posted February 11, 2007 01:47 PM              

From Stella Hyde’s Darkside Zodiac

To cheer the soul, let’s look at a few of the famous, infamous, notorious, and just plain bad [insert Sun sign] there are… you’re in very good bad company.

Aries
You will be impressed (but not surprised) by the number of monomaniacs, superegos, politicians warlords, and self-centered artists there are.

Charlemagne (April 2, 742)
Charles the Great, King of the Franks the first Holy Roman Emperor, and the man who put Europe together in the Middle Ages. Top empire builder, military campaigner, and scholar, but never a fan of delegation.

Leonardo da Vinci (April 15, 1452)
Renaissance man, and all that: a fount of new ideas, futuristic inventions, and revolutionary techniques, but never actually quite finished anything, unless threatened at Pope-point.

Giovanni Giacomo Casanova (April 2, 1725)
Top-class serial lover, combining energy stamina, lust and a dedication to the chase that puts tomcats everywhere to shame; he claims a hit rate of 122. A career fidget, he was a soldier, spy diplomat, writer, and adventurer, but ended his days as a librarian.

Vincent Van Gogh (March 30, 1853)
Flame-haired Dutch rebel artist, who hated his teachers, exploited his family, loathed fellow artists who sold more than he did, annoyed the pants off absolutely everyone, and got so cross with everything that he chopped off his own ear. He just knew he was right! As it turned out, he was.

Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier (April 14, 1907)
One-time doctor turned Haitian dictator and self-proclaimed voodoo adept, who ruled by fear, military might, mass execution, and curfew; created a personal police force, the Tontons Macoute, to enforce his will.

Taurus
You will be truly impressed by the sheer number of long-lived, world-class dictators who share your field.

Genghis Khan (May 5, c.1162)
The world dictators’ world dictator—Khan means universal ruler. Took over the Mongol horde at the age of 13, and slowly but surely built up an empire that stretched from the Black Sea to the Pacific. Died aged 70 (-ish) in his bed, with a nubile young friend.

Karl Marx (May 5, 1818)
Opinionated German philosopher who constructed an entire political theory around the idea of materialism. His greatest work, Das Kapital (all about money and the free-enterprise system), took him 30 years to produce and was never finished.

Adolf Hitler (April 20, 1889)
Wins the Darkside Superstar prize: everyone’s choice for top world-class villain! The most hated and evil man in modern history—a coup for Bullkind! Although born on April 20 (usually Aries), zodiacal differences led him to annex a neighboring sign; start as you mean to go on.

Tito (May 7, 1892)
Leader of the feuding, factionalist states formerly known as Yugoslavia. Tito ran the country his way, tolerating no opposition. He must have done well: it all fell to pieces less than 10 years after his death in 1980.

Saddam Hussein (April 28, 1937)
Successfully imposed his notions of how things should be done as president of Iraq’s one-party state from 1979, mainly by staffing the regime with family members. Famous for his innumerable palaces and the solid-gold taps in their innumerable bathrooms.

Gemini
You will be impressed by the number of revolutionaries, irresistible cads, plausible charlatans, career flirts, and main chancers who share your sign.

Marquis de Sade (June 2, 1740)
Olympic-class sexual athlete with an “ism” all his own. Invented an exquisitely painful self-pleasuring device, and favored whips, beatings, and torture for foreplay. When imprisoned for sexual vices he wrote down his every fantasy, which is how we know all about him.

Paul Gauguin (June 7, 1848)
Impressionist painter who dumped a sensible day job as a Parisian stockbroker, abandoned his family, and ran away to the South Seas to paint gorgeous Tahitian lovelies. Died romantically amid poverty and disease.

Jean-Paul Sartre (June 20, 1905)
French philosopher who built a whole doctrine (existentialism) on the idea that you could choose who, what, and how you wanted to be, and thus change roles every day. Constantly searching for new ways to be free. A formidable womanizer despite looking like a squashed toad.

Errol Flynn (June 20, 1909)
Handsome, hard drinking, hard living Hollywood hellraiser, adored by women, envied by men; a notorious sex machine and career swashbuckler, he died young(ish) at 50, but didn’t stay pretty.

Che Guevara (June 14, 1928)
Revolutionary poster boy and thorn in the side of US imperialism, Che was born wealthy in Argentina, but got restless and traveled all over South America on a Norton 500 motorbike. After helping Castro establish Cuba, he moved on to help liberate Bolivia, but was shot dead in 1967. Still cool.

Cancer
True, you’re a bit low on world dictators or action villains, but you have plenty of in-your-dreams writers, artists, and actors who like a wild side, but at one remove.

Henry VIII (July 12, 1491)
Shows what happens when crabs get their pincers on power. Tetchy, hard-assed, paranoid King of England; serially dissatisfied with his VI wives, none of whom gave him a viable son and heir; argued with everybody, even the Pope.

J.-J. Rousseau (June 28, 1712)
Bad-tempered, unsociable, misanthropic quarrelsome, clinically paranoid French philosopher, who introduced the idea of the noble savage and the degeneracy of “culture”; unabashed by contradiction, he championed the rights of children, but put his own five little b*stards into an orphanage.

Marcel Proust (July 10, 1871)
Strange, wealthy, reclusive French writer who cocooned himself in a soundproof apartment in Paris, spent his days in bed and his nights working, and took 12 years to write a seven-volume novel all about retrieving his past.

Edward Hopper (July 22, 1882)
American artist (Nighthawks), who not only saw the infinite blackness that surrounds us and makes our every gesture futile, but painted it. Angst on canvas.

posted February 11, 2007 01:48 PM              

Napoleon Bonaparte (August 15, 1769)
Top Leo badboy. From a standing start as a tiny Corsican nobody, Napoleon clawed his way to the top to become emperor of France; he really did have a plan for world domination.

Benito Mussolini (July 29, 1883)
Proclaimed himself II Duce (leader) of the one-party Fascist government in Italy in 1922. Democracy—who needs it! But it all ended in tears in 1945, at the end of World War II, when he was murdered by his own countrymen. See what happens when bigger lions muscle in…

Fidel Castro (August 13, 1926)
Premier of Cuba, which he took over in 1959 and has kept an iron grip on ever since. Often mistakenly described as a revolutionary, when he is just an old-fashioned king (and what’s wrong with that?), ruling by divine (all right Marxist) right.

Andy Warhol (August 6, 1928)
Conceptual artist (which means that he had the idea, while everyone else did the work); coiner of the phrase “Famous for 15 minutes” (excepting of course A. Warhol; so everlasting fame for him, stale cake for the rest of us).

Madonna (August 16, 1958)
Globally worshiped international superstar, film star, actor, style icon, children’s author, and hard-nosed businessperson, Madonna is the epitome of Blond Ambition, queen of showbiz jungle.

Virgo
You will be impressed by the number of world-class obsessives and hypercritical handwashers who share your sign.

Ivan the Terrible (September 4, 1530)
First ever Tsar of Russia; a martyr to chronic ill health, Ivan is famous for his progressive administrative policies, which unified Russia into a powerful country, and infamous for his repressive peasant policies, which killed or enslaved a large proportion of its inhabitants.

Cardinal Richelieu (September 9, 1585)
Prime Minister of France and top-class lackey to the king, Louis XIII, whose status and power he improved by an integrated program of political repression and force; celebrated safely in retrospect for his powerful analytical intellect; Richelieu believed that small crimes should be harshly punished, to discourage bigger ones—it’s all in the detail, you see.

D.H. Lawrence (September 11, 1885)
English author of the infamous Lady Chatterley’s Lover (among other works), Lawrence was plagued by ill health (which made him peevish), and simultaneously obsessed with and repelled by earth-shaking sex, which he appears neither to have experienced directly nor to be able to describe without making readers laugh uncontrollably.

Greta Garbo (September 18, 1905)
Reclusive Swedish-born Hollywood star, who conducted many love affairs with members of all sexes, but never committed to anyone. Famous for wanting to be alone, she managed to be so far almost 40 years after retiring from the silver screen at the age of 36.

Libra
You will be impressed by the number of world-stage strutters and self-indulgent artistes there are.

Oscar Wilde (October 16, 1854)
Flamboyant writer, dandy, and wit, famous for being able to resist anything but temptation. His works, especially The Picture of Dorian Gray, dwelt on the folly of judging a book by its cover and on the downside of a life of indulgence and devotion to pleasure alone.

Arthur Rimbaud (October 20, 1854)
French vers libre poet who wrote all his poetry in the five hot years between the ages of 15 and 20, when he was shot and wounded by his lover, Paul Verlaine. Then he gave up la vie bohéme to become a trader in Africa. Extremes, see.

Alfred Nobel (October 21, 1883)
Swedish chemist who invented dynamite, one of the first of many manmade weapons of mass destruction, and who then, to balance things up, used the profits to endow international prizes for contributions to “the good of humanity.” It didn’t work, but nice try, Alfred.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (September 24 1896)
Great American novelist, chronicler of the lives of the beautiful and the damned, and no stranger to indulgence himself.

Margaret Thatcher (October 13, 1925)
First British woman Prime Minister (1979-90); an iron fist clutching a velvet handbag (she transformed the word “handbag” from noun to verb). Memorably described by French leader Francois Mitterand as having “the eyes of Caligula, but the mouth of Monroe.”

Scorpio
You will be impressed by the number of dark, brooding manipulators and merchants of excess who scuttle across the black desert sands with you.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (October 30, 1821)
Dark, brooding Russian writer, military engineer, and gambling addict, who was sentenced to death, but reprieved. Author of Crime and Punishment (1886), a study in sociopathic homicide, and The Brothers Karamazov (1880) about three dark, brooding brothers.

Bram Stoker (November 8, 1847)
Dark, brooding Irish civil servant, theatrical impresario, and writer creator of Dracula (1897), a fable of blood, obsession, sex, lust, evil, death, and un-death.

Pablo Picasso (October 25, 1881)
Dark, brooding Spanish artist, the passionate, prolific, seminal shaping spirit of 20th-century art, who considered art to be “an instrument of war against brutality and darkness.” His powerful genius lay in his ability to analyze and synthesize form (Cubism), yet his work was all about humanity’s cruelty, folly and love; also an indefatigable womanizer.

Dylan Thomas (October 27, 1914)
Dark, brooding Welsh poet, permanently steeped in liquor; his most famous work, the verse drama Under Milk Wood (1952), was published a year after Thomas slipped, raging, into the crow-black, sloe-black night.

posted February 11, 2007 01:48 PM              

Billy the Kid (November 23, 1859)
The gunslinging boy wonder (aka William Bonney) was actually born Henry McCarty in New York City, but by the time he was 18 he was way out west in Arizona, a horse-thievin’, a-cattle rustlin’, and a-killin’. He shot and killed at least nine men (legend says 21) and was himself gunned down by Sheriff Pat Garrett in 1881 (although maybe he wasn’t, and ran away to Mexico, where he died aged 92).

Ty Cobb (December 18, 1886)
The Georgia Peach (but never peachy off the diamond); the legendary best-ever baseball player and the sport’s most detestable human being, according to most aficionados; violent, ubercompetitive (he allegedly wore spiked boots), and frequently prosecuted for violent attacks on fans, neighbors, and hotel staff.

Lucky Luciano (November 24, 1897)
Sicilian-born celebrity gangster of the 1930s, who came to New York in 1906, got arrested for shoplifting in 1907, went on to run drugs, drink, gambling, and prostitution rackets in New York, and founded Murder Inc., the contract killing arm of the Mafia. He got his nickname from his smart choice of horseflesh.

Jim Morrison (December 8, 1943)
Frontman with legendary Sixties cult-rock psychedelics, The Doors, Morrison (who strutted the stage as the Lizard King) consumed every mind-bending drug known to humanity, cleared the boundaries of reality in a single leap, and kicked down the doors of perception. Actually said, “We’re more interested in the dark side of life, the evil thing, the night time.” Died poetically in Paris, aged 27.

Capricorn
You will be seriously impressed by the number of power-crazed tyrants and cruel-minded perverts who share your office.

Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809)
American Gothic writer and Darkside aficionado, addicted to the thrill of pain torture, decadence, sickness, premature burial, and ravens. Also invented the detective story.

Hermann Goering (January 12, 1893)
Nazi. As early as 1933 he had invented the Gestapo and set up concentration camps to contain people who did not fit the Nazi ideal (i.e. almost everybody). He glittered less fiercely when the Luftwaffe (of whom he was in charge) failed to deliver during World War II.

Mao Zedong (December 26, 1893)
Ruthless, blunt-speaking peasant who fought his way up the bamboo pole to rule the People’s Republic of Communist China in 1949, throwing friends, allies, wives, and children to the wolves, and punishing everyone who deviated to the left or right of his path.

J. Edgar Hoover (January 1, 1895)
Director of the FBI, father of the G-Men, and relentless witch-hunter of pinkos, deviants, and civil rights activists. Allegedly a closet transvestite and homosexual all along.

Charles Addams (January 7, 1912)
Known as “Chill” to his friends, Addams grew up on Elm Street (in Westfield, NJ) and as a boy liked visiting graveyards. Best known for his cartoon take on domestic life with the gothically undead Addams family. He collected medieval crossbows.

Aquarius
You will be impressed by the number of resolute outsiders and chilled-out weirdos there are.

Tom Paine (January 29, 1737)
Career revolutionary born in Norfolk, England; thrown out of every European country for publishing his eccentric ideas and theories (abolition of monarchy and slavery, sexual equality, public education, the poor to get regular food, that sort of thing). Very popular in the US, where his pamphlet, Common Sense inspired the Declaration of Independence (1776); a must-have at every A-list revolution, freedom fight, and popular insurrection.

Lord George Byron (January 22, 1788)
Eccentric British poet; he invented the cool floppy-shirted, floppy-haired, bad, mad, etc. hero; besieged by women, in spite (or because) of being a short b*stard with a club foot. Died fighting in the Greek War of Independence.

Eva Braun (February 6, 1912)
Hitler’s mistress, although you’d never have known; the duo rarely displayed intimacy and she chose to spend most of her time alone in his isolated alpine retreat, Berchtesgaden; yet she poisoned herself to die with him. Strange.

James Dean (February 8, 1931)
Achingly cool (even after all these years) moody screen supericon, who said little, died young, and stayed pretty; a template for doomed youth since his death aged 24.

David Lynch (January 20, 1946)
Mysterious, eccentric independent filmmaker and artist, auteur of TV’s most bizarre soap, Twin Peaks, and cult movies Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Wild at Heart; he knows what he means, but he isn’t going to tell us.

Pisces
You will be impressed by the number of fantasists, cultmongers, and lost souls there are.

Buffalo Bill (February 26, 1846)
Although he was a real Iowa-born frontiersman and worked as a trail scout, Pony Express rider, buffalo hunter, hotelier (!), and railroad owner, Bill (William Frederick Cody) is best remembered for his Wild West Circus, which brought the fantasy of the wide open spaces to city folk, such as Queen Victoria.

Adolf Eichmann (March 19, 1906)
Hitler worshiper, and architect of the Final Solution, the Nazi plan to exterminate all Jewish people in Europe. Abandoned family and escaped to Argentina at the end of World War II, but was caught, tried, and executed in 1960; claimed he was “only following orders” (a textbook Pisces maneuver). He wasn’t alone; other high-ranking Nazi fish include Joseph Mengele and Albert Speer.

L. Ron Hubbard (March 13, 1911)
Successful pulp SF writer, Lafayette (for that is his name) went on to found a fiercely evangelical self-help cult—scientology—which has no basis in known fact, science, myth, or religion. Did he believe it? Was it all a cynical money mill? Whatever—he hooked all those self-indulgent Hollywood types, didn’t he?

Lou Reed (March 2, 1942)
Survivor and musician from the Warhol factory, whose oeuvre draws heavily on his adventures in altered states; currently obsessed with dead professional Goth, Edgar Allan Poe.

posted February 11, 2007 02:27 PM            

I liked this one though:

quote:

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J.-J. Rousseau (June 28, 1712)
Bad-tempered, unsociable, misanthropic quarrelsome, clinically paranoid French philosopher, who introduced the idea of the noble savage and the degeneracy of “culture”; unabashed by contradiction, he championed the rights of children, but put his own five little b*stards into an orphanage.

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