Posts tagged: goth

History.

The Whitby Goth Weekend began around 13 years ago, and was originally only held once a year in October. It became so popular, that the organizers decided to hold it every six months. It has grown so much that one shop can take enough money over the 2 weekends that it doesn’t need to open for the rest of the year.

People travel from all over the world to come to the small fishing town. One person we met had traveled from Alaska! First time visitors maybe a bit confused when they first arrive in the town, as each side of every street has a different name (due to the person that was asked to draw up plans for the town was paid by the street name, so he named as many streets as possible.)

This Weekend.

Most people start the weekend early, arriving on the Thursday. It’s a night of meeting up in a bar with old friends or making new ones.

Friday is when most of the festivities start, when the Spa Pavilion hosts the first night of the bands, and for those that don’t want to see the bands, there was a burlesque night at the Metropole Hotel. There were several other events like bands playing in social clubs and bars.

Saturday daytime saw the dedication of the Sophie Lancaster Memorial Bench, which is situated near the WhaleBones on the West Cliff. There was also a Charity Bungee Jump called the Dracula Drop, for the Royal National Lifeboat Institute. The Goth weekend has got a long reputation of donating to local charities, usually the local Cat & Dog Shelter, but also this year there was the campaign for S.O.P.H.I.E. (Stamp Out Prejudice Hatred and Intolerance Everywhere) which was trying to get …

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Corporate Goth is a familiar expression in East Coast cities where people tend to separate their playtime from their workdays. I was living and working mostly in Washington, DC and Baltimore when I founded Blue Blood in print. I did primarily contract design work and most of the companies I worked for were conservative federal contractors, management consultancies, and lobbyists. My hairstyle at the time consisted of only natural colors, albeit definitely not colors which would appear striped together in nature. On my own time, I believed that shirt was spelled L-I-N-G-E-R-I-E. Heck, one of my neighbors harangued me from across the street, telling me I belonged in a whorehouse for what I wore just to clean my car. (I called the cops on her.) But, when I was seated at a computer in someone else’s place of business, I might not have looked like the most standard employee (or contractor). My clothes might have tended towards a darker palette and my hair was not really a businessperson’s cut, but it was usually businesslike enough. (When I worked at EDS, my manager did complain to my agency about my sexy stockings.)

This might go without saying, but I’m going to state the obvious here: I read a lot of cyberpunk at the time. I loved William Gibson and John Shirley and Richard Kadrey and Norman Spinrad and Pat Cadigan and Walter Jon Williams and George Alec Effinger and of course Bruce Sterling’s Mirrorshades anthology was seminal. The list goes on, but one of the salient points of the emerging cyberpunk genre at the time was that it acknowledged both street culture and corporate culture. Cyberpunk was, in many ways, first and foremost a sociological study of how the human …

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So Scar 13 and I wanted to blow off a little steam in a chill environment after work. We listened to Loveline as we rolled over to Boardner’s in my Town Car. We were not actually going to Boardner’s, but Scar had checked her camera at Bar Sinister the preceeding Saturday and tipsily forgotten it there, so she needed to pick it up. Fortunately, they were able to find it. Yay! She keeps her camera in this little pink sort of chamois slipcover. She mentioned to me that Bradical, who has been kind enough to loan us his house and his lemons (don’t ask), for photo shoots, calls it a pink sock. Pink sock is one of those awful phrases, like Dirty Sanchez, which you must learn the meaning of if you are going to successfully use the internet in the future. Apparently Bradical had run into Dr. Drew, of Loveline fame, backstage at some KROQ event and had decided to ask him impertinent questions about how Scar should run her sex life. He then dutifully reported Dr. Drew’s answers back to Scar, along with the definition of a pink sock.

So we listen to more Loveline on the way over to the gothic club night which is our destination. The guest is advising the best way for a woman to orgasm during heterosexual intercourse is to only insert the guy’s dick about a third of the way in and rub her clitoris. A third of the way in? How enormous is the penis we are talking about here? Anyway, I’m pretty sure the answer is a bit more varied than that and I think I could have helped the caller out way better. Loveline’s guest was …

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Speaking of Rachel Kramer Bussel, some of you who get various newsletters already know this, but Rachel did a really kickass interview with yours truly for the October 2007 issue of Penthouse Variations. It was a really good interview because Rachel asked really thought-provoking questions.

Oddly enough, you can order a subscription to Variations through Amazon, but you need to hit the newsstand in the next couple of days to get the October 2007 issue with the BlueBlood.com photos and Rachel’s and my brilliant words. Due to the way newsstand distro works, November starts the first week of October. Sort of. Then again, if you end up with the November 2007 issue of Penthouse Variations, then you will have the lovely Justine Joli on the cover and that is always a good thing too. The October edition says “DEEP INSIDE BLUE BLOOD’S CUTTING EDGE GOTH SCENE” on the cover, though, so you should be able to pick it out okay.

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Maybe I should post it here whenever Blue Blood gets a press mention, but I usually don’t. You all were great when I was feeling sad about one mean press bite, so I also wanted to share that I’ve been really happy about a mention we got on Dark Side of the Net recently.

Anyway, Carrie Carolin, the seemingly indefatigable editor of all things dark recently culled and updated her Dark, Goth and Horror Zines section and here is what she wrote about Blue Blood:

“BlueBlood.net - Highly recommended! The paper magazine is legendary, and its amazing companion website is worth visiting every day or two for new content. High quality articles and photos on fashion, music, and literature. Blogs, community postings, and a newswire, too. This is pretty much the center of the goth universe as it stands today. Extremely professional and high quality. Their MySpace page is here.”

I’m not sure precisely how long editor Carrie Carolin has been collating the best dark links on the web, but it feels like three reincarnations at least. I just checked and when I wrote her site up for Playboy in 1999, I referred to it as “Carrie Carolin’s respected and long-running Dark Side of the Net,” so it was already the gold-standard then and the site was hosted on Gothic.net before that and I think somewhere else before that, maybe a couple somewhere elses. So it is lovely to get positive coverage like that and that much more meaningful coming from such an esteemed source.

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