Well, we're on the tail end of my friend Alamar's visit to Chicago - just today and tomorrow, then he spends the entire day Wednesday in transit back to Germany. It just so happens that most of Alamar's biggest experiences were bunched around the two weekends of his trip; and we just got finished with the second weekend, and I have lots to report, so I guess I'll get right to it.

Things started on Friday, with our first trip to NEO (on Clark Street, just south of Fullerton), pretty much Chicago's oldest goth club, which I thought Alamar would enjoy because he's a goth kid himself. And it turns out, in fact, that a bunch of my friends in Chicago are ex-gothers too, so got all excited when they heard we were going to NEO, because NEO's one of those places - one of those places you used to hang out at when you were 25 and going out to the clubs all the time, and no one can ever believe it when they hear that NEO is still open.

And indeed, as I mentioned in my audio post that night, it seems anytime I go that NEO has been packed in dry ice since 1992 or so, and is just thawed out whenever I want to visit again. I mean, same music, same outfits, same haircuts, same dancestyles, everything! Absolutely nothing has changed about the goth scene in the last 15 years, man, which just amazes me to no end.

It's so bad, in fact, that my friends and I started compiling a "favorite gothclub stereotype" list in my "Getting Things Done" notebook that night, as we got drunker and drunker and kept rolling our eyes to all the NIN and Skinny Puppy. And here's the highlights of the collective list we created:

--The Weirdo Tae Kwon Do Guy Who Needs 20 Feet of Dancefloor To Himself 'Cause He's Running Around Doing Karate Kicks And Shit Like That

--The Guy Who Keeps Twirling Around Even When A New Song Is Starting And There's No Actual Dance Beat Yet

--The Crazy Half Naked Girl Hopping Up and Down In The Corner

--The Serious Girl With Short Hair Dancing By Herself While Staring At The Ceiling (otherwise known as Jason Pettus' Next Ex-Girlfriend)

--The Mutually Unattractive Couple Who Keep Dancing All Nasty And Intense And Force Everyone To Watch Them Make Out

--The Undergraduate Girls Who Are A Little Afraid Despite All Of Them Wearing Sexy Little Leather Outfits And Who Will Only Dance In A Big Circle With Each Other

--And finally, The Guy In The Polo Shirt Who Wandered In Here Accidentally, And Who Stands In The Corner Nodding His Head And Drinking A Beer And Thinking How Great It Would Be To Score Some Hot Little Goth Girl Tail Tonight (winner of the "Holy shit, Jason really is high" award)

Okay, so that was Friday! And then Saturday morning Alamar and I made our way to the western Chicago suburb of Villa Park, to attend this thing called Gothicfest that the organizers were billing as "the largest all-day goth event in North America." And so for the life of me, I still can't figure out why they actually held the thing at some crappy low-rent sports arena out in the middle of nowhere in a western suburb - you know, one of those places where intramural leagues of various local heating and plumbing companies play basketball every Tuesday night and shit like that.

In fact, going to the suburbs three times in the last four days really awoke the inner "city snob" in me, one of those fucks who's always calling it "The City" and just assuming you know what he means, and bitching about everything in his new location that's not as good as things back in The City. But I mean, fuck, how can you go through those fucking experiences and not become a big ol' city snob? Take Saturday, for example, where we had to take a Metra train for 45 minutes, then walk more than another two miles to actually get to our destination - two miles in the middle of the day, the sun blaring on our necks, and with no sidewalks in sight, of course, but rather having to walk along the gutter of a rural highway, with semis whizzing by us every 30 seconds, and not a single pleasant thing to actually see or do in the entire two-mile walk. And I kept thinking about how much nicer this Gothicfest would've been at a place like, say, the Vic - where I could take an el and be dropped off half a block from the front door, and have plenty of things to do in the neighborhood when I'm not at the fest, and fun bars to go to with all my new little goth friends after the last band has played. So, you tell me, how can you not be a snooty little fuckin' city snob in such a situation?

Anyway, so we did finally get there, and it was certainly an interesting experience, although awfully surreal to see an entire expo hall full of goth kids desperately trying to pretend that they weren't all standing around some nasty low-rent sports center out on some service road in a western suburb. And instead of sitting here and trying to recount a chronological recap of events, maybe I'll just repost the random notes I took over the eleven hours I was there (yes, that's right). These are posted roughly in the order they were written.

--"We are Ghost Orgy! We will drink your blood! Please visit our page at MySpace.com!"

--The goth scene is inclusive, in that it actually enfolds a whole lot of different tastes and styles into one overall attitude. Weepy frail girls who worship Tori Amos mix with buzzcut soldiers into heavy German industrial-style hardcore, who mix with ponytailed former metalheads who are into elaborate guitar solos and medieval-saga concept albums. The reason they can mix the way they do at a place like this is because of the shared set of expected behavior in the goth scene - to treat everyone with respect no matter what they in particular are into, and to realize that you are all there to collectively celebrate the underground.

And the goth scene is egalitarian as well, in that the goal is for there to be no difference between musicians and fans once the band leaves the stage. That is, unlike the rock world where the musician is expected to dress and look cooler than his audience, in the goth world the audience is many times sexier and dressed more elaborately than the band itself. I've seen now a number of bands from earlier today mixing in on the floor of the Odeum, and the only way I'd know they were in a band was because of actually seeing them perform; there's nothing about their dress, hair or demeanor that marks them in any way different from the audience, once the concert is over and they're all mixed on the floor of the festival.

--It's difficult to be spooky and evil at two in the afternoon while in a low-rent suburban sports facility! Poor death-rock kids!

--Unfortunately, a reality of the goth scene is that a band can many times be more effective when it's not actually seen. Given the right electronics and attitude, it's pretty easy for most goth bands to make music that sounds like it came straight from Hell; but when you see the actual musicians playing the music, and they all look like those pasty D&D fags who got the shit beat out of them every day in junior high, needless to say it tends to diminish the effect.

--My favorite of the daytime bands was definitely Project .44, who were sporting an unusual look as well; that is, instead of the usual goth/industrial clothes, they were all dressed in early-'60s mod suits and had short, stylish haircuts. Well, except for the 300-pound black guy dressed in a ninja suit, that is, who stood on the front edge of the stage the entire set and beat the hell out of a metal trashcan. Where do bands find these people, I'm tellin' ya! And they even did a blistering cover of Ministry's "Burning Inside" (a song which was first popular back when I was an undergraduate myself), which is always nice to hear.

And then on the other hand was a group like Drake, a two-person band (and only one instrument, too - the other guy did nothing but sing) - who not only decided to perform an entire concept album onstage, but even got their goth friends to go up and act the storyline out as the band played the songs. And it was just this awful storyline, too, about two goths in love, and during one song this unattractive goth couple just waltzed around the stage for three minutes, and then the boyfriend mysteriously disappeared, so then the girlfriend sat on the edge of the stage and cried for three minutes. And then the boyfriend showed back up, but this time under the spell of some evil wizard dude or something like that. And then the lead singer of the band had a swordfight with the evil dude onstage, in order to release the kidnapped goth boy and reunite him with his goth girlfriend! I'M NOT MAKING THIS SHIT UP, PEOPLE!

--Earlier today there was this band called Withering Soul, with a lead singer who exactly looked the part - long straight hair, pale fair skin, white ruffled pirate shirt, unbuttoned to show off his rock-hard abs, matched with a pair of tight leather pants. But now I'm sitting here on the back loading dock of the Odeum, watching this guy load all his stuff into a pine-green SUV, and it makes me remember why I never chose to be a full-time goth in college or any other 'type' of person - because the work involved to keep up that persona 24 hours a day is exhausting, and not worth it to me.

When I was an undergraduate, for example, there was always a part of me that wanted to take on the persona of a jittery, nerdy, early-80s European club kid - skinny ties, mirrored sunglasses, speed addiction and the rest. But that persona always fell apart when it was like a Tuesday afternoon and I had to run to the convenience store for a pack of smokes. So fuck it, I guess I'll just be me, and will simply take on personas temporarily when they best suit me.

--It's at events like this that I thank God all over again that I'm not a woman. I mean, seriously, as a guy I can slap on a black shirt and black jeans and simply show up (like I precisely have today), and not have everyone around me wonder if I'm making some kind of political statement by covering up that much of my body, or wonder if I maybe have a self-esteem issue. But given just how many women here today are running around half-naked (that is, most of them), if I were female and showed up in the exact same clothes, that is what everyone would wonder. And how strange, perhaps, that it's 2005 and I'm hanging out with people who like to claim that they're one of the more tolerant groups of people in the world, and we're still dealing with this issue of "Are you going to dress like a slut, or are you going to be all weird about it?"

--Just had a very pleasant conversation with a guy named Rain, just finishing his twenties and currently living in the downstate city of Peoria. Rain is very much like I was in my twenties - just getting exposed to people like Nietzsche and Chomsky, very excited about what he's discovering, with an insatiable appetite for more. And now that I think about it, I suppose this is yet another reason why the goth scene is still so strong and so unchanged 15 yars after I was first involved with it - because it's a great place to explore, to grow, to become a different person than the one you were before.

And again, this gets back to the behavior you're expected to have if you want to be a part of the scene - to do no harm, to assume that everyone's opinion is worth listening to at least once. When you're living your life in such a way, how can you not grow and mature at a rapid pace? So maybe this is why goth continues to stick around for so long - because ultimately it's more about personal growth than about bands or haircuts. There are certainly worse ways to emerge from one's early twenties, that's for sure.

More tomorrow!