Yep, another of these dumb things. I like to get very long-winded, so I might as well do it in my blog.
Your SENIOR year of high school! The longer ago it was, the more fun the answers will be:
(sure, okay; is half a lifetime ago long enough?)
1. The year:
2003-2004
2. What kind of car did you drive?
I uh, still don’t drive anything. When I get behind the wheel of a car my anxiety goes through the roof and I just freeze up, forget left from right, even forget which pedal is the brake and which is the gas. I think it has to do with my autism, and inability to multitask, especially if mine and somebody else’s life is at stake. I can’t watch the road in front of me and watch the rear view mirrors at the same time, and there are so many little buttons and levers to keep track of. My brain can’t do it. I am actually mentally disabled. Most people can’t tell when they meet me (and I didn’t even realize it myself until somewhat recently), it doesn’t mean I’m not intelligent. But there are things I can’t do, driving is one of them. Working the only gods-awful jobs I can qualify for is another. And this is one of the many reasons I don’t live up to society’s standards for masculinity, or adulthood in general. Gods, I hate US society.
3. It's a Friday night football game where were you?
At home, sitting in my darkened bedroom, rocking back and forth while listening to my mixtapes or metal albums.
4. What job did you have?
None, and I think forcing minors to work is wrong. As if school didn’t rob me of enough of my youth.
5 Did you party?
No
6. Did you play sports?
Not at all, except when forced to in P.E.
7. Were you in the band?
“The band”? You mean like the school band class, or a cool garage band? Well, I was in band class during Freshman year. I played clarinet, but was never any good at it. My teacher was a lot nicer than the evil tyrant I had in Middle School. And during that year we went on a cruise to Ensenada, Mexico, where I bought my infamous leather hat. The next year my Freshman English teacher was starting a Creative Writing class, so I took that instead of band.
8. Were you a nerd?
Yes, but probably not the typical nerd. I didn’t play Magic The Gathering, when it came to anime I had only seen what was shown on Toonami on Cartoon Network. Those were the two main things nerds at my school were into. I didn’t even really fit in with the nerds in High School, not that I didn’t have friends.
9. Did you get suspended?
Not senior year. I got suspended Sophomore year when my math teacher wouldn’t let me use the bathroom and my rage built up to such a point that I drew him being cut in half with a chainsaw and fed into a wood chipper. The teacher saw it, and not only got me suspended but called the cops on me. They luckily thought the whole thing was stupid.
10. Were you sociable?
Not especially.
11. What was your school mascot?
A stupid falcon, that was ripped off from some NFL football team. I’m not bothered to look up which team. The school should have been sued.
12. If you could go back and do it again?
Okay, I really hated High School. But, I don’t think I could turn down a legitimate offer to travel back in time. I would take a lot less crap from people the second time around. Actually what I should have done is drop out and get my GED instead. That’s what I would do, maybe after I meet my current friends. I could also avoid some of the mistakes I made after High School, like going out with that girl who dumped me after four months (probably thanks to my undiagnosed autism), and getting that damned Creative Writing Masters degree that kinda ruined my chances at any kind of career outside of retail and call centers, and put me in tons of debt I’ll never pay off. You get punished for pursuing your passions in this country. And I could become a goth early, since I didn’t get into goth until my 20s. I could also try to meet my wife early, but then again with our four year age difference things might get risky once I turn 18. I only want to go back once though, no need to get stuck in a four year Groundhog’s Day time loop.
13. Are you still in contact with people from high school?
Yes, a few friends, particularly my friend Kris.
14. Do you know where your high school sweetheart is?
Didn’t have one. I was too afraid to talk to girls in school, especially after things really didn’t go well in Middle School; a certain bullying incident with a girl left me with severe trust issues. I don’t remember having a crush on anyone in particular during Senior year either. I just wanted to do my time and get the hell out of that prison. After I got out I started to wish I had a girlfriend, and that got me into more bad situations when I jumped at whoever showed the slightest interest in me and it always ended badly until I met my future wife.
15. What was your favorite class?
Creative Writing. Followed by German.
16. Do you still have your high school class ring?
What a waste of money! Luckily I knew that back then too. School “spirit” is just another way to instill obedience. Just like nationalism.
17. Do you still have your yearbook?
I threw them away. But now that I’m drawing a webcomic about High School I wish I had kept them. I do still have a yearbook from Middle School that somehow survived the purge.
I was struck with inspiration for this month’s blog. I’ve been keeping records of my top songs of the month for a long, long time, going back to 2000 (and yet I was only diagnosed with autism last year, what a shock). I originally started it as an answer to the deeply flawed Top 20 lists I would hear on the local rock radio station I listened to. Before 2019 it was relegated to notebooks. I thought it would be interesting, after looking at this month’s list, to look at what I was listening to 20, 15, 10 and 5 years ago. Don’t expect a little essay on each song, but I might provide a bit of context, like where I was in life at that time.
Lately I’ve been really into Spanish-language post-punk, from Central and South America, and California (that counts, right?). It just has this particular gloomy feel to it that I love, distinctive from varieties of post-punk from the US, Western Europe and Russia. Vestron Vulture was my introduction to this style, but I also really love Guerra FrΓa of Guatemala, and Death by Nature from Los Angeles. I don’t speak Spanish (other than the little bit of linguistic osmosis I picked up from living in California most of my life), but not understanding the lyrics has never stopped me from enjoying music before. But as usual I have a few songs from other parts of the world as well.
Death By Nature ~ I’m Not Real
This is a band from Los Angeles, California is one I just found out about a week ago, and so far I love every single song. This song accurately describes what it’s like to have a bout of Depersonalization/Derealization, and there’s not enough music out there directly about that.
There is another band out there with the same name, so beware. Look for the one spelled in all-caps. I don’t exactly see this song on Bandcamp, but here is their Bandcamp page.
This song seemed like it got a quiet release, I only accidentally stumbled upon it when looking the band up on YouTube. It’s a single released on March 17. It is a melancholy song, not particularly political as the title might suggest. But perhaps it is just about how living and trying to survive in America has become a nightmare.
This song came out in May 2021, and I think I did hear it when it came out, but this is one of those songs that laid dormant for a while and then clawed its way back onto my charts when I listened to it again when going through my YouTube likes and ended up enjoying it greatly. It has a Christian Death sound to it, and is in the deathrock genre. I like deathrock a lot more these days than I did in 2021
Poison Dreams is a band out of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and this song is off their EP Faustian Glow.
I hope ACAB doesn’t apply to the French Police because I really like this band. I’ve been hearing more from them in recent months and have gone on a binge of their earlier music. They are not from France, as I initially thought, but Chicago, Illinois. I thought they were following the grand tradition of French coldwave that dates back to the 80s with bands like Little Nemo. If you listen to this song you can see why I was fooled, it has that 80s coldwave sound to it. Very catchy, a little melancholy.
Memory Drops is another Guatemalan band, like Guerra FrΓa, the other band from there I’ve been listening to. I found this to be a very beautiful song. It came out in January of this year, and translates to “All that Remains”. From what I can gather its kind of a tragic, dreary breakup song, but the tune just really stuck with me.
Out of the goth/goth adjacent bands I know of that are from Armenia, Node seems to be the one with the most reliable output. Aside from the voice sample at the beginning this song is largely instrumental, with a laid back, dark trance vibe to it. I wonder if Node will be in attendance when Lebanon Hanover plays in Yerevan next month? That would be such an awesome concert to go to. Maybe that will inspire other bands too, help invigorate Armenia’s goth scene.
This doesn’t seem to have an official release yet, but you can find their other music on Bandcamp.
This song caught my attention because I was just learning about what a liminal space is when I discovered it. Basically it’s a location that looks uncanny or makes you feel uneasy, characterized by mixed feelings of familiarity and unfamiliarity. Like a playground at night, a house with nothing in it, hallways that seem endless, things like that. It’s kind of popular with the young ones, so I’ve heard. Probably a reaction to the Covid lockdowns. That’s what the song is about too, mentioning a “transitional space” which is another way to define it.
The song came out in December 2022, so it’s still new. I should like to hear more from Another Abyss.
Oops, all Covenant/The Kovenant! It was my High School metal period and I was really into their Nexus Polaris and In Times Before the Light (the 2002 remake) albums.
2008 was a weird time for me musically. I was getting out of metal, hadn’t fully embraced goth yet, and I went into a 1930s jazz period. It was my early 20s, a time of soul searching. I also really liked the Gangs of New York soundtrack that month.
And One had been a mainstay for me for years at this point. The song “Und Wieder” is beautifully hypnotic, really give it a listen if the only song you know from them is “Military Fashion Show”. And for most of the year I was really into Light Asylum and Zombie Girl. “IPC” is still awesome. Really doesn’t feel a decade old.
Now we’re really in “that doesn’t feel like that long ago” territory. My musical tastes were almost what they are today. In the intervening years though, I have only come to understand the song “Medication” even better, with its “I am sad, even though I am on all the meds” chorus.
Sometimes I miss living in the Tampa Bay Area, because I got to go to so many concerts of my favorite goth bands. I would go to like three or four concerts a year. Tampa has a thriving goth scene and I took full advantage of that. But then in 2019 we moved to Rockledge on the eastern Florida coast. Nothing but boring suburban people driving either golf carts or twenty foot tall pickup trucks around. Nowheresville. It reminds me of the town from Edward Scissorhands (which incidentally was filmed in Florida). Not even the obscure underground bands I love would play anywhere near Brevard County. Nothing interesting ever happens here. They do have pro wrestling shows sometimes, and actually a cool local theater that puts on plays and occasionally shows silent films, but that’s about it. Orlando isn’t that far, and a lot of bands play there, but it’s far enough to where we would need a babysitter for our kid and have to spend more money on gas on top of the concert itself; it’s a 45 minute to one hour drive depending on traffic. That’s the other reason why my days of going to concerts all the time came to an end by the way, parenthood.
But you know what, one day something DID finally happen here. I usually hate seeing ads when I scroll through Facebook, and I do my best to ignore them, but one happened to catch my eye. Nirvanna was playing in Cocoa, the next town over. I did a double take. Then I noticed the extra “n”. Ohhhh. Clever. (The band later explained that it’s pronounced “Nirv-annah”, like the announcer says at the beginning of their music video for “In Bloom”). So it’s a tribute band. The tickets were affordable enough, $15. So I decided, eh, why not? You win this time, capitalism. You got me to CONSUME. Ever since then I’ve gotten ads for other tribute bands playing all over the country too. I’m not flying to the other side of the country to see a Pearl Jam tribute band, Facebook.
First, I suppose I’ll give some background about what led me to the point where I would go to a concert of a Nirvana tribute band. It was a long series of events. Firstly, Nirvana has always been there in the background of my life. Nevermind came out when I was five years old, and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was playing all the time on MTV. I grew up listening to rock radio stations which of course played their music. My first ever mixtape had “Lithium” on it, and they were regulars on a lot of my old mixtapes. But I still never really dug deep into their discography until the last couple of years. Followers of my blog may know that I’ve been on something of a grunge/90s alternative rock binge the past almost two years, returning to the music of my childhood after years of being into metal and then goth (which is still my number one genre). Alice in Chains was the band that lured me in after I heard “Get Born Again” for the first time in 20+ years. After listening to all the Alice in Chains I could find, I moved onto Nirvana. I had really only heard what was played on the radio up to that point, but for such a relatively short-lived band there are tons of demos, bootlegs, live shows and even good fan-made music, and after listening to Nirvana for over a year now I’m still finding new stuff. Songs like “Heart-Shaped Box”, “Sappy”, “Dumb”, “Something in the Way”, “You Know You’re Right”, they all really speak to me. I like music that’s dark, thought-provoking and emotionally powerful, mostly regardless of genre. I’ve gotten to know about Kurt Cobain too, his life, his art and his philosophies, and I find him really relatable. I feel like we have a lot in common. A fellow tortured artist. But I know there are millions of people who feel the same way.
Anyway, the night of April 7th. I had been suffering from gout all week, but I was still determined to go to this concert even though I needed a cane to walk. The venue, The Attic, was a place I had probably walked past many times but never noticed, hidden up a narrow staircase above a bar, in a nondescript corner of Cocoa Village, the touristy area of Cocoa. Due to my gout and back pain I needed to secure a spot, but because I didn’t arrive early enough, a barstool was the best I could get. The crowd was small, maybe 25 people or so at most. A lot of Gen X people in the audience, older than me, and a few younger people. The general vibe of the show was kind of like a pre-fame Nirvana concert. Like seeing them in 1989, except for some of the song choices of course. Like if you watch this old concert, it was a lot like that. The lead singer was a young man who pulled off a good Kurt Cobain cosplay, wearing the big sunglasses and snow hat, a green sweater and ripped jeans. He did a good job sounding like Kurt Cobain too. Not 100 percent, but he clearly has studied how Kurt Cobain sings, down to the slight “yodel” vocal pitch shifts that was his style.
The band was open to requests many times throughout the show. I was too shy to request anything myself. I thought about requesting “Moist Vagina” just to see peoples’ reaction but ultimately chickened out. They weren’t able to play everything requested though. Someone kept requesting one of their more obscure songs, “Mr. Mustache”. The band knows 52 Nirvana songs, but they haven’t learned them all yet. I think they were later unable to play “Sappy” either, another one which never made it onto an official album, which was a bit of a shame. The three of them did well with what they did play too. I had to remind myself how Nirvana sounded live versus how polished they sounded on the albums when making comparisons. They sounded closer to the live performances obviously. I really liked how they nailed that scream after the bridge in “Drain You”, that was definitely a highlight of the performance. There was a nice mixture of high energy moshing songs and the slower, drearier songs such as “Something in the Way” and “You Know You’re Right” that are my favorite. The much-overlooked debut album Bleach was well-represented, along with songs they were obligated to play like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Lithium”.
A lot of the banter between the bandmates were direct quotes from some of the more famous Nirvana concerts. There were a lot of little easter eggs for those of us who have binged through old Nirvana concerts on YouTube that most people probably wouldn’t catch. The singer began “About a Girl” by saying “This is off our first record, most people don’t own it.” just as Kurt Cobain said at the MTV Unplugged concert. When they reluctantly played “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, they instead started playing “More Than a Feeling” by The Pixies, just like Nirvana did at the 1992 concert in Reading. They also talked smack about Axl Rose, which is very in-character, and talked about the rivalry they had backstage with Guns n Roses at the 1992 MTV Music Awards. We also got the inspirational quote from the booklet of the Incesticide album, wherein Kurt Cobain explicitly tells racists, sexists and homophobes not to buy their albums or show up at their concerts. Being in the unfortunate part of Florida that I’m in, I was wondering if that quote would anger anyone in the audience, but it was met with cheers, and anyone who didn’t like it kept their mouths shut. Toward the end of the concert they wanted everyone to come up to the stage, and I felt a bit guilty for staying in my seat but with all my aches and pains it just wasn’t happening. Leave the mosh pits to the young whipper-snappers I guess.
In the end I got to hear most of my favorite Nirvana songs, the only way you could ever hear the songs played live these days, by impersonators. But you know, there’s nothing wrong with impersonators, particularly of bands that aren’t active anymore and never will be. It was a lot of fun and I’m glad I went. I will be paying attention to any concerts that might come through this small town from now on thanks to this. I wouldn’t mind seeing Nirvanna again one of these days.
A blog exclusive that I’m not sharing on Facebook. Whoever sees this will just have to stumble upon it.
I have been awake all night, with an enflamed toe joint that I’m pretty sure is gout. Like shit, I missed the part of yesterday where I kicked a brick wall barefoot. To get around, I’ve been using my grandfather Suren’s cane. The grandfather I am named after, who escaped from a Soviet gulag. In my slight delirium, it inspired this poem, and I jotted it down before I forgot it. Kind of free verse. With some tweaking I could make it into song lyrics. But I’m not sure if I’ll use it for anything.
The time to do a mixtape reflection on the very theme of this blog has come. For this time, I will scream into the abyss about the abyss. “Tales from the Masked Bard” was the original name of the blog, named for a character in my unpublished fantasy book series, but that name harkens back to a time in my 20s, when I had such impossible dreams and aspirations. Before reality slapped me in the face. Now that I have realized that, even if I somehow did achieve fame (a zillion to one chance), the day will come that even the most famous person in history will be forgotten. The act of creating art is really screaming into an abyss. That’s all you can do with the abyss, either scream or gaze. You can’t fight it or escape it. One day the voice of everyone who has ever screamed into the abyss, from Shakespeare to Edgar Allen Poe, will be silenced forever.
First, a quote:
The true meaning of the first line of the quote is something along the lines of “beware that you don’t become the very thing you struggle against”. I suppose a famous example would be the Soviet Union; an attempt (at least, so they say) to create a communist utopia based on the ideals of Karl Marx, which instead became even more tyrannical than the Czars ever were under Stalin, and in fact was imperialistic even before that under Lenin, as Armenians well know, when their newly independent country was carved up between the Soviets, Azerbaijan (which didn’t exist before 1918) and Turkey. But it’s that second part of the quote that interests me. What is the abyss?
My interpretation of the abyss, is that it is the darkness that encompasses the entire universe. It is that which will swallow us all, and make us forgotten. It is death, oblivion. One day trillions of years from now it will swallow the entire universe. I had a vision once; everyone alive is falling into an abyss, the abyss of death. Being alive is like falling into an abyss, we are all rushing towards its pitch blackness at terminal velocity but we look away from it and pretend it doesn’t exist, and we pretend we aren’t even falling. But as my body ages I know it to be true. I don’t know if I’m making much sense, it’s hard to put into words, you see. But I think I have gazed long into the abyss.
I finally made a mixtape about it, because that is how I like to organize my thoughts and philosophies. And I used a lot of voice clips, and even a spoken word poem, along with music. I allowed songs about voids too, because a void is kind of the same thing as an abyss. Or perhaps the abyss is more of an idea, while a void exists physically.
Follow along with my YouTube playlist if you wish. It has most of what’s on the tape, although you may have to skip through a couple of the voice samples. With the first one, I stopped the tape when the quote was finished.
First we have a clip from the anime Blue Exorcist, where Nietzsche’s quote is spoken. I have never watched this anime, but I liked the clip when I found it. We then go into songs I’ve known for a long time, since my teens; “The Abyss” by Stratovarius is one of the band’s darker songs, although it’s not entirely dark. I think it makes for a good beginning to the tape though. Then, there’s “The Chasm”, the 2002 remade version by The Kovenant. I could have gone with the original, but I think the remade version fit the vibe better. Pretty Addicted’s song “Blue Cage” is really about the cruelty of making whales perform in front of audiences, but I feel like it still fits the mood if you take the lyrics at face value. It’s a song about being ripped from everything you know and being placed in a cage and mistreated. It reminds me of what I went through in school, although to a far less severe degree. I was ripped from my innocence and plunged into a cruel dystopian world, hurdling toward oblivion. This is what eventually led me to gaze into the abyss. It mentions the abyss multiple times, that’s why the song is here. And it’s a good transitionary song between the metal intro to the tape going into the more goth songs.
We then come to our second voice clip, from the trailer for the English dub of the anime Made in Abyss. This is my favorite anime now. A very dark tale about a young girl and her half-robot boyfriend descending into a deep abyss to find her mother, encountering unspeakable horrors. I only included the beginning lines. For those of you following along on the playlist, skip after the opening line. “In the abyss, there is nothing as impartial as death. And soon we realize, in this cruel and indifferent world, it’s just the way we like it.” The abyss is likened to an inevitable death, and if the world is cruel and indifferent, it is how we designed it. We don’t have to build a society based on hierarchies, imaginary numbers deciding who lives and dies. We could collectively decide right now that money, nationalities, genders, countries, don’t exist. But enough people consent to it. So it goes on, crushing the unlucky underfoot. Did we create the Abyss ourselves?
The next couple of songs are a bit of a buffer, but they mention voids and the abyss. The next great song that captures the essence of the abyss is Tango Mangalore’s “Son of Adam”, which you may remember from my top songs of the month blog for March. “Let us stare in the abyss” is repeated throughout the song, and the mood it creates is exactly what I was going for with this mix.
The next part that really gets to the point of the mix, is something I was unable to find on YouTube. To get it on the tape I had to play the Made in Abyss DVD on my laptop and hook it into my boombox with an aux cord. A technical marvel, I know. This speech comes from a scene where the two protagonists of the anime meet Ozen the Immovable, an elder woman who has lived in the abyss for decades. She first appears to be a villain, but when she fights the protagonists it is revealed that she did so to see if they were able to handle going further down into the abyss. She deems them worthy and ends up helping them.
The greatest nihilistic philosopher since Nietzsche.
You can view it in the manga online, although it isn’t the best translation. In the anime, she says:
“Do you have any conception of God, boy? All of those who decide to stay down here, they don’t believe in any kind of almighty deity. Instead they have something else to believe in. The Truth. It’s stronger than God, because it is the Abyss itself. And since its end is unknown, that fear becomes their almighty.”
You see, I think she’s right. The Abyss is God. It is The Truth. As Carl Sagan once said, it made a lot of sense for humans to worship the Sun. The Sun gave us life. We are a part of the Sun. Our body and soul come from the Sun, and the other stars. The Sun, however, is a local God. And it is mortal. The Abyss is stronger than the Sun, and stronger than the galaxy it inhabits. One day, the Abyss will consume even that. The Abyss is indifferent. It us not good or evil. It is the Great Cosmic Indifference. I think out of everyone in the anime, I relate closest to Ozen, who inhabits not the deepest part of the abyss, but deep enough to see the truth about it. She is about where I am, philosophically, on the scales of jadedness and darkness.
If you were to have a humanoid personification of the Abyss, I think it would be something like Satan in Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger, or how he appeared in the claymation adaptation from The Adventures of Mark Twain. Far from the biblical Satan, this entity inhabits an empty void, and creates and destroys civilizations on a whim, without a shred of sympathy. But, as far as this mixtape is concerned, I have already used plenty of voice clips from that film on multiple tapes, especially “Nothing exists but empty space, and you. And you, are but a thought.” Solipsism, now there is a scary thought. Am I the only conscious being that exists, floating in an endless abyss while hallucinating reality? Or is it you? We don’t know. We can’t know. Maybe everyone is trapped in their own separate universe.
We continue to Side B. A couple more songs about voids, and we get to the next voice clip. It’s from a game called Dragon Age, which I have never played. I only found this clip when searching for more abyss/void songs for the mix. It’s a hopeful quote from an old woman, who says that when the world plunges into the abyss, don’t be afraid to jump, for it is the only way to know if you can fly. I suppose my pessimistic and cynical retort is that nothing can fly forever, but I digress. It’s basically about not living with regret, which I can agree with, it just uses the Abyss as a metaphor.
After this Tango Mangalore returns, with a song that is also about the Abyss. The dreary mood it creates brings you back down after that last voice clip, perhaps, but I find the transition relaxing and smooth. Now the Gothic Archies have two songs mentioning the Abyss, and I regret having to put them so close together but that’s just how it worked out. And after one of my favorite songs from Diary of Dreams (“see me drown in this abyss”) we have an actual spoken word poem that I found on YouTube, which I have to say is a first for my mixtapes since starting them in 1999. This poem likens the Abyss to depression. It’s about when you reach a level where you no longer struggle against the Abyss, but just let it consume you. You want to fall, you want to disappear into the Abyss. To lose your pain within the silence forevermore. I’ve been to dark places like this. I don’t know how I’ve ever managed to pull myself up again. But life just goes on, and so do I. I keep eating, trying to take care of my body, trying to tell my stories while I still have time to do so, playing this game called “life” that I never chose to play, even though it’s all absurd and meaningless. I’m going to get consumed by the Abyss one day regardless, why rush things? Might as well try to enjoy myself.
Gothic Archie’s song “Dreary, Dreary” is the perfect song to come on after this poem. It manages to pull you up again somehow, while being a dreary song itself. It’s a song mostly about losing your close loved one, losing them to “a black and bleak abyss”. By that they are either referring to her death or just that she disappeared. The rest of the songs from here all relate again to the abyss/void in different ways. We return to Stratovarius with “Abyss of your Eyes”. Read the lyrics, it fits the theme well enough despite the genre shift. References to drowning, pain, losing your mind, these are all feelings associated with the Abyss. And appropriately enough the final song is “Final Abyss” by Your Funeral (great band name). The true final Abyss will be the Heat Death of the Universe, long after all of the stars burn out and die, black holes consume the universe until they too disperse, and soon not even atoms and particles remain. Maybe from here another Big Bang happens? But with something finally reduced to nothing I don’t see how that can happen. These are my thoughts by the end of the tape. What will be, at the end of everything? To think, not even the stars in the sky are safe from the Abyss. Nothing is forever, except for the Abyss. The Abyss is eternity. Infinite. The nature of the abyss is reflected in how unjust and indifferent this universe is. When you reflect on that, you gaze into the abyss.
I have been having quite the eventful month, let’s just say. It all started when my wife and I narrowly avoided a horrible car crash, so that brush with death and the accompanying reminder that when you wake up each morning you don’t really know if you’ll still be alive by day’s end kept my mind busy; then my son got a terrible ear infection and was up all night screaming, then the following Monday when he went back to school, he got injured falling off the playground slide and had to be taken home, and just a bunch of other stressful stuff happened. I’m finally recovering mentally. That’s why this post is like a week and a half late. Any little motivation to work on my creative endeavors that I’ve been able to squeeze out has gone into making my webcomic. Well, I’m finally ahead on that so I might as well get this blog out. I’m going to keep the list to what it would have been on March 9th, even though I’ve discovered new music since then, or else I may not have much to list next month. I’m still going to try to do April’s blog on time.
Devoted Sinners ~ The Mediocre Goth Club
I’ve been to goth dance clubs exactly like the one described in this song. Haven’t updated their playlist since 1993, always playing the exact same worn out songs, even slipping in non-goth stuff like Rammstein, Die Antwoord and Korn to please all the normies in attendance. Even when they play something from the 21st century it’s always the same song; like say “Military Fashion Show” by And One, the band has dozens of better songs but it’s always that one. Anyway, thanks Devoted Sinners for voicing many of my frustrations with the goth scene.
The first song I heard from this Greek nautical-goth band was “Mort Marin” back in 2017. The singer is also a fisherman and sings about the sea a lot, an ongoing theme in his work. This song was on their January 2022 release One Fathom Heart. What got me to revisit this song and become addicted to it was that I was constructing a mixtape/playlist based around the theme of The Abyss. “Son of Adam” is all about staring into the abyss, Nietzsche-style. I have the playlist ready if you’re interested, I hope to write a blog entry on it with detailed explanations of the song choices. This song is one of the most fitting entries. Not to mention, it has fitted my mood as of late.
This is one of those songs that keeps getting better as it goes along, ending with this badass dark riff that reminds me of a guitar riff from a really good black metal band, although the Bristol, UK band Naut is definitely deathrock through and through. One of those rare songs where the last third or so is the best part, kinda like “Over Now” by Alice in Chains. Well, at the halfway point at 3:24 is where you get a change of pace, that’s really where it started to get my attention. It just builds and builds momentum from there. Got my inner metalhead teen excited.
Naut’s album Hunt came out on February 24, still pretty new. Give it a listen.
Back to the 1980s with this one, the gift that keeps on giving. To be honest I hadn’t heard this before the YouTube channel DarkGoth Alternative Music uploaded it with this 80s dance club video. Makes me wonder what other songs I’m going to discover and love from before I was born. (This came out in 1985, I was born the next year.) This so g is similar in tone to other wonderful, overlooked classics like “Game Over” by Ministry and “The Sounding” by Affordable Floors, I don’t know how to describe it but it’s kind of a similar, magical 80s vibe that you don’t hear anymore, even from bands that try their best to emulate 80s music.
Opera Multi Steel ~ Les Soleil Est Parti
The music video, with its clips from the silent film adaptation of Faust, was what grabbed my attention, but I stayed for the vaguely Middle Eastern sounding darkwave music. Opera Multi Steel, from Bourges, France, describes themselves as a medieval darkwave band, which is a combo I’ve never seen before. They’ve also been around since the 80s, so I have a discography to explore. This is brand new from last month though. Anyway, it got me to watch Faust for the first time. I love the 1920s special effects.
I am so glad I discovered this band recently. Yung Cortex also does vaporwave music, which I’m not into as much, but their post-punk is awesome. Last month’s pick “Time Won’t Stop” is still very relevant to me and fresh in my mind. Another favorite song of mine is “Miserable”. But this is a beautiful hate song that is so relevant to my day to day life. You ever get stuck talking to someone you never wanted to speak to in the first place, and they just go on and on and on, and you just kind of nod and smile because you don’t want to be rude but inside your mind you’re screaming “shut the fuck up!”? It happens to me surprisingly often. Doesn’t help that I’m a bit agoraphobic these days.
They have a Bandcamp page, but I don’t see this particular song on it.
The Australian darkwave band Buzz Kull is an old favorite of mine at this point. “Avoiding the Light” is still one of my favorite songs after first hearing it back in 2019. Their latest album, Fascination, was released in November of last year and somehow flew under my radar until this music video came out. I’ll have to get it next time there’s a Bandcamp Friday. See what other goodies are on there.
Guerra FrΓa from Guatemala is a band I really love right now. I could have picked any song here really. They sound a lot like Vestron Vulture, a very gloomy post-punk sound with some shoegaze influences. Hispanic goth bands deserve more attention. I feel like each country/region kind of has its own flavor of goth music, and the goth music of Central and South America certainly does have its own sort of vibe. This is off their February 2023album Cuando Todos Duerman.
I filled out one of those chain mail copy-paste lists on Facebook earlier today. You know the ones, they’ve been passed around since the days of MySpace, and probably even earlier. This one was about movies you love and hate.
If you can’t read that:
MOVIE I HATE: 102 Dalmations (I’ve blocked most of it out, but it was awful)
MOVIE I THINK IS OVERRATED: Any Marvel movie. I’m not a fan of the superhero genre outside of maybe Batman, but even then the villains are what interest me.
MOVIE I THINK IS UNDERAPPRECIATED: Return to Oz
MOVIE I LOVE: Masque of the Red Death
MOVIE I CAN WATCH OVER & OVER: The Dark Crystal
MOVIE THAT MADE ME FALL IN LOVE WITH MOVIES: Jurassic Park
MOVIE THAT CHANGED MY LIFE: They Live. I hated advertising and capitalism before watching it too, but I really don’t look at the world the same way after watching that. It pushed me all the way left politically.
MOVIE THAT SURPRISED ME: Cats Don’t Dance. It had such brilliant animation and production values, and yet it is forgotten.
GUILTY PLEASURE: Once Upon a Forest. When you read into the production of the film it’s quite sad, the executives forced them to tone it down and cut a bunch of scenes. It even had a much better title originally, The Endangered. If I come out and say I’m a fan of Once Upon a Forest everyone who never saw it is going to assume it’s some sappy kids movie. Bah.
MOVIE I SHOULD HAVE SEEN BY NOW BUT HAVEN'T: Citizen Kane
MOVIE TRILOGY MASTERPIECE: Lord of the Rings
MOVIE MASTERPIECE: Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times
I love that this list starts with “hate”. You don’t see that a lot. These things are probably secretly some data-mining operation, I know. But whatever, the corporations and FBI probably already know everything about me, it’s a lost cause trying to preserve my privacy. Anyway, my good friend Kris Silva did one about books, and now I want to do one about books and music. Then I remembered I have a blog for this sort of thing.
As for the original list; I’m probably not the biggest movie buff, but I do like watching classic and even silent films, which I don’t think a lot of people watch anymore. I also love animated films, particularly traditionally animated ones. And I tend to hate formulaic cash-cow movies, like most movies within the superhero genre, and most modern Disney movies (the best Disney movies are the ones that bombed at the box office for some reason; I’m sure there’s some conspiracy behind this). Capitalism so does not breed innovation, the Hollywood film industry has become so profit-driven that they don’t take any risks. Their plots are not written by actual writers but constructed by a committee looking at charts and graphs. I can’t remember the last time I was excited to see a newly released movie at the movie theater.
Anyway! I’m going to do more of these lists, even though I should be doing something more productive with my time. Like my art. Don’t worry, tomorrow’s page of Alcatraz High is like 99% finished. Here’s the one for books. By the way, I’m including graphic novels, because those are books too. Now I have like tons of books, that I don’t even have the time to read anymore now that I’m a parent and a very underpaid, overlooked webcomic artist. I mean, I could have more time to read them if I wasn’t playing video games, watching TV, scrolling Facebook and Reddit, and writing meaningless blogs. It’s a matter of priority I guess. Writing that makes me want to shift my priorities a bit.
Books
BOOK I HATE: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. I got tormented by William Faulkner in my creative writing Masters program. So incomprehensible and boring.
BOOK I THINK IS OVERRATED: Harry fuckin’ Potter. Such derivative trash, written by a trash author.
BOOK I THINK IS UNDERAPPRECIATED: Any Oz book that isn’t the first book. And especially any book after the sixth one, as most adaptations that do touch the sequels stop there. But not the Ruth Plumly Thompson ones, a lot of those deserve their obscurity.
BOOK I LOVE: The Crow by James O’Barr. The movie is great, but the comic is even better. It’s a gothy revenge story. The art is amazing. You can tell it influenced my art of course.
BOOK I CAN READ OVER & OVER: The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain. It is a very dark, nihilistic book. But the character Satan has such insight into the human condition, the hypocrisy of organized religion, and indeed existence itself. That rant in the last chapter. Check it out.
Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago—centuries, ages, eons ago!—for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane—like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell—mouths mercy and invented hell—mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who
151mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!
BOOK THAT MADE ME FALL IN LOVE WITH READING: Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton. I know, same as my answer for movies, but this was the first adult novel I ever read, at age ten, and I was just absorbed by it. That book made me a writer.
BOOK THAT CHANGED MY LIFE: Under Stalin’s Sun by my grandfather, Suren Oganessian the First. I first read the book in my early teens, at a time in my life where I felt like I had no identity, no pride, I was directionless. But this great man who I am named after survived so much. It gave me an identity. His story about how he escaped a Siberian gulag has helped motivate me all my life.
BOOK THAT SURPRISED ME: I guess The Marvelous Land of Oz by L. Frank Baum. When I decided “eh what the hell, let’s read all the Oz books on Project Gutenberg” while I was stuck at that call center job, I wasn’t expecting it to be so addicting. I mean I can’t say it’s high literature, I know that, but it was good character writing. Anyway, it surprised me by being good. And now Oz books are like the only books I read anymore.
GUILTY PLEASURE (BOOK): Huh I accidentally skipped this one but came back to it when I got to the guilty pleasure for music. A book that’s a guilty pleasure? I don’t know. Hey, Once Upon a Forest had a novelization, that I bought in my 20s because for some reason I had access to disposable income. I couldn’t imagine doing that today. Like my kid and I need to eat. Buuut, it probably sounds like I’m shitting on Once Upon a Forest. I’m so ashamed, ohh noo, people on the internet will know I like something! If I was that ashamed I wouldn’t even mention it here.
BOOK I SHOULD HAVE READ BY NOW BUT HAVEN'T: I’ve been neglecting the L. Frank Baum books that aren’t Oz books. The only one I read was The Sea Fairies.
BOOK SERIES MASTERPIECE: Lord of the Rings. Because I’m talking about Oz too much and I want to make it seem like I read other books too, so people will think I’m intelligent. That’s what these Facebook lists really are, for showing off to people on your friends list.Well I did slog through those books in High School when the movies were popular. There’s a good story but it’s buried under these details that don’t need to be in there, pages and pages of dry, unnecessary world building.That’s just JRR Tolkien’s writing style. But it’s still a masterpiece because no one before him had ever done something like that before, as extensively. Yeah, Oz pioneered world building as a concept but Tolkien is the example every fantasy writer follows at least to some degree, whether directly or indirectly.
BOOK MASTERPIECE: Oooookay, now I have to think of a masterpiece with no sequels. Well you know what, I really like this book I have, Armenian Legends and Poems by Zabelle Boyajian. It was written in 1916 and is public domain, but it has a lot of my favorite Armenian poets, like Bedros Tourian, Hovhannes Tumanian, Raffi, Sayat Nova, a bunch of others. You can read it online. That was how I first read it, but I ordered a hard copy book of it back in Grad School.
Okay, time for music. This time I’ll replace “MOVIE” with “BAND”, or “ALBUM”. Actually this might be trickier than the BOOK one was. I hate all-caps don’t you? But I guess that’s how the copy pasta goes. Who was the one who wrote it I wonder? Some spy for the CIA or something. Well write normally! My touchscreen keyboard doesn’t appear to have Caps Lock. Maybe I’m supposed to fiddle with the arrow that shifts between upper and lower case letters. Ohhh I have some trivia! Did you know that “lower case” and “upper case” comes from the old printing machines? They would keep the letters of the typeset in cases. Big ones in the upper case, small letters in the lower case. I learned that when I worked at the Cracker Country museum on the Florida State Fairgrounds. Hey let me dig up that blog I wrote about it. Here it is. From three years ago! Time flies. I will have to reread it later.
Ohhhh what was I typing about again? Oh yeah! Music.
Music
BAND I HATE: Kid Rock. First I thought of Creed, then I thought wait no, Limp Bizkit is even worse than Creed, and then I thought of the worst band/artist of all that used to get played on rock radio stations in the late 90s. Screw that wannabe redneck. He’s not even a real redneck, he was born rich and pretends like he grew up in the trailer parks or something. Stupid Trump worshiper. And his music is just Gods awful. “Play with your balls and pick your butt, diggydiggydiggy pick a boogie and then hawk a loogie!”
BAND I THINK IS OVERRATED: I think it’s The Beatles. I’ve just never liked them. I know they were influential and stuff.
BAND I THINK IS UNDERAPPRECIATED: The entire goth genre is underappreciated. And apparently that’s actually supposed to be two words, and the CIA agent who wrote this is illiterate. But within the goth genre, you still have bands that receive way more attention than others. Like the DJs that do goth radio shows and YouTube playlists always focus on bands from North America and Western Europe. You don’t get to hear bands from South America or anywhere east of Germany unless you go out and dig for them yourself, or find a really cool YouTube channel that uploads stuff like that. I am going to be a proud Armenian and give the title to Jrimurmur. They’re like the Armenian Lebanon Hanover. Listen to them.
BAND I LOVE: Lots of bands, obviously. Let’s go with Das Ich, that’s the band I’m in the mood to say right now. That’s the band that got me into goth music. When I found their CD in the metal section at Rasputin Records, where it shouldn’t have been.
BAND I CAN LISTEN TO OVER & OVER: Lately, it’s kind of a tie between Nirvana and Alice in Chains. Hey, you can be goth and listen to other genres too you know. But yeah, I always have to go through and listen to every single live performance, demo and bootleg I can find of these bands. Rarely a day goes by where I don’t hear something from either band.
BAND THAT MADE ME FALL IN LOVE WITH MUSIC: We have to go wayyyy back to answer this question. Back to my toddler years in the 1980s. My mom would watch MTV all the time back then, and I would listen to all sorts of music. Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” comes to mind. I used to love watching that stop motion music video to it. I guess it was that. Then you had Guns n Roses and Aerosmith very early on too. Too bad I know what an asshole Axl Rose is now.
BAND THAT CHANGED MY LIFE: Das Ich certainly did, but it was preceded by Kraftwerk. I first heard Kraftwerk when I was 12, and it tuned me into electronic and German music. It set me off on a journey that would eventually lead me to goth after several detours.
BAND THAT SURPRISED ME: Uhhhh hmm. That’s a tricky one. You know, that scream at the beginning of “Them Bones” by Alice in Chains still gets me sometimes, like if I accidentally have the volume up too high. “AAAH!!!”
GUILTY PLEASURE: Well you know Once Upon a Forest had a soundtrack - No, no, I’m not going to pick on Once Upon a Forest again. What else can I think of?
“I can tell time by the moooooon” no no stop it.
I will say though that I hate that gospel song the dumb birds sing in the movie. I always skip that part of the movie. Don’t think I’m into that.
BAND I SHOULD HAVE LISTENED TO BY NOW BUT HAVEN'T: Ummm, I mean listening to a band is pretty easy. What should I have listened to? What could be such a chore to listen to that I won’t just go on YouTube and search the band, and listen through my bluetooth headphones for one minute? Maybe it should be album. Hmmm. Oh, okay. Well here it is. In the 90s there was this kinda industrial band called The Prodigy, had two hits, “Firestarter” and “Breathe”, and those are still the only two songs I have ever heard from them. I need to listen to their other music. I would probably like it. They sound like they could have been influenced by Das Ich, or another electro goth band.
ALBUM MASTERPIECE: I’m going to ignore the trilogy one for music. Okay, I want to pick an album that is a masterpiece from start to finish, has no songs I would ever skip. In Times Before the Light by Covenant. Or “The Kovenant” if you will. Followed closely by their second album Nexus Polaris. Covenant is my favorite metal band by far. Too bad they disappeared in 2003. They said they were going to release a new album and that they were done recording it, and I’m still waiting for it. It’s been 20 years since their last album. The lead singer got bullied on his blog by a few metalheads because he was putting synths in his music. So what? You’re just going to quit because of that? What a disservice to the fans that did like your later albums. I love you guys, but there’s absolutely no excuse not to release that last album you said you were done with back in like 2004 or something after all these years. I don’t really know the full story of what happened I guess. It sucks though. Their music was so good. They didn’t officially break up, they just disappeared. Did a few concerts here and there since then, rereleased their first and second albums a couple times, but that’s it. At least give us that new album, then you can go back to the abyss if you want.
Well, I’m done ranting. Yaaaaay. My comic page is mostly finished at least, so I was able to waste time writing this while chilling in my bedroom. I guess I will go back downstairs and help Deborah with Jareth. Then she can have a break if she wants. We take shifts in parenting.
