kazlovesbats - "DIY: Make a Gothic Shawl Great for Fall and Gothic/Deathrock Events."

This one is how to make a goth shawl.

kazlovesbats - "D.I.Y! Make your Cardigan Badass and Uniquely Yours."

One thing I like about kazlovesbats is that she does some gothically inclined arts and crafts. I'll post a couple of her vids today. This one is about her customization of a cardigan (largely on the cheap).

Straftanz - "-jl- eats his first deep fried Mars Bar."

This is exactly what is advertised.

Here's a Ricki Lake clip from the 90s that will make you remember when things were worse.

Goths have it easy these days, in my opinion. People are way, way more comfortable with it than they used to be. Back in the nineties, this kind of programming was considered to be OK. It wouldn't be, anymore.

Kill Natalie - "How to get REALLY big Goth hair"

If you want to know how to get really big goth hair, I think this vid will work for you.

LigeiaResurrected - "Goth Talk - Dealing with Bullies"

Here's a less "positive" video in regard to bullying. One thing that I do like about this video though is that LigeiaResurrected is very blunt about how far bullies may go, and she doesn't sugar coat things.

Kill Natalie - "Goth Talk: dealing with bullies"

Here is some interesting and sound advice on how to deal with bullies.

Black Dove Design Company

(Property of Brittany Bindrim, used under Fair Use for direct, substantial commentary on product)

As many of you should know, Brittany Bindrim of I:Scintilla is a master visual artist. She's the one who designs all of I:Scintilla's album covers. Her art business is Black Dove Design Company, and if you want to see her art, buy a piece of her art, or get a commission, this is the place you go for it. Take a look at her illustrations page, in particular, if you want an idea of just how well she has mastered this craft.

kazlovesbats - "What Great Paying Jobs can an American Goth have?"

This video from kazlovesbats is an interesting watch, although I think there are a number of things in which she should expand upon for clarification in one or more future videos. She has general ideas that I agree with, but I think she really needs to really go a step further, because there are a number of things that have an effect on how well someone who is visibly "scene" is accepted, including, but not limited to: which state you're in, how urban or rural your area is, the size of your current or prospective company (and whether it's a corporation vs. a sole proprietorship or something else), whether or not you interact with the public, the subtle nuances of the company, exactly how you express yourself as a scenester, your professional and personal qualifications, your market demand as an employee, and the personal whims of your superiors.

The difference between having an opinion and being a horrible person

(Photo by Ivo Jansch, CC 2.0)

It's been a while since I've been on a good rant, but an interesting thing happened to some of my friends earlier today, and that's what prompted me to make this post. See, my other big social crowd besides the goth-industrial scene is the anime convention scene. I have a significant number of friends and associates who are active within the anime scene and are involved in a number of ways, including cosplay. As it so happened, some of my friends did group costuming at this year's Katsucon. For the most part, these people received praise for their costumes, but one incident that happened on Facebook today made for the entire spark for this entry.

There was this one person who was supposed to be a friend of one of my friends who did the cosplay. Apparently, this guy didn't like the cosplay and thought the majority of the cosplayers looked subpar. What was particularly tactless and odd was the fact the perpetrator told my friend that he looked fine, but all his friends who were part of the cosplay with him were awful to look at. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see where this is going, particularly after the person making tactless comments about the cosplay threatens to put the pic in question on 4chan.

With friends like that, who needs enemies?

Cosplay is one of those small-time community art scenes, a lot like the goth-industrial music scene. There are a few people high up on the food chain, like Jessica Nigri and Yaya Han, who really make a decent living out of what they do, but most of the people who "make it" within the scene are still people who are close enough to the realities of the world of the common people that they aren't above feeling the sting or elation of what others say about their craft. If you keep up with cosplay, you sometimes see the same people get featured all the time on the big and semi-big geek portal sites, and they're the people who are really popular cosplayers who people enjoy seeing. These people may have a considerable number of followers on their cosplay pages on Facebook. But when Monday morning after cons hit, these people who are not the Jessica Nigris and Yaya Hans put their pants on one leg at a time and go to mundane jobs or classes like the rest of us.

In the goth-industrial scene, it's no different. For instance, while Brittany Bindrim might be telling you about how things were "not [her] plan" and letting you know over and over again that "[she] did this" after work, her mad skills with Photoshop are what pay the bills. I can guarantee you that nobody in I:Scintilla gets treated like Hollywood royalty. Those people shop at the grocery store and pump their own gas like the rest of us. As such, they're more like us than you might think.

We're quick to detach ourselves from artists, particularly in the age of the Internet, and we have kind of thrown decorum out the window. As a result of this detachment, we forget that someone who is a lot like ourselves worked hard on the thing we're consuming. It's one thing when someone who is very famous has a product that has been exposed to the masses, because when someone is at that level, he or she isn't even going to notice what individuals other than people with comparable clout have to say. Someone with that level of success will only notice macro-level trends from the masses, so noticing one person's flippantly biting remark is like noticing a single particular drop of rain within the context of a thunderstorm. But when it comes to most people within the indie scene, up-and-comers, and other people who haven't made it to the big time yet, those people do notice criticism on a much more micro level. Regardless of whether or not they've learned to deal with the criticism, they still notice it.

Of course, none of this is to say that I believe you shouldn't ever criticize artists below a certain level of fame. As a matter of fact, I think that idea is completely absurd. Good, constructive criticism is necessary for artists to improve and gain fame over time. Artists gamble when they completely ignore the input of their fans. Angering your fanbase is a great way make your artwork no longer financially viable. It's better to get constructive criticism now and be able to make adjustments than to wonder why your fanbase simply dwindled over time. That's not to say artists should never take risk, not is it to say that the fans are always right or perfect seers of the future, but public opinion is very important to consider when trying to peddle one's work.

But the key term within the last paragraph was "constructive". If there is something you didn't like about a song, a video, an album, a show, or anything, you need to explain what you didn't like in as direct and non-confrontational as you can. "I didn't like this, because..." or "I would have preferred if you have done this, because..." works a lot better than "Your album sucks!" or "Don't quit your day job!" (An exception to this is if the artist actually did something you deem wrong or offensive. (e.g. took your money and didn't give you product in return, said racial slurs on stage, etc.) In those cases, being a bit more confrontational, without doing something that will get you arrested, mind you, may be more in order.) Artists who want to continue to be artists are remarkably receptive of feedback. You may think some of them are aloof, but they listen to what you have to say. As such, you need to not treat them like garbage. Talk to them like human beings, as if they were standing in front of you in a room.

In summary, I suppose the whole point of this rant is that you shouldn't treat artists within the scene poorly. They actually notice what you have to say. Even if they may not address you directly, they pay attention. Don't be a jerk, unless you just want the scene to dry up and die.

Industrial charity

(Public Domain License)

One thing that I wanted to highlight for a while now has been the different charitable things people within the goth-industrial scene have done. Although this is drastically not a comprehensive list of nice things that musicians have done ever, this just gives you a taste of their humanity.

Honestly, what finally got me off my duff to write this post is the fact Spider Lilies joined Music for Good on ReverbNation today to give a portion of their proceeds to charity: water, an organization that focuses on making it so people in developing nations have access to potable water.

I:Scintilla gave a portion of their proceeds from the sales of the Dying and Falling EP to help the victims of the 2011 Tohuku earthquake in Japan.

Helalyn Flowers donated music in 2012 for "The Greenlight Bundle" on groupees.com, which donated proceeds to War Child International, Make a Wish, and the Sandy Hook School Support Fund.

Trent Reznor raised money to help someone pay for hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical expenses incurred from a heart transplant in 2009.

Finally, Emilie Autumn released a charity single, By the Sword, after the events of 9/11 to raise money for AmeriCares and the American Red Cross.

Like I said, I'm probably only just scratching the surface here, but the goth-industrial community does a lot of good things for people. If you know of other musicians who have given to charity or performed other charitable acts, let me know!

The balance between self-expression and making it (Part I)

(Photo by c_ambler, CC 2.0)

This is meant to be more of an exploratory piece. This is something for which I don't claim to have the definitive answers, but I think it's worth having a discussion. The subject for the next three afternoons is what it means to be within the scene while having to be part of a greater world. I intend to focus on interaction with employers, because that's where there is the most conflict that I feel self-expression isn't going to necessarily win a significant portion of the time.

First, I'll need to explain a bit of background about myself to give people some context about where I come from in regard to what I'm going to say. I'm in my late-twenties. I have a bachelor's and an MBA. I have a day job in an office, I utilize my skills from my training, and I make an adequate living. I'm not married, and I don't have kids.

All that being said, I think the first thing we need to focus on people's definitions of two things: happiness and success. What makes you happy? What makes you not necessarily happy, but at least something you can live with? What do you find intolerable? Does success directly correlate with happiness? What do you consider to be success?

There was a study done a few years ago that tied money to happiness in which a person would be less likely to have daily emotional downturns as he or she made more money up to about $75,000 per year. I won't go into the details here, since I provided a link for you, but in short, the idea is that the more money someone makes to a certain point, the less he or she has to worry about survival needs. At about the $75K mark, one doesn't have to worry about basic survival anymore and worries generally involve things tied more to greater enjoyment of life. I'm not going to attempt to argue that exact number here, because there are a slew of different things that can make that number go up or down. The point I want to drive home is the general concept that there is a certain income point in which your worries stop being about surviving and primarily involve living. Until then, the amount of money you make has an effect on your day-to-day happiness. (Of course, I'm making the assumption that your life doesn't have any sort of extreme circumstances. For instance, you could be making $250K per year, but if your sibling is dying from cancer, your daily happiness has much different stimuli that work on it.)

For most people in an individualistic industrialized society, such as that of the US, money is a big part of life. Your quality of life is directly related to how much money you make. Pooling of resources is kept to a minimum and is frowned upon in many cases. As such, the money you make purchases your status within society. Your ability to live starts and ends with your pocketbook.

So, I've sufficiently beaten it into your skulls that money really does matter in regard to happiness. What's my point? Obviously, the next logical step involves the fact that you have to have to find a way to get the money you need to live a lifestyle that you can reasonably tolerate. For most people, that involves finding employment that pays a sufficient wage to live. If you're someone who has inherited a fortune, born into riches, married someone with money, or is otherwise independently wealthy from ways outside of direct employment, this series of posts is going to mean nothing to you.

At some point in your life, if you aren't already an adult who takes care of himself or herself, you will be. You will have to find some means of employment, whether it's working for someone else or working for yourself. The vast majority of people are employees of someone else, and even among those who are exclusively self-employed, they still have to answer to other people, even if those people aren't direct bosses in a chain of command. As such, because you have to answer to other people by virtue of laws, company policies, and good business practices, you do not have full control over how you operate within the confines of the workplace environment if you wish to keep your job.

I know you're thinking, "I get where you're trying to go with this. Why don't you just cut to the chase?"

That's more for tomorrow's post, because I want to set up a good base, today, for people think about exactly why I'm saying the things I'm saying. I want people to really think hard about what it actually means to be happy and successful, particularly in a country like the US, and what you have to go through to make it happen. We'll get to the goth stuff tomorrow, but today, just think about what you think I'm going to say. Think about what your priorities are in life, but more importantly, think about how you will actually go about achieving the goals you want to achieve. Remember that I mention "balance" in the title of my entry, and that is something important you have to consider.

A lot of these people have day jobs, you know.

(In the Thick of It (Alex Proimos) / CC BY 2.0)

One thing about being part of the underground music scene is the fact that a lot of these people have day jobs that pay the bills, and music is what they do with the time they have left. I would imagine that means they have extraordinarily little spare time, since they're professionals when it comes to their music. It really must take a lot of drive to succeed.

I may make this a recurring column if there's interest in this. Basically, I just want to share what the day jobs are of a few musicians you all know and love.

Erica Dunham of Unter Null is a pastry chef. Her baking business, Unterbites, focuses heavily on bacon and has a whole section of the merchandise devoted to it. I have yet to try her pastries, but I'm definitely interested. She does have a number of good reviews from her customers.

Brittany Bindrim of I:Scintilla is a graphic designer by trade. She has a degree in graphic design, and she does all the physical artwork for the band. Considering her talent in that field, I've pitched the idea on their Facebook page that she make a Tumblr or another site totally devoted to her artwork. I don't lie when I say that I look forward to the album cover artwork just as much as the music.

Sam Rosenthal of Black Tape for a Blue Girl owns and manages the Projekt independent record label. Prominent artists include Aurelio Voltaire and Android Lust. Owning and running a record label sounds like a lot of work to me. I wonder how Mr. Rosenthal has the time.

I know what it's like to have to work to make ends meet while having something very important and time-consuming in the background. So I can definitely sympathize with these people who probably have insane schedules and little time to just vegetate. A lot of people seem to think that being a musician means you get to just hang out and perfect your art all the time, but that only happens once you get to a certain level of fame and fortune. Before you get there, unless you have someone else doing the work of keeping the lights on and food on the table, it can be a real grind.