the boombox of loves lost.

Depeche Mode's Black Celebration album goes on the repeat, rescuing me from work. 1986. I'm in the front hall of Tucson High Magnet School, and someone has this tape on a boombox. Me, Angie, Lando Ettrick, Leah, Dee Dee, sitting around a pillar, Swatches, K-Swiss, Benettons, pretty as a picture, we're together but alone, no talking, just listening, shoulders touching. There's a stretch of "Sometimes", then "A Question of Lust", and by "Here Is the House" and "World Full of Nothing", we're weeping, weeping uncontrollably, each of us thinking of someone we no longer have, and can never have again. The tape clicks and stops, and we look at each other, knowing, and go home.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.

join the Armada.

Honestly, we voraciously dove into Ernest Cline's new novel Armada (2015) in the sincere belief that it would be an even more awesome sequel to his 1980s inspired videogamepunked Ready Player One (2011).



While that expectation turned out to be wrong (rats!), Cline's literary coding runs a similar program. If one hadn't already read RP1, we'd be introduced to the same precocious classroom prisoner, the hero of all YA, a kid with issues, a too-cool-for-school geek girl love interest, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game that perhaps is more than it seems, and mad gaming skillz that just happen to turn a young nobody into a hero. 

References abound to John Hughes, Conan, Dune, The Twilight Zone, and of course the twin pillars of sci-fi fandom, Star Trek & Star Wars, keeping the dialogue witty and the prose retro-pop fun to read. There's even some guided playlist cassette culture mixtape love, if you actually wanted to soundtrack your reading experience at certain points of the story.


For his second novel, Cline's produced a winning ode in the key of space opera, a homage rewritten from Ender's Game (1985) & "The Last Starfighter" (1984), except set in the very near future, and with far higher stakes than RP1. High school gamer Zack Lightman one day sees a UFO hovering about his small hometown. Weird enough, but the cognitive dissonance is that it's straight out of his favourite game, "Armada", and after discovering his late father's secret journal full of paranoid notes, Zack questions his sanity and wonders if he should lay off the console until his head clears up.



At points the text reads like the best bits of MMORPG flight & ground future combat sims, so if you ever cockpit jocked dogfights in the classic "TIE Fighter Vs. X-Wing" PC game, it'll be especially delightful reading these white knuckle on joystick Earth Defense Alliance passages.



The winning characters elevate this book above a skeletal space action novel with it's central sins of the father-son dynamic, hilarious besties, compassionate mother, all in the shadow of a possible doomsday scenario.



In the inevitable comparison to RP1 many will complain the author's written the same book, or maybe suspect it was the version he didn't use, or even posit that it was an unpublished earlier novel. Yet others would've complained even more if he'd decided to instead write a cheese eating paranormal romance YA novel, a scandi noir pastiche, or something equally divergent instead.



Ernest Cline writes what he knows & loves, sci-fi fandom-inspired prose from the heart, and that honest center is what makes his writing shine. Woven around that, Armada's a mosaic of cult book & film & graphic novel sources, scripture, Tolkien, Shakespeare, and other winning DNA.



And it's more clever than mere adulation as it's a metaliterary "The Cabin In The Woods" (2012)-style examination of alien invasion scenarios. In doing this, however, the twist truncates the end into a Childhood's End (1953) a la Arthur C. Clarke that would seem less of a denouement than one might have expected after all the intensity. We'll see if the upcoming Universal Pictures version sticks with it.



At the end of the day it seems Cline again wants us to find the depth and life-in-art meaning in the medium that is the videogame: One can apply game theory to life, but it's too emotionally deep to pixelate it down into such a coded reduction. It means more than clearing a level or topping a high score, and you don't get three lives for a quarter, you only get one chance. By all means play, but play it like you mean it.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

are you Ready, Player One?

The '80s were the last macrocultural zeitgeist.



After that it all fragments with the media's pronounced non-objective political divisiveness and the internet making endless forum & chat room for every myopic splinter interest, as we went from one shared page where everyone wondered about the same things: whether Coke or Pepsi was better, if Prince or Michael Jackson reigned supreme, what exactly's up with those Goth kids, or when the nukes would drop and justify our unassailable doomsday existentialism. After the web's technological expansion there was no way to keep track of it all, nor at that point would anyone want or even need to.



As such the 1980s will always be relevant.



Which brings us to Ernest Cline's "Ready Player One", an unapologetic 374-page lovesong to the last true pop cultural monolith that is the 1980s.

[Sweet foreign language Tron-inspired cover!]

Sack up, gunter*: Say Bill Gates or Steve Jobs dies/died, themselves competitive ego-products of 1980s greed-is-good corporate raider materialism, and instead of leaving their tech-legacies to friends or family or shareholders, decided to posthumously announce an internet-based contest within the virtual reality network they'd created, allowing the winner not only their personal fortunes of nigh-bottomless billions, but executive ownership of the whole internet itself. Essentially that's the high stakes plot of this near future 2041 cyberpunk modern masterwork.



Unlike most cyberpunk however, instead of grasping forward, Cline's virtual world frames its goggle-net in the rear-view mirror of Tom Cruise's Porsche 928, or Michael J Fox's DeLorean DMC-12: the 1980s context that not only sets our world's watershed reference points for the last agreed upon books, movies, music, and videogames, but the very same earmarks become possibly important clues for the greatest treasure hunt ever devised by a man who grew up in the '80s who was enamoured of all its facets. The conceit sounds like a writer's cop-out, but if you think about it of course we as users would want proverbial lightsabers, or sling a second-gen phaser from our spandexed space-uni hip, smoke the street comp in that unattainable Vector, sport a fierce "Lost Boys" jacket, or rad awesome big teased hair from "Square Pegs". They would pick these, and Cline takes us into the most bitchin' shopping mall of our collective media past with credit cards at the ready, going "Oh yeah! I sooooo wanted that!"



And I can't get over this book. It's so nerd geek gamer retro-wonderful, and payloads John Hughes teen brat pack films, half-remembered TV shows, nascent hacker empowerment ethos, kaiju cinema, classic Star Wars, Saturday morning cartoons, New Wave, Synthpop, hair metal, 8-bit, Radio Shack hardware and so much more into an intellectual atomic bomb signifier that completely levels the irrelevant house of "postmodernism"'s cards into the valueless joke it really is. All the things we have affection for become invaluable, and everything in its way is a miracle we can share, celebrate with each other, and, even more importantly, can be the things we can grow ourselves from, and inspire us to transcend.



Of course there's villainy ex machina and, as with any contest, loopholes & hacks to be had, so Cline builds the tension up, and the seemingly impossible search pulls his world's contestants, and the readers with them, in, trying just as hard to figure out where the clues are hidden.



Good sci-fi tends to be prescient in that egg/chicken, causal/predictive way. Just look at Verne (submarines), Dick (cloning), and Gibson (cyberspace). As we browse right now, convergence technology's busy combining networks down to smaller numbers with more features, whether that's Sony's liberal PS4 over Microsoft's over-regulated Xbox One next-gen consoles, sync service focused Windows 8.1, or multi-app A.I. driven smartphones, all vying to be the preferred user device. It's not too far off to imagine that the world wide web, the cloud, mobile networks, online gaming and video conferencing could also umbrella into one single shared virtual user interface. Recently Cline went and tried out the Oculus VR, deeming their device the looking glass step into his book's OASIS (Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation), the novel's world changing virtual reality.



Cline reveres the tools of technology and the things it can manifest, but indulges in a couple small humanizing moments to remind us not to lose ourselves socially & psychologically within the artifice (albeit pretty hollowly by comparison to the digital grandeur of the brilliant technostalgic world he posits, but point taken). And at the end Cline asks if we are ready to play on this newfound virtual grid where anything is possible, and if so, by whose rules? Will it be by an authority that will limit those possibilities, or by our independent selves with our shared media heritage & no limits save the potential of our imaginations? Either way, Cline's vision is coming. Are you Ready, Player One?

[*Gunter: Easter Egg Hunter]

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

a life cast in John Hughes.

There's that montage in Pretty in Pink where Andie/Duckie/Blaine are sitting by the phone soon after the physically decisive hay-rolling horse stable date, it's raining outside like the world's trying to drown itself, and New Order's Elegia creeps its way in & builds into an inexorable throb as the next day at school comes to cast its harsh light on the emotional shortfall.



That's exactly where I'm at right now.



Surprise. Joy. Frustration. Disappointment.

I can hear myself counseling a friend not so long ago that we were better men for holding onto our romantic ideals, that they imbue our souls with worth & value, that they represent an undefeatable hope that we will one fine day find that girl, that our desires will be met & exceeded with passion & comfort, and it will all be achingly transcendent.



"What about prom?"



All I want to do right now is listen to The Smiths, nurse a three finger tumbler of scotch while hucking cards into a bin, ride my BMX until I collapse in unthinking fugue, or go beat the crap out of something. And to seriously back whatever kickstarter or tech stock that's working on gynobots.



Yet I also want to believe I'm still right, to hang onto my 1980s optimism and teen drama motion picture ending.



I watched two friends of mine at work not look at each other today. They'd talked about moving away together, about taking trips to far cities & deep wildernesses, worked on merging dreams, and helped each other through some of their past damages. But they broke up last night, showing up so bitter and unhappy, just standing there 20 feet from each other, unable to escape, unable to look. It killed me to watch it, though it might've been for the best and beyond repair, the selfishness outweighing their willingness to understand & accept the other. It was so uncomfortable & ugly. But they aren't me, nor are they she.



"No! What about prom?"



A girl I'd had a crush on since my freshman year asked me to senior prom. She asked me. Because it happened once, I have to believe it could happen again.



It just feels so, so, so, very, very, very, hard right now.



Fuck.



Fucking happen already.

[Andie, I feel you. I would've called because I still believe in you. I wish upon your star.]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.

on being the Gothfather.

My 20-something friends have taken to calling and sometimes even introducing me as "The Gothfather," which isn't so new, having jokingly been called "O.G." for "original goth" to pun off the hip-hop patois.



And while I would love to take credit for Goth in Tucson as a whole, I'm afraid it certainly isn't true, Gothic Exemplar that I am. But my thinking about it has raised the question: How did the Gothic germinate in Tucson?



My memories of the whole affair remain quite muddled in the haze of clove smoke and Boone's Farm, hypnotized away by silver serpent rings on pale fingers, skull-buckled boots, and a worldwiew outlined in kohl.



By the time I managed to get the car from my 'rents, and a passable explanation for where I was going to stay out so late, there were already maybe 15 or so core people wearing the black. Petite & doll-eyed Little Norma, now dead of pneumonia in the wake of AIDS. Laura & Suki, both evil twins who loved to hate each other. Patrick, both doorboy darling and verbal whipping boy. The antics of our very own local deathrockers Fall From Grace, including the devilish Frye brothers when they were young and cruel. Jen & Jenn, the Dress taller than her cohort, both dommy of stature and attitude, cleavage queens of The FineLine. And the Barbara, so problematically cute and somehow unwinnable. All were larger than life, and I remember it all dearly if not clearly. And then the first blush of those later '80s baby bats, Teri, Leslie, Kim, Emily, Zev, Maxx, and the others. "Trainjumpers", regulars grumbled. But if it were not for those new passengers, our night train might have derailed long ago.



Where are most of them now? Slipped away from the lifestyle, a period disregarded as an acid-soaked tab in the books of their past, or moved & lost to the mists of time. But I'm still here. Like the setlists that still repeat from The 'Line to The Cage, Abysmal beneath The Double Zero, to the Teagarden's Haunted Palace, in the Heart V, a day at Eclipse, through the unshui-itude of Asylum, back to the Surly Wench's "FineLine" monthly, to The Motherland this very night, maybe I am a fixture, a small cultural lynchpin in my own iconoclastic way. The Gothic is mine, as much as I am its.



As much as memory allows I can place the scene's genesis in The Old Pueblo as early as 1986, which would be only 4 years post-Batcave, which is fair catch-up in a pre-internet world. Whether that was by an issue of "Propaganda" landing in a progenitor's hands at punk-indie Wrex Records on East 6th St or an actual transplant from NYC or LA, I'm unsure. I'd emailed Dick Plowman, the in/famous proprietor of The FineLine, but he's probably too ill at this point to shed any light on the matter. The all-ages dance cabaret/bar catered to a homosexual clientele most other nights of the week which supported the what initially was a fairly small turnout. Door counts were soon bolstered by more affluent suburbia punks, peacocked new wavers, skins, and more adventuresome preps, though the night was still felt to be owned by the Deathrockers/Gothics. Bear in mind there was no mall outlet for our fashion, everything was either mail-ordered from specialty locales or self-crafted: Fishnet shirts were actually strategically torn fishnet stockings, black nailpolish was cheap drugstore dark brown Wet 'N' Wild either multicoated into near black or judiciously mixed with ballpoint pen sludge. And, of course, the whiteface. While it seems almost ridiculous now, then it was nearly de rigeur for most, and some really did achieve an alabaster stature. There was a feel of inventiveness, daring, and transgression at that point in time. We were an amalgam of old and new, dark-clad harbingers of an insight we were only subconsciously beginning to define. We behaved aloof & serious as a heart attack to the world at large, but irreverent, glad to be with, and to have found one another. Early social self-defense or ego-mechanism? Probably some of both and the usual exclusionary anthropological earmarks to both preserve and keep us secure individually and collectively. Fortunately we no longer require outward anti-social behaviour to survive.



And why consider the Gothic in the first place? You ask anyone in the scene as to why they wear the black and you'll get likely get different answers everytime. Ultimately there's an attraction and identification that's both instinctive and aesthetic, a knowing, if you will, of this perspective. (See my "regard for the Gothic." entry.) Given Tucson's warmer weather, it's always been harder road of fashion to walk, but Tucson's never lacked a Gothic high-profile subpopulace.



My dedication may sound resolute, yet there's always been a certain amount of purposeful distance. I've watched the drama bomb explode twice in a social holocaust that leaves its damage so that things are never the same again. The second time it actually shut down a venue as the promoter was involved. The scene's a fragile thing, and if it's important to you, then respect that. Even big cities only have goth populations in the lower triple digits, and given how insular a subculture we have, it can take very little time at all for small things to become blown out of proportion and cause damage not only within, but without. I'm not saying we have a proclivity for drama more than say our love of horror literature or Victorian coats, but I know to stay out of it because I believe we're more high-minded than the rest of the world and its celebrity-obsessed lunchroom cafeteria hater clique dynamics. From day one there've always been disaffected people who think this or that sucks or is boring but take closer look at their posturing and see how it really reflects a deficit of imagination or character. Remember, the scene's what you make it, and while there've been some good but unrewarded attempts like Parasite at Matt Bevel and Doomsday at Skrappy's, others have succeeded, and on a personal scale, it's how one lives that makes it a rewarding lifestyle.



So if you want to light your candle from my torch, this so-called "gothfather" would be honoured. And here I'm not only setting the record as straight as I can, but also setting it down for the record itself. It's our legacy. Be glad to be part of that. I am.

[Plowman at the 'Line's third incarnation on Lester St in 1999.]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.