About Damátir Ando

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all that before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap..."
—Holden Caulfield

Regressive, Irrelevant, Insane!

Destroy the New, Resurrect the Old!

Damátir Ando (also known as Raskolnikov) was born around 500 B.C., the son of Apollo, in the guise of a giant bottle of Asahi Super Dry, and an Oriental princess, who was imprisoned in a gigantic labyrinth. After digging through the stone walls with his fingernails at the age of 30, he embarked upon a career in slaying assorted monsters. During the Middle Ages his interests shifted to literature, and as a side project he became the first person to write down the Çomyopregi language. Around 1700 he formed what is, in fact and unbeknownst to most, the world's first speed metal band, Combustible Soul, formerly a klezmer kapelye. In 1960 he was snubbed for the Nobel Peace Prize but awarded immortality by Jehovah. He currently lives with his four wives and sixteen angel-wingèd babes, dividing his time between mansions outside of Paris and in Yakima. Currently he is working on drawing, writing, inventing fake languages, and solving all of mankind's woes.

.......

Actually, not. I just like to make up amusing fictional biographies. I am an undergraduate linguistics student at the University of California at San Diego. I have no life, to the extent that I can be bothered to make up elaborate fictional autobiographies. I write, draw, sleep, listen to music, invent useless languages, and spend an inordinate amount of time thinking. I'm pretty boring. Yeah. I think that's about it.

I was born to a lower-middle-class family in Southern California, although I developed an attitude appropriate for dwindling nobility. My upbringing was cramped and, relative to modern American standards, deprived: no air-conditioning, no cable, no internet (until we got dial-up a few years ago). We washed our dishes in a sink and listened to casettes. I went through the infamous Pasadena Unified School District for 12 years which I spent being disengaged and alienated and somehow got admitted to the University of California at San Diego, which was a big improvement. And that's where I am now.

My musical experience has been an interesting one, because unlike the expectation that people's tastes will broaden as they age or get educated, my musical taste has become more restricted the more I've learned. I call it "specialization," and it's more akin perhaps to someone who majors in one area and on the degree gets an emphasis in something more specific.

I became interested in metal about two years ago, following my enthusiasm for Master of Puppets. I was lucky enough to be introduced to it through Metallica and Megadeth, and then proceed beyond to discover some of the great, mostly little known bands. (Extreme metallers may argue that everyone's heard of Burzum, but extreme metallers should realize they are small in number and to 99% of the world it's not a household name.) Most people have one of two inaccurate images of metal. Beyond the popular images of it, metal isn't all about inflated rock star primadonnas only interested in laying groupies or superficially rebellious suburban teenagers who think it's profound to describe being molested by "Daddy". Instead metal — true metal — when done by intelligent and talented people offers an experience and perspective that is extremely rare in other art forms.

Art, in the sense of marks on paper or canvas usually forming broadly representative images, is something I've been doing here and there since forever. I don't have much artistic training; I had a couple of art classes in public school which basically taught me how to draw perspective and clean oil pastels from a brush. I got far more practice by doodling pictures in the spaces between my notes about the Civil War. I did some more "official" drawings on Xerox paper too. Now I use an actual drawing pad, but I still sketch with regular pencils and a Bic pen, and sometimes I use Sharpie markers or whiteout. Later, I began developing my own style, and I paid attention to increasing the scope of what I could draw. I studied the human figure with a copy of Grey's Anatomy (the textbook, not the TV show) and by downloading pictures of Japanese celebrities and sketching them.

Some frequently-asked questions:

Who are you?

I am one of the lesser gods. My particular kind are sometimes called Nephilim.

Are you doing homework?

Whenever relatives are around while I'm working on one of my personal projects, and they look over and see all kinds of notes, arrows, and tables of sound correspondences, they seem to think I'm working on a project for class and start asking me about my studying. It isn't that my work is a pragmatic endeavor, it's just that I am a nerd. Indeed, when bored I've been known to find all the pronunciations of a Chinese character and attempt to reconstruct middle Chinese. (It's fared better than my reconstruction of Proto-Uralic.) I'm not getting paid, nor getting a grade, to design and fill a site with elaborate languages or analyses of art and music. Nearly everything on this site is something I've done for fun.

How did you make your website?

Some people have commented that my website seems very well-designed. However, I'm not actually a tech-savvy person. I've been able to do this website with a few fundamentals of HTML, and a bit of aesthetic taste as well. I use GeoCities because it's free, easy, and convenient. I type out the pages, with all the code and tags, in Notepad and save them as HTML files, then see how they look in Internet Explorer and Netscape. When I think I've done a decent job, I upload them on GeoCities. I give all the pages the same consistent style by use of a stylesheet. My stylesheet can be found here: (link). A link to the stylesheet is then embedded in the "head" section of each webpage. These pages will guide you through the process of writing HTML including stylesheets.

How do you draw? What do you use?

I'm really not the person to ask for art tips. Since I'm rather ignorant about these kind of things, I simply use what's convenient and what's been shown to work in the past, if not what's appropriate. In the past I used to draw on Xerox paper a lot, now I use sketch pads. I outline with a regular pencil, then go over it with a ballpoint pen and / or charcoal. Sometimes I add colored pencils, permanent markers, whiteout, or I wash over charcoal with a wet brush. Not very high-tech or specialized.

You're funny! Have you ever done standup?

No. I have no sense of humor.

What does The Wheel mean?

Originally, it didn't have much of a meaning, it just looked cool. I used it as the symbol for a fictional rock band called Blac Ice. Later when I got the more serious idea of making a death folk band, I continued using it as a symbol for that band. I've thought about different aspects of it and imagined them at different times representing certain ideas I've had. For example, the cyclical, non-progressive nature of history.