The Cliffs of Insanity

A very appropriate line, given my issues with "The Waltham Phantom" (the Cadmus/Flint short) and Flint himself. He is pretty well pissing me right off with his insubordination to Cadmus, along with his overly-active sense of irreverence.  And now the bastard is writing himself.  The only character who has ever done that has been Cadmus Pariah.  Having two autonomous creations in my head is pretty much a recipe for utter madness.  Anyway...the line.

"There the insolent rat is subdued and is stricken and shaken."

Yeah, that. That all over the damned place. Why? This is why...

 “You and I,” Cadmus said, his voice one of dead silence scattered amongst the lilies and dry leaves. “We are cut from the same cloth in many ways.”

“How...do you figure?”

Cadmus moved his head away from Flint, and averted his eyes back, giving Flint a sidewise glance that had the perfectly desired effect. Flint could not stop looking at him, so enthralled he was with the beatific Pariah.

“Well, Flint, it seems that you and I are the only Vampires to walk this Vale of Tears, who can mask our passing from others of our tribe. Only the very special can do this and, apparently, I am not the only one, when all this time, I thought that I was. This is a monumental discovery, my Absinthe-eyed friend.”

Flint smiled widely. “That was what he called me, the Vampire who brought me over.”

“Absinthe?”

“Yeah.”

“And you did not keep the name.  Why is this?”

Flint shrugged. “I preferred my own.”

“Flint.”

“Well, Simon Flynt, to be honest. But it just morphed into Flint in these contemporary times.”

Cadmus could not wrap his mind around this ridiculous Vampire. He tried very hard to mask the emotions that spilled over when he least expected them.

“So, you are telling me that you have not truly changed your name in over six...hundred...years...? And you abandoned a perfectly good name aligning yourself with a perfectly wondrous drug for this common little cognomen with which you were born into mortality?”

Cadmus felt his grasp of his Glamour slip a little, and saw Flint lean away from him, unsure as to what the Plenipotentiary was going to do. The hint of anger in the Pariah's voice disconcerted him enough to shake the unquestioning desire stabbing at his heart, if only for a few seconds. This was a dangerous creature, Flint surmised, and he must be very careful indeed.

But it was only a brief moment of hesitance before Flint was back in the throes of desire, sitting on this tree branch with the greatest of all the Darklings who still walked the Earth.

Cadmus had returned to his regal state of imperviousness, exuding every shred of Glamour he could muster on Flint without killing him with the enormity of it all. Flint seemed drunk from the effect...until he reached into his jeans pocket, pulled out an almost broken cigarette, popped it between his lips, and lit it with an equally bent match.

Cadmus did not know what to think of this. Flint should have been nigh to paralysed by Cadmus' magickal attentions. He knitted his brow and pursed his lips, watching the younger Vampire take a long drag off the scraggly fag. Flint cut his eyes back to Cadmus, full-on love shining in their strange greenness, and he said, “One of the great things about being a Vampire is you can abuse your body all you want and nothing ever affects it. You can smoke ten packs a day, and your lungs will remain like two pretty pink roses in your ribcage!”

The Dark Chylde of Night closed his endless eyes and pulled a deep breath, taking in the secondhand smoke along with the long gulps of oxygen he craved to calm his fury. What madman had turned this person to the night? Cadmus danced on the edge of desperation to know, so he could go murder him, if he were in fact still alive.

Whilst doing a search for an obscure Tim Roth performance on a British show called 'The South Bank Show,' I came across a five-part doco about Clive Barker from the same show. Funny, that, considering Barker and Roth could have been separated at birth. But that got me to thinking about how much Clive Barker has infiltrated my life.

In the 80s, of course, along with a host of others from my generation, I went to see the horror movie Hellraiser, and was utterly transformed into this soul who could no longer see the world in exactly the same way. Clive Barker had shown me that, for lack of a better phrase I'm going to steal from Shriekback's 'Exquisite,' "beauty can be terrifying, and there is nothing straightforward about pleasure." I had always been a diehard Stephen King acolyte, but that was no longer enough for me. It was heartening to hear Stephen King give his blessing to Barker, as it seemed to give me permission to wholly love this man.

But it was years before I actually read any of Barker's work. The reason for this was, his books were not available in our local libraries (that has since changed), and I could not afford to buy any of them. That changed when I began working and I soon began buying as many Barker books as I could find in the bookshop. The first book I read by Clive Barker, The Damnation Game, I read in 1990, at almost exactly the same time I began voraciously listening to Shriekback. The following books were all read to an almost exclusive Shriekback soundtrack:

• The Damnation Game


• The Hellbound Heart


• Weaveworld


• Cabal


• Imajica

A decade later, that connection was made quite apparent when the group that helped bring to life the Shriekback Digital Conspiracy decided we needed a collective name by which Shriekback fans who came across the site could call us. We wanted a more obscure name for the word 'group,' and we wanted something that would align us with reptiles. It fell to me to create the title and, drawing from Clive Barker and our collective sense of conspiracies and how they connected to Shriekback, I suggested the name of Cabal Iguana. The others dug it and Derk, who was my partner in crime in all this, us being the two founding members, well...he adored it. So it stuck.

Imagine my sense of hilarity being twisted almost to breaking point when booraven22 and morriganwind dubbed our writers' group The Writers' Cabal, of which we three comprised the Vampire Division. I still have our tee-shirt, which I often wear with pride. The fact that my place in the Cabal was assured simply because of my stories, which found themselves insanely driven by Shriekback's music, made me cackle with a sense of absurdity. And one of Barry's friends, who is a writer in his own right, is a member of our Writers' Cabal on Facebook. My, how things do cycle 'round in an endless sort of madness. At least in my little world.

Then, there's the Illuminati's music, which I'm trying to finally bring to the world almost 24 years after it was all recorded. One song, "Gods in Exile," brought visions of Clive's worlds to my mind. So I began a search for his artwork online and began to collect pictures. This was the result.



The picture that's shown when Adrienne Loehry screams out 'GODS IN EXILE!' is Clive Barker's own vision of Pinhead, who was never called Pinhead in The Hellbound Heart and was actually envisioned to be more female than male when first written by Clive. Of course, once his childhood friend Doug Bradley took on the role in Hellraiser, everything was changed forever, but most satisfyingly so, IMHO.

I just find that particular Illuminati video to be a marker of sorts in the continuing cycle that links Shriekback, and particularly Barry Andrews, to Clive Barker and his work. It all melded so perfectly, especially for anyone who may have read Imajica and knows the myths about the Dominions and how the fifth one was banished in a way from the other four, and how the gods were all scattered by Hapexamendios.

And, ooooh, I could go on and on about Imajica, but I won't here.

Anyway, I sent Clive the link to the video, so he would know how his art had been used. If he was not okay with it, I wanted to know so I could redo the video with something other than his work. He made no indication of being displeased, so the video remains. Woo hoo! Oh, and I don't know Clive Barker personally. It was sent via Twitter, the medium by which he communicates with his Darklings (that is what he calls his friends and family, which he includes those of us on Twitter as being). I wrote to him several years ago about his usage of Darkling, because I'd never seen it used anywhere ever except in relation to my Vampires. So that was deeply strange and familiar to me. Another moment of WTF in my life.

Another bizarre connection between Shriekback and Clive Barker is this:
When I read Cabal, I did so whilst listening to Shriekback's Go Bang!, probably their only reviled album. But there were some gems on this album, like (most wondrously) "Dust and a Shadow," and "Nighttown." "Nighttown" became a kind of theme song for Cabal, which was made into a movie called Nightbreed. Now, this movie was, and is, deeply loved by falkenna, whom I had met through association with The Darth Maul Estrogen Brigade. Besides our abiding love for Maul, we discovered that we also loved this movie. Years later, after becoming very close friends, I would spend more than a week at her house in Brighton, where I would meet Barry Andrews, who had written "Nighttown." These are the moments that demand my disbelief in coincidence. These are the moments that haunt my mind and call out for stories to be told.

And, if Clive Barker doesn't beat me to them, telling the stories better than I ever could, then I will someday commit them all to paper, and can then die, knowing that my mission has been accomplished.

In the meantime, I continue to read Clive Barker, and I continue to listen to Shriekback/Barry Andrews.

Oh, and I never did find that blasted footage of Tim Roth from 'The South Bank Show.' Dammit.

Sent to me just today. He was either 20 or 21 here. Just a wee tot.

Munich, 1977

I've worked on this off-and-on all day, in between writing and watching a movie. Multi-tasking Tin is multi-tasking! This is a song that has been on my Vampire playlist for going on 13 years now. It has helped drive the story in various parts of The Vampire Relics so much, I really don't attribute it to any one character, more to the ambiance of certain scenarios. I can't remember how I got to meet Bruce McRae, though I'm certain through association with Barry at one time or another. He wrote the song, and he's a poet in his own right. Go look at his website for all manner of artistic goodness. I do remember how I met Carlo Asciutti, because of the song "Il Mystero del Tempo." He's like this mad Quantum philosopher who lets language guide him as much as anything else. Something tells me that he might have to smoke a pack of cigarettes after seeing Youth Without Youth. They both gave me permission to make the video, and I'm gonna create for them a page over on Facebook in order to compile all of the Thee/The Caretakers info, music, pics, and vids. I have one or two more songs, these by the core duo of Bruce and Carlo as Thee Caretakers. I'll be making vids for those too.



I'll be back shortly with some actual bloody writing.

I'd like to eventually get the entire Haunted Box of Switches up on You Tube, because the album is brilliant piano porn. Here are the songs I've so far "movie'd.

Enjoy.

See, this is what my brain does at night instead of sleeping. Here goes...

• Barry Andrews has created a character and is developing a musical around him called Vile Homunculus.


• The first time I ever heard the word "homunculus" was in a Tom Baker Dr. Who episode called The Talons of Weng Chiang.


• Dr. Who was referring to Mr. Sin when he uttered the word.


• Mr. Sin was played by a very young actor by the name of Deep Roy.


• Deep Roy later on played every Oompa Loompa in Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.


• As the Oompa Loompas, Deep Roy performed all the songs in the movie.


• But he was actually lipsynching Danny Elfman, who wrote the score and the songs for Charlie.

So, once again, B and Danny Elfman are connected in my head. Now, wasn't that fun?

He accidentally called me Adrienne instead of Angelina. *cackles* How I wish I were Adrienne. Then I could sing like a motherfucker.

Working on the 'Eurydice' video today got me to thinking of how Orphaeus got his name. Originally his name was Cygnet, oddly named because Jack Skellington always put me in mind of a Gothic swan.

I had heard Danny Elfman sing before, but never like he did as Jack Skellington. His natural vibrato shining through on some of the loveliest songs ever composed finally pulled me over to The Elfmeister's way of thinking, so much so that a new Vampire was born in my head, belonging totally to Elfman in appearance and in talent. I named him Cygnet, because of my affiliating Jack Skellington with swans, and went to mapping down his origins and alignments. He was originally a party animal kind of Vampire, who also just happened to be one of the greatest singers and performance artists to have ever been born. He was of Austrian origins, being an opera singer in Vienna when he was turned. In modern times, he ran a cabaret in San Francisco and was a "family man," who just happened to have a big crazy party every single night of the week, welcoming both Vampires and humans.

Not long after A Nightmare of Christmas, Oingo Boingo released what was apparently their final studio album. This album boasted the song "Pedestrian Wolves," which would forever alter not only Cygnet, but also the entire Vampire Great Hive. "Pedestrian Wolves" created The Hive of the Beast, a sect within the Great Hive that was responsible for the legends of werewolves. These Vampires were masters at anubis, or shapeshifting, most usually shifting into wolves. They were the origins of the vicious Eastern European vrakshatha, who engaged in the rending and consumption of the flesh of their victims, as well as bathing in the blood they did not drink. Suddenly Cygnet was not as innocent as he had once been. The name of the Vampire was also suddenly quite precious.

So I set to rename the newly-crowned Prince of Beasts, but I wanted to keep him aligned with my beloved "Skellington Swan." It was then that the idea dawned on me that I could rename the character after the greatest musician of all time, Orpheus, whose constellation was Cygnus the Swan. It was perfect, since Cygnet was already a legendary singer. So I altered the spelling of the name a tad and Cygnet became Orphaeus Cygnus.

I so enjoyed writing this character, I found myself ignoring all the others, even Cadmus Pariah. I enjoyed the rest of 1994 and most of 1995 writing about my favourite party animal, and how he and his little family held fetes at their cabaret, and dined on one or two of their guests each night. It was during this time that Orphaeus adopted the serial killer's proclivity for taking souvenirs from his victims. To this day, the Swan still treasures his little leather bag of finger bones he has collected from his victims over the centuries. The two defining songs for Orphaeus became "Pedestrian Wolves" (of course) and the Oingo Boingo party anthem "No One Lives Forever." These allowed Orphaeus to be a monster, yet maintain a mischievous lovability despite his bestial nature.

But somewhere along the line, my demon child Cadmus began clamouring for my attention again, and I found the characters at odds with one another in my mind. Part of me wanted to stay in San Fran and party with the monsters, but the other bigger part of me was compelled to acquiesce to the dark demands of that singular monster who had upstaged all the other Vampires in my immortal pantheon. And so it was that the Pariah and the Swan became enemies. When the characters began battling for my attention, even though I wanted Orphaeus to win out, it was Cadmus who rose victorious. The battle for attention culminated in the scalping of Orphaeus, a vile act that became one of those sublime moments of Vampire legend in my head. It was only years later that the story of that scalping was ever properly told. The legend proper made it into the first book of The Vampire Relics.

Seven years after the birth of Cygnet, while I was still seeking out fellow Shriekback fans on the Internet, I was pointed in the direction of a website run by someone purportedly of interest to Shriekback fans. On the site was a link to another website called 'The Head of Orpheus,' which turned out to be a/the Russell Hoban fan site. Russell Hoban's works, particularly Riddley Walker, have been referred to by Barry Andrews as "Shriekback-required reading." The website I'd been directed to turned out to be a veil behind which Barry Andrews was hiding. He had been the one to link visitors to his site to The Head of Orpheus.

The irony of all that wasn't lost on me, given my characters' histories with their inspirations and one another. Of course, it was all just a little too strange for me too. Either way, it's what got me intrigued with Russell Hoban's works, not because the members of Shriekback suggested his writing, but because of the excerpts from the author's books found on The Head of Orpheus, especially from Pilgermann and The Medusa Frequency (which I quoted in the 'Eurydice' video, a quote using the voice of Eurydice, talking to her beloved Orpheus. It was that writing style I unabashedly tried to emulate when I began writing 'Sui Generis' about a year and a half later.

What's so funny is, Orphaeus Cygnus has never and will never anubis into a swan. That would just be too tame and serious for the likes of him. Cadmus would be more likely to shift into a swan, since he prefers birds (particularly the nighthawk) as his primary species into which to transform when he needs to employ anubis.

Ah, but Orphaeus possesses the ethereal beauty of the swan in his soul. When I look at his Cygnus alignment, I never fail to see Jack Skellington walking slowly up the curly hill, his thin, graceful form illuminated by the giant moon behind him. He will forever be my Gothic Swan, my Cygnet.

And here's what triggered my tip-toe down Memory Lane.

Here's another song by Illuminati, music and lyrics by Barry Andrews. This music was almost lost, but this is a small effort to keep it alive for any and everyone who wanted to know what Illuminati was and what music they made.

I’ve been busy today. I’ve given myself a severe crash course in Windows Live Movie Maker and produced this, the first of the nine songs that comprised Barry Andrews’ rock project, Illuminati. The Shriekback fans here probably know that name from the back of ‘The Dancing Years’ compilation mapping where all the band members went after Shriekback dis-banded the first time. This is my attempt, with Barry’s permission of course, to save this music from extinction and bring it to everyone who has wondered what on Earth Illuminati was all about and why had there never been any music produced by the band? Well, it was never officially released. I think that James did a remaster of it and had it available for a short period of time on the old Digital Conspiracy site, but that’s gone now, so here we have it. I’m waiting to get the rest of the songs transcribed so I can be consistent with the clip below.



Let me know what you think of this song. I’m very curious to know as it’s my favourite out of the collection. And pass it on to everyone. All you Shriek fans need to rally like we did in 2000 and get the word out that Illuminati is finally going to emerge. It’s been a long wait and we all deserve it, don’tcha think?

I’m now calling it a day and am going to engage myself on a date with Death. Archibald Cunningham, that is. :D