Welcome on HIM - His Infernal Magazine, the on-line magazine of HIM - The Crimson Gate Official Italian Street Team! All materials and products are property of HIM - the Crimson Gate Italian Street Team and is forbidden to copy all the contents of this magazine.
EDITORIAL
AN IMAGINARY CHAT BETWEEN VILLE VALO AND CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Helsinki, a warm evening at the end of June: it’s 11 pm but the sun is still up in the sky, the air is fresh but pleasant and invites to enjoy the long days of the Finnish summer.
At the “Inferno”, a famous club of the Finnish capital, is given an absinthe-based night: the clients are strictly invited, the body guards personally control the invites of the customers.
Between these a particularly singular character is distinguished: a man, apparently 35/38 years old, with brown moustaches and curly hair, long jacket and shirt with dandy style, like his shoes… a really unusual clothing easily noticed between the guys dressed in black, tattooed, with dreads and long hair with purple or red dying.
He enters, and subtly gets straight to the bar where quickly orders a glass of the liquid which constitutes the night’s theme, then looks around and finds a place to sit at the only free table, next to one of the club windows; not completely free because in front of him contemporaneously sits another person: a young man, brown hair and green eyes, his head hidden by a beanie covered by the hood of his jumper; in front of him there is a pot of something that could be defined Coke, or perhaps it is rum and Coke, and this is the conversation that one of the customers refers to have witness:
“May I sit here with you? My name is Charles, what is yours?”
“What, you don’t know who I am? It’s impossible…”
“Actually I should say this; look at me, are you really sure you have never seen me?”
“To look at you better, perhaps your face remembers me something, even if your clothing it’s a bit out of time, rather it seems mine in some occasion…Anyway my name is Ville, Ville Valo, my profession is being a singer, if you call it a profession…”.
“Instead my name is Charles Baudelaire, my profession is to be a writer and a poet; and actually neither my profession have been defined a real one. For the right minded persons of the Paris high society I’ve always been defined a drunk and pervert bummer…”
“Well; just like some newspapers described me…Here you are, finally, it seems impossible but at the end we met; what are you doing here in Helsinki?”.
“I like so much travelling, sometimes with fantasy and sometimes even with the body; and then, to be honest, somebody talked me about this city and the magic Nordic atmospheres of Finland. After seeing the seas of the South, the sunny landscapes of the Orient, I told myself why not to visit even the green fields of the Scandinavian countries?”
“You have always been one of my inspiration fonts; your poetry, your life, your character…everything enchants and hits me!”
“Yeah, ‘Les fleurs du mal”: I bet you are talking about that writing, or the Artificial Heavens, and then my life, my myth; everything given in the hands of history, everything has become a symbol, a role model to follow…If you’d only know how much heavy has become to carry a burden like that sometimes…”.
“What if I tell you that I fully understand you? In this city and for a certain number of people me myself is considered an icon. I sing, make music, I write the lyrics of my songs: I tell you some titles…The Funeral of Hearts, Join me in death, Love’s requiem, Killing loneliness, The kiss of dawn. I’ve been defined from someone the unholy poet of this generation…but in fact I put into music just my fears and my pain!”.
“Mhhhh…I should read or listen to something, titles tell me quite nothing!”
“Here some lyrics: you can find them in this booklet, they are the songs of our last work. Ah, just to let you know, my band is called HIM, acronym for His Infernal Majesty”.
“Ahahahah…his infernal majesty himself, not something ordinary I’d say! Let me read this one:
“You had demons to kill within your screaming
with a gun loaded with guilt you opened their eyes” (1)
Not that bad I’d say; I believe we two have more things in common that I’d think. What did carry yourself to all this suffering?”
“Life, Charles…perhaps really touching with my hands the flames of hell, the scorch until feeling the pain burning inside my soul, the risk to lose it, you know… perhaps when you touch the bottom then you find the strength to find a way to the top: At least it happened to me”.
“And that way to the top it’s a real ascent on top of the every day sickly smell to elevate yourself: “ just like larks in travel, in the morning sky, free to fly…” (2)
There is something that is able to save both of us, and it’s poetry; and then there is even love, something that could make us like a God, but that sometimes is like a diabolical possession. In fact, you know, Heaven and Hell, love and hate, God and the devil what else are if the two faces of the same coin?”
“Love…Charles, I looked for love, perhaps in the wrong way; sometimes it’s been fantastic, wonderful, and I really thought to understand what happiness could be, sometimes It’s been drowning in the deepest dark of desperation:
“We’ve sailed the seas of grief, on a raft built with our tears
Looking for a way to disappear for a moment from our deepest fears” (3)
And our nightmares disappear just for a moment, in a hug, into a kiss, into holding a body to ourselves, but this is nothing but illusion, because we always have to make the counts with ourselves and no one else…”
“Yeah… there must have been a woman too as I can read, just like me: Janne Duval, angel and vampire at the same time, my strength and my desperation, and really love is a slow and continuous bleeding with women like those!”.
“But when a feeling like that leads you to the deepest place, when you don’t see anything else than your desire for self-destruction in two charming green eyes, in a poisonous smile, then you can’t do anything else than run; I’ve tried to do it in the most wrong way, through alcohol and then after with panic attacks and then through alcohol again…till the last, desperate fall, before finding the most important thing that counts in my life: music.”
“We have followed the same path: a descent to hell through the same road. Alcohol, absinthe, desire to die, to shut up these nightmares that, bully, live in our mind like poisonous bugs able to niblle our soul…and we are prisoners of our baseness, but able to give incredible strength to our wings!”
“The albatross: I know that poem you know? Perhaps it’s been thanks to these words, perhaps with the help of the right people I had around, but at the end I really gave strength to my wings; an hospital in Malibu helped me to understand what I became…”.
“No, my dear: an hospital doesn’t solve anything if you don’t change inside. You need something else to save yourself and you cant deny this truth to yourself: you need sleepless nights looking for a single word to express everything you feel, you need the knowledge of a heart that beats for something which consumes you on the inside like a fire…”
“You need two or three notes that have to combine together to form a melody and that don’t let you sleep until you didn’t find the right sounds, you need a guitar which is able to give life to the copositions by herself, and you are its slave and you don’t have peace until you didn’t find them: all this is called LOVE, Charles, and I, for this love, I understood it was not worth to ruin my life and the one of the guys who walked the path with me in all these years and who believe in what we do. And it is for this that now, here in front of me, I have a simple Coke and nothing else, and with this I cheer to our encounter!”.
“Perhaps I should try it too Ville, is it good?”.
“Excellent, believe me!”.Mrs. Lindstrom
(1) Ville Valo - Bleed Well
(2) Charles Baudelaire - Elevazione
(3) Ville Valo - Cyanide Sun
LA REDAZIONE SI PRESENTA
Here we are...the ones of HIS INFERNAL MAGAZINE:
|
|
MRS.LINDSTROM: EDITOR IN CHIEF |
|
|
NAILEDTOACROSS: EDITOR Reviews, interviews, opinion article, translations, journeys and vacation tales |
|
|
LEGOLAS _DI_MIRKWOOD: EDITOR Music reviews, movies and readings, translations, journeys and vacation tales |
|
|
SHIKAIA 590: EDITOR Foreign correspondent: reportages from Finland, background and opinion articles, other music, vacation tales, translations, graphic support |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
MY SELENE: EDITOR Live performances, other music, reviews, journeys and vacation tales |
|
|
|
|
|
JEN_SWEETHEART: EDITOR Foreign correspondent: reportages from Greece, live performances, reviews, journey’s tales |
|
|
|
|
|
DAN [616 Version]: EDITOR Reviews, Him events and live performances, graphic, translations |
|
|
|
|
|
Sweet Pandemonium: EDITOR Reviews, Him events and live performances |
|
|
|
|
|
Girlpoison: EDITOR Reviews, Him events and live performances |
|
|
|
|
|
Kitiara_77: EDITOR Reviews, Him events and live performances |
|
|
|
|
|
Mrs. Paananen(ex Blast): EDITOR Reviews, concerts and HIM events |
|
|
|
|
|
Vaneitalia: EDITOR Reviews, concerts and HIM events |
|
|
|
|
|
BlackMamba "The Bride": EDITOR Reviews, concerts and HIM events. |
|
|
Sidonie Gabrielle Colette: EDITOR Reviews, concerts and HIM events |
|
|
Sol: EDITOR Reviews, concerts and HIM events |
|
|
Lady Crow: EDITOR Reviews, concerts and HIM events |
|
|
Medusa: EDITOR Reviews, concerts and HIM events |
|
|
Aerith: EDITOR Reviews, concerts and HIM events |
Planned and developed by Mrs Lindstrom with the help of Nailedtoacross, Legolas di Mirkwood,
Shikaia590 and Maia.Editor in chief: Mrs Lindstrom, Graphic Project: Dan[616]
