'you look like your mother' - complete text

i was unsure if i wanted to share the pages of the book without having the ability to shuffle them any way you saw fit but my commitment to an openness towards culture won out.

these images may be saved and reordered in any way you like, just reference me if you share or use them.

'you look like your mother' - describing alternative narratives.

as discussed before i have been writing an  auto-biography which contains multiple and largely false narratives.

my aim has been to question the often constructed narratives around trans* identity and the processes by which we construct the narrative thread of our own lifes.

i have spoken in the past about the seductivness of the 'i always knew' tradition of trans* identity in which having known you where a girl/ boy from childhood is treasured and viewed as more authentic. i wished to challenge this in the book and i also wanted to challenge common themes i have found in trans*autobiography relating to coming out, 'transitioning,' medication and surgery. as i state in the book

so many choices for the direction of biography not least of which is when to allow the great life changing moment too occur. there are various trusted approaches: rebirth upon surgery, rebirth upon taking hormones

some of these narratives grew out of the 'standards of care' which, for many generations of trans*women including my own, formed the basis of how we understood ourselves, changed how we constructed our own narratives. though this time has passed and a greater openness exists in the community to alternative narratives the old ideas of legitimacy and the old hierarchies hold true.

ofcorse the book goes beyond only discussion trans*autobiography to discuss the whole genera of autobiography, biography and even the idea of narrative itself.

though indebted to b. s. johnson's 'the unfortunates' i wished to move beyond the limited structure he offered (or even that offered by marc saporta) by destroying the order and sense of the page, offering narratives that collapse in upon themselves, eat their own tails.

this is an ending which will lead you back to the beginning, a circle, a narrative eating it’s own  tail. stop, begin, speak.  end

the book can be purchased along with two cds of music and a two hour film on my bandcamp and as a stand alone item here

trans*autobiography and the slippery nature of truth

i have written here before of the slippery nature of trans*narratives and autobiography and i have always wanted to write an autobiography without a narrative which can be unpicked or relied on.

i finally began work on this today.

the completed text will be printed with some passages cut out, sections cut from pages, pages printed on transparencies and any other trick i can think of to break the narrative.

this is the first draft of page one

the past comes back to haunt you

quite some time ago i parted ways with a label owner over their increasing drift towards far right politics. before this they had asked to publish my harsh noise work so my own bandcamp could be given over to drone and improvisation.

i will not go into the particulars of the dispute with this person and that is not the subject of this post.

when my work was deleted from their label i republished it as two separate albums - one dealing with drone and the other with harsh noise but, at the time, i believed three albums to be lost including one of the releases under my harsh noise wall side project green shadow.

thankfully two of those albums where found on an external drive and have been republished on my own bandcamp.

sadly one album, the deeply personal 'three christmas ghosts' (where i spoke about my brother's death and seeing the woman who had raped me several years previously) is lost and may be lost for good. perhaps it is fitting that an album about letting go of pain should itself fade away, a poetic end to it's life but still something in the back of my mind wants it to be preserved. alas it appears this is not to be so.

a few points on this album: the sound quality is not fantastic as it comes from mp3s converted to flac files and some of the files where uploaded as mono tracks even though i sent the individual stereo tracks. to get over this i i copied the mono track, panned each track to different channels and created a false stereo track much as you will find in early stereo releases (i myself have one of these in the shape of the rolling stones 'his satanic majesties request.') this should be thought of as an archive release rather than as part of any ongoing projects or thematic concerns.