Life to Death to Art

In past Substack posts, I’ve thrown around phrases like: “I actually have a goth heart.” Which sounds too much like the promise of a poser. So I’m about to prove it definitively. Here’s something that is actually hanging in my house. That my wife and I see when we walk downstairs every morning.

Which makes me seem a hypocrite in other ways.

I don’t normally talk about this online, but I’m a vegetarian, not vegan only by virtue of wanting to be able to sustain this. (I know a lot of ex-vegans.) One of the things that I’ve steadily cut out of my life, over the years, is unnecessary animal cruelty. No leather jackets. No boar-bristle brushes to comb my beard. No furs.

But that’s an actual bull’s skull hanging in my house.

Here’s the quandary, as well as why I have the bull’s skull in the first place: You start going to the kind of gothic street fairs that my wife and I love, and you start running into bones being sold. Not fake resin bones. Real bones turned into art. And while ethically I struggle, aesthetically, I’m in love.

The above image is from the “Shadow & Bone Oddities Show & Gothic Market” held at Weir Beer Brewery in Vista, CA, earlier this month. In this neck of the woods, “Oddities,” in particular, is a code word. It means: “Dead things will be sold here.”

I did not learn this here, at this event. I learned it well over two years ago at an event called the “Oddities and Curiosities Expo” in Del Mar, and I’ve been grappling with complicated feelings ever since. I do think that there’s some value in talking about the more intimate market held inside and around a Brewery, and especially in talking about the deeply NSFW entertainment held as soon as the sun began to set. (We’ll get there.)

So let’s start with the obvious: Taxidermy gets a bad rap. And I do mean aesthetically. I have yet to see a broader media depiction of taxidermy that does justice to the actual creativity exhibited by real taxidermic artists. Usually, we imagine a tacky recreation of someone’s dead pet with glassy eyes that plunge us deep into the uncanny valley. In reality, such creations exist and are common. But also, let’s be real: Bad writing is pretty damn common on Substack. Bad art is everywhere, in every medium, and yes, its creators often feel irrationally attached to it and are in denial about how bad it is.

But there’s also good art. And once you open the door a little wider, accept hybrid work and bone work, some of the things that people can do with death, as a medium, become absolutely striking.

Of course, the ethicists will start objecting straight away. They won’t just call me a hypocrite, but sit back and think to themselves: “How can you actually praise this???” Well here’s where things get…not squeaky clean, in my opinion, but actually quite complicated.

Remember the image of the bull skull I shared above? It came from a street fair in which my wife and I were actually vendors, with her selling print and stickers, and me selling my stories (which she had printed for me.) Next door to us was another vendor who we got to know, by virtue of being pressed up against them. We learned about that bull. How it had been an animal they’d owned. How it had died, and how this art was a representation of their choice to preserve it forever as something beautiful.

And then, at the end of the night, we bought it.

There is a term that has never been so important as it is at these types of gothic, oddity-selling street fairs. “Ethically Sourced.”

I asked the vendor who put this up what it meant to her. At an event so dedicated to selling pieces of actual dead bodies, what is ethical sourcing?

Hers became a common answer, when other vendors were asked: She has networks of people she knows who own animals. She contacts them and tells them that when the animals die, they could bury them like boring people, or they could sell the bodies to her for art. She checks up on all these people, knows they would never intentionally kill their animals for her, and eventually trusts them. She ended by joking that airport security must hate her, by now. Because she is “having dead things sent to her from all over the country.”

This is great. Good for her and I hope she keeps at it, I hope others do the same. Other, more specific terms for ethical sourcing are “Natural Death” and “Repurposed.” Basically, you either found the dead thing instead of killing it, or you found something that might have been killed by a human, but you weren’t the one who did it, and it’s too late to do anything about it, by now. So you might as well make art out of it. Right?

This…is where my “what about the other side” tendencies rear their head. My complete inability to ignore implications.

Which is this: What if this stuff stops being underground? What if it takes off? What if business starts booming? What does a world with very successful death-based art look like?

We have precedents for this. They aren’t good ones.

The solution seems to be self-policing. The fairs themselves already declare that only ethical sourcers can attend, and that they must be able to demonstrate that ethical sourcing. But in a world filled with online shops and in which we have a demonstration of the artistic community trying (and very much struggling to) police against generative AI usage, you must forgive my cynicism. If I were to buy this art, no matter how beautiful it is or how respectfully it is made, what kind of future am I contributing to? If I demonstrate demand, where does that lead?

These kinds of far-reaching implications, the belief that morals don’t stop at the door of: “I’m not directly hurting anyone,” were what led to my choice not to eat animals in the first place. I can’t abandon them now.

But maybe there is a way through. Maybe this art is important enough to be worth it.

When I say this “takes place at a Brewery,” it might sound small, and by all rights it should be. But “Shadow & Bone” showcases an efficient use of space. Some of the booths are outside in the parking lot, others are inside the brewery itself, with chairs and tables moved out of the way to make room for them. Others, still, are on the patio behind the brewery. There’s even room for a food truck. (Dedicated entirely to pork products. I can’t eat any of it. Fitting.) Overall, I’d estimate the total population to be roughly twenty vendors. Not all of them sell dead things, of course. But death hangs over the general atmosphere. And despite the cat skull T-shirt I wear and the skull and crossbones denim jacket, I feel (as I often do at these events) insufficiently goth.

There’s an underlying backstory to all of this that I haven’t properly explained: This is, in a sense, a fundraiser for the expansion of the “Dark Xmas Market” in Vista. A Krampus-and-Dark-Winter-Folklore themed event that is actually the same place my wife and I were vending the year I sold my stories and we bought the bull skull. Yes. All these things are connected. Tania Yager, a puppeteer who is running the show, is a constant visible presence at every one of her events, with her distinctive crimson twintails. She read my wife’s runes at another, separate goth street fair once. Unsurprising, in retrospect, as Tania seems to be everywhere that anything gothic is happening. She’s hoping that her Dark Xmas Market can take over Main Street in downtown Vista by 2027, and that hope is pretty rational. Last year, the market was overcrowded with customers. Vendors were already being turned down due to lack of space. Just on raw popularity alone, it seems inevitable.

When I first attended the Dark Xmas market, something about it struck my soul. To the core of myself, never had I been somewhere in which the vibe was so perfectly me.

So these complicated feelings are new, and not the fault or Tania or anyone running this. They have to do, entirely, with my own reservations regarding things like this.

A surprising amount of the taxidermy, actually, is dedicated to sex jokes. And if that surprises you, get ready, because sex hangs over a lot of this. As it does for all of goth culture. To understand why, we have to first understand that, to talk about death, we are really talking about life and all its passions.

As I sit out on the patio, two stereotypically dressed goth women talk loudly about finding the things in your world that drive you, and dedicating yourself to them. This is common. People everywhere are having meaningful conversations laced with Carpe Diem and Raison D’etre, admittedly with the aid of beer. One vendor is selling skimpy bikinis with gothic prints while another is part of the “black cat club,” which uses its sales to fund cat adoptions, and they seem far from discouraged by all the dead animals around them. AI art, on the other hand, is loudly discouraged, and it is made clear that meaningful creation only arises from human experience. These people are not nihilistic. Ironically: they believe in truly living so much more than the average normie.

And I think that’s where the sex comes in. In particular: kinky sex.

To be more blunt: To talk about death is to talk about life, because acknowledging death causes one to reflect on life. You will die, but not now. Now you are alive, and it means all the more. And what is more linked to life, and all the pleasures of it, than sex? Or, even if we forget pleasure: Why are you alive? Where did you come from? What single act made you?

Therein lies tension. Because, for most people, death is not sexy, right?

Or maybe it is. Ask the larger orbit around goth culture. You know, all those horny guys who can’t get enough of it?

Lately, a lot has been made of the goth look being fetishized, and yeah, I suppose that’s bad, but let’s be real about what I saw here - kinky art, exposed thighs, cleavage-baring dresses, dick-shaped candles and tattoos along the muscular forearms of the kind of men who front edgy rock bands, their tight black shirts straining against just enough muscle. On the way out, I passed a woman wearing a skirt so short it exposed half her ass to the night air, talking to a man who I know as a Middle School Teacher. (Don’t worry, if you’re reading this. You’ll remain unnamed.) People are horny for goths because goths radiate sexual energy on multiple levels. Physically, yes, but also possessing that thanatic taboo that first made women go gaga for vampires. You don’t get to be that hot without porn repackaging your likeness, not in 2026.

And despite my vegetarianism, my staunch distaste for using animal bodies in unnecessary ways, I am so god damn close. All of this fascinates me. I might even be looking deeper into it than many of the vendors. I talk to a woman who prints news articles related to serial killers, then stains them so they look like authentic first editions and frames them. When I ask her, open-ended and without judgment, why she wants to dedicate this energy to the stories of murderers, she answers: “I just think it’s cool.”

She says she used to go to the museum of death all the time, when she worked in Horton Plaza, and she was intrigued by things like displayed car crashes, even then. She then starts talking about the particulars of printing paper and making it look like an original news article. You would not realize the amount of work that goes into it, and she is much more comfortable discussing this process, rather than the “why.”

There’s a kind of purity to the goths around me that, I realize, I can’t match. This should be so simple. It’s all ethically sourced. It’s beautiful and death is interesting, especially for how it makes us think about life. All this makes sense to me, and this interplay of life and death should feel especially pertinent, now, with the world as it is. Since roughly 2017, when I first realized that there would be no escape from the apocalyptic impacts of climate change, every party I’ve gone to has felt like the Masque of the Red Death. Hedonism before the fall. Sometimes, as I’ve fallen asleep thinking about the withering Colorado River, I’ve comforted myself with the thought: “I’ll probably be dead by then, anyway.” My own death as a balm. The thing to sooth anxiety when nothing else rational can.

But, damn it, that’s my own death.

But here’s the thing, as I argue with myself: Every bone, every fur, every mothwing or feather belonged to an animal doomed to an eventual death, just as you or I are. If they hadn’t been here, they’d probably be buried. Shoved under the Earth and hidden away forever. If they’re lucky.

(Hey, the following story involves actual animal death, just as a forewarning)

There are kids, in my neighborhood, who take care of stray cats. Once, they failed to save the life of a cat who was severely injured. I don’t know whether they mercy-killed it themselves or buried it alive. What I do know is that the hard-packed dirt of my neighborhood, filled with tubing for sprinkler systems, did not allow for anything but a shallow grave. In the night, a coyote sniffed out the cat remains and dug them up. The coyote was a messy eater. By morning, dirt-encrusted bodyparts were strewn across the space near my home. My wife couldn’t look at it. We walked our dog in circuitous routes that gave it a wide berth, until eventually someone cleaned it up.

That’s nature. That’s what happens to dead bodies when they are offered human care that is not quite careful enough.

(Okay, I finished it. Sorry.)

When we (of the overall collective of living things) die, most of us are eaten. If not immediately, then later by maggots in the dirt. Or we feed the soil, and I suppose this is noble in its own way. This is a cycle of two states: Brief life, and then a much longer death which goes on to feed other life. To some, it’s unbearable. So we’ve imagined afterlives practically the entire time we’ve been a species. Something other than just being spiritless food for worms.

Or, with the power of human artifice, a gift we have in abundance like no other species, we can create an afterlife ourselves.

At the much bigger Oddities and Curiosities Expo, there was a large section just marked: “Dead People’s Things.” Not bodies, not even bones. Just objects excavated from houses of the deceased. There’s a sort of spiritualism to this. Could these objects be haunted? Wouldn’t it be fun, at least, to pretend that they were?

The impulse is the same as literal taxidermy. It’s a second life, insofar as we can provide it. And with art, we seem better able to provide it than any other species.

I think that, as long as my dead animals are ethically sourced, or repurposed, I can handle it. I think I can be an actual goth about this. Albeit not a very sexy one, on the level. I’ve clearly got some tough competition.

Right. Sexiness. Let’s talk about that performance.

There is barely any sitting room, and what’s there is reserved for donating VIPs. People are crowded together for the show. This is the main event, and a drunk man near me is trying to convince me to steal one of the seats so he can watch me get in trouble. I smuggle my way into a pretty good viewing area, leaning against a pillar just behind one of the VIP tables. My wife isn’t so lucky. She arrives late from work, and she gives up on actually watching the show, at first. She’s able to come back and take a space later, when a few of the more normie patrons find out just how 18+ the event is, and leave, clearly uncomfortable.

Tania comes onstage, and cannot stress this enough. 18+. Event. Only. If you have any kids in this brewery, get them out, now.

And then we start a performance titled, I kid you not: Shadows and Shibari. Which involves no complete nudity, but is otherwise lewd on a level you’d expect from a performance at a strip club, if not slightly kinkier. For obvious reasons, I won’t be sharing many images from it.

But there aren’t any half-naked performers onstage at first. At first, we watch a shadow-play on the screen about the love story (lust story?) between a Fox and a Rabbit. They start as animals, their silhouettes traipsing across the screen as the rabbit runs, and the fox chases. The grass rises as the rabbit hides, and we move ahead to the future. The rabbit and the fox are now wearing clothes, and greet each other like humans. A shadow heart rises in the fox’s chest. He howls in desire like agony after greeting the rabbit again. Then the display changes, the performers are now behind the screen, dancing silhouettes wearing a rabbit and fox head. The fox opens his jaws, again approaching the rabbit. But now, with her human hand, she beckons him. The fox jaws, open seemingly as if to eat, meet the rabbit instead in a kiss, and they sink below the grass together as he comes atop her.

From there, the performers came onstage, the woman wearing a rabbit tail under her dress (which, ahem we saw a lot of). And what followed was Shibari as performance. Her being tied up to a rig that suspended her in the air. Spanking, simulated sex acts. Again: an event far more 18+ than I initially expected.

But I fixate on the lead-in because that, to me, was where everything finally bridged together. Life and death, primal predation, the taking and using of a body ironically desired by the used, all in one brief performance.

The reality is that we, as humans, have taken power over the world and most its creatures, whether you like it or not. For the most part, we do not honor them. We treat them as a resource to be extracted. Like these living beings, now scientifically proven to be sentient, are as fungible of a good as plants or minerals. We do use their bodies without care. This is normal.

But it is abnormal to see death, and to think about it. And, tragically, it is abnormal to venerate the body as it is used. To honor it the way it deserves. It is grotesque, to most, to turn dead things into something beautiful, or at least interesting. Perhaps my hangups with that are just those hangups. I stopped eating meat out of conscientiousness for the weight of ongoing animal death and torture that would be considered an unspeakable humanitarian crisis, were it happening to humanity. What’s normal, in this ethical arena, is not what’s okay. So perhaps what’s abnormal can be fine, unseemly as it might seem.

When I die, donate my body. It’s hard to say to who. There are, if you think about it, so many uses for a body. There’s science, there’s the Earth itself (and there are certain eco-friendly methods of burial I find attractive), but one of the places I’d be happy with seeing it is as art. There it is. My written consent. Read it for proof upon my demise.

And maybe, perhaps naively, there’s an animal spirit somewhere that feels so honored by these pieces.

(But still, don’t overburden this market with demand. And definitely don’t buy dead things, or even living things, from anonymous online vendors. Be cool, guys.)