Writings of the Nomad Junkie
Biography
…maybe I should just reference that anarchic pull inside of me, the razzled strips of energy flowing through me, my grandiose moods, and my inability to sit still for bullshit or wait for the train…Perhaps it is my ancestral neuroses filtering through my brain, flooding my soul – the Bushmen of Africa, the Aboriginals of Australia, and the Adavasi of India all are historically nomadic peoples and have influenced my genetic make-up. It may have some relevancy, but it seems too academic.
Let’s get down to it: By “nomad,” I actually mean those who may be tramps, but specifically – those not allowed to be mad. No mad people. As in “You cannot be angry.”
Known as THE NOMAD JUNKIE due to his peripatetic lifestyle and artistic restlessness, DENNIS LEROY KANGALEE is a NYC-based artist from Queens born to West Indian parents. His stories, essays, and satire reflects his own anger and frustration as he sees the world's injustice in an everyday observation. A former theater artist and maverick of the New York underground, he has led several lives & is constantly looking for meaning. His surreal, slightly didactic, and occassionally insightful, tales of life seek to abandon the fragmented mirror and become whole.
Inspired by the Black Arts Movement, punk, and Theater of the Absurd, the Nomad Junkie's works are a ferocious cocktail of poetry, monologue, and revolutionary polemic. Urged by the Last Poets to continuing writing prose during the creation of his 2001 nightmare-movie about racism and its consequences, As an Act of Protest, a powerful avant-garde drama that has now earned status as a cult film, Dennis Leroy Kangalee's writing is at once personal and political. He writes for the little man caught in the snow (and beneath the corporate avalanche), those who draw lines in the sand--the losers, the rebels, the tormented, and the romantic rovers hovering on the margins of the mainstream who dare to try to make sense of "life in society."
Since 1997, he has begged, borrowed, and stolen to support his art.
He is married to Nina Fleck, the beautiful and elegantly austere German director/photographer from Munich, who saved his life in 2003.
An outsider Artist from the get go, the Nomad Junkie has no degree and has won no awards.
Currently, he is developing his first spoken word album, My Dying City, a radio drama that expresses the rancor and frustration over the gentrification of New York City and its excessive corporate mentality. Taking its cue from the darkly comic What Happened to the Brother on the Block? (A New York Horror vol.1), My Dying City is a cubistic portrait of a spirit crushed under the weight of Capitalism and a generation's struggle to fulfill or betray its destiny. With musical arrangements and sound design by Isaiah Singer, this "movie for the mind" will be made available in the spring of 2010.
The chapbook, American Loser: Two Stories of our Great Depression, will go on sale April 20, 2010. Buy it. Or steal it. Or write me and beg for it. But, at the very least, be sure to get a copy and read it--you'll probably be the only one who will, proving to yourself that you don't need the Zeitgeist and will not conform to what THEY tell you to read!
Contact the author at info@nomadjunkie.com
