the horizon of a brand

This is the "Art Blog" for one Leeah Swift, which is me which is she we are we

[leeaagghh]

Interview Pt. 16

Reporter McStrawman (RM): So what about “Valerie?”

Leeah Swift (LS): Who?

RM: The Amy Winehouse song?

LS: Oh yeah, that BBC recording…organ on every quarter, the guitar frolicking, the encouraging chorus of backup singers.

RM: Why on the mix?

LS: Just another one of those jams that’s not super heavy with pertinent meaning, but it’s just so good. The first time I heard it, I cried. It felt so vulnerable, like asking someone to come over, like asking for help, just, like, doesn’t come easy.

RM: To you, you mean?

LS: Oh yeah, reaching out is terrifying. Even opening my mail can send me in horrible anxiety. I usually go to other places, too. I just never find where I live that fun, most of the time. If I ever asked someone to come over, it would feel so wild, so unreal. Magic.

RM: You chose the track because of magic?

LS: Yeah, magic. It doesn’t make that much sense to me, but it doesn’t have to.

RM: How so?

LS: I feel, like, a gagging because this is probably going to be real cliché, but, like…ok, trying to pin everything down doesn’t, like, work. It doesn’t fulfill. I feel like facts are pride.

RM: What?

LS: I don’t know. Maybe it’s more about the delivery.

RM: What are you talking about?

LS: Facts. Maybe it’s more about why you’re sharing, how you’re sharing. Like, correcting people. I want to learn how to really let it go sometimes, like, what am I sharing a fact for? To impress someone? To contribute? To build myself up or to enrich everyone?

RM: Depends on the delivery.

LS: Yeah, definitely the delivery.

[leeaagghh]

i will be talking to my dad on the phone for the first time in more than three months, this conversation being prompted by my coming out to him as trans via email

he gifted me the roy orbison shirt i’m wearing 

[leeaagghh]

[leeaagghh]

I'm trying to get re-started on my Topside Press submission and a dialogue turned into bad improv comedy

[leeaagghh]

i drew this picture of a baby

[leeaagghh]

tell yr friends so i have people to pressure me to finish writing this self-indulgent hunk of potentially visually appealing scrap metal, thank you

[leeaagghh]

drawring

[leeaagghh]

A PICTURE OF THE DISEMBODIED ARTIST LEEAH SWIFT

[leeaagghh]

persisting in this whole Drawing Shit venture

[leeaagghh]

making attempts at self-portraits

[leeaagghh]

Interview Pt. 15

Reporter McStrawman (RM): Where’s the problem?

Leeah Swift (LS): Well, the problem is, like, why am I doing this?

RM: Well?

LS: I could cloak it in a “Well, I’m trans and there’s not that much representation so I need to change cis media to make it relatable,” but there’s a few things wrong with that sentence, I feel. I mean, there’s nothing necessarily wrong about it. It just feels sometimes that I am bending over backwards to make this shit trans and it’s like a game to me to distract me from other shit, including, like, media, art being made by queer and trans folks.

RM: That’s a good point.

LS: Well, it’s not really mine. A friend of mine, Neeah, has just said that a lot on her blog and I’ve really been attempting to internalize it. I mean, this viewing-cis-things-as-trans is fun, kind of funny, and has been psychologically helpful to me at a few points. “Just Like a Woman” is a perfect example of that, actually.

RM: Okay, we’re back on track.

LS: Yup! The reason her cover is really rad is because Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman” has, I believe, been called one of the most misogynistic songs in the history of rock and roll. So, number one, Nina Simone, a singer known for being a strong woman, a singer known for being a strong black woman, deciding to sing that song kinda stops you in your tracks.

RM: Yeah, definitely.

LS: but she fucking OWNS the song! She takes out one verse, the “her amphetamines and her pearls” one, because, honestly, there was no way salvage that verse. She changes the rhythm of the words and the length of the notes and the nature of the arrangement and, most important of all, in the last chorus, she changes the pronouns from third-person to first-person, owning it, essentially saying “Yeah, Mr. Dylan, I fake, I break, I take like a woman, so fucking what? I am a woman, get over it.“

RM: Whoa.

LS: Yeah, so, the whole trans thing for me is reading the leftover traces of contention towards to the third-person female subject of the song as, like, an inner struggle, hating and coming to terms with one’s femininity, which can be particularly angst-ridden and dissociating when it’s, like, a trans woman dealing with that. Plus, when I was in my “I don’t feel comfortable calling myself a woman right now, but I’m definitely not a dude” period, it felt good to sing along with that first-person pronoun bit in the last chorus, saying I did all these things “like a woman.” I wonder why, heh.

[leeaagghh]

Interview Pt. 14

Reporter McStrawman (RM): Your story’s gotten distracted by talking about how you get distracted.

Leeah Swift (LS): Yeah, heh…anyway, Laura Jane Grace talks about one of her earliest memories being seeing Madonna performing on TV and thinking to herself “That’s what I wanna do. That’s what I wanna be.”

RM: Seems like she got her wish, touring the world, playing arenas, openly being be a woman.

LS: Yeah, if only all such dreams were fulfilled.

RM: They can be. You and I are sitting at the precipice of a hypothetical future reality where you’re doing that, right?

LS: Right.

RM: Right, so dream on.

LS: Hah, thanks, that’s nice of you to say.

RM: I have the capacity.

LS: Haha, yeah, I suppose we all do.

RM: You’ve got dreams to remember, so it’s best you remember ‘em.

LS: True enough. I love that song.

RM: Me too. Anyway, let’s get back to Nick Cave-Nina Simone connection, which’ll let us get back to “Just Like a Woman.” I’m interested in what you’ve got to say about it.

LS: Okay, yeah, good call…Nick Cave has this one story about a time he met Nina Simone, you can google it and find this picture of the two of them. He’s wearing glasses and is visibly geeking out about meeting her. When she performed that night, he says he witnessed the performance transform her. He talks about that performance two or three times in his film 20,000 Days on Earth.

RM: and how is this trans?

LS: Well, I guess one could think of him watching her as similar to Laura Jane Grace watching Madonna, thinking “This is what I could do.” He’s certainly said that.

RM: He’s said he’s wanted to be a woman like her? Now that’s proof!

LS: No no no, he’s only talked about her informing his ideas about the transformative power of music. She herself has talked about it talking, saying in performance there are times she’s felt truly free, doing her best to define “free” as “no fear.”

[leeaagghh]

Interview Pt. 13

Leeah Swift (LS): What’s the next one?

Reporter McStrawman (RM): “Just Like a Woman” by Nina Simone. Is that a reference to the Bob Dylan tune?

LS: It’s actually just a straight up cover.

RM: Really? Nina Simone doing that song?

LS: I know, right? I mean, she had an amazing talent for doing other people’s tunes, most often rendering the original obsolete. That sort of transformative power is actually something Nick Cave admires about her.

RM: Does that play into your Nick-Cave-as-trans ideas? .

LS: Well, I mean, no, not really, but, like, it could be. One of the unnerving problems when I read things as trans is,like, I can do it with nearly anything. I’ve done it with an entire Fall Out Boy record. This “Just Like a Woman” cover has its own things that I look at through a validation-of-transness lens, and I’ll go into that in a bit, but I’ve never thought of Nick Cave’s admiration of Nina Simone as a trans thing.

RM: Your point is that could, though, right? and that’s a problem?

LS: Yeah, actually, like, check this out: Laura Jane Grace has talked about how her earliest memories are of gender dysphoria, an experience I don’t precisely identify with, I guess, I’m not sure…memories are hazy and hard to decipher.

RM: Where are you going with this?

LS: I’m getting there, sorry, I can distract myself really easily.

RM: I can tell.

LS: It runs in the family. My mom tells stories like that too, though it seems my sister has gotten a bit more streamlined. It’s taken the entrance of my brother-in-law into our family unit to have someone at the dinner table who will be like “Okay, focus, what happened to the story you started with?”

RM: which is what I feel like saying now.

LS: Haha, yeah, I bet.

[leeaagghh]

Interview Pt. 12

Reporter McStrawman (RM): So the next track is Antony and the Johnsons’ “For Today I Am A Boy”; I guess you could say that sounds like a guy at the first moments, plotting his infiltration of the TERFs, huh?

Leeah Swift (LS): I didn’t tell you what that meant so that you could make a, frankly, fucked up joke about trans women, ok? I mean, that’s barely even a joke; where’s the punchline?

RM: Okay, okay…so, did you want to say anything about what that song means to you, then?

LS: Nah, I think I’m good.

RM: Okay.

[leeaagghh]

Interview Pt. 11

Reporter McStrawman (RM): So why is it that you chose “Love Bomb” by Grinderman for this, out of all the Nick Cave tunes?

Leeah Swift (LS): There’s bit where Nick goes “I’ve been listening to the radio / tryin ta find some self-expression / I’ve been listening to The Woman’s Hour / I’ve been listening to Garden Question Time / but everything I try to grow / I can’t even grow a dandelion.”

RM: How’s that pertinent to the mix?

LS: It’s about trying to cultivate a self and getting hung up on the idea that there’s any wrong way to do that, ultimately believing that one has failed. I can relate to that and the mention of Woman’s Hour and gardening makes it easier for me to think of it as about being trans.

RM: So that’s your proof?

LS: It’s only one thing. It’s not “proof,” though; it’s a tool I use to cope, that’s it.

RM: Okay.

LS: Though, practically, linking it up with all of Nick Cave’s work, the Woman’s Hour thing is actually a little terrifying.

RM: How so?

LS: In his second book, The Death of Bunny Munro, which he was working on around the time that Grinderman wrote that song, the eponymous protagonist listens to The Woman’s Hour on the radio so that he can memorize what their talking about, so he can recite it later to build trust and a fake mutual interest with women he intends to sleep with.

RM: That sounds pretty skeezy.

LS: Yeah, if one compounded that with the idea that Nick Cave is a trans woman, I guess the fear of TERFs would actually mean something.

RM: TERFs?

LS: It stands for trans exclusionary radical feminists, I believe. Essentially, they hold the idea that trans women, or all femme-ish people who were assigned male at birth, are just men attempting to infiltrate feminist women’s spaces so that they can rape the women there.

RM: I guess that’s possible, though.

LS: Well, fuck, anything’s possible. That doesn’t mean it’s probable.

[leeaagghh]

Interview Pt. 10

Reporter McStrawman (RM): Where are you?

Leeah Swift (LS): I’m right here, talking to you. I don’t…I don’t understand.

RM: I can’t quite get a hold of what you’re feeling.

LS: Um, I mean…do you have to? Is that necessary?

RM: At first, it seemed like you were trying to not impose your ideas about a famous person onto them, also trying not to make your friends uncomfortable—

LS: Is this necessary?

RM: —then you made that turn at the end there; what was that?

LS: Is this—

RM: Necessary? Was it anger? Why are you angry? Because your friends aren’t agreeing with you? Because Nick Cave isn’t trans?

LS: What?!

RM: You have no ground. Some people are just comfortable with their gender.

LS: Yeah, I mean, there is some very, very small part of me that’s, like, more mildly resentful than angry that he isn’t transfeminine, but that part’s honestly so negligible that I could’ve gone without mentioning it at all.

RM: Then why did you?

LS: Because of your drill questioning? Your quest to know if or why I’m angry. Well, guess what? I’m fucking angry now!

RM: I was just trying to—

LS: You should do this type of analysis after the interview! You’re not my fucking therapist? You are Reporter McStrawman and you are interviewing Leeah Swift, hypothetically future-known for her contributions to music, because she just came out to her mother as a trans woman, attaching a mix to the letter, and we’re talking about those songs. You came to this interview ill-prepared, with seemingly little investment in talking to me, which has transformed into a persistent, intrusive, voyeuristic, disgusting lust for a defined sense of my insides. I couldn’t give you the “why” for it, but that is what’s happening right now.

RM: Okay.

LS: Okay?!

RM: Yeah.

LS: Good.

[leeaagghh]

i realize there are only so many people that look at this blog, let alone follow the interview “series” i’ve been posting, but, like, for those who care,,,

it’s gonna be a comic

eventually 

what i’ve been posting are just the mind’s piss first drafts, so it will be better than what i have been posting here, believe me.

plus, the visual aspect