The Teeming Brain

At long last, I’m proud to present the cover art for the first album from my musical project Daemonyx. It was created by my friend Jason Van Hollander, whose artwork is very familiar to many of my horror-and-fantasy-oriented friends. The article on him at WikiPedia is nicely informative:

“Jason Van Hollander is an award-winning illustrator, book designer and occasional author. His stories and collaborations with Darrell Schweitzer earned a World Fantasy Award nomination. Van Hollander’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Weird Tales, Interzone, Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine, The New York Review of Science Fiction and other publications. Van Hollander’s morbid and grotesque artwork adorns dust jackets of books published by Arkham House, Golden Gryphon Press, Subterranean Press, Tor Books, Night Shade Books and Ash-Tree Press. He has illustrated books and stories by Thomas Ligotti, Gregory Frost, John Clute, Gerald Kersh, Fritz Leiber, Matthew Hughes, Ramsey Campbell, William Hope Hodgson, Clark Ashton Smith and Matt Cardin. Van Hollander was nominated twice for the International Horror Guild Award before winning in 2003. He has won two World Fantasy Awards (2000, 2004). In 2005 Van Hollander received a second award recommendation from The British Fantasy Society.”

Here’s what he’s done for Daemonyx:

You can visit his website at www.jasonvanhollander.com to see more of his work. I recommend it.

In further news, the songs that will comprise “Curse of the Daimon” are finally mixed and finished. The album will contain 15 tracks running to a total length of about 55 minutes of music. I’m on the verge of having the tracks mastered. Then it’ll be time to get the CDs pressed. I’ll also make digital files available for download somewhere or other. After more than two years of playing, recording, self-divining, mixing, and obsessing, “Curse of the Daimon” is now an imminent reality. As always, you can visit the MySpace page for the project at www.myspace.com/daemonyx, where you can listen to sample tracks and read enthusiastic blurbs about the music from Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Ligotti, Brian Hodge, Tim Lebbon, and Mark Samuels.

To clarify before I’ve even said anything: No, I’m not going to step up here at my blog and bash hip-hop as an anti-civilizational force. I’m not going to criticize the whole hip-hop musical-cultural nexus for its elevation of crass consumerism to the perceived status of the Ultimate Ideal in the eyes of millions upon millions of American teens and twenty-somethings. I’m not going to lay into hip-hop for its egregious glorification of misogyny, gun violence, drug use, pornography, and all the other “gangsta” elements that have come to dominate it over the past two decades. And I’m certainly not going to come down on it for the brutalizing, coarsening, barbarizing influence it exerts over its makers and minions. No, I’m not going to do any of that.

Instead, what I’m going to do is point to something that’s currently going on in hip-hop culture, as reported in an Associated Press article that was carried yesterday in my local-area daily newspaper, and then use this to back up something I’ve been saying with increasing frequency in recent years.

But first, a brief preface: Are you aware that Jane Jacobs, the renowned, and indeed the legendary, social philosopher who died only a few months ago, and whose epochal 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities has served for more than three decades as the practical and theoretical template for modern urban planning — are you aware that Ms. Jacobs’ last book, published in 2004, was titled Dark Age Ahead? Are you aware that she specifically defined a dark age in terms of loss of cultural memory, as a period when people have not only forgotten previous knowledge, but have forgotten that they’ve forgotten? And are you aware that in this final opus she argued that America and Canada are probably entering just such an age with all of its attendant human suffering and misery?

Are you aware that cultural historian and social critic Morris Berman, who touched a nerve with his 2000 book The Twilight of American Culture (which The New York Times named as a “notable book of the year”), wrote a follow-up book, published in mid-2006, titled Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire in which he argues that America has passed from a twilight phase into a true dark age, and that it seems likely that nothing will be able to reverse the cultural death spiral?

Are you aware of Neil Postman’s famous warning to America in the age of television? In Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Postman wrote, “When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when a cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainment, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.” Do you recognize that when Postman wrote these words, he thought — and feared — that the transformation he described might already be well underway?

Are you aware that all of these and many more dire cultural warnings from the recent past were presaged by a number of dystopian fiction classics such as Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which depict future dark ages in which cultural memory has disappeared and entire nations full of people are obsessed with trivia and titillation even as they live in unacknowledged misery and desperation?

Thinking of all this, in recent years I’ve talked repeatedly to classrooms full of high-school students about the galling transiency and vapidity of the things that occupy the attention of the pop media culture, which itself encases their consciousnesses like the matrix in The Matrix. I’ve pointed out that the span of cultural attention and memory in America has become so narrow and shallow that what seems so momentously important to these teenagers right now — the movies and movie stars, the pop music songs and icons, the clothing styles, the video games, the television shows, all of it, virtually every last element — will be forgotten with a swiftness that they’ll find hard to believe. I tell them they’ll be shocked only a handful of years from now when they’ll find that the new younger generation that’s replaced them knows virtually nothing about the things that they, today’s teens, have been programmed to regard as so earthshakingly important and entertaining. (Note that those last two qualities have increasingly collapsed into each other and become all but synonymous in the collective pop culture consciousness.)

And so, with all of that as background, my attention was instantly captured by an article in the entertainment section of yesterday’s newspaper titled “Reality Show Examines Race in Rap.” It seems there’s a new reality show debuting on VH1 today titled The White Rapper Show. As reported in the article, “The setup is simple and instantly amusing: Ten white amateurs are picked to live in an apartment in New York’s South Bronx (the birthplace of hip-hop), where they must prove their rhyming skills and gain respect. The winner gets $100,000.”

Then comes the part that really hooked my interest in relation to the dark-age ideas outlined above. I’ll quote it at length, adding my own emphases:

“The host is Michael ‘MC Serch’ Berrin, known for the early ’90s hit ‘The Gas Face’ with the group 3rd Bass, who schools the 20-something contestants on the history of hip-hop and the art of the rhyme.

“‘This generation can’t answer basic hip-hop trivia,’ says Berrin, 39. ‘Early on, there was a history that you had to know. I had to know who the Funky 4+1 was, who Sha Rock was. I had to know this because when I was coming up, guys would test me.’

“Like rock, blues and jazz, hip-hop began as a distinctly African-American expression. Unlike other genres, though, rap has remained a predominantly black art form.

“The guys of [the producing media company] ego trip (none of whom are white) are well aware that rap is now mainstream popular music and that its record-buying audience is mostly white. They joke that the show presents a vision of the future.

“‘There are more white kids who are captivated by the music and the culture than ever,’ says ego tripper Jefferson ‘Chairman’ Mao. ‘I think it’s a terrific thing because music should be shared. It’s for everybody — you just don’t want the origins of it to be lost.’”

So do you see why this drew my attention? I’ve been preaching for some time that in an age of shallow and transient cultural productions that are framed and marketed as being somehow “important” by the corporate-controlled media, it’s not only the memory of the ancient past but of the immediate past that’s going to be forgotten. I’ve preached that our situation is becoming just like in Fahrenheit 451, where the pathetic, zombified citizens of that hellish future society are captivated repeatedly by endless rehashings of the same meaningless, phony entertainments and distractions, to which they have been rendered susceptible by the infantilizing of their consciousness. And now we have a new television show whose makers have become emblematic of this truth in their very attempt to say something that’s supposedly important.

For the “ego trip” collective that’s behind The White Rapper Show really is trying to get across the idea that this show represents a significant reflection on race and culture. Ego trip, which began as a magazine, “has grown into a media company that produces books and provocative television shows (’Race-O-Rama!) often dealing with race and hip-hop.” One of its founders, Elliot Wilson, says of the new reality show, “The power of the show is that when you hear the title, you already have images of what it’s going to be, whether good or bad. . . . Most of them are thinking, ‘Oh, it’s going to be some dumb nonsense.’ But it’s not that — it’s smart.” If you do a Google search using the show’s title, you’ll find all kinds of press-release material that claim the show will try to be provocative by testing and exposing the contestants’ views on race. Ken Mok, the show’s executive producer, claims the whole thing is “really about race and the context of white culture versus hip-hop culture.”

Leaving aside Mok’s interesting, if not downright astounding, choice of words (instead of contrasting white and black culture he chooses to contrast white culture with hip-hop culture, as if “black” and “hip-hop” are entirely equivalent), the most fascinating thing about all of this is the illusion of cultural gravity that the show’s makers are attempting to surround it with, in combination with host Michael Berrin’s comments about the dying sense of history among the younger hip-hop crowd. It’s been less than 20 years since he hit his heyday in the rap/hip-hop scene, and yet he’s already talking in terms of a loss of memory among the up-and-coming generation of young hip-hop artists. In other words, Berrin is recognizing the advent of a miniature dark age within his beloved musical/cultural milieu.  And that, my friends, just seems par for the course in the future that currently surrounds us and awaits us. Short of a radical deindustrializing of everything, spurred by the advent of peak oil, that will short-circuit the machinery of the military-industrial-technocratic-entertainment complex and push us all into a future of depopulation and neo-agrarianism, this accelerating cycle of disposable entertainment being consumed by a lobotomized public and then forgotten almost immediately will become the norm. Indeed, it has already done so to a remarkable degree, and this accounts in large part for the historic blunders in America’s foreign policy over the past fifty or sixty years, which have led to such increasing misery abroad and at home. The American public is sleepwalking into the future while the economic and political power brokers — who are often fundamentally just as somnolent themselves — ply their trade.

But hey, The White Rapper Show debuts tonight on VH1 at 9:30 Eastern Time, and it’s going to rescue the fading memory of hip-hop’s history and origins while simultaneously offering a serious meditation on race and culture. So all’s well, I suppose. Just switch on your television set and plug into the coziness of our ready-made matrix.

While you still can.

Apologies for my failure yesterday to make my regular Monday blog post. I really have no excuse, especially since I was off work yesterday due to last week’s winter storm that has resulted in several days of school cancellations. Today we’re in our fourth day of this unexpected vacation, with a return to work tomorrow looking mighty doubtful given the dreadful ice-packed conditions of all the rural back road around here. I devoted yesterday to working on some writing and musical projects, so at least I was productive after a fashion. But alas, I let the blog slide.

Today I realized that I’ve let something else slide here at The Teeming Brain: I never announced the winner of the fourth Daemonyx contest! I announced the contest way back on October 23rd, almost a month and a half ago, as part of my ongoing attempt to spread the word about Daemonyx (my musical project whose first album will be released next year). My apologies go out to Cody, who won by correctly identifying the source of the sound clip that appears multiple times in my/Daemonyx’s songs “The Gates of Deep Darkness” and “Daimonica.” For his prize Cody chose a hardcover copy of the horror anthology The HWA Presents: Museum of Horrors. I’m sure he’ll enjoy it, since there are some fine stories by some fine authors in there. Congratulations, Cody!

The sound clip, incidentally, consists of a man’s voice asking, “Is there someone inside you?” Cody correct identified it as coming from the film version of The Exorcist, where it is spoken by the psychiatrist (played by Arthur Storch) who hypnotizes Regan in an attempt to get at the source of her bizarre behavior. She answers “Yes” to his question, after which the psychiatrist announces that he is now speaking to the person inside of her. As we all remember, frightful chaos ensues.

My fascination with the theme of possession, inner presences, and that kind of thing won’t be new to readers of The Teeming Brain. The idea of a demonic, or rather a daemonic, or rather a daimonic influence evidencing itself in a person’s psyche has become a kind of philosophical/psychological/artistic/spiritual/religious lodestone to me over the past several years. It gets at the foundations of everything that has always fascinated me about the questions and issues surrounding art, creativity, inspiration, religious authority, God, the Devil, good, evil, spiritual transcendence, human subjectivity, psychosis, dreams, nightmares, mythology, and more. As I’ve mentioned in the past (e.g. in my post titled “Daemonyx: What’s in a name?“), the same idea stands at the center of my musical and literary pursuits.

At one or two points in the history of this blog, I’ve offered excerpts from my essay “The Angel and the Demon,” which will appear in Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares, a two-volume reference work from Greenwood Publishing Group that’s scheduled for publication on the 30th of this month. I thought it quite fortuitous, given my intense personal fascination with the subject, that this specific topic fell to me when the essays were being assigned. A couple of posts ago I talked about the upsurge of religious-themed horror that I see taking shape in contemporary popular culture. As all culturally informed readers know, this is hardly the first time such a thing has happened. It famously happened once before, in the 1970s, when The Exorcist became a phenomenon, first as a book and then a movie, that swept across the American and Western cultural landscape. We should remember, especially in present circumstances, that Blatty’s famous novel was one of the key elements in the birth of “horror” as a modern publishing category. Right from the start, then, religion was central to this whole enterprise.

Surely you guessed a paragraph ago (didn’t you?) that I was going to quote once again from my Angel and Demon essay. Here’s a goodly chunk of its introduction, excerpted from the extended or complete version, which will only appear in a scaled-down fashion in the Greenwood book. The introduction discusses America’s cultural fascination with the iconic Angel and Demon, both of whom are aspects of the “someone inside you” that inhabits us all. As frequently happens when I really throw myself into nonfiction projects, I found all of my research playing right into the topics that fascinate me most as a human being.

FROM “THE ANGEL AND THE DEMON”

by Matt Cardin

I. Introduction: the prevalence of the Angel and the Demon

Even a cursory survey of the supernatural horror genre reveals the important role that the angel and the demon have played in it. From texts such as Dante’s Divine Comedy (written 1308-1321) and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), which straddle the boundary between religious devotional literature and outright fiction, to fictional works such as Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971), the demon has provided ongoing fodder for creators of supernatural horror. As for the angel, while it has most often served as a mere foil for the demon, and has often been left entirely unmentioned in favor of focusing exclusively on demonic horrors, it has still made its presence known. Paradise Lost, for example, begins with a dramatic narration of the fall of Lucifer and his fellow angels from heaven and their subsequent transformation or transition into demons. More recently, the Prophecy series of horror movies from the 1990s and early 2000s has flouted modern Western conventions by abandoning the cute, cozy angels of Victorian art and the greeting card industry, and returning to a more ancient and traditional portrayal of angels as powerful, terrifying beings.

Nor are these figures influential merely within the confines of the supernatural horror as such. In 1973 the cinematic adaptation of The Exorcist became a sensation among audiences and was subsequently recognized as the first true “blockbuster,” predating the likes of Jaws and Star Wars. It was nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won two of them. Its earnings made it one of the top grossing films at the U.S. box office that year, and in the decades since, it has steadily remained in and around the top ten highest grossing films of all time both domestically and internationally. Upon its first release it ignited a national conversation about theological matters within the United States, just as its author (Blatty, who penned the screenplay from his own novel) had hoped it would do, and spurred many fear-based conversions and reconversions to Christianity.

Angels have shared a similar widespread influence. Director Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, which begins and ends with angels, received only a middling response from audiences and critics when it was first released in 1946 (although it was nominated for five Academy Awards). Then in 1974 a copyright lapse due to a clerical error placed the film in the public domain. When television stations around the country began to take advantage of the opportunity to run the film free of royalty charges, a new generation of viewers rediscovered and fell in love with it, thus transforming it into a widely beloved “holiday classic,” and thus rendering the supporting character of Clarence the most famous cinematic angel of them all.

Over the course of subsequent decades, angels became the subject of a bona fide national obsession in the U.S. A slew of television programs (Highway to Heaven, Touched by an Angel), movies (Angels in the Outfield, City of Angels), and best-selling books (A Book of Angels, Ask Your Angels, Where Angels Walk) arose to cater to a rising fascination with the idea of winged heavenly guardians and messengers. In 1994 the NBC television network aired a two-hour primetime special titled Angels: The Mysterious Messengers, and PBS ran a well-received documentary titled In Search of Angels. A 1993 Time magazine cover story about the angel craze included a survey indicating that 69 percent of Americans claimed to believe in angels, while nearly half believed they were attended by a personal guardian angel. Newsweek, which ran its own angel-themed cover story the very same week the Time issue appeared, reported that the angel craze appeared to be rooted in a very real spiritual craving: “It may be kitsch, but there’s more to the current angel obsession than the Hallmarking of America. Like the search for extraterrestrials, the belief in angels implies that we are not alone in the universe—that someone up there likes me” (quoted in Nickell, 152-3).

Not incidentally, this sentiment closely echoed Blatty’s expressed motivation for writing The Exorcist. As he has explained in numerous interviews and also in his 2001 memoir If There Were Demons, Then Perhaps There Were Angels: William Peter Blatty’s Story of the Exorcist, when he was a junior at the Jesuitical Georgetown University in 1949 he encountered a Washington Post story about a fourteen-year-old boy in Mount Rainier, Maryland who had undergone an exorcism under the official sanction of the church. Blatty had long been concerned about the spiritual direction of modern Western society—The Exorcist, let it be noted, was published in the immediate wake of the 1960s’ “death of God” movement—and in the account of this boy and his apparent demonic affliction, Blatty thought he could discern “tangible evidence of transcendence.” Two decades later he fictionalized the story in his famous novel. But it was a fiction with a serious existential purpose; as he later explained, in his view the reality of demons served as a kind of apologetic proof for the existence of God: “If there were demons, there were angels and probably a God and a life everlasting” (quoted in Whitehead). In 1999, at a time when movies such as The Sixth Sense, Stir of Echoes, The Blair Witch Project, and Stigmata were flooding movie theatres and video rental stores, he invoked a version of the same idea to account for the resurgent popularity of supernatural thrillers: “One of the prime allures of the supernatural thriller is that there is a world of spirit and that death doesn’t mean our final destiny is oblivion” (Bonin).

In the early 1970s it seemed that the Roman Catholic Church, or at least the Pope, agreed with at least the first half of Blatty’s demon-angel apologetic. In November of 1972, Pope Paul VI delivered an address to a General Audience in which he expressed his concern over what he viewed as demonic influences at work in the world: “Evil is not merely an absence of something but an active force, a living, spiritual being that is perverted and that perverts others. It is a terrible reality, mysterious and frightening. . . . Many passages in the Gospel show us that we are dealing not just with one Devil, but with many” (Pope Paul VI). These statements ignited a debate both inside and outside the church and embarrassed many priests whose outlook was more in tune with the secularistic, demythologized tenor of the time than with what they viewed as the mythological belief system of pre-Enlightenment Christianity. But the international phenomenon that was The Exorcist demonstrated that the Roman pontiff obviously spoke not only for himself but also for an enormous public that either believed as he did or, at the very least, suspected or wanted to believe in the existence of a transcendent spiritual reality. The fact that the pope’s remarks were bookended, temporally speaking, by the 1971 publication of Blatty’s novel and the 1973 release of the movie makes it difficult to avoid speculating that all three statements—the novel, the movie, and Paul VI’s speech—were expressions of a burgeoning cultural phenomenon.

I’ve decided to hold another contest to promote my musical project Daemonyx. As always, the contest involves your visiting Daemonyx at MySpace in order to listen to some music and answer a question about it. Also as always, the prizes include DVDs and books (well, a single book this time) with a horror slant.

Visit the contest page to read the rules and start playing!

It has come about that I’m going to be interviewed sometime soon by Heathen Harvest, an online magazine whose tagline says it all: “Illuminating the post-industrial underground.”  They feature news, reviews, concert reports, and interviews with such bands as Coil, Sol Invictus, and many others of the same ilk.  One of the editors contacted me to request the interview after discovering my musical project Daemonyx through its MySpace page.  I will of course provide a link here when the interview is published.

Two or three months ago I created a couple of MySpace accounts. One of them is intended to give a visible face to my musical project Daemonyx. Its address is www.myspace.com/daemonyx. Obviously, if you’ve been reading my posts here at The Teeming Brain then you’re already aware of this one’s existence, since it’s the page where I’ve directed people for purposes of winning prizes by listening to Daemonyx’s music. Just a couple of days ago I beefed up the page with all of the blurbs Daemonyx has received to date from prominent figures in the horror and fantasy communities. Several of these will be familiar to readers of The Teeming Brain, since I posted them here awhile back, but one of them — a super quote from Brian Hodge, before whom I bow in awe for both his literary and musical productions — is brand new. So head on over there if you want to check it out. Also remember that from time to time I’ll be rotating the songs that are available in the music player.

The other MySpace account I created over the summer is a personal one. That is, I created it for my Matt Cardin persona. (And does that sound at all whacked out to refer to my regular identity as a “persona”? If so, then you haven’t been studying your Jung.) I believe this is the first time I’ve mentioned it here. You’ll find it at www.myspace.com/mattcardin. It features a bit of information about me and my writing, along with some cover images from some of the books in which my work has been or will soon be published. It also features a collection of some of the best blurbs and reviews I’ve received for my writing, from the likes of Thomas Ligotti, Brian McNaughton, John Pelan, Cemetery Dance, and several others. So I encourage you to visit it.

Permanent links for both MySpace pages can be found on the sidebar here at The Teeming Brain, under the heading “pages I visit.”

On a related note, just last Sunday I read an AP news story about MySpace’s plan to beef up their services for bands and musicians by allowing artists to sell mp3 downloads through the site. I had really been wondering about doing something like this anyway with Daemonyx’s music, since I’ve been reading up for several months on the revolutionary music sales model created by the fine folks at Magnatune and have been thinking that it sounds like a brilliant way to go. So I may well avail myself of this when it becomes a reality. And of course I’ll let you know about it here at my blog.

Finally, I’ve been thinking of offering mp3 discs for sale. As in, right now, several months before Daemonyx’s debut album Curse of the Daimon will become a reality. I’ve been thinking I might charge $3.00 plus postage (at the cheap Media Mail rate) for an mp3 disc containing my home-mastered mixes of most or all of the songs that will be featured on the album. I would then count those $3.00 towards the purchase of the official album itself, which will of course be professionally mastered, and which will feature cover art by Jason Van Hollander and extensive liner notes by yours truly. Would this interest any of you? Maybe in a collectors’ kind of way? Not only the mastering but also some of the mixing on the mp3 disc will differ from what will eventually be released on the final version. And maybe I’ll throw in another bonus as well, perhaps an excerpt from my currently unpublished personal journal There Is No Grand Scheme (portions of which appear in the 2006 anthology In Pieces: An Anthology of Fragmentary Writing). If you’re at all interested in acquiring such a disc, please let me know either by commenting on this post or emailing me at mgcardin@hughes.net, so that I can know whether it’s worth the effort of working out the details.

And it’s Trevor Zajac, who came in a close second in the first Daemonyx contest. This time he managed to beat out the competition by sending me the correct answer within just a few minutes of my posting the contest announcement. The challenge was to listen to the song “Daimonica” at Daemonyx’s MySpace page and identify the source of the movie sound clip that occupies a 45 second chunk of the central section. Trevor correctly identified the movie as Network, the character as Howard Beale, and the actor as Peter Finch. For his prize he has chosen a trade paperback copy of editor David G. Hartwell’s anthology Foundations of Fear. Nice going, Trevor!

As for the song I centered the contest around, in “Daimonica” I try to convey in musical form the sense of daimonic obsessiveness that has overcome me with increasing intensity as I have grown older. Especially in the past decade, I have come to feel more and more vividly that I live in the grip of a driving force that determines the fundamental tenor of my thoughts, emotions, outlook, and actions. Maybe it hasn’t really grown stronger with time. Maybe it’s just that I’ve grown progressively more self-aware and am therefore more cognizant of it. But whatever the truth of it, it’s an inescapable subjective reality that has emerged from and dovetailed with my longtime interests in philosophy, religion, and supernatural horror. The initial inspiration for “Daimonica” came to me over 18 months ago when I was noodling around on a Yamaha digital piano with arpeggiated chords and began to mentally synchronize various lines of movie dialogue with the music. It all happened rather spontaneously. The mental movie clips all dealt with issues of obsession, possession, and mystical rapture. The music represented an emotional mixture of coolness and dread and a stylistic mixture of goth and electronica. I soon realized I had a workable project on my hands.

I ended up devoting three months of my life to the song, plus an additional couple of weeks this past summer when I returned to revise, rerecord, and remix significant portions of it. In case you’re wondering, the dialogue clips that saturate “Daimonica” come from The Exorcist, Frailty, Zardzoz, Network, Mr. Frost, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), and an unknown movie featuring Christopher Lee (I found the sound clip on line with no mention of its origin). Taken together, I think all of these clips add up to an obscure but definite statement. I’ve reprinted them below for your reading pleasure. Make of them what you will.

And congratulations again to Trevor.

Oh — and before I finish this post, I’ll mention that it looks like I’m going to be interviewed at some point in the near future by the editor of a popular website devoted to ambient, experimental, gothic, and related types of music. I’ll provide more details when it becomes a reality.

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The “lyrics” to “Daimonica” by Daemonyx:

Is there someone inside you?
Is there someone inside you?
There are demons among us
There are demons among us
I am the puppet master

Demons

It is not a breakdown
I’ve never felt more orderly in my life
A shocking eruption of great electrical energy
Demons
I want, I must

I am imbued with some special spirit
It’s not a religious feeling at all
It’s a shocking eruption of great electrical energy
I feel vivid and flashing as if suddenly
I’d been plugged into some great electromagnetic field
Into some great, unseen, living force
What I think the Hindus call prana
It is a shattering a beautiful sensation
It is the exalted flow of the spacetime continuum
Save that it is spaceless and timeless and
Of such loveliness
I feel on the verge of some great ultimate truth

A shocking eruption of great electrical
Demons
The power of darkness is more than just a superstition
It’s a big conspiracy
It is a living force

Is there someone inside you?
Demons are taking over the world
It is not a breakdown

I am the puppet master
Electrical energy
The power of darkness
It’s a big conspiracy
I manipulate many of the characters and events you will see

Yes, it’s that time once again. The hour has rolled around when I encourage people — including you — to listen to the work of my personal musical project, Daemonyx, by bribing you with free stuff. At stake this time are two DVDs and two excellent horror anthologies. Visit the contest page for details about how to play.

On an entirely unrelated note, and by way of previewing future blog entries, I can tell you that next week I hope to post an interview I recently conducted with British horror writer Mark Samuels, whose star has been rising precipitously for several years now. So stick around!

Recently I received some positive blurbs about my music from a few people whose opinions I really respect, and whose support I’m proud to have.

From Ramsey Campbell, who I assume needs no introduction (but if he does, just click on his name): “Daemonyx’s compositions conjure up visions of eerie strangeness and awesomely alien worlds that nothing can evoke better than music.”

From Thomas Ligotti, who probably needs no introduction either (or at least he shouldn’t, in a perfect world): “There are many haunting and beautiful compositions that complement or completely make horror films—you know the ones—as well as appeal to listeners who are sensitive to the mystery and dread of life. In its debut album ‘Curse of the Daimon,’ Daemonyx has offered us eleven works of such quality.”

From Mark Samuels, whose name you really ought to know if you don’t already: “The overall ambience of the music reminds me a little of the electronica of Klaus Schulze. There’s a similar powerful evocation of vast and terrifying soundscapes. In the song ‘Daimonica,’ I very much like the way the haunting and oppressive music blends with the grim signal motif, ‘Is there someone inside you.’ In ‘The Gates of Deep Darkness,’ the ominous martial nature of the music provides a real chill, as of some impending apocalypse.”

Finally, Tim Lebbon, whose star seems to be shooting ever higher these past few years, described the music of Daemonyx thusly: “Intricate, haunting and complex pieces of music, richly creative and inspiring.”

So here’s a sincere thank you to all four gentlemen for their fine words.

Apologies for the very short blog entry this time. I’ve had precious little time at the computer today. I’m hoping to post more soon, although I’m sure the lack of time will become an even more pressing issue next month when the Gates of Hell reopen — I mean, when the new school year begins.

EDIT NOTICE - Sunday, June 25th:
If you read this piece on Friday the 23rd or Saturday the 24th, please be aware I've just gone and made significant revisions to the final five paragraphs.  As if the thing needed to be any longer. . . .

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WARNING: Brace yourself for a very looooong post, the longest by far that I’ve yet had the temerity to post here at The Teeming Brain. What’s more, it’s also scattered, rambling, digressive, and self-indulgent. (Am I encouraging you to read it yet?) If you stick with it, I hope you'll be rewarded with a few thoughts and speculations that have been worthy of your time.

I’m assuming you’ve heard of Rob Zombie. I mean, after all, who hasn’t? The man is more deserving of the title “King of all Media” than his friend Howard Stern. From being a graphic artist and struggling musician in the 1980s, Zombie has gone one to become one of the masters of the entertainment world. He’s a heavy metal god, a movie and video director, a comic book designer, and master of a merchandising empire. The man is a bona fide pop cultural phenomenon. I mention him here at The Teeming Brain because he occupies a special place in my affections. Let me explain.

I chose the title of my former blog, Confessions of a Conflicted Cultural Skeptic, to highlight a longstanding contradiction in my affections, which is simply this: that although I feel a deep disgust for what I perceive as the pervasive evidence of contemporary cultural degeneration in America, at the same time I still enjoy and even revel in some of what this culture has to offer. Hence, I feel conflicted about it. And ranking high on my list of pop cultural memes and themes that inflame this feeling is Rob Zombie. On the one hand, I feel serious reservations about his influence on America, but on the other hand, I absolutely love his music and movies, and I find him philosophically fascinating and even inspiring because of the daemonic or daimonic nature of his artistic and commercial ascent.

Regarding my reservations, they stem from the combined fact of, first, my agreement with a lot of contemporary cultural criticisms along the lines of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, and second, what I’ve encountered in my frequent contact with adolescents through my teaching job. Postman, for his part, loathed modern American pop culture, including rock music, so very deeply that he hated it when his work inspired Roger Waters to title an album Amused to Death. That sort of elitism may be damnable in some people’s eyes, but in some cases I think it may be justified. I’ll let Postman himself argue the point with his all-purpose "graduation lecture" about the difference between the archetypal casts of mind and ways of life exemplified by the Athenians and the Visigoths, if you’re inclined to follow the link.

As for what I’ve seen in my teaching job, I’ll first ask you a question: Have you observed American youth culture lately? If so, have you thought about what it portends? I’m talking about the in-your-face variety that occupies center stage in contemporary mass entertainment a la MTV, hip hop, (un)reality television, and so on. Have you thought about the two-pronged question of what this crap culture reveals about the collective mindset of America’s youth even as it simultaneously shapes that mindset? I ask you to pay attention to the nihilism that’s evident in this culture’s pervasive casual attitude toward extreme violence and kinky sex. Also pay attention to the obsessive focus on scatology, gross-out humor, and “stupid” humor of the type heralded by the likes of Tom Green (who is surely one of the Four Jackasses of the Apocalypse). Also note the frantic idolization of “celebrities”—musicians and singers, movie stars, (un)reality television stars, people who perform stupid and dangerous stunts —that has reached positively stupefying heights of fake importance. Then consider that this same youth culture also seems to be equally obsessed with grim moods of hopelessness, despair, inner emptiness, ennui, and so on, as evidenced by innumerable popular songs. Remember Woodstock? Have you heard about the revival of this venerable event, which was originally all about hippies who preached peace and love, smoked dope, and grooved to peace-oriented songs, but which in its 1999 incarnation became a spectacle of Dionysian chaos? I ask that you mull this over and get a good feel for the overall picture it paints. Then ask yourself: What does this say about the worldview, the sub-zeitgeist, and the sense of self that these kids are growing up with?

For me this isn’t just a matter of purely academic concern, because I teach high school nine months out of the year and thus live and move among contemporary teens. And after four years of this, I can tell you that the primary fact I notice about them—and bear in mind that these aren’t big-city kids but rural Midwestern ones—is their combined character of general affability, cultural ignorance, low-grade hopelessness, and in-your-face apathy. None of these qualities dominates the other. They all seem equally mixed. The kids are nice and often eager to please. And they’re also being taught by their culture, and especially by the entertainment culture that’s marketed to them with almost miraculous precision, that their real lives are meaningless, and that life as a whole is all about coarse and debased things. And so on.

So that’s one prong of my two-pronged response to Rob Zombie. Anybody who’s familiar with him knows that he’s the crap-culture king. In fact, he’s made a career out of glorifying and feeding off the gaudy luster of the Z-grade movies, television shows, comic books, and other cultural detritus that populated his youth. As such, he’s part of the problem that’s working to create a generation of Americans who—and I mean this in all seriousness—very well may help to usher in a new dark age of savage ignorance and civilizational collapse (in tandem with the advent of peak oil, of course).

But then again, maybe not. Because Rob Zombie is so passionately obsessed with his beloved Z-grade crap culture that he appears to be motivated by an authentic daemonic drive, and when we enter the territory of the daemonic, all bets are off with regards to making highbrow-lowbrow distinctions and moral judgments about subject matter. So here’s where my feeling of conflictedness comes in.

Consider: Rob Zombie was born Robert Cummings. He grew up in Massachusetts during the 1960s, 70s, and early 80s, where by his own account he was so bored with his world that he spent all of his time immersed in movies, music, and comic books. Later he moved to New York and started his music career while supporting himself by working various other jobs, including a stint as the art director for a porn magazine. He also worked for a while as a production assistant on Pee Wee’s Playhouse.

And now, of course, a short couple of decades later, he’s become like unto a force of nature in American mass entertainment. He directs movies, records and produces music albums, writes and sometimes draws comic books, directs music videos, runs a merchandising empire, and for a time headed up a Halloween-themed Rob Zombie funhouse/horror maze at the Universal Studios theme park in California. One can of course attribute all this to business savvy, a massive ego, a good measure of talent, a pathological ambition, and more. Probably some or all of these are involved. But it seems apparent to me that at a deeper level, the guy is driven by something more significant.

To cut to the chase: In my view Rob Zombie seems to be driven by a fierce desire to assimilate the various elements of everything that has been most important to him in his life—all those things that he always loved to immerse himself in as a boy—and to filter these through his own sensibility in order to produce artistic works that express a worldview, or that at least convey a certain cast of mood. If I’m right about this, then Zombie counts as a true artist, since that’s a description of what all artists do. It seems he’s possessed of an authentic daemon, an inner drive that amounts to a calling, a life mission, a direction given to him by fate.

I have also toyed with the pet idea that sometimes in the rather oblique lyrics to his songs—so oblique that they often seem like verbal Rorschach tests—Zombie all but comes out and announces this drive by directly describing his particular daemon. In many of his songs he borrows an idea from rap music by speaking or singing in the first person and repeatedly identifying or announcing himself. For example, back when he was heading up the band White Zombie he wrote “More Human than Human,” which begins with:

I am the astro-creep
A demolition style, hell, America’s freak

Later in the song he calls himself “the crawling dead,” “a phantom in a box,” “a shadow in your head,” “the ripper man,” and “the nexus one.” And of course, he is “more human than human.”

The “nexus one” identification seems to be key here. Maybe there’s a college professor somewhere who has already written about this, but if so I’m not aware of him, so it’s my own pet theory when I speculate that Zombie has tried to position and describe himself as the nexus of America’s collective insanity, much in the manner of Charles Manson. Zombie’s fellow shock artist Marilyn Manson has done the same thing but has catered to a more segmented and isolated audience, whereas Zombie has exploded all over the scene in his bid to be seen as the nexus of America’s pathology. And he always links it to Z-grade gaudy horror.

In his song “The Great American Nightmare” he says,

Call me the American nightmare
Call me the American dream
Call me your soul corrupted
Call me everything you need

Soon after this on his solo breakout album Hellbilly Deluxe, he began the first track by singing,

Hey, yeah, I’m the one that you wanted
Hey, yeah, I’m your superbeast

as if to say, “Okay, America, this is what you wanted me to be,” referring to the over-the-top "hellbilly" zombie persona that he adopted for that particular album, and that proved so massively popular that it almost tripped him up by disappointing some of his fans when he tried to abandon or move beyond it on subsequent albums.

On both Hellbilly Deluxe and his next album, The Sinister Urge, Zombie identified himself as the “demonoid phenomenon” (see the song “Iron Head” where he says explicitly, What is my name? Demonoid phenomenon). Earlier, in “The One” (from his White Zombie days), which appeared on the soundtrack for Escape from L.A., he had said,

Yeah, I am the One, destroying you and every mother’s son
Yeah, I am the one, the king of the world and the devil’s son

So what does it all add up to? “The One,” “Demonoid phenomenon,” “The nexus one,” “Superbeast,” “The astro-creep,” “The American Nightmare,” and more, much more strewn throughout all of his music—what does it mean? The simple answer is, I don’t know. But I’m fascinated by it because I’ve gained the inescapable impression that Rob Zombie is hinting at something, some core truth about himself, whether he even knows it or not. And I suspect that he does know it. He seems to have hit upon a central driving idea for the image he wants to create and project to America, and he exploits every metaphor he can hit upon from the world of Z-grade horror in order to illustrate that image. And what, exactly, is the heart of it all? I suspect it’s found in his personal daimon, which would indeed seem to be bound up with all of the things hinted at by those metaphors.

Now, I may be making a mountain out of a molehill by devoting so much space to the question of Rob Zombie. But like I said, it’s a personal fascination, and it’s not as though I’ve spent a great deal of time and effort to think it all through. Rather, it has thought about itself. I’ve chewed on it in the back of my mind for years. The man has gotten under my skin and into my head. I’m sure he wouldn’t be disappointed to hear this.

Finally, as for the issue of whether things daemonic or daimonic really do transcend or elude categories of moral and qualitative judgment, well, that’s largely what James Hillman says in The Soul’s Code when he points out that legions of artistic and other types of geniuses throughout history have been weaned not on high culture, but on the type of crap that I like to hate in contemporary America. It seems to be the daimon and not the conscious ego that makes these decisions about what “meat” will serve as its proper nutrition. “We need to remember,” Hillman writes, “that just as the bodies of sports giants have often been raised on junk food, the imagination may be fed by cheap, popular, and ‘unhealthy’ equivalents. What matters is passion, which may be more predictive of capacity and productive of motivation than other usual benchmarks. There is no right food and no wrong food; the food must only meet the appetite, the appetite find its kind of food” (my emphasis).

So, Rob Zombie as a child — or rather, Robert Cummings — was drawn to low-grade horror. This has proved to be his life’s obsession. I myself am drawn to Rob Zombie, as well as to various other leading lights that populate the world of horror entertainment in its literary, cinematic, and musical aspects. In fact, I've long been helplessly fascinated by the very things that Zombie himself loves. People who have read my published writings know me as a literary and scholarly type, but I'm also a sucker for Italian horror movies. Throughout my youth I devoured comic books of all types like they were candy bars. I could happily live alone with a stack of EC horror comics and a small supply of food and drink. I've spent many ecstatic hours reveling in low-budget American horror movies from the likes of Roger Corman and William Castle. Abel Ferrara's The Driller Killer is one of my favorite films.

Along with all this, I’m also drawn to the type of concentrated reflection that I’m engaging in right now, regardless of the subject matter. I’m sure that you yourself have always found yourself drawn toward and repelled by certain things. The daimonic theory holds that your conscious purpose should be to find ways to nurture and release this sense of being drawn or led, since it represents your personal psychological/spiritual lodestone. It provides the direction that you are "meant" to go. And it makes itself known precisely through your involuntary obsessions. Hillman says obsessiveness is one of the daimon's primary defining and revealing qualities, which brings us again to the subject of Rob Zombie, and which exonerates and even elevates him as an object not of disapproval, but of inspiration.

I would love to leave it at that, and to end this extemporaneous and well-nigh directionless essay right here on a note of encouragement for each person to divine and develop his or her daimonic calling. But it's not that simple, because once again my inner conflict rears its head in the form of a voice that says, “How the hell can it be commendable for millions of teens to grow up absorbing through their very pores the atmosphere of pornographic violence and sex that Rob Zombie glorifies and exemplifies?” If you’ve seen either of the movies he has directed to date, House of a Thousand Corpses or The Devil’s Rejects, then you know what that nagging little voice is talking about. Ditto if you’ve leafed through one of his CD booklets and looked at the semi-pornographic and sometimes fully pornographic imagery. I read an interview not too long ago in which Zombie revealed that even Bill Moseley, the actor who played Otis in both movies, was so bothered by some of what he had to do in the notoriously sadistic motel room scenes in The Devil's Rejects that he hesitated to do it. So this is very extreme stuff we're talking about.

I hasten to add that I certainly don’t condemn such things wholesale, as should already be abundantly clear from my list of personal loves listed above. To paraphrase a line from Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing, which is really a book about creativity and inspiration in all its aspects, the artistic sensibility rejects nothing because it realizes that everything, no matter how dark or seemingly vile, is worthy if it’s approached with passion. (And boy, is that ever a loose paraphrase. I wonder whether Ray would even recognize its source in his own words.) But does this resorting to artistic and daimonic justifications really exonerate Rob Zombie and crap culture in general? Does it mean we ought to just accept the possible maiming of the souls and weltanshauungs of an entire generation of young people, many of whom don’t consciously feel that similar sense of being passionately guided by a driving obsession that will help them find their way safely through the dark thickets and tunnels of a pathological culture? Or does it mean this very view of things, including the phrasing of the question itself, is marred by an unwarranted moralistic ideological slant?

Obviously, I have no answers to offer. It's the mere pursuing of the questions that grips me. I hope it has done or may do the same for you, if you’ve come with me this far.