The Fine Art and Design Blog of Darren Daz Cox

…and when you stand up and give my euolgy all i I want you to say is that I was totally in the ranks of the totally cool…

Daz is a nickname I was given when I was a mere slip of a youth growing up in the south of England ( and I still use it to sign my works of art ).

I was born in Ely in the UK, but I am not the Darren Cox who owns darrencox.com and lives in Ely that’s just a coincidence!

I don’t believe in coincidences though but I do trust in synchroncity!

When I was around six years old my folks sold our house, bought a camper-van and we traveled all over Europe. These are my first memories, France, Spain, Germany, Pisa, Venice, Yugoslavia, The Grand Tour!

My consistent memory begins with living in sunny Exeter in the south of England. I wonder what happened to my old friend Timothy Braddon and his guinea pig Wilbur?

I drew, painted and wrote fiction and poems and here I am at 41 doing the same thing!

I was (and still am) an avid reader, devouring Enid Blighton’s novels and Action Comics (NOT the ‘wimpy’ American version!), and Action’s successor, the mighty 2000 AD.

Suddenly we moved from Exeter to Victoria Peak Hong kong, then shortly after to Repulse Bay..

I went to school at Stanley Fort School where my dad was my teacher for the semester that included the day 7/7/77. He’s a semi-retired teacher in El Salvador now, and if you think I’m punk rock, he moved to El Salvador in the 80’s, which, if you know your history, was hardly a vacation spot.

I remember watching the Sha-Na-Na show on tv and still love do-wop music - and The Ramones (who were guest stars!).

My friends and I made our own version of the greasers from NYC, Baa Na Na, and recorded our renditions on cassette tape (mono of course and hopefully lost for ever!)My friend Richard Winton and his brother Edward ("Wod") encouraged my creativity with our home-made comic books.

We read ‘golden age’ sci-fi novels,Issac Azimov, R.A. Heinlein, A.C. Clarke, Harry Harrison and copied the style of Marvel comics (Jack Kirby rules!) and wrote columns in the vein of Stan Lee (’Nuff said!). I loved being my own publisher and still do, back then we drew things in pen, snapped a staple on it and that was it, each comic an edition of one, no copies no editing, you didn’t make mistakes you made explosions with a whole lot of ink to cover them up haha!!

Richard and Wod were unusual as their mother was American and they had been to The U.S.A little did i know that I’d end up American. The Army unit that Rich and Wods’ dad worked for rotated out, a Scottish brigade moved in and my folks split up.

I was officially in the C.B.A
The COOL BUMS ASSOCIATION I am seeking information on former club executioner
EDWARD ‘WOD’ WINTON last known HQ Bedford, England.

The new kids brought punk rock with them which soon became a major influence in my life, but I was a budding metalhead and want to give a shout out to my mates Steve Bosworth, Jamie Anderson and  Shaila Subba who stayed in Hong Kong and stayed just as cool!!

I now went to school at St. George’s School in Kowloon (my 6th school by then). My short story ‘Love and Robots‘ uses this time and space as a background.

I moved to Chi-Fu-Fa-Yuen apts in Aberdeen harbor with my dad. Reached puberty and danced along with "Dance Fever" It was at this time i realized i couldn’t disco dance, but i could ‘pogo’ sort of like Sid Vicious did (jumping up and down mostly) and eventually rounded out my dance repertoire with ‘air guitaring’, which is something I still do!

My folks divorced and my mom married an American who worked for Caterpiller tractor co. I moved back to Repulse Bay where I saw a lady who’d set herself on fire and leapt from a window (17 floors). Being a step-kid was ok, my step-sister was cool and we took vacations all over the far east, Thailand, The Philippines, Malaysia, Guam, Truk lagoon and even jetted to Dearborn Michigan USA to visit my new step-grandma.

Here are my sisters, Sonja (left), Gabrielle (right) and I, why was I wearing that nerdy shirt?

Then we moved to Peoria Illinois USA. America was different but I am used to culture shock. I found out that a B student in the British school system gets A’s in the American system!

No one knew about punk rock in my rural high school, but heavy metal is a universal language that I was fluent in. I wrote rock music trivia quizzes and drew a comic strip for the school paper "Joe Blood - Intergalactic assassin" until I was kicked off for the infamous "Eata Featus Week" incident. These days I’d probably be forced into counseling, put on corporate drug therepy and become a statistic on an FBI database of potential terrorists. Luckily the early 80’s were ‘open’ enough for me to be a dumb kid and enjoy the privilege of free speech without it counting against me.  My cool friend Nicola Aaron knows that I turned out ok even if my art at the time wasn’t very sensitive to say the least!

During our Junior year at Illinois Valley Central H.S. my best friend Jim Holeman and I had decided to join the Navy instead of going to college.The Navy recruiter was a ‘wanker’ so we went across the hall to the Air Force and signed up. I’m glad I had a few really good friends in high school and got to see a whole lot of my favorite bands in concert, but I really couldn’t wait to graduate.

A few short months after I graduated with a ‘medal’ for my grades, I was in basic training in Lackland AFB Texas, then off to Chanute AFB in lovely Rantoul Illinois for technical school. There I was reacquainted with the Ramones and read my first American punk ‘zines, Flipside and Maximum RNR. One night while driving back from Rantoul to Peoria, Jim and I had a car wreck which could have killed us, the car was totaled after we hit a tree at 55 mph, my head smashed out the windshield as we weren’t wearing seat belts and yet we walked away with cuts and bruises.

I arrived at my first duty station Columbus AFB in mysterious Mississippi, with a black eye and stitches and I soon grew to enjoy where I was at. People still say I have a ’southern accent’ but i live on the east coast now and they all sound like Sha Na Na to me haha!! While in the air force, I lived in the dorms at first and made lots of friends including Russell "Biff" Brown a fellow Illinoisan.

He had a lot of cool LP records and could play guitar and write songs, he introduced me to The Cure and The Violent Femmes. We would record imaginary radio shows and made a punk band called Lead Babie (pronounced Led like in Zeppelin) and recorded spontaneous songs and commentary that often plagerised Monty Python and the Black Flag radio commercials. We made an imaginary punk rock radio station called WFUK ha!

This photo is Biff Brown, Daz Cox (me) and Diamond Dave at our world famous Bar and Grill in Columbus Mississippi. Dave was a pioneer of ‘irony’ wearing a Smiths button.

 

One of the Lead Babie side projects was The Spooge Monkeys, here is our hit single "Piss Off", a happy go fucky dirty punk song that showed how much we respected our boss, Ronnie.

Biff, me and a guy from supply "Diamond" Dave Flemming got an apartment off base and had alot of parties. We started listening to the local college radio station and became DJ’s on campus, which was pretty nice of them since we weren’t students! This was a fateful moment in my life as i finally found something I loved to do and was pretty good at. I started to hang out with the local college crowd (and other cool civilian types) and soon realized that the military wasn’t my thing.

Pamster and Jane-o-la at the WMUW FM 88.5 studios

Being in the military was paradise compared to living at home, but I didn’t fit in there. After I obtained my honorable discharge I became a student at the local college where I already had a radio show playing heavy metal and punk rock. I had taken a few college classes at night on the air force base but hadn’t given much thought to what major I wanted. I was a geek before it was cool to be a geek, just look at the IVC year book for 1984 and look at the computer club, the guys who look like Beavis and Butthead are Jim and I. I always knew I would do something with computers but I’m a user rather than a programer and it was a dozen years after those lovely Apple II’s before I discovered Photoshop and was actually productive!

I decided to become an art major because my girlfriend was one and I still drew as much as I did in high school and before.

Me and Lynn 1987 or so (the bear is called Archibald Bear Asshole )

We had a great time experimenting with art (who doesn’t?) and thanks to the genius of Thomas Nawrocki I really took to Intaglio printmaking.

After completing two years towards a printmaking degree and literally a million cool things happened, including meeting the awesome artist Cathy Dailey aka The Groovy Chick,  I was given the opportunity to finish college at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. By coincidence my old Air Force buddy Biff was going to start school there too so we decided to become roommates again.

Before I left Mississippi I had my ‘Ground Hog day’, the day you could live over and over, it’s on another page of my blog here

I did some great intaglio prints at S.I.U, but after taking alot of art history and studying the Italian Renaissance, I knew I wanted to be a painter rather than a printmaker.

Egg magazine #1, Intaglio etching

Biff reprised the punk rock  we started with Lead Babie, in a band called 3-Man, writing, singing and even performing non-ska trombone solo’s. Somehow, against fierce competition, 3-Man won the Carbondale Illinois Hangar 9 battle of the bands. Biff broke up that band and made a ’supergroup’ from the local musicians called Groove Swamp (sort of a funk / Primus type band) and won the next Battle of the bands too, a feat that had never been done before. I am proud to have contributed song lyrics and artwork to both bands. Me and Biff continued to record spontanious interviews and songs…

I started oil painting at S.I.U, in fact this one (below) is my very first oil painting! My awesome artist friend Kim aka Revo-Gruv in her apartment.

Instead of graduating I moved to Ft. Lauderdale Florida to do great art, write poetry, I made two bands, Artifex Flux and Rataxis (I’ll spare you the mp3’s until I’m far too old to have any dignity left!) and to avoid adult responsibities (I can now admit) but little things like Hurricane Andrew made the experience unpleasant. I stuck it out for a year working on my paintings then returned to Carbondale with a solid grasp on figure drawing but little else. There’s something I did in Florida on my Flickr site here.

I was literally a starving artist , but I found a job I could walk to and continued to paint and study art. I was an urban Gauguin, but eventually poverty started to inhibit my sanity and creativity. So when I had a second chance to get a degree I felt that I had to take it. My cool friends Travis Neighbors, Brian Sutton and Christian Eisenhauer made a potentially depressing situation into a positive creative time, thanks guys.

Darren Daz Cox - starving artist days!

I finally obtained my degree in Graphic Design at Bradley University in Peoria Illinois. To paraphrase The 80’s movie "Making the Grade" "It’s not necessarily a good education, but it is an expensive one,and that has to count for something!". I learned to use my painting skills with digital tools and became a master of Photoshop.

College Graphic Design project

During college I was an intern at Lakeview Museum and had the rare honor of sorting through a huge collection of historic posters. After that gig I worked at a local independent photo-lab that had a graphic design dept. The owners (Laure and Wayne R. Miller) have a radio show now, man, it’s weird how some themes keep repeating!  My boss was a goofy guy known as DJ Disaster who I found out also was a huge RUNDMC fan so we became friends and later business partners in a company we founded called Riverfront Media. (we ARE riverfrontmedia.com forget the other ones!)

 

Riverfront Media logo by Darren Daz Cox  

It’s funny how things work out because one of my friends, the Almighty MC who while roommates in the airforce introduced me to RUNDMC’s music at just the right time, the time when heavy metal had started to get stale, the time when I could have become some kind of alcoholic red neck.

If I hadn’t had been introduced to RUN DMC back then i might not have become such good friends with DJ Disaster years later and surely not have invested my time and energy into a tiny start up graphic design company after I recieved my college degree.

The picture to the left is Chris Johnson aka The Almighty MC, seen here with my Run Dmc album he encouraged me to buy! You can see my Apple IIc computer and Iron Maiden records in the pic too! AMC along with Jazzy D were the Krush 2 MC’s (this was the mid 1980’s so it was the old school days! and since we were in Mississippi it was REALLY old school, so while it might not seem like a big deal now, interviewing a rap band on the local college radio station was unprecended, but as weird as it sounds, here’s the very first rap band to be interviewed live in NE Mississippi.

Debonair Darren (me) and Dr. Danno interviewing the krush 2 MC’s on WMUW 88.5 Fm mid 1980s.

Anyway, back to the story of Riverfront Media…DJ Disaster and I started out with a goal to make music videos and video art, funded by making commercials, custom DVD’s and graphic design, which we did and in addition to that we ended up building a recording studio. We produced and recorded several artists from country singers to hiphop rappers and promoted our artists on our weekly internet radio show and streaming stations. (here’s a couple of random tracks from our radio show that somehow survived…)

My favorite movie is Tapeheads (1988 John Cusack and Tim Robbins film produced by Mike Nessmith of Monkees fame) and I loved living a real life version of that movie, except when we ended up having to fight for our very name and identity. We won btw, a valuable lesson in self esteem. For all of you out there who think you are just an insignificant pissant, take heart, the little guy can and does win, probably more often than you’ll ever know!

  

DJ Disaster and I even built the soundbooth at the RFM studios. We recorded the vocals for many decent singers and our own not so decent songs!

We also made our own music and raps (not quite as good as good ol’ Run and D, but it was fun). We put some techno songs we made from loops in Acid on MP3.com (back when it was indy) under the name Homer Simplex and amazingly made the dance charts in Germany!

We were working on an internet TV show called HipsterTV, a talk show with local bands, that was slated to star the mighty Diva Dave Omega but we were also making DVD’s which, along with our day jobs (I was doing tech support for Hitachi home electronics and DJ Disaster is a mail carrier) put a lot of pressure on us. SecondLife celebrity builder and original inventor of the tiny animal avatars, Wynx Whiplash had just introduced me to SecondLife and I could see the possibilities of combining the virtual world with the real world in a hybrid internet TV show (don’t tell anyone, but she is my friend Jane-O-la, scroll up to see her in the WMUW studios when she was known as Ultra Violet, the goth DJ!) and Riverfront Media was just the ones to combine the two. RFM had a new studio that was donated in exchange for DVD work, which gave us a place to make a stage and set up a talk show set.

Unfortunately  Life was squeezing us in other ways too, both of our respective home lives were becoming uncomfortable and suddenly the universe told me to move to Detroit where my step- grandmother lived. I ended up saving her life (by being there when she had fallen) and suddenly I was her caregiver and ultimately her legal guardian before she passed on from a brain tumor. My proudest moment was that I was given the chance to take care of her in her last year of life, allowing her to stay in her own home until the last possible moment before she needed constant care. I know that many of you have been burdened and blessed with elder care (not to mention all the normal family things) and hope you can see how your sacrifices help you grow in a spiritual way. For me it was a big deal, I changed for the better and it put me on a spiritual path something that has helped me make sense of this crazy world.

I’ve been listening to Coast To Coast AM since 1995 and for a while I thought that the evil lizard men were going to herd us into concentration camps and suck our brains out but now i realize that it is our fears and apathy that will suck our brains out. There might be aliens and there might be global disasters, but once you are solid with your higher power there is no reason to be anything but positive as our time on Earth is short but we are eternal, how you see the world matters! I’m a big fan of quantum physics.  That’s a pic of my mom, I called her M, and Macy, they live in the desert in Colorado now!

I moved to New Jersey in May 0f 2007 as i have family here and needed to reconnect after losing Grandma.

I am taking a break from oil painting and art just for the internet for a while while I find a new job, and am concentrating on my old fashioned snail mail paper xeroxed zines. I love the idea of making my own little magazines and sending them to people across the world. My sister Sonja and I used to play ‘office’ when we lived in Exeter and it was fun to make envelopes and draw stamps on them and write memos etc, I think about that joyful fun when I make my zines and I hope that feeling comes through when you receive them mixed in with your bills and miscellaneous things. Email me at daz@99daz.com if you’d like to be on the mailing list!

This page was unexpectidly submitted to digg.com by a random surfer! please digg it too!

to be continued!

~~**Daz Honey logo by Darren Daz Cox**~~

September 2008 I will be back in Illinois for good and back at work with Riverfront Media, almost a decade after we founded it, our skills have improved considerably so expect great creative things to come!!!