Stochastic Musings – On Art and Other Musings

This month our former Transvamp and current Stochastic Muser, Miss Kalina Isato, muses on art, art galleries, hair art and acting as if every meal might just be your last. If you recognize names like Degas, Cezanne and want to get to know Kalina’s brother-in-law then this is the Stochastic Musings that you don’t want to miss. Read on.

I’ve been taking a class on nineteenth century Impressionistic art in Europe this summer. It’s a six-week class with 12 sessions of which two are devoted to a midterm and final and there are two papers due around the midterm and final. Each class is two to three hours long and there’s tons of material to cover in this really compressed time. For the midterm, I had to memorize the titles, artists, and dates of 138 paintings and compare and contrast ten of them that were randomly selected. I also had to write my heart out in the essay portion of the test. There are only two weeks left and we have a research paper of ten pages due as well as a final exam on the last class day. This is really crazy! Overall, I’m learning a lot and it’s quite enlightening.

Did you know that there were artists in the area who painted androgynous figures in their works? Edgar Degas, known by some critics as being misogynist, liked making his female nudes look hideous. He created a number of images in pastel giving them a surreal look. His female nudes had very small breasts and not much of an hourglass shape. Cezanne had an affinity for hermaphrodites as shown in his paintings called The Large Bathers and The Conversation. Look for hidden penises in the paintings. He even painted his wife to look kind of manly. Gauguin met the mahu in his Tahitian travels. The mahu were considered a third sex in Tahitian culture.

• I got my first art gallery exhibit! The William Way Community Center saw my online gallery and loved my Clublife series. The gallery will be exhibited in November and December of this year. I’m going to make sure my exhibit will be amazing. All of the images will be for sale and a percentage of the proceeds will go to the community center.

• I got my hair colored and cut earlier this month at The Saturn Club Hair Salon. Elisabet, a pretty Albanian woman, was billed as a senior stylist with over ten years of experience. She revealed that she actually had ten more years of experience as a hair stylist in Europe. “Do you have experience cutting Asian hair?” I asked. She said that four of her clients yesterday were Asian. Not too farfetched given that the salon is on the Penn campus. “Here’s the deal,” I said to her while showing her my pictures from Monday Night Tgirls, “this is me and I want my hair colored and cut so I can continue doing these hair styles.” “My God, you’re beautiful,” she said. She actually wanted to keep the length of my hair more or less as-is, but I insisted it be shorter and still allow me to do my hair wings. “Don’t worry, honey, I know what to do,” she said. We got to chatting about family, food, foreign languages, and such and I knew just when to be quiet so she could do her job. Thirty-six wax papers containing hair coloring were added to my hair to create highlights. Elisabet washed and cut my hair after the highlighting. She gave me a cute little shaggy layered cut where the ends flip up. She showed me how to change the look of my hair using pomade, which I discovered independently on my own, and it was a fun learning session. The cost of the color and cut was only $110, quite reasonable actually. I like the way my hair bounces when I walk.

• I opted to go to my nephew Paul’s thirteenth birthday instead of celebrating Pride Day in Philly this year. Having missed Paul’s last six birthdays, I felt obligated to go. Except for my nephew and niece, everyone else looked the same. Whatever they remembered of me last time we spoke, it was asked again, as if time stood still for them. My brother in law is a gargantuan man, eating three plates of food with a hot dog, a hamburger, and a turkey burger as entrees on each plate. Sides included garden salad and pasta salad. Everyone, from the kids to the 60+ devoured huge slices of birthday cake with big scoops of ice cream next to them.

“Good fucking God,” I said to my wife later. “Your family sure eats a lot, especially your brother. His mother-in-law must weight 400 pounds!”

“He looks like he’s gained a lot of weight,” she said, “and she’s been trying hard to lose weight.”

“Wasn’t he on Nutrisystem or Jenny Craig or something?” I said.

She shrugged.

“I wonder if he only counts the turkey burger when he talks about eating healthy,” I said. “And I wonder if he knows that ranch dressing is going to make that turkey burger just as bad as the beef burger.”

My brother-in-law isn’t transgendered but the way he eats is similar to the way I see many transgender women eat. They eat every meal as if it were their last. That’s never a good thing.

• I’m working on two books right now, one called How to do Glamour Makeup and another called Passable. How to do Glamour Makeup is meant to augment and even replace Secrets to an Awesome Makeover, my best-selling glamour makeup guide. In it, I will delve into more makeup techniques than most makeup guides will give you and you will learn how to conquer the male face and make it look female through the power of makeup. Passable is an ambitious work meant to help transgender girls learn about and develop one of the keys to their success in their transgender lives. I will draw from many, many examples in my life and others, go into various do’s and don’t’s, citing specific examples, and help girls understand that passability requires more than just having confidence.

Are you ready to learn the secrets to becoming super glamorous and super passable? Just order copies of my videos, Secrets to an Awesome Makeover, Natural Makeup Techniques, and Totally Natural available here.

Category: Style, Transgender Opinion