Gothic Beauty Magazine Issue 28 in stores

Latest news from Gothic Beauty:

“ISSUE 28 is now available in stores nationwide. Grab it at Barnes & Noble, Borders Books, Hastings, Waldenbooks & B.Dalton. The list of indie stores that carry the mag can be found here

Keep reading for your chance to win a copy!

ISSUE 28 FEATURES

Features in this issue include the 2009 Dark Cities Survey, Enigma Fashions, Kambriel, Morph Clothing, The Night Dracula Called ~ Acid PopTart’s new (mis)adventure, Bats Day with Kynt & Vyxsin, artist Davey Jones, Tonner Dolls, Coffin Quilts, Topsy Turvy, Gothic Weddings, Mirror Mirror (a fantasy style editorial) & more! Music interviews with Mike Patton, La Floa Maldita, Combichrist, The Legendary Pink Dots & Revue Noir. Plus music reviews, product reviews & book reviews.

subscriptions 10% off!
SUBSCRIPTION & GIFT PACK PROMO
From now until June 5th all subscriptions and Gift Packs are 10% off!

Grab one of our popular candle gift packs!

New promo cards for street team members

CARDS FOR STREET TEAM
4 by 6 promo cards are available for Street Team members. Sign up to receive a bunch and help spread the word about our mag.

All Genre Travel Gothic Cruise
2009 GOTHIC CRUISE
We had a lot of fun on last year’s cruise and we are looking forward to sponsoring the 2009 cruise. Fashion show produced by GB with events such as the Masquerade Ball, Rocky Horror interactive viewing and bands The Cruxshadows, Modulate, Cruciform Injection and State of the Union performing. For more information visit All Genre Travel.

WIN A COPY OF ISSUE 28!
We have ten copies up for grabs. For a chance of winning one, simply answer the following question:

Q. What band was also featured on the cover of the first Gothic Beauty?

Send your answer along with your full name and postal address to: contest@gothicbeauty.com
Entries need to be received by Monday, May 25th. Winners will be selected at random from all correct entries and notified by email.

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Take care,

Steven Holiday
Publisher”

***

I love this magazine — so many beautiful clothes and wonderful products — when one of us gets an issue we all pass it around the table and enjoy looking at it together.  Highly recommended!

BB,

Vivienne

Gothic Opera — “Repo: the Genetic Opera”

Last weekend, my boyfriend introduced me to the most amazing movie musical I’ve seen in a long time. More accurately, it’s an opera — almost entirely sung in rich and powerful goth rock and with powerful themes to match any Greek Tragedy.

Set in a futuristic world (2040 A.D.), where a genetics company has become the most powerful entity on the planet, Repo: the Genetic Opera presents the premise that any necessary organ transplant is possible, cures for many life-threatening diseases are easily available, and even cosmetic surgery is so common that for many it has become an addiction. One character, Blind Mag, has even been given the gift of sight courtesy of Geneco — in exchange for which she has been contracted to a life of virtual slavery, singing each night in the company-sponsored “genetic opera” and serving as their prime spokesperson.

But there is an even worse catch — people unable to make the payments for Geneco’s transplant services are hunted down by “The Repo Man” — played brilliantly by Anthony Head (best known as Giles from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series).

In this world, the owner of Geneco, Rotti Largo (Paul Sorvino) is the most powerful man in the world, and he has managed to get a law enacted that makes it legal for Geneco to repossess the organs of anyone who defaults on their transplant surgery payments.

This is invariably a cruel, bloody, grisly mess. Victims die in terror as the Repo Man glories in their torture and his own self-loathing for being a licensed serial killer. Scenes of his murders are reminiscent of Sweeney Todd, Phantom of the Opera, and Les Miserables all rolled into one.

This dystopia is brilliantly depicted in a truly beautiful Gothic style. The budget was not high ($8.5 million), but the production values most definitely are, and the artistic direction is superb.  From the cemetery where the heroine passes her time in the crypt of her mother, to the tower room where her father keeps her locked away as an invalid, to the sordid back alleys where “The Graverobber” peddles a drug stolen from corpses, the sets are breathtaking in their dark beauty and surreal quality. The costumes are gorgeous, and several Goths of my acquaintance are already planning their own reproductions.

The music is brilliantly written, and surprisingly well sung — I say surprising only because I had no idea that Anthony Head had such a wonderful singing voice, or that Paul Sorvino had such a deep, rich operatic tenor himself.

Other surprises come from the casting.  Blind Mag is played hauntingly by Sarah Brightman, her ethereal voice adding an achingly poignant quality to her role. Paris Hilton, of all people, plays the drug and surgery addicted spoiled brat daughter to Paul Sorvino. Not only does she sing well, she acts the part, which is more of a stretch than you might imagine because of the science fiction twists to a character that would otherwise be fairly close to her reality. I can only imagine that she wanted this part to show a certain depth of self-awareness, as well as a self-mocking commentary on the shallowness of her media image. At one point her newly transplanted face falls off — right in the middle of a stage performance being broadcast to millions — revealing the raw and bloody naked muscle beneath. The irony could not be more perfect.

This film, like any good opera, does NOT have a happy ending. The tragic flaws of its many players lead to death for some, and undeserved rewards for others. The heroine is left with grief and loneliness, but also a new life with the mixed blessing of knowing the truths that were hidden from her all her life by her lying, murderous father. Nevertheless, it is clear they love each other to the bitter end.

While this film will not appeal to everyone, it most certainly will appeal to most Goths. Deliberately released only to seven theaters, its makers fully expect its popularity to spread by word of mouth, and it is rapidly becoming a cult classic.  People are already engaged in “shadowcasting” (a practice known from reenactments of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.)  I highly recommend Repo: the Genetic Opera.

It’s home page is found at http://www.repo-opera.com/

BB,

Vivienne

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new vampire fiction in the PH Book Store

Dante Valentine series by Lilith Saintcrow

I just posted about these books to my ile mailing list (an ile is a household in Lucumi (Santeria).  The one I belong to meets at my padrino’s (godfather’s) house).  They are new additions to the bookstore here at Persephone’s Haven.
I just finished the first one, Working for the Devil.  The main character, Dante Valentine, is a necromancer who works with Anubis and the Egyptian pantheon.  During the course of the novel she travels to Nuevo Rio, where there are many shamans practicing Santeria and Voudon.  In one scene, she sees a woman has a drawn a veve (a voudon symbol) in the street.  She describes how the chicken that the woman sacrifices keeps twitching after its dead, and as the blood pours onto the veve, Dante feels the rush of power flowing in.  A few moments later, she sees someone resembling Baron Samedi (one of the voudon loa (spirits)) coming through the crowd, but she leaves the area after that.

I haven’t yet read the other books in the series, so I don’t know how much these traditions come into her story lines, but I was quite interested with her treatment of them in this book.  If anyone else here has read any of them, please let me know what you think.

BB,

Vivienne

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The Science of Vampires – review

Lady Amethyst of Nephilim United and the Sanford Vampire Meet Up loaned me this book as a resource for the February meet up, which will be discussing vampire Awakening and whether Turning is possible (see my previous post for details).

The Science of Vampires, by Katherine Ramsland, Ph. D. covers a wide range of topics: fictional vampire characteristics, psychological illnesses and serial killers, vampire spirituality, the vampire subculture, the physical basis for bliss and the nature of evil.

Ramsland first discusses fictional vampires and how modern science might explain their abilities, using Dracula as a jumping off point.  She points out how tuberculosis and decomposition might have once been mistaken for vampirism, and then goes into the cellular process of aging, and the properties of blood.

She goes next into how literary vampires have evolved in popular culture, discussing the many paradigms and types of vampires and vampire mythology that have blossomed over the last century.  From this she leaps to quantum physics, psychology, psychic research, and a description of porphyria (an illness that has many symptoms in common with traditional vampire weaknesses, such as heightened sensitivity to the sun).

Next Ramsland discusses the bliss of a vampiric embrace in terms of certain brain functions, techniques such as hypnosis, meditation and trance, drugs such as DMT and LSD, and brain chemicals like endorphins (”inner morphine.”)  In this same section she discusses the possible results of being “embraced,” or how a normal human might be “Turned” into a vampire.  She suggests DNA and genetic mutation, viruses, and pathogens.

Next she goes into what I find to be the most disturbing sections of the book — a discussion of Vampire Personality Disorder, Renfield’s Syndrome, and a list of serial killers who may have fit these profiles.  She chooses to follow this up with an explanation of how forensics and profiling might solve a “vampire” killing, but she uses as her example fictional vampire qualities.  In other words, if Dracula really existed and really had the abilities he had, how might a CSI lab examine the crime scene, analyze the forensics, and profile the killer?  I find it unfortunate that she chooses to confuse real life serial killers with an aberrant psychological disorder, with fictional or literary vampires as if they really existed and a CSI lab would be faced with really trying to figure out what was going on.  I would have found it much more responsible if she had discussed how these forensic labs and profilers dealt with the actual crimes committed by the real life murderers.

Even worse, Ramsland then chooses to describe vampire hunters, and how to kill a (literary) vampire.  I call these portions of the book the most disturbing, because I have no doubt there are confused individuals out there who will be unable to draw the distinction between the “fictional” or literary vampires she discusses, the real-life serial killers she catalogs with legitimate psychological peculiarities, and the modern vampire subculture.  Oh, she throws a few lines in each time she begins to discuss the latter, stressing that they are not psychologically disturbed nor serial killers, but there are disturbed individuals out there who consider themselves to be self-appointed “vampire hunters,” and have attacked members of said vampire subculture.  I can easily imagine such disturbed individuals taking Ramsland’s discussions of literary vampires and the detection of their “crimes” as “real,” equating them with the real-life serial killers she also discusses in such close proximity, and from there making the leap that members of the  vampire subculture, are both “real” literary vampires and serial killers — especially since Ramsland jumps back and forth so frequently and freely between these three types in her explanations of various topics.

I was further disappointed that she chose to follow these sections with a discussion of psychic vampires and vampirism as a spiritual movement, while blending this with a discussion on the nature of evil and  an analysis of Dracula as a dark shaman and alchemist.  This unfortunately adds further credence to the idea that vampirism as a spiritual path is inextricably linked to the nature of evil.

Ramsland saves her “hook” for last — her discussion of vampires and sex is the next to last chapter of the book.  She goes briefly into a discussion of whether vampires can breed with humans when she mentions the dhampir in the vampire hunter section (supposedly the offspring of a vampire and a human), but not until this chapter does she get into the mechanics and hydraulics of sex.  She talks about the different vampire paradigms in various novels and explains whether their physiology would render them impotent, sterile, or capable of having sex and reproducing.

In this chapter she also discusses the attraction the vampire archetype has for the homosexual community, another so-called “deviant” or “outsider” community supposedly drawn to the similar status of vampires, who are seen as sexually uninhibited and similarly unbound by society’s sexual mores.  She follows this up with a discussion of AIDs (a very real problem for sanguine vampires) and the cross over of the vampire subculture with the S&M/bondage subculture, including the shared attraction for dominance and submission role playing.

Ramsland closes by equating the dark allure of the mystery of the vampire, and its ever shifting and elusive nature, to the dark matter of the Universe that scientists are still struggling to explain.  A bit of a stretch, but I like her poetic turn of mind when she makes such comparisons throughout the book, and her ability to think outside the box.

All in all, The Science of Vampires is extremely well researched.  Ramsland does a pretty good job of keeping a wide variety of seemingly unrelated topics well organized, and she has a lot of fascinating information that should appeal both to fans of vampire fiction and to members of the vampire subculture alike.  I do believe she tried to be responsible in her presentation of real vampires amongst discussions of evil, serial killers, and literary vampires. If you can overlook the dangerous potential that certain unbalanced individuals might get them all confused, you should find a lot of very useful information, as well as many resources for further research in her well-cited text and extensive bibliography.

If any of you have read this book I would be very interested in hearing your take on it, and whether your opinions jive with mine.  Please do leave comments on this post and let me know what you think.

BB,

Vivienne

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Friday’s vampire and Shadowlore meet up conference call in information

You have been invited by viviennedavalon to join a live Community Call. Sanford Vampire and Shadowlore Meet Up (Join in) Host: viviennedavalon – vivienne_davalon@yahoo.com Episode: EPISODE8 – Sanford Vampire and Shadowlore Meet Up – history and folklore Well, we didn’t have access to the community room at Panera Bread last time until mid-way through the meeting, but hopefully that doesn’t happen too often. Otherwise, it has been working out quite well for us. It is quieter for our recordings, and Kirra continues to come through for us by bringing her great mike. Of course, it helps if I remember to hit the “record” button on Talk Shoe, so there is actually a podcast for people to access later! eep! Last meeting’s topic was suggested by Vampiress, and she took the lead on this one. We addressed the relationship between vampire and donor, how to appropriately begin such a relationship, how to delineate the parameters of the relationship, spell out the responsibilities each has to the other, and avoid problems. It was a very informative meet up, and I am just kicking myself to here and back that I forgot to hit “record!” We will have to repeat the topic sometime down the line so we can have a podcast on the subject up for handy reference. Our next meet up on October 3, 2008 is our last meeting before Halloween, so Mordred suggested we talk about history, folklore, and other topics that are usually addressed by Hollywood and TV documentaries during this month — facts and fallacies, near-misses, myth and legend, etc. If you have any books along the lines of the “Vampire Encyclopedia” and its ilk, please bring them with you for handy reference and to share around. *** As our meet up matures, we want to continue to reach out to more like minded people in our area who need some networking and social acceptance, and who want the opportunity to learn and to teach. Our members have mentioned being rather insulated because of family issues, or the underwhelming enthusiasm of at least one local Wiccan group for vampires, or social drama online. We’ve been teaching specific topics and gotten some good discussions going, and want that to continue. We’re here to be an educational resource and support network, and the more talented people we get who are willing to share their experiences, the better that resource will be for all our members and for the larger community. There is a lot of creative cross-pollination going on, and I want us to continue to create a space and network that encourages productive, creative interaction, personal growth, and community cooperation to make great things happen! Looking forward to meeting more of you at October’s meet up. BB, Vivienne Call ID: 17560 Personal Message from the Host: This host did not include a personal message. Scheduled Time: Date: Fri, October 3, 2008 Time: 07:15 PM EDT How to participate: Call in: Dial: (724) 444-7444 Enter: 17560 # (Call ID) Enter: 1 # or your PIN Join from your computer: Click here to join the call or just listen along (Optional) Become a TalkShoe member Facebook user? You can join this Call directly through the TalkShoe Community Calling Facebook application. Listen to the Recording: If you missed this event or want to hear previous recorded episodes click here. P.S.: If you enjoyed this post, please share it by clicking on the “share” button below. Thank you!

Unique Creations

My friend Dorothy has a wonderful custom jewelry business, Unique Creations; she is in the process of getting her domain set up, and then I will try to get her hooked up with WordPress so she can blog and we can link to each other.  I will post here again as soon as she is up and running, but I can’t wait to see her website!

BB,

Vivienne