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promise???

Lewiston Morning Tribune, May 29, 1931.

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as a personal aside, i recall when Chicago banned the fog/smoke machines in clubs and suddenly you could SEE stuff and damn that was a fucking shock. Like, i did not want to see that much.

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in the unlikely even someone here is interested in A.G. Convergence we are pushing out a call for bids, you can find more info on FB: https://www.facebook.com/groups/altgothicconvergence/ Yes, THAT Convergence: spread the word!

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"She Desires of My Blood" - by Randy Ortiz

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Barbara Steele

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mood

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This reminded me of something, i was looking up a Tom Waits lyric on Genius and it was for "Mr. Siegel" - a rather epicly dirty song - and someone for real put in there that "red wings" were a kind of work boot. My children, my sweet summer children, this is most absolutely not the intention of that lyric. Some people clearly didn't read Hunter S. Thompson's "Outlaws and Hells Angels" and if shows.

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h.naoto fw 08

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Arantza Sestayo (b. 1964) - “Witch”

from ‘Coven: A Gallery Girls Book Vol. 2’, 1998

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Bizarre No. 13, 1954, from The Complete Reprint of John Willie's Bizarre (1995)

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Its time for every sort of counterculture to start breathing FIRE

In 2025 you have to fag it up as much as possible. Goth it up also. Godspeed. Gothspeed, even.

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not me once again needing to rip my CD collection to another device. RIP Zune, truly you were the Betamax of your generation.

But i have a Mighty Need to listen to my Mercyful Fate collection and i'm not re-buying all those albums since my CDs still function. sigh. (yes Youtube music has all that stuff, still)

𝖑𝖆𝖙𝖊 80𝖘 𝖆𝖓𝖉 90𝖘 𝖘𝖆𝖙𝖆𝖓𝖎𝖈 𝖙𝖍𝖗𝖆𝖘𝖍 𝖒𝖊𝖙𝖆𝖑

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“I am attracted by unconventionality. I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits.”

— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

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“I try again and again to console my heart and pick the flowers that grow in the midst of hell.”

— Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

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Bluebeard's Castle / a novel by Anna Biller

I first encountered auteur/cinéaste Anna Biller when she screened her Cal Arts thesis film Three Examples of Myself as a Queen (1994) at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center in Venice, California. The film was a tour-de-force - a straight-faced hilarious surreal camp fantasy musical that Biller wrote, starred in, directed, costumed, composed and set-designed. Around that time I was also lucky enough to catch her live stage production, The Lady Cat, in which she starred as a be-whiskered furred sexy feline. Those glorious offerings have since been followed by films such as The Hypnotist (2001), A Visit from the Incubus (2001), Viva (2007) and The Love Witch (2016), each of which has been a gleaming iconic/iconoclastic constellation in the Anna Biller firmament.

Now, years later, I've just finished the audio version of Biller's debut novel, Bluebeard's Castle (Verso Fiction, 2023). Fascinating, complex and interwoven with stealth historic, cinematic and literary hat-tips, the novel absolutely felt like an Anna Biller production. Biller's indelible mise en scène over the years has been so gloriously signature with its unapologetic embrace of nostalgic high fashion and cinematic kitsch that the novel unspooled in my head as a dazzling film punctuated by bits of quintessential Biller-esque theatrical side-business: naked men painted white posing as statues; costumed dancers performing a sensual pas-de-deux between a caterpillar and a butterfly.

The book is a true-to-form romance novel that follows the erotic evolution of romance novelist Judith as she is drawn ever deeper into the gravitational pull of a devilishly handsome cad. But Biller subverts the genre by confronting the reader with the nightmarish horror of the narcissistic demonic, all the while seducing us with inescapable eroticism, daring us not to turn the page (or keep listening to the audio - convincingly read with Gothic intensity by Samantha Hydeson).

The juxtaposition of romance novel genre and rigorous razor-sharp psychological insight of Bluebeard's Castle made my head spin. In vivid Biller-esque fashion, the dark momentum of the work made me feel like I was being strangled with a gold satin cord and lowered into a red velvet lined coffin in a symbolic death. This is a filmmaker's novel with big dreamlike technicolor impact and Hitchcock-like precision.

I read somewhere that Biller had originally pitched Bluebeard's Castle as a film and, rather than wait for the capricious wheels of cinematic fate to spin in her favor, took to the novel form and made it happen.

Here's holding out hope that this scintillating work gets a green light. Would be epic.