in every way, but especially the singing real high bit. That's right, all these Man Bands of 2011, they all owe SO MUCH to this singular icon, who's cast such a long shadow that I cannot conceive of male artists being influenced by anyone else. (Because we all know it is completely impossible for artists to ever be influenced by someone of another gender, ever, so we can never ever compare across the gender boundaries.)

That's right, it's the Kate Bush of Man-Rock

So there you have it, ladies and the rare gentleman reader who I know doesn't really care about music or blogging or ~real~ culture, but I'm hoping to impress with how much I understand and relate to your sex's music making abilities. The Man Scene of 2011, the children of Roy Orbison's long shadow. The Radioheads, Azari and III, and Active Child. I hope that men everywhere can continue to be inspired by their groundbreaking work, so I can write one of these articles every few years.

Anyway, so I now have to decide which of these worthy men to include in my Best of 2011 list. The safe choice would be The Radioheads, but like... you know, all the other ladies keep talking about how hott their lead singer is. Because that is the single most important thing when you are talking about male artists, how conventionally attractive they are, whether they make a good sex object for the female gaze. And I just don't see it. He's done something really tragic to his hair, and I cannot actually conceive of appreciating a man for his musical ability, rather than thinking about how much I want to sleep with him. Or not. This socially awkward and rather unattractive blogger does not want to fuck you, ergo, you are no good at all.

Next up would be Azari and III, but looking at that photo - OMG, I have just noticed there are black people in that band. And I already have a black woman in my top 10 list! It would totally be patronising tokenism to include more than one black artist in my Best Of, and since they have the double whammy of being both male and black, well, Azari just have to go. Intersectionality is just way too big a word, let alone concept for my poor little blogging head to grasp. Also, I have just been informed that they might be, you know, gay? And although I have nothing against homosexual men, especially when they are hot and snogging for my titillation in my porn, I'm sorry but the idea of ~actual~ gay men? Taking them seriously? Come on, they don't really exist. I call Unicorns!

So that was easy! That leaves Active Child to take over the coveted last spot in my Top 10.

And I have now adequately covered the ENTIRE spectrum of Men In Music so thoroughly that I can go back to covering only women for the next 51 weeks of the year - next week, we'll be putting Kate Bush on the cover for the third time this year, not because she has a record out, but just because SHE. IS. AWESOME. Also, you know, it's just... my blog's stats just do so poorly whenever I put a man on the cover - see, it's not me refusing to cover men, it's just the demographic target market of my ~audience~ just can't handle being exposed to them.

So there you have it. Remember. Men In Rock. It might just be the future.

Mansplainin'

2011-11-08T06:07:00.004Z

I'm tired. In point of fact, I'm exhausted. I've been having the same conversations now for 25 years, and I just don't have the energy to do it any more right now.

I've been involved in music since I was in my mid teens. (Don't tell the local nightclubs where I used to see bands!) I am, first and foremost, a fan. An obsessive music fan. I have also been a musician, first an amateur, then a professional touring musician, a session player, a music journalist (for them there print magazines as well as the interweb ones) I've DJ'd, I've run clubs, I've booked bands, I've produced records, I've done radio shows. During this time, I've made a lot of contacts in the music industry, so I've got to know people who work at record companies, people who run record companies, run music festivals, book international tours, and do PR and press campaigns. In short, I think, by this point, I have won the right to call myself a bit of an expert.

And for 25 years, literally from the first time I walked into the soundcheck for my very first gig, I have been having one particular conversation. The Why Don't More Women... Do X?" conversation. I have not had this conversation once or twice. I haven't had it 20 or even 50 times. I have had this conversation, or variants on it, hundreds of times. (4 times a year for 25 years? I'm estimating a bit low, to be honest.)

The thing is, when you have a conversation, literally, a hundred times, you start to notice the patterns in the responses. You start to notice the excuses, the justifications, the "it's just a coincidence!" in the other side's arguments which turn out to be not coincidences at all, but a systematic, structural level inequality. Which is often so deeply engrained that people actually think of it as somehow biologically determined, rather than a cultural bias - even when the actual form the structure takes changes from culture to culture. (Or even, on a highly localised level, from music scene to music scene. This is something you learn when you are in a touring band, as opposed to staying in one scene your whole life. That the music scene in, say, Brighton, can be quite different from that in, say, Newcastle.)

However, when I am talking to a man about this, unless he's very clued up (Yes! I can reliably tell you this! It is actually different when you have this conversation with, say, Everett True, than when you have it with a Random Dude On The Internet!) it is very often literally the *first* time he has ever had that conversation. He has never *had* to think about this issue, in the way that women who repeatedly find themselves the only female in the room have been forced to. (There's a word for that.)

And these men, who are having these conversations FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME deem themselves to be the Experts, on the Experiences of Women. Unlike the women who have actually lived these experiences, for many, many years. (There's a word for that, too.) And they get very, very pissed off, when you suggest to them that their carefully thought-out first explanations about why it's just ~natural~ that their magazine / club / gig / internet messageboard / film / top ten list is all male (or, if they consider themselves very, very progressive, 10 men to every woman) might be, well, something which is 1) not very original and more importantly 2) not very true.

And then they get annoyed because your pesky lived experiences directly contradict their assertions that 10 men for every woman is normal and natural because... MERITOCRACY!!! (If this is the case, why is it that panels of white men routinely produce "meritocracies" of all white men? And when women or PoC produce lists of women or PoC, that's not a "meritocracy" that's "OMG niche interests!") And they get angry because you will not waste another few hours of your life having that same damn conversation yet again because it's like bashing your head repeatedly against a brick wall. Because I've decided that it is officially no longer my job to have those conversations any more.

Yet, if you don't reply quick enough, they will claim that you, dear little woman, lose your right to call out sexism at all, ever again, because they are BUTTHURT that you called them a mansplainer. That's right. As my friend Jen put it, "Well obviously using a cheeky yet accurate portmanteau to summarise his position is just as bad as sexism." That whole "earning 80% of what men earn" thing. The whole rape culture thing. The whole Madonna/Whore dichotomy and the fact that your gender and sexuality will always be used to discredit you no matter what thing. That whole "hundreds of years of structural inequality, the not being able to vote or own property through 99% of history, and STILL, IN 20fucking11, being totally woefully inadequately represented in governments around the world" thing... ALL OF THAT, ALL OF THAT STUFF IS DIRECTLY EQUATABLE WITH THE TERRIBLE AND DEVASTATING ACT OF USING THE WORD "MANSPLAIN" TO DESCRIBE A DUDE'S BEHAVIOUR.

So, you know, I'm done with having this conversation. I really am. I would rather waste my time talking about Thom Yorke's hair and the Caledonian Orogeny and other brain-warping feats of nature.

Judgy

2011-11-03T06:55:00.011Z

I've been in the trough of a depression recently, that awful feeling when you take a step it's like falling off a cliff. Everything becomes slanted oddly, like up-heaved rocks, and it takes the hugest effort not to see everything in the most negative way. Critical or even casually ambiguous comments can take on the most terrible you are the worst person ever tone, and actual ad hominem attacks become inflated from merely annoying to almost suicidally triggering.

And that's one of the worst things about mental illness, that awful realisation that sometimes, you simply cannot trust your emotions to provide a reasonable response. It's like trying to walk with a broken leg, they just don't do what you - or anyone else - expect them to do.

But the other half of the coin is that, the poisonous expectations of other people and how they are slanted by the knowledge of mental illness. That they take knowledge of "mentally ill people behave in ways that I do not understand, or find scary, threatening or incomprehensible" and twist it around so that "therefore, behaviour that I do not understand, or find scary, threatening or incomprehensible can only be ~evidence~ of a person being mentally ill."

Which becomes a way to 1) stigmatise people for, you know, not being like you as being "crazy" or 2) for taking behaviour caused by, for example, immaturity, irresponsibility, being manipulative, coming from a different culture, or having a different type of personality, or even just general stuff you disapprove of and stuffing it into this big gunnysack of "I don't have to look any further because, you know, mental health issues."

And then some people take that a step further, and look at the stuff they've put in the gunnysack of "I've decided this is ~definitely~ mental health problem related," evaluate it as "not actually legitimate" (well, no duh) and then come up with the incredibly convoluted dismissal that people behaving in these ways "use MH issues as a crutch to avoid, you know, actually being an adult." Yup, that's an exact quote.

Context: an ILX* discussion of the infamous "OMG every pharmacy in NYC is out of the morning after pill" article in XOJane. I have to admit, I don't think it's a very good article. It's poorly written, in that breathy kind of "OMG you girls" blog prose which is popular everywhere from Tiger Beatdown to Gawker and the author is just not a good enough writer or thinker to pull it off effectively.

But... it's sometimes important to unwrap style from an argument, especially when dealing with emotive topics like birth control and abortion. To be honest, the first time I read the blogpost, I genuinely thought it was a trollumnist. I seriously thought this was something written deliberately as a wind up. Specifically, I couldn't believe that anyone could *fall* for being trolled into spitting, pearl-clutching outrage on that level by such a facile article. But then on my second reading, I came back with two takeaway messages:

1) The writer of this article is self-admittedly irresponsible, and to my eyes, incredibly immature. This person is in no way ready to have children, and should be offered access to whatever birth control she finds most effective for her. That's the hard part of being a Feminist: the realisation that you sometimes have to defend the rights and the *agency* of women whose behaviour you deeply ~disapprove~ of. That's inherent in that whole "Women Have The Right To Bodily Autonomy" deal. That it's their choice, and not yours, even if it's a choice you would never, ever, personally make.

2) At the time that article, it appears Morning After Pills were unavailable in NYC. Not just to "immature trust fund babies who use MH as an excuse**" but to any woman in the position of needing emergency contraception. Maybe that's something which needed to be addressed in a more serious ~style~ - so that people could realise that actually, that *IS* something which needed talking about, way more than pearl-clutching about the contraceptive choices of a young woman who may or may not be mentally ill depending on who's totting up the evidence.

**(I mean, let's not even get into the idea that actually, someone can be a "trust fund baby" and also be, genuinely mentally ill? Because these two conditions are not actually mutually exclusive?)

The other major thing I noticed after reading the article a second time, after reading the pearl-clutching storm on ILX, was that although the author mentioned a whole bunch of things that she blamed for her not liking various contraceptives (getting fat! spotting! forgetting to take pills and getting pregnant anyway! sheer laziness, a point which she brings up again and again***) there was one big thing she never blamed for her lax attitudes towards contraception. What was that? MENTAL ILLNESS.

***This is the backwards bizarro land bit for me. Because this is one of the biggest prejudices that people with MH issues (especially depressive illness) often face - that we're just lazy, workshy layabouts. So this self-confessed "this is sheer laziness" getting twisted around to "no, actually, I, in my infinite wisdom, have decided that what you say is laziness is, in point of fact, mental illness" in order to castigate them for it, is really quite loaded.

Because no, the "mental health" issue is just something that Dr ILX threw in there - this person is behaving in a way I find incomprehensible, this person is known to have mental health issues, ERGO, the stuff I disapprove of is caused by the MH Issues, QED. And then this is used as ammunition to build the author up as someone who just used MH issues as a crutch to justify bad behaviour. No. She didn't. YOU. JUST. DID. You made that excuse, not her. And then you condemn her for using the excuse that *you* just manufactured?

I think there is a very good word for what you just did there, and it's a great portmanteau of "judgmental" and "preachy" and that is JUDGY.

It's such a classic double bind, and one I have experienced before - blame the behaviour you find problematic on mental illness (even if we don't) - then condemn us or dismiss our (real) illness as "a crutch" even though we never claimed it as one.

It's something that needles and niggles and has thoughtwormed inside my head for a month now, but why bring it up, why *now*, such a throwaway comment? It's obviously something that hurt because it hit a sore spot, and yeah, it's ~personal~. (Insults don't rankle in this way unless you've internalised them to the point where you secretly think they might be true.) Because it's something you've heard so often that you secretly start to believe it. It's one thing to be told "grow up" meaning "stop being obsessive about bands and pop culture" because, whatevs. But when being told to just grow up means, y'know, "stop being bipolar!" (like, literally! just stop it right now! Snap out of those MH issues, like you can just snap out of having a broken leg!) because that's what this is, just a wilful refusal to ~grow up~, oops silly me. I mean, that's not an idea that has caused me - or any other person with MH issues - guilt or shame or fucked with our self esteem or caused us to push ourselves into situations we were not well enough to handle because, hey, what the fuck are you using that crutch for, person with a broken leg? Stand up and walk!

And how it becomes more personal because this is a person with a long ILX history of that whole "I am going to tell you exactly how you are feeling/acting, contradicting your own explicitly stated motivations, because I know you soooo well I can see the ~real~ truth (even though I actually know you so poorly that you managed to post for literally a ~year~ under a fake name without my recognising who you were)" thing. So maybe it is really quite liberating to see her doing it to someone else, even an immature and annoying trollumnist, in a way that I can point and say "that! that! that is the thing that you used to do to me!"

So maybe this is what this is, parting shots in a dissection of my long break-up with ILX. Reminders of the things that infuriated me, reminders why it's an unhealthy place and I must not go back.

* I know. ILX again. I fear I may have an even more dysfunctional relationship with ILX now than when I posted there. That before, it was this weird compulsion I couldn't stop myself from participating in, even when it hurt me. But now it's like I'm a ghost, pressed up against the glass, watching the human beings on the other side but I can't call out to them or engage them, I can only do these weird haunting activities, reading but never replying. Except in these weird ectoplasmic dribbles of blogs or tweets where I complain about stuff that used to or still does go down there. And that's the level that I have reached, that I have become a ghost, unable to accept that I've passed on, and unable to leave. And I hate this feeling.

In Every Music Fan Community Ever

2011-10-23T16:43:00.006+01:00

I honestly don't know if this is one of those blog posts that should be an email or a blog post, and it will probably cause ruffled feathers either way, but it's still bothering me days later, and that means I have to write it out. The main reason I don't want to make it a private email is because I don't want it to look like I'm singling *one guy* out for censure when it's a way larger and more recurrent problem than that, and I'm not saying "you as an individual are being sexist" so much as I'm saying "the entire culture around this phenomenon is so riddled with deep and engrained sexism that I just wish someone would, you know, even *notice* it."

And there's the whole thing where people shrug and say "but I'm just laying it out the way it is!" And it's weird because those same people, they are the ones that have definite PINIONS on The Way It Is and why it shouldn't have to be that way, when they are talking about X-Factor or Heavy Metal or shit pop or shit culture or even dynamic range compression in modern mastering. But suddenly, turn the conversation to engrained sexism and there's this shrug of "I'm just describing things the way they are."

It's frustrating, because this stuff, this "that's just the way society is" stuff (and the refusal to problematise it) is just that - abstract discussion - to men, when, to women like myself, it is this huge barrier to participating in parts of culture.

Add to that, it's never *just* telling it like it is. Because it is really telling, the things that *are* enumerated, or even considered worthy of being mentioned, and the things that are left out, either as not possible, or as not even needing to be noted. (This is one of those things that comes from Feminist linguistics - that English has the phrase "woman doctor" but does not have one for "man doctor" - because the idea of a doctor being male is simply not extraordinary enough to require its own epithet.)

It's a jokey list thread on ILX (Yes, I know it's a toxic place for me now, and I should just leave it alone, but it's hard, when you have a ten year investment in a place, to just walk away.) called "on every artist-specific message board ever." Which is, you know, a topic I know quite a bit about. I've left - and in some cases, been driven off by a lot of the behaviour I'm going to detail below - more music messageboards than most people have ever been on.

I mean, look at this one.

Middle-aged women with kids who seem to spend all their time ignoring their kids and following said band around the country to every gig in some attempt to reclaim their youth.

I'm not denying the existence of this phenomenon. But you know who isn't mentioned? The middle-aged men who do exactly the same thing. You know what else isn't mentioned? The way that, when a heterosexual couple have children, the man carries on in his fandom, almost exactly the same way as before (dependent only on how much money is available) but the woman just disappears from her fandom. Because that's just expected. A woman's fandom, hobbies, career, her entire life, is expected to just end when a baby arrives, but the man's just... don't. In fact, it only becomes a notable *event* when they do.

Yes, I know quite a few women who, once their kids get old enough to fend for themselves, or maybe they've been through a divorce, get back in touch with who they were before marriage-and-babies, and part of that is a return to obsessive fandom, perhaps because they're catching up on all those concerts they missed during the diaper years. But for each one of those women, I know easily half a dozen men that, when I go to a club, or a gig, or a forum meet-up and I ask "where is your lovely missus?" the answer is "home with the K.I.D." THAT is something that happens in every music community ever, but that is not considered noteworthy enough to even comment on. Only the "misbehaviour" when women fail to conform to the motherhood-is-everything expectation that is not expected of fatherhood.

So far, so straightforward in terms of engrained societal level sexism.

And now is the next one which is much more complicated.

Poster A: 65. New girl who tries it in with various prominent male form members in an attempt to go in ever decreasing sexual circles towards the singer.

Poster B: 65b. This results in a complete bitchfest amongst the more established various prominent female forum members

It's hard to untangle why this provoked such a furious reaction in me. Partly because, in a fast-moving thread, it took nearly an hour before an even remotely similar problematisation of *male* sexuality was posited:

Predatory male poster who repeatedly targets emotionally vulnerable female posters for sex. Eventually marries one who has a baby with him.

(Note also, that dudes who circle bands and their entourages, the ones that ingratiate themselves not through sex, but through drugs or claiming to be from a fanzine/club night/record company that doesn't exist anywhere except on paper, or other assorted favours - the hanger-on dude who's always backstage, always on the guestlist, cadges rides on the tourbus, tries it on with girls in the audience with the old "do you want to get backstage?" line, who drinks the rider, wears a free tour t-shirt, who behaves in every other way, short of sucking the singer's dick, *exactly* like that circling girl - he's never problematised as a "groupie" even though that's exactly what he is, bar a couple blowjobs.)

((Not to mention that, if a male interloper attempted to join a new community by attempting to sleep his way through prominent men's wives and girlfriends, would the resulting complaints be trivialised as a "bitchfest"? I think not. The words "taken out back and shot" spring more easily to mind.))

But mostly it's because of another set of unspoken "in every music fandom ever" rules. I would add:

65c. "Groupies" are universally despised by all members (both male and female) of the community.
65d. Male musicians who enjoy the sexual favours of female fans will be lionised for it by young, male fans and excused or pretty much blind-eyed by all others.

From these two unspoken rules follow on another set of behaviours. The form it will take usually depends on the number of female participants in the fandom and the number of high profile female posters on the forum, but it will always take one of these two options (and sometimes aspects of both at once) in which the threat of "groupie" status is used to denigrate or control the behaviour of female fans.

65e(i) On forums that are predominantly male, "groupie" becomes a stick used to beat female fandom of *all* types, therefore all "feminine" coded aspects of fandom will be discouraged and disparaged.

This includes not just the expression of sexual or romantic interest in male musicians, it also covers stereotypical "feminine" concerns such as photos, haircuts, clothes, families or relationships. Any female poster will be subject to censure for "fangirling" - and the few female posters may even censure themselves and other female posters to avoid the taint of fangirl. To survive as a woman in this kind of fandom means, often, erasing any part of your identity that might code as female.

Note: this prohibition does *not* extend to the discussion of female musicians. In this case, the discussion of the appearance, sexual attractiveness etc. will be considered completely appropriate, even obligatory. This double standard can result in such bizarre states of affairs as a forum running one thread for the posting of pornographic photos of female celebrities, and at the same time a fangirl-ish thread devoted to photos of the changing hairstyles of the (male) musician whose forum it was, being swamped with posts decrying the female threadstarter, and calls to have the thread closed/poster banned.

65e(ii) On forums that are more gender mixed, or predominantly female, "fangirling" will be tolerated, even encouraged (there may even be "teams" allocated for fanciers of particular band members.) However, a sharp distinction will be drawn between "fangirls" and "groupies" - with women policing themselves and other women far more than men ever do.

This is one of the weirdest and most frustrating effects of the Patriarchal demonisation of female sexuality, and the endless madonna/whore dichotomy of women into "nice girls" and "sluts." It is bizarre to see women - even women who have had sexual relationships with the musicians they admire - bend over backwards to invent new categories whereby *they* are just "with the band" while it is those other women, those nasty women, who are the "groupies." And it is precisely because of these patriarchal strictures on female sexuality that *women* have the most to gain (or lose), assigning themselves to the "nice girl" category by thrusting other women into the "slut" one. So this is where the "it's not sexist because women do it, too!" thing really is no excuse.

I could write a whole nother post on the problematisation of "Groupies" within fandom and music culture.

The thing is, my objections to groupie-demonisation revolve around two contradictory ways of thinking. This isn't necessarily a flaw of *my* logic - it's a flaw within the whole messed-up contradictory expectations of women and perceptions of female sexuality.

The first is the idea that Groupie-Sex is exploitative. It revolves around the idea of unequal power dynamics - older, more powerful, usually very spoiled (women throw themselves at them, after all) and over-entitled men, with young, powerless, naive, often exploited women, coerced, in the liminal zone of "on tour" into fulfilling sexual acts they would never normally countenance, seduced, used and discarded by the lies of romanticised rock'n'roll mythology. (Because, of course, all women *only* want relationships, marriage and babies, and never ever want just hott sex, for one night only, with a Dionysian love-god embodiment of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. Never. At all. Honest. Not even if said dirty dronerock boy is wearing leather trousers and eyeliner. Nope.) And yet, in this dynamic, despite the fact it takes two people to have a heterosexual encounter, it's the *girls* who are demonised, problematised, and used to justify the exclusion or second-class-citizenship of female fans in the *whole* of fandom, not just backstage.

The second is, as you've probably guessed, an *objection* to the Paternalism expressed in the above problem. The idea that women are passive, exploited nonentities in their own sexual experiences rings really false in comparison with my memories of *being* a teenage girl. Aged 17, I was a simmering maelstrom of hormones and sexual urges, and the pop idols of the day served as a locus for those desires. And this is probably closer to a deeper truth of why groupies are so demonised in musical mythology - because the *idea* of actively sexual women who are the agents of their own desires, rather than passive receptacles for male passion, threatens to bring down the "nice girl"/"slut" dichotomy, male supremacy and the whole patriarchal house of cards on which not just fan culture, but general culture rests.

I don't even know that those two things are contradictory. It's entirely possible for both of them to be true. That yes, there are young women who are exploited (the heart-breaking tales of women who think they're in a real relationship when they are just tour playthings) - and also that women whose groupie sex experiences are more Germaine Greer than Pamela Des Barres scare the *shit* out of more than just the teenage boys on music forums who have never actually had sex with a woman whose surname wasn't .jpg.

So that's why I'm troubled by the enumeration of the "sexually circling female" and the "bitchfest" that accompanies her arrival. The stuff that gets left out, as much as the stuff that gets mentioned. And it's the stuff that *really* gets missed out when these conversations become all male, often *because* of the dynamics described above.

There's so much more here that I don't have space for. The unwritten assumption that, by default, bands = male and groupies = female is, obviously the massive elephant in the room that I haven't even touched on. (Someday when I write my memoir, I'll blow a hole in Louise Wener's assertion that male groupies don't exist. They do, and I've fucked them.) The utterly heteronormative assumptions with regard to this dynamic stink like a week old fish, but that's another blogpost, too. I am countering stereotypes with more stereotypes, but if I didn't, this would be a PhD rather than a blog post. And that has to wait for another lifetime.

Words Matter: tl ; dr

2011-10-14T10:44:00.002+01:00

This morning, I found a brilliant quote in Robin Talmach Lakoff's groundbreaking work, Language and Womens Place which neatly summed up the concepts I was writing around yesterday. In dicussing the political and linguistic power of racist and sexist slurs, she made the following observation:

The presence of the words is a signal that something is wrong, rather than (as is too often interpreted by well-meaning reformers) the problem itself.

This is the idea I'm trying to get at, when I'm trying to get people to look at the language they use. It's not that the word is "offensive" to others, but that it signals that there is something wrong with *your* conception and expression of the world.

The reason that a white feminist should not use the N-word in the context of what is supposed to be a feminist safe space, like Slutwalk, is because *you* are holding up a sign declaring "I do not give a shit about Black women."

The reason that a working class male talking about gentrification (or anything else) should not use casual rape metaphors is because *you* are saying "I don't care about actual crimes committed against actual women."

The reason that it's not OK to turn "sexualisation" into "stripperfication" and say that the agency of women (especially Women of Colour) is "irrelevant" is because *you* are saying "I find women's agency irrelevant" and "sex workers are not people."

I'm not saying that these things aren't offensive. They are. But the problem is *not* in the ears of the people hearing them, but in the brains of people who can SAY. THESE. THINGS.

Words Are Powerful

2011-10-13T16:15:00.005+01:00

There is this idea I have been circling around for the past couple of days, and I don't know how to get into it. It is this: that the words we use matter.

And they matter, not just because of the power of some words to ~offend~ others (which is important, but it's also kind of passive, in that, it puts the problem in the ears of others, rather than in the mouth of us, the speakers) but because the words we choose use do not just express our viewpoints (including our prejudices, conscious or not) but also, actively shape our perceptions.

I got this wrong, the last time I tried to talk about it. It got bogged down in mudslinging with someone who felt personally insulted by the context that provoked it. I didn't know as much then, as I have now read, about linguistics and power.

But I keep coming back to it, this past week. At least three things got me thinking about it.

1) A series of posts on Racialicious about not just the *use* of an incredibly offensive racial slur on a placard during the NYC Slutwalk, but also about the refusal of a group of white feminists to engage in debate about, or understand why it was not OK. Sure, I recognise that my understanding of racial issues is crude at best and I have (and continue to) get it wrong and try to learn from my mistakes, but jesus christ, the lack of understanding - or even willingness to listen - made even me cringe. Dear fellow white feminists: we do not get to define the bounds of racism. We just don't.

2) A twitter conversation about this piece on Sociological Images about the different rates of sexualisation in images of men vs women on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. That was the word used. Sexualisation. Yet the man whose retweeted link alerted me to the article chose to use the word "Stripperfication." (And oddly, tried to claim that the reason for changing the word was the 140 character limit of twitter, even though, as you can see "Stripperfication" - with all its inherent slut-shaming and demonisation of sex workers - is actually a longer word than that the researchers used.)

And oddly, even though the women in the images displayed in the post were all the kind of passive, childlike (young, white, slim, blonde) images of submissive and objectified women that tend to annoy feminists - when he responded to my concerns, the person that raised *his* ire on the "stripperfication" front was Rihanna, who is well known for her images of assertive, female-directed depictions of sexuality which highlight her own desire and agency of the kind that some feminists call "sex positive" and other feminists, well, aren't so sure. It's complicated. We're still working this one out, but Feminists are allowed to agree to disagree.

Thing is, when I pointed out that perhaps there was a difference between passive sexualisation (like the Rolling Stones covers) and the kind of active, agental sexuality expressed by Rihanna, Electrik Red or Nicki Minaj, he told me that "Minaj's own plan is irrelevant." That's right. The agency, actions and sexuality of women - especially Women of Colour, whose sexuality has been long been demonised - is irrelevant, in the face of White Man On The Internet, Splainin'.

He then went on to tell me that the whole visual and sexual marketing of boybands like Take That is based *entirely* on gay culture because oh yeah right, women aren't ~visual~ in their sexuality and all images of naked men are homoerotic - sorry, I just forgot all that, with me being a visual artist who works with erotic images of men sometimes even for a feminist porn magazine.

Then of course, he starts in on how I'm just being picky and "squandering my energy" by "berating someone about the language they use" because that's the problem here. Just the language, and not the racist, sexist, slut-shaming, agency-denying, demonising-of-marginalised-people (because when he's saying the problem is "stripperfication" or "pornification" that's not making negative judgements about sex workers, not at all) ideas inherent in those words that he's using.

Because, yeah, I agree that the endless dichotomy of "men clothed, women naked" is something that I'm really tired of. But I don't take the easy route of blaming strippers, I see this as being down to the endless pressure that men act, women appear and women will only ever be judged on their appearances, whether they are strippers, or platinum recording artists or cabinet ministers. The pearl-clutching over Rihanna or Britney, it's that age-old tool of patriarchy, that you narrow and constrict the paths and means available for women to achieve power or success - and then you condemn the women who *do* play by those rules and use those paths.

There are so many words that he could have chosen. Yes, I have a problem with the *commercialisation* of sex and the sexualisation of commercials. I have a problem with the *genderfication* of childhood which involves the *pinkification* of girlhood - my biggest problem isn't that children are being *sexualised* but they are being squished into narrower and more constricting definitions of gender, of which a highly sexualised and passive presentation of femininity is just a part. But do we talk about body image, media literacy and the Beauty Myth? No. We talk about Strippers and their bad, pornified sexuality corrupting our youth because demonising sex workers has never been used to justify the oppression of whole classes of women, oh no.

So is this a petty argument about just ~language~? No, I'm afraid it's not. It's an argument about agency and power, and who gets to define those things, and when you tell me that women's desires don't exist, and the artist's own plans are *irrelevant* and I should just STFU and not challenge your assumptions because they're just words - I'm sorry, but we are not on the same page here, and you and that whole "not listening to women" thing are part of the problem in a way that a lady taking her clothes off to pay the rent, well, isn't.

See, this is the thing. It is not just words being ~offensive~ - the words you *choose* tell others the concepts *you* believe, the ideals you buy into and accept as reality.

3. Reading an interview with a band I actually really like and admire, and I think that they were vastly underrated, and have a pretty important story to tell, about how the blossoming diversity of the musical landscape of the 90s, got shut down in the face of the monolith that was Britpop, and how that was all tied up in notions about class. And it was challenging reading to me, sure, because I'm middle class (I was born, by accident, in the very "High Essex" he talks about Blur being a part of and yeah, I'm a Blur fan, though that meant a slightly different thing in the US than it did here) but it's good for me to read viewpoints that challenge my preconceptions.

And there it is. 5 questions down. The "rape used as a cheeky metaphor for things that are not rape*."

(*And before someone decides to be clever and point out that I have used a rape metaphor on this blog before I will point out that I was comparing the emotions of a situation where I felt powerlessness, with the emotions inspired by a real sexual assault that actually happened to me. Not quite the same thing.)

And that is one of those red-letter words that makes me instantly click the little red X in the top corner of my browser. (Ditto rape jokes, which get you an instant unfollow on twitter.)

It's not even about being triggered any more, even though I am a rape survivor. Many other people have written about why this is not OK better than I ever could. And it's just... Why did you have to do that? Of all the metaphors you could have chosen? Pillaging? Harrowing, with its ready made class associations? Here, you are trying to get me, the reader, to align with your status of being marginalised due to being working class, yet you pick a word which so deliberately marginalises *me*, as a woman and a rape survivor? I can't even...

Words are important. Words *mean* things, both overtly and by implication. The words that you pick show what you believe, what you value, what you disparrage. The words that you use describe your world, but the words that you consider available, or appropriate also *define* your world - both internally, and externally, for the people who read or hear them. It is not just that they are offensive to others, but that they show your *own* prejudices, and that maligns you as much as it offends others.

I have probably made mistakes in this blog posts, I am sure that I have expressed mine own subconscious prejudices. If I have done this, tell me, because I never claimed to be perfect, but I am *trying* to learn.

Where Did You Learn About Money?

2011-10-12T15:13:00.007+01:00

So I'm sorry, but while I was thinking through this blog and how to write it, the whole thing with the NHS just happened in the House of Lords, and I'm sorry, but I can't even process that, let alone cope with it or think about it. So this blog is about something else.

I had a blog post percolating in my head after an awkward exchange with a man on twitter about the whole "sexualisation debates" that basically boiled down to "porn is not the problem, the deeply inequal structural differences between how society VALUES men and women differently, whether they are sex workers or cabinet members - THAT is the problem." But it's not done cooking yet.

But then I read this and I realised that today's blog was actually going to be about debt. George Monbiot encapsulates some very complicated economics about the causes of great depressions (like the one in the 1930s, and the one it looks like we're a couple of years into at this point) and it boils down to the levels of private debt. And in the midst of a government that seems to be intent on shifting the debt for basic services like healthcare and education from the public sector, to private individuals - that idea scares the shit out of me.

I don't know how I feel about the suggested mass write-off of irresponsibly made loans. It's complicated. Seems a bit less furiously unjust than letting massive corporations off their tax avoidance interest. Many people that I know who took on those "irresponsible" loans were woefully underinformed about what they involved. I remember myself, in the US, when I signed for my first college financial aid package (including a couple of thousand dollars worth of loans) I basically thought I was being given free money.

What I do know is this: People need to be better educated about finance, and how it works.

Were you taught about debt, credit cards, interest, loans, etc at school? I know I wasn't. I was forced to take a semester's worth of "Home Economics" at one point but that was rather more about baking cakes than it was about balancing chequebooks. And yet, I'm one of the lucky ones, who has somehow kept out of the red though a combination of mostly privilege (racial privilege and class privilege I recognise and acknowledge - it's too easy to bang on about "bootstraps" when you are structurally well-heeled) but also partly because I got an early and chilling peek behind the curtain of financial services.

When I was about 23, my first post-college job, I spent a few months months temping in the call centre of a well known American credit card company, in the brief period before it was outsourced and moved offshore. In order to answer questions about basic account info and balance, we were given a two-day crash course in the products they sold, and the fine-print stuff. They taught us what interest was and worked, how interest was compounded, and how to calculate the minimum payments on card balances.

Simple stuff, right? (And this was in the early 90s, before much of this stuff was deregulated in the States, too.) I tell you, the scales fell from mine eyes.

As a teenger, I used to beg my parsimonious Scots Mum, nose pressed up against the glass as we passed Pizza Hut, wondering why we couldn't go out to eat every week, like many of my schoolfriends. "Put it on the credit card," I'd beg, looking at Ponderosa or Pizza Hut. "And where do you think that money comes from?" my mother would explain. "You have to pay it back eventually." And how.

They actually taught us to push the scams. Get customers to take out cash advances instead of store point purchases. The interest on cash advances was compounded daily, instead of monthly, like conventional purchases. That meant you were charged interest every day, on a balance including the previous day's interest. A few hundred dollars could shoot up into four figure balances. It didn't help if you tried to pay them off quickly - unless you specifically instructed the company (usually in writing) to apply a partial payment against the cash advance, the money would be automatically applied to the whole balance, interest first. That "interest first" thing was always the catch - they taught us how the minimum payments were calculated to cover the interest, but no more. And we were encouraged to assure the customers to make the minimum payment - even though this would make the debt roll on forever. If you followed the bank's friendly, helpful, free advice, you could pay and pay and pay, and never make the slightest dent in your balance. So long as you kept making the minimum payments, they'd raise your credit limit forever.

I was rubbish at that job. My idealistic younger self, unsaddled by a mortgage, used to patiently explain all of this to the poor ladies who rang up wanting to know why their bills were so high, and my contract was discreetly terminated.

The thing is, had I not worked that job, my 20-something self, nose pressed against the glass of Manhattan, would have signed up for every credit card I was offered and ridden them for the same "free money" that I thought my student loans had been. It wasn't that I was smarter or wiser than my friends who *did* fall into the credit trap - if anything, in a lot of ways, I was dumber, more naive, and believed in ridiculous things like unicorns and piskies and the record contract waiting at the end of the next gig. But that experience taught me just how hard banks work to get people to act against their better interests, and how *easy* it is to get sucked into colossal debt.

So, you know. I am not an economist. I'm just someone who's good with spreadsheets. I know that this economic crisis requires solutions which might be counterintuitive to me. I know that it's mainly not down to the individual, but that strong consumer advocates and legislation to protect the consumer against the interests of banking are absolutely vital.

But I do think that one thing we could REALLY do with, is putting in every school, the kind of financial education that I had to go work for a bank to learn. At the same age that kids learn fractions and percentages, they should be learning how interest works and how it compounds. How loans work, how mortgages work, how banks work. Knowledge is power, and banks trade on our ignorance.

Loving In A World Of Desire

2011-10-02T16:44:00.003+01:00

So this is weird. I'm currently editing and "re-mastering" LIAWOD, the final installment of the grand trilogy I wrote through my late 20s and early 30s (I still don't know what for, given that it straddles the line between fan fiction and proper novel, and I am still so highly invested in the concept of fan fiction as folk art that I don't *want* to file the serial numbers off and make it a Proper Novel) and I've just rewritten one of the pivotal scenes of the romance, the one where, after an immensely long (3 novels long) Long Game, the romantic hero finally proposes to the lead female.

It was always going to be a tricky scene. After some spectacularly failed relationships, Kate Gordon (obvious author avatar, subverted MarySue, and yet, at the same time, the kind of Big Bird character through whom the reader enters into the emotional world of the artists whose fandom puts the fan in the fiction) is understandably wary of formalising her relationship with "Damien," the charming but roguish conceptual artist (bear with me, here) with whom she has finally found acceptance, contentment and a healthy, workable relationship which actually meets her needs.

In the original scene, written when I was pushing 30, he essentially bullied, manipulated and emotionally blackmailed her into it. Which probably speaks a lot more to my thoughts, at that age, on marriage, than it ever did to the characters in the novel. It sat uneasily with me for a decade. It was supposed to be a giant romantic gesture, albeit one that backfired spectacularly for the purposes of plot development and ~drama~. His bullying, and her acquiescence - it read all wrong. I rewrote it about 3 times before its initial publishing back in the 90s, but I still couldn't help feeling I'd betrayed the characters.

But re-reading it, safely from the other side of 40, I was struck by how insistently, how vociferously KG protested the she did not, in point of fact, want to get married at all. Some of her concerns seemed valid (as the bass player in a touring rock band, she feared losing her freedom, creative as well as physical, not to mention her fear that she was a compulsive cheater, and just not suited for monogamy) and some of them now seem ridiculously childish (an archetypical kidult, she did not want to grow up and get pulled from her world of backstage parties and Groucho Club booze-ups to a life of "minivans, tupperware and the school run.")

It was actually shocking to me, to remember that aspect of my 20s, and realise how, by my 40s, I have actually come full circle. Not with regards to boozing and carousing, which I've given up, but in a complete resistance to even the idea of trying to aspire to a marriage-type relationship.

My 30s were weird, like some kind of aberration. The pressure, it was relentless, from my family, from my peer group as they paired off, from the cultural climate, sometimes, surprisingly, according to the typical narratives, even from the lads I dated. Maybe part of it was "biological" - not so much a ticking clock, as an almost compulsive hormonal frenzy, triggered by a failed pregnancy when I was 31. Looking back on it it seems like some kind of madness, that frenzy for Coupling. All I can say is, it passed, and looking back on those relationships, I am *so* grateful that it did pass.

So I rewrote the scene, from the wisdom of distance, to be more faithful to the characters' personalities, and to the kind of relationship I would have actually have wanted, and been happy in, when I was 30. Though I still kept the proposal as exactly that - a marriage proposal. Then into the middle of this, dropped a tweet linking to an interview with Samhita Mukhopadhyay about a book I'm actually quite curious to read. In opposition to the cultural narrative that, if you are an older single woman, ~feminism~ is ruining your lovelife, she posits that actually, it's *dating* that is ruining your lovelife. That those old cultural narratives and expectations need a thorough revising, not just a revisiting.

I want to shout back, through the intervening decade, at Kate Gordon "If you don't want to do it, don't agree to it!" But if she'd done that, there would be no drama and no story, no drug-induced elopement with the wrong man, and the novel would be 200 pages shorter. So perhaps it's my own younger self that I want to shout back at. Stop putting so much pressure on yourself!

I suppose that's the nice thing about getting older, as well as the awful thing. People tell me that it's never too late, you may yet meet some nice man... but that's missing the point. It's really freeing, to give yourself the permission to accept failure. I've let myself go. I've stopped trying. I've become the kind of mad old lady who shouts at bus stops, if that's what I feel like doing. One level, sure, it makes me a little bit sad, that nagging reminder of what might have been. But mostly, it's pure relief.

There are days that it's hard. Mostly Sunday mornings. The uncomfortable reminder that I wake up in an empty bed, when really what I would like is some leisurely spooning followed by some energetic sex. But who am I kidding? The other six nights of uninterrupted sleep and what my friend Sarah calls "going starfish" in an empty bed more than makes up for it. Not having to negotiate the endless petty sacrifices of a relationship. The never-ending emotional admin of looking after a man. No thank you. I *like* the freedom to be selfish.

To be honest, it's when I start to wish prostitution were legal - or at least, that it catered more to women. When I wish I could negotiate a contract on those terms - we will have relations on Sundays only. I don't pay you to have sex with me, I pay you to leave, afterwards, with no questions and no entanglements and most specifically, no demands until you return without fuss the next week. Yes, it's an unreasonable expectation, and a selfish one. But why can't I negotiate a relationship that is nothing more than an ongoing series of one night stands? Because, I suppose, like the author I used to be ten years ago, I hear mine own mouthpiece stating explicitly what I really want, but I'm too scared to listen and actually ask for it..

Adopt A Peer

2011-09-08T15:19:00.005+01:00

This morning, I woke up in a weird daze, with the vague sense that what happened last night had not happened, that it had been a bad dream, a twitter hoax, some kind of psychotic break where I imagined something which did not in point of fact happen. Oddly, the blogosphere, at least that parts I inhabit, was silent on it. Messageboards which normally hum with every political intrigue from Hackgate to the recent UK riots had nothing to say about it. Even the usually vaguely-left chatterers of the Guardian seemed to be oddly absent - the top headlines when I looked were about Michael Moore and Gaddafi. The only parliamentary news to get a header was the good news that Nadine Dorries' anti-woman anti-choice amendment had (phew!) been dropped.

So that whole thing of the Commons passing the massively ill conceived and misguided and unwanted Health and Social Care Bill, that never happened, right? RONG.

It was even suggested by some cynial types that the whole Dorries kerfuffle that got commented on and liveblogged was some kind of diversion, a smokescreen for the real damage they were about to inflict on the NHS, while our attention was diverted with some incredibly dangerous bit of nonsense they had no intention of going through with. I don't know.

But maybe this piece of news is so awful that it's just not possible to process it. Maybe it's disbelief. They can't. They won't. They promised they wouldn't. Maybe people who have grown up with the NHS have got so used to it, they can't even imagine how awful it could be without it.

Someone in my tweetstream suggested that they'd seen more support for the Save BBC4 campaign than any Save the NHS campaign. Maybe most people, healthy people just use BBC4 more, on a daily basis than the NHS we all just kind of take for granted.

Well, there's this: http://goingtowork.org.uk/peers/

It hasn't got through the House of Lords yet, so there's a chance... maybe they won't. I mean, they can't, right? Maybe people have faith that they can't really sell off the NHS.

I wrote a letter. I wrote an actual physical, stick-it-in-the-post letter. I can't tell you the last time I did that, I've got to used to signing petitions, on paper and online, and watching them do absolutely no good at all. What extra harm could writing a letter to a Lord or Lady do. I have to do *something* beyond all that clicking and signing.

Anyway, here's the text of what I wrote:

I am writing to you as part of a campaign to urge the Peers to change or reject the Health and Social Care Bill, in order to stop the NHS being broken up or having parts of it sold off. But instead of sending the form letter they suggested, I’m going to tell you some of my experiences, and why the future of the NHS is so important to me.

I was born in England, but when I was 9, my family moved to the States, and I spent my teens and my early 20s there. In my late 20s, I returned to the UK, expecting to stay only a few years, but instead I have resettled here permanently and remained here for over 12 years. Apart from the expected family and cultural connections, my single greatest reason for making the UK my home again was the NHS.

You see, I have a long-term health issue. I am bipolar. It is a treatable condition. With regular access to proper medical care, I am able to live a normal life. I work full-time (I have a good job, as a computer programmer.) I pay taxes, I support myself, pay my mortgage, and contribute to the UK economy. Thanks to the excellent care I receive, from the NHS, I am able to be a fully functioning member of society.

In the US, my "pre-existing condition" made me uninsurable. Despite the fact that my condition is controllable, the amount of care they thought I required made it almost impossible for insurance companies to make a profit off me, so I was denied insurance. I was unable to pay, not just for my long-term condition - making my mental health so unstable that I was sometimes not able to even hold a job - but for other simple, basic healthcare, such as broken bones and ear infections.

Running health care on a principle which puts profit before people means that people like me, who are capable of living normal, productive lives, are denied the chance to do so, because we are not profitable. If the NHS is changed, to echo the American system of "competition" and "profit-making" it is people like me who will suffer.

I urge you, in your debate and vote on this bill, to resist the unnecessary changes this bill would bring.

I recognise this is probably not non-problematic. I speak only for myself. I can't help thinking that maybe I'm being a bit harsh by referring to myself as only being a "productive member of society" when I am able to work, as if people who are too sick to work are somehow not? I don't mean that, I mean, working - or not working, so much as the *ability* to work, the ability to be sane and healthy enough to BE ABLE TO work is so damned important to me that I'm terrified that US-style profitmongering would strip me of it.

I had a bit of a wakeup call two weeks ago. I don't want to get into too many details, but I experienced some online bullying which pushed me into what felt like the start of another ... episode. I had some disturbing and quite frankly terrifying symptoms, which in the past have been precursors to a breakdown, even hospitalisation. This time, I recognised the symptoms. Crying and shaking, I went to my doctor. Who saw me immediately, and packed me in a cab (they kindly offered me an ambulance, but I didn't think I needed one yet) to the emergency room, with a letter to the psychiatric crisis response team. I was seen, evaluated and treated within hours. Timely intervention meant that expected breakdown did not have to occur. I was back at work within 3 days. But this is the kind of shit that reminds me sometimes, how thin the line between "functioning", "sanity", "coping" and nonfunctioning, madness, breakdown can be for me. This is when the NHS seems most real, to me, most important. Remembering what it was like, back in the States, being uninsured, when those kinds of symptoms meant a breakdown, meant getting sacked from another job, months of my life (not to mention the people around me) getting turned upside down.

I guess there's more at stake for people like me. But I don't know what I can even do.

Keep Your Culture Wars Off My Ovaries

2011-09-05T16:37:00.004+01:00

So I said that I would write a blog post on this, because a friend of mine didn't understand why I went on a twitter rant yesterday.

Someone in my tweetstream retweeted a series of tweet by a left-leaning, apparently Movement Atheist* comedy account. In which, the topic of Abortion was referred to as a "complex issue of bioethics."

*OK, I can hear the intake of breath from some of my friends over that, even as I write it, so let me please explain the difference between atheists and Movement Atheists, why I have no problem with the former at all, and rather a large suspicion of the latter. Atheists are people who do not believe in god. That's all! The end.

Movement Atheists are the ones who are so convinced of the Utter Irrefutable Truth of their philosophical system (usually attached to tenaciously, almost religiously held beliefs in the omni-competence of Totally Objective Western Science) that it's not enough for them to merely reject religion themselves, they will not rest until they have argued, bullied, shamed, or otherwise converted everyone else to their philosophical system, and, you know, the hell with other individuals' experience of spirituality, community, and the pesky cultural traditions of the 7/8 of the world that are not Western, college educated, middle-class, white men.

In short, Movement Atheism is often almost indistinguishable from another group of self-righteous, overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male fanatics so convinced of their utter rightness that they use it to uphold the privilege of, well, white middle class males over "ignorant" and "backwards" cultures around the world. I mean, does that sound historically familiar, at all?

Oh. Right. Their sworn enemies.

So. This is the Culture War. In one corner is Science and in the other corner is Religion and according to the philosophical landgrabbing of *both* Movement Atheism and Fundamentalism of various creeds, never the twain shall meet. Like chalk and cheese. Like oil and vinegar (except without the delicious salad-enhancing properties that characterise successful blends of the above, like many, many people manage to reconcile science and religion with no more problems than reconciling, say, mathematics and other humanities like poetry.)

Which brings us back to Bioethics which I found such an immensely unhelpful term for the discussion of abortion that I was reduced to an inarticulate rant.

See, I learned the term Bioethics way back in high school, where it was generally used to describe and discuss the morality of the scientific use of animals and plants. So that's the first connotation I associate with the word - that this is how MAs see women, and discussion of the right to bodily autonomy of women. On a level with genetically modified wheat, and cloned farm animals. Yes, I'm aware that technically, the prefix "Bio-" means all living things, but the connotation, reinforced by words like Biodiversity, Biofuels, Biomass, is that it means non-human life. Words related specifically to humans get different prefixes, such as "Anthro-"

Philosopical concerns related specifically to *males* - they're not called Bioethics, they're just called Ethics. Try typing "bioethics of circumcision" into wikipedia and watch it get redirected to "ethics of circumcision." Words and their connotations have power. Men are people; women are... other.

Even the updated dictionary definition of "bioethics" is inappropriate. "Bioethics is the study of controversial ethics brought about by advances in biology and medicine." Abortion, as an recorded medical practice, is nearly 5000 years old. How is a procedure known to the Ancient Egyptians supposed to be a quandary brought about by "advances in medicine"?

(I know, I'm technically not supported on this on this discomfort - supposedly Assisted Suicide is a "bioethical" concern, despite being documented even before the death of Socrates.)

But Bioethics just seems to me, an inappropriate term to use when describing Abortion. Abortion is not about technology, or advances in medicine, it is about the right of women to control what happens to, and in, their own bodies. "Bioethics" frames it as something technical, something sciencey, and places it firmly within the Science camp of the Science Versus Religion!!!! culture wars.

And there are women, and womens' autonomy, placed yet again as another pawn in someone else's philosophical territory wars.

Because guess what? There are many, many people who identify as religious, who belong to or even lead churches, synagogues, temples, etc. - who are Pro-Choice. I know them personally - my Roman Catholic former housemate, who works for a womens reproductive rights organisation. Mine own mother, a priest (C of E), and staunchly Pro-choice, taught me the joke "if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament."

Framing this solely as a "Science v Religion" war is 1) hugely insulting and devisive when it comes to Allies who support the Pro-Choice position and 2) the whole "most of the people who are anti-choice are religious, ergo all religions are anti-choice" is an illogical and frankly wrong-headed assumption on the level of "All dachsunds are dogs, ergo all dogs are dachsunds!"

And like I said above, I *distrust* Movement Atheism. MA's god-head leader is an unmitigaged racist and bigot not to mention is a massive sexist douche with a propensity for making rape jokes. Even self identified progressive female atheists have expressed discomfort with the level of sexism and misogyny in Movement Atheism and if you want a quick lesson in exactly how much the Skeptic Movement does not give a shit about the concerns of women, just google "ElevatorGate".

So when I see Movement Atheists redefining the bodily autonomy of women as "bioethics" and lining it up as another pawn in the great Science V Religion Wars, I feel about as comfortable as I feel when the US Military uses "women's rights" to justify the invasion of oil-rich Middle Eastern countries.

'Splaining

2011-09-04T09:58:00.002+01:00

Reading this blog, and seeing how I've neglected it recently, it makes me realise something: I used to spend a whole lot more time, and energy and effort, trying to explain my behaviour. Not rationalise, not justify, not excuse - just *explain*: This behaviour, which may look incomprehensible to others, happens because I am feeling X, Y and Z.

Did it do any good? Not really. People draw their own conclusions, they project their own situations. "That is not the way that I feel, in fact, I could never even conceive of feeling or thinking X, Y or Z, therefore you must be lying or ~making it up~, and I will now tell you how you *must* be feeling, to be doing that, if you were *me*." Never mind that I've spent 40 years in this body, in this brain, in this set of experiences, and they have known me for a few months, mediated entirely through a messageboard format which strips context, culture, affect and emotion from everything that I say.

So I eventually gave up explaining.

Did the projecting and the accusing and the condemning stop? Of course it didn't. But at least I wasn't wasting my time, my effort, and all that emotional energy of trying to justify my very existence to people unwilling or unable to listen. What a relief.

Truth Bombs

2011-08-25T07:26:00.003+01:00

A couple of things I've learned in the past few days:

1) The men who are quickest to condemn "gossip" or "talking about 'feelings'" are also the same ones who are quickest to rush in and gossip and spill all *their* damn feelings when it comes to condemning and demonising women who are showing signs of mental illness. Oh boy, do they ever let their 'feelings' be known then!

2) A man who repeatedly says "woman X is SUCH an attention whore!" actually means "I really enjoy showering my attention on woman X" especially if it involves going to extra ordinary lengths to acquire information about woman X.

Here is this Thing that happens

2011-07-20T15:07:00.003+01:00

I do a Thing on a messageboard. A messageboard like ILX. A Thing which lots of other posters seem able to do, without comment or complaint. And yet, because it's *me* doing it, this Thing suddenly attracts all kinds of complaints and concern trolls and people who generally just object to my ~very existence~ or something and there ends up being a clusterfuck - which is not about the Thing, but ends up, for whatever reason, becoming all about the Cluster's PINIONS about ~me~.

And it doesn't seem to actually matter, if I participate in the clusterfuck, or close the browser and walk away in disgust, sometimes all it requires is someone to just ~mention my name~ and there will be a clusterfuck, whether I participate or ignore it or what.

And here's what happens: I stop doing Things.

This makes me pretty unhappy, because generally I enjoy doing Things, but I really really do not enjoy being the centre or subject of clusterfucks. Because clusterfucks are really pretty unfun for everyone except The Pig. And when the cluster is well and truly fucked, who takes the blame, and the negativity, and the accusations of "OMG, you are always so all about the ~drama~!!!" Is it the people who cluster and complain and concern troll? No, it is not. It is me.

And the thing that makes it worse, and even more annoying is those other people, who somehow manage to do exactly the same Thing, without incident, then turn around and go "what is your problem? Why can't you just do a little Thing without all this fucking Drama?" Because guess what, *their* experience of doing Things is completely fucking drama-free.

And if I try to explain, they turn around and say "OMG, why is it you always think that everything is all about YOU?" I don't know, why don't you go and ask the people back in paragraph one who make that Thing not about the Thing, but all about me?

That is just the irritating icing on the goddamn clusterfuckcake. I am pretty much the only person on ILX who gets slagged off if they are involved with a clusterfuck, and then gets slagged off for refusing to *start* a thing that I fear might become a clusterfuck. I'm fucked if I do, I'm fucked if I don't.

Streatham Is Beautiful

2011-07-09T07:41:00.004+01:00

Guide to Karen D. Tregaskin's Work
(and short architectural walking tour)

Streatham Town Hall - (Frederick Wheeler, 1888) Directly opposite this gallery is a modern building at the end of a row of Victorian shops known as "The Triangle." This was once the site of Streatham Town Hall - not actually a civic building, but a venue for concerts, lectures and public meetings. It was demolished in 1988. Many of the other buildings in this exhibition are currently under threat, or have already been scheduled for demolition, while others have been re-used and redeveloped to become vital parts of the local community. Please take some time to walk up the high road and look at them carefully, as much of Streatham's rich architectural history may soon be gone forever.

Bank Parade - (Tooley and Sons, 1890) Turn left out of the gallery and walk down the High Road towards the Common. Opposite the children's play area, observe this row of shops with their elegant scrolled pediments. One of the buildings near Greyhound Lane has recently been cleaned, revealing patterns in the brightly coloured brick. Prior to the arrival of the railway in the 1860s, this was the site of two vast country houses, but in the last decades of the 19th Century, Streatham was redeveloped in the decorative late Victorian style of which these buildings are quite typical.

Streatham Ice Arena - (Robert Cromie, 1931) Turn around and walk back from the Common. On the left is this lovely Art Deco rink with Egyptian detailing, designed to hold 1000 skaters. This world class rink is internationally famous. (My friends in the States, whose knowledge of London consists of "that big clock on the river" had still heard of Streatham because of our ice rink.) It is currently slated for demolition, in order to build a Tesco's. Which I am quite certain will be neither world class nor world famous.

Streatham Baths - (Ernest Elford, 1927) This single block shows the wide range of architecture, from Art Deco to Neo-Classical within a few hundred feet. The roof of this building features stunning stained glass, but it has been subject to such neglect and allowed to deteriorate to the point where the building became unsafe and had to be boarded up. It, too, has been scheduled for demolition to make way for the new Tesco. On a stretch of road where there are already four major supermarkets within half a mile.

The White Lion - (F. Gough & Co, 1895) Walk back along the high road, past the gallery and up "The Dip" and find this magnificent pub two blocks past the church spires, on the left. There has been a coaching inn on this site since at least 1730, when it was the terminus of a horse-drawin bus from London. As well as a pub, inn and live music venue, the White Lion's Stables have been redeveloped for use as a community centre for workshops and children's classes.

The Tate Library - (Sidney R.J. Smith, 1890) A block north along the high road, on the right side, is the Tate Library, with its green dome and distinctive clock (recently repaired after water damage.) It was donated to the inhabitants of Streatham by the sugar magnate, Henry Tate, who lived nearby. In the 19th Century, rich men like Tate and Andrew Carnegie became philanthropists, using their money to improve the lot of ordinary people. These days, some very rich men are trying to cut funding for public libraries and have been trying to shut down several of Lambeth's fine libraries.

Sharman's - (Architect unknown - 1929) Walk north another block and you will reach the main intersection that is the heart of Streatham, with the Odeon on your right and this group of buildings opposite. Sharman's, build as a draper's shop, now W.H. Smith and the Post Office is a beautiful example of Art Deco design, with its geometric metal window frames. A recent cleaning, during the refurbishment of Sainsbury's next door, has revealed the lovely mellow red and cream brick work underneath 100 years of dirt and grime.

Caesar's - (Trehearne and Norman Preston & Co, 1929) Continue walking north past Streatham Hill station. On the same side of the road is one of the most notorious buildings in Streatham. Caesar's started life as the Locarno Ballroom, the glamourous centrepiece of the nighclubs and movie palaces that lined Streatham Hill in its incarnation as the "West End of South London." It became a nightclub during the 60s, hosting performances by the Rolling Stones and the Who, and was known as the Cats Whiskers, the Studio, the Ritzy and finally as Caesar's. The iconic chariot and horses were removed last year - the building is slated for demolition as the block is to be redeveloped, but work has stalled and the area rots.

Megabowl - (Charles Nicholas and J.E. Dixon-Spain, 1932) On the same block, and also facing demolition, is the former Gaumont Palace Cinema. At the time of its opening, it was the largest movie palace in Streatham, with 2431 seats - a similar size to the Streatham Hill Theatre on the next block, which was itself the largest theatre in suburban London, bigger even than the Covent Garden Opera House. During the Gaumont's heyday, there was an open-air cafe in the recessed terrace behind the pillars. It was converted to (at the time) Europe's largest bowling alley in 1962 and reopened as MegaBowl (featuring the alliterative Zapp Zone) in 1989. The building's frontage is listed and may be preserved in the new development, as has been done with the former ABC Cinema across the street, but the future of the rest of the building, which survived a hit by a V1 rocket during WWII, is uncertain.

Selected Bibliography

A Chronology of the Parish of Streatham - John W Brown, Roger A Brewer and Cecil T Davis
The High Road Streatham, An Architectural Appreciation - Graham Gower
Streatham Pictures from the Past - the Streatham Society
Additional research courtesy of StreathamPulse.com and the Tate Library

Colour versions of most drawings can be located on the artists "Streatham Is Beautiful" set on http://tinyurl.com/StreathamIsBeautiful

The (Copyright) Elephant In The Room

2011-07-08T12:55:00.000+01:00

It's every illustrator or designer's nightmare. There has recently been a rash of high profile retailers copying or stealing artists' work. It's become so common that it seems almost like a rite of passage for up and coming designers, but I never dreamed it could happen to me, too. Fortunately, my story has a happy ending.

A few years ago, I was in a struggling indie band. Since we didn't have the money for the usual video promotion for our single, Elephants, I decided to draw a comic book to drum up interest. Now obviously the pop star thing didn't work out, but I worked out a nice little sideline designing T-shirts, posters, album art and other graphics for bands.

A few months ago, I noticed I was getting really odd spikes of google activity in my Flickr Statistics. But it wasn't until last Thursday that I got a tip-off from an anonymous commenter: brandy melville sells this on a shirt... you probs know that though... anyways i love it!

Actually, I'd had no idea, but a quick google confirmed my fears. The shirt was being sold by Brandy Melville, an Italian fashion label now based in LA.

(Source: Brandy Melville US Facebook)

I immediately launched a panicked tweet, with a link to my image and a link to an online retailer, asking for advice and help. I'd never before experienced the power and the *speed* of crowd-sourcing like that. Illustrators and designers retweeted my plea hundreds of times, offering help, advice and words of support. Within an hour, people in my network had located contacts at both the retailer and the designer. Within a day, thanks to the power of social networking, I'd spoken to several lawyers, a copyright expert, staff writers at both online and print style journals interested in the story, and a fashion PR and a high end brand consultant! Another friend looked up the company information, and located their owners, lawyers, and publicists. (I think it was at the point that they sent me a link where I could view their factory and warehouse on streetview, that I realised exactly how powerful a tool crowdsourcing was.)

The internet was also immensely helpful at digging out information about the scale of the issue. Not only was the shirt on sale everywhere from Japan to California (as confirmed by online friend who'd seen someone walking around wearing the shirt in Orange County, and thought "Hey, that looks like one of Masonic Boom's drawings!") but also had been written about by several fashion bloggers.

My initial disbelief and anger turned to fear. I heard so many horror stories from the blogosphere of everything from DeviantArtists finding their work being sold by Etsy users in Bulgaria to small artists getting royally ripped off by large corporations, safe in the knowledge that their victims did not have the money to pursue the matter. The singer of a world renowned rock band told me how his band's name and t-shirts had been pirated by a trendy high street shop whose name rhymes with "turban shout shitters" - without permission, without payment - but they could not afford the lawyers to pursue it.

At this point, I realised I had better seek legal advice, and quickly. I'd like to tell you I crowdsourced a lawyer, but that turned out not to be necessary. Firstly, one of my closest friends is a patent attorney in LA. Although this is completely out of her area of expertise, so she was not able to offer me any official advice, she was able to guide me through the options open to me, and the legal steps I would have to take. In the end, I spoke to my brother, an economist and author, who keeps a lawyer on retainer. Yes, I do realise exactly how privileged this situation makes me, but there are many other resources out there.

But, like I said, this story has a happy ending. Although I was prepared for the worst, a representative from Brandy Melville contacted me late that evening (my time - first thing in the morning LA time.) He admitted immediately that yes, it was clearly my image that they had copied without knowing the source. He apologised and asked how we could "collaborate" to make this legal. Although I was initially sceptical and mistrustful, within 24 hours, they made good on their word and emailed me a contract for a licensing agreement, detailing payment of fees and royalties for my drawing.

Well, colour me surprised. "International corporation acts responsibly, complies with the law" should not be news, but in the climate described above, it was actually refreshing.

As my lawyers read over the contract, I debated what to do. Some advisors were pushing me to demand punitive damages - to which I was legally entitled - as some kind of "punish money".

In the end, I decided to sign the contract, and not pursue damages. I just thought it would be vindictive and avaricious to do so. I do not know if the theft was deliberate, just an oversight or genuine mistake, or if some third party passed off my work as their own. In the absence of that knowledge, I follow the Categorical Imperative. How would I act if I knew my actions and outcomes would be made universal? I consider that a result of the company 1) admitting it, 2) apologising for it and 3) legally licensing the design to be a good universal outcome, not just for my case, but for the copying cases described above. I want to encourage other companies caught in this situation to settle, amicably, not dissuade them from following the example by punishing one that did the right thing.

I asked that in lieu of damages, they make a donation to The Elephant Family, an elephant-based charity, which would be a topical & poetic justice way of showing good faith & restoring karma or whatever.

I personally believe that punishing people for doing wrong is not as effective as rewarding them for doing the ethical and responsible thing. In a consumer society, one often feels powerless with regards to large corporations - but we have the ability to punish and reward corporations with our clicks, our pageviews, our "likes" and our purchases. In this case, Brandy-Melville behaved responsibly and ethically. They did the *right* thing, in admitting and making reparations for their mistake, and they deserve credit for it. Their actions, through being responsive and quick, turned me from an angry litigator to an ally and even a fan.

Are you listening, Urban Outfitters? This is how you respond to a copyright claim.

On Montol Eve

2010-12-22T19:25:00.003Z

It's dark as hell, up on top of the hill, the kind of pitch blackness you only ever see out in deep country, though the lights of Penance and Mount's Bay are spread out only half a mile below. I'd walked out of the train station and up a hill, up a pleasant suburban street. Then, abruptly, stepping off the road into Lescudjack Hillfort, it's like stepping back in time. Not a few hundred years, but a few thousand years, back to pagan, Iron Age Cornwall. Trying to get my bearings in the dark, I stumble round. As my eyes adjust, I see, on one side, a gathering of dark, hooded strangers, like the ghosts of forgotten druids, and on the other pale white forms I take for menhirs.

Closer examination proves the menhirs are made of papier mache, but I don't fancy taking my chances with the hooded men in case they are not, similarly, ersatz. The wind picks up as I make my way around to the other side of the circle, but suddenly there is the hiss of flame, and I turn to see a young man in Victorian dress, with a full beard and wild curly hair, juggling with a pair of rods lit on fire at both ends. It's fiercely cold, but he's in billowing shirtsleeves, making his way around the hilltop in a slow circle.

It's hard to judge time in the dark; my mind is playing tricks with me. I keep thinking I hear drums in the distance, but when the wind shifts, the sound is gone. It's quite scary, actually, up here on mine own, except for the hooded men, who keep disappearing, silently, into the dark by the side of the hillfort, and the man with the fire, who I'm still not entirely sure isn't actually a haunting, some slippage of time from another era. The sound is picking up, those are definitely drums off in the distance, insistent, primal, growing louder and louder as whoever - or whatever - draws nearer.

The tension is unbearable. I run back down the hill, and I find myself back in the safety of the twenty-first century, the familiar suburban street lined with cars and streetlamps. And yet, still the drums get louder and louder, coming nearer and nearer. Compelled and yet afraid, I find myself breaking into a trot, until I get to the breast of the hill, and I freeze in my steps.

Coming up the hill is a ghostly army, wreathed in unearthly blue lights, their bodies jerking in a rough dance to the beat of the music, creatures in masks and fancy dress, leading an army - of imps? of piskies? Of children! An army of dancing children are following these masked blue devils, holding up a sea of glowing triangular lanterns. For a few moments, I dither, caught between wanting to run forward and join them, dancing wildly up the hill, and turning and running for my life. I run back to the darkness of the hillfort, feeling giddy and wild, the anticipation stronger than fear. Despite the piercing cold, my heart is beating fast.

Back on the hillfort, the hooded men have prepared the circle, lighting torches all around the perimeter, as the drummers and entranced children flood around the enclosure, settling at the far end, their rows of pyramidal lanterns like the sails of some phantom fleet of ships beached on the ground. The tall, pale menhirs have been lit from within, glowing with an ethereal light. And as the drummers start to play again, more fire-jugglers make their way into the ring. One boy has flaming torches at the end of chains, swinging them about like comets. Another and another appear, each bursting onto the scene with a fire-breathing puff of flame leaping up into the night, until there are half a dozen. A tall girl with elfin ears has a circle of flames like a hula hoop which she is dancing around in slow, sensual circles.

A rumour goes round the circle that the other half of the procession has been delayed, but soon enough, another drumbeat is heard off in the distance. More revelers pour around the circle, filling up the makeshift stands three or four deep. Some are tourists like myself, but most are in fancy dress, masked, carrying lanterns. The hooded druids take up their places around the circle, holding flaming torches, and then, slowly, the ragged procession enters the circle. They are led by a dancing creature, half pierrot, half fool, shaking his bespangled umbrella at the crowd. Behind him, follows the Lord of Misrule, with staff and turban, and a hooked mask with a long nose like plague doctors wore 500 years ago. And following him, the band.

The are terrifying. Dressed in long black coats, masks and high black hats, decorated with feathers and ribbons and beads, they are all decked out in Victorian finery, but dusty, ragged, as if the Lord of Misrule has pulled them from their graves to dance and cavort, playing fiddles and horns and pipes and drums as they process about the circle once, twice, three times, bowing and scraping. They look like the ancient Celtic dead, marching abroad on the darkest night of the year.

The Lord of Misrule comes forth with a lighted torch, and thrusts it into the beacon, piled with wood and doused in petrol. The crowd holds its breath as the fierce wind toys with the flame, then the wick catches and the fire takes hold. The bonfire is lit, let the dancing begin!

Five small girls, all in black, with gauzy cloaks and suggestion of fairy wings, creep about the crowd and slip into place. At a signal from the drums, they leap forward and as one, carefully raise their hands towards the fire, then start to dance. Slowly, elegantly at first, they bow and flutter and pirouette, then, as the drums pick up, the dance becomes wilder, as they throw themselves about with wild abandon. And then...

THE CREATURE breaks into the circle! At least eight foot tall, it's dressed in a long ragged black cloak and hobnailed boots, but where its face should be is a horse's skull, glittering white and checkered silver in the moonlight. Round and round, it wheeled wildly, night-mare spirit of the dark, dancing closer and closer to the fire until we cried - with terror or delight - fearing it would be burned up. The fairy-girls danced with wild abandon as the music seemed to lift with the wind. Then the horse-skull-man-god stamped its terrifying feet one more time, and was gone, taking with it the darkness that would swallow the sun. The danger was passed and the earth had turned the solstice. From now on the days would grow longer again.

The Lord of Misrule lead his ragged band of the dead around the circle again, playing an apocalyptic drone-folk dirge for the dying sun. Then, collecting up the hooded men behind them, they passed out of the fort, back down to the town for feasting and celebrations. The more intrepid of us, seeking the magic and warmth of the fire, pressed close to the beacon, watching the flames flicker and the embers glow. There are really only two things at which humans can stare, entranced, for ever - at fire, and at the sea. At the top of Penzance, back to the fire and face towards the sea, I felt suspended out of time, ageless and eternal.

As I make my way back down the hill to the modern high street, my eyes look at everything anew. The bright and shiny shops, all glittering with Christmas decorations, the teenagers tottering about in high heels, all this now seems like the dream, and the phantasmagorical creatures at the top of the hill more real than the flimsy modern world of missed buses and Tesco's sandwiches. I feel shellshocked as I collapse onto the bus and make my way home to dream of dancing monsters.

Details, performers, etc. of Montol Eve in Penzance, Cornwall

A Racist Bone

2010-11-27T22:02:00.002Z

This blog has been some time coming, mainly because I don't have a clue how to address the topic. I've been talking about the concept of Privilege, with regards to gender and sexual orientation, and of course that brings up the enormous elephant in the room that is the fact of the Privilege of my race.

Recently, I was reading an article about a (white) comedian, who justified his "edgy" jokes about black people by claiming "I can make these jokes because I'm not a racist! I don't have a racist bone in my body!" I've never been deluded enough to make this same assertion, I've never had the privilege of denial. The fact is, I was raised within one of the most racist cultures on earth, and grew up in one of the most deeply racist countries on earth. I've lived, surrounded by racism, soaking in it, both overt and covert. It is very likely that I have a great many racist bones, some I'm aware of, but others so deep in my skeleton I don't even know they're there.

I was born in suburban London to white South African parents. In the 70s and 80s of my childhood, this mere fact was enough to damn me. (Never mind the actual politics of my family, or their reasons for leaving the country.) When I was 9, we moved to America, total innocents who had actually believed the internationally promoted myth that America was a perfectly free, perfectly classless country.

Even to South African parents, the racism of nice, suburban America was a vicious shock. My mother told me that it seemed actually worse than South Africa. There, due to the entrenched political system of Apartheid, at least racism was out in the open where it could be owned, addressed, spoken of. American racism, economic and social, seemed somehow more vicious for being covert, even denied by those that were perpetuating it.

When we were first looking for a home in suburban Connecticut, the estate agents were legally obliged to show us a house which seemed nice enough, but advised strongly against buying it. "Look around you," they hissed. "Look at the other families on the block!" My mother looked. To an African, being surrounded by black faces was neither particularly shocking nor the slightest bit frightening. But the realtor moved us swiftly on to an all white neighbourhood. (A nice, white neighbourhood where a cross was burned on our lawn with the accompanying message "Brits, go home" but that's another story.)

My mum soon started a cub scout troop in order to meet other young mothers, and for us to meet other kids outside school. One mother called, warily wanting to know if there were any spare places in her troop for her sons. Of course; it was a brand new troop, my mum told her, and asked the two boys to come to the next meeting. When their mother dropped them off, she explained that every other boy scout troop in the town had mysteriously become too full when a black family wanted to join. Indeed, a couple of kids abruptly dropped out after they joined - which was good news for me, as suddenly there was extra space and material available for the annoying little sister who wanted to tag along on everything.

At school, things were supposed to be different. My brother and I attended one of the most elite, upper middle class pre-prep schools in New England, albeit one with a supposed "liberal" tradition. (This meant they admitted the occasional scholarship kid to boost their athletic or SSAT scores, which was how we ended up there, naively unaware of the differences between the UK and US class systems.) Divestment was a big buzzword in these circles, the Problem of South Africa was a popular topic of conversation at upper middle class dinner parties.

How this filtered down to the world of an eleven year old was somewhat more direct. A group of girls confronted me in the locker room after gym class. "Our mothers say we can't play with you any more." (They had never really played with me - the scholarship kid, the English kid, the cootie girl - much to start with.) "My mother says you're South African. She says you're a RACIST."

I had to look it up in the dictionary. Being British, and not used to American English, I often had to do that with insults. ("Cootie" hadn't been in there, but other perennial favourites such as "Dyke" and "Lesbian" were.) Racism: the prejudice that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, esp. so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races. To an eleven year old, it seemed a kind of prejudice that members of the group "Americans" distinguished themselves as possessing characteristics superior to all members of another group called "South Africans." But I hadn't quite got to the page of the dictionary with the word "hypocrite" on it yet, to realise that this message came from the same mothers, calling my mum "racist" for being South African, that had refused to accommodate two little black children in their cub scout troops.

We eventually moved to a new town and a new school, where I learned not to tell people about my parents' nationality. My mother started to tell people that her charming accent was from New Zealand. (It's astonishing to me that Americans couldn't tell the difference.) At high school, my closest friends were girls in the ESL (English as a Second Language) program, whose families came from places as far flung as Malaysia, South Korea, Brazil. It was years later that I understood, what had brought us together was a specific part of the immigrant experience. They understood the conflicts of using one language, one culture, one way of presenting ourselves outside the house, and a completely different one inside our family homes. I learned to *pass* for an American, changed my accent, my clothes, my hair, though I never got the hang of that American race thing - that although my skin was the same colour as those nice, white, middle class American girls, our experiences were nothing alike.

I moved to New York City, as soon as I was an adult, and it seemed like another world. I loved Queens, with its profusion of colours and languages and cultures. For the first time in my life, I experienced the freedom of living in a neighbourhood where everyone was an immigrant. Everyone came from somewhere else, and in a place where no one *really* belongs, *everyone* somehow belongs. I spent a lot of time in an Indian neighbourhood because, desperately homesick, I discovered that one could get Crunchie bars, Birds-Eye custard and Bisto powder in the shops there. I didn't, at the time, think about the inherent British Imperialism of this. And I cringe now, thinking of the cultural appropriation whereby I started to take on the trappings of my new neighbourhood, wearing Indian clothes and jewelry, watching Bollywood films and listening to classical ragas and bhangra. But it was as much a rejection of adopted American culture as a co-option of Asian culture. I couldn't stand the mawkish anglophilia of places like Tea and Sympathy; instead I ate dosas at a restaurant where the waiters, immigrants like me, commented on my accent because they had family in Manchester and Birmingham. British-Asian culture seemed more familiar, more homey to me than American culture ever did.

Don't get me wrong. NYC wasn't a racially harmonious paradise. Second generation immigrants can often be more hostile to first generation immigrants because they have more to lose. And back in Manhattan, WASP culture reigned supreme. At one of my first proper, post-college jobs, a young Latina woman and I were interviewed and hired at the same time, so we went through the company induction together. We were the same age, so we chatted in the waiting room as we filled out our forms, about clothes, television, which subway lines we'd ride in to work. The HR person approached my colleague. "I'll need to take a copy of your Green Card before you can start work." She rolled her eyes, explained that she was a third generation New Yorker and neither had nor indeed needed a Green Card. "OK, I'll need to see your birth certificate, then." Me, I had my documents, my Green Card, my Social Security card and my British passport, all ready to go, but HR ignored me. "Would you like to see my Green Card?" I asked, worried. "Ha ha, very funny," the HR person replied dismissively. "No, really," I insisted. People *never* asked me for one, but I knew it was illegal to even have me on the premises without one. "I thought you were joking," the HR person told me as she, flabbergasted, took and xeroxed my documents.

It was utterly eye-opening. It was the first time I actually understood what it meant, the idea of racial privilege. That although *I* was the immigrant, only 12 years in the country, and some of her ancestors had been on the American continent when mine were painting themselves blue and hurling themselves at Romans, the white girl got to pass, unchallenged, and the brown girl had to prove her right to work, to even exist, within the American system.

That year was the year of the OJ Simpson trial. America was divided in a way I didn't understand. I can remember arguing about it at one of those endless druggy boho parties, me, my housemate and a handsome young black man. (He was a model, who had just starred in a Toni Braxton video, so maybe there was a subtext of competitive flirting.) For me, the issues were clear cut. Males had one legal system in America, whereby a man could beat or even murder his wife and get away with it, females had another. My housemate brought up the time I'd spent in jail, and the male model gaped at me, wide-eyed, my chances of pulling in ruins. "They put a white girl in jail? What'd you do, kill a cop?!" For him, the issue was just as stark - white people had one legal system in America, black people had another.

I was hugely ignorant then. I am, still, hugely ignorant, but I try to be at least aware of mine own ignorance. Race and gender and the privilege thereof intersect in ways that are complicated and difficult to detangle. There are stories I've left out - the fellow writer, on a radio program, who shouted at me, patronisingly, that I had no right to speak of Feminism or the prejudices that women faced, because little white girls had nothing to be angry about. The time my mother accidentally joined the African American Students Club when she returned to university, because she took it literally - she is, indeed, an American who was born in Africa - and they, in bitter irony, could not throw her out without being accused of racial discrimination. (She found herself repeatedly on the same side of arguments as a group of Nigerian exchange students, against American born black students, Culture seeming much stronger than Race alone.)

I do not pretend in any way that my experiences as an immigrant are remotely comparable to experiences of Race in America - if anything, my experiences only prove how different they are. I know that no matter what I've seen, I don't *get* it. I will never understand the American experience of Race, despite living there for over fifteen years. There is no hierarchy of privilege, race does not trump gender or vice versa, though they can intersect powerfully. (I recognise this is one of my faults, that I will stop and listen when a woman of colour calls me, or my kind, on issues of privilege, when my kneejerk reaction to a man of colour is to tell him to check his own male privilege first. Is this because my immigrant distrust of American WASP hypocrisy makes me identify more powerfully with my gender, rather than my Race? Or is it in point of fact some kind of racist misandry?)

I do not know. But ignorance is not an excuse. Although I cannot change the way I was raised, the culture I was imbued with, I can only try to be aware of it and try, not always successfully, to make conscious choices not to *act* in a way that is racist.

How Many Things Constitute a THING?

2010-11-02T13:56:00.004Z

OK, so there's this *thing* that I repeatedly notice on ILX, and it bothers me. And how many times does this *thing* have to be repeated before we can say it's a pattern, a general tendency, and talk about that pattern, rather than dissect each individual example, which can always be explained away.

Because this is often exactly how things like harassment, and sexism and The Patriarchy all work. That it's not just the one example that can be easily explained away, it's the repetition of these things happening over and over until you realise it is actually a pattern, and it's patterns that move to show intent as much as individual actions.

It happens like this:

-Link is posted to an article. It's always a *woman* columnist, she's always addressing some kind of aspect of feminism. (It happened with Laurie Penny today, it's happened before with Bidisha, with every female columnist or blogger ever from Lucy Mangan to "The Indie Professor".)

-ILX media-wannabes start circling the article, usually with this aghast "OMG, how is this dreadful columnist allowed to have a job at this paper!" (with the following "...and I don't!" never explicitly stated but usually implied) subtext.

-The resulting circlejerk usually takes on a slightly ad hominem tone, or rather, an ad-writing-style tone, whereby the writer's style, and "lumpen prose" and "jargon" (because, of course, the use of words like "patriarchy" and "heteronormative" in an article explicitly about feminism are jargon in a way that, say words like "offside rule" are so totally NOT jargon in an article specifically about sport) are implicated, rather than the actual message because *that* would mean they had to actually take the feminist principles being discussed seriously.

-The actual *content* of the article (hey, this thing! it's kinda sexist, huh?) is never directly addressed, but more the writer's whole ouvre is dismissed as being, oh you know, all the usual things like "PC" and "student left" and "humourless and strident" (we've never heard that one before, have we, ladies?)

And then all the mens get together in this giant circle jerk where they congratulate themselves on being so much more enlightened and politically aware and realist-cynical-ironic-snarky than that *terrible* strident, idealist, student-newspaper type woman-journalist. And in this masturbatory frenzy, they invariably somehow just forget to even *discuss* the actual, original *point* of the article. (This thing, it remains kinda sexist, you guys!)

But oh no, of course you can NOT go calling them out on this because oh noes, we do it to *male* columnists as well. Even though, actually, when they go in on terrible male columnists, for some reason, they are actually able to discuss, thoroughly, the on-point or off-point message of said male columnist's argument instead of just circling it like a bunch of squeamish teenage boys poking it with gingerly with the toes of their shoes because god forbid they might actually have to have a discussion of feminism which could challenge their own male privilege.

So, how many times does this approximate script have to happen before we can say, "Hey, guys, so this is actually a *thing* for you, right?" and call it for the subtle sexism it actually is?

Re: Fry himself. As I stated myself on the thread, "if I'd wanted sweeping gender essentialist pronouncements about the sexuality of women from men who, you know, never actually *had* sex with a woman, I'd have joined the Catholic Church. I have not actually read the Attitude interview he claims was misquoted, but I'm all too familiar with low-level "eeewwww, FISH!" misogyny which has been so popular among older generations of gay men. (You know, from before the memo went round that misogyny and homophobia are actually two sides of the same male-heteronormative-privilege coin.) So I'm prepared to write it off as a "horribly formed" "joke" from someone who turned the clocks back a little too far on Sunday morning. Because really, his descriptions of female sexuality bear little to no resemblance whatsoever to my own personal experiences or the experiences of friends and other women of my generation.

If people were to simply roll their eyes and forget it, writing it off as the kind of retrograde stereotype "white people drive like this, black people drive like this..." JokeFail, it would end there. What bothers me is the posters, usually men, who read this kind of thing and retort, uncritically, "LOL, this is the truuuuuuuuth" rather than countenance any kind of challenge of the stereotypes and the damage they do to all of us - all women (straight or gay), gay men, and also actually, straight men themselves, most of whom *do* actually have emotions and affections and the desire to form attachments, rather than *just* a penis.

But hey, that's the message that actually gets lost. And that's the real shame.

Stereotype Threat

2010-10-27T14:06:00.003+01:00

Again, something inspired by a brief exchange on twitter, that 140 characters simply can not do justice to, but of course I'm going to end up springboarding off into thoughts that have been rattling around my head recently.

So last week I posted a mixtape that I entered in a contest. Even before I made it, I knew I had no chance of winning. So why did I do it? Firstly, because I just wanted to make a damn mixtape. It's autumn, I wanted a new set of songs to pop on my iPod by default. Secondly, why did I enter the contest, even knowing that I was never going to win it? Because my entry singlehandedly doubled the number of women who had entered.

The results were announced yesterday - of course the winners and all the runners up (a total of 5 DJs) were all men. I commented on this, in a desultory passing way, on twitter: "Oh, look a bunch of men won the Phantasy Sound mix competition. Big surprise there!" I mean, it's simply statistics, isn't it? A competition where 20 people enter and only 2 of them are women. The winner is male. That's pretty predictable, just from a mathematical standpoint, isn't it?

So then I am told that I was "bitter" and that I could stand to be more gracious about losing (like the men who entered and didn't win) or something. This is the problem with making the personal political. Some observers will see only the personal, and never even notice the political.

Am I disappointed that I didn't win? I KNEW BEFORE I ENTERED THAT I WOULD NOT WIN. FFS, it's the first (and probably only) DJ competition I will ever enter. I am disappointed that only 10% of the entrants were female. (And it would have been 5% had I not entered.) I am disappointed that NO female DJs were even given honourable mention. I would be JUST AS DISAPPOINTED if the two female entrants had not included me - perhaps even *more* disappointed, because I can easily write off my own failure, but I cannot write off the systematic exclusion of mine own gender.

This is probably a good time to mention that I've been reading Pink Brain Blue Brain by Lise Eliot, which is all about how actually measurably quite tiny differences in ability between the genders are reenforced by cultural stereotypes into the kind of differences that gender essentialists like to claim are innate. It's actually been completely eye-opening (well, not in the way you'd think, because, seriously, I'm quite aware that "Girls Suck At Maths" is total bullshit) but more in what actually reinforces those stereotypes, and what can help young people to escape them.

People of either gender are often reluctant to enter into territory which has already been extensively colonised by members of the other gender. I call this "first girl in the room" syndrome, when dealing with my own experiences of working up the courage to enter a territory which has been solely male up until that point (be that guitar shop, recording studio, DJ booth... IT Department...) Some women actually get off on that idea of being the loophole woman. I'm not actually one of them. I don't want *me* as an individual to get in; I want *women* in general to get more opportunities. Eliot talks about a tipping point of about 25% - when the proportion of women (or men) in a field gets above that point "stereotyping declines and people begin to be judged by their actual abilities." More women entering these things means simply a better numerical chance of one of them winning.

Eliot talks about so much more which interests me - reminding me *why* it is harmful to bandy about negative stereotypes, and why language *matters*. (Going back to the subject of previous blogs...) She talks about the stereotype threat and studies which prove this to be a very real and powerful thing. Women perform *worse* at tasks which are stereotypically held to be "male" specialties *when* they are reminded of the stereotype before doing the task. The example is this: when a control group of men and women are given a basic maths test without being told what it is for, they perform equally well. When another group of men and women are given the *same* test - but after reading something which states that men typically do better at the test than women - men's scores are higher than in the control group, and women's scores are worse. That's right. REMINDING women of a stereotype that "girls suck at this" actually can cause them to suck. In fact, if the stereotype is persistent enough, such as the "girls suck at maths" one, simply reminding women of their gender is enough to trigger the stereotype threat.

And jeez, what reminds one more of one's own gender than being the *only* person (or only one of two people) that *is* that gender. Or being a hypothetical third woman who was thinking of entering that contest, and saw those odds and then saw those results and just thought "Nah, I won't bother." *That* thought is what genuinely upsets and angers me. It isn't whether you win or lose, it's enabling a fair playing field in the first place.

Autumn Mix - Phantasychogeography

2010-10-18T12:47:00.003+01:00

No whinging today, just sweet, sweet music.

This was supposed to be an entry in Phantasy Records' walking mixtape competition but, silly me, I read "mixtape" and automatically thought "90 minutes, Hi Bias Chrome" - oops, showing my age there.

So there's a short version for the contest and here is the longer, unedited full version, with more development and better transitions.

It was inspired by the long walks I used to take as a kid, from our sprawling farmhouse way out in the country, into the nearest city. The pastoral calm of the country, followed by motorik bus ride into the city, the bright lights and dazzle, slowly growing more frenetic and disorienting, and then the return journey back to calm.

Download the full version here

Laurie Spiegel - Improvisation On A "Concerto Generator"
Boards of Canada - In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country
Carl Sagan - A Glorious Dawn (ft. Stephen Hawking)
Mercury Rev - Senses On Fire
Hawkwind - Opa-Loka
The Hundred In The Hands - Young Aren't Young
Mrs Jynx - Second Over First
DMX Krew - New Star Broadcasting Station
Eurythmics - Here Comes The Rain Again
We Love - No Train No Plane
Delia Derbyshire - Liquid Energy (Bubbling Rhythm)
Glasser - Mirrorage
The Teardrop Explodes - Seven Views of Jerusalem
Scott Walker - Little Things That Keep Us Together
United States of America - The Garden of Earthly Delights
The Black Angels - Science Killer
Broadcast - The World Backwards
Sleigh Bells - Run The Heart
Chapterhouse - There's Still Life
The Charms - Did You Ever Wonder?
The Church - Under The Milky Way
Galaxie 500 - Listen Snow Is Falling

Why Are You So Defensive?

2010-10-16T18:58:00.002+01:00

TRIGGER WARNING: In the interest of safe-space, I must warn that there may be triggers in this post - for childhood abuse, relationship abuse, sexual assault and just general bullying. I've tried to be non-graphic because I am most emphatically *not* saying "I am a victim, pity me" - I'm saying "these are things that happened to me, this is why I *am* like this, please *understand* me."

These are my experiences, I am owning my feelings about them, though I may sometimes write in the second person, because it's easier for me to address some pretty upsetting stuff that way. If you were there and you saw it differently, please remember, this is about how it *felt* to me, not about how it might have *looked* to you.

This is a blog post about defensiveness.

About the kind of defensiveness which is so deep-level and so engrained that it can actually come across as paranoia or even aggressiveness.

I was talking in my last post about bullying, well, take a step further to abuse. Not just the sexual kind that many people assume when they hear the words "physical abuse" but the brutalisation kind. (Hell, I was once told by the person who beat my brother and me, regularly, through childhood, "you and your brother were not molested repeatedly by a relative, like I was, therefore, you were never abused!" Eventually, after a fuckload of counseling, they admitted that maybe we had.)

You can often tell when someone has been regularly beaten, because if you raise your hand unexpectedly, they will flinch and pull back, on a reflexive level. I actually noticed it in my brother - my 6'6" cornfed slab of American male - before I noticed it in myself. And the flinch reflex becomes psychological as well as physical. If you have become used to receiving blows, you come to expect blows.

When you have been conditioned to expect violence, you may start to anticipate it, all the time, at an unconscious level. Gestures which appear ambiguous or even friendly to others are interpreted as threatening to a person who has internalised what I'll call the Conditioned Expectation of Violence Reflex. (I'm sure there is a genuine psychological term for this, but I don't know it.) Gestures which seem unambiguously joking to a person without that reflex, but which *resemble* the violence a person has experienced, will not be read as jokes, but as ambiguous at best or, more likely, threatening by a person who has this conditioning.

Think about it. You may greet a close friend with horseplay - a friendly punch on the arm or a hearty backslap - and think nothing of it. Do this without warning, to a person with this "CEV Reflex" and they will recoil, perhaps even think that they have been attacked, even though you, and your non-conditioned friend observe nothing threatening, and react with only the pleasure of greeting a friend.

This behaviour, this conditioning and response, happens in the online world, as well.

I've spoken before about experiences I've had where people, with whom I had relationships IRL, used the internet to stalk and harass me. (And no, I don't want to go into lurid details, because I don't want to re-inhabit that mental space yet again, trust me, their behaviour met the legal definitions of those words.) The internet was not the sole cause or exercise of this behaviour; these people were perfectly capable of using phones, cars, mutual friends to accomplish the same goals of intimidation and control.

But what I want to talk about are the examples that were purely internet based, people who I never met, and had no other experience of, except online. These experiences mirrored and were reinforced by what I describe above, but they were a new thing to me. These experiences didn't *create* who I am, but they certainly *changed* my experiences of "online" and and reinforced my already existent CEV Reflex. This was the line, I think, that tipped me over from adventurous, ignore-the-haters cybernaut to angry, automatically defensive freak.

(Why do I attract so many hateful, awful people? The answer lies in the mirror, somewhere, but I'm clearly trying not to see it.)

I probably should have left ILX over the bullying that I received from a user I'll call "ex machina" and the moderator response to that bullying. It was a sustained, escalating campaign over several years, that even people who did not like me described as "ugly and excessive." I'm not entirely blameless. I was, at the time, going through the breakup of what is still my longest serious adult relationship. My defenses, energy, patience, and self esteem were all at rock bottom and stretched to breaking - in short, the perfect victim for a bully. If I ignored it, it got worse; if I protested, officially or unofficially, it escalated to a whole nother level. The official admin response was "we recognise that this is over the line, but we cannot or will not do anything about it" - mainly because he was a programmer who had already shown himself capable of dismantling the messageboard's server code at will.

Any time that I tried to take matters into mine own hands and return in any kind, certain moderators viewed this as my condoning or even *inviting* the bullying. When I finally lost my patience and fought back, one moderator changed the name of the thread to "watch ex machina and Masonic Boom masturbate over one another." (Except using our actual IRL names, something which was against ILX policy and itself a moderation-inducing offense.)

This felt, to be honest, as if someone was attempting to sexually assault me on a dancefloor, with me kicking and punching to try and get the guy off me, while my friends and even the bouncers stood around going "ha ha, isn't their foreplay cute?"

Yes, I went there, but actually, I *am* entitled to make the rape analogy at this point, because this exact scenario *has* actually happened to me. Although the violence involved was not comparable (my thumb was not dislocated from its socket by my attacker's "foreplay" online) the sense of *powerlessness* and the feeling of *betrayal* by the people who were supposed to stop this, those feelings are the same. I still remember these incidents, a decade after one, and over five years after the other.

The moderator is, amazingly, still a moderator, though funnily enough, ex machina got permanently banned a few years later, when he started going after mods instead of just weird girls.

My online life after that got weird. Now I know more about both assault and harassment, and their aftereffects, I know why I got so intense about setting weird boundaries, and only admitting people who were willing to follow them, or freaking out when my seemingly arbitrary boundaries were violated. It's one of the tests that women use to establish whether they are safe with someone or not. A person who violates your little boundaries (don't rudely push in on a conversation I'm having with friends) is much more likely to violate your big boundaries (don't try to rape me in the middle of the Betsey Trotwood.) If I cannot trust you with the silly little rules that don't matter (don't post about football or BB on my threads, only mention jazz if accompanied by a picture of a crush who likes jazz) then I cannot trust you with the big rules that do matter (don't use the internet to stalk, harass, bully and otherwise terrorise me.)

It started to happen again, a few months after I joined the Erol Forum. Up until that point, it hadn't been entirely smooth (there had been the usual yapping tools who get completely outraged that OMG, a fangurl is all in our stuff with her girl cooties!) but it had been... mostly harmless.

I now *know* enough to recognise it in the early stages - that kind of nerd entitlement. It's always the same kind of guy - above average intelligence, below average social skills, who has come, from nerd culture (or hey, from just general, you know... *culture* culture) to believe that Chicks are just things, like bonus hit points or videogame easter eggs, that you just automatically *unlock*, as a reward for performing certain tasks (like DJ-ing! or being-in-a-band!) rather than actual human beings with whom you have to negotiate relationships, like anyone else.

It always starts the same way, with some weird pigtail pulling incident where you think "WTF? is that dude *actually* making a clumsy pass at me, or is he just being, uuuhh, kinda creepy and weird?" It will never be anything as straightforward as a declaration or invitation like "hey, I like you, can we, like, skype or something?" It will be something odd, and ambiguous, so that he leaves himself maneuvering room to go all "WTF? are you KIDDING? Don't flatter yourself, bitch-whore-cunt from hell!" if you do not respond to the compliment, or weird "joke" or whatever it is. That's when the shit really starts. The "Kate is bad, throw rocks at her!" revenge threads are easily dealt with by moderators. The creepy messages on Twitter and MySpace - those you can actually block.

But it's the weird, under-the radar stuff that gets to you in the end. And that's where your CEV Reflex is your worst enemy, because when you stop feeling safe somewhere, you do start acting a bit weird, a bit defensive. And that's when they start trying to turn people against you with the whole "look how weirdly that creepy horrible bitch-whore-cunt girl that I hate is behaving" whispering. OF COURSE SHE IS ACTING ODDLY; YOU ARE SERIOUSLY CREEPING HER OUT. People who feel threatened often act defensively. Is that weird? No, it's human fucking nature.

And this is something I know from bitter experience. That state of defensiveness *does* make you act ostensibly "weird" to the casual observer. It reinforces the bully/abuser's insistence that *she* is the one with the problem, not him. (DJ Munchausen, my abusive ex, he was the king of that game.) Neutral people start doubting you, because they never notice the trigger, they only see the reaction. They see someone pat you on the back, and you freak out - totally bizarrely! - because they don't know that your abuser waited until you turned your back before pulling a Billy Shelf full of CDs over on top of you.

Someone who doesn't get your "edgy" "jokes" on a messageboard might not just be a humourless feminazi, they might actually have experienced those things you joke about, first hand. Someone who freaks out at stuff you just don't even sweat, they might not be acting aggressively, so much as defensively. And that defensiveness might not be quite so paranoid and delusional as it appears to you.

So where do we go from here? What do I do with this amazing insight that it's actually mine own *defensiveness* that drives the vicious circle that makes people hate me so much on messageboards? I wish I could wave a magic wand and make all the Entitled Nerds who make internet fora so unpleasant for women just... GROW UP. But hell, I can't even wave a magic wand and make myself just grow up this time. Even if there were a magic forum with no creepy entitled nerd to antagonise me, is mine own internalised defensiveness so deep it will trip me up every time?

How do I make this defensiveness and this deep-level anger that I'm carrying around - that poisons my experiences just as surely as bullies do - go away? Don't suggest therapy, the first time I was sent to therapy was 1981, the last time was 3 years ago (a cognitive therapist who diagnosed my problem as "abandonment issues" then promptly disappeared off the face of the earth - like, wait, WTF, is this part of the therapy, or are you fucking with my head?) I've done it so much, I know the tricks too well for it to work any more. Drugs are only ever a temporary solution, they treat the symptoms but not the disease. Exercise? Meditation? More and more and more art therapy? (This is how I can write a novel in a month, practically on demand - I have a faucet where I can just turn on the angst like a tap. I don't know if that's relief, or just "rehearsing the negative neural pathways" as a dear friend is fond of saying about rumination.)

This is the ultimate programmer's nightmare. You've identified the problem, you've even located the exact bug - but you find yourself utterly incapable of rewriting the code to fix it.

A Tangle Of Connections

2010-10-14T14:49:00.004+01:00

Today I am going to attempt to string a bunch of one-link-leads-to-another thoughts together into a coherent post. Or maybe I'm just going to do an old style Weblog that's just a bunch of links to stuff that has made me think today. I've been complaining recently about lack of understanding or even stuff-with-intellectual-interest-to-me on various messageboards I've hung out on - well, in these posts I find a whole lot of places where the stuff I *am* interested in is talked about, often in great detail and depth.

It started with my usual morning "round of sites I check when I'm bored" (insomnia made me get to work half an hour early today so I've had lots of free time) and a completely random Jezebel article suggested a related article entitled Do Bullying Victims Have Bad Social Skills? Despite the rather "Department Of Stating The Obvious" conclusions (weird kids with poor social skills are more likely to be picked on, in other news, Pope still Catholic) there was a lot of interesting debate in the comments. (Such as the vicious new Post-Columbine Bullying tactics of officially persecuting the already persecuted.)

Obviously I've been thinking a lot lately about bullying and persecution (complexes?) due to recent events. It's a kind of vicious cycle, if you have poor social skills to start with (for any reason - perhaps Autistic Spectrum disorders, perhaps, as in my case, simply being moved from place to place, school to school so quickly I never got the chance to develop a secure grasp on local cultures, let alone develop social skills appropriate for them) you are more likely to be bullied. Once you have been bullied, you are more likely to become socially withdrawn, less likely to acquire any social skills, and what's more, prone to interpreting the behaviour of others as "making fun" or threatening because, hey, that's what you know, that's what you've come to expect.

But, like I said, the comments managed to get past the borderline "blame the victim" tone of the initial post. I was especially struck by a woman who talked about the mirroring of the behaviour she encountered as a kid, bullied for having Aspergers at school, in the behaviour of her colleagues at the psychiatric hospital where she now works. And her response to this is yes, teaching bullied kids social skills as a survival tactic is important, but so is teaching "normal" kids to be more understanding of difference with regard to neurodiversity.

Anyway, I started reading her linked blog because her comments were fascinating and she seemed very perceptive. It's really interesting to me reading about Autistic Spectrum disorders - firstly because that's where the idea of Neurodiversity popped up - that many of the mental things we think of as disabilities or illness are just natural differences in the way that the brain works. And that diversity isn't "better" or "worse" - it's just that. Difference. And secondly because, although I'm fairly certain I don't have Aspergers, I routinely score quite high on some tests for autism (because, you know - weird, smart, geeky, obsessive, poor social skills, excellent systems thinking) and I think I could probably stand to *learn* a great deal, in terms of coping strategies.

So she had a post about Inertia and Perseveration - and I did not recognise that odd word, perseveration, but when I read her description, I thought "Hello, old friend - THOUGHTWORMS." But her post seemed not so much the bad, OCD kind of thoughtworms, but more the calming, helpful repetitive behaviour that forms so much of my art and my music and offers me a respite from the more harrowing aspects of mine own mental illness. (But also the thought about how much of the process of learning a craft involves the same thing, albeit consciously? How many times, as a musician, have I played endlessly repeating scales? How many times, as an artist, have I drawn the same subject until I felt I got it *right*?) And then BOOM! There's a link to her own post about depression and rumination and the purposes it all seems to serve.

I've previously seen discussion of the article she linked to - it's a way older idea than Evolutionary Psychology, this idea that since depression is so common, it must *serve some purpose*. The more I read these experiences of Aspergers, the more I realised how the autism-like experiences I sometimes have are usually correlated to periods of deep depression. It's like the parts of my brain I use to ... I wouldn't say *empathise* with, but more *understand* people just shut down. Social rituals like simply going to the pub become confusing, meaningless, terrifying. I lose my sense of humour - or more specifically, I lose my ability to understand when other people are joking or threatening. I become intensely routinised, and my flexibility (which is, when I'm *not* depressed, usually quite good) and my ability to tolerate exceptions to those routines utterly disappears, leaving me anxious, tense, irritable, snappy.

In short, much of this paranoia, my inability to read people and their intentions, my utter loss of a sense of humour, it's all symptomatic of depression. Yeah, THAT's a surprise, right? Bipolar person in being depressed shocker, in other news, bears still shitting in woods.

But what brough me up sharp was something buried towards the very end of the article. I went off antidepressants earlier this year. They were no longer working for me, I did not want to up the dose because of the weird side effects I was experiencing, the only reason I continued to take them was to stave off the withdrawal and I had recently read a whole host of literature suggesting that on a statistical and an anecdotal level, medicating mental illness has exacerbated rather than ameliorated the problem.

In recent years, Thomson has cut back on antidepressant prescriptions, because, he says, he now believes that the drugs can sometimes interfere with genuine recovery, making it harder for people to resolve their social dilemmas. "I remember one patient who came in and said she needed to reduce her dosage," he says. "I asked her if the antidepressants were working, and she said something I'll never forget. 'Yes, they're working great,' she told me. 'I feel so much better. But I'm still married to the same alcoholic son of a bitch. It's just now he's tolerable.'"

...

People on antidepressants had a 76 percent chance of relapse within a year when the drugs were discontinued ... "The high relapse rate suggests that the drugs aren’t really solving anything," Thomson says. "In fact, they seem to be interfering with the solution, so that patients are discouraged from dealing with their problems. We end up having to keep people on the drugs forever. It was as if these people have a bodily infection, and modern psychiatry is just treating their fever."

So how does this resonate with the idea I've been told my whole life, that I have Bipolar Disorder, which is supposedly just this lifetime unsolvable problem that I have to medicate away with substances that destroy quite important parts of my psyche? What about this other idea that there is, actually, a qualitative difference between being Depressed as a chemical thing (which I know how to deal with) and being Deeply Unhappy, which is something I have to be not-medicated to inspire me to move and change and deal with?

Because I have not been steadily Unhappy and Miserable since my early teens like the Bipolar Script says. I have actually had some quite long periods of stability and contentment and even bursts of incredible creativity and productivity (or you could just cast them as "manic episodes" if you're so inclined) and many of those periods have been during times when I was not medicated, but my life met other criteria which are not being met now. And it would be a much better idea to try to change my life to meet those criteria again, rather than alter my brain to meet the current state of my life.

This is the problem with Diagnoses - that once you are in a box, it is very hard to get out of it. Once you have been framed so that you are Manic Depressive, you start to see yourself in that box. If you're bored and miserable and stressed and unhappy, it must just be because of the Manic Depression, not because there might actually be something in your life making you that way. In a way, it's almost like an excuse. Why should I try to alter my life when I have this convenient "blame this" box I can put everything in?

Anyway, enough with the navel gazing and back to the linking. I found a beautiful quote on The Alternate Lexicon, so perfect that I had to go and dig out the Aspects of Asperbers, the blog it came from. It's crisply and beautifully written, insightful glances into the inner workings of someone with Asperger's, framed with such perceptiveness that someone like me, who is not on the Spectrum, is able to understand and even *relate*. (And also, although it's specifically about Autistic Spectrum disorders, the polite yet insistent demand for mutual *understanding* could really apply to any aspect of neurodiversity.)

One of the most frustrating things about Asperger Syndrome is that I find I sometimes react to certain things in a way that is quite different from what is considered the norm. This is because my brain sometimes perceives things differently from other people, and often has different values and priorities. And so there are times when I can't understand why people are reacting the way they are, and times when people can't understand why I am reacting the way I am.

I think it's important to draw attention to the fact that this lack of understanding goes both ways. I find that when people on the autistic spectrum fail to understand someone's reaction, this is seen as 'lack of empathy' – but, when someone who is not on the autistic spectrum fails to understand the reaction of an autistic person, this is seen as a case of 'autistic people are a puzzle' and a justification for representing us as a jigsaw puzzle piece. These double standards are unhelpful. They place all responsibility for lack of understanding on the autistic person, and create a divide between those who are on the spectrum and those who aren't.

And now the blog has pretty much come round in a circle. Even if you didn't enjoy my whinging, I hope that you enjoyed the links.

Dreams Of Escape

2010-10-13T13:08:00.002+01:00

So I'm not a happy bunny recently. You may have guessed that. Or maybe not. I did not realise, over the past few months, how much of my stream of anger and frustration and irritation had been directed at 750words.com or brief bursts on twitter.

I dream of escape all the time. Even when immersed in work, I've got twitter open in one browser window and googlemaps/streetview open in the other, looking at some landscape of the mind and letting my imagination slip away, anywhere that isn't here. Pricing holidays. Pricing what it would cost not to go on holiday for a week, but on some kind of... sabbatical for several months, a year. And then what?

But didn't my recent holiday to St. Ives with my mum prove anything? Hasn't my entire life of just getting up and running away, another city, another continent, another school, another job, proved anything? The demons are in your head, not in a location, you take them with you. That's true, but although a place can't make you happy, a place, a situation, can make you *unhappy*.

But that's what it is, isn't it, the situation? I'm bored, lonely, depressed. Again.

The bored bit, that's easy to understand. I'm a spoiled brat, I have an overpaid job where I'm absolutely unchallenged, in a field I find morally repugnant. The depressed bit grows out of that, as explained so utterly perfectly in this blog. I could, perhaps, with a lot of effort, and a lot of strife and standing up for myself, enough of a sense of ownership and direction to make this *role* somewhat enjoyable. But the problem is, as always, in order to *do* my job, I have to not think about what it is I actually *do*. Like a vegetarian working in a slaughterhouse, an atheist working for the Catholic church - I have to accept again and again that the product of my work supports something that I believe to be deeply morally indefensible. And if I think too hard about it, the cognitive disconnect starts blowing large chunks out of my psyche.

So there I go, stumbling on, knowing that the way my brain works, the only way for me to enjoy the path is to look up, see the play, the systems, the whole map of the terrain kind of thinking that makes me love what I do (data analysis) - but if I look up, I see the blood everywhere, and the realisation that I can't go on doing this.

So instead, I just dream of escape.

When I quit my job, I'll rent out that millstone of a flat in South London whose mortgage keeps me tied here. I'll take my savings - and fuck, I accidentally have a lot of savings - and go live somewhere remote, somewhere cheap, and just paint paisley and record weird radiophonic burbles until the money runs out.

What is there to keep me in London? I mean, seriously? You know the old addage, "when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life itself." OK, hands up, I *am* tired of life itself. There was a time when the culture - the gigs, the art, the whole multicultural whirl of food and music and experiences to be had - outweighed the obvious massive irritations. (It is expensive, crowded, stressful, uncaring, alienating, the sheer volume of people, literally, in your face, your armpits, crushed up against your skin which makes you start to think of people not as human beings but simply as irritating obstacles to be overcome - you can see why London makes people cruel, unfeeling, manipulative.)

But none of those are the truth of why I loved London. I loved London for the *people*, for the friendships I formed and the connections I made. And where have they gone?

Some of them were just transients themselves, ex-pats and emmigrants, just passing through, went back to where they came from. London is not a place you come from so much as a vortex you pass through, that attracts the young and ambitious and creative with a magnetic force before spinning them around and flinging them off, elsewhere. And even my closest London-native friends are leaving, have left, bound, ironically, for the States. (Which makes me wonder, was it me they actually liked in the first place, or just the veneer that 15 years in that country gave me.)

And the others. The guilt. I am not a nice person. I am not an *easy* person to be friends with. I'm difficult and complicated and demanding, emotionally and intellectually. I *exhaust* people. I exhaust time and patience and goodwill. I'm like the unfixable project, a black hole, and no matter how much energy or effort you pour into being friends with me, yes there will be good times and worse times, but I will never, ever be *fixed*, I will never be *better*. Walking around the coast of Cornwall, you round a huge bay and then another mass of rock, and as you scramble desperately to the top of the headland, you look out and see... another headland, and another one beyond it, endlessly into the shimmering distance.

Without the people, London is nothing. I'm tired of making new friends, only to lose them again when I fuck up, in the unfailing way I always do. I want to be a recluse. A real one, not just the crazy neighbour who scuttles away when next door's door opens. I want to be alone, just me and the sky and the sea and my understanding of god. Anyway. I don't even know what I'm saying any more. The end.

Hair Trigger

2010-10-11T12:58:00.005+01:00

"Please don't confront me with my failures, I had not forgotten them" - Nico

I'm fairly aware of my faults. Sometimes only too painfully aware of them - and this is why I take negative criticism so harshly. Not because I have some internal image of myself as perfect which is shattered by criticism - but because I am constantly haunted (not necessarily in the "lie awake in the dark and weep for my sins" way, but close enough) by the knowledge of my own failures, my own flaws. I am often riddled with thoughtworms, whereby films of my own worst personal Waterloos play on endless repeat. If I take criticism poorly, it is not because I don't believe it - but because I overwhelmingly, unfailingly do.

Hence the blogging, the constant evaluation and reevaluation, the reframing, the attempts at owning my own experiences and reactions, trying to evaluate whether the constant stream of shit from both inside my head and the confirmations from the outside world are The Truth or distortion. Because the overwhelming bulk of my experiences, getting dumped by friends, sacked from jobs, kicked off communities, etc. points to a preponderance of evidence that actually, yes, I *am* as shit as the negative internal monologue says I am.

And no, this blog isn't any exception.

The things that truly rankle - declarations of "OMG, you have such a hair trigger!" and the old classic "but you *are* so angry" and "you do lose your temper, are you surprised people portray you as a ranter, (even when you're being reasonable)?"

Compare and contrast that with assessments I do accept ("I'm starting to understand why you get upset so often" and "I'm not surprised that [Kate] comes across as slightly embattled sometimes the amount of yapping tools she gets on her back.") and a clearer picture emerges.

"Hair trigger" - really? I admit I'm not a patient person, and I do not suffer fools gladly. I do actually think I've improved on this score - but given the sheer volume of shit that gets lobbed at me when I stick my head over the parapet, I don't feel like I ever get any credit for it from people who have never put their head over a parapet in their life (or indeed, never *had* to). It's like...

First time: Ignore it, let it slide
Second time: Get slightly annoyed
Third time: Would you mind not doing that?
Fourth time: Shout for the moderator
Fifth time: LOSE MY TEMPER

^^^^does this kind of pattern really mean that I have a "hair trigger"?

Weirdly enough, it's the little shit that builds up the most. The big stuff, the out in the open stuff is usually obvious enough to actually dismiss, but it's the little constant, under the radar things, the stuff you'd miss if you were skimming a thread. Then again, it's confirmation bias. If you're alert to something, you tend to find it. People notice their own names, their own viewpoints far more obviously and quickly, especially when confronted with a large, quickly moving source of information. Unfortunately, this also means it's easier to spot negative comments directed at you, or your kind, and much easier to ignore or miss negativity aimed at other people or groups you are not a part of. (And this works both ways.)

If you lose your temper, you lose. And this has *always* reflected more negatively on women than on men. If you're a man who occasionally loses your temper, that makes you a bad-ass, a maverick, a straight-talker, a sharp-shooter, a hip young gunslinger. If you're a woman who occasionally loses your temper, that's it. You are unreliable, hysterical, a "bitch", irrational, emotional, and it means that people never ever have to take you, or your opinions seriously again. Anything you say, no matter how reasonably or friendly, will be dismissed as "ranting."

Yes, yes, that's me relapsing on the old "oh noes, it's because I'm a woman" "excuse" but again, it's the kind of subtle difference in the way the genders are treated that women (who are the focus of this kind of thing) notice and men gloss over, or write off as excuse making. Good old double bind again, isn't it?

I'm aware also, that the unceasing negativity about myself, as fed by all these experiences, is a big part of the reason that people dislike me. Double bind.

Criticism which is revealed by its very mechanism to be paradoxical. It was the classic ILX moment, really, at the exact moment a concern troll was trying to tell me "OMG, I really HATE that you are always going on about how much people dislike you, you are SUCH a drama queen!" and in the time it takes to compose a reply, BAM! "you have been suggest banned" - which means that actually, I'm not such a paranoid, that 51 people in a row have clicked a button saying "we dislike you enough to want you removed from this site."

Even paranoids have enemies. Angry people sometimes have a justified reason to be angry. I don't know what this blog is even trying to accomplish. A defense? Throwing my hands up and going "you're right, I am shit!" ? It doesn't change anything.

The Semiotics of Swearing

2010-10-10T14:23:00.006+01:00

WARNING: contains lots of rude bits and bad words, obviously. It is impossible to address the linguistics and implications of swearing without containing some examples.

I've always been fascinated by swearing, from a linguistic point of view. The dynamics of what words are forbidden, what words express our most primal (and often negative) instincts, what words are used to shock, and what our go-to insults and most-bad-thing words are. You can tell a lot about a society or a culture by their swearwords - both what they value and what they denigrate. Words interest me, especially in the totally text-based environs of an internet messageboard, words define, shape and reinforce our worlds. And words and their connotative meanings are bigger than you, despite what you may think your intentions are.

This comes, of course, from another internet forum kerfuffle. (It's the things that really get under people's skin - yours or someone else's - that are worth talking about.) Of course, I've learned the hard way that a lot of people dislike debate because they see any and all disagreement as conflict. I get accused of "ranting" when really I'm just rambling, often thinking out loud about stuff I find - you know - just *interesting*, even if I'm being quite calm and reasonable and thoughtful. I think it means that if I'm talking about emotive topics which produce discomfort or even anger in the reader, they project that feeling onto me or my writing. They're angry, so *I* must be ranting. Riiiiiight.

Update: I have been told that I have misrepresented the views expressed by some people on this thread by condensing several posts/viewpoints for the sake of summary, and by not explicitly stating that there was a variety of other views, some enlightened, some not so. This is a blog. This is not a newspaper, it is not a forum digest, it is not claiming to represent "the truuuuuuuuth!" - it is a a diary, a journal, a record of my *opinion* and *my* experience and interpretation of events. In the past, I would have linked to the thread itself, I have not done so in this case because 1) this post was not meant to be about the thread so much as the things it made me think about (you really don't have to look very far on the internet to find kids using homophobic language, whether "ironically" or not - anything from Facebook to 4chan, or even supposedly "Intelligent" dance music forums, for example, WATMM, will provide you hundreds of examples) and 2) I have since asked to have my account removed from the forum, and all my associated posts have been deleted, making the resulting thread now incomplete.

The argument started about the use of the word "faggot" on a supposedly "satirical" (read: that kind of little boy mocking piss-taking) website, probably intended in the same kind of spirit as Hipster Runoff or @tiestosuperfan. That is, the "satire" is only really obvious to those who are already so deep into the culture as to blur the line between satire and participation. To the outsider, it's either incomprehensible, or indistinguishable due to the narcissism of small difference.

I don't find that kind of humour funny - granted, as a middle aged woman, I am not its targeted audience. To me, the site just read as a sniggering "Let's call people faggots to show that calling people faggots is wrong" and the way its "offensive" content was quoted on the forum (the title of the thread itself being not about the other puerile but non-political blog entries, but the most eye-catching and controversial use of the word "faggot") just seemed to me a kind of childish gleefulness at getting to use the "bad words."

This lead to a discussion of humour and offensiveness, which started out getting at some interesting points, but was derailed by the typical "why are you offended?" and "people need to get off their high horses and stop being offended on other people's behalf." (my emphasis) as if it is only the offense taken that is the problem with Hate Speech. Some people get as far as "You shouldn't use these words because people will get offended" and then stop. This is only part of the story - and it's a part that is very easy to abuse, because it often leads to the kind of victim-blaming whereby one casts the people so "offended" as being to blame because they are "oversensitive", rather than actually accepting the responsibility that one is using terminology - and reinforcing the world-views behind that terminology - which degrades, denigrates, and excludes.

There are words that are loaded, and usages that are inherently bigoted, even if you, yourself, are not. An *action* can still be bigoted (racist, sexist, homophobic) even if you do not, personally, hold those beliefs. Claiming "I'm being ironic!" is not a "get out of the hegemony free" card.

You can see how much people are missing the point by their explanations - "why are we even having this conversation? We're all tolerant here! I mean, most of the time when we insult people by calling them fags, they're not even gay!" Yeah, this is the reason we're still having this conversation. If we lived in a culture where being gay or straight was as much a non-issue as having blue or brown eyes, then you wouldn't view calling someone "a fag" as an insult. We don't live in that world, we live in a world where people can still be criminally penalised or even executed for being gay. Even in the nice, "tolerant" west, we live in a *culture* where gay kids are still bullied about their sexuality to the point of suicide, as shown by recent, high-profile events.

The reason that it's not cute or funny to use "fag" or "gay" as an all purpose insult is NOT because "oh noes, gay people might get offended" - it's because every time you use the word "gay" as just another synonym for "bad" you are reinforcing that cognitive link between "homosexual" and "negative." You are contributing to a culture of homophobia by reinforcing those stereotypes.

And no, claiming this thin veneer of "irony" does not protect one as the writer. Firstly, as someone pointed out, it's Beavis and Butthead syndrome. That the people against whom the irony is most sharply pointed will not understand it as irony, they just see it as reinforcement or even celebration of their own idiocy. Secondly, there is not much difference between an ironic fist and a sincere fist for someone who is on the receiving end of the homophobic attitudes that this writer is perpetuating and reinforcing. Thirdly, that whole "I am so post-homophobic I can make fag jokes ironically" and the audience's response of "I'm so sophisticated I can eye-roll knowingly as I laugh - while we still get to keep the hilarious fag jokes" hides a kind of smug self delusion whereby one's own privilege goes unmentioned and unexamined.

It's no accident that "fag" and "gay" are the insults of choice anywhere that large amounts of young straight males congregate. Choice insults and swearwords cut straight to the heart of a community's worst insecurities. The homophobia expressed by groups of young males speaks directly of this crisis of masculinity (especially in communities where women have been excluded, by accident or design, such as many internet fora) expressed as a kind of "gay panic" or terror at not being seen as masculine enough. (See also feminist writing on Patriarchy: It Hurts Men, Too, as to the negative effects of over-policed gender binaries on males as well as females.)

Other communities have other deep-level insecurities, expressed by their insults-of-choice. A friend on the same thread commented that although he cringed at "gay", he still felt comfortable with a similar use of the word "retarded", even thought the use of "retarded" or "lame" as negatives is generally viewed as ableist, and therefore to be avoided. Among people who view themselves as intellectuals, the fear of being thought of as unintelligent manifests itself around insults aimed at portraying the other as stupid or ignorant. (I do this myself - my reflexive insult is to dismiss an irritant as "stupid" or "thick.") It is, however, a harmful and derogative category error to portray the mixture of the developmentally disabled and mentally ill commonly dismissed as "retarded" as simply a synonym for "unintelligent" or "non-intellectual." It reflects the Able person's fear and denigration of the Disabled under the guise of the intellectual's disdain for the ignorant.

Peel back the layers of any culture's "forbidden words" or "insults of choice" and you will find their deepest fears laid bare. Volumes have already been written about America's relationship with their worst-bad-thing word, "N*gg*r" - a word I cannot even bring myself to even type, let alone say, because, as a liberal, I fear being labelled as a racist or bigot myself as my "worst-bad-thing." I still don't entirely know what it means that the UK's worst-bad-thing word is "cunt" - if this speaks to a pervasive cultural misogyny, or more generally, to a deep-level terror of sex, or the body itself. (See also "bollocks" and "wanker.") The prevalence of scatological swearwords such as "crap" or "shit" can also represent a discomfort with the body, rather than simply its more base functions. Ironically, swearwords such as "hell" or "goddammit" or irreverently invoking the names of deities reflect the importance of religion within a culture, rather than point to a culture's irreligiousness.

If these concepts were not *important* they would lose the power to shock, which is one of the most crucial functions of a swearword - the shock, the rude jerk which the swearword produces mirrors and expresses the rude shock of the annoyance which triggers it. This is why swearwords intrigue me, *what* has the power to shock or "offend." But it is so important to look beyond that shock value, to realise *why* something is shocking, and assess whether that makes your 5-second LOL really worth it. Words do have power. Choose them wisely.

Slash: Painting Male Faces Female

2010-07-20T11:04:00.010+01:00

It flickered across my tweetstream this morning: @dickon_edwards to give talk about slash (Blur slash, in particular) at the NPG, touching of course, on Dennis Cooper and his infamous Alex James "slash" as part of a talk on Queer Perspectives.

(I put the description of Dennis Cooper's work as "slash" in quotes because, although it depicts gay sex involving a pop star, which many people think of as the very definition of Slash, it was in fact, very *untypical* of the Slash genre.)

This is, of course, to me - someone who was the curator of a mostly Blur-oriented fan fiction site, in the mid to late 90s, before the days of LiveJournal and DreamWidth and gated communities (so I, personally, had to take the blasts and the threatened lawsuits when pop stars were not amused by my authors' work) - a bit like a red rag to a bull.

Is Slash "Queer"? That's a question that gets endlessly debated within the Fan Fiction communities. My problem with assigning Slash solely as a Queer concern is one of Authorship, and implied Audience, and the misogynist assumtions involved.

Slash is inherently 'not Hetero-Male'. But just because something is 'not Hetero-Male' does not make it automatically Queer. When I paint pictures of naked, vulnerable or available males, I am often told that this work is "homoerotic." Um, how? A straight female painting a naked male is *anything* but "homo" - the automatic assumption that a naked man *must* be evidence of homoeroticism is to deny the fact that females could experience desire, or, indeed, posess a sexuality at all, let alone the visual experience of sexuality. It is the same mistake that assumes Slash, because it depicts men, must be "homo-erotic."

I often quip that Slash is no more representative of gay sexuality than the standard "Lesbian Scene" in mainstream hetero male porn - nor is it *supposed* to be. It is the Performance of homosexual acts for an inherently hetero audience, rather than *actual* Queerness.

Slash (and the greater category of Fan Fiction which it is a part of) is one of the few spontaneous, unfettered expressions of *female* sexuality allowed within our culture. It is pornography created almost exclusively *by* females and *for* females. (Edit: mostly, but not exclusively hetero.) Women have been creating Slash for at least 50 years (the term originates from the Kirk/Spock romance texts of the original 1960s Star Trek) and yet it's ignored, swept under the carpet (except for those occasional "OMG Man discovers slash and writes article about how WEIRDED OUT he is" moments of press hysteria) because women aren't supposed to be interested in porn.

Then, suddenly, a man (Dennis Cooper) writes a gay wankfest about a male pop star and OMG OMG Slash is suddenly "High Art" and it's GROUNDBREAKING and both pop culture and Highbrow Journals are suddenly interested in discussing it.

(Are any other women getting flashbacks to those kinds of conversations where you and a gang of men are sat round a table Talking About Music and someone will pose a question, and you'll answer it, but they'll act like they haven't heard you, and carry on, like no one has answered the question, so you repeat your answer - no response. And then suddenly a man across the table will snap his fingers and go "oh yeah, Archie Bell & The Drells - Tighten Up!" and they all clap and say "yes, of course" - like, did you not just hear me say that THREE TIMES?)

So we've got yet another case where it's this thing that women do, and yet it's only addressed within High Pop Culture when *men* talk about it. I can't tell you the number of times I've read some Male Pop Critic mention that he's been asked to talk about Slash and Fan Fiction, then almost as an afterthought goes "ooh, maybe I better read some..." I mean, the usual way it's brought up is by (male) critic addresses, snarkily, (male) Pop Star "Did you know people write GAY SEX FANTASIES about you on the internet?!?!??"

And yet no one ever thinks to ask the people who already *are* experts in it. You know, the women and girls (wait - there's the problem. Right there.) who actually write and consume the stuff.

See, here's my take. And you will see why all the "OMG, why do people only pay attention when it's a *man* doing/talking about it?" carping comes in. Because this is inherently written into the structure of why *I* engage in, create and read Slash. The obvious bias towards men within pop culture, and the exclusion of female voices from it.

My earliest fandoms were Star Trek and Star Wars. (OK, technically, I used to watch Dr Who in the 70s, as a toddler from my father's lap, hiding behind his knees when it got too scary. But we're talking about the first fandoms where I engaged with the text on a personal level, and interacted with other fans.) When you're 9, you want to identify with the characters, partly you're looking for role models, partly you're just looking for who you are going to be when you play "Star Wars" with the neighbourhood kids. And let's face it. The roles for women in sci fi of that era were *RUBBISH*. Playing "Star Wars" was problematic - there was only one woman in it, and all she did was stand around waiting to get rescued with her hair tied in knots.

And playing "Star Trek" - as a pre-teen, I loved Star Trek more than I loved Star Wars, because I could already see that it was more complex, that it was more "sci" and less "fi" - and it used science fiction to address the philosophical issues I was starting to be interested in. But the roles for a 10 year old girl to project herself into? Well, it was Lt. Uhura or green-skinned alien girlfriend of the week? No thanks!

And yes, I know that Lt. Uhura was a groundbreaking character in terms of the depiction of race on primetime telly. First major black character, first interracial kiss... yes this is significant stuff. But as a female role model? Communications Officer? Fuck that - she was the bloody RECEPTIONIST. Her role just reminds me of the endless companies I've worked for where all the Board Members are males, except for the lone woman who is the "Director Of PR" because, like, girls are so GOOD at communicating, aren't they? (notice anything about all those pictures of "receptionists" in the link up there?)

The interesting characters, the ones who got to have emotions (or not, and struggling with it, in Spock's case) and character development and decent plots - they were all men. Passionate, impulsive Kirk; logical, intellectual Spock; the cranky but compassionate conscience of McCoy; houseproud Scotty. These were the people *I* identified with, and they were all men! So is it really any wonder that when women projected themselves into the universe of Star Trek, they chose to animate and inhabit the males?

Anyway, fast forward to puberty, and I have to admit I swapped sci fi geekdom for pop. Aged 12, I fell in love with Duran Duran and synths and new wave haircuts. And guess what, yet again, it was gang after gang of 5 Fearless Men with no females in sight (except the rotating Other-ised Girlfriend Of The Week in their videos.)

And you know what? The roles of women in the world of Rock Music were EVEN WORSE than those in Sci Fi. It wasn't even a choice between "stand around with your hair in buns waiting to get rescued" or "ship's nurse in a miniskirt" - it was basically groupie or... nope, just groupie. That's it, that's your role, that's all you can aspire to, as a woman, in rock music. (Wait a few years, and if you're lucky enough to be in an American indie band, you can be the token Girl Bassist, but this is 1982 and indie hasn't been invented yet.) GROUPIE. Disposable sex receptacle. No thank you.

See, I already know what to do. I grew up on sci fi. I got used to the idea - if there are no female role models available, identify with a male one. But hey, I'm hitting puberty. I'm... experiencing... odd... urges... As everyone else in my grade was picking who their Duran Duran boyfriend was going to be, I was experiencing the bizarre and conflicting urges of simultaneously wanting to fuck them and *be* them, all at the same time. So where my mates were lusting over John or fawning over Nick, I became that weirdest of creatures - I became a Nick/John slasher.

It had nothing to do with Queerness. Aged 12, I didn't even know what "Queer" was. It had nothing to do with wanting to "be a gay man" - it was a defiant statement about the rubbishness of the roles assigned to women. It was a *female* response to a world from which females were excluded.

Now I know that I don't speak for all Slash consumers or writers in this regard. For some women, the lack of female characters is part of the *appeal* - no perfect, toned, blonde, barbie model girlfriend to feel insecure in comparison to. (This saddens me in ways I can't entirely express - how thoroughly the Beauty Myth has twisted the ability of women to even enjoy their own sexuality.)

And obviously not all women *have* to identify with the male characters they slash. Sometimes it is just about the smut. Many women choose to consume or produce slash because well, let's face it, men kissing men, men making love to men is TOTALLY HOTT on a visceral, physical, visual level. (You know, all those things that females are not supposed to care about in our sexuality, because we are "not interested in pornography" and all that.) If you're a woman who finds male bodies beautiful or desirable, having two of them, with added extra bonus emotional content - double the pleasure.

And yeah - the emotional content is an implicit part of the appeal. Guys getting emotional, guys bonding, guys going through hurt/comfort and all the other slash conventions - this has its own sexual and romantic appeal to women, independent of the lack of female voices and role models within the cultural world - whether that culture is Rock Music or Science Fiction. Slash is a way of exploring and inhabiting the emotional landscapes of our culture's Texts, whether that Text is a television show or the pop narrative of Four Lads With Guitars Who Become Famous.

It's a common complaint, in internal criticism of Slash by other fans. That the men in Slash don't behave like men (even gay men); they behave, well - like women. Those heady, emotionally charged friendships that spill over into almost romantic intensity... the jealousy, the oversharing, the emotional dynamics... that's the emotional landscape of teenage girls and the women they become.

Slash is NOT a way of painting "straight faces queer" as Dickon would have it. What it is, when you participate in it, is a way of women painting MALE faces "FEMALE."

Anyway, I survived adolescence. I grew up. The Indie explosion happened. Riot Grrrl happened. I was part of that generation of women in the early 90s who woke up and decided to start their own bands. For a brief bubble, it was awesome. Women invaded the Male Space of Rock Music. Men decided that it was possible to redefine Masculinity in a way that looked almost as if we could all actually throw off the gender role straitjackets entirely.

And then just when it looked like the world was opening up, there followed the Britpop Backlash. The NME put its foot down, it was time to stop bopping our handbags round to the Marxist Feminist Dialectic of Stereolab and go back to treating pop music like a football match between two gangs of straight, white, cis males. (And girls had to get back to their traditional role of cheering from the sidelines wearing British Flag Bikinis - ironically missold to us as "Girl Power") A multicoloured, multicultural, multigendered landscape got reduced down to Blur v. Oasis.

Except, well... with *Blur* we initially wanted to protest "But no! They're more like us than against us - they went to ART SCHOOL. They have girlfriends in riot grrrl bands! Their proper cultural counterparts aren't football louts like Oasis, it's queer theory referencing gender terrorists like Suede!" Except no, watching the pop culture landscape of late 90s British "indie" change, and become whiter, more male, more heteronormative - it was a real conflict, to watch a band you thought you loved slowly destroying everything you *did* actually love about a music scene.

Well, we knew how to react to this, didn't we, ladies? When they took away our female role models, and started forcing this male-centric worldview down our throats again, we picked up our pencils and started re-writing, in fan fiction, the world we didn't get in the "real" fiction of the pop landscape.

And wow, were Blur a slashable band. All bands - well, the good ones at least, the ones that aren't just props for one person's ego - revolve around a creative Romance. (Think Lennon/McCartney, think Jagger/Richards.) Blur were interesting because they didn't just have *one* central romance (the obvious Damon/Graham pairing) they had this strange triple-act between Damon and Graham and Alex, with the pairings constantly being pulled off balance by the presence of a third party. That was what made their music interesting (Damon and Alex combining to form a pop landscape that Graham would rip apart with ugly-beautiful guitar noise) and what made the slash interesting (what's the OTP? Is it Damon and Graham because they were childhood friends? Graham and Alex because they were art school pals? Damon and Alex because they were thrown together by Graham's refusal to join in Groucho-fuelled tabloid antics? And what about Alex's love affair with Damien Hirst? Graham flouncing out of Blur in a lover's tiff and Damon taking up with Jamie Hewitt? The possibilities were endless!)

But anyway, I digress. (Slash is like that - once you see the world in that way, it's very hard to pull back and view interactions "objectively" and not as a series of "romances" again.)

Yes, we Slashers, we know that we are only borrowing homosexual acts for our revisionist female rewriting of pop texts. But that borrowing is mutal, evidenced by the way strong female artists get rewritten as "Gay Icons." Gay men take strong women for their Gay Icons because strong Out gay males have traditionally been so lacking in our homophobic society. So we do the same thing. Females rewrite male pop culture figures as gay when strong *female* characters are so lacking within our misogynist cultural landscape.

False Dichotomies

2010-07-03T17:20:00.003+01:00

The reason for this blog is that this is a subject which comes up often in conversation on the internet, and it's far too complex, involved and emotive a topic to resolve in the running battle of a flamewar or the brevity of a typical forum post. Nonetheless, it's something I find myself explaining too many times, in too great a detail, via private email conversations. I wanted to put it in writing somewhere I could simply point people at and say "this is my experience." This is not meant as an attempt to change anyone's mind as to what they believe - simply as an explanation, to demolish some straw men I have found myself accused of being.

It seems to me that Atheists (and by this, I mean the card carrying types that like to start public debates) have as many delusions and false ideas about "Religious People" as they believe "Religious People" to have about God. Then again, that may be down to the kind of "Religious Person" that chooses to get involved in these antagonistic "Science Vs. Religion" debates.

In my general experience, the greatest gulf is not between Atheists and... whatever the opposite of Atheist is - what an odd term for a movement, one that defines itself solely by what it is opposed to - but between people who say "well, this is what I believe, but I'm fine with whatever you choose, so long as you don't try to force it on me" and those who are convinced that their personal philosophy is the best, and in fact only method of viewing the world. The latter is what I call "Dogmatic" whether the text they are banging is Richard Dawkins or the Bhagavad Gita.

People are often surprised to find out that I am not an Atheist, given that I am interested in science and maths. They often like to put this down to my upbringing, but the truth is, I spent much of my life as a somewhat hostile agnostic - it was only in the post-Dawkins landscape of conflict that I started to give it serious thought, and realised that I was not, by any means, an atheist. Although I don't currently subscribe to any organised religion (though if I had the time and the inclination, I would be a Quaker) Spirituality is a part of my experiences and my personality that I can not deny or discount.

And this is something that many Dogmatic Atheists miss, for all their talk of "memeplexes" (whatever that meaninglessly reductive term signifies - a religion or a philosophy is no more a "memeplex" than a symphony is a "noteplex" or a Monet a "brushstrokeplex.")

Spirituality, for the religious person, is an experience, and generally an emotional experience. Have you ever tried to explain the experience of "being in love" to a person who has never loved? Have you ever tried to explain an acid trip to someone who has never taken drugs? Of course it sounds nonsensical.

For example, people who are in love behave in ways that are incomprehensible to those not involved. Best friends become murderous rivals, formerly single-minded careerists give up their ambitions to nurture another and formerly vibrant people can pine away when denied the object of their affections. Yes, these are extreme examples, but so are many of the behaviours that Atheists bring up when deriding the religious experience. From a purely Materialist point of view, Love does not exist. Humans are driven by chemical reactions in their brains, animals are compelled to reproduce by their DNA. A reductionist approach that gets rid of Spirituality because it is a purely emotional experience would also rid us of love, music, novel-writing, painting and many other non-rational activities that most humans derive enormous meaning - and pleasure - from.

Which brings us to the second point - a question of temperament or personality. Human beings come in different flavours - some are pedantic, some are easy-going, some love the company of others, some crave time alone. This is usually where I tell people to go and take a Meyers-Briggs test, and see where they fall. Unlike most "personality tests" (which split the world into two types of people - those who like dichotomies and those who hate them) - this measures personality along 4 axes of 8 qualities. It is also recognised that many of these indices are not strict binaries - for example many people may use a combination of Thinking and Feeling when making decisions, or show a strong preference for one in some situations (for instance, Thinking when deciding what job to accept) and a weaker preference for the other in a different kind of decision (for example, Feeling, when deciding what person to enter a marriage or civil partnership with.)

As you read through the personality types you will recognise friends, family, and maybe even yourself - these results can be confirmed by taking the test, and these results are replicable.

The preference to privilege "Logic" and "Rationality" over "Emotion" and "Instinct" is a cultural bias that has been written into Western society for hundreds, if not thousands of years. A recent conversation complained about how human qualities were divided in two, and the "rubbish" ones assigned to women - it could be just as valid to say that human personality types were divided up, and those traditionally associated with women were rubbished.

I reproduce here a page from a book by the Philosopher of Science, Mary Midgley. Section 1 shows meaningful dichotomies in which Science, indeed, is preferable. Section 2 starts to break it down into philosophical differences which are debatable. By Section 3, it has degenerated into the False Dichotomies and arbitrary cultural privileging with which not just Dogmatic Atheism but most of Western Culture is riddled with.

The point is, that certain personality types will find "Scientific" (logical, rational, reductive) ways of looking at the world helpful and descriptive, others will find "Spiritual" (metaphorical, symbolic, subjective) ways of looking at the world helpful and descriptive. The metaphor that Midgley uses to describe it is as if a botanist and a carpenter are looking at a tree. Both will use different language, to describe different aspects, for different purposes, but there is no doubt that they are both looking at the same tree. Science and Spirituality are no more in conflict than mathematics and sculpture; they have different functions.

Which brings us to the final catapult with which Atheists like to bombard their spiritual counterparts. The endless cry of "but it's not truuuuuuuuuue!" What does True mean? This is like the difference between accuracy and precision. It is a misunderstanding of terms, the conflation of a Myth with a lie. We use the term "myth" quite casually to mean a falsehood, but this isn't strictly accurate. A Myth, as opposed to a lie, is a story which, although factually false, may still reveal useful insights into the nature of (and assumptions about) humans and the world. The vast majority of religious people today who are not fundamentalist extremists understand their religious texts as guides, as metaphors, as poetry to be interpreted. Saying that a story is a myth may make it not true, but that does not make it not useful or meaningful.

And the next conflation is that of little-f faith and its dictionary definition with the idea of a capital-F Faith, often used as a synonym for Religion. Faith in this sense is much closer to the idea of a Philosophy, a framework of truths which are held to be self-evident in order to function within a culture. As Midgley points out in her book "The Myths We Live By" - even the great bastions of the Scientific Method - and more commonly, the kind of Scientism as espoused by Dogmatic Atheists - are not free from a philosophical framing device, and a set of cultural assumptions about the world.

My own personal experience of religion and religious people is that their big-F Faith could not be further than the kind of blind little-f faith that Atheists believe it to be. It is something which is experienced, challenged, examined and reaffirmed in a myriad of ways, which may not be Scientific, but are still useful and meaningful, both to the individual, and the formation of community.

I am not pretending that all of humankind's Religions are as liberal and positive as the tradition from which I come. Religion can be as "self-serving and evil" as the humans that comprise it. So can governments, political parties, academic institutions, corporations, sporting teams and in fact, any formal association of a group of human beings. Should they, too, be disbanded on account of the diversity of human nature? Especially when many religions have, at their core, an attempt to address and make sense of the changeability and "evil" aspects of human nature.

Religion is an expression of human culture, good and bad, not the cause of it. To quote Midgley again, "The evils which have infested religion are not confined to it, but are ones that can accompany any successful human institution. Nor is it even clear that religion itself is something that the human race either can or should be cured of."

The myriad interpretations and expressions of the Spiritual experience within humanity is not proof of Spirituality's falsehood, but of human ingenuity. If anything, it seems to me small-minded, to fail to see the staggering cultural richness which can produce systems as diverse as Animism and Monotheism, and traditions as mind-bogglingly different as Mahayana Buddhism and Roman Catholicism - let alone bundle up this glorious diversity and casually dispose of it within the same wrapper.

Favourite of a Favourite

2010-06-03T14:22:00.003+01:00

OK, so this isn't cheating, it's something I did for a music messageboard which I'm recycling for my blog. Partly because the forum is full of cockwads who are too busy squawking at how dare a FEMALE penetrate their inner geek sanctum to actually notice any actual opinion I offer on music. Partly because it was an interesting exercise to write about a favourite album by a favourite artist as if you were hearing it for the first time. But mostly because it's been far too long since I blogged and this blog was starting to look really, really wilted and abandonned, especially since I so rarely write about music any more on what was supposed to be a music blog.

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So here's a track by track of the Richard D James album by Aphex Twin.

4 - A statement of intent, and an ambitious one. The marriage of his fancy new grown-up Orkester-esque soundbank with the ability to digitally manipulate every microsecond of sound into those terrifying snare rushes that sound like living, fire-breathing monsters of fire and brimstone that rise up from under the haunting melodies and snap at you like crocodiles in the moat of his pretty fairytale castle. And it is just adorable, his inability to resist just tagging the song like a graffiti artist - "Richard? Yup!" - I mean, who else *could* it be making this kind of thing, really?

Cornish Acid - This song never seemed to fit. Not Acid, not particularly Cornish either. With a name like that, it should have been great. I mean, mental images of Mr. Twin strapping on his helmet and his belt and going down the Twin Mine and coming up with great bucketloads of Cornish Acid bubbling and spilling all over the dancefloor, that is such a compelling construction. And the song sounds nothing like. A blemish on an otherwise perfect album and the thing that makes it 9/10 not 10/10.

Peek8675309 - aaah, that opening modem makes me laugh so much. There's nothing that dates a song from that era quite so much as everyone in the world who thought that sampling their modem and sticking it on their track was a great idea because it's such a neat sound (and kind of an in-joke during an era when only nerds were really online.) The burbling of the bassline is just such a wonderful sound, like a happily bubbling pot or maybe a witches cauldron.

Fingerbib - yay! I'm 6 again! So playful and childlike. Or maybe that odd sense you get when you've stayed up all night on mushrooms until the sun comes up and the telly starts showing kids television and you're entranced by the colours and the sounds and then suddenly you realise - your buzz is actually wearing off, and hang on, kids TV is actually totally *warped*.

Carn Marth - a lot like the actual hill, it doesn't look so massive from a distance, until you get about halfway up and you realise that it's a LOT steeper than it looks and you've tried to walk up it way too quickly and whoa, that's really kinda exhausting. The indignant trumpet noises that come in about 0:40 totally make this song. (Again with the modem samples, dude, we get it)

To Cure A Weakling Child - again, just perfection. The combination of this jaunty, childlike melody with the really stately, almost classical instrumentation is just devastating. And then that wild creature of a beat beneath it. It's a total inversion the whole idea of a dance track - that the propulsive driving rhythm is carried in the melodic instruments and the drums are there to provide texture and the *feel* of the piece.

Goon Gumpas - the theme to a nostalgic pastoral 1980s BBC comic-drama serial with lots of shots of vintage cars gadding about with pre-raphaelite hair flowing in the open air, set in the Edwardian age and probably starring Nigel Havers... and I mean that in the nicest possible way. This is like the Merchant-Ivory of Aphex. Just immaculate.

Yellow Calx - "Oops, sorry, did you forget that I could be creepy and odd and bring the intriguing experimental radiophonics in the midst of all this pastoral gorgeousity? Ooh, good. Well, here's a lovely little reminder for you." ::big aphex grin::

Girl/Boy Song - The exact moment that Richard enters his Imperial Phase. Never has such a statement of utter control and mastery of one's art and "look what I can do" resulted in such a deceptively simple and compelling piece of music. Who knew he could be so... unrelentingly *pretty*? This is a piece that's going to be taught in music composition classes in the 24th Century. Yeah, sure, it's overhyped and it's the second favourite song of "people who don't really like Aphex" (after Avril 14) but the thing is - I NEVER get bored of this song. It's a perfect orgasm every time, not a note out of place, not a beat out of alignment (even in the mad snare rush gone mental bits.) It *is* that good.

Logan Rock Witch - weirdest album closer ever, especially coming on the heels of GBS. It's like Richard lets all the toys out of the box and they run amok killing everything in sight. Don't ever let your guard down with this man, don't ever forget that under the stately melodies and the immaculate cello sequencing, he is a total fucking weirdo. And we love him for it.

Everything You Know Is Wrong

2010-05-17T11:38:00.004+01:00

Hello, I know it's been ages since I last blogged. My life has taken a turn for the exceedingly busy in the past few weeks, and looks set to become busier still. My new database upgrade finally went live last weekend, but that meant having to work on Sunday and then having to pull 9 hour days for the next week trying to get everything sorted. Fairly obvious conclusions: all the people who participated in the beta testing had either no problems or very minor problems that were quickly sorted. The people who were "far far too busy" to do any beta testing? Yes, astonishing isn't it, that they had all the bugs. And guess who they tried to blame.

Well, the great thing about User Acceptance Testing is that we can now turn around and say - "So you have bugs? That's funny. You SIGNED IT OFF saying you were happy with the upgrade." Maybe next time you won't be "far far too busy" to do beta testing.

In the meantime, I have mostly been doing huge amounts of reading. After my stinging £9 fine at the library last month, I decided to just bite the bullet and buy books off the internets so I can take my time with them - and ended up flying through the pile of reading materials that keep arriving in brown cardboard boxes.

I've read two incredibly interesting books in the past week, both of which seem to be quite well researched, scientifically documented books which totally contradict the conventional wisdom regarding certain health issues, and the industries which have grown up around them. One was Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker, which takes on mental health, and the effects of the Pharmaceutical Industry. The other is Health At Every Size by Linda Bacon, which takes on the myths about weight loss and dieting, and discusses the effects of both the diet industry (and by proxy the huge world of Corporate Beauty by which I am unfortunately employed) and the food industry.

The takeaway message from both books seems to be, "everything you have been taught is wrong."

Or, if not wrong, heavily biased and influenced by corporations with a massive financial stake in the "solutions". There was a sentence in Bacon's book which absolutely blew my mind - paraphrased, because I don't have the book with me, but I shall correct it when I get home and check. "Corporations which prioritise public health over profit are liable to be sued by their shareholders." Yes, I know I'm a massive idealistic hippie, but something about that struck me as so... wrong... beyond even wrong. Just massively, actively *evil*.

I'm still processing the information that I read in both books. They will probably require re-reading and further research, for the simple fact of "if this is true, why haven't I seen this shouted about elsewhere?"

The Whitaker book started with a seeming paradox: despite the introduction of dizzying amounts of new drug-based treatments for mental illness, mental illness rates have skyrocketed over the past 50 years, with the rates of disability due to mental illness seemingly to be growing exponentially faster in more recent years. Sure, life is more stressful than it has been in previous decades. Part of this is due to the increasing medicalisation of non-medical issues. People who were previously thought of as "shy" are now diagnosed with "social anxiety disorder" and prescribed medication. And diagnostic tools have grown more detailed, diagnosing conditions which may have gone uncaught before, while public acceptance of mental health issues is growing and the stigma is shrinking. And yet the figures on mental illness continue to grow, and what's more, on the whole, the long-term prognosis for the mentally ill has actually worsened when looked at on a statistical basis.

Whitaker chases down increasing evidence that many of the growing manifestations of the more severe mental illnesses are actually iatrogenic. That means that the illness was exacerbated - or even CAUSED - by the very medication administered to "cure" it.

The author traces the entire history of the drug-based treatment of mental illness back to its birth in the mid-20th Century, out of the "magic bullet" theory of medicine which resulted from the discovery of antibiotics and other life-changing medications. Psychiatrists wanted magic bullets of their own. The difference was, that physicians looking for a treatment for infection knew the general mechanics of how infections were caused - once they discovered that infections were caused by microbes, they went looking for medications that killed those specific microbes.

Mental illness, however, was more nebulous. Theories about what caused it were myriad; actual scientific evidence, however, was thin on the ground. The first few treatments for mental illness (major tranquillisers such a Thorazine, for example) were discovered by accident, as their psychiatric effects were noted as side effects from targeting other symptoms.

And so the "chemical imbalance" theory of mental illness was invented. And yes, I say invented, rather than discovered, after reading this book.

I, myself, was long taught the "you have a chemical imbalance in your brain" theory. In fact, I've parroted what I was told by my doctors in this very blog - "I have to take medication for my bipolar disorder, like a diabetic has to take insulin."

Whitaker chases down the evidence, disorder by disorder, drug by drug, that psychopharmaceuticals do not cure chemical imbalances in the brain - they CAUSE them. These drugs do not "normalise" disturbed brain chemistry. They actually create pathological brain chemistry themselves, first, in the short term, by disturbing the natural flow of neurotransmitters, and then in the long term, as the brain struggles to compensate. And the longer one stays on these medications, the more disturbed the brain chemistry becomes. It appears that the medication, and the brain's compensatory mechanisms which change single-event illnesses into long-term conditions requiring revolving door hospitalisation.

Whitaker talks about Bipolar Disorder - how cases of this once-rare illness have skyrocketed in the past few decades - in line with the increasing use of anti-depressants. Case studies abound, of people who never had a manic episode until they were put on anti-depressants. It ameliorated their depression, but also pushed them into mania. That idea knocked me for six, as it was almost an exact description of mine own diagnosis. I found myself going back through mine own history, trying to remember if I'd had manic episodes before I was first put on anti-depressants. The uncomfortable truth is that I did - manic episodes and bipolar symptoms appeared in my late teens. But after going on anti-depressants, manic episodes changed from rare events to appearing with increasing frequency and duration, as I started rapid cycling. It's a common theme within the mental health world - you are put on one medication for your initial illness, then another to compensate for the side effects, and then another, and next thing you are on a cocktail of interacting psychoactive substances.

It's a terrifying idea, that the past 20 years of mental instability, of going on and off medications, of lost jobs and broken relationships - could actually have been exacerbated - or perhaps even caused - by the very medications I was prescribed to "cure" them. Reading through the book, no less than four of the various medications I've been on over the years were implicated in long-term mental health problems. It makes me angry. It makes me feel like I was LIED to - though, honestly, were the psychiatrists lying if they actually believed the chemical-imbalance meme themselves?

But I got off lightly. Reading both the case studies and the meta-analyses in the book, I feel... well, the phrase "dodged a bullet" rings a bell, though I don't feel like I dodged it. I feel like I escaped with a flesh wound rather than a crippling injury.

Perhaps this book has resonated so deeply with me because I have recently weaned myself off medication - and had the experience of seeing first-hand, both how hard it is to withdraw from the stuff - and also, how much better, more human, more alive I feel now that it has gone from my system. But this book changes my feelings about it from a simple personal experience to the idea that this is a much wider problem. And something worth shouting about.

Read the book, I urge you. If you suffer from mental illness of any stripe - or if you know someone who does - or even if you care about issues of justice and patients rights and the prioritisation of profit over public health. It's not just eye-opening. It's brain-changing stuff.

3 Weddings And A Refusal

2010-05-01T11:13:00.005+01:00

Woke up early, strangely horny, and had a wank. Yeah, yeah, you only have the right to complain that this is TMI if you've never, ever done it yourself. Normally (i.e. when not too off one's tits on Citalopram to actually orgasm) this is just nature's form of valium, relieving anxiety and sexual tension - but this time, the peaceful "yeah, everything's gonna be alright" daze passed into guilt and angst in about two minutes.

Why? Oh no, not the usual catholic guilt about resorting to onanism - I outgrew that when I outgrew traditional Christianity. Because I was thinking about internet crushboy, because it was his name on my lips when I came. Yes, I realise this makes me look like the biggest creepy stalker freak in the known universe. One's inner fantasy life is not an explainable or justifiable thing.

And yet, still, it filled me with angst. No, not depression, thankfully. But angst, definitely. I thought I was over this nonsense, but clearly I'm not. Yesterday, I was all "you can't go from love to indifference overnight, you have to go through hate right now, and this mild disdain/hate thing I'm at right now is really healthy." Today I'm pining again. Why? Because I can only be attracted to people who make me feel completely unloveable.

Is it that old Nico thing, "I can only ever be truly happy when I am unhappy"? Is it that my self esteem is so low that I look for people who will reinforce my own viewpoint that I'm completely vile, disgusting and unloveable?

Pick up the post and there's a letter with an unfamiliar Vancouver return address. It's a handwritten invite to my little cousin's wedding. I know that she really wants me to go, my brother has communicated this to me. The last time I saw my cousin, over a decade ago, she was at University, and seemed on the verge of growing into a really interesting person. But a family wedding? No fucking way. Does this sound selfish? Yeah, I can imagine that it does. But there's no way to really communicate the horror that the entire assembled St.Claire family inspires in me. It's not just the intra-family politics, the low-level sniping, the subtle competitiveness between the branches of the family, the endless minefield of what I'm Allowed To Say and what I'm Absolutely Not. (Do my cousins even know that my brother is separated from his wife? I've been told under strict orders not to mention this.)

The main, utterly selfish reason I do not want to go to my little cousin's wedding is because I am the last of the 4 of us in this generation to remain steadfastly, unrepentantly unmarried, and I do NOT want to face the inquisition, the furtive talk, the pitying glances, the gentle nudges, the outright suggestions that isn't it bloody well time I settled down and got married, too. Because that just sets off the same ugly cacophony, only a thousand times louder, in mine own head. Yes, I am an utter, abject failure, because I, alone of the four cousins, have failed to produce a partner.

There's a part of me that wants to rebel, wants to wind them up, wants to tell them, actually, the reason I've never married is because I'm gay - but they're so fucking faux-liberal I would be expected to produce a wife or even better a fashionable Civil Partner.

No. Isn't it obvious? The reason that I'm not married is because I'm utterly, irrevocably flawed. Because in a world where humans come in two-packs, I'm an irredeemable, unsortable onesie. Plato was wrong. Some people are not halves of a greater whole, they are impenetrable, unassailable, single Units in and of themselves. I'd like to shout that there's nothing wrong with that. That it's better to be happy by oneself than stay miserable and slowly suffocate in an unhappy marriage between two utterly unsuited people - you know, like my parents did for most of my teenage and early adult years.

But of course I don't feel like that right now. I just feel like a failure. And there is nothing *quite* like failing in front of your family. Failing in front of strangers is one thing, but failing in front of people who have kept a catalogue of your every flaw for future use against you in a whisper gallery of semi-private opinion? No thank you.

The Dreaded E-Word

2010-04-29T17:57:00.006+01:00

Well, the good news is I think that I am finally, permanently off Citalopram. The reduction method (spacing the time between doses further and further apart) proved effective. I took the final step of going off it entirely while I was on holiday in Cornwall, with the idea that if I had any of the usual symptoms, at least I wouldn't have to suffer at work. But no... although the withdrawal was more prolonged, it was nowhere near as bad.

The task now, is to stop myself from sinking back down into depression. It's been a question of remembering - or rather, relearning those things that I discovered and knew in the years before medication. It's a question of discipline - sleep right (at least 8 hours, at the same time every day) - eat right (no refined sugar, limit the amount of caffine) but the single most important influence on whether I have a fairly upbeat and bouncy day, or descend into crying jags and snapping attacks at random people on a crowded tube:

EXERCISE.

I hate the fact that this is so. I hate it with every fibre of my lazy body - but actually, that's not true. I am not naturally lazy. I'm perfectly happy to walk - in fact, I often to prefer to walk instead of relying on public transportation. I enjoy dancing and playing musical instruments (often a somewhat physical activity - at least, it was before the Laptop became my primary instrument.)

Yet the moment someone mentions the dreaded EXERCISE word, I drag my feet like a recalcitrant teenager.

And therein lies the reason why. I went to school in the States, where, after the Kennedy-era administration enacted legislation governing school curriculums, all forms of exercise were turned into the dreaded SPORTS.

If ever there is a way to suck the joy out of physical movement, it's to turn it into an athletic competition full of pointless rules and combine it with a vicious winner take all culture that glorifies the winners and vilifies the sad, pale, pathetic computer nerds and bookworms that are invariably picked last for the team and lose every physical competition in which they are forced to participate.

Do I still sound bitter, 20 years later? Come on. You're talking to a woman who, as a teenager, intentionally got her foot broken at a punk show so that she could have a doctor's note off sport for a semester.

This legislation from before I was even born brought in rigorous physical testing for children during their most sensitive years. Like most private school kids, I was used to batteries of tests - the SSAT, the PSAT, the SAT and so on. I was used to acing them with one frontal lobe tied behind my head. But those physical tests that measured how many situps or pushups or pullups you could do, or how fast you could run a mile... run a mile? No fucking way could I *EVER* run a mile, not with M.I.A's Anti-Ginger League shooting guns at my feet.

The results of the SSAT and the PSAT and the SAT all came privately, in an envelope delivered to your parents' house. The results of the physical fitness tests, however, were posted publically in the gym for everyone to see. Kate St.Claire was on the 0th percentile for physical fitness. Never mind that I got a 99th percentile on every other standardised test they could throw at me, that 0 haunted me, as if they'd painted a target on my back and thrown me hogtied into homeroom.

I hate competitive sports. No, I don't hate them - I *LOATHE* them with every fibre of my being. Anyone who repeats that old trope "it's not whether you win or lose that matters, it's how you play the game" has never really lost - not repeatedly, every single time you try, until you finally give up - but no. If you don't go to gym class, we won't let you graduate, we will make you repeat the 10th grade over and over and over, no matter how brilliant your academic grades are - unless you spend a couple of Saturdays running - did I say running? - no, dragging yourself around the playing fields wishing that you could, actually, drop dead of exhaustion.

So if there is so much of a WHISPER that any kind of physical activity might be exercise or - worse - sport - my brain and body simply rebel and will. not. do. it. It's almost like I have to play tricks with myself to get it to work. Add music, and I'll bounce away. (This has been the biggest positive about getting an iPhone - the iPod part of it has been the biggest incentive to getting me to move since my ancient Sony Discman died.) Add Scenics - and the prospect of getting to look at interesting things and I'll walk for, literally, miles, without even noticing.

Perhaps this was an added bonus to coming off citalopram while I was in Cornwall. If there was one thing I did a lot of while on holiday (oh, apart from eating cornish pasties and cream tea) it was walking. Up and down hills, along windy coastlines, tramping all over castles and tin mines - I walked an average of about 5 miles a day, easily.

And walking is, seriously, the most effective anti-depressant I have EVER known, the only one that works every time, works both short term and long term. I'm not saying that doing it makes me feel fantastic - but if I *don't* do it, it's guaranteed that I will feel like shit. And so this is what I must hold on to. Forget those awful teenage competitions, forget the humiliation of the locker room ritual, forget those brainless bimbos talking endlessly about their diets and aerobics routines like steel-abbed robots.

Remember this: it is the ONLY thing that will keep your precious sanity intact.

That Boy's Got My Heart In A Silver Cage

2010-04-27T17:58:00.003+01:00

I've fallen in love with this song. I kept hearing it in Aeroplane mixes (sometimes mixed in with their swooshed out, dreamy remix of Friendly Fire's Paris) - the plaintive tones of Giselle Rosselli burning a hole straight through my ears down to my heart.

It's an odd one. The song's production isn't that special (update: the "Version 2" on iTunes is actually a lot better, a more bouncy house-piano-driven disco a la Spiller's Groovejet) the tune isn't an obvious earworm - but my god, that *voice*. The heart-wrenching longing encapsulated in a certain purity of tone broken by the barely contained emotion, the little swoops on the end of each phrase, as if barely surpressing her sadness.

The lyrics... well, they tread the hinterland between utter banality and sublime wisdom that Bernard Sumner mined so exquisitely. On the face of it, a simple "I want the one I can't have..." lament, but combined with the utterly forlorn delivery, it's just deadly and brings me close to tears every time.

And, of course, it just resonates with the mood I've been in, moping about, that stage where Shroedinger's Crush has opened the box and the cat is dead, you know it's unrequited and never will be and there's nothing to do besides Get The Fuck Over It - except I don't really want to. There's a part of me that somehow really enjoys this feeling, enjoys the sense of pining, the sense of melancholy and unworthiness. This sensation that I have come to equate with love itself. I've never really known it any other way.

I'm avoiding him. It hurts too much to do anything else. I blame myself, call myself for stupid for even thinking that I had half a chance (even though rationally I knew I never did) then blame myself for the fact that he doesn't even notice I'm avoiding him - then blame myself YET AGAIN for being so childish as to actually CARE about all this. The pity party has reached the stage where all my worst insecurities are dancing on the tables, blowing whistles and forming a conga line down the hall.

Today I'm having massive blasts of self doubt. Reading my twitterfeed, I had the sudden (completely out of character) wish... "Why can't I just be one of those girls who cares about clothes and makeup and toenail varnish and boyfriends and just be, you know, all feminine and girly and... normal?!?!?" And then hated myself a moment later for falling prey to that awful trap that reckons that that kind of hyperfeminine gender restrictiveness *is* normality. If I tried to live like that permanently, I'd be even more miserable than I am now. I am who I am, how on earth could I be anyone else? (And even if such behaviour did win me friendship and love, would I really want to be loved for something so false? I don't think so.)

It will pass. It always does, but for now, this song and my mood flutter together, perfectly catching the moment.

Pink Elephants & Purple Flashes

2010-04-24T15:05:00.004+01:00

So I've got myself a Mixcloud and didn't have a clue what to do with it so I uploaded this groovy old 60s psych/freakbeat/bubblegum mix I had lying around.

http://www.mixcloud.com/masonicboom/pinkelephantsandpurpleflashes/

Tommy James & The Shondelles - I Am A Tangerine
The Marmalade - I See The Rain
Kaleidoscope (UK) - Black Fjord
Sun Dragon - Green Tambourine
First Crew To The Moon - The Sun Lights Up The Shadows Of Your Mind
The Electric Prunes - Get Me To The World On Time
The Nazz - Open My Eyes
13th Floor Elevators - Nobody To Love
Amon Düül II - Archangels Thunderbird
The Rattles - You Can't Have Sunshine Everyday
Donovan - Barabajagal
The Electric Banana - Alexander
Dumbo Soundtrack - Pink Elephants
John's Children - Smashed! Blocked!
Peter Cook - Bedazzled
The Creation - Painter Man
The Turtles - Outside Chance
Kaleidoscope (US) - Lie To Me
Tomorrow - My White Bicycle
The Move - (Here We Go Round) The Lemon Tree
Wendy & Bonnie - Let Yourself Go Another Time
David Bowie - Let Me Sleep Beside You
The Fenwyck - Mindrocker
The Factory - Try A Little Sunshine
Aquarian Age - 10,000 Words In A Cardboard Box
Sands - Listen To The Sky
Max Frost & The Troopers - Shape Of Things To Come

Witch Cults Of The Radiophonic Age

2010-04-22T17:10:00.005+01:00

I've really been falling behind in my gig-going this year. Artists I love tour, and I have either neglected to buy tickets (usually forgetting that the gig was evening happening) or worse yet, bought tickets, and then decided at the last minute that I'm too tired or depressed to go.

To counteract this, I've been trying to book more tickets for seated gigs. Yes, I'm (LOL) old and the prospect of being able to sit down and enjoy a gig in relative comfort is far more appealing to me than the thought of standing up for 2 or 3 hours in a dirty, crowded environment. So I bought a load of tickets for gigs at the South Bank Centre and I've even managed to get a ticket for The Knife's opera at the Barbican.

Last night was Broadcast at the SBC - I'd already had sad news via email that Micachu had been volcanoed (you don't realise how much many artists travel until it takes an act of god to close airspace over your country, and reports start filtering in from all the strange places where your favourite artists have been stranded) which was a shame, as I was looking forward to seeing them.

The replacement however... Oh my god. Now, I have quite a high tolerance for meandering artwank. I dated a sound artist for a long time, and put up with a lot of highly conceptual and inaccessible ... material, on a daily basis. This, however. No. A man in floppy hair and a diamond pattern sweater sits on a dais abusing a cello. Although there's sheet music in front of him, the music follows utterly no pattern that I can discern. Across the stage from him, sits a bored looking woman in front a laptop. Occasionally she rises and hits some buttons, and some vague, droney looping patterns echo out across the stage. Hey! Don't get me wrong, I love me some droney loops if they're interesting sounds, well manipulated, and create some kind of textural build and drama. This was just background noise. I lasted less than three songs before pulling a runner out to the lobby, deciding that my iPhone was infinitely more interesting than the band on the stage.

(I realise now that this is only the second gig I've been to since acquiring my iPhone. You don't realise how addicted you get to the little critter until you have to sit through an hour's set without checking it.)

There's an announcement that Broadcast are about to go on, and we all troop back obediently to our seats.

It's been about 10 years since I first saw Broadcast - at the London Scala. It was one of those rare nights when I looked around, and realised I was a *type*. The entire audience looked like me, all the girls in thick black tights and vintage 60s dresses, the boys all dressed like my date, black jeans, turtlenecks, long sideburns. At once it felt awful, and yet oddly reassuring, to know that you were *part* of something, that you were some kind of strange motley youth tribe.

So 10 years later our youth tribe has all grown up, rocking middle aged paunches and bald spots instead of Stereolab and Warp t-shirts. Broadcast, too, have aged in their own quirky off-kiltre kind of way. It's no longer a band, so much as two people facing each other across tables full of electronic gear and vintage synths (always a good look as far as I'm concerned.) Instead of getting more accessible, their sound actually seems to have got *stranger* over the intervening years. The icy 60s cool has given way to a sort of cracked electronic backdrop, the warped hiss of a detuned radio, the plume of occasional retro-futurist Moog rising in an elegant melody above the static.

It's elegant, stately, as windblown and desolate and alien as the Brutalist concrete slab of the South Bank Centre, and yet at the same time, strangely comforting, like the warm glow of an old black and white television. Trish Keenan's voice remains as perfect as the glaze on Ming China, at once both anonymous as the voice of The Speaking Clock, and yet as distinctive and reassuring as the shipping forecast, quintessentially British, and yet oddly accentless and ageless. Occasionally, recognisable melodies drift across the soundscape, as she sings one of their more familiar songs over the intriguing soundscapes.

And yet the true star of Broadcast's show - now, as it was a decade ago - is actually the videos they project over themselves as they perform. Clips of science documentaries, NFB public service films, space age graphics and bizarre occult symbolism flicker and glow across the stage in multicoloured psychedelic profusion. Sometimes the imagery seems to synch with the music, sound and colour throbbing together in harmony, sometimes it seems to pulsate with a life of its own, pulling the music after it.

There's a whole genre based around this sort of thing now - Library Music, hauntology and all that, the synthesis of found objects and lost arts. The synthesis of science and mystery, folklore and scifi phenomena, low budget and high tech. There's something so beautifully English about them, something homemade and yet at the cutting edge of science - British eccentrics from the same school as TC Lethbridge and Quatermass. It's probably a cheap pun to describe a band named Broadcast as being Radiophonic - yet that is the proud and noble tradition they belong to, and continue to uphold.

This really needs no introduction

2010-04-20T14:07:00.002+01:00

Do you ever wonder why the comments on this blog are moderated? Because, quite frankly, it's amazing, the amount of bile that people can express towards human beings on the internet, safe behind the anonymity of a monitor and a keyboard. I'm not even going to bother to edit this comment at all, I'm just going to post it, in its entirety, so you can see the full range of anger, hatred, projection and ungrounded assumptions that one stranger feels entitled to direct at another.

I suppose it's kind of testament to something, that my post, about mine own experiences, moved someone to such emotion that they felt compelled to take the time to write this.

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Discontinuation Syndrome":

My grandfather has leukemia and is pushing 90. He has recently entered a deep depression on account of you know... facing the inevitability of death and all. Nothing as serious as being a whiny recluse with bad self-esteem, but, then again, nobody is as unlucky as YOU. He was prescribed Citalopram to regulate said depression. He took it, it didn't do much except makes some of his accompanying neuroses simmer down. He took it for a while, then yesterday i find out he had finished his prescription and had forgotten to tell me or my dad to refill it. So he'd essentially been off it, cold turkey, for a few days. Absolutely no withdrawal symptoms.

So yeah, my point is that you're pretty much a "lightweight" (a term i use in substitution of another only to elude any profanity filtering that may occur). Since you're looking things up on the internet, look up "hypochondria", "cry for help" and "grasping at straws to feed said compunctions".

Since i bothered to write this much, here's a bonus: that crush guy will never like you because he's a guy and you're fat, ugly and old. Even fat, ugly and old guys try to date up one league at least. Even where that not the case, you have an abysmal personality riddled with myriad made-up disorders that hide simple chagrin at not being everybody's favorite little princess. Plus you hate women and men equally in various creative twisted little ways that you rationalize as a "feminist" philosophy, simply because, unlike them, you're an amorphous blob.

When you next face a mirror i hope you meet your own gaze and in that terrifying glimpse into the void that is your soul your resolve to leave the internet forever and never take pills again, as the first two baby-steps in emancipating yourself from a super-vocal and well-connected spec of dust to a more demure, elegant, introspective and, ultimately, happier, human being.

Best regards,
Martha

Thanks for your time, "Martha".

Discontinuation Syndrome

2010-04-07T15:52:00.002+01:00

Three weeks into Citalopram withdrawal, and this is the point where I usually give up and go crawling back to the soft, warm, fuzzy druggedness. I was hoping it would be better if I tried a slow tapering instead of stopping cold turkey (apparently, according to online support groups, stopping citalopram cold turkey is harder than kicking heroin) but although that's helped with the physical symptoms, the badtemperedness and quick moodswings from happy to irritable to mysteriously suicidal are back in force.

"Oh, that's just your bipolar disorder coming back" the doctor told me the last time I complained, and I believed him, and shut up and went back on the pills, despite the side effects. That was before I looked up SSRI Discontinuation Syndrome on the internet, and discovered that every single one of the symptoms I was having was on the list. Yeah, sure they might not be considered "addictive" and the side effects not classed as actual "withdrawal" but it's still one of the most physically and emotionally harrowing experiences I've had to go through.

Still, I'm determined to get through it this time. I've been on these things for five years now. Five years of weight-gain, five years of total lack of libido, five years of becoming more and more disconnected from myself, my body, who I am. Sure, it effectively shields you from anxiety, depression, smooths over a host of irritations. But at what cost? I know that it helped me to endure situations I otherwise could not have, but should all situations be endured? Is habituation, acceptance, settling for the path of least resistance always the best option?

It's my birthday this Saturday, and birthdays are always a time to sit back and look at the milestones. Is my life where I thought it would be at this age? Of course it isn't. OK, count your blessings. I'm employed, albeit in an industry that makes me feel morally ill. I own mine own house, albeit in a shitty neighbourhood of a city I no longer love.

And there I stop. I spend my days alternating between boredom and frustration, sleepwalking through my job, too bored to even argue with people I don't even respect on the internet. I've been demonised on every messageboard I've ever joined, alienated and misunderstood, my name becoming slang for some crazy cat lady. I haven't had a relationship in so long I can't even remember how to do it, yet I can't stand the idea of joining a dating site and sorting through more damaged people, trying to make those split second decisions while they judge you with similarly jaded eyes. It takes forever for me to actually be attracted to someone beyond the silly, fragile crush stage and there's just something so meat market-ish and offputting and unnatural about the whole set up that it ends up feeling like harder work than even looking for a job with less reward.

Oh, I feel like stamping my feet. I don't *want* to have to meet new people. Why can't I just have the one I already *like*? Because life isn't fair. This is the problem with outsourcing your emotional happiness to another human being, especially one who is not even aware they have that role.

What am I complaining about? Oh, I don't even know any more. Irritability and impaired concentration is all part of the "discontinuation syndrome" so I can barely even focus on this post. Was that the cat? Wait, I don't even have a cat. Goodbye.

Crush To Crash

2010-04-01T14:07:00.002+01:00

I knew the depression was in the post. It started on Tuesday, with that sense of utter exhaustion as I could not drag myself out of bed. This morning, it took the shape of insomnia, ripped out of sleep, wide awake at 6am.

P was in my dreams again, a shadowy reflection, a post of his photograph, and as I woke I realised something awful.

I'm doing it again. I have this awful, negative habit of effectively outsourcing my self esteem to an (usually oblivious or outright apathetic) man for whom I look to for approval or validation or just some kind of *reaction*. It's dressed up in a crush, but it's that old fashioned impossible craving for the distant daddy's attention - come on, just turn around, *notice* me, dammit. Pretend for one second that I'm actually a human being worthwhile of your attention.

It's total self sabotage - I usually do it when I'm about to embark on some big or important-to-me creative endeavour. It's almost like I *plan* some way of stripping away any uplift of self esteem such an event might win me.

And when the inevitable rejection comes, it's crushing, in every sense of the word. It's not just my achievements which are diminished, reduced to nothing, but my very self because I am unable to perceive anything good about myself, except through the eyes of this idealised crush.

The horror he feels at me is the externalisation of mine own self loathing. I'm vile, I'm creepy, I'm grotesque, both physically and emotionally. Even if he does actually like me to start with, my bizarre behaviour and constant attention-seeking will drive him away.

And this destroys what little lift in self esteem I get from whatever mine accomplishments might be - it's worthless because *he* can't or won't appreciate me.

And I load the dice against myself from the state. Pick a man who is flawed to start with - OK, he has to like me enough to pay a bit of attention in the first place, which clearly means that he has disputable taste. Pick someone you know will *never* give you what you need - for example, look for validation from a DJ who has never, to my knowledge, in any of his posted charts that I've read, rated a female artist. That's bound to work out well, isn't it?

So now, on top of feeling like shit about myself, depressed, crushed - I'm also ashamed of myself, and ever so slightly angry at myself for being a Bad Feminist, for looking for validation, love, approval from a man. And here I am, lonely, isolated, miserable, pulling the rug out from the few positive things in my life - and on top of it all, beating myself up for all the ways I feel.

Anger Management (A Reply)

2010-03-30T11:24:00.004+01:00

This started as a comment on Alex MacPherson's blog about Jude Rogers' piece in the Guardian, but it vastly outgrew its comment box.

Thank you for *getting* the point that Jude's piece was specifically about women in *rock* - and a very specific type of rock at that. You know that I am really not one to be down with these gunnysacking "women in music" type articles, but she was talking about a very specific role which has all but disappeared. It's like there was some weird loophole in the early 90s which has closed.

As a woman, and a musician who came of age in that era, it is disappointing how rock/indie music has changed, and written these women out of their important role in it and written a particular archetype of woman out of the story.

I think you've got Lucy O'Brien wrong - it's not that the Spice Girls and their music had a negative influence. (As you say, bubblegum music has always existed.) More that the way they co-opted a certain kind of slogan and linked it with imagery of the totally reversed message. It was that kind of double-speak way of taking "girl power" to mean the right to prance about in their knickers. That was really symbolic of the co-option of Feminism into female raunch culture - as Suzy Corrigan put it to succinctly on ILX - I do not believe it's possible to pole-dance your way to equality. That's not to dismiss female sexuality, but for years, given that that is the *only* role assigned to women - it seems to me that these "angry women" were in a way turning their back on that typical sexualisation of women, of saying "HEY, THERE ARE OTHER ASPECTS TO BEING A WOMAN, LET'S EXPLORE THEM."

It's not fun to be the "crazy bitch." In mine own "career" (I don't think of it as a Career, but I do have a 20 year path of making music professionally and semi-professionally) it's always a constant line one has to tread.

Show too much anger, even if it is legitimate, and you are dismissed, your points invalidated. Yet even if you are reasonable, funny, wry - the words "feminist" and "angry" are so linked together in popular culture that you will be accused of being "an angry feminist" even when you are being reasonable. (There was a great post about that on Feministing recently.)

The allotted, acceptable role that the music industry is prepared to slot non-standard women into is that of the "Ethereal Girl" - which these days has been bastardised into your dreaded "Quirky Girl." All those emotions which are so *important* to rock music - the anger, the sense of being an outsider, the *danger*, the ability to make people *uncomfortable* - these are viewed as inherently NEGATIVE when expressed by women. Ethereal Girl is the only way to evidence that "outsider" status without being *threatening* so that's why women take it up.

You can, as a woman, get trapped in an image. My band before Shimura Curves - The Lollies - had a deliberately planned image of being fun, being upbeat, being positive (about men as well as women) - after my experiences within Riot Grrrl. But the cute, cloying cutesy-indie sucks the life out of you, neutralises you, neuters you. I pretty much had a nervous breakdown, being in a touring band that was representing cute! happy! fun! onstage while going through stuff offstage that I needed to catharsise through music, but just couldn't because it just didn't fit.

In the end, the emotion won out - those songs simply *had* to be written, it was like a tidal wave coming through. But the sudden burst of emotion and anger and catharsis was not acceptable to an audience that were expecting arch, wry, ironic, funny and above all "cute."

(Those songs are lost forever - my biggest regret, musically, is that the Lollies never got to make a second album, because I felt those songs were so powerful - it saddens me that the only artifact of that band is the arch, twee shit that so does not represent who I was as a person or an artist at that time.)

Anyway, I digress, as I always do, because this is not abstract, critical stuff for me, it's real, visceral stuff that affects my life and my work every day.

I completely disagree with Kogan on the positioning of Swift and Simpson et al within this genre. Different genre, different beast. To compare a POP Star with a ROCK Star is apples and oranges. I'm tired of the girls = pop, men = rock dichotomy, and anger getting "channelled in different ways" for male and female stars. And the way that he talks about, say, Taylor Swift's "under the radar" anger is just frankly insulting. It reads to me as yet another man dictating the acceptable ways in which women MAY show anger without disturbing their male paymasters. Not having it. She has not been given a free pass - she is only "free" to work within a quite narrow and acceptable range of image, of songwriting - sure, this demeanor may work for male music journalists preconception of an acceptable, well-behaved female singer-songwriter - it does NOT work for me.

The absolute CRUX of Rock as opposed to Pop is, as Huggy Bear put it best "THIS IS HAPPENING WITHOUT YOUR PERMISSION."

Women who refuse those bounds, who refuse to be styled, who refuse to be constrained by the "pop" genre or the critical ghetto, who refuse to look or act the part. Women who will not be tamed. Women who almost *scare* you, by how perfectly they have captured that side you are not *allowed* to show to the world. You know - a ROCK STAR. Where are they?

Film Deaf

2010-03-27T14:35:00.002Z

This morning I had the unusual experience of engaging in a discussion about a film I actually had more than a tiny amount of knowledge about. (Sunshine - a DVD I bought almost entirely for its Dr Brian Cox science commentary.) It's strange. I like to think of myself as a vaguely culturally aware person - I definitely keep up with contemporary music, and try to keep at least aware of current trends and movements in visual arts and literature. But film?

I have a terrible confession to make. I am film deaf.

It's not that I don't enjoy films. I certainly do enjoy watching and even discussing it with whatever person who has made me watch it. It's more that I don't have much discernment when it comes to films. I don't really know enough about the artform to discuss genres or really assess them on a quality level beyond "I was engaged by that" or "this is boring, I'm going to read a book."

I took a course in basic film at art school, as it was a core requirement, but I can't say I learned anything. (Apart from reaffirming my teenage goth love of German Expressionism.) I have been taught about auteur theory and "Mise en scène" (whatever that is) but the whole concept of film as craft just slides off my brain. It's not like music, where I can be aware of the production techniques used to generate a sound, and still be caught up in the emotion of the piece. Movies are just something that wash over me without my ever really knowing how it was done.

And I certainly don't really know enough about films to actively seek them out. Despite living practically next door to a decent cinema, I think I've been there once in the past two years. I don't have a video club membership and it's very rare that I'll buy DVD unless I've seen the film before - these days, since I don't have a telly, that's because someone has shown it to me.

I just didn't grow up in a cinema-going family. Hell, we didn't even have a colour television until I was in my teens. Many of my childhood memories of familial television watching involved gathering around a tiny 70s B&W set the size of a toaster to watch Dr Who on Saturday nights, and that was about it. My Dad would occasionally take us to sci fi blockbusters - we saw Star Wars on our first visit to the States, and watched The Black Hole in an empty movie theatre on our first American Thanksgiving - but I was aware that my mother had never been *allowed* to watch films as a child. Her grandmother disapproved of films and would especially not allow her to watch anything by Disney, for fear of a pernicious Americanising influence.

So I suppose it's not accident that film-watching is something I associate with boyfriends - and why someone who is almost totally film deaf has almost exclusively had relationships with serious film buffs.

It's one of the few things I actually miss about having a boyfriend - having someone to actually make me watch films, and pick good ones to put in front of me. I mean, in most of the relationships I watch friends have, it's the men's job to provide the women with mixtapes. In most of my relationships, it's been the reverse - I'm such an insufferable music snob I'm far more likely to do the music selection. Yet choosing films is one of those jobs I'm happy, or even grateful, to rely on a boyfriend for.

Perhaps that's it, though. In my experience, most men like to be the experts in the house. They seem to actually find it vaguely diminishing if a woman knows more about something than they do. And trust me, I'm simply not the kind of person to keep it to myself if I have any kind of expertise or opinions on a subject. On film, however, I'm perfectly willing to accept and concede to someone else's greater knowledge. In fact, use that knowledge to heighten mine own enjoyment.

Ada Lovelace Day

2010-03-24T12:17:00.006Z

It's Ada Lovelace Day again, the day to celebrate and bring attention to women in technology and science through blogging. Last year, I blogged about my musical and production idol, Delia Derbyshire, but this year I wanted to blog about a female scientist a little closer to home, and with a far more important and far-reaching effect on me.

Dr. M.G. Gilliland, the head of the Botany Department at the University of Natal, South Africa. Or, as I knew her, "Granny Pani" nicknamed after her love of the frangipani flower.

I often joke about having a "maths granny" and a "science granny" - it's true. My paternal grandmother was a mathematician whose lasting accomplishments I have written about before - she wrote the standard maths textbooks for the whole country of South Africa. My maternal grandmother was "science granny," an accomplished Botanist and renowned academic.

In trying to look up her body of work and research online, it's initially tangled up with my grandfather, Dr. H.B. Gilliland, a fellow botanist who rose to the role of Vice Chancellor of the University of Singapore before returning to South Africa to run the Botany Department of the University of Natal at Pietermaritzberg. Although it is commonly recorded that a new species was named after him, both family legend and academic gossip has it that the plant was actually named after my grandmother.

After his early death at the age of 54, my grandmother took over both his work and the running of the Department of Botany of the University of Natal at Pietermaritzberg. I can still find the abstacts for her papers online if I search for her initials and they are still being quoted as references and co-authors in papers around the world.

My memories are of a jolly, yet intellectually active lady with a stout figure and a wild mane of iron grey "King Lear" hair. There was no activity which could not be turned into an opportunity to stimulate and expand young minds - one of my fondest memories is aged about 9, weeding the garden path, a boring chore which was turned into a voyage of discovery by my grandmother. "Do you know what this is?!" she would cry out excitedly, seizing on the hapless plant I'd plucked from the gravel. "It's a GYMNOSPERM!" With this, she would gently take the weed to pieces, showing me the differences in form and and behaviour between the varying plants of the lawn. A simple exercise in planting seeds for flowers could become an exploration in germination and genetics - she absolutely worshipped Watson and Crick and loved to tell me about DNA at every occasion.

I got to see her in her natural environment - the lab - on a few family visits to South Africa, though this was very difficult to manage during the political unrest of the 1980s. It was amazing and impressive to me, how my jolly granny turned into a formidable lady as she entered the world of her university department, put on her white coat, and all her students and lab technicians jumped at her every word.

The day of Princess Diana's wedding - being about 10, I still cared about this sort of thing - that morning, my grandmother packed my brother and I into her car and whizzed us down to her lab to use THE ELECTRON MICROSCOPE. This was one of the most advanced pieces of technology available in the world at that time, the idea of this being wheeled out as amusement for 10 year olds is astonishing, and yet she made this happen. The preparation of the slides - impossibly small specimens had to be coated in an infinitessimal coating of gold - the hum and whir of the machine, the grainy television screen displaying previously unknown worlds of tinyness. Trying to think of tiny, tiny things to look at on it, I suggested "a fly!" "Too big!" replied my grandmother. "The eye of a fly..." "Too big! How about we look at the eyes of the tiny parasites that inhabit the tiny eyes of tiny flies!" My mind boggled.

But I remember the Electron Microscope, the lab, the bottles and jars of specimens pickled in formaldehyde far more vividly than I remember the wedding we watched that afternoon, over tea, thanks to the time difference between Natal and the UK. I became obsessed with microscopes, I saved my pocket money for months to afford a cheap 50x magnification school model found at a garage sale.

The single most important thing she ever taught me, I can still remember, in her booming Scots-African accent: "CORRELATION AND CAUSATION, MY DEAR!!!"

To this day, I hear her voice in my head, every time I read an article about science in the paper, every time I run mine own mathematical analysis for my job, every time I observe the world and think and speculate about the causes of the things I see around me. It is the single most important lesson that any scientist can ever learn - that correlation does not imply causation. Just because one observes A and B occuring together, that does not necessarily mean that A caused B. B may have caused A. A and B may be totally unrelated, except by coincidence. It is the job of the scientist, of the rationalist, of the Thinking Person to use the Scientific Method to tease out correlation from causationm and move from magic into knowledge.

She remained a scientist until the very end. Even in her 80s, when her university suggested that it really was time to retire and let someone else have a go, she could not stay away, and returned to school as a mature student, to get yet another degree. To this day, she remains the oldest student ever to acquire a PhD in all of Africa. Towards the end of her life, after a stroke meant that she had to move into a nursing home, my mother recalls fielding a phone call which declared "The Minister of Agriculture for Dr. Gilliland." "Yes, and I'm the queen of England," my mother replied, putting the phone down. It was only when the same minister rang back a few minutes later, that my mother remembered - her dear old ma was still one of the world's foremost experts in bamboos, grasses and grains.

The fact that I am interested in science and maths, that I work in technology, is down to many factors and influences. But the single greatest inspiration was the living examples of the women of science within mine own family.

Mushy Gushy Crush Stuff

2010-03-16T22:04:00.002Z

It's reached the stage of the crush where I'm scouring the internet for photos. His MySpace pics are blurry, he's always looking down, or away.

I'm finding it quite odd. Looking at pictures of him, I'm struck by the fact that physically, he isn't particularly my type, at all. In fact, quite opposite to my usual long-haired girly-boy tastes. One of my friends, who knows him IRL described him as being "really rugged and manly."

But that's the thing about internet crushes, isn't it? You build up an idea in your head of what a person is like, based on their personna, their posts, their words, their actions. And based on all this, I have decided that he is beautiful because he's kind, because he's thoughtful, because he's clever, because he's humble and gracious and gentle, and a host of other reasons that seem terribly shallow when I try to list them.

I suppose this is the kind of crush where you admire in the other person what you wish to be more like in yourself. Which is odd, because so much of our online interactions have been FITE-ing. Mostly playful, but sometimes quite fierce. But when it mattered, when a bunch of people were ganging up on me on account of something I believed in very strongly, he always seemed to be on my side. I really liked that, that "you got my back" feeling. But I didn't entirely realise until the infamous sex dreams, just how much of that play-FITE was pigtail pulling and repressed sexuality, well, at least on my side. That desire to get in someone's face, to annoy them - it doesn't always mean you hate them, does it? ;-)

It's bad, though. My obsessive aspects are always put into overdrive by the attraction process to the point where I think it's less to do with like or lust and more to do with OCD. I give the person way too much power over me. Yes, the power to make me feel good, to make me feel high and happy and amazing, that "sun is shining, sky is blue, world is a good place" feeling where you sit all day writing songs about them. But also the power to feel terrible, to feel small and awful and unworthy - not even with a harsh word, but just with the feeling that they are ignoring you.

It's been like this as long as I can remember. Being attracted to someone almost invariably makes me feel like absolute and complete shit. It opens a trapdoor beneath my feet and drops me down the ladder into my deepest insecurities. I just have to remind myself, don't I - that I don't stand a chance. I am old. I am overweight. I am not conventionally attractive. I am bad tempered and moody and anti-social. A 200 lb manic depressive is the punchline to a terrible joke, not a dream date. How dare I even presume! He'd be shocked, appalled, horrified if he thought for a minute that my half-joking banter was not actually joking at all. In fact, probably terrified that I have started to think about him as much as I do.

But then again, all those little details that the internet glosses over. I know almost nothing about him. I don't even know how he lives, don't know any of the mechanics of his life offline. Hell, I don't actually even know if he has a girlfriend or not. It's that crush facility shading in the details for me and the internet sharpens that glossy focus into a mirror like sheen that only reflects back what you want to see.

Having a crush on someone on the internet adds a layer of distance, an emotional shield. Yes, you can get hurt, and the emotions are real, but not as real as someone you see IRL all the time. Not as completely safe and hermetically sealed off as a celebrity crush (though curse those celebrities that use the internet to come crashing through the fourth wall) but still. It's real, but it's not real enough. It's protected, but it's not protected enough. That weird quasi-real land halfway between make believe and a somehow truer reality.

I Thought My Interpretive Dance Post Was Funny

2010-03-09T18:39:00.003Z

I will now explain this thread through the medium of interpretive dance.

(Explanation: a newbie wanders into a thread where several regulars are engaging in banter and referencing several long-running memes in mostly joking form. He then decides that everyone is doing this with the specific intention of mocking *him*.)

MB (in Betty Boo voice):
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!

SSD: Yo, what is this shit?

MB: Awwww purrr purrr I just playin'

Erol forum en masse: LOL LOL LOL PLAY PLAY LOL LOL

Dr Jammmm: WHY IS EVERYBODY PICKIN' ON ME?!?!?

Cow House

2010-02-26T15:58:00.004Z

n.b. this is not Cow House, it is an abandonned barn nearby, at the top of Krumkill Road, photo by Eduardo Olivera

It was one of those Urban Legends that, when you think about it, you can't even remember where you heard it first. Maybe it was on the school bus, maybe it was your parents whispering to each other in the front seat of the car, maybe it was a real estate agent trying to explain away an eyesore on the neighbourhood.

As you drove down New Scotland Avenue towards Voorheesville, perhaps to pick up some groceries at Stonewells (the last of the independent supermarkets that hadn't been bought out by Grand Union or Price Chopper just yet) or taking the shortcut down the back way, past the abandonned country club, you'd pass Cow House.

It had clearly once been a beautiful house, one of those huge, sprawling farmhouses you only really get in New England and Upstate New York, dating back to the early 19th Century, when white clapboard Colonial started to give way to the gingerbread fancies of American Victorian. Two or three stories with bay windows and a porch wrapped all the way around the outside, of the sort you could see old grandmothers sitting on in rocking chairs in the summer heat, knitting and telling stories.

Except the paint had long since peeled to a weathered grey and the only occupants that dared shelter on the porch were black and white Friesian cows, chewing their cud complacently out of the heat. There was an orchard by the house, with ancient, grizzled apple trees that had long gone to seed, but no one dared pick the apples, and they fell and rotted among the unmowed grass.

It was such a sad story, the gossip went. 50 years earlier, a farmer had lived there, the last of his line. When his wife died, he shut himself up in the house and became a recluse. Here the story gets muddied - or maybe it's my memory. Some kids tried to break into the house, and he chased them with a shotgun, and shot one of them in the leg. Or perhaps it was someone from Social Services who came to check up on him, on account of the state of the house and land, and he chased them off with a shotgun. (I wonder, these days, why he wasn't sent to jail for doing such things - but then again, this was America with its right to bear arms, and, unlike the UK, if you find an intruder in your house, you're within your rights to blast them to Kingdom Come. Don't quote me on that, I'm a storyteller, not a lawyer.)

Whatever, the story, it was somehow both terrifying and sad. There were actually quite a few abandonned houses in the area (and even an abandonned schoolhouse where I used to hide out when I ran away from home) but only this one had rumours about it. When we first moved in, in the early 80s, it looked conceivably still inhabited. But as the porch crumbled and the roofs fell in, I wondered if the shotgun-toting, lonely old man had died, or if he ever existed.

When I was a teenager, I didn't understand the impetus that would lead someone to such a life. Lock yourself away from the world, bar the windows, let everything go to rack and ruin around you. But lately, it's begun to look more and more appealing. Why bother to interact with a world that has abandonned or disappointed you on every level? As you feel yourself slip away, social ties growing ever looser, you wonder what it is to stop you. That revulsion that people feel towards old cat ladies and old crazy guys who shout at traffic - it's that shuddering sense of "There but for the grace of god..." How easy it is to fall between the cracks. How many missed calls and unanswered emails before you slip away for good. And as you get older, those connections get harder to replace. Until one day there are none.

I used a slow afternoon at work to look for the house on Google StreetView, up and down New Scotland Road, trying to remember how the back roads all connected up. The house was gone, not a trace that it had ever stood there - obliterated so completely that at first I wasn't even sure I had the right corner. The house had been bulldozed, the orchard had either been chopped down or simply fallen down through old age. Cow House was utterly vanished.

I deleted my MySpace today. I'd been threatening to do it for weeks and not quite had the nerve, as there were still friends for whom that was my only way of contacting them. But then again, if a social networking site is the only way you have of contacting someone, how close a friend are they, really? A few years' worth of blogging gone in an instant. Is it a loss? I don't know. Perhaps those years are better off buried and forgotten.

So What Happened To The Shimura Curves Album?

2010-02-21T14:22:00.001Z

This is one of those questions I should really be paying more attention to, instead of getting in pointless fights on the internet. It's been nearly a year since we decided to put it out, and almost nothing has happened. There was a kind of brief flurry of activity last year, and then nothing.

I've honestly got to the point where I don't think it will ever come out. And indeed am wondering *why* people even put out records in the first place, trying to find some motivation to do it. So many of the reasons I can come up with seem either illegitimate or things I absolutely do not want to do.

People put out records because they want to make money off their music. In the current economic climate, with the business model for music and the internet changing so drastically, I'm fairly certain that I won't make any money off it, indeed, it's extremely unlikely that it will even break even, and will most likely end up costing me money.

People put out records because they want to be famous. The last thing I want is to be famous. That's the single most important lesson I've learned off the small amount of indie "fame" I had, and the rather more substantial amount of internet infamy. You think that Fame means everyone will love you. It doesn't. It means that everyone thinks that they are somehow entitled to a piece of you. No thank you.

People put out records because they want the respect of their peers. Yes, I admit. This one still appeals. Yeah, I'd like some critical acclaim. I'd like fellow musicians and DJs to go "That Kate St.Claire, she's a good musician and a good songwriter." I'd like to see my name in some in end of year lists and DJ sets. Except this is the one that's least likely to happen. I know that I'm handicapped before I even start by the mere fact of my gender. I'll be shunted off into a little box labelled "female musicians" and left out when the accolades of genius are distributed. This hurts. This makes me think that if I have to work twice as hard to be taken half as seriously, I might as well not even try.

So really, what does that leave? The desire to have other people listen to my music, and maybe even get something out of it? I can do that with a blog and a MySpace. Why invest so much time, effort and yes, money, into putting out a *record*?

I don't remember where it stalled. The album is finished, it's sitting on my hard drive (and backed up, this time.) I listen to it at work, and I'm *proud* of it. I like the way it sounds. And though I can hear the obvious influences and reference points (Stereolab, School of Seven Bells, St.Etienne) I don't really hear anything else out there at the moment that *sounds* like it. It's unique. It's a bit weird, not easily pigeonhole-able. This is both a problem and a strength.

So why not just fucking put the thing out? The last time I spoke to Chris, we were a bit stuck on the Mastering process. A minor hitch, and certainly not any kind of iceberg to stop this album. The truth is, it's me. I don't want to do it.

Pardon me for doing this in public. Pardon me if I bruise any feelings. This isn't about you; this is about me.

1) I feel like I'm alone in this. My former bandmates have all kind of wandered off and lost interest. When we first discussed this, everyone was keen, they all volunteered - but when it comes to doing any work, where are they? Yeah, I recognise that people have lives. Since we first started work on this album, a couple of years ago, there have been a wedding, two babies, a successful club night and a crafting group, countless jobs, countless breakups and countless moves. Life happens. But I am so tired of doing this by myself, and I'm so tired of feeling like the only one that cares.

2) All of this dredges up painful memories from years ago, that should have been long buried. Music is about emotion, of course some of those grudges get written into the very emotional fabric that makes up that music. I don't want to re-engage with so much of this negativity.

3) It's not just the record, it's everything that goes with it, the album artwork, the liner notes, photographs - not to mention the promotion when it comes out. Of course I'm going to have to do all this now, since no one else has. There's only one of me, and only so much time. By the time I get to the end of a long day at work, I'd rather draw paisley or pretty boys than album artwork.

4) The promotion. I just don't want to fucking do it. I actually start to feel sick to the stomach when I think about it. Everything I went through putting out that last album, Taste The Lollies. Interviews. Photo shoots. Press. Radio. Tours. I am an introvert. I find this stuff exhausting, invasive, and, when you do it day in, day out with the intensive kind of effort that went into the Taste launch, incredibly tedious and boring.

This has all changed now, and it's all about getting out on the web and making your presence known, which is somehow even worse. The internet is a total fucking sewer of attention-seeking idiots escaped from Daily Mail Island. I don't *want* to make myself available to these people. I know from experience, the kind of personality I have, if I spend more than 10 minutes on an internet forum, there's a flamewar up around my ears. This is *not* good promotion. This means that the collective work of half a dozen people will be flame fodder for assholes because I don't conform to their narrow, conservative idea of what a woman should be. Yeah, I know there's a school of thought that says there's no such thing as bad press, but when it's *me* out there getting the flak for it? It hurts. Don't pretend it doesn't hurt because it's some random internet troll having a go. It makes me very depressed, and I don't mean "ooh, a little sad" - I mean, it triggers and aggravates the serious, can't get out of bed clinical depression that brings my life to a halt. I don't want that in my life.

5) Did I mention I have to do this alone? If I can't get my former bandmates to care, how on earth can I get strangers to care? If I'm having trouble coming up with a reason to release a record, how on earth am I suppose to sell it to other people?

6) What if it bombs? Or worse, what if no one listens and no one cares? These songs are my babies, my precious little jewels for me to listen to in my home. What if no one wants them?

I guess I want someone to encourage me. Someone to turn me around, to tell me that it's worth it, to tell me to go for it. And that is the least likeliest thing of all.

The Relentless Machine

2010-01-08T16:51:00.002Z

An expansion of something I was going on about on Twitter this morning.

Halfway through listening to an Aphex Twin song (I think it was Phlange Phace or maybe it was We Have Arrived) I realised what it was I loved about his music - and indeed what I loved about so much of the music that has captivated me on that obsessive listening-over-and-over scale.

Actually that's not true. Back up; it came to me earlier, as I was sitting on the Victoria Line, eyes squished closed, trying to blot out the world around me, as I'd neglected to bring along a book on my morning commute. I started hearing the most amazing ambient techno whistling and throbbing in my eardrums and realised it was the sound of the train itself, the left-right pulse of the wheels, the high pitched whistle of the air in the tunnel, the weird My Bloody Valentine squeal of protesting metal as we scraped round the corners. Because trains have always made the best music, especially steam engines. When I was a little girl, my dad used to take me to see the big steam engine at the Science Museum in Kensington, and it was one of the few London landmarks that, in adulthood, seemed just as gigantic and HUGE and awe-inspiring as when I was a wee 7 year old seeing it for the first time.

No, wait, that's a lie. It was an interview I read earlier this year archived on some RDJ fansite where he talked about ventolin and how it was inspired by the sounds of his asthma and his inhaler. I've never had asthma, I've taken ventolin only once for teenage kicks with my first girlfriend and it knocked me flat, but I know all about those weird wheezing bodynoises that echo in your ears when you're really ill. The operations I've had (on my hand, twice, on my teeth when I was a child) have surprised and amazed me not so much for the pain or the technology but the SOUND the clicks and repeating beats and wheezes and squish and bzzzzzz you hear under anaesthetic - that you don't realise until you wake up, it's actually the sounds that your *body* makes that your conscious mind filters out.

No no, this line of thinking goes back earlier. It was last year, even (though that's only a few weeks ago now.) A chapter I was writing in EKT, a conversation Sandy P was having with a lover - I will not to give away any spoilers for the 2 people who are still reading it - but she is describing a recurring dream she has. Based, indeed, on a recurring dream that I myself have had since childhood. A dream about being placed - trapped even - inside an all envelopping Relentless Machine. Sandy describes how, as she ages and changes, the dream takes on different significance - wonder-filled in childhood, sexual in adolescence, musical in the prime of her life, malevolent as she ages.

Sandy P doesn't know what the dream means (though it's unspoken in the novel that her lover does and this is one of the reasons that he loves her). And I didn't until this morning, either.

I love those intensely machinelike songs. Those songs comprised of dozens of little interlocking parts which are meaningless in isolation, where no particular instrument dominates or holds the focus, yet everything click together to form a cohesive whole, intricate melodies arise and interlace like clockwork. One phrase repeated over and over like a mantra, adding elements slowly, bit by tiny bit, like lace, like fractals, like the symmetrical abstract tilework of Islamic art. The same trick employed by motorik krautrock, by dronerock, by 'braindance', by minimal techno, by all these lovely repetitive beats.

The sound of this relentless machine - the relentless machine I'm trapped inside. It's this sack of bones and muscles and neurons which ferries Me around like a sad soccer mom in a station wagon. The relentless machine is mine own body.

Look On My Works Ye Mighty And Despair

2009-12-29T13:08:00.002Z

It's when I wake, that it's hardest. Yes, it's nice not having to be woken by the dull but insistent buzzing of my alarm, but as I drift to consciousness, out of that fuzzy warmth, into the cold light of day, the purposeless sets in. It does not matter if I wake up or drift in that dreamy half-state. I have nowhere to go and no one to miss me if I don't turn up. Freedom from responsibility also means, unfortunately, freedom from the entanglements that connect you to the world, to other people.

I should have gone away. Even in Broadstairs, I rose and went out every day, convinced that I would miss some sight of staggering beauty in the many moods of the sea if I stuck to my bed. Why did I cancel my trip to Istanbul? I woke up one morning and the fear, the sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach outweighed my curiosity. I read about riots in Ankara, hundreds of miles away, but after reading Orhan Pamuk's snow, my stomach turned at the thought of unrest. The weather - the snow and ice and the chaos in Eurostar and at the airports. I had a sudden glimpse of myself, stuck in an airport in a foreign country where I do not speak the language (apart from a few cliches gleaned from pop songs) - and memories of the three days I spent in Newark Airport after 9/11.

And the fear of depression. The idea of being by myself, a stranger in a strange land, during the darkest days of the year. I feared my own mind more than I feared riots or bomb toting terrorists or snow and ice and plane crashes.

And so I stayed.

Mostly, I have spent my time writing. I'm not sure this is good for me. Yes, I enjoy it - and so, apparently, do the few people who leave comments on my stories. It's intoxicating, slipping into that other world like a warm bath. A world where even the unhappiest endings have a silver lining. Where everyone gets what they deserve, even if it's not what they expected. And when I'm not writing, I've been drawing, giving faces to my characters, making them real, or as real as anime characters can be. It's a kind of a drug, addictive, habit-forming and ultimately isolating.

But what else would I be doing? I don't think that many people realise I didn't go to Istanbul after all. Being cut off from ILX has been like an amputation. Yes, it's just a messageboard. I know. But it was a window - or perhaps even a door - to many real life friends. And with that door gone, I feel like I'm trapped on the wrong side of one-way glass. I can watch, but I cannot engage. I haven't even asked if the ban has been lifted - even the rare times I drop in to lurk... I feel utterly unable to reengage. There's the annual FT pub crawl this afternoon, but I shan't be going. Pub socialising is hard enough for me, but with the added social dis-ease of sitting next to these people, wondering if any of them pushed the button, voted me out? If they didn't have to look me in the face, would they vote me out of the pub, as well?

I should reach out to my other IRL friends, but it's so hard. That nagging feeling that I'm a bother, an irritation. Using the social tools of the internet provokes strange sorts of dissonance. Social networking provides the illusion of intimacy without the substance. You can read someone's updates and believe that you are interacting with them in a meaningful way, but one-way conversation is ultimately empty. These technological spiderwebs are much more fragile than their real-world counterparts. Make the wrong step - have one friend move to Facebook and another to Twitter - and you can fall out of synch, as if the bonds never existed in the first place.

I've been reading old stories, Deep Field and Loving In A World Of Deisre - mainly because A has been asking about them. This whole universe that existed for a brief bubble and is now gone, archived only in bits and pieces on the WayBackMachine. Except the world of Entertain Me! was very much a collaborative world. We checked over, edited, guided, and even participated in each others' stories, in a way, like a sort of quilt-making. One of the writers noted, sadly, that although she had her grandmother's quilt proudly displayed at the end of her bed, the ephemeral nature of the web meant that these cobweb worlds we worked on would never be passed down to our children and grandchildren in the same way. (Is this true, though, I wonder as I send the manuscripts on to A, watching like a proud parent as she draws inspiration from my stories in her own work. Fathers are terrified that their own children will surpass them. Mothers hope and pray that they do.)

Impermanence, impermanence, all is transience, a friend of mine was in the habit of muttering when the world seemed too awful, though I was never sure if it was Buddhist philosophy or her Catholic childhood peeking through. To her, this brought comfort. "And this, too, will pass." Time wipes away everything - the good things and the bad. The double meaning of Shelley's Ozymandias - "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair." It is both the threat of the all-powerful Pharaoh against rival demagogues and the ultimate triumph of time itself, ravaging all earthly kings' power until nothing remains but ruins.

In the end, nothing remains of ourselves but our descendants. And this is, yet again, where it hurts. I leave no descendants behind me. As I leave behind my last year of my 30s, and with it, the last of my unused fertility, I feel useless, superfluous, just another old, unwanted, excess woman. A weird evolutionary bubble, an artifact, like the appendix, with no biological reason to exist.

Life is long. I've got another 40-odd years of this, if the women of my family are anything to go by. That's a long time to go without a purpose. But as I look at my mum, my grannies, I realise that none of them actually found their raison d'être, their purpose in life until their 40s, when their kids had grown up, their husbands dead or run off. My grandmothers discovered Science, one became a professor of Botany, the other a writer of maths textbooks. My mother, in an act of rebellion, discovered Religion and became a priest.

I can only take comfort from the idea that I am in chrysalis form right now. I have not become what I will be in my final life stages just yet.

And so, at the end of the year, I count my blessings. I am comfortable - in fact, I am, at the moment, wealthy, which came as a shock when I checked my bank balance. I am, for the most part, healthy. It is only loneliness which cripples me, and not actually depression. I have much which excites me - at least in the world of music, my one true love.

I am disconnected, yes, isolated, lying dormant, waiting. But waiting for what? Looking for what?

Celebrating Singletonia

2009-12-22T15:12:00.002Z

Inspired by a random chat I read on a messageboard, a girl complaining how sick she was of reading facebook updates or twitters or whatever of other girls complaining about their rubbish boyfriend. I replied, the answer to that is simple: dispense with them entirely.

She thought I meant to dump said rubbish boyfriends and obtain a new one. No, I didn't mean that at all. I meant dispense entirely with boyfriends and the desperate need to obtain or keep one.

I was being frivolous of course. Having myself been celibate for... christ, 4 years coming up next March, it's not as if I don't *miss* sex. I filled out a LiveJournal survey and the answer to the "thing you would have liked to have had this year but didn't" or "hope you get next year" remains sex. It's not as if I don't get terribly, horribly soul lonely. (Though that, honestly, has less to do with not having a boyfriend and more to do with not having a "best friend".) And yes, I have caved in several times during the past few years and joined internet dating sites and even ::gasp:: gone on dates.

But the stark truth remains, I am single because I don't *want* a boyfriend. (Or, perhaps, to put that a bit more harshly - because I don't want to settle for the kind of boyfriend that seems to be available to someone like me.) Because I don't want all that stupid bloody hassle that seems to go with obtaining and keeping a boyfriend.

If I were in a more financial state of mind, I might go about estimating the amount of money I've saved. However, I can still do this as a mathematical analysis:

Since I have Officially Given Up Having Boyfriends:

-Amount of money I've spent on cosmetics, makeup etc: £20
(and granted, the great majority of that was buying nail varnish to refinish my bass guitar in)

-Number of professional haircuts I've had: 0

-Number of shitty movies I've had to sit through because BF wanted to see: 0

-Number of parties or gigs I've had to leave early because BF wasn't into it: 0

-Number of shitty parties or gigs I've not been able to leave because BF insisted it would be disloyal of me not to stay: 0

-Number of videogames I've had to watch someone play: 0

-Number of diets I've been on: 0

-Number of unsatisfactory sex acts I've had to participate in despite not being "in the mood": 0

-Number of pregnancy scares I've had: 0

-Number of early morning trips to the chemists for morning after pills: 0

-Number of nights I've been dragged out to pub with BF's mates when I wanted to stay in and read/write/sleep: 0

-Number of pointless, long-lasting IRL fights I've had over some stupid misunderstanding that turned out to be nothing: 3
(OK, despite not being in a relationship, these things still happen with bandmates)

-Number of uncomfortable shoes I've worn more than once: 0
(sometimes it takes wearing a pair of shoes once to find out how uncomfortable they are)

-Number of uncomfortable second dates I've been on, wondering what on earth I saw in bloke the first time around, if I'd simply had too much to drink and mistaken drunkenness for camaraderie: OK, 2

-Number of bad records I've been forced to endure in mine own home: 0

-Number of times I've been told, in mine own home, to "turn that bloody shit off": 1
(OK, I believe this was @GiaScala's reaction to Justice)

-Number of art openings/DJ sets/gigs etc. I've had to sit through, bored off my arse, simply to show "moral support": 0

-Number of times I've had to waste hours of my time listening to diatribes and complaints of BF who shrugs off mine own concerns: 0

-Number of times I've been:
-physically seized or otherwise assaulted during an argument: 0
-told I look "fat" (or otherwise unattractive) in that outfit: 0
-emotionally blackmailed or manipulated: 0
-cheated on: 0

OK, now this is starting to get depressing. But you kind of get the point.

It's really hard, sometimes, at the holidays, with the entire world seeming to conspire to shove this image of family and coupledom and the like down your throat, to make you feel as bad about your single status and lack of family as humanly possible. Sometimes it takes being really negative, and remembering all the awful, horrible, bad things about being in a relationship, in order to feel happy or at least content about being alone at this time of year.

So, in case, anyone wonders, I'll be spending Xmas day alone, in my flat, with the phone turned off, watching last season's episodes of Doctor Who and eating loads of junk food.

Some Things I Have Been Listening To In 2009

2009-12-09T11:14:00.004Z

So this is really not going to be a Top 10 list because, quite frankly, I find the idea of "Top 10" lists absurd when it comes to music. Yes, I know, this is very unlike me. I have a mathsbrain and I just LOVE putting things in order, making lists, in fact half my job involves tabulating league tables. The problem is, my mathsbrain revolts at the idea of trying to quantify something which simply does not involve numbers. A proper Chart is one thing - I'm perfectly happy to discuss who has sold the most records or who has garnered the most plays, on radio or iTunes or Last.FM or wherever. These things are quantifiable and orderable.

But aesthetic quality? Emotional impact? "Importance" (either in one's own life or in general cultural terms)? These things are not quantifiable.

Also, what on earth is a year-end (or decade-end) list supposed to be tracking? "Best Of" - as in, representative of the finest musical offerings your culture has to offer? How on earth is one supposed to judge that, given that most of us can never even hope to listen to *every* record that comes out in a given year. (And that's not even getting into the complex layering of gender and race biases that dictate what is even released, let alone critically lionsised or Rated - and how those race and gender biases interplay with notions of "genre" and pidgeonholing and ghettoisation etc. etc.)

Or is it just "Favourite"? I'm going to try and go with favourite, and try only to worry about how the music I select is representative of *myself* rather than make some sweeping statement about What Music Was Great In 2009. (especially because there are quite a few records that I have *not* heard this year, which I am convinced might have been "best" had I got to hear them in time.)

Here are some albums I really loved this year, in alphabetical order.

Black Meteoric Star - Black Meteoric Star
Techno/dance music interpreted in a way that a dirty dronerock girl can understand.

Broadcast & The Focus Group - ...Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age
Odd, warped radiophonic record about EVP. It doesn't sound like an album, it sounds like an artefact you discovered in a dusty library.

Electrik Red - How To Be A Lady Vol. 1
Super-joyous, sex-positive girl group singalongs with utterly lush production.

Fever Ray - Fever Ray
The creaky, claustrophobic sound of losing your mind from cabin fever in a deep Norwegian winter.

Lindstrom & Christabelle - Real Life Is No Cool
How could Linstrom's yummy kraut-drone-cosmic-disco possibly get any better? He could add a female singer and lashings of classic 80s girlpop.

Little Boots - Hands
Bouncy electro disco-pop with songs about maths. Come on, this was made for me.

Memory Tapes - Seek Magic
Like all those odd shoegaze-tronic 4-track tapes my sisX0r and I made in my bedroom, with a chorus pedal and a 505, only much, much, MUCH better.

Phantogram - Eyelid Movies
Nu-gazetronica that actually manages to both capture the woozy boy-girl vocals and textures that I love about shoegaze *and* still hold up as a decent electronic record.

St. Vincent - Actor
The most "grown up" record on this list, but still proof that being a grown up doesn't mean you have to become boring. A real sleeper of an album full of unexpected moments of beauty.

The xx - The xx
One of those landmark "important" records that actually seems to unite disparate groups of critics coming from completely different ends. How can so many people read so much into such minimal music?

There are other records that should have been on here, had I spent more time with them (Lightning Dust, the new Raveonettes). There are artists who were omitted simply because their record was too similar to a record I had already included (I could have tipped the Annie record over Little Boots - or ASDIG or the Telepathe record over Phantogram) There are whole genres missing - despite the education about say, R&B I've got from The Lex, and about dance... bobbins from the Erol forum - firstly because those are such single-oriented genres*, and secondly because I don't think I really *know* enough about them to make an informed choice. There are people who couldn't get it together in time to get a proper album out in this year (Aeroplane, Beyond The Wizards Sleeve, I'm looking at you.) This isn't supposed to be complete, or canonical. It's just some records I really loved.

*That's another list all together

The Noise Made By People

2009-11-28T09:54:00.000Z

So the world just doesn't want me to sleep this weekend. After being kept up until 1am by the pub across the road, I was woken up by a car alarm going off every 10 minutes from 6.30. I've documented my troubles with the pub before, on another blog. I don't mind there being a pub across the road 90% of the time. I don't mind when they have the occasional quiet lock-in on a weekend night. I don't even mind when they have bands playing at, you know, normal pubtime, say, 9 to about 11. What I MIND is when the two combine, and they have some god awful karaoke covers shite blasting until 1 in the morning. In a quiet residential neighbourhood.

This time I didn't muck around trying to reason with drunk people - I just called the police, told them that there was a lock-in at the pub across the road, that there was a lot of shouting (there was - huge amounts of bellowing over the PA) and that I was concerned, as the last time this happened, there was fight, with broken glass all over the neighbourhood. (OK, I didn't mention that last time, I was involved in the fight, but it's still a matter of police record that there was one.)

It's just so frustrating, though. They sent a police van round. I saw flashing lights and heard slamming doors. But when I poked my head out, 5 minutes later, the van was just sitting there outside the pub, and the noise had not stopped.

I can't exist without sleep. I wish I were one of those people that could get by on 4 hours a night and catch up at the weekend, but I'm just not. I learned long ago that there are some very basic things that will eliminate or at smooth over at least half of the symptoms of my bipolar disorder. Regular sleeping patterns, regular eating patterns and regular exercise patterns. Regular sleeping is the single most important one of those three. My mind looses structural integrity when I go without sleep - and that doesn't just mean I get a bit spacey and a bit sleepy, it means I cannot function on the most basic level.

What this means is, basically, I can't go out tonight. Which sucks. I've been looking forward to this gig for months. However, I bought a ticket for it before discovering that Lindstrom would not even be going on until 2am. I can understand dance clubs that operate on that timescale, but for fucks sake - why would have a *gig* start at that time of the morning? If I were in a better place, moodswing-wise, I might risk it. If I'd had enough sleep last night, I might risk it. With the combination of the two, I have to be an adult, and I have to make the judgement call not to go.

So yet again, I have to miss a rare live performance by one of my favourite artists. I fucking hate my brain sometimes.

I'm going to try *not* to spend the whole day writing today. I need to get out, need to interact with human beings and nature and things, instead of shiny silver machines. Of course, I say that now, but "not writing all day" means I'll end up spending the weekend working on the music I've been neglecting for the past month. I've got that odd Turkish Disco track I did with my sisX0r a month ago, to mix & finish. I've got songs, sounds, textures rippling around in my head that I need to get down on paper - or at least a sequencer.

It's hard to shake the tremendous sense of "Why bother? It's not like the majority of obsessive music fans even *listen* to female artists, let alone love them or rate them" that makes my heart sink every time I see another all-male best of list posted somewhere in the media or on the internet.

But this is the thing - I have always believed that massive crushes don't appear out of nowhere for NO APPARENT REASON. I think it was Tom Ewing (sorry if I'm misquoting you) who said, that when you have a massive crush on someone, it's usually more about wishing for yourself some aspect you feel they embody. I think the idea to take away from this crush is his oft-repeated mantra, the idea of making music for the sheer *fun* of it, because *you* want it to exist, you want to listen to it, rather than with the preconceived idea of audience or reception.

This is hard for me to get my head around, at this point in time - which is really odd considering how much of my life I spent, from about 1986 to 1999, as a bedroom producer. I spent my entire 20s playing in other people's bands, trying to please other people. It wasn't until I was nearly 30 that I got a band of mine own, playing mine own music - and as intoxicating as it was to play *my* music for other people, and to get adulation for it, in a way it ruined something.

I need to go back to making stuff in my bedroom, for me to enjoy. This is when I produce my best material, not when I'm writing to please or impress other people. Which is odd, as somehow, writing for the ears of others *feels* easier. Because you kind of know what they expect. But writing for yourself - the music that you make just because *you* want it to exist. That's what I like the best, and what I need to recapture.

If I could just stop writing smut for a weekend... That shit is addictive!

Things That Are Nice

2009-11-26T18:06:00.002Z

Yes, it's a slow day at work today. And without a forum to blab all my random thoughts on as they pass across my BRANE, well, they've got to go somewhere, haven't they?

NICE THINGS. LET US DISCUSS NICE THINGS.

Um, I won NaNoWriMo - does that count? I didn't even realise that they'd turned on the proper workcounter while I'd been offline, and logged on this afternoon to find my homepage covered in fireworks and a giant purple bar added above my name. 50,000 words in 30 days? Well, actually, considering I last updated on the 21st, and only really started writing on the 4th, that's more like 67,000 words in 17 days.

And I'm not even finished yet. But I thought I'd take a break after hitting the climax of the novel to get some perspective, and edit some continuity (and argh, grammar correction for all those run-on sentences) into the bulk of the novel before writing the ending. It's all good, though. I'm pretty sure I know where I'm going.

But I have rediscovered the joy of the discipline of writing every day. It's like priming a well, the more you write, the more story spins out of you.

So I'm currently writing the threatened quick little RDJ sexfic as threatened on twitter over the past few weeks. (If you are disturbed or offended by the idea of fanfic - LOOK AWAY, LOOK AWAY NOW.) Of course anything involving our favourite reclusive circuit-bending ginger knob-twiddler is never, ever going to be simple or quick, is it? Ha ha, I'm talking about Sandy P, of course. I'm writing a memory/narrative expansion of the affair she alludes to in in Chapter Nine of Pulse.

And it's also kind of creepy and weird - because so much of her career and her back catalogue and working method in the novel was based on Aphex Twin while I was writing her (I deliberately pitched her as a kind of cross between RDJ and Kate Bush for "Great British Eccentric" status.) manouvering the two of them into bed has really odd incestuous overtones. Fuck, they even share the same birthdate, though that was accidental. (I wanted her to be 3 years older than Erol, and gave her my best friend's birthday as I wanted her to be a Leo.) But hey, I mean, that whole "spooky twin" thing is often quite intoxicating, both in relationships and friendships.

(though ha, maybe I should ask mine own twin about that, eh?)

Anyway. Yeah, time to go home now. Hurrah.

"It's Just The Internet"

2009-11-26T15:37:00.004Z

I think I've clawed myself out of the black hole for now. Being bipolar, in some ways, always feels like walking down the dividing line of a major highway at night, in the fog. WHOOSH. The truck passed this time, you dodged it this time, but you never know when another is going to appear, from which direction, or how close. Sometimes you see the headlights as they come, sometimes you can't, and you don't know until they're on top of you.

Some people give a shit. It's enough.

Of course, there are just as many people that don't. And worse, there are the kind of vultures that seem to take some perverse pleasure in another's pain, whether gloating (assholes) or worse - taking that whole "cluck cluck" concern troll attitude - while clearly twisting and manipulating or deliberately misunderstanding everything that you say.

I mean, why on EARTH would anyone be upset about being thrown out of a community they've been a part of for a decade? How WEIRD. How UTTERLY BIZARRE.

These are the kind of people who say things like "it's just a messageboard, it's just the internet" if you get upset by the deliberately rude or horrible things that they say or do. As if messageboards and the internet are solipsisitic playgrounds populated solely by robots and scripts, instead of being comprised of individual people.

I mean, isn't this what Web 2.0 was supposed to be about? Social networking, connectivity, all that gubbins? The internet isn't this weird little world populated by freaks and people who are "not quite right" (I mean, if they had a real life, what on earth would they be doing on this weird interweb thing?) and hasn't been for a long, long time. The communities and relationships and dynamics that form on the web are JUST AS REAL as the ones that form "in the real world." Especially, as in Web 2.0, the "web" and "IRL" interact and overlap with increasing frequency.

I sit in front of a computer for 9 to 10 hours a day, for my job. That's not unusual, at all. I have more interactions with the people through my browser than I do with anyone - friends, family, etc. - except perhaps the colleague that sits opposite my desk. My family are scattered around the globe. Ditto my friends - and even the ones that still live in London often live at the end of an hour-long journey on public transport. Is it somehow more wrong or creepy or weird to reach out or connect to people using a messageboard or twitter or facebook/MySpace than it is to use, say, a telephone?

So when someone turns around and says something like - and I quote - "if participating on a msg board can impact your life to the extent that you feel suicidal, then i really think you need to stop participating."

Take that quote and replace "messageboard" with "place of employment" or "school" or "church" or "social club" or "family life" or any of the places that you find your community. Yes, many of these communities are voluntary, but it does not change the level of engagement or involvement that one feels towards them. The pure physical *means* of engagement does not determine how "real" these communities are to those that are involved.

Now replace "participating on" with the phrase I actually used - being EXCLUDED FROM. Excommunicated. Shunned. Especially when no reason is given, and no recourse is available. Have you ever been sacked from a job? Have you ever been expelled from a school, or excommunicated by your chosen religion, or even simply "friend-dumped" by a social circle? Being ejected from a community - it HURTS - no matter what the medium.

This idea that the internet is somehow "not a real place" and that one's actions on it - or other people's actions towards you - somehow do not have very real emotional impact - is TOTAL BULLSHIT. And is totally in line with this horrible, selfish, solipsistic view that somehow other people on the internet are not real, that they are just playthings for your amusement.

If that, seriously, is your attitude towards the internet, and the social media utilities on it, and how individuals use them, then I'm not sorry. It's YOU that has the serious problem, and it's probably YOU that should stop participating.

Insomnia

2009-11-26T05:54:00.000Z

The insomnia is one of those nagging awful things about depression. Basically, I love sleeping more than I love anything else, except maybe eating and writing. Sleep is a world where I go where I'm divorced from this body, divorced from the petty concerns of reality. I think I would even prefer nightmares to sleeplessness. But no. You don't get that choice.

I'm riddled with thoughtworms to the point where I don't know what thoughts are mine and what aren't. Over and over, the same images and symbols play in my head and there's no stopping them, no diverting them. You can change the subject momentarily, but stop concentrating, stop paying attention for even a moment, and they slip back in.

The sense of powerlessness is the worst. The sense of NOT. KNOWING. WHAT. YOU. DID. WRONG. It is, actually, psychological torture. First, the excommunication, the shunning, the being forcibly ejected from your community. But worse than that is the not knowing, you have been charged with a crime, and they will not tell you what it was. You are being punished and forced to pay for a crime when you don't even know what it was.

In the absence of information, paranoia runs wild - wait, is it really paranoia if 51 different people are, indeed, very much out to get you? No, I don't think it is.

It's not one post, or even one argument you're being punished for. It's your entire personality.

I'm already aware of the reasons that most people dislike me. It's not just that I'm a woman, I'm a woman who doesn't conform to gender expectations. I'm mentally ill and I insist on actually talking about it, instead of shutting up and going away and locking myself in some box where people don't ever have to be confronted with either 1) the darker and less pleasant aspects of the human brain or 2) their own fears and prejudices about people whose bodies or brains don't work the same way theirs do.

We don't have to go through the character assassination again. Whatever bad thing you think about me, I'm certainly more than capable of coming up with something much, much worse. Do you know what its like to be locked in a room with someone who will not stop saying the most vile, negative, awful things about you? YOU'RE SHIT. YOU'RE USELESS. YOU'RE HOPELESS DIFFERENT. EVERYBODY HATES YOU. EVERYBODY *FEARS* YOU. GIVE UP NOW. THERE IS NO HOPE, THERE IS NO LIGHT, YOU HAVE NO FRIENDS, YOU HAVE NO ALLIES. You'd either try to leave the room, desperately, or you'd become cranky, miserable, short-tempered.

Now imagine that the room you're locked in with this seething pit of negativity isn't a room, but your own head. This is depression.

There are only two ways out of the room. One is suicide. The other is pure escapism. Writing, drawing, making music, dreaming. If I stop writing, I will die. Simple as that.

Actually, I'm Not OK

2009-11-25T18:06:00.002Z

Actually, I'm not OK, thanks for asking. Not that anyone did. This has been the most shocking thing about the events of the past 48 hours. It wasn't even an anonymous jury of 51 people lining up to say "not only do we dislike you, but we hate you so much we actually want to remove your right to even have a voice." It was the fact of how few of the people I thought I was close to actually even *noticed*, let alone cared, when I disappeared without a trace.

Argh. No. Start over. See, this is why I haven't wanted to write, tweet, even turn on my phone for the past two days. The anger and depression and bitterness just spills out of me like an ugly thick, black bile.

I was actually proud of myself, how well I'd been dealing with the seasonal change this year. As the days lengthen and November spins into the dark, horrible, miserable month of December, I usually sink into a deep, dark depression. I thought I'd escaped this year. I'd given up drinking, been keeping creative, feeling fairly engaged, trying to stay social - and then this crashed down on me like a ton of bricks.

I'll be honest, the past two days have been rough. It's been a round of crying jags (to the point where my boss noticed how red-eyed and sunken-cheeked I look and told me I looked "mashed") and bursts of paranoia and even the old friend, the suicidal urges. I try to keep busy, but how the hell am I supposed to get through the day with a tiny thoughtworm whispering in the back of my head "just give up, everyone hates you, you're a wretched, useless old woman and you might as well spare the resources of this earth by throwing yourself under a train now."

Why? For what?

I've talked before, about being banned from ILX, the online community I've been a part of for about 9 years now. The last time, it was a mistake, an abuse of power by a new mod. This time, no. It's for real.

ILX operates a bizarre popularity contest called the "suggest ban". It was meant to act like a form of self governance against trolling and deliberately offensive posters. When it was first installed, it acted in that capacity, and within a short time, 3 notoriously vicious posters had been removed from the site. The moderators declared it a success, despite the misgivings of several posters about this form of mob justice.

Since then, things have deteriorated. Other people started getting banned - not people who were particularly vicious or nasty, but simply posters who had "large" personalities, or unusual or nonstandard political - or even aesthetic - views. It became obvious that it was no longer being used to control behaviour, but to punish OPINION or attempt to conform expression of ideas, rather than actions. The definition of "trolling" was clearly being widened to include "any and all repeated posting of ideas that contradict the hivemind." Instead of readdressing the issue of the suggest ban, it was simply modified, from a permanent ban to a 30-day reviewable ban.

Things turned ugly around the end of July/beginning of August. A long-term ILX poster - Mark Craig, aka Bimble - committed suicide, while under a Suggest Ban. I was in contact with him via email through the whole period leading up to, and after his banning, up to a few days before his death. I was well aware of the other issues he was facing in his life, both emotional and physical, during the lead-up to this devastating decision, and despite the allegations of a former ILX0r with an obvious axe to grind, AT THE TIME, I honestly believed that the Suggest Ban had little or nothing to do with his death. If anything, he seemed happier, more engaged with life, without the constant drag of negativity that others' reactions to his particularly ebullient posting style and sexuality.

Now I've actually been dealt a suggest ban myself, and am dealing with the emotional fallout of it, I'm not so sure.

Yes, I come with mine own set of emotional and mental health issues myself, that predated ILX and have nothing to do with it. I have long-term issues with abandonment and rejection that several different courses of psychotherapy and CBT did nothing to shift (in fact, in one case, may have made worse.)

Excommunication has long been used as a threat and a form of control for communities, religious and otherwise. Shunning, the emotional equivalent, is commonly known a form of Relationship Aggression, a facet of abusive relationships and bullying.

A suggest ban comes without warning, after 51 people have clicked that button. There's NOTHING in the system to say "you're getting close." There's no explanation of WHY you have been banned. Just a blank screen, saying "you have been barred."

If it's supposed to act as a punishment or deterrent, shouldn't it refer the person being punished to some reason *why* they are being punished? If it was a particular post or exchange that triggered the ban, wouldn't it be helpful to tell the person which one it was, rather than leave them hanging in the dark? The refusal to share this information seems perverse at best.

It was 1am when I logged on to find myself barred. I was having a rough night; I'd fallen asleep at 9pm, to be woken by indigestion, so I thought I'd futz about on the internet to make myself sleepy. BAM. You are banned. It was like being slapped in the face, or otherwise insulted or injured by 51 anonymous people in a row, in some kind of Kafkaesque nightmare. No explanation, no chance of reprieve. YOU ARE SHIT. YOU ARE A BAD PERSON. WE LOATHE YOU. WE JUDGE YOU UNWORTHY AND WE WANT YOU GONE. WE WISH TO TAKE AWAY YOUR RIGHT TO SPEAK, OR EVEN EXIST.

I suffer from bad enough bursts of paranoia and self loathing as part of my illness. At 1am, with no one to speak to, no explanation, no one to even ask, this spiralled into such deep, black depression that - it seems odd to be able to type this calmly now - had there been a gun in my house, or even an adequate supply of medication, I have no doubt that I would now be dead.

"You'd kill yourself over a messageboard?" In the cold light of day, yes, it seems absurd. But can you imagine what it feels like, cold, alone, at 1 in the morning, mental illness rattling round your head, feeling that you have just been forcibly removed from the only permanent community you have ever known? No, I don't think you can. I don't think that until you have actually been in a situation like that, that you can ever really comprehend the kind of agony this produces. Human beings are by nature a social animal, even an introvert loner like me. It HURTS to be excluded. It HURTS to be ejected, forcibly, publicly, humiliatingly, from a group you considered yourself part of.

Now obviously, I didn't kill myself, though it has been a rough couple of days. I withdrew into my shell. Turned my phone off, stopped reading my email, stopped responding to Twitter. I wanted to ERASE MYSELF. I wanted to commit internet suicide, wanted to delete all my accounts and disappear. I mean, that's what that shadowy Jury of 51 wanted, right? To ERASE me, to make me DISAPPEAR.

It took two days to even get a response as to what had happened. This was the mystifying thing. I had said or posted nothing even remotely controversial in weeks. I had actually been friendly and joyful, and had started/contributed to a couple of successful threads. If it had happened in the midst of a heated exchange of opinion (such as the "clusterfuck" about gender and race bias in media "best of" lists - again, note - expression of nonstandard opinions rather than actual personal nastiness) then I would have had some explanation. But no, it happened arbitrarily, randomly, in the midst of a calm, even *good* period.

I had emailed a mod who had always been friendly to me (a mod who shares mental health issues, and unfortunately, also shares rape survivor status, so might understand why certain situations and misogynist behaviours trigger a highly defensive reaction in me.) during the last set of troubles detailed in the previous blog linked above. The vast majority of the suggest bans, they said, came from ILM, and dated back to the period 4 or 5 months ago (around the time of Bimble's banning and suicide.)

Sadly, I remember the incident well. An innocent poster started a thread asking why more women didn't post to the Music portion of the board, though the genders were well balanced across the site. I answered, as one of the handful of prominent female posters on ILM, explained some of my not-so-great experiences on the site, and tried to draw some conclusions about why other women might be put off by it. I was totally unprepared for the reaction this inspired.

Rather than listen to my criticism, this inspired a 200-post pile-up that turned into a highly personal character assassination of myself. "We don't hate you because you're female - or even a feminist" the argument went. "We hate you because you're an uppity bitch with a nonconformist attitude and an assertive sexuality that we find scary and threatening."

I took an ILX break after this incident. Not just because of the vile, nasty, personal nature of the pile-on, but the fact that the moderators stood back and did absolutely nothing. And yet these are the people who are the very same ones who are dishing out the Suggest Bans.

No, I did not kill myself, but my blood is still on your hands. I'm still dealing with the emotional effects of this, and it isn't pretty. My psychic defences have been overwhelmed, the depression has overwhelmed me. It's like a cloud of filth blotting out the sun. I take pleasure in nothing. The things I'd been looking forward to over the past few months - my trip to Istanbul, the delayed release of my band's album, even a gig on Saturday I've already bought tickets for, but now do not feel strong enough to attend - I want to cancel them all. They bring me no pleasure. My capacity for pleasure, for joy, for companionship, just seems to have snapped off, destroyed by that anonymous Jury of 51.

When A Woman Is In Love With London...

2009-09-26T22:03:00.002+01:00

...she's in love with life itself.

I have been sleepwalking through the past few months. Long, boring days filled with nothing but repetition and unhappiness. And as I sat down in the classroom, and opened my notebook and looked expectantly towards the lecturer, I suddenly felt myself waking up. A part of my brain that had lain unused for too long. That dormant curiosity, that relentless intellectual longing for more information, more discussion, more *discourse*.

By lunchtime, as I sat in cafe in Holborn with a Buddhist painter, discussing spiral symbolism and labyrinths in the archetypal symbolism of C.G. Jung, I suddenly thought "Hang on, there *is* a place for me. There is a place for people *like* me - and it's called a University."

I signed up for a course at City Lit, for no other reason than I was interested in the subject. Mythical and Legendary London - combining two of my great loves, esoteric lore and the Psychogeography of my hometown. Within ten minutes, the lecturer had mentioned Nigel Kneale's Stone Tape, T.C. Lethbridge, Geoffrey of Monmouth and Alfred Watkins. I was sitting forward in my seat, eyes wide open, scribbling away taking notes, mind racing - not with mania or illness, but with the sheer joy of learning.

The petty feuding of the past few weeks simply evaporated, utterly unimportant. Surrounded by people who don't think it's "weird" to learn, to question, to dream, to wonder... I experienced something I haven't felt in I don't know how long. The sense of being in the *right* place. Sod everything that turned me off University the first few times round - the barriers to entry, the test-taking, the ivory tower mentality - actually, sod it. Right now an Ivory Tower seems like a pretty dream. Learning just for the simple joy of finding stuff out.

I'm hooked, and I'm going back - I've found a reason to keep living.

The Different Degrees Of Difficulty

2009-09-25T15:52:00.007+01:00

If there's one thing I really hate... no, wait. There's LOTS of things I really hate, who am I kidding? I'm a veritable geyser of annoyance needing a tiny provocation to set me off. OK, here's a thing that I really hate:

People who needlessly complicate simple things, in order to not only big up their own egos, but at the same time raise the barriers of entry to others.

I made a joke, on That Forum about the fact that I started to DJ after dating a DJ/promoter and seeing how piss easy it really was. Of course this ruffled a few feathers of "grrr, it's not easy." Yes it bloody well is. Insert disc. Cue it up. Press play. Repeat. This is *not* exactly rocket science, or brain surgery or even the level of complication of, say, soft boiling an egg.

Yes, that's a vast oversimplification. The *art* of DJing is slightly more complicated than the basic level of skillset of putting on a record. You need at the very least, a fairly deep level of knowledge about (and just plain love of & curiosity about) music, a passing understanding of crowd dynamics, a sense of timing and mood - and - depending on the type of music you play - technical skills to transition smoothly between songs.

But saying such a thing really gets some people's knickers in a twist. I know the type. I met them for the first time, in late adolescence, when I was first learning to play guitar. "You're not a Proper Guitarist unless you can solo" was the type of thing they would say. Meaning shredding, show-off mastubatory Yngwie Malmsteen solos of the type that were fashionable in the late 80s. Now, I came from the Johnny Marr school of guitar playing - the only acceptable type of solo was a riff simple and direct enough that you could sing it.

Aged 16, this gave me pause. But I listened to my Jesus and Mary Chain and my Sonic Youth records and my hardcore punk records and decided that passion was more important than technique, that having something to say ultimately trumped the technical proficiency with which one said it.

By age 21, I had proved my point against the guitar fascists. I was playing regularly in the local indie nightclubs, and had a song on rotation at the local college radio station - all without soloing. (although, as @anna_anna has pointed out, I was eventually featured playing a guitar solo on UK Breakfast TV a couple of years ago.) They could solo, sure, but they did so in their bedrooms and the showrooms of guitar shops.

Which is kind of how I feel about idiots who tell me I'm not a Real DJ coz I don't beatmatch. Um, I'm a "real" DJ because I'm in the booth, I'm making music come through the PA and people on the floor are dancing/enjoying the music I'm playing. Beatmatch all you like in your bedroom, it doesn't make you are "real DJ". Oh yeah, and I play MP3s. What of it? I find it hilarious the way CDJs sneer at MP3 DJs the way vinyl DJs once sneered at CD. Um, what matters is the music that comes out, not how you get that music to the speakers. Of course, what they *really* despise is the declining level of technical skill required to step into the booth and play. Anyone - girls! - even Peaches bloody Geldorf, FFS!!! - can DJ with MP3s! Where's the Cultural Capital in that?

Thing is, as far as I'm concerned, lowering the Barrier To Entry of anything, although it may in the short run produce a glut of not-very-good people on a learning curve, in the long run, it will raise the quality of an art, because with a wider variety of people able to do something, a wider diversity of people attempting it, the chances are increased that one of them will do something of genuine interest or novelty or talent or whatever it is you appreciate in art.

DJ-ing is *easy* now, thanks to technology - and I consider that a *good* thing.

But of course that's hideously offensive to anyone who thinks that something easy means something not worth doing. "You might as well say playing a guitar or pushing keys on a piano or writing a novel is easy!" they sneer. "And if you call anyone with an MP3 player a DJ, you might as well call anyone with a blog a writer or anyone with a camcorder a filmmaker!"

Why not? The test is, really, if you can do it in an engaging enough fashion to get others to listen/read/watch. Are you gonna say a blogger that gets 10,000 hits a day is *not* a proper writer?

The other question is about difficulty, and not just levels of difficulty, but types of difficulty. There are different types of *hardness* - some things are totally skill-based. These are learned skills that take rote repetition and practice to master them. And sorry, but for all the fuss made about beatmatching, it is a rote skill that an animal could learn - I'm waiting for someone to train a woodpecker to tap a target when beats are at the same speed. Would you pay money to watch that? Actually, I bloody well would, that would be well cool, a beat-matching bird.

There's another level of difficulty that involves accumulating knowledge. It's about assembling and organising large amounts of data in a meaningful way. This is where you start to reach human levels of intelligence - a skill that schoolchildren struggle with as they learn to assemble names and dates into the patterns of History. This is what DJs call tune selection - that fingertip knowledge of genre and artist and song and how they all put together. A musician with their repetoire of common material that they have learned by heart. A mathematician with a headful of already proved theorems. (And there's yet another level of difficulty on top of that, which involves using that knowledge and that skill to turn pattern recognition into pattern prediction.)

And then there's that spark of something utterly ineffable that's usually called "talent". Sometimes it's physical (a congenital lengthening of bone that makes someone able to run faster) or genetic (there's a kind of "maths gene" that runs in my family like perfect pitch runs in another) or even just completely random (a person just born with a naturally "beautiful tone" to their voice - the fact that from a young age, I could be put in front of any instrument, and make a tune, while my brother, after a year of lessons, was found to be utterly tone deaf.) A "talent" something that you can - or rather must - *hone* if you have it, but no amount of coaching will create it where none exists.

In any activity, especially artistic ones, it's a combination of all 3 that comes into play. And a combination of all three that makes them difficult or easy.

TO ME (like I have to put this qualification on a blog? Hello, it says in the disclaimer at the bottom this is MY OPINION and nothing more)...

DJing is easy. It's "easier" than playing guitar, certainly, as I've done both. So many less movements to make, so much less to go wrong. You make a decision every 3 minutes and 20 seconds at the most, not 4 times a second (as you do if you're playing even rhythm guitar at 120bpm). And yet, playing a piano is "harder" than both. Why? Because the way that sharps and flats are arranged in separated black notes makes me have to stay constantly aware of what key I'm playing in - when, with fretted instruments, the box structure of playing and the existence of barre chords enables me to play well in an instinctual, purely physical way no matter what key I'm playing in.

Writing a novel? I've found that way easier than ANY of the activities above. But I am aware that this is probably due to the quality of my education, and how much time and effort was spent drilling the basics of grammar and plot structure and character development into my head (endless bloody book reports I hated so much in 5th grade) - though clearly spelling has alwaies ecsaped me. (Not to mention my run-on sentences!)

DJ-ing *IS* easy. (Much easier than I was ever lead to believe by over-protective lads who wanted to keep it for themselves.) That's not to diss DJing (or guitar playing or piano playing or novel-writing!) It's rewarding and fun and enjoyable, or people wouldn't want to do it so much. But the only reason I can think to SO overcomplicate something so easy and so rewarding is to exclude and place barriers in the way of others, in order to preserve some kind of artificially inflated ego-enhancement derided from excluding others. And that I can't stomach.

10 Artists That Got You To The Music You Like Now

2009-09-22T17:33:00.003+01:00

OK, it's a crap meme I got off the Erol forum (yes, it's SO freaking boring at work today I'm lurking, simply through a lack of anything else to do) but rather than post a list there, I thought I would post it with a bit of exposition here.

This isn't even a list of my Top 10 Favourite Bands (that changes daily) but more the artists who had the most far-ranging and long-lasting effect on my musical taste.

1. Duran Duran
Duran Duran made me the person I am today. They were the first band I was ever *obsessed* with, the first band whose entire universe I wanted to enter, whose every move I wanted to know. And they truly were the first time I realised the effect of "influence". Investigating the artists that they were interested in lead me on an educational journey. Through them, I discovered Andy Warhol, David Bowie, Roxy Music, Brian Eno, huge swathes of 80s synthpop. It was the first time that I realised music could be more than just a song on the radio, but a whole *lifestyle*.

2. Bauhaus
I could blame art school, I could mutter something about "you can take the girl out of goth but you can't take the goth out of the girl" but the truth is, although I did go through a massive goth phase (with its accompanying love of black clad, big-haired bands like Sioxsie and the Sisters of Mercy) - it was actually Bauhaus's penchant for art-damaged glam that captured my imagination. Oh, and left me with a lasting love for disco-inspired octave-hopping bass and hi-hat work. I followed them all the way through Tones On Tail to Love & Rockets (through whom I would discover the joys of wibbly wubbly 60s psychedelia during their ''Express'' incarnation.)

3. New Order
Oh come on, do I really have to explain this one? They were like a religion to me. (Especially during the lost years of dodgy pharmeceuticals when I quite literally believed that Bernard Sumner controlled my thoughts. On checking into rehab for the second time, I carried a picture of him in my wallet, that I would tell the nurses was "my higher power".) They were a window into the ways that rock music and dance music could coexist without either genre losing what made it special. Oh, and introduced me to all of Madchester, but that's another story.

4. The Jesus and Mary Chain
"Makes you proud to be Scottish, doesn't it?" A prepubescent, sheltered Catholic Schoolgirl saw Just Like Honey video and although she didn't know what lurked inside those leather trousers, she knew she wanted it. The first time I'd ever heard feedback, and I was instantly hooked. *THAT* Ronettes drumbeat on "Just Like Honey" introduced me to the entire world of 60s girl groups, which would become an obsession. Oh, and through their namedropping and their covers, I discovered Can, Syd Barrett, the Velvet Underground, and the whole world suddenly made sense.

5. Spacemen 3
Could really be combined with the above, though I fell in love with them about 5 years later, they were a continuation of the same exploration. Directly introduced me to Delia Derbyshire, Suicide, Nuggets, the entire genre of Spacerock (Hawkwind, so much to answer for), the rest of the genre of Krautrock that the JAMC hadn't covered (especially the motorik NEU! side, early Kraftwerk, that sort of thing) and the synthesis of 60s bubblegum and space gospel pioneered (and then abandonned) on the first Spiritualized album would provide the blueprint for my musical taste for the rest of the 90s.

6. Throwing Muses
OK, I lied, this is more a "favourite band" than "influenced my musical taste" - unless of course, I bring in the whole 4AD connection because this was, I think, the first album I bought on that label. It was only after 1986, that I discovered the lush (argh) ethereal (double argh) sonic textures (shoot me now) of Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance and His Name Is Alive and Pale Saints and Lush and even The Pixies - and if you think of it that way, they probably affected my actual life more than any other band on this list. There's just something so impelling about the twisted melodies and off-kilter harmonies of Hersch and Donnelly that sends shivers down my spine.

7. Andrew Weatherall
This is an odd one, because I didn't discover the man's own work (specifically Sabres of Paradise) until only a few years ago, but his production and remix work bestrode my misspent clubbing youth like a colossus. My obsession with Manchester (started by New Order) caught fire after hearing his remixes of Happy Monday's Hallelujah. Primal Scream's Screamadelica was the soundtrack to more of my life than I'd like to admit, really - and opened the door to understanding the invasion of dance music that a mid-90s boyfriend bombarded me with on mixtapes.

8. Stereolab
The first time I played Peng! for a then-bandmate, she glared at me and grumbled "I thought I told you to stop playing me your demos." One of the accidentally highest compliments I've ever received in my life. Of course, in them, everything that had been swhirling around in my head for the previous decade was brought into sharp focus - droning Velvets guitars, analogue synth wub, motorik rhythms, dancable basslines and the sweetest of girlgroup harmonies.

9. My Bloody Valentine
My name is Kate, and I am a shoegazer. I admit that I am powerless in the presence of massive chains of effects pedals, belching feedback, woozy boy-girl harmonies, dirty bowl-cutted hair dangling in pale faces, stripey shirts, floppy brown corduroy trousers and worn-out chelsea boots. I have succombed to the temptations of Ride, Chapterhouse, Slowdive, Medicine, Curve, early Boo Radleys, early Verve, the Dandy Warhols, and I accept Kevin Shields as my lord and personal savior, for ever and ever, amen.

10. Xenomania
Well, I mean, come on. Indie rock in the 00s (with a few straggling exceptions) was straight-up nasty. The Strokertine Stripes? Fuck right off. The bubblegum super-producers managed to keep the string of perfectly poptastic hits going in a run that rivalled Kasenatz-Katz, PWL and Micky Most for chart and earworm domination. Yeah, so they're a bit rub now, and their formula has failed, as evidenced mostly clearly by the gruesome ruin of the Sugababes, but when they were good, they were untouchable.

Crafty Beats 5

2009-09-21T10:06:00.006+01:00

Well, I thought my DJing days were over, at the end of my residency at Crafternoons. But, according to my download stats, it seemed that even *more* people d/l the sets and listen to them at home than actually turned up to the gigs themselves! Several people started asking when I was doing another, so I decided to give bedroom DJ-ing a try.

For the most part, I found it was actually much *harder* than DJ-ing "live" in a club. Mainly because when you're in a club, you have what you've chucked in a CD wallet or ripped to your hard drive, and that's it. At home, with your entire record library, you can take 20 minutes to decide your next song as you pour through your collection. Oh, and that's the other thing - no time pressure. Live, there's no undo. You have 3 minutes and 20 seconds to find your next song, and then you're stuck with it. There's no CTRL-Z if it doesn't work, like there is with bedroom DJing.

But the upsides are 1) I don't have to worry about what the other DJs are playing/have played. So you'll see a heavy slant towards sugary girlpop in this set, as that's what mostly got played at these events, but I had to avoid playing certain artists because I *knew* that the other ladies would play them. Now I don't have to. 2) Edits - I'd never have attempted any clever sampling or editing in a live set. In a bedroom set, I can mix and match and throw things around and drop Electrik Red samples into Japanese NOIZE bands to my heart's content.

Anyway, enjoy.

Crafty Beats 5

Laurie Spiegel - Patchwork (edit)
Sugababes - Freak Like Me
Britney Spears - Freakshow
The Knife - Silent Shout
Roisin Murphy - Overpowered
Yazoo - Don't Go
Little Boots - Stuck On Repeat
Annie - Greatest Hit
Shimura Curves - Thoughtworm
Ruby - Tiny Meat
Harem - Zennube
Echo & The Bunnymen - The Cutter
Electrik Red - Bed Rest
Burhan Ocal & The Trakya All Stars - Karabiber
Goldfrapp - Little Bird
Siouxsie & The Banshees - Kiss Them For Me
The Future Sound of London - Elysian Feels
The Telescopes - High On Fire
Revolving Paint Dream - (Burn This House) Down To The Ground
Asobi Seksu - Goodbye
Ebony Bones! - The Muzik
Wildbirds & Peacedrums - My Heart (Weapon Family remix)
Boris - Buzz in (Optimo Remix (edit)
Mutyumu - (the title is in Japanese and didn't come through on the formatting)

Hello Darkness My Old Friend

2009-09-20T13:59:00.001+01:00

I hate having to be careful. I hate having to be diligent and mindful, but I've left the back door open, and depression snuck back in. It's not fair, most people don't seem to have to live their lives like this, in constant fear of the shadow, like the evil eye or something.

I could be purely biological about it, say that I've gone 4 days without exercising properly, and been eating badly, hyping myself up on sugar again. I could say that it's falling back into bad habits. I found myself at home on Saturday evening (I mean, honestly, where else am I going to be?) - I was actually having fun, playing bedroom DJ, putting together another Crafty Beats comp because several of my friends have been asking for one.

And then something in the back of my brain remembered - oh, it's Erol's 6mix tonight. I wrestled with my internet connection to even get it to load, and at the sound of his voice - so familiar, nervous, slightly stuttering, all that information in his brain coming out in fits and starts. It's like he starts a sentence, realises he's on the air and freezes up, then a moment later, the rest of his words tumble out in a great rush to finish the thought before the next song comes on. It's strangely endearing.

And I *ache*, remembering the last time, a gang of us listening together on the internet, the glow of computer screens like a digital age fireside, though we're thousands of miles apart. I want Alexa and Ida to be there, but Alexa is on the way to university and Ida is working late. In a fit of nostalgia, I log onto the board - big mistake. I can't just slip back into something I've left so flagrantly. No matter what thread I comment on, it's like, no one can just talk about the topic with me, they have to turn it around and make it all about me and how shit I am, and what the fuck I'm doing on the board again (usually in the most nasty, pointed, vicious internet bully way) and it's like I'm caught in the glare of a dozen headlamps.

I'm looking at his twitter, glancing through the fuzzy iPhone pics he's posted. There's a dark, grainy, blurry photo of what appears to be him with my internet crush. Oh fuck, I'm doubly glad I didn't go to the gig now. Like it wouldn't have been painful enough - by myself (because none of my friends like that kind of music), in an unfamiliar bar in a part of town I dislike - knowing no one in the venue except the two people on the stage - and then my tarnished idol turns up? My idea of hell. I shudder at the simultaneous lost opportunity and the narrow escape and turn back to the forum.

Then he does a shout-out to all the forum members, mentioning several of us by name - and I realise he's reading them off twitter. Of course my name isn't on the list, though a quick trending search of twitter reveals my stupid, nostalgic tweet is one of the first that comes up. A stab of paranoia shoots through my brain like a bolt of blue lightening. He's blocked me. Proof, finally, in the absence of other information, that he does, truly, dislike me. He only ever spoke to me when I was being negative. I writhe with jealousy over everyone else on the forum he's *nice* to. What the fuck is it about me, that I'm so hateful and repulsive that even someone who is *known* for being so gentle and gentlemanly - even he dislikes me.

I *am* a bad person. I am a negative and bitter and twisted and generally angry and misshapen person that clearly deserves all of the negativity and bile that is thrown at me on the internet.

NO! Why do I give these people such power over me? Why do I *let* them bother me? Is it like I have some kind of deathwish, that I go somewhere I know I don't belong, in order to justify mine own self loathing?

I am who I am. There will always be people who loathe you because of difference, perceived or real. There will always be those who sneer at you and try to cut you down, saying "You think you're better than us, don't you?" No, I think I'm *different* and I am *allowed* to be different. I am no better or worse, I simply am.

I switched off the internet and went back to my mix, playing with the transitions, mixing together girly electropop and arabic percussion, rushing back and forth between 80s goth and 00s R&B on the basis of textures and feelings, plotting a mixtape like a journey, a slow dance in the middle, a mad psychedelic sprawl to toss yourself about to, a quiet interlude to go to the bar or have a cigarette or just sit back and catch your breath. Bedroom DJing offers you new opportunities to muck about with new techniques, capturing and sampling bits of songs to juxtapose, backflashes to songs that have gone before, flashforward teases of what's coming up next. No, the edits aren't always perfect, and I cannot be bothered with beatmatching, but it's not the grammar, it's the feeling. I don't care who listens to it - these sets are to make *me* happy. I have enough respect for my "audience" (read: the dozen or so friends that download my mixes every month) to trust them to be able to follow the journey if they so choose.

Shyness Is Nice

2009-09-19T10:24:00.001+01:00

Life without alcohol is a funny thing, especially when boozing is so utterly engrained into British culture. It's been a while since I last went to Pure Groove - and got there last night to discover that the place has essentially been turned into a bar that just happens to sell records. In the internet economy, I guess it's the mail order side of the business that actually pays the bills, and the shop has become a kind of cool hangout, a place to socialise and see bands.

Going to clubs and bar gigs has been the biggest difficulty, in terms of giving up drinking, it's just so built into the fabric of these events to the point where I skip them if I think it's going to be a temptation. Clubs really are, at the bottom of it, just exercises in getting people into a building to buy and consume alcohol.

But I'm sick of how much of my life I can't remember. It was a surprise yesterday, digging through the Sonic Cathedral website (I was trying to find the playlist for the video loop they used to play in the back of gigs, for CharlieNo.4's #shoegazefriday) and stumbling into the flyer section. I was a regular, back in the day, so I started ticking off the ones I'd been at (pretty much all of them for a 2-year period) and started to have trouble actually remembering *any* of them. Christ - there was the kicker. There was a flyer advertising Erol Alkan DJing at Sonic Cathedral. True, I would not have shown the interest in this, then, as I would now - but it still scares me that I have *utterly* no memory of the fact that it even happened, let alone the messy wine-bottle dregs of after hours at the Legion, deflating balloons and the smell of sweaty leather jackets on the dancefloor. All the nights smear into one.

But the thing is, the alcohol made me fearless - and though I cannot remember those conversations with my teenage idols - Mark Gardener and Sonic Boom - I know that they happened, and marvel at my courage in walking up and talking to a complete stranger, albeit one wearing a face achingly familiar from my teenage dreams.

I walk into Pure Groove, and I'm timid, even scared. I feel totally out of place - old, unhip, out of fashion. I may recognise the album covers on the walls and the songs played over the sound system, but it's painfully obvious I don't belong here. I'm 15 years older and 3 stone heavier than anyone else in the shop. Immediately, I stride into a decently lit corner and propel myself into a leather armchair. In the olden days, I'd drink myself into sociability, or proceed to draw everyone in the place, but I've forgotten my sketchbook, so I pull out a book and read.

Introversion settles over me like a blanket. I'm not even watching Derren Brown, but I'm glued to my seat. A gang of boys assemble on the sofa beside me, all friendly horseplay, but I'm too shy to do anything but smile without making eye contact. Christ, it turns out they're the band. I ache to try out my French on them, tell them how much I like their record, ask if they're playing my favourite song, but I can't quite seem to break through my shell.

A hip-looking couple wander in and settle at the table next to me - the boy looks incredibly like Rory Phillips. Oh wait, it is Roray. I have the urge to go over and introduce me, say "Yeah, I'm that mad person you've bantered with on the internets" or even just compliment him on the last remix that makes me bounce in my seat as I work. But the badness of the Erol forum hangs over me like a black cloud, and I can't work up the courage to do it. I am hopelessly tainted with creepiness and madness and more than a hint of stalkerdom.

Finally, the band goes on, and I am relieved of my thoughts. The drummer winks at me as he goes by "are you ready to rock'n'roll?" I grin at him and give him the thumbs up, wishing I'd spoken to them, they're pumped up for the show and super friendly. Their bassist makes funny faces at me from the stage, trying to make me laugh. I smile back, but I can't quite meet his eyes.

Joakim appears, unfolding himself from his laptop. He's so impossibly tall and thin that he makes his bandmates look like toys beside him. They start with Ad Me, rhythmic thumps on the analogue synth (I think it's an MS series Korg, but can't see properly) and bass, and then swing into their easy, playful prog-disco stomp.

The spell is broken, I am released, I move, I give myself to the music, my sense of being displaced has evaporated for the moment, banished by the insistent bouncy joy of the music. Come on in and party, it tells me. Everyone is welcome here. There's laptop squiggles of texture, chewy progtastic synths and the occasional yelp of indie-boy singing, all underpinned by this swaggering, hip-swinging, octave-hopping disco beat.

Mentally, my inner music geek is re-tagging my MP3 collection, moving them from "scando-balearic" to "microprog" - but externally, I'm twitching, dancing in my chair, squeaking the rotating seat back and forth in time with the filter sweeps of the synth, my toes tracing elaborate figure eights to the hi-hat work. Is it Prog you can dance to? Or is it Cosmic Disco with Prog affectations? Who cares, I love it, this bastard hybrid of things that shouldn't fit together, but *do*. It's the kind of thing I fell in love with Capitol K for - "electronica, but not as we know it - dance music as made by long-haired gods from Planet Prog" - except these aren't long haired god-men, they dress like sweetly awkward geekboys who love to rock out. Or is that projection?

Oh, but what a beautiful, odd, challenging yet strangely familiar sprawl of magpie musical finds to project onto.

One last long, epic, synthtastic cosmic jam, all synth arpeggios and building guitar textures (is this a live rework of Nebula Laughter? Hard to tell) and it's all over. I shout and clap my hands, but I'm back in my awful, hated, lumpish body again. I'm the fly in the ointment, the fat, ugly middle aged woman in the painfully hip and unbearably cool record shop, and I need to leave before I'm outed.

I stop at the bar on the way out - resisting every urge to order a double vodka and coke, knock it back, and engage the sweaty, euphoric boysintheband standing next to me with chat about how much fun their show was - and ask to buy the record. He tells me it's really good, and I keep my mouth shut and nod, smothering that one-bettering urge to tell him "I know, I'm a journo, I've had the promo for months on MP3" - because I know what I look like. My magazine has folded, my DJ residency has been cancelled. I'm just a sad old woman who can't quite find her place.

Death Of The Hoodie

2009-09-13T10:10:00.003+01:00

I am paying for my massive "spring clean" yesterday with a massive sinus headache today, caused by all that bloody stirred up dust. Dust is always the enemy in an old London house - I look at the bookshelf I bought only last week, and already it has a thin film.

I was a lazy slob last night. I couldn't face going to NOTLS on so many levels (Hoxton, clubbing, drinking, noise, people, crowds, Northern Star and their reactionary "revolution" in sound.) so I stayed at home and watched the ridiculous John Boorman version of Excalibur, the Dark Ages as a shimmering 80s sci fi disco dream. I told myself I'd work on the SC album art - I didn't. I just sewed sequins onto a new cardigan.

Why? Oh, of course there's a story behind it. I rose early yesterday and walked down to the Big Sainsburys to do my monthly stockup. I hadn't bothered to change, just threw on my long black linen skirt and a black hoodie over what I'd slept in (leggings and a Tshirt.) As I caught sight of myself in the shiny glass windows, I suddenly thought I looked ridiculous. Caught between cultures, caught between ages.

A hoodie is such an ugly, shapeless garment. The uniform of disaffected youth, a kind of cloak of anonymity. I bought it almost as a joke 2 years ago, when I was asked by a friend to start writing for Terrorizer Magazine. It was such a ridiculous thing - the idea of me, a woman in my late 30, writing for a metal magazine, that stalwart genre of disaffected boys. So I took on the uniform, and turned in a series of somewhat disappointing articles about Hawkwind, Silver Apples, Diamanda Galas. (Not metal, I know, but I was supposed to be their Special Dronerock Correspondent.)

I stopped when some other friends started taking it all too seriously - and realised that metal wasn't a joke, it had a meaning and culture all its own that meant a great deal to the people that loved it. How would I feel if some ironic club kid started writing about music that I genuinely loved and identified with? I decided it was wrong - this double pose, both me as a music journalist and me as a metal fan, when I am neither - and quit.

The garment, however, stayed with me, this ugly, black, shapeless, incongruous thing. Standing in Sainsburys early on a Saturday morning, next to another middle aged woman in pink pyjamas and a grey hoodie, I decided it had to go.

Maybe it was that Affluenza book - which, most of the time, I want to throw across the room and shout "people do NOT actually think like this, you exaggerate!" - talking about beauty as an expression of one's own personality (rather than the iron maiden ideal of the Beauty Myth.) Maybe it was the William Morris philosophy I was raised with - "have nothing in your house that you do not believe to be beautiful or know to be useful" - this horrible garment was neither beautiful nor an adequate expression of who I, now, am. Perhaps it was disillusionment with the Erol forum, and realising that it, and the world of clubbing is set up for 18 year old boys, not for 30-something women. I can never be a 18 year old boy, even if I wear their clothes. (Nor would I, in fact, ever *want* to be, despite this youth-worshiping culture that Erol inhabits.)

I bought a cardigan. A nice, soft, loosely structured proper Guardian Reader Cardigan. Charcoal black with flecks of grey and copper. A witchy cardigan. A folky backwoods sensible cardigan. (Well, perhaps too sensible really, which is why I sewed little copper sequins into the fabric, a glimmer of my old glittery self peeking through.)

I left the hoodie at Sainsburys. I can never quite bring myself to throw perfectly good clothes away, even if they're too full of holes for even a charity shop. My mother laughed aloud when I told her - she reckoned I should have left it on a hanger and hung it back up, imagining the amusement of chaos should someone try to buy it. But no, I folded it neatly and left it on a bench by the door. A part of my personality I no longer need, wrapped discarded like a piece of old clothing.

"Put off or put on, youth hurts, and then it's gone."

Rooms With Many Doors

2009-09-10T14:18:00.004+01:00

So it looks like the depression has finally cleared - for another day, another week, another month, I try not to think how long. It's like weather, when it's sunny, you cannot even conceive of the concept of rain, just like when it's raining you cannot believe it will ever be sunny again.

I've been overdosing on music, which is always the clearest way for me to take me out of myself, "release me from the tyranny of conscious thought" and all that. Except, well, no, because the process of listening to music is a steady stream of mental and emotional imagery - both swooning subjective identification and sharp objective analysis.

I've been on a spree of listening to older stuff - both digging out CDs I bought ages ago and revisited them, and downloading new things. (one-click iTunes account + superfast connection = RUIN)

I wandered through the ruined elegance of the Fever Ray album, a weird, magical creature that seems to be slightly different every time I listen to it. "A room with many doors," I described it as, on Twitter. The Lex shot back "i still don't feel that i've found all the doors yet and others, i've felt like i haven't been able to open - but their presence makes it special" - but I insisted that part of the appeal of this album was those closed doors, that refusal to open up and reveal their mysteries immediately, or maybe even ever.

I listened to School of Seven Bells and Telepathe, and wondered to myself, why the hell doesn't music this magical come from mine own country?

Oh, but it does. I dragged out the Goldfrapp back catalogue - or at least I dragged out Seventh Tree, that last, weird, slightly "folk" album which I always thought I didn't like because I'd been so enamoured of the robo-glam disco stomp of the previous two albums. And this time I got it - it's a headphones album, not a dancefloor album. I thought the textures were gone amidst all that acoustic guitar wibbling that passes for "folk" to most ears - but no, they were there, submerged, subtle, a much more complex album than I'd given it credit for being.

From there, it was a hop and a skip to Roisin Murphy's Overpowered. Someone on ILX linked the video, which I'd never seen.

The boys of ILX complained that the video was bad, but the moment I saw it, I identified. That feeling of coming offstage on a high, in your glittering stage clothes - and then the comedown. Lord knows I've taken enough busses home from gigs, go home late at night, alone, make a cup of tea, put the laundry on, and climb into bed alone - still wrapped in your shimmering shiny personna that you can't ever really seem to take off.

I don't know; I like Murphy, I love that song, (despite nicking the synth line off Yazoo) but although they are often mentioned in the same breath, she's not quite in the same league to me as Goldfrapp. There's something so *ordinary* about Murphy that the video really picks up on - but I suppose that's the point. This ordinary Norf London Irish girl wrapped up in these weird clothes, this high fashion pose. Goldfrapp is theatrical as hell, poses are put on and discarded - but still, somehow, doors remain closed.

This is the complaint, again and again, about the current crop of "quirky" indie girls. Someone on ILX (I forget who, or even in refernce to what, I'm sorry) talked about how women like Florence and the Machine (or worse, the dreaded La Roux) though in massive debt to the sainted Kate Bush still manage to come off like giggling drama students who give a little bow at the end and reveal themselves to be totally unthreatening nice little girls under the facepaint and glitter. The overall effect is just a bit too Elfine Starkadder

But that's it, isn't it? They're *girls*. They're too YOUNG to have closed doors, to have secrets, to have mystery and GLAMOUR (original meaning of magic, sorcery and spells, concealment and disguise).

And that's when I realised what I was doing in this musical quest. I was searching for a place for mine *own* music, for what I consider its references, its contemporaries, its influences - and the pidgeonhole where I suspect I will end up filed. And more than this, I was searching for mine own place in society.

Thoughtworms: From Belief To Delusion

2009-09-09T14:10:00.005+01:00

Back at work today. The depression got so bad yesterday I had to take the day off. I knew, as I sat on the side of the bed, staring down at my feet, unable to even put my slippers on, that I could not face work. Fired off an email to my boss, as I couldn't even face the phone and lay staring at the ceiling for a while.

This depression wasn't lifting. I was going to have to do something. A friend posted a link to a site which listed things to do in the event of depression. It's funny how, even though you *know* that these things work, when you're that depressed, you don't even think to do them.

5. Eat healthy food. Sugar is the devil - I love it, I love its heightening and drugging effects on me and my mood, but the crashes, the up and down cycle, it's poison for a bipolar. No chocolate, no sodapop, no profilterols.

2. and 3. Exercise, and get some sunlight. It took me a couple of hours to force myself, but I climbed out of bed and up to the park, sat in full sunlight for nearly an hour. Everything screamed RED at me. Japanese maples. Berries on trees. A pack of Irish Setters that accosted me, drawn by the smell of menstral blood, and forced me to throw a ball for them.

11. avoid negative people who make you feel bad or irritated.

Oh god, this is the hardest. I'd been asking for days to be removed or blocked from the Erol forum. Blank refusal, and then a terse note saying that it wasn't technically possible. I didn't handle this well, I confess. I was an utter brat. A childish fantasy of some dinner party, where you and the host get into an argument - and the other guests stand around and cluck their tongues or hiss at you like outraged monkeys. So what do I fantasise of doing? Sneak back into the house while everyone is asleep and leave a perfect pile of human faeces fresh on the dinner table for their breakfast.

Well, not really. I took all of my bile and read every single one of those insults again and thought "you want condescension, you want 'issues' - OK, you can have it" and wrote a horrible mean nasty, condescending satire of a parody of a post and left it, a deliberate troll in a blatant attempt to commit suicide by mod.

Did it work, was I banned? Of course not. I can seemingly only ever troll by accident. I'm getting to the point where I think I could post links to nazi sites advocating the castration of Turkish Cypriot males and not get banned. But it was a kind of Rubicon, a burning of bridges to keep *myself* from going back.

That place is not for me. There's only so long you can try and squish yourself as a round peg into a square hole. The world has changed. It's not 2002 any more. You're nearly 40, you're well beyond the world of clubbing, leave it to 18 year olds and move on. You're only upsetting yourself, staying somewhere you stick out like such a sore thumb. But I found the quote in a Carol Shields novel, that perfectly describes the situation: "I know nobody likes me. People can't stand me, and that's a fact. So I make sure they really and truly can't stand me."

It's not good to wind myself into such a frenzy. It's a terrifying thing to admit, but the thoughtworms have managed to get inside the things I believe most fervently. I used to recognise it in my brother, when he was at his worst, going really mad, that his bipolar disorder would latch onto a certain kind of politics that would infect his brain like a virus. Sure, he was always big-C Conservative, and these views were deeply held and carefully rationed beliefs - but there was a line it would cross, that it would become not a philosophy, but a symptom of his madness. An obsession, a delusion that held him in a vice-like grip.

There's a line, somewhere, that I cross, and I don't know where, that goes from mine own deeply held beliefs on Feminism and the role of Misogyny, in culture and especially in music - and crosses over, clicks into thoughtworm mode. Where it goes round and round, and repeats itself on this little track, eating away at my brain like soul cancer, destroying my belief in myself and my faith in other people. It stops being a thought, and starts being an obsession.

I'm not saying that my belief in Feminism is a delusion - FAR FROM IT. But the depression, the thoughtworms have learned to take advantage of these beliefs and turn them into a stick to beat myself with, and a rant to exclude myself from the world and distance myself from other people.

In this instance, I have to preserve my sanity first, and idealism second.

Anyway. Number 6. Divert yourself from negative thoughts by doing something you really enjoy.

I finished Larry's Party by Carol Shields, and I'm quite sad that I have run out of Shields books at my local library. She has that sense of Austen, of painting on a tiny piece of ivory, and yet somehow capturing the whole world. Her work leaves me thrilled and inspired.

And I discovered a musician I'd never heard of before, but fell instantly in love with: a pioneer of electronic music (and also visual artist and computer theorist) named Laurie Spiegel. Go and dig out the album The Expanding Universe, a landmark of ambient electronica that makes the Aphex Twin sound like a wibbling schoolboy.

The Arbiter Of Cool

2009-09-05T11:58:00.001+01:00

The year is 1988. The place, a college town in Upstate NY. I'm a freshman, and an atypically young freshman at that, as I burned out on high school in my Junior year, wiped out with a nervous breakdown followed by a bout of mono, and got my GED as quickly as was legally permissible, and headed straight for the nearest state University to commence Real Life.

There were two tribes in our campus centre (youth culture always splits itself in two, as them vs. us is the easiest way of defining a newly hatched adult identity.) My tribe, the Hipsters (this word had not been tainted with its 00s association - it still harked back to Beatniks and The City - New York, of course, not our pathetic local town) and our arch enemies, the Art Fags.

The Hipsters gathered around the campus food coop and its accompanying record shop - we were marked by our politics (radical) and our music (hardcore and punk, SST and Alternative Tentacles.) Art fags, wearied by nearly a decade of Reagan-Thatcherism, were not thought to have politics, and their music was effete European synthpop - all sneeringly dismissed as "Depeche Mode." Hipsters majored in *real* subjects, like politics and and philosophy and journalism (or even hard sciences like physics and maths.) Art Fags, of course, studied art and design and fashion - or even worse yet, English. Hipsters dressed in lots of leather (or black denim if they were vegan) and flannel and spiked their part-long part-shaved hair up into elaborate crests. Art Fags wore clothes from Boy and Contempo and dressed like, well, art fags.

I was told, by one of the arbiters of who was "scene" and who was not, that I was always sightly suspect. After all, my favourite band was not Crass, but Bauhaus, and I was suspected of preferring the sell-outs New Order to the sainted Joy Division, and what's more, my major was "Public Communications" (a weird catch-all division that would in a few years evolve into "New Media") which was decidedly more art school than journalism. Still, my politics were unimpeachable. As part of a radical feminist student group, *we* had occupied a university office while they had stayed in the coop and debated. What's more, my father had actually *held political office* for a socialist (OK, the Labour) party. So I was grudgingly accepted as Hipster, rather than Art Fag.

I tried to be as tribal as I could, because this was the first genuine Scene I'd been accepted into in my life, but I had my doubts.

The thing was, the most *interesting* people I knew, the ones whose thoughts were beautiful and original and challenging, the ones whose musical tastes were most expansive - they didn't dress like punks at all. In fact, when I met up with a penpal at an all-ages VFW gig, the Arbiter of Cool was suspicious of him for dressing like a "hippie" (more proto-grunge, really, with the benefit of hindsight, but still.)

I suppose it was a kind of shorthand more than anything else. If you saw someone with a mohawk sitting on the steps of the campus centre, you could go over and ask them how much they hated Reagan, and have a friend for the next semester. But a friend I met this way confessed to me that the AoC would only greet her when she spiked her hair up, but would blank her when it was down. Did her personality change with her hair? I didn't think so.

I remember the moment it all changed. We were sprawled over a picnic table outside the campus centre, eating hummus and taboule from the food coop, when AoC turned to me, and asked me, pointedly, about my friend V. "There's such a dearth of *real* punk rock girls around here," he mused. "It's so refreshing to see a real punk rock girl again."

I gaped at him, not quite knowing how to answer. V was my best friend from high school, who'd been home for the weekend. I'd proudly taken her to one of the Scene parties, desperate to show off my new, cool friends. But V, as much as I loved her, had the musical tastes of the redneck community where she'd grown up. She owned Grateful Dead records, FFS, she had Rush posters on her walls when I met her. She'd been forced to keep her precious collection of books (sci fi and fantasy mostly) in a locked chest because her mother thought they were "untidy." We started to expand each others' horizons. I began a campaign to educate her about music, about literature, about art - and she educated me about life outside of books - sex, drugs, shopping. I lost my innocence, gratefully - she lost her ignorance, not always so gratefully.

But punk rock, punk rock she was not. The clothes she'd worn to the party had been borrowed or adapted. My old Sex Pistols t-shirt. Heavy metal slut boots were easily enough adapted to look punk - and a black leather miniskirt. A motorcycle jacket customised with a few studs and a lick of paint. Her hair, her heavy metal mop - we crimped it and teased it out to the size of a small bush and we painted her face with black lipstick like Siouxsie Sioux.

And this boy, that I'd taken to be the arbiter of our Scene, he looked at her and he didn't see that her favourite band was Led Zeppelin and that she had voted Republican, like her parents and her grandparents. Our Arbiter of Cool looked at her, and saw her leather jacket and her spiked hair and said "This, this is a *real* punk rock girl."

Yes, we were teenagers - of course it's as shallow to judge people by their favourite band as by their punk rock costume. It's the quality of a person's soul that counts, not the quality of their record collection *or* the spikiness of their hair. But I learned a lot about image and about Arbiters of Cool on that day.

Flash forward ten years, my brother and I sitting in a posh bar in NYC, and he laughingly quotes Oscar Wilde "I have never met anyone who did not turn out to be exactly what I thought them to be within 5 minutes of meeting them." I looked at him carefully and shook my head, thinking how deceiving his own Young Republican costume was. I knew then, as I know now. My favourite people are those who do *not* turn out to be exactly who you thought they were within 5 minutes of meeting them.

So the violent revulsion in my previous post, to Arbiters of Cool who would make you pay to stand in a queue to be judged worthy of entry by bouncers - this is where it comes from. Not from arrogance, or from insecurity, but from this.

Shower Of Shit

2009-09-04T14:37:00.006+01:00

Depression is back with a whallop today, after a brief remission yesterday. Remission - I mean, that's what it's like, isn't it? It will recede for a while, but it never really goes away, this terrible shadow that hangs over everything like an ominous grey cloud forever on the horizon of even the sunniest day.

You know it's bad, when trying to keep the sort of "gratitude journal" that happiness scientists reccomend to ward off depression, you can't think of a thing to be grateful for. Negativity seeps into every pore, sucks the colour out of the sky.

The cognitive dissonance of my job grows worse every day. How do I recconcile my idea of myself as an idealistic person, as a Feminist, with the fact of working in an industry I believe to be morally wrong. It makes me feel physically ill to think about it, so I try not to think about it - until those times when I find myself having to fix coding and find myself confronted with a list of labiaplasty, mastoplexy and other such torture applied to womens perfectly healthy bodies in the name of pure aesthetics.

And once I grit my teeth and get past that, there's the sheer frustration of my job. I was hired as a Crystal Programmer, I've been here for 6 months and they still haven't even bought a copy of the software. I spend my days fixing Excel queries like a glorified secretary. I should just shut up and take my paycheque - the pay of an MI Analyst for the skills of a secretary - but the truth is I am BORED out of my fucking mind.

So I spend my day bored, distracted, frustrated, surfing aimlessly about the internet and feeling more and more alienated.

The other minor complaints, the tiny things that eat away at the joy of life...

Lost my DJ residency. The venue moved Crafternoons from the upstairs room to the downstairs. No decks downstairs. Lisa says that they'll book a proper night up in Walthamstow soon, but I can't go all the way to Walthamstow and back on a school night. I just can't do it. Didn't realise how much work I put into it, and how rewarding that work was, until it's suddenly gone. Didn't realise how much of my music critic identity had been reshaped (since the death of Plan B) as DJ. Several times in the past week, I've found myself about to d/l some great remix or some rare track, thinking "Ooh, I'll play this in my set..." only to realise I don't have a set to play.

And I haven't talked about the mess with EA, have I? It's just... I don't even know where to start there. I'm sure he's completely forgotten the argument by now, but of course, I haven't. Suddenly looking into the eyes of your idol and seeing a plain, fallible human being. Your Nebuchadnezzar has feet of clay.

Again, the cognitive dissonance, having an argument with your addmitted idol over the single issue most important in your life. I walked away, I didn't even finish the argument - not least because I didn't want to carry on disagreeing with Him, but also because I just didn't want to have this whole process of disillusionment unfold in front of your typical internet rubberneckers.

I can't even say what it was that suddenly snapped. The straw that broke the camel's back was his patronising use of the diminishing "dear" - to use this kind of term while arguing with a feminist is a lesser akin to using the term "boy" when arguing about racism with a Black Panther. The level of disrespect and patronisation is just amplified a hundred fold.

I keep trying to explain what I was trying to say, and then realise that it doesn't matter, and delete the whole thing. Here's this man who went from playing Riot Grrrl anthems to operating in this world of electronic dance music that seems to become *more* gender imbalanced, rather than less, as time goes on. How do you go from championing Peaches and Chicks On Speed to championing Boys Noize (I mean, that name just says it all - music of boys, by boys, for boys - how many females does he have on his record label? Please prove me wrong by showing that number is above 0?). And rather than challenge this hyper-masculine world, just reinforce it with all-male charts on Beatport, all male sets, all males in the DJ booth at his gigs.

"I don't listen to gender," he protests. "I listen to music."

We've had this argument before. If you don't listen to gender, if it "doesn't matter" if it's male or female, then why is it ALWAYS male? How can you come up with an all male ANYTHING (except maybe sperm donating list) and tell me you have no bias - when the world is 50% female?

Clearly he didn't listen to the message and meaning of riot grrrl. Maybe he was just playing that music because it was fashionable at the time. And that's what really infuriated him. Started going on about the Trash "brand" and how it was fenced off from what he did now, and how this man who I thought spent half his life dismantling boundaries between "dance" and "rock" and "pop" is now bricking them back up- but that's when his patronising "dear" slips out.

And that's when I remember. Why I didn't *go* to Trash. (This is the irony, my saying that a Trash set was more diverse, more fun, more... BETTER than his recent sets.) Because of that fenced off attitude of exclusivity. The queue and the clipboard at the door and the "do you know what kind of music we play?" sneering and the refusing to let people in on account of wearing the wrong *fashion*.

I'm from New York, I know why people will pay money to stand in a queue and have their fashion sense insulted. They pay for the privilege of being judged worthy to enter.

But this is the problem with this attitude of exclusivity. That being exclusive automatically involves EXCLUDING someone. And I've been that person, excluded for things I couldn't help (my gender, my mental illness, my nationality, my sexuality) far too many time to ever condone that attitude. It goes contrary to everything I've ever believed in.

So where does this leave us? I'm looking at this man and thinking that I've idolised him for all the wrong reasons. And wishing I could just delete the past 6 months of adulation, write it off as a mistake, an illusion, a willing suspension of disbelief. I mean, that's what is so stupid about all this - it's not a case of "I didn't realise..." as "I knew, but chose to ignore." Build 'em up and knock 'em down? Put a man on a pedastal to knock him off?

Doesn't matter. That protecting coccoon of worshipping a god, of being in love with an idea - of holding an ideal - it's just another good thing that's gone.

Of course he dislikes me. Most people dislike me. I'm spikey and abrasive and this endless bad weather moods and depression is so fucking boring and tedious. I wouldn't want to spend time around me if I had a choice. But I don't have a choice, I'm trapped in this awful head. And there's only one way to get out of it.

Mad Woman

2009-09-02T10:04:00.002+01:00

So it's finally happened. I've turned into the kind of mad old lady who shouts at newspapers in the tube. (So much hinges off the double meaning of that word, "mad" - if a woman is angry, it's clearly because she's insane, not because she's frustrated and beaten back and beaten down and has just had enough. Mad.)

Picked up a copy of the Metro off my seat, flipped through it to read the comics (I wanted to dive back into my Carol Shields novel) and saw a picture of a naked woman. Oh, don't get me wrong, it wasn't a Page 3 girl or pornography or anything, it was definitely an art print, a Man Ray or something, a woman bent over double with her arse in the air, headless, limbless, so that the curves of her torso formed a geometrical shape.

And then the tagline - blah blah blah, some artist has put together a lovely coffee table book of the female nude celebrating the female nude as "sign, symbol and as designed object."

I was so angry I tossed the whole newspaper over my head with a snort. But no, that wasn't enought. Couldn't concentrate on the novel, with those words banging around in my head. SIGN. SYMBOL. DESIGN OBJECT. Woman? No. Person? No. Human being with desires and wants and needs and aspirations and talents and a personality all her own? No.

SIGN. SYMBOL. DESIGN OBJECT. NUDE.

I took out a biro and grabbed the newspaper back. Scrawled across her naked and reduced-to-object back.

HUMAN BEING
NOT A SIGN
NOT A SYMBOL
NOT A "DESIGN OBJECT"
I AM A HUMAN BEING
I AM A PERSON

Left it open and face up as I got off at Oxford Circus. Will anyone see? Will anyone care? Probably not, but I feel better for doing it.

I Am The Ex Offender

2009-08-14T19:27:00.001+01:00

His name was out of my mouth before I could stop myself.

"Joe! Joe Banks!" For a moment, I thought he would walk on, pretend not to have heard me, and that thought made me angry, made me shout his name louder.

He turns. I knew that face, that body so well, once, I could trace it in my sleep. His hair is almost all grey, a little too long (though I always liked it that way) his beard a little too shaggy. That long nose, that slightly foolish grin - like Busy P's mouth inserted into Lindstrom's face. I thought my knees would give way as he turned around. We stared at each other in shock.

It's been 5 years since I even saw him. He hasn't changed. I have, I'm not sure for the better. My knees feel like they will give out.

We exchange tense, stuttering greetings. "Sorry, I'm just shocked," I manage to get out. "Me, too. Well... I'm shocked to see you. But I'm more shocked... about something else in my life, I can't tell you about." Fucking Joe. In an instant, any residual love or fondness is gone. His evasive answers, his half truths, his self aggrandisation. I want to run away, I want to leave, but I'm rooted to the spot.

It spills out of me. I don't even ask how he is, I don't want to know. I tell him I've got a good job - well, it is good on paper, it's well paid for a start. I tell him I've bought mine own flat, down in Streatham (that's a dig at him, still living in the flat his mother bought him, I bet.) I tell him I've been working a lot.

"On music?" he asks. Yes. I mention it so casually. Oh, that little band I started after we split up, we did really well, we were on the telly, on the radio... "Oh, I didn't know. I listened to your stuff on the internet, though. It was good." Yeah, well, this record label in California wants to put out a retrospective of our work. I'm really busy, I'm DJing a lot...

I can't shut up. I want to rub it in his face. He made me feel like such a failure when we were together - look at all the things that I did when you kicked me out. It wasn't me that was at fault, it was you. I was a failure as a Bloomsbury wife, but I was a success as a musician, an artist, a writer. More successful than you. Anything to avoid the questions about my personal life, anything to avoid the answers about his personal life. I don't want to know, don't even glance at his finger to see if he's married now.

He mentions his mysterious shock again, tells me again he can't tell me what it is. I don't care. I don't want to know. Your mother has died. You're having a baby. I don't want to know. I force myself not to care. "Yeah, well, see you around," he tells me, touching me on the arm as he looks straight into my eyes. His eyes are so blue as he raises his sunglasses. I remembered them as greenish. I remembered lots of things as better than they were.

I practically run, crossing the street to get away from him, more shocked than anything else. To see him, so suddenly, so unexpectedly, after 5 years. I'd just been walking back from work, laughing over a funny twitter exchange with friends that morning, and there he was. Three years of working around the corner from him and I never saw him, then suddenly there he was.

I managed to get to the tube before I started crying. I wanted to put my book down and bawl, but I just couldn't, not with so many people around. You hurt me. You broke me. I've never been in love again, since you. Now don't take that as a compliment or anything - it was because of how badly you betrayed me, how systematically you broke my trust and you broke my heart, how utterly unflinchingly you did your best to destroy me.

Well, I was stronger than you. I wanted that song on the TV, wanted that song on the radio so you would hear it, and you would know. Was it the truth? No. Life is so unfair. How do you get to go on, and be happy, and I don't? I hope karma hits you hard, I hope your shocking news is awful and horrible and terrible and rips your world out by the foundations like you did to me. Our relationship was a prison. You demanded freedoms for yourself that you refused to allow me. I could not bloom, artistically, until I was away from you. But emotionally, I never bloomed again.

I want to call someone, want to cry and moan down the phone, to someone who has known me since then, since before then. Who knows what it means, to have seen you. But there's no one I can call. All my friends of 2003, oh how they've all moved on, new lives, new friends. And me left behind, never really healing.

Everybody gets tired of me in the end. The mental illness, it never changes, it never goes. There are occasionally better patches, but that darkness that you saw inside me, that scared you so much - that will never go. I wear people down, wear them out, they get sick of my bullshit and they move on.

I should never have called your name. Should have let you slip off down the street, written it off as a trick of the light and too much caffeine.

Came home, and I can't even cry. No more tears left in me, I cried them all for Bimble last week.

Why did I see you? Nothing ever happens for no reason, I fundamentally believe that, to impose order on chaos, coincidence on randomness. Note to self: finish the album. Fucking do it. What do you have to prove? I have to prove to Joseph Caxton Banks that I am *still* stronger than you. I still record on your mixing desk, still do my sequencing with your MIDI controller. I took your stuff and I did better work with it than you will ever do. Yes, you absolutely broke me, emotionally. But I am still stronger than you.

Why I Hate My Job

2009-08-12T10:31:00.002+01:00

Memo from the head of marketing came round today:

The feature focuses on bikini bodies and how XXXXXXXX achieved hers by having life-changing surgery (tummy tuck) at MB's Employer – she looks wonderful doesn’t she. I always find it motivating to read these stories and realize what a difference we all make to our patients confidence.

You know what would give *me* confidence? Living in a world where women are judged by their accomplishments and talents and personalities, not by their appearance, and CERTAINLY not by unrealistic "Bikini Bodies" they have to have dangerous, expensive and pointless surgery in order to attain.

There are days when my job really, really gets to me. Today is one of them. We're not just supposed to do this dirty work, we're supposed to take some kind of twisted pride in it.

Crafty Beats: Volume 4

2009-08-10T13:12:00.003+01:00

It's a bit short this week - well, mainly because Anna turned up (when I was expecting to have to do a two hour set). She played for a bit, then we did a Back2Back - really wish I had recorded that, but it wouldn't make any sense without her tracks.

The Bauhaus is a memorial to Mark Craig, aka Bimble (Is More Goth Than You) R.I.P.

The rest is a mixture of Turkish pop and Belgian disco. Go figure.

Bauhaus - Third Uncle
Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares - Svatba (The Wedding)
3 Hur-El - Kol Basti
Selda - Yaz Gazeteci Yaz
Tarkan - Simarik
Aeroplane feat. Au Revoir Simone - Paris
Siriusmo - High Together
Saint Etienne - Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Late of the Pier - Random Firl
Joakim - Spiders
Yazoo - Situation (US 12" Mix)
Goblin - Tenebrae
Siousxie and the Banshees - Happy House
Erkin Koray - Cemalim

http://www.mediafire.com/?ugmry0helnd