Tokyo Expo - I didn't do a lot , but the pictures are pretty

My outfit, hehe. I like wearing autumn dresses when it's still summer.


Elli and Emilia are cosplaying Little Twin Stars, in case anyone is wondering.








So, I went to Tokyo Expo, looked at things, met some people, took a lot of pictures. I really didn't do a lot there, and I'm sort of tired with the whole people-obsessed-with-japanese-pop-culture thing and the lolita subculture too, so I'm not sure why I went, haha. I guess 'cause I'm aquainted with a lot of people there?

However, these days I'd rather just wear whatever I wear, japanese or not, and be left the hell alone. Same way I've always felt about music. I like what I like and I don't feel that I need to belong to any subculture because of it. Organised stuff and closely knit cliques tend to freak me out anyhow.

(I would like to point out, again, that I don't mind labels. I just don't want to be friends with everyone who happens to fit the same labels as me, just because of the label. My friendships run deeper that that. Still have an upcoming post on labels lying around, haha. :3 )

Yes.

But the pictures turned out lovely. And the awesome people are awesome.

Day 5 – Is there a local Goth band or group in your area? + a small unrelated thing

Hi pumpkins!
I'm so sorry for randomly disappearing, especially after I started the whole challenge thingy and all... It's just that I've been super busy doing really awesome stuff, quite unexpectedly. Some of this stuff I've been doing is music related, which I think excuses everything. Heh. Once that music stuff is anywhere closer to done, I'll shower you with links and posts and god knows what. You know I will.

Anyhow, I'll try to do many of the challanges in one day untill I catch up. Not today, though.

So. Local goth groups.
Well, there's Dansdepartementet, I guess. I think they're okay.

There are no currently active goth bands in Sweden that I know of, but there are definitely some goth-friendly, post-punk inspired ones.
Diskoteket, for example, that I've recently found out about and turned out to really like. They let you download some songs from their last.fm, so go there and have a listen.

Day 4 – Name a stereotype or cliche you can relate to

Well, the whole "goths are introspective intellectuals and always create their own art/poems/whatever" thing I guess. I write stuff, lots of stuff, weird stuff. Books, novellas, poems. Most of them I throw away when complete, haha, but still. I want to write, or sing, or both, for a living. I also read Kafka because I actually like his writing, not because it scores me smart-person-points. Heheh. Stuff like that.

Also, I'm obsessed with bone jewellery(real bones, not the cheesy fake ones people keep putting in their deathhawks). I guess that's kind of cliche?

Day 3 – When did you come out the Goth closet?

I'm not entirely sure what this means. I was never really in a "goth closet". If I had not started dressing oddly at all, I belive the people who knew me would have been much more surprised. If I had listened to boring radio pop, not only would I have made a lot of people very surprised but I would also have like... disappointed my parents. Haha. Okay not really.

Seriously though, it was really no big deal. Wearing odd clothes was something that I had gradually been doing more and more throughout my entire life, apart from age 13-14 when there's a lot of pressure on you to fit in which I wanted to try to see what it was like, and then I started listening to the music, and everybody was like: "So what?".

A few outfits I forgot to post

Day 2 – Share photos and experiences from your Baby Bat days

Err, okay. I never had baby bat days the way most people think of them. My first year of being into goth, I really only cared about the music. So I would spend most of my time listening to it or reading about the bands, when I wasn't reading books or hanging out with the few friends I had at the time(I was super shy, and also had a severe case of social phobia). I never really got around to trying to join the "scene", dress uglily or act like a dork. Possibly because I was so shy. I did in fact not dress like a goth at all untill I was 15, so any pictures from my "baby bat" days will be me being blond and wearing something all blue or something black and white and having smokey brown eyeshadow. Just like before I took any interest in goth. Boring as hell, but at least I was never downright ugly. Around the middle of my 15th year of life I magically morphed into a bit of a Siouxsie clone. Then, after a few months, I got my own style. I'd wear typically trad goth stuff mixed upp with huge necklaces and bustiers and corsets. (I've always been secretly fond of dark cabaret, and it'd shine through I guess.)

What did I do as a "baby bat"? I don't really know. My early teens were the worst part of my life, for big and serious reasons, and my brain tries to censor those years a bit. I didn't really do goth stuff because I was too busy having a horrible life. Things got better though, obviously, much better, but I really cannot mention my early teens without also mentioning that it was hell on earth.

Music and literature were the few highlights of that time. And also the few friends I had. I only knew one girl who also liked goth music (I was aquainted with another one, but we really weren't close). It wasn't her favourite genre or anything, but we both really liked the Banshees and The Cure and The Virgin Prunes at the time, and developed a silly crush on the band The Glove(which has members from both Banshees and Cure, as I'm sure most people bothering to read this know). We'd sing and play their music really loud, and constantly nag about what an underrated song the Banshees' "Sin in my heart" was. We'd also stay up in the middle of the night and watch Monty Python, or go into town and eat ice cream and brownies. We're still friends today, she's a great girl.

Yeah. That's what I did at the time.

Oh, and look at the pretty pictures. Not sure that I actually am 14 on all of them, I might be 15, but this is pretty much what I looked like at the time.








Yeah, I actually looked like this. My favourite bands were Siouxsie and the Banshees, Virgin Prunes, Joy Division, The Cure, 45 Grave, Cinema Strange and Alien Sex Fiend and I looked like this. Makes no sense. I guess I tried to blend in with the other kids a bit? It didn't work.



Oh, my god. This has turned into "the story of my childhood". Ugh. Hopefully the next questions will result in slightly less childhood-related things.

30 Days Goth Challenge - Day 1 - How did you come across the subculture?

I am secretly a dork with absolutely nothing to write about. I am also, less secretly, very fond of goth music and, y'know, familiar with the subculture. So I guess I'm a goth. Same way I'm also a postpunker. Or a random artsy chick. Or an atheist. Or any of the hundreds of other things I also am.

(I think people who try to defy all labels are silly. I plan on writing a post on this some time. Labeling is in my mind really only silly when people try to adjust their real selves to better fit a label. However, denying that you are part of something or that you have something in common with someone just so you can feel like a super special individual is pathetic. Of course there is no point in over-useing labels. But they're handy sometimes. We are all, however, many different things and only when combined can they even begin to reflect the true complexity of our natures.)

So, errr, I thought I'd combine these things somehow and answer Juliet's Lace's goth challenge. At least this means that I will write something in my damn blog.

I have the feeling my answers will be incredibly boring and overtly logical. Fret not though, I'm throwing in a gigantic outfit post soon.



Day 1 – How did you come across the subculture?
Day 2 – Share photos and experiences from your Baby Bat days.
Day 3 – When did you come out the Goth closet?
Day 4 – Name a stereotype or cliche you can relate to.
Day 5 – Is there a local Goth band or group in your area?
Day 6 – Handwrite your favourite lyric and take a picture.
Day 7 – Ten of your favourite goth bands.
Day 8 – What's your worst and best experience with non-Goths?
Day 9 – What genre of music do you dislike?
Day 10 – What do you hate and love about the subculture?
Day 11 – Is Goth a lifestyle for you?
Day 12 – What's your gothic inspiration?
Day 13 – What was your first band t-shirt?
Day 14 – What was your best and worst DIY disaster.
Day 15 – Your favourite or most expensive item in your wardrobe.
Day 16 – What's the most casual you've ever dressed?
Day 17 – Your favourite Goth brand.
Day 18 – Worst hair experience.
Day 19 – Share beauty advise and take a photo of your make up.
Day 20 – If you could dye your hair any colour what would it be?
Day 21 – What body mod do you have or have you considered?
Day 22 – If you could attend any Goth event what would it be?
Day 23 – Your favourite artist or photographer.
Day 24 – Name the best websites for Goths.
Day 25 – Did you ever consider leaving the subculture?
Day 26 – Show a photo for every year (or month if you're new) that you've being into Goth.
Day 27 – The worst thing you ever did to a newbie.
Day 28 – Do you consider yourself an eldergoth?
Day 29 – What do you think will happen to Goth in the future?
Day 30 – Make a list of blogs you regularly read and link to them.


I grew up in a family that regularly played The Cure every time music was needed. I was doomed from the start, hehe. Not that I had any idea that any of The Cure's songs could be labeled "goth" when I was a kid, though.

I always had an odd sense of aesthetics growing up. Which led to me being fascinated with any- and everything that looked distorted, peculiar, torn, asymetric. I would look at people from all kinds of subcultures and think they looked marvelous. I decided to do research on some of them, and found out that quite a lot of them were very different in reality from how they were portrayed in the media. I wondered if this was the case with the goth subculture, which had always seemed rather cheesy and over-dramatic to 13-year-old me. So I looked into it, and, dear god, it was. However, at the time I had absolutely no intentions of ever becoming a goth myself. I was happy with being a vague, hard-to-define, artsy girl with a slightly "darker" outlook on life. (Gosh, this sounds incredibly silly, but I've always been sort of introspective and... fascinated with macabre things. Not in a typically goth way though. ;)) Plus, I did not take any interest in music anything other than appriciating more complex kinds as a violinist. Essentially, my interest in music at the time was technical and completly lacked passion.

Then, one day (I was 14-ish, I think), an old friend of my father decided to give our family this huge mixtape of doom (on a dvd) which had pretty much all the music he liked as a twenty-something on it. It contained a lot of electronic music, 80's pop stuff, some synthpop, new romantic, and to my surprise, lots of postpunk and a bit of goth. I listened to some random songs, then thought, "Hey, y'know, I sorta wonder what this goth music that everybody keeps nagging about sounds like?" So I put on Siouxsie and the Banshees'(who I had heard was one of those goth bands) "Spellbound" and fell in love. It was like nothing I'd ever heard before. Needless to say, Siouxsie and the Banshees were my first music crush, and from that day on I sure had a passion for music. I kidnapped my dad's old record collection, decided I liked a few of the records, found out they were postpunk, and in one case (The Cure's "Pornography") goth. And after that I guess I just decided that this whole goth/postpunk-thing was for me. I didn't dress anything remotely close to a goth until I was 15, though, but I guess that goes in the next post?

My, oh, my. This is one lengthy meditiation on an, to anyone but me I suspect, incredibly dull subject.

A short, unrelated note on swearing

So, whilst having a cup of chai latte with a friend earlier this week, our conversation tangented the topic of swearing and it got me thinking of something. I personally swear quite a lot, as anyone who stays in the same room as me for a noticeable period of time will notice. In general, swearing is considered to be something unintelligent people do because they lack better ways to express themselves, and, as my friend commented on, they are generally considered quite the faux pas amongst certain subcultures that strive to be "fancy" and "elegant".

I would like to claim that I am not unintelligent. I have a very varied vocabulary, and many big complicated words to express myself with. I still curse a lot. This is because curse words already have a certain amount of aggression associated with them, in a way that few big, complicated words do. Sometimes, you don't want to express your feelings perfectly. Sometimes, you're just in a heated discussion or really angry about something and you want to express this like a normal fucking person. No need to write poems about it. I personally loathe people who constantly try to show everybody how bloody clever they are, constantly use the most intellectual-sounding words they can manage, never relax and then look down on everybody who does not act exactly the same way.

Swearing isn't dangerous or something. It won't ruin your beautiful, beloved moral, I promise. It's just not a big deal. People are people. People get upset. People sometimes express this in a "low", "bad taste" kind of way. ...So?

Talk whatever way you want. People may not like it or find you pleasant, and that is indeed their right, but it is awfully peculiar to consider you less intelligent due to something like swearing. Especially if you are otherwise well-articulated.

In my opinion, the whole clever-people-don't-swear stuff is just the kind of thing you teach young, non-questioning children to get them to behave in a way appropriate to society's standards. But that's just my opinion.

Candy Pastels

Oh hi there.

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Sorry I haven't updated lately. I was on a boat in Italy, which would have been lovely had I not been so sea sick. Apparently, I get sea sick easily. I had no idea. I never used to as a kid, and I've spent ridiculous amounts of time on boats.

Anyhow, I have started playing the bass guitarr. Which is incredibly fun, and brings back these weird ghosts of memories from when I was young and played the violin(I did so for 6 years). I'm learing pretty quickly... Might have something to do with old violin- and general music-knowledge hiding in the back of my brain somewhere.

I go out on Monday, looking for a Tuesday

o.O-face, for a little less seriousness.


This looks... pretentious somehow. But I'm just showing off my ring.

To live once again, to live in dreams

Uppcon 11

Last week, I started off summer by going to the convention for japanese popular culture in Uppsala called Uppcon with a few friends. We mostly ran around and giggled, but we also attended a lolita meet and saw a Versailles concert. Really fun, the audience was totally wild and at the end half of them had left their seats and tried crawling up on stage.

Anyhow, here are a few pictures.


My outfit the first day.




























Me twinning with Elli of http://springbells.blogspot.com/



Okay, a lot of pictures.


I had to get home early on Saturday to sing at a birthday party togheter with my friend Elvira on the piano, as part of the entertainment for the evening. It was sort of sad to leave before everyone else did, but we had fun anyhow, and it only took a few minutes before people at the party stopped ignoring us and actually stood and listened. I love how some people honestly thought we were professionals. Perhaps we will be some day, who knows?

On attention, and wanting it vs. just being yourself

I'm so tired of the constant naging about how lolitas, goths and all kinds of people from other subcultures with unusual styles "only dress the way they do to get attention". How they could possibly ever do such a thing for themselves? Because if you dress that way, you must expect attention and therefore want it. Right.

Hey, here's the deal. You can dress a certain way and it might be for yourself, or it might not. No matter what, this has nothing to do with you wanting or not wanting attention. You can definitely want attention and still dress unusually because you, personally, like it and think it's pretty. One does not exclude the other. You can also dress unusually and not want attention from anyone, ever, because you're a socially fobic hermit. You can just sit in a forest somewhere, all alone, looking peculiar. That's okay. Not only ordinarily dressed people are hermits.

It is also possible that you don't care how you dress, just want attention, and decide to dress unusually to get it. This, I don't personally understand, but each to their own. It is also possibly to want attention from everyone all the time without looking unusual at all. There are other ways to get attention, you know.

I sort of go a mid way with this. I dress the way I do because I persona think it's beautiful. When I get dressed, I think of noone but myself. A small amount of egoism is good for you.

However, I want attention from a few, select people: people like me! People I have something in common with.

Of course most people want some kind of attention. It's an essential part of being a human being, unusually clad or not. It's not the main thing, but when you're in a subculture, you want attention from your peers. Not the train conductour, not some random lady in the street; your peers! What you want is the look of recognition. The little nod or smile that says: "We have something in common". That's the kind of attention you actually want. That is why even so many subcultures that are centered around other things than fashion have a style of their own: so that you'll recognize your peers!

Then you'll have someone to talk to about this interest/subculture of yours, and you can all be happy pumpkins toghether.

Of course, you must expect and be prepared that anyone might give you attention, but expecting is not the same thing as wanting. Anyone who stands out in any way, be it the way they look, their opinions, their behaviour, will get more attention and be questioned and stared at. Without wanting to. People are only human after all. I'm sure you've done the same some time. I have. The choice is between attention and pretending to be someone you're not. I'd rather deal with the attention. However, there is of course never any excuse to be rude. Staring is fine, being rude and grabbing people isn't. No matter who you are, who they are or how any of you look.

Fuzzy hair and a bowler hat

Thought you'd see a sweet outfit here by now? Well, that'll take a litte while. Possibly 'til after next weekend. Possibly one with a tea-cup hat.

I just wanted to show of my hair. I now have a crimping iron, and it makes teasing my hair about 20 times easier.

Att käfta eller konsumera

Så, den senaste tiden har jag läst fler och fler bloggar. Bevare oss väl. Jag har kommit fram till någonting.

De flesta bloggar är väl modebloggar, ja, det visste alla. Folk som skriver var man kan hitta det där nya snygga smycket någonstans och visar bilder på dagens outfit. Det är trevligt, visst. För trevligt ska det vara. Man kan skriva en blogg där man visar upp sin egen förträffliga smak och vad man åt till lunch eller bakade. Man kan skriva en blogg där man ger råd till folk inom en viss stil och gör tutorials och visar hur man bör bära håret. Det är alltid trevligt och nästan alltid ganska snällt.

Men allt handlar på sätt och vis om konsumtion. Inte bara när man visar upp nya kläder man köpt, utan även när man skriver om hur man bäst bär upp den nya mori girl-möter-lolita-trenden. Allt handlar om det man ska införskaffa, det man ska se, det man ska höra; kort sagt, det man ska konsumera. Ja, på sätt och vis även bloggar om musik och böcker och mat och livstil i allmänhet och gud vet vad. Det du tillförskansar dig definierar dig. Jippi.

"Vad kan man skriva om annars då da?", undrade jag. Tydligen inte så mycket, om det ska vara intressant nog att läsa. Man kan käfta, det är den uppenbaraste lösningen. För ingen skriver snällt och trevligt om teorier som intresserar dem och saker de varit med om och iakttagit, det är ju inget kul. Man måste granska och politisera allt och banne den som sysslar med så ytliga saker som "dagens outfit". Nä, man ska argumentera, och argt ska det göras. Hela tiden, utan pauser. Att käfta är det enda vettiga man kan göra i en blogg.


Eller så gör man både och, som jag. Åh herregud, jag avlider.

Den som har ett förslag på ett bättre sätt att blogga, snälla berätta för mig. Och säg inte att jag ska blogga om min vardag, för min vardag består av att käfta och konsumera kultur.

In English:
A small rant about how pretty much all blogging essentially boils down to two concepts: consuming(be it fashion, music, whatever) and (often quite angry)argueing about different subjects. And also a plea; please help me realise what else there is to blog about.

Oh dear, how meta is this? I'm blogging about blogging.

Really old picture

I found this picture from when I was 16-17 or something... I need to do this outfit + hair again. It'll be fun with my new super-red hair twice the length of the old one. I used to think my hair was red when I was 16. Now it really just looks brown with slight hints of bordeaux.

Cherry Blossoms and a Lolita Flea Market

On Saturday me and some friends went to look at the pretty cherry blossoms at Kungsträdgården and then have a fika.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fika_%28coffee_break%29
I love how wikipedia seriously has an article on that.



A guy told me I looked like Amelie Poulain would if she was a gothic lolita. I thought that was sort of adorable.

Sunday I went to TokyoStops Lolita Flea Market. (Yes, there are a lot of themed flea markets in Sweden for some reason!)


This is what I bought: