sebastienne

I've not been around these parts for years, but Doctor Who has drawn me back.

Because I'm not sure if there's anyone who's been subscribed to this blog for over 18 years (!), but this post that I made in 2006 turns out to contain accidental spoilers for the most recent episode:

https://sebastienne.dreamwidth.org/224443.html

( cut for spoilers for the first episode of an RTD two-parter season finale.. just like the good old days )

Delighted to have had the HTML tags for lj-cuts and links just flow from my fingers, even after years away. I don't really know any of you any more, but this place was my home for a very long time, and my body remembers.

I wish you joy and gentleness. We live in spirals.

Dear Dreamwidth,

You've been an important part of my life for a very long time, and Livejournal for even longer before that.

Seventeen years - that's half my life. My entire adult life.

You are part of my 1990s dream for what the internet could be - people connecting worldwide based on shared interests and values, in a facilitative creative space that isn't mediated by money or advertising. Primarily text-based (which used to be about Freedom from the Tyranny of Society's Gaze, to Create Ourselves as we Wish to be Seen, and these days is more about accessibility).

Now I spend most of my online time on Facebook (for socialising), Twitter (for politics), or Tumblr (for fandom).

But lockdown has crystalised how they're all, for me, ersatz. The sense of connection they give is absolutely real - but it's so attenuated compared to what can happen in person, over video, by phone, even by synchronous text messaging.

I feel like I'm becoming realer, not through creating myself an online persona which Perfectly Reflects My True Self, but through a real experiential being with other people. And I hate articulating this because I feel as if I sound like one of those tedious people saying "put your phones down and talk to each other!! godd!!" -- as if my phone isn't FULL of all the people I love the most in the world.

It feels like progress towards believing that I don't just have value through being the Cleverest or the Kindest or the Most Loyal or the Most Radically Accepting. That I don't have to have all the answers, to anything. Maybe I have value through just being.

Today, I am mostly going to be Being in the sea. (Which I'm trying to understand in terms of having intimacy with the natural world - see the 'Jade Mars' circle at https://www.instagram.com/farandpride/ for a (text on pictures, auto-scrolling, ugh) fascinating exploration of 'more-than-human' intimacy, and how it differs from my previous objectifying-colonising framing of 'being outside is Good for my Mental Health and I should Access This Benefit daily'.)


"sebastienne", as the name of this journal founded in 2003 comes from one part of the three-part characterisation I made of myself as a teenager - "Sebastienne, Alia, and the great unnamèd id".

Sebastienne was the glam rock part - artifice, decadence, glitter and velvet and steel. Determined, decisive, angry-fragile glamour.

Alia was the hippy part - nurturance, growth, nature, love and life. Gentle & bending yet grounded & strong.

They fit together like the face-tattoo in Hedwig, syncretic opposites, both tending towards something magnificent, in creative contrast with each other and destructive contrast with the id (which was where I put all the parts of myself I didn't like).

The names feel too femme-coded now. Sebastienne has long been in the ascendant through online usernames and feminist cabaret stagenames. It all smells of adolescent dramatisation.

But still, I'm thinking of all of those parts of me today. Integrating opposites, living paradoxes, preferring questions to answers.

Happy Solstice, Dreamwidth.

I'm having a lot of feelings about Doctor Who.

Like after a decade-and-a-half of desperately hoping, "but what if finally nu Who is giving us Rassilon, Omega, and the Other?"

Chris Chibnall came along and went "ehh but wouldn't you want your Gallifreyan lore to have more women and a more explicit critique of colonialism? also fantastic metal collars and somehow an Even Hornier Master?"

And, it's a fair point.

Still no genetic looms though.

I just watched the New Years' Day episode and I am hugging myself with glee.

She had an upgrade!

( spoilers )

( ETA )

I just finished reading the third Becky Chambers book - Record of a Spaceborn Few.

I've heard people saying that they missed the plottiness of the first two, but I actually adored the gentle slice-of-life style of this. Probably I'm just feeling overwrought but I cried quite a few times.

In particular I had Feelings about the socioreligious structure of Archivists and Caretakers - the former providing ceremonies for the recording of births and marriages, the latter a combined undertaker and funeral-officiator. I wanted to understand more about how this evolution of the sacraments intersected with care and community, though - and other big things that People Get From Religion. I suppose the hexes are community units, and a lot of the care/charity work of religions become meaningless in a society where everyone is fed and housed? Perhaps the reason I had so many Feelings is that the whole of the Exodus fleet had the feeling of a monastic life - everything Purposeful, with a good balance of Freedom and Knowing One's Place (in the safe-certainty sense rather than the subservience sense).

And ultimately the whole thing was precisely the hopepunk that I needed this week. Particularly Eyas, whose questioning and ultimate development of her vocation felt very timely to me.

If anyone has recommendations for similarly hopepunk books, I still have a couple of weeks before uni kicks off...

Dear internet,

I thought you should know that Doctor Who is good again. Tonight the Thames was actually a dragon, rich racists got punched, Bill Potts was perfect.

I'm on holiday! I think this is pretty much the first time in my life that I've just gone away for a week and stayed in one place, without a play to put on or an itinerary for travel. I'm in the Canary Islands with a couple of friends, trying to get some winter sun in my face in the darkest week of the year. It's pretty great.

Day 1: drove up the coast to Playa El Duque, a ridiculously luxe fake beach (they shipped it in from the Sahara to make it yellow enough for tourists who don't like the black volcanic sand??). Spent about six hours topless on a sun lounger, reading Terry Pratchett, eating ice cream, getting a massage (!), went in the sea a bit. (Fake coast is creepy as it has no ecosystem - so no danger from sea life either). Laura went foraging for lunch so I didn't even have to get up for food. This day completely lacked peril: 1/10.

Day 2: got up early to watch the sun rise over the red mountain. Found my way to a bit of coast, hidden round the corner by a closed beach bar, which had volcanic rocks with little rock pools in all the way down to the sea. Despite it being the early morning and having nobody in line of sight or shout, I decided to climb down to the sea on the steep, slippery rocks in plastic shoes. Spent the rest of the morning on a lovely volcanic beach and went in the sea some more; the clouds rolled in for the afternoon so I watched a lot of a Brazilian Hunger Games ish TV show called "The 3%". Promising start undercut by an uneventful afternoon: 4/10.

Day 3: coach trip up the volcano, Teide. After an incredibly early start (our isolated little village was the first stop on a never-ending stream of hotel pickups around the built-up coastal tourist sprawl) we started to climb, and climb. By the village of Vilaflor (at 4,600 feet) where we stopped for second breakfast at 10am I was definitely feeling the effects of the sudden altitude shift; dizziness and weakness. The feeling was something like a cross between the early stages of a panic attack, and being pleasantly drunk. By the time I got out of the coach in the caldera (7,700 feet) any exertion was making my heart pound painfully, and I felt frankly euphoric. So of course I decided to ditch my travelling companion and climb up a rocky outcrop (stopping every few steps to calm my sympathetic nervous system), well above the safety rails, to get a phenomenal view that I was almost too dizzy to appreciate. (The caldera is something like 45km across, and so wonderfully alien that it's been used by NASA to train peopole for moon landings.) Probably the single most foolish thing I did all holiday: 8/10.

Day 4: got up early to go climb the red mountain at sunrise. Was a bit surprised by the lack of redness; everything seemed the same generic grey-brown dust as the surrounding country. It was absolutely lovely; a smaller, older volcano jutting out from the south of the island, with views to the north all the way up to Teide, and views to the south of the uninterrupted Atlantic ocean. I went out past the handrail to the very south edge, and found a small shrine overlooking the sea. A memorial to a man, who looked so young in his photograph.

I watched a ridge of darker cloud slowly move in from the East, enjoying the shadow it cast over the land and sea, looking forward to some light summer rain; instead I was caught in a hailstorm just as I began my descent. As the rain fell the mountain became red; the brown dust dissolved or washed away, and the open scree-covered slope with a steep drop at either side became.. a challenge for my plastic shoes. But I made it down without falling over even once. And now I'm off to a watersports beach to maybe try body-boarding, if the sun comes back at all... so far, 6/10.

I'm glad to have got the (flocked) self-flagellation out of the way! Thanks to everyone who called that bullshit right out: my head's been stuck in that loop for a month. (Most of the time, I know that the game is unwinnable, and that I will fuck up, and that what matters is how I deal with it when I realise that's happened - in fact, didn't Lashings have a song about exactly that...)

It's been particularly powerful to have people I know I've hurt in the past tell me that I should create art regardless; because of course, that's the advice I'd give the performers of those shows that hurt me, alongside "maybe think about how you could reduce the negative impact of your show on the people you're trying to liberate?"

So, why else have I not been creating?

In part, it's the problem of having nowhere to perform - Lashings usually had to put on our own shows, build a space from the ground up; we wanted to be safe for people who'd avoid mainstream comedy and cabaret because of the prevalence of hate-humour & kyriarchal bullshit or the possibility of unwarned triggers.

I keep thinking that a YouTube channel could be the way forward: so much more accessible than putting on physical shows. But I know so little about film-making - all my skills are about engaging live audiences. And I'm an MC at heart - getting the audience going and introducing someone else with the actual skills. MCing made me feel like my love & enthusiasm for the people who performed in Lashings was contagious.

Ah, there's my answer - I'm not creating any more because I'm no longer part of a community of people with shared creative drives. And I'm not a student in a houseshare, I can't just stay up til 3am brainstorming with like-minded queers and reprobates.

But I've tried levelling up to "adult creativity", which I've seen modelled by friends writing novels - scheduling the time, making myself do it when I have the time rather than waiting for an inspirational flash - and I come up with lectures with jokes in, not cabaret-comedy. (Then again, "Adventures in Menstruating" made that genre absolutely *shine*, so perhaps I should not be so quick to dismiss the lecture format.)

There's always something lurking at the bottom of my to-do list that means I never feel "free" to spend time on creativity. Even when my life is pointedly part-time, supposedly leaving me space to pursue my own projects - it doesn't happen. So maybe it's a red herring, to worry that if I Commit To A Career I'll lose space in my life for creativity - I've barely been managing that anyway.

Techies the Musical

Charming silly show, that utterly split the room into "thesps" and "non-thesps" - as the show started with a chaotic whole-cast scene of trying to get the stage cleared (but the actors are warming up! but this prop just needs moving/fixing! etc!) half the room was waiting patiently for the show to start, and half the room (the half, I assume, who'd ever been involved in a theatrical get-in) were falling off their seats at the accuracy of the actors' warm-up games, at the casual rudeness in all directions, at the exasperation and the incoherence of the whole thing.

Plot was nothing to write home about - power-hungry director wants to make the Most Techincally Advanced Show Ever and doesn't care what health-and-safety rules she breaks to get there.

"You want to set the entire musical UNDERWATER??"
"Yes."
"But how are the cast going to SING???"
"Uhh, microphones?"

But for a fiver a piece - on the cheap side for paid shows, bloody hell this was not a cheap holiday - I'm very glad I snapped up some last-night tickets before they sold out.


Axis of Awesome

I'd pretty much just seen "4 chords" and "Elephant in the Room", and decided to book on the strength of those. If you've not seen Elephant in the Room, I'll give you a moment:



(If you can't / don't want to click that link, I'm afraid I couldn't find a transcript anywhere, but to summarise: one member of the band transitioned, and they've deflected all the shitty questions and assumptions into a song about how one of the other band members is now bald. "Lee, now that you're bald, do you like men now?" "No, because congenital alopecia has nothing to do with sexual orientation!" "Lee, now that you're bald, are you going to cut your dick off?" "None of your fucking business!" It is a work of fuck-you brilliance.)

So the thing that I take away from this is that it is possible to fill the Gilded Balloon Ballroom, every night, and pepper a silly comedy music show with nuanced comments about transmisogyny, about fucking-up and learning-from-it, without even slightly alienating a core audience of geekbros. Shame about the racism.


Gender Spanner

This is why I've been putting off finishing my review posts. I still don't know what to say about this. I can't tell if I hated it because it was on at midnight and I wanted to be in bed - or if I hated it because I was jealous, because I wanted to have created it - or if I hated it because it was deeply transmisogynistic - or if I hated it because there's only one body type that can do genderfuck striptease and it sure as shit isn't my body type. Probably, a little bit of all of those things.

I wanted to have made this - it was, fundamentally, a series of burlesque skits on the broad them of "feminism and gender identity", much of it very trad burlesque with a slightly radical-political twist. In so many ways it was everything that I had in mind in 2008 when I pounced on Annalytica: "hey, I've got a NYE gig for my filthy feminist songs, want to help me out?". This was alternate-universe Lashings of Ginger Beer Time, and it hit me right in my sadness that those dreams were derailed.

It was horribly transmisogynistic - appropriating transfeminine experiences only when it wanted to talk about how hard it is to be trans, and doing it in a way that was simultaneously deeply stereotyping and hugely evocative of violence in an almost gratuitously triggering way. Sexualising and gloryfying transmasculinity (talking lustfully about "silicone dicks") while desxualising and delegitimising transfeminity (talking patronisingly about "plasticine tits"). Lashings may have had our fair share of fuckups (particularly around racism) but surely we never did anything this hateful.

I could never do this - and so, we come to the climax of the piece, the genderfuck striptease. I'm.. so angry at it, even as I really enjoyed it. To see someone flicking back and forth between high-femme tassle-twirling body language, and super-macho pec-twitching body-language, was brilliant and liberating. The fact that I could never do either with my 36JJs feels like a side issue, but how could it not be central in my response? The ability to tell non-binary stories got tied right into the ability to use a naked body to perform "masculinity" and "femininity" in equal "convincingness" - for all the simplistic "sex-is-body, gender-is-mind" narrative that the show put forward, it all seemed to come back to the ambiguous body in the end.

And that just leaves me wanting to scream into the void, "fuck you fuck you fuck you".

Well what do you know? I think I finally found my dysphoria. Thanks, Gender Spanner, for causing me sufficient distress that I feel almost entitled to my transness.