Ghost Rock

I hadn't been around goths much since graduating high school, so I didn't really know too much about the current dress code until checking out a few goth Web sites to research this piece. Pretty much the same, it seems, except with a wider acceptable hair-dye color palette. That, and the girls are not as sexy as I remembered them, which was all dark makeup, torn fishnets, milky white legs and shiny leather boots. Maybe I'm confusing the reality of high school with my high school sexual fantasies—which amounted to roughly three-quarters of my waking hours during those years. Music will be provided by Skin (of Hydroponic Sound System) and Nature of the Party, so maybe this won't be that goth-y after all. Not because Skin's Hydroponic is known for dubby, funky hip-hop, but because Skin has never appeared in my sex fantasies.

Laptop Deathmatch, Halloween-Style

By now, you've read plenty in these pages about Wanz Dover's Laptop Deathmatches, in which competitors are judged on their performances of music created on the fly with one laptop and one external device. Let's hope you've gone to check out for yourself just how diverse the music created through sampling, blending and looping can be.

This week's Deathmatch is more performance than competition, according to the official Web site's calendar: "Performers should be in costume dressed as the act they are sampling, mashing up or covering."

Sign-up was still available as of Saturday; potential gigabyte gladiators can check www.laptopdeathmatch.com for spots. Non-participants could cause a performer to briefly panic by using poster board to create a "blue screen of death" error message costume.