| Hangin’ with the SeaGoths.
Formerly known as the hip hop-centric Art Bar, Seattle’s Noc Noc has done battle within the busy nightclub corridor of the city’s downtown district since 2001. The club bills itself as a musically diverse and unpretentious place for the city to hang out, and features several nights hitting on the usual hipster touchstones of house, neoburlesque (Sinner Saints Burlesque do a weekly performance here) ’80s synth pop, and rock.
Weekends, however, belong to the SeaGoths, with the EBM night CrucifiXion on Saturdays and the more retro Resurrection on Sunday. Well, we are NightStalkers, same as they are, so that’s when one of our more, shall we say, covert agents decided to strike. Here’s what he/she/it dug up.
Stalker #1
No one wears flannel in Seattle anymore. I think they still run Windows on their PCs, because Bill Gates is still making shit-tons of money, but I did not see one flannel shirt the whole time I was there. I didn’t see one mosh pit or even any muttonchops - at least, not on the guys. Indeed, this is a town that has lost its soul.
So in case you haven’t heard, grunge is apparently dead, and nothing has taken its place locally, but what can you do when the new Seattle is actually MySpace? Besides, for a city as awash in new media dollars as this one happens to be, you’d think there’d be some fabulously overpriced superclub that was set up to take advantage, but everybody’s gotta be in Redmond by 10-ish. Clubbing’s apparently something most people did back when the scene really meant something, maaaan, so one may as well kick it old-school with the Goths at Noc Noc in Belltown, where the modern-day palefaces come to swim through the dancefloor, and everyone else comes to remember when they used to look like them.
For this mission, I roll up with my old college chum, Jae-Jung. To the rest of the world, Jae-Jung might be a well-to-do, sexually repressed, white-collar worker, but on her offhours she’s an estrogen-enhanced social nightmare with the kick of Bruce Lee and the mouth of a policeman who’s just shot off his right toe. After making a pass at the bouncer at the last joint, I realize the need to put her under heavy sedation, and figure
a blast from the past may do the trick.
So we roll up to the door and, already, we know it’s the right place, because the music is murky, the vocals are distorted and someone’s smoking cloves. I’m the only one who could possibly pass for Goth in our crew, but since I’m bringing young, nubile female flesh to the altar, we all get the reduced price. And of course, the minute my party hears the words “25-cent drafts,” they’re sold. We roll in.
The first thing I notice walking in are booths. Booths. Booths. Booths. OMG, booths. The same dingy, dive-bar, ain’t-changed-the-look-since-Chuck-Bukowski-yakked-on-’em booths that every single Seattle bar needs more than a liquor license, even. They’re all lined up to the side, and the nightcreatures seated at them gaze at us sullenly, warning us silently not to disrupt their coolness. We take a seat at the benches near the bar. The last bar we went to, Contour, was much smaller, and the brand new sound system they installed may be great for DJs eager to blow out what’s left of their eardrums, but it’s horrible for people who want to catch up with each other. Here, it’s a bit better - not much bass at all to speak of, but the fills do it about right here in the bar area, and in the back dance area, it’s a bit more pronounced, but not obnoxiously so.
One of our guests is a massage therapist who’s just experienced the weekly Gregorian chanting hosted at St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral. She seems a bit disappointed by the decor here by comparison. Not dank and creepy enough for her tastes.
“What do you mean?” I ask her, pointing out the faux medieval tracery and yard sale sculptures positioned oh-so-artfully on the pale purple wall above each dive bar booth. “Look at that. It just oozes thick globs of Goth all over your toothbrush, doesn’t it?”
She ain’t buying it. Maybe next time we should pick a mortuary. Everyone’s complaining about the beer now. Twenty-five cents gets you exactly what you pay for in Seattle, it appears. A highway patrolman might consider giving us a breathalyzer if he wanted to piss himself laughing at the results, but I could get more drunk off Orangina. But the minute the DJ drops Marilyn Manson’s cover of “Personal Jesus,” everyone in the club runs to the dancefloor.
 Stalker #2
Note to all who may enter here: Resurrection, like any self-respecting Goth/industrial night, plays all the hits from the ’80s and ’90s, and the DJ does take requests. Stepping onto a dancefloor like this for me is like jumping back into time, as I eerily enough can recognize about 70% of the tracks from my youth. Yes, the lights are a little more intelligent, blinking and moving in synch with the music (although the house lights are up high enough so that it really doesn’t make any difference whether they’re on or not), but no, ain’t a damn thing changed in this thing called Goth, except for all these normal-looking people who act far stranger than the nightcreatures would ever allow for themselves.
But hey, everyone was well-behaved, and as long as they’re slamming quarters into the lite beer jukebox, one can continue to watch the variations of Goth dance that have evolved over the years. From the classic “pulling-taffy” maneuvers to the ballet-school dropout pas deuxs, it was all in glorious display. One non-Goth hoochie even attempted to do the splits before her boyfriend scooped her up off the ground, which all gave us something to cherish forever.
OK, Marilyn’s done. We go back to our bench. I pass one booth and see an umbrella pointed out into the aisle, shading the fair lady seated in it. It was the light pointing directly at her, you see. It was singing her flesh. And it rains in Seattle, too. All the time. So you never know when you’ll need an umbrella, especially when you’re a SeaGoth.
So we shrank back into our little corner of the club, waiting for another consensus-grabber to guide us back to the dancefloor.
www.clubnocnoc.com
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