Mary Rose Cook

I live in London now, but I used to live in Leeds. When I was there, I was heavily involved with a volunteer-run social centre called The Common Place. I helped with a number of things there, and one of the events we did was a club night called Harder Faster Louder. The idea was to have an evening where DJs only played the most brutal music, but from a mix of genres: hard-core, death metal, breakcore, dark d&b, gabba, grind and noise.

I had really high expectations, because brutal music seems one of the few genre-spanning genres. Many people into death metal also like breakcore. Many people into gabba also like hard-core.

Hardly anyone came. And I’ve always hoped that someone else would give it a go and maybe do it better than us and make it work.

I always knew music was better, and now I know why.

When it is live, as it should be, it is a performance. Anything can happen when I am on stage. I might find some new, more beautiful, sadder melody to sing; my laptop might explode; I might be see my own thought in the face of someone in the audience; I might sing louder and change the whole character of the song; I might finally realise what I’m singing about.

Films are different. The artist creates the art, distributes it, and then it is static. That is fine, but I find it less compelling. The default mode for music is to have some sort of live, unpredictable interaction with the audience, whereas director Q&As just don’t happen very much.

However, Tracy + The Plastics are slightly different. They are a band that blend live music with live video. Wynne Greenwood, playing Tracy, stands on stage and sings in front of a projected video that shows her acting out the parts of her band mates, Nikki (keyboards) and Cola (drums). The interesting part is that Greenwood puts pauses in her videos and sections where she converses or even argues with her bandmates.

So, what Greenwood has achieved is live, unpredictable film:

I didn’t upgrade my MacBook Pro to 10.5 until I got home from the Berlin tour. (It would have been a shame if the Live/Leopard mix had made my computer explode on stage.)

I finally inserted the DVD and got cracking last night. I selected the upgrade option, some things whizzed, the computer restarted, the desktop appeared, and then everything slowed the fuck down.

Opening a new Finder window took thirty seconds. Launching TextMate took five minutes.

The solution was to do a clean install, then restore my files from a backup.

I have no idea what screwed the upgrade - I had done a clean install of 10.4 relatively recently, I’m not some freakfuck haxie fucktard and my setup and configuration is exactly the same as it was when I was on Tiger.

For reference, I installed on a first generation 15” MacBook Pro w/ 2GB RAM which had the following applications on it: Transmit, TextMate, Quicksilver, Coda, eMusic Download Manager, Firefox, Live 6.0, GraphicConverter, PodWorks, YourSQL, iTerm, Ruby, Rails, MySQL and Tascam US-122 audio/MIDI interface drivers.

Theresa, the lovelz ladz who is putting Matt and I up in Berlin and acting as our tour guide, advised me that Germans are sick of people sazing Ich Bin Ein Berliner because thez’ve heard it a lot before.

We are having lots of fun in Germanz. Zesterdaz, I went to meet Theresa after she had finished Uni. Unfortunatelz, Matt took the map so I had to ask mz waz there. I said a lot of “Etschooldigong”, followed bz mz two-second guide proceeding to conduct matters entirelz in English.

Must go to breakfast with Theresa-resz and Mattieu.

Contact

mary@maryrosecook.com

Masks Elsewhere

Art

They say that you can judge a person by the contents of their bookshelves. Well, here is a very small selection of mine:

If you like even one of these bands, check them all out: Heavens To Betsy, Love Lost But Not Forgotten, Tracy + The Plastics, Maximillian Colby, Xiu Xiu, Dilute, The Fakes, Huggy Bear, The Need, Sweep The Leg Johnny, The Paper Chase, Circle Takes The Square, Converge, Sextional, Will Haven.

The same might not be true for these books: Love And Death And Other Disasters, The Secret History, V For Vendetta, Stirfry, Tipping The Velvet, Frog And Toad, 1984, Gifts Of The Body, The Eighteenth Emergency, Goodbye To Berlin, Rotary Spokes, Potential, The Scarecrows, The Lost Garden.

Or these films: Heat, When Night Is Falling, Goodfellas, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Swingers, Bound, The Thin Red Line, Go Fish, The Insider, L’Auberge Espagnole, Betrayal, Sneakers, Malcolm X.

Technology

Hosting: TextDrive. A bit flaky when it comes to uptime. Good for Rails, but one can’t help feeling that the Official Rails Host should be able to make it a bit easier to deploy your application.

Diary software: custom Ruby on Rails application written in a couple of days.

Database: MySQL.

Development tools: TextMate (code editor), YourSQL (desktop SQL client), iTunes (noise), Transmit (file transfer client).

The title begins a quote by Claude Cahun (1894-1954). It appears in Cahun’s book, Aveux non Avenus, and in the original French it reads, “Sous ce masque un visage. Je n’en finirai pas de soulever tous ces visages.”

There is disagreement on the English translation of the second part of the quote:

“Beneath this mask, another mask. I will not stop peeling off all these faces.” - Neue Gallerie, an exhibitor of Cahun’s work.

“Beneath this mask, another mask. I will never be finished lifting off all these faces.” - Printed on the inlay of V For Vendetta’s album, Beneath This Mask, Another Mask.

“Beneath this mask, another mask. I will never cease to carry all these faces.” - Some random person on flickr.

Regardless of the translation, the quote is the closest I’ve come to defining both blogging, and my queerness.

Masks And Blogging

I used to keep a secret diary. I gave myself a pseudonym, and also gave all those who featured in the diary some sort of false name, generally based upon an applicable adjective.

The point of all this obfuscation was to allow me to write totally freely - put down my innermost feelings and saddest thoughts and deepest fears and desires. In short, to say everything, whilst maintaining complete privacy for me and the people I knew.

However, despite the diary being pretty frank, I still left stuff out and changed events and reinterpreted motivations and was too easy and too hard on myself. Inevitably, I wanted to project an image - to don a mask - both for me and my unseen readership.

All my representations of myself are masks: Facebook, Twitter, this diary, the real world, my reflection in the mirror.

Does one ever peel away the final mask?

Masks And Queer

The translations of Cahun’s quote have different tones. The first is sort of combative, saying: I will not stop changing the way you perceive me. The third is much sadder. It makes Cahun sound like she is not evolving, just becoming more burdened by her projections.

I transition from gender to gender and sexuality to sexuality. I think there is probably a close coupling between the two: boyish lesbian became girly straight became androgynous whatever. The umbrella term for all this is queer, but, by definition, the word queer doesn’t really mean anything. Like situationism.

So, each new combination of gender and sexuality is a new mask that I wear for a while and then stuff in my little black rucksack.

But, sometimes, I think there is a face under there somewhere.

I keep on finding these little notes inside the books on my shelves. Each note describes why Alice likes the enclosing book, what it means to her, why she thought I’d like it, why she wanted me to read it.

About two years, Alice and I had a correspondence. She was putting together a cassette of spoken word performances and, coincidentally, I’d recently read some of my own short stories into the little microphone on my laptop and played the recordings back out to a tape deck.

We got to talking via email, initially about the tape, but increasingly about our lives and our favourite bands and our dreams and our Mums and our teddy-bears and and our sexual identities. We imagined each other into our walks and nights out and crafternoons. Emails developed into letters and letters grew into parcels; parcels of books and CDs and little sketches and home-made stickers and notes.

We kept up our correspondence for about a year, but our letters dwindled, and then stopped. She got a new girlfriend, I started seeing a new boy.

But each time I find one of those notes, I go back to that time, and feel how I felt.