Hurt Me Daddy, for I Have Blogged

 It's so interesting to observe how "safe" arts and entertainment feel overall right now. Anyone else have any thoughts on this? Boundary: I will not debate either cancel culture as a concept or the ethics of AIs with you. But it's so interesting to observe. I'd love to create a followup video piece to our "Are You There?" short we did last year that explores arts and entertainment as an especially self-soothing mechanism of familiarity right now. Even a lot of the AI cyberpunky stuff that's getting generated has this very fantasy, dreamlike quality. Nostalgia is getting recycled at a breakneck pace. And a lot of the "experimental" stuff out there, at least in my entertainment-based town, is specifically rehashing a lot of the same very fem-leaning stuff. How are fems subverting or playing with or conforming to tropes and expectations? How are historically marginalized people reinserting themselves into utterly Disneyfied, conventional narr...

  Old people rant ahead… Before I begin, I would also like to request that people who’ve never been a part of the goth scene in any location anywhere not participate in this discussion. I actually kind of feel it’s an intracommunity discussion. So at my age right now, I can rest assured that most humans on earth don’t think like I do. I need those regular reminders to humble me sometimes. And of course, inevitably, a lot of us don’t see eye to eye on things like politics. But I guess I’ve always maybe been either naïve or overly optimistic in assuming that Goth subculture should always be, at worst politically centrist, but most likely by default progressive, inclusive and left-leaning. Because I still remember the era of getting screamed at on the street for how I dressed and folx who dressed like me getting threats of violence. I remember my friends in the scene older than me explaining exactly how the queer nightclubs were some of the few willing to host goth clubs at the ...

 I have made a strong decision for my wellbeing right now. This particularly relates to supporting metaphysical co-business owners/entrepreneurs,  I will not be giving my energy any further,  to people who have difficulty standing in community with me as a fellow human. If that is potentially toxic or emotional blackmail, I am open to and ok with that. If you think I am acting exhausting, I might be. But this is also in alignment with what I need right now. I know that I can be problematic and difficult to deal with. I am also coming to terms with the fact that I have muted and tamped down a side of myself for too long-- that I am an ethnic-American. In the 80s and 90s if you were light-skinned it was the legacy of just being whte and wanting to blend in. Well, my relationship to that has changed and honestly this identity has created problems for me through my entire life. I would actually compare it to some peoples’ versions of transness—the constant inability to get tr...

I keep seeing that graphic of "2023 is the year when people show you who they are and you believe them" and I'm sitting here like y'all have already been doing that with people like me, don't worry 😆 Some of us give shit first (or ongoing) impressions but are still ok humans, fyi. I'm more put off by potential manipulators who know how to "check all the boxes" off the bat and show good behavior. No I'm not talking about masking, I'm talking about people who try to effect a social outcome, for survival reasons or otherwise. So maybe 2023 is the year we don't mute people like TV channels just because they say occasional off-putting stuff. I think we could stand to connect better and practice a touch of social resilience without running away at someone else's every misstep. No I am not telling people to put up with harm. I'm saying most people are going about life trying their best and we forget the fuck out of that sometimes. Stop ...

  So I’ve started to work out a lot more around my gender and here is how I’ve broken it down. About 70-80 percent of the time I feel completely agender/gender null as well as somewhat genderfluid. I’m solidly a they/them during that time, and in general that’s always a good set of pronouns to default to. Roughly 20-30 percent of the time I have concluded that I’m a nonbinary woman/multigender person who, ok this is going to be the confusing part…would prefer to take he/him pronouns. Let me see if I can drill down on this a little bit more. AMAB people presenting fem, in either deliberate performance drag, genderfluid expression, or showing that they’re women (aka transwomen/fems, who are women!) have ALWAYS been the foundational roots of my aesthetic influence. The list includes. Adam Ant Pete Burns Boy George (yes I know he’s problematic) Gen P Orridge (yes I know s/he’s problematic) Robin Finck of NIN in the early days RuPaul (yes I know he’s problematic, but h...

  I want to bring something up here, since my FB is split between people I hang out with in person and people I know online. If I’ve said something that’s directly damaging to our connection together, ideally, I’d like to know. I realize that that implies a certain level of intimacy and familiarity that I don’t have with 100% of people here, so I allow for that. I also understand that the cultural norm is now to preserve oneself and just ghost and walk away. I’m fully, maturely aware that no one owes me a “breakup” conversation about anything. I allow for all of these realities and see and hear them. But for those who have the spoons, I’d like to actively know how I might’ve harmed our relationship towards one another, so that I can try to make it better, or at least know for other relationships in future. Some of it is going to be socially trained stuff, like various forms of privilege, that are not immediately visible to certain people on a daily basis and that we have to wor...

Weirdly I've been revisiting a lot of Dresden Dolls' music and aesthetic lately, especially their first album. I'll admit to something--when the album came out I worked at Borders shortly thereafter (people got bored with releases a lot less quickly), and a LOT of people there compared my visual aesthetic to AFP, which really kind of put me off giving anything more than a single superficial listen, though I could recognize quality in that album when I did. AFP's Twitter shenanigans were no better and I continued to find her annoying, until around the early 2010s when I got a little more into her solo stuff and eased my opinion on her a bit. (I still do not give her problematic behaviors a pass but I finally read The Art of Asking early pandemic and it helped with some things. It's complicated and I still like Neil more but I can also see where misogyny might come into play with that.) Looking at some other personal artistic-aesthetic influences. Bowie's early m...