I call it glam goth: Adam Lambert at the the American Music Awards, Lady Gaga’s photoshoot for Out magazine, Miley Cyrus in black eyeliner, Rihanna in a hasp collar, and sparkly vampires. Peter Murphy’s cameo in New moon is a long way from the opening scene of the Hunger. Bela Legosi really is dead. Goth is dead. Long live the new goth.

The gothsters (hipsters but wearing vinyl and platform heels) moan and groan that it’s not really goth. That it’s faux-goth. It’s surface level goth like Rihanna’s little foray into fetish wear in her Disturbia video.

Goth is much deeper and more meaningful like the Cure’s Lovecats.

Besides, goth isn’t fashion. It’s about the music. Of course, that music ranges from early darkwave to industrial to it’s current EBM/electropop phase. It’s goth if it gets played in at goth clubs? I guess this means Nirvana was goth for the 2 years the deejays overplayed Smells Like Teens Spirits.

Goth has always been about the exploration and acceptance of the darker nature of things. Who’s to say one person’s search is more valid than another’s?

The current economy coupled with the realization that some things will never be fixed is getting the mainstream to take a hard look at the Yin. Goth isn’t doom-and-gloom. Goth is the permission to look at those things that balance the light.

With the success of New Moon, which almost made more than the new Batman on opening weekend, Hollywood is repackaging goth (NCIS, the Vampire Diaries, Interview with a Vampire remake with Robert Downey Jr.) as I’m writing this. Last weekend, my friend Brad brought his corporate co-workers to one of the goth nights. The mainstream is flocking to see what the fuss is about.

It’s nice to see people learn to play in the dark. Just as long as it’s not slit-your-wrist dark because that would be emo and that’s faux-goth, too.

Category: I'm not goth | 0 - Leave a comment

A few days ago at Milk Bar, someone came up to me and said they liked watching me dance. It was the second time in a week. And even though neither time involved large bills and a pole, I chose to interpret them as compliments anyway.

Dance is a big part of my life. For that, I blame a girl. Tiffany stood me up on a fateful Wednesday 18 years ago. I can’t remember the name of bar, but they had alternative nights on Wednesdays. I waited 30 minutes and was just about to leave when Blister in the Sun started playing.

I liked Tiffany. It had taken months to work up the nerve to ask her out. When she didn’t show, it was just another let down in a long line of disappointments. I didn’t want to be alone and so I went to the crowded dance floor. I had nothing to lose so I danced.

Before that night, I had danced only once, in junior high, when a friend asked me at the last school dance. The deejay was playing Bryan Adams. Yes, my first dance was to Bryan Adam’s Heaven and I’ve since learned to live with it.

Seven years later, I found myself doing who knows what to the Violent Femmes. I have these horrible images of me doing some version of the Elaine dance from Seinfeld. I’ve blacked out that part. However, I remember a feeling of release once I started dancing. Of letting all the crap in my life melt out of my body as music filled it. There wasn’t room for both.

From that moment I was a club kid. For a period of four years, I was dancing 4-6 night a week often driving to Denver and Boulder to get my dance fix. When I say I went dancing, I mean I went to dance. Often as soon as I walked in, I would put my coat on the nearest empty chair and go immediately to the dance floor and stay there the entire night, all three plus hours, leaving maybe once or twice to get a drink of water.

Dance means different things to different people. Some people dance to impress. Some dance for release. But for some, dance is expression. It’s a way to let go of the thoughts and doubts bouncing through the synapses. Dance is a way of saying this is me–the good, bad, ugly, cheesy, strange, bent, broken, needy, giving, oxymoronic, dichotomous me.

You have to be willing to accept certain amount vulnerability when you let dance express the real you. In that vulnerability, there’s a joy that opens inside of you. People react positively to that openness and are more willing to give you a compliment because in giving that compliment they become vulnerable too.

Not everyone dances to express, but I’m starting to notice the ones who do. Somewhere I had lost this part of my dancing. I’m finding it again in myself and others. So when I come up to you and say, I think you’re a great dancer, I’m also saying thanks for sharing.

Category: Dancing like no one is watching | 1 - Leave a comment

My friend Clarice dresses in the skimpiest outfits when she goes dancing. She’s looks incredibly hot and so I’ve told her equally handsome, down-to-earth, one of the coolest guys in the world husband who dresses like he stepped out of a J Crew catalog.

Yes, I know the photos are a completely gratuitous attempt to spice up my blog with the sexy girl showing skin cliché. But hey, who am I to reinvent the wheel? All blogs need a little sex appeal and my fat ass certainly isn’t going to provide that.

(Side note: I’m eating Ben & Jerry’s ice cream while I’m writing this.)

Last night, a group of us celebrated her 23rd birthday. Clarice has had many 23rd birthday over the years and that’s just the way she likes it.

I met her dancing a few years ago through friends because the Denver alternative crowd is pretty small and eventually you meet everyone. I’m glad I did. She’s the only club person I know who knows how to lindy hop, and we have a blast swing dancing to the Cure’s Love Cats.

I’ve never heard her say a bad word about anyone..ever. She’s unassuming, bubbly, charming, funny, generous and modest and that’s why her friends universally adore her. She’s is nicest person that I know.

After dancing, she and her hubby hosted a movie night. On her birthday at 2am, she’s serving food, making sure everyone has drinks, showing people how to work the recliners and getting blankets and pillows so the people on the floor would be comfortable. All the while, everyone’s telling her to sit down and relax because we had already raided her fridge for frozen pizza and drinks as soon as we arrived. That’s what you get when you invite drunk people to your house in early hours.

Most of all, I admire her. She isn’t the type of person who defines herself by playing hostess to a bunch of inebriated guests in her family room which is roughly the size of my house, or being doting wife to a wonderful and successful husband.

She’s the type of person who defines herself by working 30 hour shifts in the Intensive Care Unit as a resident physician of one of the best hospitals in the city.

Happy birthday, Clarice! I hope your thirty-f twenty-third year will be spectacular.

Category: My friends don't care that I'm uncool | 2 - Leave a comment

I have two friends who deejay alt/goth/EBM and 80’s music. They are awesome so I dance where they deejay and rarely go elsewhere.

One deejays at a club that’s an old cathedral, unimaginatively named The Church. Yes, that place is as cool as it sounds, unless you’re a young Servas guest from Poland from a Catholic family. Then, it’s just sacrilegious. I didn’t know. Oops.

The other deejays at a place called Milk, supposedly named after the Korova Milk Bar from A Clockwork Orange. However, I was disappointed the first time there when I didn’t see any naked mannequins for tables. Epic fail.

On the plus side, Milk has couches and pillows and oil paintings of Jimi Hendrix and Lucille Ball, and it had Deejay Mike last night. He’s very old school which is to say that at one period in his career, he had to beat mix on vinyl. Also, he doesn’t play shitty music.

In a club setting, shitty music is anything that people aren’t dancing to. This, of course, changes from week to week because club people are fickle like God or children. However, all shitty music stems from shitty deejays. I’ve been subjected to plenty and here’s my easy guide on how to tell if you’re a shitty deejay.

1. You try to play cool music no one will dance to. E-jays or Ego Jockeys are easy to spot. They’re the ones that want to be the tastemakers by playing lots of esoteria because they don’t want to be trendy. I like new music, but if you’re music empties the dance floor for more than 15 minutes, you suck.

2. You try to be cool by playing the same thing every week. There’s a game that my friends and I play called Guess-The-Next-Song. If we can consistently guess the next song, you suck.

3. You’re too cool to play requests. People like it you when you play requests, especially IF THERE’S NO ONE ELSE DANCING.  Your  job is to get people to dance.  We get it when it’s busy and you forget our requests as soon as we walk away. But if I’m there early and the only other occupants are five seat warmers, and it takes an hour for you play my request, you suck.

4. You try to be cool by playing something “outrageous”. You know what. I like old Motley Crue. Yes, I did get to see Tommy Lee drum upside down in mid-air & bought the t-shirt. I think Nikki Sixx’s 2007 album, the Heroine Diaries is an awesome album. Of course, you wouldn’t know that you hipster POSER so stick to Wolfsheim, VNV Nation and the stuff you actually do know. Journey is only hip and ironic after Marilyn Manson if you can get people to dance to it. Otherwise, it just goes to show you suck.

If you couldn’t tell, all this suckage comes from deejays trying to be cool. Deejay Mike isn’t young and hip wearing latex and buckles. He’s close to 40 and wears shorts and soccer t-shirts because “this booth gets really hot” as the night progresses. He has a lot of fans because he knows his shit. The good shit from Kraftwerk to the latest Pet Shop Boys release. And the bad shit, making the music all about the deejay instead of the dancers.

That’s why he’s so cool.

Category: I'm not goth | 9 - Leave a comment