Maura's Illuminated Manuscript

The last photo dump: outfits, mine, in chronological order.



The Devil Girl. I couldn't go to the Kätz Club wearing anything else, now could I?



The 10th Rebirthday outfit that I got from Gallery Serpentine. The Automelodi show was pretty warm in this outfit, let me tell you.



My 50th birthday outfit. There were plenty of other women in corsets, but I had the best ones. Neener neener neener.



Action goth!

No pic of the Tuesday outfit. It was sleeveless, floral print, and New Look-esque.

This concludes the Treffen posts, unless I make it back there.

These photos are all things that made me think, 'WAT?!'



Here is how good the tram service was even in the wee hours of the morning after Ladytron let out.



The best thing in the vendor hall for my money was this spider chair by Lucas Haupt.



It was election season in Germany. The lower sign says, "More security and order." Ptui!



I saw precious little evidence that Leipzig was in East Germany, but I did find this ghost sign on top of a building.



Auerbachs Keller, a rather nice and very traditional German "dining cellar". It's best to go with a group.

On Sunday I put on the fiftieth birthday outfit only with comfier (but not quite comfy enough) boots, and headed down to agra. I ran into DJ Wrain Havoc from Seattle's own Mercury! She's been to WGT any number of times, and when she goes, she goes hard: three days into the festival, she'd slept maybe six hours. I told her that at my age, I just couldn't do that. Even if I could, I think it would detract from the total experience for me.

Wrain Havoc bought me some local absinthe with some of her last cash euros*. It tasted for all the world like Scope mouthwash. I'm positive it wasn't Scope because I watched the preparation, with sugar cube, right there. But that was probably the most astounding food or drink experience of the entire trip. Being an ethnic WASP, I drank the Scope and carried on.

Wrain Havoc was there to see Los Angeles band Diva Destruction, an artist who'd come off several years' hiatus. It was old school goth — not generally my bag — but what struck me about them was that their front woman sounded a lot like Anisa Romero of Seattle psychedelic band Sky Cries Mary from the '90s. I'm a big SCM fan to this day, so it was a surprise nostalgia trip for me.

Wrain Havoc bailed to see an artist elsewhere, leaving me alone for UK band Editors. They... were good, but they didn't grab me as much as I expected them to. I'm tempted to say that if U2 went dark, it would be something like Editors. That may be less charitable than they deserve, but that's what I was thinking.

Monday's outfit was Action Goth: tartan leggings, black top, black patent Docs. The only band I had listed as a must-see was Kirlian Camera. I showed up a band early for them, expecting to see Vive La Fête. But no, there was a substitution called Welle: Erdball ("Wave: Globe"). Not only are they German; they may be the most wholesomely German band active today.

They set up five vertical screens a little taller than a person. For the first song they played keyboards projected onto the screens. The two men were wearing black suits and black leather gloves. The two women were in little peach dresses that they removed partway through the show to reveal sparkly underwear. There were synchronized dance moves. People — just the women? — on turntables. Giant ballons and paper airplanes thrown into the audience, which was singing along. Inflatable angel wings; a stage hand carried the inflator in and we all watched the wings expand for several seconds.

What do they sound like? Synthpop. Cheezy synthpop. This band has been around for about thirty years, and they are clearly beloved in their native Germany. Their live show is 10km over the top, and probably impossible to translate into English. This was Germans not taking themselves seriously and having fun, and it was a beautiful thing: Eurovision, only longer and more substantial. I've bought an LP of theirs, natch.

I walked out of there thinking, 'What have I just seen?!' According to Zuck's data mine, several of my friends have been into them for years and I'm just the last to know as ever.

I saw the first third or so of Italian band Kirlian Camera. The goth bombast was well done, but that kind of thing is is much more cupcake_goth's thing than mine. I quit while I was ahead. Thanks, WGT, for surprising me.



*Mental note: go to her night and buy her a damn drink sometime. Yeah, it's a weeknight, but come on.

[Confession: While I was in Germany I used Zuckerberg's data mine as a microblogging platform and scratch pad. I could have typed up Dreamwidth entries on my phone, but I mainly couldn't be bothered. Much of what you're about to read here is based on what I put there. I'll be doing this in chronological order because it's just easier.]

On the 14th, just minutes after my on-call shift ended, I left for Leipzig, Germany for Wave-Gotik Treffen, the goth & industrial music festival to end them all. Basically, a black-clad mass of thirty thousand takes over every venue in greater Leipzip with... music. And outfits, so many outfits. And a (very) little kinky stuff.

So how was the trip over? Nine hours in a coach-class seat, but at least not nearly as bouncy as across the tropical Pacific. I did get to see something interesting as we zipped over the Netherlands and north Germany: hundreds of windmills in rural areas. They're serious about renewables over there.

I never did really adjust to Central European Time, but that's just as well because I was staying up into the wee hours every night to see shows.

Getting my wristband was an adventure. I left my hotel room around noon on Thursday expecting to need to take the tram, which is free if you already have your wristband. But no! I was staying in the beautifully designed Adina Hotel just two blocks from Hauptbahnhof (main train station). Since that's the transpo nexus for the whole city, the WGT ("veh-geh-TEH") organizers wisely put a satellite box office there.

There was one trip through the line to figure out that I needed to get into the short line for ticket buyers, get the paper ticket that they won't mail overseas, then go through the line again to get my wristband. It all seemed a little bit cumbersome; I'm not sure whether that's German or not. They just didn't seem very well set up for people coming from outside Europe. To be fair, such people are a small minority of WGT attendees.

I was wearing my Pride-and-stars-and-stripes leggings, so I stood out in the sea of black. A video crew interviewed me during my first trip through the line, asking me why I was so brightly dressed. I told them the truth: I wanted to make myself visible to someone I was going to meet later.

And did I see that person? No, but I was in the appointed place and time for that, namely the Sadgoth gathering. The Sadgoths are a large group of goths from Anglosphere countries. The dude running it now is English. I should have hit the Sadgoth Facebook page more to be less lonely, escape the horrible feeling of being that dumb Auslander who doesn't speak any German, and maybe party ridiculously late into the night, but honestly, I just plain forgot to. That, and I didn't really want to punish my body any more than I had already. This trip was... a lot.

At the Ratskeller, i.e. the cellar of the "new" town hall (Neues Rathaus), I had a salad with sorbet & ricotta on top (?!) with a one-liter beer. Fear not: Germans are so old school about their beer that it's usually at most 5% alcohol, so large volumes don't put you under the table. I got some interesting info: there were to be a couple of official pre-funks, one at Felsenkeller.

And what was Felsenkeller like? It has about ten times the capacity of the Mercury and is more of a concert hall than a club, but otherwise it looked and felt familiar. I didn't feel the live act that was playing when I got there, but DJs in the basement, Paradroid and Puppe, really kicked butt! The basement dance floor was about half the size of the Merc's, and the Germans just kept on packing in. It warmed the cockles of my heart to see two girls making out on the dance floor; some things really are universal.

On to Friday! I hit the local equivalent of PCC because it was going to be a long weekend for Pentecost, and I therefore needed to stock my hotel fridge. Hey, I got to try gen-u-wine Müsli, and found it satisfactory.

Sometime on Friday I tried Currywurst. They could do with more curry. In general I found that the Germans could do with more spice and less salt.

I donned the Devil Girl outfit only with comfier boots and bopped over to the Kätz Club for a fetish night. It's a playspace cum dance club into which an awful lot of love, money, and thought has been poured. It's mostly in a basement and is divided into many small rooms. Each of these rooms is set up for a different kind of... activity. I had a couple of Schwarzbiers, watched some impromptu pole dancing, and headed for Ladytron at the largest venue, agra. Yes, lower case.

On the way to the tram I saw a much younger blonde woman who was an absolute vision in a black dress with a hoop skirt. I made the heart sign. After the obligatory "I don't know German", she asked me where I got the Devil Girl corset and I told her. Game recognizes game.

WGT attendees basically swarm the trams, especially line 11, the one between agra and Hauptbahnhof. That passes through a heavily graffiti'd neighborhood called Connewitz. The representative graffito that stuck in my memory is "Yuppies raus."

Agra looks like it used to be a hangar. Half of it was devoted to vendors, and it's a minor miracle that I didn't buy something bananas expensive there. My fave was a sculptor and furniture maker named Lucas Haupt. He welds together arthropod-shaped... things. Spider chairs. Face huggers from Alien. Lamps shaped like spiders perched on pistons. Giant molars with faces. Creatures inspired by Hieronymus Bosch.

I needed to caffeinate because Ladytron wasn't to take the stage until 0100. This was where I first applied my knowledge of the Pfand that I gained at the Ratskeller. And what's a Pfand, you ask? A deposit that bars & cafes charge for the use of their reusable glassware, typically one euro. Much of my caffeine intake on this trip was in the form of Irish coffee at agra.

But on to Ladytron! I'd missed this band in Seattle at least twice, so this was my revenge, and sweet revenge it was. They sounded fabulous, and I felt a bit guilty for not buying their entire catalog and listening to it constantly. They seemed to have changed some of the arrangements to appeal to gothier tastes. Near the end of the show, their drummer burst the head of his kick drum. As the stagehands replaced it, Helen Marnie joked, "That's why they call him the Highland Hammer." When I laughed, I was the only one within earshot who did. Take that, Germans.

How did I get back to my hotel? By tram, of course. At 0233. Not only does Leipzig let WGT attendees use their trams prepaid; it runs the 11 at high frequency late into the night. God bless 'em.

Am I going to write up the wrest of WGT tonight? Hell no. There will be at least one more entry tomorrow, though, and I have pics that I'll put up.

I hit the Mercury for May the 4th. I've largely outgrown my once intense Star Wars fanship, and I don't have any Star Wars-specific costume pieces, but it warmed the cockles of my heart to see a goth club full of Sith, Twi'leks, and Stormtroopers.

Plus, I got to pump a couple of people — A of A&J fame, Marc17 — for info about Wave-Gotik-Treffen. Said the latter, Moritzbastei is a good venue for larger bands and general hangout. To see bands you want to see, some planning and waiting will be necessary. I'll have to scan the (long!) program and do a little planning, but for better or worse, my capacity for going bAnAnAs as usual with planning will be limited by my ignorance.

Fear not, I'm only bringing practical shoes. We're talking Europe here, so there will be walking, even though I'm assured that German mass transit is the stuff.

Speaking of WGT, yesterday I emailed the fine folks there about my ticket. It said, contrary to their original and likely automated email, that they don't send tickets overseas and that I'll have to hit will-call. Kein Problem, and whew.

Edited to add: The tic in my right eye has stopped jumping. I don't think that's a coincidence.

After nearly two months of waiting, Wave-Gotik-Treffen started selling tickets. I've wired the money, because that was the only way I could pay for it.

For the second time today, I feel justified in using the Taco Madonna user pic.