Rare sighting of a Goth at the beach - shield your eyes from the pasty white glare!
Still, sensibly, Sioux seems to be applying sunscreem
Can you imagine the Ice Queen burned and raw? Wouldn't be very a-peeling.
Judging by the quality of sand, and a faint memory of the caption when I stole this, it's a LA beach, not the kind of gravelly job you get in England. Possibly Venice Beach. (Well I suppose it could be somewhere Mediterranean)
Goths - and industrials - are a big subculture in LA (hence the Cruel Worlds festivals) and I think it's got something to do with dissent against the Sun itself - and the attached culture of tans and muscles and blonde hair and surfers.
McLaren was making a film - or trying to make a film - about Nazi surfers. Can you imagine a Goth on a surfboard?
Reviewing the new album from Model/Actriz, who perform a very queer, near-glam variation of post-punk, has made me think about the absence of explicit queerness in the original post-punk scene. There were exceptions like Peter Christopherson and the B-52s, but am I overlooking anyone?
ReplyDeleteI don't know - much of the 'political' wing often favored a unisex aesthetic that didn't leave much room for expression one way or another; on the glammier side, it could be the classic weirdly hypocritical homophobia so common to those kind of scenes (including glam metal contemporaneously) where dressing like a chick is one thing, but you better make it clear that you're not gay while you're doing so
DeleteLike a lot of punk, you have to balance which parts were reacting against the mainstream (which meant queerness would've been part of it) and which were reacting against the previous counterculture (where it was often a bone of contention - in Rosenbaum and Hoberman's Midnight Movies (1981), they describe the punks they've encountered as mostly reactionary suburbanites who want to make it very clear that they aren't, quote, 'sexual fa**ot hippie scum.')
Something I've said before about Tim Burton is that his 'no one knows the pain of a nerd dressed in black in Southern California' shtick works much better when you're young and from somewhere else, before you grow up and realize that describes like a third of Los Angeles County
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