the songs of song
syllabus of stygia
epistle upon the casuals
hymns
self portrait
story
question and garden
There is only one music and one song. All other music is an echo of this most primal lullabye. Here I will list a very few intrinsic Gothic bands which are not corrupted by the taint of despicable musics. Here is a simple list of bands and their greatest expressions:
- Joy Division 1977 (single: Love Will Tear Us Apart 1980)
- Siouxsie and the Banshees 1977 (album: Song from the Edge of the World
1987)
- The Cure 1978 (album: Disintegration 1989)
- Bauhaus 1979 (single: Bela Lugosi's Dead 1979)
- Dead Can Dance 1982 (album: A Passage In Time 1991)
- This Mortal Coil 1983 (album: Filigree & Shadow 1986)
- Sisters of Mercy 1984 (album: Floodland 1987)
BLD is available on cd in England; try Press Eject and Give Me the Tape
Prime: Joy Division (Love Will Tear Us Apart, Closer), Bauhaus (The Sky's Gone Out, Press Eject and Give Me the Tape, Bela Lugosi is Dead), Rozz Williams's Christian Death (Only Theatre of Pain, The Decomposition of Violets), Chrysotomos Alas (My Kissless Sister Ophelia), Sisters of Mercy (Floodland), The SWANS (The Burning World), Cure (Pornography, Faith, Disintegration), Siouxsie and the Banshees (Join Hands)
Derivita Prime: New Order (Movement), Shadow Project, Poesie Noire (Oblivion)
Secund: Legendary Pink Dots (Island of Jewels), This Mortal Coil (It'll End in Tears, Filigree & Shadow), His Name Is Alive (Livonia), Dead Can Dance (Passage In Time, Toward the Within), And Also the Trees (And Also the Trees), The Birthday Party ()
Trine: Lycia (Ionia), Black Tape for a Blue Girl (Ashes in the Brittle Air), Miranda Sex Garden (Suspira), Faith and Disease (Beauty & Bitterness), Mephisto Walz (Terra Regina), Requium in White, Screams for Tina, Lucie Cries, All About Eve, Sky Cries Mary, Faith and the Muse, Siren Song, Rehearse And Remember O Somerset Embers (Moreso Chastity than Love)
Of Interest: Cocteau Twins (garlands, treasure), You Shriek, Shelleyan Orphan (Century Flower, Hellesbourne), Nick Cave, Diamanda Galas (Plague Mass), Marc Almond (Torment and Toreadors), The Cranes (Wings of Joy), Depeche Mode (Black Celebration), Virginia Astley (Hope in a Darkened Heart)
Avoid: Heavy Metal, NIN, Type-O Negative, Marilyn Manson, Death Metal. Unless you like them, then partake as you see fit -- enjoy. Play loud & long.
Although unpleasant, ravers are not the Casuals I speak of. Island thought so, but I have told him time and time again that most ravers are Dream Children, without Hearts. They do not oppose the Gothic Scene per se, although bright colors and loud, cheerful music is their apparent mainstay. Neither are the Skins the embodied Casuals. Most Skins really don't care about the Gothic Scene, which is good, because they could thrash us unto bloody pulps. Punks are not Casuals; if they thought about it they'd not really mind our existence, as we do not oppress their freedoms although they might not like our constraints and premeditated artistry.
Casuals don't exist outside of moments and attitudes; that is, no one is a Casual unless they oppose the Gothic Scene, in its aesthetic or populace. For the most part these folk provide a minor irritant but being nibbled to death by ducks is not condusive to a poetic life. It is the Casual that will spread rumours about the Scene, sow dissent, and spread complaints through the Scene.
Here, I have listeed the complaints commonly spread by Casuals and the responses you might edify yourself by and vary due to circumstance.
The main complaints seem to be:
1) Goths are pretentious.
Considerate Response: All intelligent humans pretend to some level or another and pretentions keep society alive, especially the Gothic society, which thrives on artful living and dreamy worldviews.
Insult Response: We are pretentious but you are philistines and dullards.
No Response: So?
2) Goths are posers who whine and pretend they're so dark and evil, well I know a darkness that would make most Goths shit.
Considerate Response: It sounds like you don't know much about the Gothic Scene, even if you were in it once. You must have kept your heart shut to the beauty of darkness, its swooning love.
Insult Response: Is that why you abhor the Gothic Scene? Your trousers are filthy? You are obviously the shite within the darkness.
No Response: No we aren't, no we don't, and you know very little.
3) Goths have no sense of humour.
Considerate Response: Depends on the Goth. Most try to maintain a sense of dignity and a sense of humour both.
Insult Response: We allow you to live. I'd say that's a joke but not to my taste in humour.
No Response: *laugh*
4) We don't know what Goth is. Is this Goth? Is that Goth? Am I Goth? This must be Goth! I'm Goth because I do this and that and like them too!
Considerate Response: If you don't know what Goth is, your heart is closed. Try observing the Scene rather than polluting it with fragmented opinions and unfit creatures. If you're Gothic, it's because of your expressions and affectations, which are the exterior signals and evidence of your heart's nature.
Insult Response: You're not a Goth. Go away, you're breathing on my velvet.
No Response: Oh.
5) Are you a vampire? Vampires suck. If you think you're a vampire, you're crazy.
Considerate Response: If I were a vampire, I'd consider the articulation of your statements and respond in a fashion I thought best in keeping with the nature of your query, if I thought it mete to respond at all. My relation to sanity is not an issue for me. Sanity is a belief that was generated out of superstition, much like the belief in sin. I am more concerned about comfort and discomfort, sympathy and apathy, and whether or not I'm late for my bus. Are you late for yours? Might you not check your schedule?
Insulting Response: That's all you ever talk about: vampires, witches, satanists. Go join a Church.
No Response: It doesn't matter to me what any are.
Also, there's a habit of Casuals to play music that's blatantly not Gothic and claim it's a Gothic band of some sort, especially to someone who doesn't get the chance to listen to much music or is new to the Scene. Make certain you have your own music before you make any judgement on it, or be certain your friend would not lie and misrepresent the music you're hearing. And if someone announces to you they're Goth or dresses or acts that way, do not judge them by their status, judge them by their behaviour and as an individual, not as a representative of all you stand for. A few Casuals dress as Goths in order to give Ours a bad name or to confuse Ours.
Gray banner in the snow
I drew a name under the rippling silk
My fingers gone crisp in the white ice
And I saw my love.
Grey lips halve the sky
I fingerpaint an unseen kiss
And bite my fingertips
And I saw my love.
Grey belly to my belly
I strangle hushed my heart
Til my youth with you is flooded
And you fled from me, beloved
Break open, boat. All boats jostle in the riven ocean;
It's a field of spar and deck, a forest of crow's nests.
Break open. The green juice swallows your feet.
Heave-ho! No islands but the sunken.
The charts are pale as poison. The sky is drowning tonight.
Break open, boat. Tonight I spit the rivers fifty fold.
Tonight, my mother is the silver dame of all mirrors.
Tonight, you are my father and my father doesn't know me.
Look, husbands to your wives. Wives, close your eyes.
Break open, boat.
I am drowning in thirst. My lips are rose. Ghosts make our deathbed. I yawn on your poor thighs til your thighs go rose. More flowers. Draw back a cowl and kiss a cowbell. We can say we said that we cannot sing a song.
We cannot sing the long lyric of teeth on wax-smirched skin. On our
throats are impressed intaglio to be translated on the deathbed. We are
children of the night imprisoned undercover. Inquisition our howls.
I cannot abide the silence in the world. Dust, chime out as you fall, make the unseen death of birds a startling funeral. Dear, build a cathedral of splintered glass and two kisses from each mouth.
Light fractures on moisture. The candle is a crucifix. In every candleflame, I am and am in hell, kissing lucifer's sad lips, teaching the feathered demons to speak, and in my moments consumed by white sparks, I hold an unlit candle protected to my breast. Come time to sleep, dream of metal lakes and your flowery skin. My hand is on your brow, cold and soft as the child you wanted as your kin.
a.
If I were to awaken from my skin, startled to the warm outside my corpse, I would sigh for the loss of friends reduced to dreams no matter how beloved, and in the end digested into the factor from which they figured: that invisble heart, an organ so fragile it would evaporate if percieved.
the holy of holies: a mystery of penultimate weakness.
b.
are you afraid of death? let's hold hands and speak of silence. i will never hurt you. we will both die, given time, beloved. i am afraid of death. my love is quiet in me. your hand is warm.
A hen cut my hair; I take responsibility for rubbing wax and menstrua into
the coarse fibres. I, September, have backwards spit-curls before the
round of my ears, eyes the color of winter thistles, and skin the lightest
shade of coffee there is, lighter than dun, darker than the dreams of
kettles. My fingernails are black to match my hair. My clothes are not
velvet yet, but I accept donations and gifts. Silk and velvet in all the
colors inside clasped hands. My girlfriend is slowly entering my
cinderstrewn heart.
large floppy black hat on his circle head. two eyes and a straight
moodless mouth, a line under the two eyes. he is drawn in black crayon, a
stick figure with combat boots and a cheap raincoat.
I'm five foot seven and weigh eight stone, no, closer to seven stone. A delicate eurasian face whelmed by disordered black wavy hair: mine. Also mine: thick eyebrows, brown irised eyes, a slender and small nose, cupid's bow lips, rough stubble when I forget or am inable to shave, and nice collar bones.
Scars are all over my inner arms, a bracelet of cigarette burns gone
incomplete on my left wrist. My stomach hurts a lot sometimes and gives
me trouble. My eyes are myopic so I often squint. I'm aging. Say a prayer
for me.
- ever and anon
Okay. My story is a hyrda, flaccid as though built of water and to be perfectly honest its head is composed of many limbs, resembling a bevy of onyx serpents or a feather duster half-seen in an unlit chamber. Here is the first goth I met: several persons in each of three cities. Before I knew what goth was, I was a strange character. I talked to trees. I shot strangers with my finger. And as Gormenghast was to Titus (you have of course read Titus Groan, haven't you? well, haven't you?), so was all the world to me: a never-never land composed of poesy text and nacre-litten wonders.
I spent half my life in Riverside, California, a city that was my bride among cities. Riverside is naturally a desert so all vegetation unsuited to desert-life dies and is dyed green at the taxpayers's expense. Naturally occuring fissures in the earth emit faint vapors which contain, among other elements, strong traces of methane. The first goth I met was Wade Racine and that was in University Heights Middle School but then... he was a sad boy who had a quiet voice and a brilliant mind; he was not of Ours yet. He would grow up to be head of the Camarilla, a vampire game fanclub. Now his hair is black, a "dyed-in-the root goth"
But the first goth I met was in Riverside, California, where I attended John Wesley North High School. Her name was April Cox. It was after Wade had left California and I decided everyone was an enemy. April gave me a reflective stone, a shining bit of hematite. We never spoke, then or after. I am not sure she was really goth or if I imagined her. My memory is wont to spontaneously generate events, giving lie to any reality my history might have. Ah well.
The first goth I met was in Riverside, California; she was a white haired monster, a gold-eyed monster, a monster of powerful sexuality and a sinister aesthetic that influences me to this very day. But I spoke with Jeanne-Marie Hamilton (for that is her name) just last year -- over the phone -- and she is no longer goth! None of Ours ever leaves so she, although darkclad and ghastly, was never goth; although more gothic than Poe himself. Maybe she was lying to me, though. Jeanne-Marie lies so well she could someday be a novelist. Let's leave her in the mythic past and my love faints before it reaches her. Evil lady.
No, the first goth I met was in Boston, five years after I exiled myself from Riverside. Her name was Lora and she was inhuman. I say "was" because it's problematic to talk of Lora in present tense; her very being is too sharp for any moment to compass. Her voice is brittle. Her eyes are unholy. She moves as if on liquid strings, a marionette shaken by bone angels. Although she is very pretty, she terrifies me so. Yes, there was the first goth I met...
One Winter I was in visiting New Haven where I lived til a week after Valentine's Day... and there I slept a week in a black mansion where a secret woman stays. The room she sleeps in is always cold. She does not enjoy leaving her perennially unlit chambers. The lightbulbs are cloudy and of unsettling hues. Ghosts whelm her paintings and spirit away rude visitors. Her pet cats offer their pulsating bodies to guests who stay the weekend. Nights are horrors. Days are intoxicated on cigarette smoke and space itself stretches, yawning in the dreary winter light.
And now I am a goth alone.
And I have lied to you and to myself.
And I love you all, good night.
Are turnips gothic?
Only while the root vegetable is underearth, cthonic so to speak, while winter spreads her gelid dominion in the air and all air touches, yea, is that root vegetable gothic.
~finished upon feburary's tenth eve,
anno domini nineteen ninety six,
upon midnight's hour,
authored by September, who by mortal law
is recognized as Lloyd Warren Ravlin the Third
pray for ours, we are hearted.
