So, having skimmed a variety of recent LJ posts on the subject...

Today's question: Is the UK goth scene broken? And, if so, just what changes d'you think would be needed to fix it?

Yes, I know this is a can of worms. But I'm curious to see what people think. This is mostly sparked by Uncle Nem's excellent Leipzig piece and the LJ comments it triggered.

(Now that you've lured him to Leipzig, can we drag him to M'era Luna next year, chimera_s? I'd quite like to see a similar write-up on that, a very different kind of German festival...).

The Permanent Way

[also posted to the Thespgoth list]

I'm probably the only person who's even *remotely* interested
in this one, but... :-)

The Birmingham Rep will play host to David Hare's new play, "The Permanent
Way" from 18th-22nd November. He's got a reputation for writing well
crafted theatre on political topics, and doesn't tend to pull his punches -
earlier in the year the Rep staged his 'State of the Nation' trilogy
(Murmuring Judges / Racing Demon / Absence of War), which laid into the
church, the Labour party and the British legal establishment. More
recently, he turned his hand to film and wrote the screenplay for the
successful adaptation of The Hours.

This time he's tackling... the privatisation of British Rail. Um, perhaps
not the most obviously gripping of subjects, but given the playwright, I'm
expecting him to do it rather well.

From the blurb on the website:

'Why aren't people angry? They were robbed. What was theirs was given away.
What was foredoomed to fail failed. And they aren't angry.'

In 1991, before an election they did not expect to win, the Conservative
government made a fateful decision to privatise the railways. Now, twelve
years later, we subsidise the industry more lavishly than ever before.

David Hare tells the remarkable story of a dream gone sour.

http://www.birmingham-rep.co.uk/core_asp/showpage.asp?id=1606

So, *is* anyone interested? Or is it just a little too close to the wrong
kind of trainspotting? :)