The Fall of Splinter

"You follow the path that you meant to avoid
A matter of time till an echo unfolds
What the next step might bring?You take a look back
While your heartbeat is raging to this song you sing."
-- Diary of Dreams, The Wedding

So, as some of you may already know, Splinter (promoted by DJ Femme Mystique) has closed its doors this week after an attempted reboot last month.

This makes me unhappy for a couple of reasons -

1. I missed the reboot because of the family emergency I mentioned in a previous post. I really wanted to go because, as I explained in that previous post on the topic, Splinter was going to be my kick-off for a crazy goth-y four-day 4th of July weekend. Ultimately, this means that I never got to go to Splinter before it died. And that makes me feel really bad - like I didn't do my job in supporting them enough.
2. More selfishly: I was really looking forward to going tonight. I had actually set it up to take tomorrow off of my day job so that I didn't even have to get up in the morning and could just dance myself stupid into the wee hours of the night. On an off chance, I checked Splinter's Facebook page only to learn that there wasn't going to be a tonight. Now what the hell am I going to do with my evening? I see a porn-centered consolation prize in my future.
   
3. This subtracts a monthly event from what had looked like a steady build-up of goth/industrial club-nights. As many have been wont to remind me when I talk to them about SFGothic.net, there was a time in the mid '90s when there was a goth club almost every night of the week in the City, if not two. And the last year or so seems to have seen something of a renaissance among the darkling community. But the scene is still small enough that one club lost means a loss of a measurable whole-number percentage of the entirety - for the mathematically-minded, it's roughly 2-3% of all the things I'd tagged for the month of July. So Splinter's absence effectively diminishes the entire scene - from Sacramento to San Jose.

So what do we do about all this? Ultimately, I don't know. I'm not even really sure why Splinter didn't work out, since I never got to go.

Femme Mystique's comments on the Splinter FB page suggest that she believes the Thursday night timing to be a big issue. I suspect she's at least partially correct. I think the "last Thursday of the month" element might be compounding that problem further, though, since "last Thursday of the month" might by the 4th or 5th Thursday, varying from month-to-month depending upon where the extra days after the first 28 fall on the week.

Also, the "single weeknight of month" aspect can be a big killer. It doesn't seem to be a deal-breaker for the Friday and Saturday events, but that's because they're Friday and Saturday nights. The only regularly-occurring week-night events seem to be every week (Examples: Death Guild and Bondage-A-Go-Go) or, at least, nearly every week (Example: Swing Goth). "Little" events like the Cell manage to make it by focusing on very small venues and catering to much smaller crowds than a San Francisco-based club is willing to risk income on - not to mention that the Cell also focuses on a very specific type of entertainment, what with the performance art and dance angle rather than a club-orientation.

Either way, I wish DJ Femme Mystique and her crew luck, and I hope to see them rolling out another club night soon. As she mentions on the FB page, they're looking for something on Fridays or Saturdays, which (as you can see above) I think is a better idea for a once-a-month event.

Here's hoping.

-- Mr M.