the steamgirl on a train.

The
more often I see models posed on top of the highly dangerous coupling
rods & wheels of steam engines, the more I realize how no steampunk in their right mind would ever risk actually sitting on them.

The above's a well-known & over-posted particular example of an accident just waiting to happen.



It would be the technological parallel to someone posing on the rods of a nuclear reactor core. Maybe daring steampunks could write it off as the alt-hist version of planking, but no. As steampunk photography's meant to show a believable alternate history, then standing on a moving train part you wouldn't ever stand on breaks the premise we strive for.



In establishing an alt-historical world, we require a level of verisimilitude. It's the history we know, but with a major point of deviation, usually technological, but sometimes political or social. To suspend disbelief and entertain the idea that history turned down a different track requires world-building that respects logical action.


I also suffered a defense of the above photo because some undersexed geek superimposed his idea of chivalry on it, as though I didn't appreciate the beauty of the model, which isn't at issue -- the would-be steampunk's lack of thought for personal safety is.


So why does this photo's idiotic motif of the steamgirl on a train persist?

[Pregnant
aspiring model Fredzania Thompson, 19, was killed by a freight train
after she became stuck between two railroad tracks while posing for this
photo shoot.]

In most photography, we are used to a fashion or artistic context.



For fashion, which far outweighs the circulation of art nowadays and so it's the device people are most familiar with, models are asked to pose in outré fashions, against nonsensical & outlandish things, all to get the attention of someone flipping at rapid pace through a magazine, or scrolling down a page so as to get the viewer to pause and buy a line of handbags or designer frocks. For example, the early 1980s Swatch ads had a girl looking through a telescope backwards, posed on one leg, the other leg up behind her, while was wearing sunglasses, and the telescope was pointed down at the ground. Like the steamgirl on a train, none of that makes any real sense, but the cognitive dissonance of the cited ad makes a viewer stop in question and look long enough at what's being worn to segue into desiring the product.


For the artistic, it's emotional aesthetics. A work is presented with a captured tableau that if successful evokes a reaction from the viewer. It could be one of repulsion, joy, agreement, moral uncertainty, social consciousness, fear, anguish, sorrow, et cetera, all depending on a combination of the photographer's intention and the individual internal reflection the viewer brings to the work. With a fair amount of photo manipulation today, we have many examples of cut & paste in order to construct worlds that never were to evoke wonders of another place & time we might desire to see or be in.



The steamgirl on a train fails because it's using the tropes of fashion photography while attempting to show a character from a greater world implied outside the frame. Still people can't see past the sex appeal of the cheesecaking model to the danger of the train, hit the plus button, and don't have discernment to realize the serious incongruence it does to establishing the world it's trying to imply. This hormonal override is why the steamgirl on a train persists.



And outside of these two mores, we have photojournalism like the following:

The photo above's a grisly and all-too-real example of what being too near a train at the wrong time does to a person. Newspapers tend to refuse to run photos like these because, as one professor I had in my journalism degree program said, "People don't want blood served with their eggs and bacon in their morning paper." Which also goes to say that it's not commercially viable content. Yet if papers had run more of the last photo in the past as a cautionary example, perhaps there'd be no foolhardy steamgirls set atop body chewing coupling rods and meat grinding train wheels, much less drivers trying to beat trains at crossings, or kids playing on tracks, with consistently fatal results.

And perhaps having to write this essay addresses a larger and more disconcerting problem in steampunk culture: That most have come to value an aesthetic shellac of thin brass paint and cogslappery over an actual participatory maker ethos. That we've perhaps forgotten the original manifestos of imagination made real, the desire to transform the world into one of our own choosing, and maybe this is also an unfortunate creative gap that requires minding lest the engine of the superculture we're commenting on runs over us in the end.



Steampunks & everyone else:

Don't muck about on trains.

Make what you want in the world to change it.

Mind the fucking gap.

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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+.

regard for the Gothic.

The Gothic has become a bit of punchline for the macroculture, for a seemingly false posture, a misanthrope, a social oddity, for someone who has gone "wrong". The macroculture however labels something once and never really bothers to examine it, to get past its appearance because it can't really be troubled to accept something so profound that might upset its limited ideas of what's true. 

And the truth really is that the Gothic is at the deep black heart of the world. 

Mythologies tend to begin with Darkness before the creation of the earth & sky, man & beasts. Even before the gods appear to cast first light, or land & sea marry, there is Night, primordial & chthonic -- it's integral, the canvas against which all is painted, and what's left in those same mythologies after the turpentine of time washes all that creation away in fire & flood, bangs or whimpers. Darkness is the permanent in a universe of impermanence. 

Goths recognize this: That besides being made of stars, we are also just as much, if not more, made of shadow, the spaces between the matter where the invisible desires of gravity and attraction hold everything together. The unconscious recognition of this force is something far beyond the misperceived need to be different, or to belong to a clique, or the compulsion to dance to majestic memento mori music. 

And so often we're asked by both the disrespectful & the sincerely curious just what is the Gothic, and all too frequently I've watched an equal exchange of the dismissive and sarcastic -- and that's sad, because it makes us no better than the intolerant. If we wish to be understood and not just culturally scapegoated by the media and those who don't question its pronouncements, then it would pay to be ready for when the braver passersby do stop and directly voice their wonder at the insight we represent. 

Why care what the rank & file think? Because there can be consequences if we don't. How many times do you see the flicker of Columbine behind the hateful eyes of others? And of course we know those little trenchcoated prats who stroked off to endless games of "Doom" & dog-eared copies of "Mein Kampf" were never Gothic, but damned if the major networks didn't decide to label them from day one as such. Ignorant bastards and their lazy journalism married to the now orthodox pop psych trend of blaming everyone but the individuals responsible. 

While the scene is thought of being predominantly gangly Caucasian teens who feel socially disenfranchised by the norms, this is just the holdover from the sun deprived & undernourished Anglais of an early 1980s London. That stereotype no longer holds, if it ever was an ideal more than a default. Now you go to Goth clubs like Roderick's Chamber in San Francisco, with its sinewy black men & mysterious Asian women, or Toronto's Sanctuary and see violet-eyed Hindu girls doing the kick-and-turn in big numbers, and it confirms that it truly is not so, and that our tribe's beauty & variants cut across all veins. 

Having endured for so long to carve out our hard-won legitimacy, we certainly don't owe anyone apologies nor are we to be held accountable for explanations about whom we choose to be in our grand excess of eyeliner & blackened fingernails, but we can grace the world with a winning diplomacy & patience we're more than intellectually capable of. 

Ultimately, with all the specialized niche media and marketing, there's enough room in this house of alternate ideas for all the subcultures to thrive, while being given the mental real estate to adorn themselves more richly as they grow -- if they are able to evolve as judiciously as the Gothic has. I've just never agreed with anyone that mistakenly thinks we have to be nasty about it when someone wants to take a look over the fence and try to see or understand what's happening in our garden. They may even taste its dark fruit and decide they like it far better. And even with such new blood we will never be the macroculture -- thankfully -- but we will always be present, the shadow between the buildings where the light never reaches, a perfect pitch inside the heart's secret conservatory, the eternal stillness that compliments the pulse, for we really are no less than the undeniable dark at the heart of the world.

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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+.