Things Gothic

Some while ago we came across a copy of the DVD of The Phantom of the Opera. I finished up watching it on my own, as my wife wasn’t that impressed. I’ve never seen the stage show, so I don’t know how the movie compares, but it seemed rather overblown and full-in-your-face. Moreover the music verges from the operatic to the pop-operatic to the pseudo-Gilbert and Sullivan. But Lloyd Webber has never been known, I don’t think, for his consistency.
All this by way of introduction to two other things: one, the ‘other’ film of The Phantom of the Opera - and I don’t mean the Lon Chaney one from the silent era dark ages - and two, the fact that there’s a Goth scene dating site. What have they got in common? Well, the Phantom and gothic are ideas that go hand in hand.
Lon Chaney’s movie is regarded as a silent classic, in spite of being hacked around in the post-production process. But I’d never heard that there was a movie in which the star of the horror films, Freddy (aka Robert Englund) appears. Apparently the slasher elements of the Friday the 13th series are retained, and the story is set in London rather than Paris, but otherwise it stays reasonably close to the original. Or as close as it feels it needs given the constraints of having to have someone die a violent death every ten minutes. According to some reviewers (aka Robert Englund fans) this is Freddy’s best performance. I suppose, given that Englund seldom appears in anything but horror movies, this may not be much of an achievement. Still, his fans think he’s great, and there are raves over the film on IMDB.com by people who have actually seen it.
And finally, GothScene.com for Goth dating, which is billed as the #1 Alternative Dating Community on the Net.
I don’t know much about gothic singles, so perhaps I’m not the best person to judge, but restricting yourself to people who are gothic in their approach to life seems a little insular. Doesn’t the idea that opposites attract go further than this?
Maybe the Goth scene is so particular that only other Goths could really empathise. One girl says she likes blood, sex, weed and rain. Hmm. Whose blood, I have to ask myself?
One 24-year-old guy is going to buy a hearse as soon as possible (handy if the local funeral director is extra busy), while a 21-year-old guy says he always wears something black and loves Gothic women because they are the hottest. (I’ve noticed that leather is hot - and sticky.)
I thought the site was restricted to people between the ages of 18 and 40, but in fact you can be 99 and still register. That would be a treat for the average young Goth, I’d suspect.

Not for the faint-hearted

A few posts back I had a little debate with my inner critic about whether writing about racing and buying shares should really find a place in this blog, being as it’s supposed to be focused on the arts. The Arts.
However, one of the curious key phrases for this blog that keeps turning up again and again is athlete’s feet/fingers. In a small post written back at the end of last year, I made a joke about athlete’s fingers. Since then this phrase has turned up on HitTail as one of the strongest key words/phrases connected to my blog. It’s very odd.
In fact in this latest search, we come up as result number three, straight after two results for Pakistani women and athlete’s foot.
So how can I connect up athlete’s foot, or athlete’s fingers, to the art scene? An interesting question.
One site introduces an article on athlete’s foot in this way:
The great renaissance artist, Leonardo da Vinci called the foot "a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art".
On the Village Voice main page this piece of work was at one time seen:
Best place to see your feet in a different light - PASSERBY
Forget your plantar warts, your athlete's foot, your bunions and calluses. The most homeless-foot-lookin' feet look fly jitterbuggin' out over the Saturday Night Fever floor at PASSERBY. The candy-colored squares flash in time to the tunes and make you want to gyrate and get thy finger pointing. -Jamie Lowe
Yes, well. I’m not at all sure what homeless-foot-lookin' feet are when they’re at home (or on the dance floor), and why you need to get your finger pointing is beyond me.
As for movies, well again, it took quite a bit of Google searching to come up with anything, and in the end I probably wished I hadn’t. Someone who enjoys horror movies to the extent of finding them a laugh, wrote about a sequence from Creepshow 2. And left pictures of some of the more unpleasant bits on the blog. As the writer says, there’s always a jock in these pictures, and this one makes the mistake of letting whatever the nasty blob in the water is get him. I quote: The blob grabs him from under the raft and turns his foot into a pulsating hideously bloody mess. That's one hell of a case of athlete's foot.
Oh, dear. The lengths I have to go to, to justify this being a blog about the arts.