Okay, 4th draft on top of whatever I was calling assembling it before it was drafts, and 18 months to get it to this. But done in the sense it goes start to finish and got heaps of pages (which is what makes it a novel yah?) and when I finished this read-through which I’ve been on since late last week, it felt … something sparked in my guts, like this, yeah, I wrote a novel. Brought some big offering into the universe. Alhamdulillah.
All that talk with Vass about Veneno reminded me I had a photo or two from way back then.
Young teen transsexual meet old auntie trans femme. Thirty-ish years between these two photos. Sometimes I need reminding.
That me back then … she survived.
I ugly cried watching Veneno. Ug. Ly. Cried. Also laughed my guts out. Hissed — hisssssed!!! at Cristina’s mother and family and all the other cis cunts who fucked with her and straight up I would cut without a second thought.
When Pose came out, that was the first time since Paris is Burning I’d seen myself in some recognisable way, and known it was us in front and behind the camera. It was America though and similar worlds, yeah, but very different ones too.
Veneno though … this was real. Truth. Painful, angry, joyful, hilarious, terrifying, spiteful, sad, beautiful truth. I love seeing us on screen. Old us who did it hard, survived, loud and foul-mouthed and cackling. Young us who have so many more possibilities for lives without harshness and exile, yet still know those all the same. If we are trans, if we are trans femmes, trans women — transsexuals, transvestites, the old words you don’t use anymore and we grew up with — this is our life. This is our world.
A question I got asked today. I’m writing a lot lately (a long overdue distant continuation of this), and well, sometimes I write, and sometimes nameless horrors what fancy themselves to be comedians write me (& cheers to Vass for leading me down the award ceremony trail).
“Tell me a truth time! What’s your porn category?”
“Hot Action Alien Tentacle Sex 6-Way Shemale Gang Bang?”
“That’s very specific.”
“Where all the tentacle suckers are James Franco’s face going ‘Eyyy, how ya doin’?’ in a shite Brooklyn accent.”
“That’s suddenly Category: Not My Fetish!”
“Bait and Switch, child! The Category is…—”
“Nightmare Porn!”
“Aw, steal my punchline, why doncha?”
“Just like Franco steals your award at the ceremony.”
“Tentacles take stage like Kanye at Taylor Swift, ‘Imma let you finish,’ rips Franco’s face off with razor-toothed Franco suckers.”
“Camera cuts to Xzibit in the audience, ‘Yo dawg, I heard you like James Franco Tentacle Suckers…‘”
“Shit just writes itself, eh?”
“It’s not a porn category unless it starts with ‘Hot Action’.”
“Amateur Porn? naah. Hot Action Amateur Porn? Now that’s a category.”
“Now That’s What I Call Hot Action Amateur Porn!”
“Volume 69.”
“The Soundtrack.”
“Hot moaning and grunting, wet sounds of skin slapping, screams of terror and ripping of flesh, ‘Eyyy, how ya doin’?’”
“Stop. Please. Stop.”
“Won’t stop, can’t stop.”
This one hit pretty hard.
There was a big Hokusai show in Berlin at (I think) Martin Gropius Bau a couple of years ago, I went to see with Dasniya. No Shunga. No pervy octopus tentacle porn. Not even a mention. But in Marbella, in the small but very nice MGEC Museo del Grabado Español Contemporáneo, in the very unexpected exhibition, Estampa japonesa — Imágenes del mundo flotante, amidst three rooms of Japanese Edo and Meiji era prints, a whole wall of Shunga. And this one, from Katsukawa Shunchō’s: series, Imayō irokumi no ito. One of my absolute favourites, just hanging on the wall in a small museum in Marbella.
On the afternoon of my hectic 36-hour round-trip to Marbella / Puerto Banùs, I had a couple of free hours in the afternoon. I could have slept, but I figured I’d be all perky at 10pm and needed some distractions. Museums, then. Yes, Marbella has one: MGEC Museo del Grabado Español Contemporáneo, in the old town, down an alley on the north-east corner of the big church (very tourist; much eye-watering Catholic art), in a former late-Renaissance hospital.
I hadn’t looked at the museum’s website properly, mainly because I was rather thrilled to have found any suitable distraction for the afternoon, and had no idea what to expect. Straight into Picasso and Miró. Straight out and up the stairs into 3 rooms of Japanese Edo and Meiji era prints. I really wasn’t expecting that. And I really, really wasn’t expecting to see Shunga in an exhibition like this. Saving on of those for its own post. That good. So here, without much elaboration, pretty much every piece in Estampa japonesa — Imágenes del mundo flotante. As usual, besides straightening, cropping, and a bit of colour-balancing, this is pretty much what my now rather old Panasonic LX7 saw. The lighting was awkward (the usual direct light glare on glass type nonsense), I am very out of practice in visiting museums and photographing art, they’re all on the underexposed side and tinted a bit blue … excuses. Fuck it. I’m not much for omens, but stumbling into this after the whole reason I was in Marbella in the first place was Pretty Bloody Significant, if you know what I mean.
In Oldenburg for the première of Das Helmi’s collaboration with Oldenburgisches Staatstheater, the “progessive feminist science-fiction soft-porno project” Gullivera’s Reise (and repeatedly realising I should have gone: London, train to Brussels, night in Brussels, train to Oldenburg, and not London, fly to Berlin, arrive at midnight, get a morning lift to Bremen, train to Oldenburg, arrive half an hour before the show). It was most excellent seeing the Helmi mob (including Dasniya Sommer and Solene Garnier) once again — the company I’ve seen more than any other.
Friday night was the second and last of this season, in the BANDEN! Festival, and after we joined the throng in the parking lot of Exerzierhalle for food and beer. And there was this bicycle caravan thing, delivering people from one party to the next. This thing was riding around Oldenburg at night like a deranged dragon pirate ship. I saw some mad good bikes in Oldenburg.
You thought I was joking about Dasniya only being in Berlin on a Tuesday? Right now she’s in Oldenburg, then she’s off to Warsaw, then back to Berlin to perform, then I dunno — too far in the future to scry. Definitely in Berlin in December with Das Helmi though. Plenty of rope/shibari/bondage/yoga workshops in November too (and Wellness to Torture is still the best name for a workshop ever).
Dasniya says:
Dear Rope and Theatre Friends,
the must-be event of the month is the Porn Film Festival 2016, starting next week. Check out my first photo exhibition Moviemento cinema! For November there will be five morning classes, and a bondage gig for Arte.
Also back in November: Yoga Shibari, and Self-Suspension #2.
Oil–burn your ropes and stay warm,
Dasniya
Here’s everything. You can also keep up with her news on her blog, Zur Zeit; on Twitter, @dasniyasommer; or her mailing list.
