It wasn't until a few years ago that I just started calling myself "goth" because I got tired of explaining to people what a rivethead was. Goths and rivetheads are in the same category now, I guess. I'm actually whatever about most goth things. I'd take an abandoned factory over a graveyard, Wumpscut over Sisters of Mercy, army pants over a corset, cybernetics over vampirism, a future dystopia over a romanticized past. I'm actually a pretty cliche rivethead. You can see it in my deviant art page (no, I won't link to it...too embarrassing...should I post my Xanga too?), where I fancied myself a photographer of abandoned construction sites. By the way, I was one of the first DevArt users. Much lower standards back then.
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| I still like this picture. |
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| yeesh terrible |
and... um... stairwells.
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| Still like this one too. |
You'll see that all of the photos are black and white and high contrast with a diffused glow. The other acceptable color was brownish red like the Downward Spiral cover art. See how I edited this gem, from a factory. Yes, while goths like to go to graveyards, I liked to hang out at factories....because that's how rivethead I was. My other favorite hobbies were: learning to code, looking at art (photos of abandoned buildings), wearing my New Rock boots, and going urban exploring. All things I still love, by the way. I was alone and angry and thought the world deserved the dystopian futures I read/gamed/watched. Personally, I didn't feel human anymore...or didn't want to feel human anymore. This is the central theme to the subculture, or it was at one point. I'd say the message is now pretty much gone.
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| boooring picture |
What the hell did I look like back then? Hm. Well it's hard to tell because of all the photomanipulation!!!! 10 years ago, we went CRAZY with that shit. Digital cameras weren't much better than today's cell phones.
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| I still think it's cool. |
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| i like this one too... I think i'm like 18 in this picture, doing my take on cyberpunk. I thread my headphones through my ears. matching rings and diy wire necklace. false eyelashes. Claws. I read william gibson all day. |
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| I can't pose now and I couldn't pose then. My dorm in college used to be an asylum (how industrial is that?), so we had these heavy fence doors everywhere. I got my uniform: New Rock boots, a bullet belt, leather skirt |
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| cyber poetry |
The problem with the rivethead thing is that there isn't a lot of variety to it (I guess you can say the same about goth, though). Eventually I got tired of posing in abandoned factories/construction sites/hospitals/insane asylums.
Also, I moved from one of the best neighborhoods in Chicago to one of the worst. One of the worst neighborhoods in the country, actually. Suddenly pretending that you live in a dystopian nightmare--because it looks cool--wasn't fun anymore. Drugged out children (that's what they were) in gangs, desperate and angry, roaming around. Closed up businesses. Horrific, random acts of violence. Nearly everyone I knew, including me, was a victim of some terrible act of violence. Yeah, suddenly the industrial thing was all too real. I was actually living a Front Line Assembly song. This next set of pictures (which I did for a book I wrote on the topic) deals with the menacing atmosphere I had to face on a daily basis.
I still like these. Industrial isn't always literal. Organic elements are often used as contrast or commentary with manmade environments. It also appears in the music: many industrial musicians sample birds, water, animals along with "industrial" sounds.
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| the view from my 14th floor high rise apartment |
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| funny thing is I thought my apartment in the hood was slummy...wait till you see the places in NYC |
And then, my life somehow got even worse. The depression hit, and my story is pretty much the same as everyone's. But during those hard times I learned wallowing was bad, so was going on a downward spiral (pun intended). This nihilist machine also learned of the human emotion known as...love. My final, and most recent deviant art pictures show the full-color conclusion of my rivethead journey...in the epic battle between Nature and Machine, Nature holds its own and will win eventually. Oh metaphors...I almost sound goth.
