This Xmas give the gift of anarchy

Xmas is coming. And we're all wondering what to buy. Like always.

But when Vivienne Westwood tells you to stop shopping and get a life. Oh crikey! We've gotta re-vamp this consumer holiday.

One option is to help others while helping ourselves. You can't buy the Revolution but you can start arming the armory.

If you need gift ideas, why not buy some books from anarchist publishing houses like PM Press or Between the Lines? As just one sample, PM Press has republished Nick Blinko's The Primal Screamer.




Source: PM Press


Goth horror meets punk rock. What could be better?

And you're not just helping the Revolution indirectly here. This fortnight both presses are donating a portion of their sales to help defend G20 protesters in Toronto.

In the summer of 2010, the world's semi-elected assholes and fuckheads gathered in Toronto to decide our collective fate. But they didn't want to be bothered by actually consulting us, so they had to beat the shit out of 1000s of protesters to shut them out and shut them up. Familiar, non?

Well, fuck them! This Xmas you can help defend innocent and nonviolent activists from bogus legal charges.

Buy a book and fight back against police brutality, poseur democracy and state repression.

Reading into the Goth sensibility

Fresh from my larval stage, I came to Goth through literature. And not Gothic lit, either.

No, this baby bat cut his teeth on the English Romantics and the French Decadents. Totally badass!

Typically, Lord Byron was the man. And Manfred was the text. And I wanted to be the Byronic hero I found in my mom's English textbook:

'[The Byronic hero] is a man greater than others in emotion, capability, and suffering. Only among wild and vast forms of nature--the ocean, the precipes and glaciers of the Alps--can he find a counterpart to his own titanic passions. Driven by a demon within, he is fatal to himself and others; for no one can resist his hypnotic fascination and authority. He has committed a sin that itself expresses his superiority: lesser men could not even conceive a like transgression. Against his own suffering he brings to bear a superhuman pride and fortitude. Indeed, without the horror of his fate there could not be the splendor of self-assertion and self-mastery in which he experiences a strange joy and triumph (Perkins, David, ed. English Romantic Writers. Harcourt, Brace and World: New York, 1967. 782).'

Oh if only...if only...Oh, if only I had a dark secret. Oh, if only I had to go into exile. Oh, if only I was 'mad, bad, and dangerous to know.'

And from Byron I naturally went to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Who doesn't shiver everytime she hears the opening lines of 'Kubla Khan'?

                               In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
                               A stately pleasure-dome decree:
                               Where Alph, the sacred river ran
                               Through caverns measureless to man
                               Down to a sunless sea.

It's like a horror movie running up and down my spine! Shudder. Shudder.

But Coleridge just gets better. You start with 'Kubla Khan' because it's short and you're a teenager. After you're hooked, then you go onto the big stuff: 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'. Here you get some really good chills:

                              Her lips were red, her looks were free,
                              Her locks were yellow as gold:
                              Her skin was white as leprosy,
                              The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she,
                              Who thicks man's blood with cold.

Yummie! I'm rigid and frigid. Kind of like Michelle Bachman makes me feel. I know. I've said too much.

Byron and Coleridge rock but if you thought the Romantics were the shit, then just wait until you meet the Decadents. Baudelaire and Huysmans make Byron and Coleridge look like priests...ok, I'll go with that. Interpret that simile however you will.

In 'The Metamorphoses of the Vampire,' Charles Baudelaire masters doom and gloom:

                             Twisting and writhing like a snake on fiery sands,
                             Kneading her breast against her corset's metal bands,
                             The woman, meanwhile, from her mouth of strawberry [de sa bouche de fraise]
                             Let flow these fragrant words of musky mystery:
                             --'I have the moistest lip, and well I know the skill
                            Within a bed's soft heart, to lose the moral will.
                            I dry up all your tears on my triumphant bust
                            And make the old ones laugh like children, in their lust.
                            I take the place for those who see my naked arts
                            Of moon and of the sun and all the other stars.
                            I am, my dear savant, so studied in my charms
                            That when I stifle men within my ardent arms
                            Or when I give my breast to their excited bites,
                            Shy or unrestrained, of passionate delight,
                            On all those mattresses that swoon in ecstasy
                            Even the helpless angels damn themselves for me!'

Whew. You be the judge. Is it better for a boi to get his sex ed from Playboy or Baudelaire?

And if Baudelaire is a lesson in perversion, then J.-K. Huysmans is its perfection. Against Nature is the ultimate decadent tale about Duc Jean des Esseintes. A noble scion, world-weary, dreary and a little eerie, decides to go into self-exile by designing his own private utopia totally cut off from the rest of the world. Here he engages in lavish experiments and explores his every whim, taste and desire. Who wouldn't want to be Des Esseintes? Drinking exotic liqueurs, gazing at the prints and paintings of Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon, reading Baudelaire and Barbey d'Aurevilly...Now that is ultraGoth!

From that batty apprenticeship I matured into full Goth-hood. First the reading, then the music, the style, the scene. . Since I've been a teenager, I've moved in and out of the scene but the dark and decadent sensibility endures and evolves. And I always come back. I can't resist...

Don't just look Goth. Be Goth, my dark comrades.

An edible god

I am an atheist but I l-o-o-o-o-o-ve the weirwood in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. What is a weirwood, you ask? Well, here is Martin quoted at length from A Game of Thrones:

'At the center of the grove an ancient weirwood brooded over a small pool where the waters were black and cold. "The heart tree," Ned called it. The weirwood's bark was white as bone, its leaves dark red, like a thousand bloodstained hands. A face had been carved in the trunk of the great tree, its features long and melancholy, the deep-cut eyes red with dried sap and strangely watchful. They were old, those eyes; older than Winterfell itself. They had seen Brandon the Builder set the first stone, if the tales were true; they had watched the castle's granite walls rise around them. It was said that the children of the forest had carved the faces in the trees during the dawn centuries before the coming of the First Men across the narrow sea.'

...wow...wow...wow...

That's the weirwood. So like the Green Man. That pagan mystique and strength. Hinting of an aweful power implacable, unmoving, inhuman and all-encompassing. Wowza!

Now if you're like me and want to remystify your life a little bit, there's nothing like building a little weirwood of your own. If you're not fortunate enough to have your own forest to remodel, then you could find some inspiration from our dark comrades over at the Inn at the Crossroads.

Just look at this luscious and creepy white chocolate weirwood cake. Fangtastic!!!

Source: Inn at the Crossroads

Xmas is coming up! And nothing puts the pagan spirit back into the season like a weirwood cake...or an Xmas tree...or wreath...or...hell! pretty much everything about that holiday is pagan.

So thank you innkeepers for one more idea for a merry winter solstice or a sinister Black Christmas party.

Eat Goth. Play Goth. Live Goth, my pretties.

Keep it simple

Here is a good example of how to say complex things in very simple, everyday language. She gets right to the bottom line in gender oppression: sexism is the source. Homophobia. Transphobia. Are all varieties of sexism. A common concept in all gender theory.

Paisley Currah, a CUNY professor of political science, does a similar job of simplifying and demystifying difficult ideas about gender in his book Transgender Rights, which unfortunately appears to be out of print. Currah actually makes the theories of Judith Butler, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida comprehensible. Elegant and eloquent.

Watch on, read on, gothlings!

Are Goths oppressed?

Goths are subject to bullying. Does that mean they are oppressed? Well, it depends on how you define bullying and oppression--and whether or not you see them as connected phenomena.

That Goths are bullied is clear. You can read accounts at the Ultimate Goth Guide. Here is an example. Here are some more.  And here are some examples of bullycide. I could go on and on and on.

And the bullying does go on. It continues after high school. Into adulthood. The murder of Sophie Lancaster for being a Goth is probably the most egregious case. That would be a hate crime if Lancaster had belonged to a visible minority. But didn't she?

As bullying expert Barb Coloroso points out: bullying is about contempt--and I would add contempt for difference. It is part of the matrix of social responses to despised minorities--and as targets all minorities are substitutes for each other. The point is not the nature of the other but the social fact of othering. Any other is just as good for the bully and the forces s/he represents as only s/he can.

Who do bullies go after? The obviously wierd. The sexually ambiguous--or threatening. The racially diverse. The targets highlight the role bullies play as the red right hand of socialization.

And bullying is part of the hazing process we politely call socialization. The bully is the frontline enforcing agent of the 'normal.' S/he can do things that are outside the means of other agents of socialization. Your parents and teachers and coaches can't abuse you (well, that's the message at least, even if it isn't the reality) but the bully can.

The system is complicit. Co-dependent. Enabling. Society would not exist without the bully. The bully beats 'the rules' into his or her victims; and the victims are outsiders who need to be reigned in or turned into a deterrent for others.

In the link above, Coloroso points out how ineffectual most official responses are to bullying. Teachers sit the victim and the bully down together and talk them through it. The bully apologizes, the victim has to accept it and then everyone happily goes back to the brutal game of high school humiliation and oppression.

Coloroso doesn't explain why this happens. She seems to think it's due to gullilbility or ignorance. What if it's part of the system? Plausible deniability: When I found out what was happening, I did what I could to stop it. I sat them down. We talked about how terrible bullying is. She apologized. Problem solved. Right...The teacher knows what he or she is doing, even if he or she disavows it.

Bullying is a political act. It is oppression. Goths need to protect themselves accordingly.

Most advice on fighting bullying is personal or social. That is why it is ineffectual and insufficient. If bullying is political, then the response needs to be collective and organized.

A key to where we can maybe begin to organize and act lies in the murder of Sophie Lancaster. She was targeted because she was a Goth. That much is clear. But what does that mean? Not just that she didn't fit in or belonged to a marginalized group. But also because Goth is a socioeconomic symbol.

Goths tend to be better educated, middle class and professional. Even if they aren't individually, they are stereotyped in this way. And that matters in the current class war. As the rich intensify their assault on the middle class, they are enlisting the assistance of the poor and working class. Goths are just one more victim in this conflict.

Yes, they aren't directly enlisting angry youth but they sure are doing it indirectly. Think of the young men who attacked and killed Lancaster. Disaffected youth with no prospects living in ever-diminishing economic conditions. A real threat to the system. But you keep them uneducated. You keep them disorganized with drugs and consumer culture. What does that ensure? They never target their real enemies. They go after the nearest best thing. Smart, articulate, affable Sophie Lancaster has it better. She is it for the moment.

If socioeconomic conditions lie behind bullying, then what should we do? Organize along with the global Occupying movement for:

1. More public funding of education, training, and social services.
2. Free post-secondary education to open it up for everyone.
3. Higher corporate and progressive income taxes to fund these public goods.
4. Redistribute income and reduce the growing income gap.

And to directly tackle the hierarchical and unequal foundation that is the blood of bullying, we need to democratize:

1. The classroom.
2. The workplace.
3. All social institutions.

We learn by doing, we need to do democracy from the beginning. Bullies are on the side of the masters. Let's get rid of them with economic and democratic reform. Let's get rid of the socioeconomic and political conditions that lead to bullying.

And let's Occupy the world, my dark comrades!

Bent, not straight--part two

We all know the difference between the rub one out on the other's body get my rocks off kind of sex. And real sex. The boundary-breaking, ego-extinguishing sort of intimacy that depends on and creates utter trust, utter abandonment and utter obliteration. That is the model for intersubjective equality. For the collapse of the liberal democratic family-bound self into the smudged body of interdependence, interaction and interpenetration. There we don't end with our bodies. We share our bodies. Feminist writers like Catherine Waldby and Lynne Segal talk about this self-dissolving intimacy and its political impact on the relations between the sexes.

But bending heterosexuality doesn't start and end with sex. This intimacy needs to be developed and extended to undermine and overthrow hetero-norms. On a personal--and collective level.

On a personal level, bending gender and gender bending need to involve openness and experimentation. Our sex and gender have been written onto and into us; and we need to change the font, alter the word order, strike some words out, replace others and rewrite some whole sentences hither and thither and yon. But there's no absolutes here and no simple program. Overcoming sex and gender means more than just switching things up: backwards to forwards, upside down to rightside up, ass to mouth...Androgyny can be gender bending but it can also reinforce and conserve the norm, for example.

Deconstructing our gendered self doesn't mean making the feminine the new black. The word of the day for body re/making is bricolage: take a bit of the masculine and the feminine, stir it up, rip it up and cut and paste it. Traditional masculine traits like self-confidence are valuable but:

1. They are not inherently masculine; and
2. They inhibit other practices like vulnerability or intimacy, etc.

Traditional feminine traits like emotional expressiveness are equally valuable but:

1. They are not inherently feminine; and
2. They inhibit other practices like assertiveness, etc.

So, we need to make sure when we bend that we don't end up simply reversing roles in a way that actually reinforces gender stereotypes--or that works against the needs of the moment: choosing vulnerabilty when stoicism would be a better tactic, for example.

We also need to remember that appearances matter. If gender isn't real and fixed, then the whole notion of identity as a found object dissipates. De-essentializing and decentring identities gives body play, style and appearances more meaning than they usually get in politics and culture. Piercings, androgynous or elaborate haircuts and unusual and striking clothes can all contribute to bending gender and sexuality. In a chapter titled 'Visibly Queer' in her book In the Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification, Victoria Pitts makes exactly this point: different bodies challenge the conformist image of the 'right' type of body and all the political, cultural and moral assumptions that go with it.

If there is no essential depth, then the surface is the realm of significance and signification. Our symbols and role-playing become deconstructing signs that undermine norms about the male and femal body, behavior and sexuality. The boi wearing a corset and deadfalls is not just making a statement but radically challenging the 'idea' of what makes a man in our society. And if that same boi dances in an ambiguous or flagrantly feminine fashion with the purpose of attracting the female gaze, it can further subvert traditional roles. But if he is simply objectified in a plain vanilla role reversal, then it only reinforces oppressive patterns of power. In this situation, the problem is acting like a man regardless of your sex. To keep the radical potential of style, appearance and performance, the actor can't become an object but must remain an active performer.

And the performance is collaborative. As Nikki Sullivan,Victoria Pitts and others have pointed out, body re/making is not a solo act. I am not alone when I identify myself. Others also identify me and share my performance, so another feature of bending is recognizing the signifying role of other people and reacting to it with sensitivity and respect.

For example, women don't like getting propositioned in elevators. You might think it's spontaneous and harmless. They don't. Something about being alone in a enclosed space with a strange man makes women nervous. Are you really surprised? Whatever you meant by it, that message is not being passed on. You don't control the meaning of your actions by yourself. Others help. So pay attention.

And bend away this weekend. Bend sinister. Bend and sway, children of the night.

Saw a snowy owl

on my way to work this morning.

"Winter is coming" to northern Canada.

As the snow smothers the world and a vampire's hunting time eclipses her beauty rest, I can't help but wonder when will I meet my first white walker?

Yes, it is going to get that bad up here. Might as well be at the Wall.