cleopatra wears floaties

2004-07-17 - 2:30 p.m.

i've been cleaning out my email today, and it's down to 53%, woo hoo! hasn't been that empty in a long time. because i save everything. and as soon as i can find a working printer i'll print out the rest and them my inbox will be empty. just imagine the possibilities. i could not check my email for months at a time and not worry about the computer eating them. isolation through cleanliness and organization! yeah!

hmm, makes me want to hear something different.

*switches from modern english, 'rainbow's end,' to alien sex fiend, 'isolation.'*

i've been listening to all the old goth favourites lately at work: bauhaus, sisters of mercy, siouxsie & the banshees, alien sex fiend, christian death, and also the trees, bel canto, (old school) cure, faith and the muse, tones on tail, joy division, etc. and my appreciation for the music is overwhelming and rather new. i mean, i always loved the beats and the lyrics, but now there's something else there that i've never heard before. i appreciate the organic sounds of the early stuff, particularly in christian death and the bauhaus. how you can hear every instrument on new model army's 'thunder and consolation' with nothing hidden or glossed over, nothing fine-tuned and left out. it's real and raw and amazing, the combination of sounds, the instruments and the words and the feelings behind them all.

i love punk, don't get me wrong. just the other day i was listening to the sex pistols and marveling at the intensity of it, the sounds that these boys who "couldn't play any instruments" made, how they conveyed such force, their anger and need for self-destruction. i began to truly understand punk towards the end of my semester in london. such a small island, people everywhere, in your face, you just want to start pushing them out of the way, get them away from you any way you can, whether it be yelling obscenities at them or scaring them off by putting safety pins through your cheek.

now it's as if i'm beginning to truly understand post-punk for the first time. there's still anger, still the need to push people away, but the despair comes through in post-punk, that and the beauty of what was being accomplished.

punk was the destruction of the world, and goth/post-punk was the dancing at the end of the world in the deserted streets.

i think that the pop-punk bands are cute as anything, but when measured against the true beginnings of punk, they seem almost obscene for their skewering of what punk was all about. music can be fun, and should be, but punk, it was more than music. it was about trying to deal with humanity, both the rest of it and being human yourself, and post-punk took that even further.

punk and thusly post-punk were simply amazing, how humans could take music and utilize that into a movement that stood for so much.

i've not researched it or anything. i've seen 'sid and nancy' and read most of mick mercer's 'goth rock,' but other than that all i have is the music and my own experiences to go on. this is what this music makes me feel.

back when i was living in boston i used to get pissed off at the net goths who made fun of vampire acolytes in the scene, because i have always loved vampires myself. true, the guys who'd show up at the clubs in a poet shirt claiming to be lestat in the hopes of getting laid were funny, but there were goths who both loved vampires and knew and loved the music for what it was. yet now i see that goth really isn't about vampires. it's not about vampires at all. they can be a part of it, but essentially the movement was about being human, not being undead.

goth, like every movement, like everything, will always have at least two types. there will always be people who dip their toes into the shallow end, maybe even wade out a bit, perhaps float, then get out of the water and never get back in. they'll regard it as a 'phase' and giggle as they show their friends pictures of the time they went swimming so many years ago, when they were young.

then there are people like me, who live in the water. they live on land, trying their best to be content but never being really happy, until something shows them the water. it could be vampires, a mixed tape, someone seen from a car window, but whatever it is, there is the water. and once we went in, be it slowly or diving straight into the deep end, we never want to come back out. sometimes we'll have to come out of the water for a time, but that's okay, because we know where the pool is, and we always come back. occasionally we'll pull out old pictures of ourselves on dry land to show our fellow swimmers, and we laugh.

religion, politics, music, what have you, there's always a scene for you. even the anti-scene is a scene. and you always know when you've found that scene, even if you don't quite understand why you're there. something just clicks into place, and you're swimming. you might try other pools, and there's nothing wrong with taking a few dips in the other waters, but eventually you'll find the one for you, and you'll never give it up. if you truly love it, you'll always be swimming.

and that's my opinion on the matter.
take that and swim with it.