Tucson, obviously.

So beyond sick of hearing complaints about the heat, the "scene", that it's not a "real city", the "boredom", the "lack of culture", and most ridiculous, that "there's no trees".

I also hear I-10 is still open. You may leave now, if that is really your wish. Believe me, we won't object.

Aside from being a third-generation Tucsonense, there actually are alot of reasons Tucson is the superior home. Cairo, Amsterdam, Olympia, Seattle, DC, Chi-town, Vancouver, Toronto, Detroit, Manhattan, New Orleans and more. I've been to all of them, but at the end of the night I still come home to Tucson. As a collective we lay claim to:

• Saguaros. Anyone can have and plant trees, but Saguaros are available nowhere else.

• Big city amenities without metropolitan ills. The crawling traffic, overtly violent crime, and indifference of the population haven't come here to detract from our fine dining, clubs, and culture.

• Astronomy. City codes prevent civic lighting to be over a certain amount of lumena, so the night skies remain relatively visible for professional and amateur stargazers who are lucky enough to be in the astronomy capital of the world. Yes, the world.

• Residents are nice, smarter than the average bear, and relaxed, which translates to all of those good qualities rubbing off on you. Sure they can't all be winners, but on the curve we're a brain trust.

• Most tectonically stable place in the world. NYC sinks by 2020. San Andreas will one day turn LA & SF & SD into New Atlantises. Meanwhile, we'll have a beach in Yuma so sit tight and wait for the new coastline.

• 300 days a year of good weather. No ice scrapers, snow shovels, or salted roads eating your car's undercarriage. July & August swelter, but it's a small trade, and nothing swamp or A/C can't remedy.

• More galleries per capita. While I'm not sure where I heard this, I'll buy it with all the artspaces downtown, the Historical Society, UA museums, and, of course, the TMA.

• Coyotes! Hear their mournful howls at night. Watch them cross breed with lonely dogs. They go through your garbage but you'll feel so sorry for them you won't care.

• A club scene more than proportional to our size. Also, unlike most cities, even major metropolises, we have a Gothic weekly happening at three different venues, on three nights a week. Other cities usually only host a monthly, if that.

• The Wishing Shrine. El Tiradito is the only wish fulfilling shrine dedicated to a sinner who got shot for loving a married woman. Amen.

• San Xavier. Rising from a dusty plain, a white stucco brilliance that is called "The Dove of the Desert" is an intact structure of Spanish colonialism. The indians of the surrounding reservation have made their peace with it and every weekend booths outside sell the best frybread you'll ever eat.

• The re-opened Fox Theatre. The 1930s art deco cinema reflects Tucson's civic sense of historical preservation over progress. Rio Nuevo will feature a mission-like structure at its heart as well, which will retrofit these same sensibilities.

• Bats! Droves of them. I hear them many nights, twittering about lampposts for flying insects. Seasonally camped out in underpasses at River Road and East 22nd, they emerge in big living whirlwinds at sundown.

• Our weirdest secret is The Door to Pandaemonium. In the heart of the city at Speedway Blvd and First Ave there's a bit of prime real estate that should've been developed ages ago, but never has been. This cactus and scrub lot just feels ... wrong. Don't believe me? Go visit in the dead of night for yourself, and we'll compare notes.

• Sunset. Reds like you can't buy in a jar.

• The largest All Souls' Procession in the world! You'd think Mexico City being the most populous, but no -- it's us with our 10,000+ mourners and celebrants who photograph each other and dress with an inventiveness rarely seen elsewhere.

• The ladies. That 'Zonie accent, the Latina calenturas, and given the enclaves of Greeks, Russians, Indians (feather & dot), as well as the flood of university and corporate transfers we get like a respiration of new beauty every season, every flavour you can savour is here for the seducing. Come get some.

Still dissatisfied? Then it's you, not the city. Only boring people get bored, so go be boring elsewhere. I hear Portland's the new spot for this year's grass is greener crowd. Get in your fucking Volvo and go be too hipsterist for Portland instead. We'll probably see you in two years when you realized how good you had it and what a fool you truly are. By then however we'll have rented your cool Barrio Viejo apartment to someone far less whiny than you.

[This long arm of Tucson belongs to Clay.]

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+.

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+.