I am an artist, a writer, a poet, and a lover of the Night. I have a Master's Degree in Philosophy and Religion. I have walked in many worlds and have faced the continual challenges of standing out, being noted immediately by those around me, marked as something not of their kind.
I love Winter. I enjoy snow, ice, and cold. In recent years I've taken up skiing as another way of enjoying my favorite environment. My lovely wife, however, greatly enjoys sunshine and warmth. We've been together for over 8 years, so our differing tastes have not imposed any serious obstacles.
Aside from skiing, the only sports I enjoy are sailing and fencing. In fencing, my weapon of choice is the epee; I like the rules (or lack thereof). I also greatly enjoy chess, but that's not exactly a sport.
I spend a lot of my free time reading, mostly books on history, geography, philosophy, and occasional fiction. I have quite the collection of books on magic within my library as well.
I'm old school in many ways. I definitely like real, solid books in my hand, and never want to use an "e-reader" or anything like that. I have no cell phone. I use cash for everything (and I pay most of my bills in person). I am modern enough to enjoy recorded music, but I'm still listening mostly to cassettes--I have a cassette walkman and not an MP3 player, we have 5 cassette boom boxes at home, and I even have a tape deck in my car. We also have several VCRs at home in addition to our token DVD player; most of my movie collection is VHS, and that's the way I like it. Analog trumps digital every time.
I'm also quite fond of wine. I've read about it quite a bit, and continue to be fascinated by the idea that a bottle of wine is in a way the bottled essence of a time and place, containing all of the secrets imparted by the soil, the rocks, the shifting light of a place, and the pattern of weather that took place over a short period. A vampire cannot help but be drawn to something that represents time standing still in a certain way. Some fine bottles out there contain the juices of grapes picked by hands that have long since gone the way of all mortal flesh. Even the air in those bottles represents a small breath of a past era.
The images below are some of my drawings (and one painting). Initially, I put these here because I was confused about where the "Portfolio" part of the profile was located. Now, though, I'm leaving these pictures here because I've discovered that the Portfolio area requires the images to be extremely small. This main profile page is actually better for displaying images.
My likes? Well, H. P. Lovecraft is my favorite author. For other fiction, I also love James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William S. Burroughs, Henry Miller, Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, J. K. Huysmans, Ernest Hemingway, and Roger Zelazny.
In the art world, I actually don't know all that much. I'm a self-taught artist, and have much to learn about the works of others. My favorite artist is Caspar David Friedrich. I also love the works of Gustave Dore and Albrecht Durer.
For poetry, I like William Butler Yeats, William Blake, Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, some early Goethe (especially Erlkonig), and Byron.
When it comes to music, I'm pretty limited, and my taste in tunes is much more modern than my taste in books. I listen mostly to metal--Slayer, Hellhammer, Sepultura, Celtic Frost, Possessed, Biohazard, Pantera, Corrosion of Conformity, Neurosis, Type O Negative, old Black Sabbath, old Metallica, and all of the incarnations of Glenn Danzig. I'm 38 years old, but I still go to shows, and I still hold my own in the mosh, there in the front rows with the people less than half my age. I'm sure that at some point I won't be able to mosh anymore, but I can't envision that point actually coming. Vampire, you know--hard to picture being older and weaker.
For non-metal music, I like Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Doors, Leonard Cohen, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel, Garbage, and a host of other individual albums from bands that I don't like as a whole.
My creative tastes are Romantic rather than Classical. What's important to me is that a work has power, intensity, hug emotion, sweeping energy. Technical prowess is far less significant to me.
