When I heard Hertzfeldt was going to set on a tour to show his latest short I was static. It’s a Beautiful Day is the last installment in a series of shorts about a mysterious man named Bill who suffers from an unknown medical condition and has a family history of mental illness. Maybe it’s Hertzfeldt’s anti-corporate legacy or his anti-commercial views, but Everything Will Be Okay (the first installment shown above) and I Am So Proud Of You had made such a strong impression on me that I just felt it was time to go see his films in a theater, pay the man some money and buy one of his DVDs, if anything, as a small token of gratitude for all the meaningful content he has produced over the years which brought a smile to my face and increased my faith in humanity a little bit.

The Venue

I love and try to support every independent theater in Portland, from the Bagdad to the Clinton, and everywhere in between, but I have a special fondness for the Hollywood. It could be the architecture; the theater was built in 1926 and has an orchestra pit and curtains that drop fifty feet to the ground. It could be the popcorn, best the damn popcorn I’ve ever had. It could be the beer; they always have Deschutes and Lagunitas on draft. It could be the programming, from Filmuzic, to European films, they are home to the Latin Film Festival, for example. I think above all, I love this place because it’s run by volunteers. Everyone is here because they want these films to have a home. They want independent filmmakers to be able to show their films on a big screen. Recently the Hollywood became the recipient of a large donation that came in the form of new cinema seats. The old seats, I wouldn’t have been surprised if they were the originals from the 1920’s, have been replaced with plushy seats with cup-holders leaving no real reason not to come here every chance you get.

The Show

I really should not give anything away. If you like Don Hertzfeldt’s work, go see it. The schedule is available at his website. The Bill trilogy gets more complex with each installment. The story, the navigation of mortality and existentialism, even the deliberate mundane moments in the character’s life, come into a different light as the animation becomes more elaborate. The use of live action shots and multiple exposures, interjected with his iconic stick-figure animation make the conclusion of Bill’s story a kind of zenith for his unique mode of storytelling.  It’s a Beautiful Day is not just the next Hertzfeldt short. It’s not only the conclusion of the Bill trilogy. It is the culmination of a style and a form that Hertzfeldt has made entirely his own. Like a Tom Waits album, this work of art could have only been made by one person, and that person happens to be Don Hertzfeldt. He will readily admit he is not as much an author as a channeler of this energy. You’d think the man would have let all this cult status fame get to him, but when took to the stage he was unassuming and without a trace of pretention. He admitted to not liking fiction (novels) which brought an unpleasant murmured response from the audience.  He had a quiet demeanor, bearded wearing converse shoes, jeans and a plaid shirt you might confused him with your average Portland citizen. I don’t know what he’ll get into next, but I fully intend to buy It’s a Beautiful Day  once it comes out on DVD, allegedly, sometime next Christmas.

We do hereby declare reality unkempt by the changing standards of dialogue. Statements, such as, “keep it real”, especially when punctuating or anticipating modes of ultra-violence inflicted psychologically or physically will hence forth be seen as retro-active and not representative of the individually determined is.

Furthermore, as determined by the collective consciousness of this state of being and the lessened distance between thought patterns and their secular manifestations, the role of men as listening receptacles is to be increased by a number no less than seventy percent of the current enlisted as vocal aggressors.

Motherfuckers… (And when I say “motherfucker” I mean literally those who desecrate that which is feminine, maternal, matriarchal and truthful) Motherfuckers better realize, now is the time to self-actualize
We have found evidence that hip-hop’s standard eighty-five RPM when increased by a number as least half an eighth of its standard or decreased three quarters of its speed may be a determining factor in heightening consciousness.

Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth. Equate rhyme with reason, sun with season. Our cyclical relationship to phenomenon has encouraged scholars to erase the centers of periods, thus symbolizing the non-linear character of cause and effect.

Reject mediocrity!

Your current frequencies of understanding outweigh that which has been given for you to understand. The current standard is the equivalent of an adolescent restricted to the diet of an infant. The rapidly changing body would acquire dysfunctional and deformative symptoms and could not properly mature on a diet of apple sauce and crushed pears. Light years are interchangeable with years of living in darkness. The role of darkness is not to be seen as, or equated with, ignorance, but with the unknown, and the mysteries of the unseen.

Thus, in the name of:
ROBESON, GOD’S SON, HURSTON, AHKENATON, HATHSHEPUT, BLACKFOOT, HELEN, LENNON, KHALO, KALI, THE THREE MARIAS, TARA, LILITHE, LOURDE, WHITMAN, BALDWIN, GINSBERG, KAUFMAN, LUMUMBA, GHANDI, GIBRAN, SHABAZZ, SIDDHARTHA, MEDUSA, GUEVARA, GUARDSIEFF, RAND, WRIGHT, BANNEKER, TUBMAN, HAMER, HOLIDAY, DAVIS, COLTRANE, MORRISON, JOPLIN, DUBOIS, CLARKE, SHAKESPEARE, RACHMNINOV, ELLINGTON, CARTER, GAYE, HATHOWAY, HENDRIX, KUTL, DICKERSON, RIPPERTON, MARY, ISIS, THERESA, HANSBERRY, TESLA, PLATH, RUMI, FELLINI, MICHAUX, NOSTRADAMUS, NEFERTITI, LA ROCK, SHIVA, GANESHA, YEMAJA, OSHUN, OBATALA, OGUN, KENNEDY, KING, FOUR LITTLE GIRLS, HIROSHIMA, NAGASAKI, KELLER, BIKO, MARLEY, MAGDELENE, COSBY, SHAKUR, THOSE WHO BURN, THOSE STILL AFLAMED, AND THE COUNTLESS UNNAMED!

We claim the present as the pre-sent, as the hereafter. We are unraveling our navels so that we may ingest the sun. We are not afraid of the darkness; we trust that the moon shall guide us. We are determining the future at this very moment. We know that the heart is a philosophers’ stone. Our music is our alchemy. We stand as the manifested equivalent of three buckets of water and a hand full of minerals, thus realizing that those very buckets turned upside down supply the percussive factor of forever.

If you must count to keep the beat, then count.

Find you mantra and awaken your subconscious. Curve you circles counterclockwise. Use your cipher to decipher coded language, manmade laws. Climb waterfalls and trees, commune with nature, snakes and bees. Let your children name themselves and claim themselves as the new day for today we are determined to be the channelers of these changing frequencies into songs, paintings, writings, dance, drama, photography, carpentry, crafts, love, and love.
We enlist every instrument: acoustic, electronic, every “so-called” gender, race, sexual orientation, every PERSON as beings of sound to acknowledge their responsibility to uplift the consciousness of the entire fucking world. Any utterance un-aimed will be disclaimed, will me maimed—two rappers slain.

- – -

My favorite line from this poem is: If you must count to keep the beat, then count.

The lines of masculinity and femininity and our current understanding of gender in western culture lies the passive role of people who follow or obey tradition blindly. A large volume of these are both Motherfuckers and Vocal Agressors. For those of us who find ourselves in a minority, outnumbered and out gunned, I will pose this question: How will we contribute to the ongoing project of civilization?

I did not plan for another “filler” post, but I’m currently working on three or four serious gender pieces. A narrative that I want to submit somewhere for publication and various musical projects. Patriarchy in a Skirt is forthcoming though.

Now that I live in the Northeast quadrant of this funky town, I make it a point to attend whenever possible. I’m attracted to Open Mic Shows for various reasons. For one, I’m confident your average Portland Open Mic features more sincere and talented performances than your average Ticketmaster show. They’re usually free, and most have some kick-ass drink special running (my broke-ass wallet always appreciates that). If you don’t like one of the acts, don’t worry about it, they’ll be done soon. The most important thing however is that you never know what you’re going to hear. It’s important to remember people like Miranda July and James Mercer played their songs and performed their work in similar settings. You just never know what’ll turn out. Suck My Mic varies greatly from week to week, just this past week it included: a cameo by the founder of Portland’s Saturday market, people playing  guitars and harmonicas, of course, sampling pedals, songs that involve shootings dogs, spoken word, mandolins, narrative poems, flash –nonfiction, banjos, accordions and more.

The Highlights of last Wednesday for me included two performances:

First it was a duet a banjo player and a guitarist. The Banjo player, a girl in a loose skirt, black leggings and some kind of riding boots, old western movie chic and quite demeanor. She explained to us how she’d met a crazy hobo who played some really fast banjo licks and had inspired her to write a fast-paced banjo song about traveling the world. Instead, her song had turned into a slow, sad banjo song about being stuck in the same place. Some people are annoyed by this type of anecdotes. I guess some people aren’t interested how songs are made, I am. Maybe it’s hard to hear these types of anecdotes from famous people, trying to aggrandize themselves, but on a night like this, it’s a close to the truth as you’re ever going to get.

The banjo has a very complicated cultural history. In this day and age it may seem as a fun, if colorful way, to add “twang” to a song, but the truth is that the banjo is a former slave instrument, appropriated by white Americans in the age of vaudeville for black-face performances. The banjo is a perfect example of American culture and history. It’s an emblem of a racist past, yet somewhere along the way, became a genuine means of expression for a people, usually poor coal miners. As much as I love a Bella Fleck tune, the best banjo songs for me are haunting, sad or angry. Their performance of “Wayfaring Stranger” offered just that, a sad, haunting melody, likely sounded as it centuries ago when it was written. The banjo player later explained that she’d changed the last verse because it gets too religious for her taste. But I wouldn’t have known. It was truly amazing.

The second performance that caught me of guard came with even more of a surprise. Every country in Latin America has gone through so movement of poetry and song that rose from the recovery of a national trauma, a bloody dictatorship, civil war, a military coup. Bolivia had the Nuevo Canto, Chile had the Nueva Canción, and Cuba had the Nueva Trova, to name just a few. They all mean “New Song” and they came to represent the feelings and tensions of a nation post a traumatic event. In Cuba, the Castro revolution, led to the rise of one these movements which produced one of Cuba’s most famous singers: Silvio Rodriguez.  I’ll admit that I have not heard his music since I was a child in South America, and last Wednesday, when this young guy, blind, white, busted out a Silvio Rodriguez song in Spanish, I was flabbergasted. He struggled through some of the verses, I suspect he had memorized the lyrics phonetically (I’ve memorized Japanese lyrics like that), though it was obvious he cared a great deal about not messing up the lyrics. That is what I found most touching.  There was no mockery. Who’d thought that I’d immigrate to the U.S. as a child and travel hundreds of miles to eventually settle in Portland and come to hear this song by a post revolution Cuban singer in a Pub. I think it speaks of the immense amount of culture this city has to offer. In the end, a city is only as good as its citizens and though I fell in love with this city a long time ago, it was another of those moments that make you feel proud of where you live. If reading Faulkner has taught me anything, is that you don’t get to choose where you’re born, but you get to choose where you’ll be buried. When the time comes, my bones belong in the ground of this town.

Of course, idiot me, didn’t bring a camera or any of recording device. But I will in fact, begin to do so from now on. Here’s Silvio Rodriguez’s most famous song (translated lyrics will follow in a separate post).

The Song from Agnes Varda’s 1962 film Cléo 5 à 7: Sans toi/Without you/Sin ti

Toutes portes ouvertes                   With all doors open wide               Todas las puertas abiertas

En plein courant d’air                    With the wind rushing through   Llena de correintes de aire

Je suis une maison vide                 I’m like an empty house                Soy una casa vacía

Sans toi, sans toi                              Without you, without you            Sin ti, sin ti

Comme une île déserte                  Like a deserted isle                         Come una isla desierta

Que recouvre la mer                       Invaded by the sea                         Que el mar cubre

Mes plages se devident                 My sands slip away                         Mis playas se vacían

Sans toi, sans toi                              Without you, without you            Sin ti, sin ti

Belle, en pure perte                         Beauty wasted                                Guapa pero para nada

Nue au coeur de l’hiver                  Cold and naked                               Expuesta al crudo invierno

Je suis un corps avide                     How can my body dream             Soy un cuerpo ávido

Sans toi, sans toi                              Without you, without you            Sin ti, sin ti

Rongée par le cafard                      Gnawed away by despair             Roída por la desesperación

Morte, au cercueil de verre          Dead in a crystal bier            Muerta en un ataúd de cristal

Je me couvre de rides                     My body decays                               Me cubro de arrugas

Sans toi, sans toi                              Without you, without you            Sin ti, sin ti

Et si tu viens trop tard                    If you wait too long                       Si tardas mucho

On m’ aura mise en terre              I’ll have been laid to rest              Habré sido enterrada

Seule, laide et livide                         Ashen, pale and alone                  Sola, fea, y lívida

Sans toi, sans toi                              Without you, without you            Sin ti, sin ti

Sans toi                                               Without you                                    Sin ti

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about cross-dressing as a masquerade, as an act of deception. When we think of the female image as a fantasy, a fetishized object constructed to conform to the demands of masculine desire; we must ponder the role of the crossdresser and where gender expression meets misogyny, and the role of patriarchy in our personal identity. I thought this song would be a good lead into something I’ve been writing: Boys will be Girls: Patriarchy in a Skirt.

Not long after relocating to Portland, I became aware of Filmusik through an ad in the Portland Mercury for Planet of Dinosaurs. It promised a performance of folly artists, voice actors, and live music to totally recreate the soundscape of a film live. I was in love. On top of that, they were offering a Spanish-language performance featuring the voice the MAX himself as one of the actors. Sadly, I had to miss this performance because a friend was reading from her new book at Powell’s. You got to support art on all fronts and sometimes dinosaur films suffer in the process. Even worse, the next day, after standing in line for twenty minutes at Hollywood Theater, with less than ten people in front of me, the English language performance sold out. I wasn’t happy, but you have to love this city and its citizens because there are people here willing to spend time and money to come to a venue and watch artistic things that involve actual live human beings. Since then, I learned my lesson have bought tickets in advance and attended the majority of their shows since with the absolute saddest exception of missing The Cameraman’s Revenge.  Filmusik organizes many types of performances, from full-blown summer productions to what they call Organ Grinders. These pair up indie bands, most of them local (past acts have include the Cello Project, Subterranean Howl, for example) with a classic silent films. This is the genius of it. You cannot remake a silent film. So how do you update it and get a people interested in it? You update the soundtrack.

 The Film:

I’ll admit it and say I had never seen The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari before. It really needs little introduction. A staple of film classics, a classic example of German Expressionism, and a favorite of films buffs, it is just a very unique film done in a unique way. I dabbled in film studies in college and perhaps never watched it because I had read about it and didn’t think I’d enjoy it. Unlike other films of the silent era, Cabinet never really became a genre. When we think of Faust as an epic, or Nosferatu and it’s many vampire cousins, Cabinet, stands alone and I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a film that may warrant being revisited by Filmusik in the future, perhaps with a different band.

The Venue:

Since the Hollywood Theater had to close its doors while they installed new seats, Filmusik searched for an alternative venue and found a home for the production at the Headwaters theater. A black box space, Headwaters sits in North Portland, feet away from rail road tracks and the whistling of the Union Pacific that roams in various corners of this town. It isn’t the fanciest of venues, but it is a working venue that pays its performers and has adequate sitting, lighting, and projection equipment. Every venue in Portland tries very hard to find its niche and headwater is a genuine performance space. They offer various goodies inside with a suggested donation. I happily donated some money and got some local beer.

The Band.

Hailing from Boston, Massachusetts, Bent Knee embarked in a West Coast tour culminating with the Filmusik show. Their performance was tight and sounded well-rehearsed. Their sound is incredibly difficult to describe beyond the point that it matched the film emotionally and rhythmically. It ranged from dissonant noise to accordion rhythms with Eastern European flare. The drummer had a fantastic sounding kit and though I have been to several Filmusik productions I feel it’s important so say to note that every show is very different. Bent Knee’s Accordionist and Drummer were, for me, the highlight of the show, but a commissioned soundtrack isn’t always a fair representation of their sound as a band. I found this video of them online and thought it was worth sharing:

Last I checked, the average thirty minute program actually runs between 17 and 21 minutes. That means for every hour of television you watch about twenty of the worst in gender indoctrination. While commercials are the worst, the programing itself is meant to be alienating in order to “capture” the adequate demographic. The thing about advertisement is that I much rather get to know someone because we like the same bands, or the same books, or because we have similar goals, i.e. writing a novel that doesn’t read like some trite piece of garbage. Social media is helping making that happen.

When I first set my facebook profile, you could still choose “neutral” rather than “Male or Female” for your gender. I’ll ignore the fact facebook apparently cannot differentiate between sex and gender. As of today, if you changed your setting from neutral to something else you won’t be able to change it back. The reason for that is that they need this demographic information to set their ad rates. I learned this one day, for fun, when I decided to set my profile to female and post a picture of me in girl-mode as my profile picture. The result was a major shift in the adverts offered to my now feminine profile. While before I was being offered exotic cars, ads for firm abs and tuxedo rentals, I was now being offered much harsher advertisements such as:

Get rid of your muffin top!

10 Mistakes Nice Girls Make!

28 and alone again?

Do you hate your body?

Lose 20 lbs in one month!

There were less horrible adverts as well:, yoga, jewelry, cheap make-up. However, as I began to develop my profile, include my interests, my hobbies, my passions, movies, bands, and thing I like… my adverts began to get more complex. When I logged in today it included adds for Gibson Guitars, Girl shoes, bass strings and an indie DJ advert. Apparently I wasn’t crazy, social media is the future.

What I had before:

What I have now:

Intro: I think there was improvement here as the second guitar doesn’t sound as harsh as what I had before. However, in the final product I’m now convinced for sure that there should only be one nylon string guitar playing the instrumental intro.

First verse: Pretty much the same as before.

Second Verse: I played around and added a bass part in the second verse and an electric guitar playing accents to the nylon guitar part. Over all the intro and two  verses have developed okay. There are some issues with the timing for when the bass part comes in. I wanted to be a kind of surprise and not be the predictable first bar of the second verse progression. I think I will need to add two bars at the end of the first verse to achieve this.

Chorus: Crap happens. I started working on the chorus and eventually came to consider most of what I did today was garbage. My intention was to pump up the song and have it kick into a kind pop-rock groove that is so familiar and boring and have this progression fall apart into a sort of musical anarchy. Music is not supposed to speed up or slow down, so I wanted both, a tempo change and then the music slows down back to its original speed. Since the song has a lyric about having the TV on and the radio blasting at full volume I wanted the song to get very busy and include some sort of sample. Considering the song was written in 1973 I felt Pinochet’s rise to power in Chile was probably one of the most significant events in Latin America that year so I found an audio clip of the speech Salvador Alende, the democratically elected Marxist president, gave before being ousted and allegedly committing suicide. While I am not a Marxist myself and often times find myself arguing with people about the importance of the Fed and capital markets, I feel you can’t revisit the past and ignore such dark events. Much of the song is about growing old, accumulating possessions, trying to live old age in some sort of comfort, that ultimately I felt it needed to be grounded in something real. So I will keep the sample… everything else will likely go away.

Homework: re-think the chorus part. I think I will need to keep the classical guitar in the chorus or have the electric guitar play a more significant part in the second verse so it can transition more smoothly into the new section. I am still vested in having the drums come in and then fall apart; I think that’s part of a cliché of popular music that will be fun to intentionally fail at it. This is largely a “modular” song and there no refrains or repeat chorus, so I need to find a way to make the part more cohesive. I will consider playing chords on a synthesizer and carrying them from the second verse and into the chorus in order to make the song feel like one unit. I’m currently still translating the lyrics, but they should be up with the next update.

While discussing Marwencol I wanted to express the need for inclusiveness in the transgender community due to the “radical othering” we face from the rest of the population. I am still, however, annoyed by certain “weird” ways gender-variant males end up expressing their femininity, such as collecting and obsessing over women’s shoes.

Why do you think this happens?

One aspect of the clinical study of “Gender Identity Disorder” (GID) that I find somewhat useful is the fact that there is a significant larger volume of documented cases of males that “suffer” from this “condition” than females. The generally accepted notion is that women can express masculine traits without as much personal risk in our society. As result they can cross gender lines more easily and therefore not be as repressed. I know plenty of women who got into trouble growing up for crossing gender lines, but I think it’s safe to assume males have a harder time acting like girls than girls acting like boys—especially when it comes to clothes. I will say that I am very skeptic of psychiatry when it comes to gender identity. I think as more transgender people go into the field the lexicon, rhetoric, and narratives of psychiatry used to describe people like us will improve.  In the meantime, I take what I can and feel uneasy about the rest.

Most children identify with their gender very early on and do not require years of “training” as to what toys, clothes, jobs, etc. are desirable for boys and which are for girls. I honestly don’t remember the first time I wore clothes meant for girls was told by parents or siblings that I was not supposed to be wearing them. I do, however, remember the first I put on girl clothes in secret because I knew if I got caught I would get in trouble. I was probably four-and-half years old; five at the oldest. What that should tell you is that whatever feminine energy I have manifested in me pretty early and was likely repressed by familial pressure. One of the most common patterns of GID is secrecy. Once this feminine energy becomes repressed it changes and mutates as life goes on: we grow up, school life gets more complicated, familial relationships develop, puberty happens, eventually adulthood. I disagree with people who try to downplay the idea of gender to basic simple equations of logic, such as, “he didn’t have a strong male role model, no wonder he’s a sissy.” The same set of parents can raise two very different children. Human life, I hope you agree, is more complex than a two clause-sentence and a conjunctive transition. Such conjecture is useless in a mature discussion and it only perpetuates the culture of machismo. I will have you known the same cultures that promotes hyper-masculinity also rejects the idea of men raising children as a result there millions of boys (the vast majority of which are straight) are essentially father-less.

I think this feminine energy even if repressed becomes a core part of our identity, a part of our sexuality, a part of our relationships and interactions with other people, our creativity and our capacity for expression. I think that if this feminine energy doesn’t get expressed in some meaningful way, it can easily turn into something rather insidious and even creepy: underwear fetishes, forced castration fantasies, she-male pornography, hyper-masculinity , aggressiveness and overcompensation, for example.

Why does this annoy me?

While I think we all start as weirdo transvestities, it is our responsibility tofind a way to express ourselves in a more meaningful way. Sure, I believe whatever people do in the privacy of their homes, alone or with a consenting adult, is none of my business, but we must at least theoretically ponder an alternative form of expressing this feminine energy. I think instead of letting boys grow up in the “tomboy” male equivalent of the gender spectrum we are channeling their identity to manifest in a variety of behaviors that maybe more problematic than wanting to paint one’s nails every now and then.  I think that most transvestites are not ready to ask themselves if there is a more meaningful way to express their femininity because they’d fallen into these patterns and feel “safe” with them. However most crossdressers engage in behaviors like hoarding (usually one item of feminine clothing, most often shoes or lingerie) and then they periodically purge these items. If you’re a crossdresser and engage in such secret activities ask yourself this question:  What can I do that is more constructive and meaningful with my gender issues?

Wait… aren’t you guilty of some of this problems?

I think one of the most radical moments I had in my life was when I finally disclosed to a friend that I was “transgender.” That was the word I had to use that the time. He didn’t really care; the exchange went something like this.

“So, are you going to dress like a girl now?”

“No… I’m too fat and ugly. I’ll look stupid.”

“So, what are you going to do, then?” The truth is I hadn’t really thought about it.

“I don’t know; wear less masculine clothes, like girl’s jeans or something. Get my ears pierced; maybe wear a thumb ring or something.”

“Cool…”

“Yeah…”

“You know you never needed my permission to wear a thumb ring…”

“…”

The truth was I wasn’t sure about what the hell I was going to do with this feminine energy I had finally come to terms with. I wasn’t ready to say I was going to buy a dress, a pair of pumps, a wig, a bunch of make-up and go out like that. I was, and still am, a large guy with broad shoulders and lineman-like physique.  I’m 6’2” without shoes, I knew then as I know now it was very unlikely I’d fool people into thinking I was a girl. Over time I figured that while it was hard to pull of the illusion of femininity in real life, I could try to do it with photography. I also realized how as an adult most of these pressures to “act normal” came from me. Sure, society will still enforce their gender standards, but it is ultimately our choice to live our lives in a way that is meaningful to us. You may choose or not to inform and educate yourself and others about gender issues—Trans or otherwise. Whatever you do, don’t fall into these patterns out of repression. I think part of the reason I wanted this blog to include my literary and artistic interests as well as gender-queer topics was to show just how being gender-variant is only a portion of what I do with my life. I think a lot people see this kind of cross-dressing as a “hobby,” and I guess that’s okay, people say “writing” and ”making music” is a “hobby,” too. I’d like to see it as a compulsion that defines my identity and informs everything I do artistically or otherwise. But defining “hobby” will have to come in a separate post.

While this video serves only as tiny introduction to an incredibly large volume of ideas regarding gender and sexual identity, it nonetheless creates the chance to explore specific ways we think about our identity and how one ought to communicate it to others. Often times, people think there’s only one way to being queer, and I use the word queer in the most liberal and inclusive of ways. Crossdressers are in an interesting position because wearing feminine clothes is a strong statement that validates our identity yet it’s so often done in secret.

If the tree falls and no one is there to hear it, does it make a noise?

The vast majority of crossdressers are in the closet and their femininity manifests in rather bizarre ways. The ones who are “out” prefer to have a feminine persona and a handful of people who share their secret identity ala comic book super hero. I often clash with crossdressers because we think there are these very rigid ways of expressing who we are. People have prescribed roles and expectations for what it means to be anything. People have expectation of how one should act “Latino” for example. These parameters are just as arbitrary as the norms of gender we transgress upon. It is important to note you can just as easily cross-dress across border other than gender such as class or race.

It’s also important to understand that all the words and labels we use to describe ourselves are only an approximation of who we actually are. The fact some transvestites describe themselves as “male lesbians” doesn’t meant that they are that only that those words approximate how they feel. I think we need to think of ourselves first and words second. I thought this video would be a good leeway to a new post coming sometime this weekend: Transvestite Pet Peeve #2: The “Weirdo” transvestite

Hosted by  Dante’s, a 300 person venue in downtown Portland, the line up includes:

• Chervona
• Pava
• Vera Panich
• Battle of the DJ’s

As much fun as the video looks like, this annual show (this year marking the 4th anniversary) promises a crazier party. There will also be a costume contest with entries as Ded Moroze a Russian analogue of Santa and Snegurochka a character of Russian folklore (Snow Girl). Though I had originally planned to attend the show as “Snow Girl” I recently injured my foot (stress fracture/wearing an orthopedic boot) and won’t be doing any jumping, dancing, or wearing heels, so look for me in non-drag, probably far from the stage sipping on something. Look for my write-up of the show sometime next week.