READING, 'RIGHTING, ROCKnROLL
And The Importance and Similarities Thereof
Fukk that Happy New Year shit. Jan. 1st is an arbitrary day as any other for "new beginnings." Realistically, what if the "new beginning" really began some time ago?
That statement make a lick of sense? Mmmm, not really, but stick with me. Also understand I may neverreach an end-point here. Considering there really isn't a starting one, necessarily.
I was 5 when I saw Alice Cooper on the Muppet Show. That left a particular indellible mark on me that will stick with me forever. It wasn't until I was 7 and my cousin gave me a copy of "Alice Cooper's Greatest Hits" that the fever really hit: the sound, the atrocity of what struck me even at that age as absurd and funny -- I got it, and I loved it. This was also around the time I discovered the Gill Man, my favorite (and most personally identifiable) of the classic monsters, began watching classic strange films that would run on PBS, or the local (Philly Area) "Ceature Double Feature" on ch 48 on Saturday afternoons. Movies like Astro Zombies, Horror Of Party Beach, The Giant Claw, Tarantula, Invasion Of The Saucermen,
the Welcome To My Nightmare Alice Cooper concert film, watching the Twilight Zone and Outer Limits reruns with my parents -- I was hooked. 7 and already a horror nerd.
Let's jump ahead a coupla years. Say, 7. After all, "Seven and Seven is . . . " -- a 14 yr old shy loner finding complete solace in the music, visual, and now literary "strange" --not just horror. just the outright weird and different, in all ways, always naturally appealed to me. Music had progressed from Alice Cooper to Venom, Iron Maiden, Motorhead, King Diamond, Dead Kennedy's --- and eventually the Misfits, at that point (1987) known only by (classic) Metallica fans (due to their covers of "Last Caress" and "Green Hell") and old-schooler skater kids. They were the ultimate "horror kid's" (of which I was) band, and back then shadowed by the beauty of mystery and memory, (They also were no longer a band -- that is another story, considering to me they still ARE NOT a band, just some guys calling themselves the Misfits, an offensive parody of the band that essentially saved my life). From there, naturally, Danzig, Samhain, of course. The Undead. Any post-Misfits related band. But the Misfits are what really drove me further into the seedier, stranger realms of punk rock, and it's varied forms and original aesthetic of certain elements (which for all intents have all but faded away, except for throwbacks such as myself and a few others scattered about -- we tend to hide like roaches, smoking them as well). I discovered the Cramps, 45 Grave, Dwarves, Bauhaus, GG Allin, TSOL --- all these GREAT bands and sounds, I found a dear love in early SoCAl punk, eventually landing me right into the luxurious lap of Christian Death.
Punk rock and horror literature saved my life then - - - and would many more times to come.
While discovering these bands, and being an early and avid reader already (mostly of Greek Mythology, Robert E, Howard Conan books, some of my Dad's strange 70's scifi he'd leave around the house), at 12 I read all the Barker and King I was forbidden to, went to the comics and book shops and ordered incredible, mindblowing splatterpunk novels from Skipp & Specter, Shaun Hutson (yeah, I read "Slugs"), Rex Miller. I'd sit for hours alone, lost deep in the sounds of Bauhaus and words of Barker's "Books Of Blood III" (still associate "Passion of Lovers with "Rawhead Rex" -- go figure). I had always been an avid reader, but after finding HPL at 12 it became almost an addiction, like music I had discovered, and like writing I just couldn't stop. Wrote my first story at 8, something goofy, and a couple others but from that first story I KNEW what I "wanted to be when I grew up." A fukking writer. Those authors and books as well progressed in both intensity and sheer strange. Read "Naked Lunch" at 16, eventally got into Byron, Keats, etc. All of this of course seemed to mix naturally with the progression of the music. Being synesthetic was a big help as weil, though it was not so much a tossed around idea then, or necessarily noticed as such by myself at that point (i figured everyone saw/thought/etc., that way -- have come to find, not so much), but I wrote incessantly, my odd, lonely, and violently strange horror tales becoming moribund poetry of many different forms, experimental, until finally turning into lyrics for my first real band, Age Of Desire. Even the band's name was copped from Clive Barker's killer final story in "The Inhuman Condition (aka: Books Of Blood 5)." The Rock and Horror connection, so firmly rooted in my mind, finally becoming one, in a 4 year band that was supposed to be a 2 "shock rock" gaffe.
At 17 (1991) I began the project, which lasted until 1994 when, invariabley, everything collapsed. We were known for trashing the places we played and people who came to us (who absolutely loved it), both house parties and legit clubs, with gallons of Karo syrup blood (home-made, of course), pounds of ground meat babies ripped apart and thrown raw at our adoring cWe had fans (deaht-metal people, most oddly, as we were a "gothic punk" band -- punks seems to hate us, which I loved). We did a small botched tour, had numerous line-up changes, an onstage, outdoor crucifixtion, started what turned into a brief but serious riot, put 3 albums out, with numerous unreleased recordings --- yet ended in creative disputes, a drug-addled drummer, and a stolen van full of our equipment.
I started to write fiction again, this time much more coherent and life experience, escpecialy after having worked at the world's most monstrous nursing home (not kidding) and having dealt quite closely with death for quite some time. Still wrote music, performed in bands, and worked a myriad of jobs I increasingly loathed. But I did keep writing. And silence never quite cut it but for the odd and rare occasion. I made many a well thought compilation to accompany these days-and-nights-long forays into the stranger realms of my imagination, interspersed with a break to write a song or two amongst the pounds of stories piling up in my in my drawer, on my dresser. By now I'm in my mid-20's.
By summer of 2000, I was actively in 4 different musical projects, still wrote stories I had no idea what to do with. Unfortunately a good portion of that written material, all those stories and years of work destroyed in an instant during an unexpected flood. I wrote and performed music at this time with Eddie "Skinhead Gourmet" Petro (find his show, THE SKINHEAD GOURMET, on youtube), in our deathpunk band the Necrotics until 2003, when he moved. After having stoppedwriting fiction again for several years (since some 100+ stories disintegrated before my eyes in the flood), I began to take it up again a little bit.
But no go. 2004-2008 was a bad couple of years. Virtually no writing, had given up on most everything, disappeared from the grid, and worked for a small home remodeling company while living alone in various nefarious places. I went essentially fully off the grid. There was no creativity (that I would allow out any longer), and a sickly "Travis Bickle" like mentality was beginning to sink in, the same sortof despair, lonliness. Weirdness. But during that 4 year period I read, non-stop, anything I could get my hands on, in fact oft-times ignoring
In the blistering summer of 2008, while working a miserable forklift job for Northtec Industries (aka: the shady-assed and wicked-corrupt Estee Lauder Corporation) and living with an even more miserable woman, I out of the blue (perhaps self-peservatory flight AND fight reactions simultaneously, heh) began to write a lot. Flash fiction, some bizarre poetry, and some disturbingly vicious full length horror stories, my first in years. And stuff that was actually good, different. Writing had become rock-n-roll for me, experience, wisdom, age, something new and nameless I was learning about the art of writing -- a feeling of having to have had lived through hells to write the proper cautionary tales about hells. And when I say hells I speak not in some Xtianiazed sense of the world you perceive and the ill's that have forever plagued the deepest reptilian region of mankinds mind for so long as being controlled by some silly, angry JudeaoXtian man in the sky, nor a GAOTU (Great Architect Of The Universe), nor any silly horse-shit like that. I'm speaking of no money, no food, nowhere to live, losses of jobs, and the heavy static of gravity pushing down so hard over such aperiod of time that - - - snap.
13 hours a day on a forklift, moving literally tons of material from A to B, causes strange things to happen.
So on January 1st 2009 I submitted a poem somewhere, under my real name, and it was accepted, even lauded by the editor. Then, a full piece of fiction, to the FREEZINE of Fantasy and Science Fiction, whose founder/editor Shaun Lawton really liked. Then I just kept doing it, writing constantly, "honing my craft," so to speak, act of 'habitual personality' (ie: addictive personality) tendencies creeping in - - - like so many haunted memories yet in the most non-haunting of ways. Cathartic release of soul pains, instead.
Were those experiences, those hells, worth the havoc they could (and would) ultimately wreak in order to finally force it out of me like some placebo-exorcism? Anxieties and depressions, agoraphobias and other true things that go bump at any hour they want, night or day, involuntary and of their own volition -- those horrid defacto ghosts of the mind -- the ghosts of memory and time, worth every grind of sound as that synesthesia transforms those notes to the shape of letters, each one a gutteral sound in itself; a numerical letter not fed from outside and into your mind by outsourced data, but instead blown forth from inside out of your mind, soul and heart, ejaculated onto the page from the pen you possess, that may in fact perhaps posess you.
Was it really worth it, letting Djinnout of bottles and opening Padora's Box to see just what it is that hides inside? Is it worth opening the closet door at 3 a.m. and facing that which holds you back?
You're goddamned right it is - - - and was. For some, in fact, it is necessary.
PUNK'S UNDEAD - - - and this began a long, long time ago.
If you actually made it this far, thanks for reading, please subscrube to blog if not already.
Stay Sick,
Vincent Daemon
