Tales From When I Had A Face: Intro

Here’s your chance to read the intro to the illustrated novel we’ve been working on for 3 years. I predict we’ll be read to publish – if we find the right publishing partner – in 2018. We’re working very hard at this to build a rich fantasy world that feels like it comes from original folklore, that ties into dreams and visions glimpsed in the first Fallen Cycle book.

In the meantime… check this out. And let us know what you think!

The Fallen Cycle: A battle between the light of remembrance and dark of forgetting, the burden of tradition, and the cost of progress. A war waged with stories and magic as well as guns and swords. 

All It Takes Is The Right Story. Mythos Media

hive

HIVE

In 2023, Hive (human interface for virtual evolution) is an augmented-reality technology that consolidates an individual's devices and technology into a holographic visual display that is projected from their mind. Millions connect and become a collective consciousness, while The Disconnected are left in its wake; forced to adapt to a primitive lifestyle in the outskirts of Hive cities. Conflict is inevitable, however the reality behind Hive may be even stranger than anyone realized. Propolis follows nine-year-old Samantha Plessis, as she witnesses her family opt-in to beta testing this new product to receive health insurance benefits to treat her immune disorder. Since her disease prevents her from connecting to Hive, she becomes gradually alienated by her family whose method of communication is now changing. Hive is a science-fiction transmedia project told through a series of books, films, social media and real-world interactive events. This six-part novella series is the main narrative. The story takes place from the year 2023 to 2050.

All It Takes Is The Right Story. Mythos Media

The Lifespan of a Fact

The Lifespan of a Fact by John D'Agata
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Lifespan of a Fact caught my attention recently, in the course of a number of project-related conversations about truth and journalism. Overall, I would say that it delivers on exactly what it promises: a discussion, sometimes debate, about the nature of literature and fact. The Talmudic formatting is interesting, and allows the conversation to flow around the central text. The only way I think you're liable to be disappointed by this book is if you're looking for any final conclusions. But this is not a subject that can — or should! — have a final conclusion. It is meant to be struggled with.

I think all writers that have worked in "nonfiction" wrestle with this issue — how narratives can't help but manipulate an audience. Literary journalism is kind of inherently manipulative, certainly you can bring out nuances and the complexity of a character, but ultimately you're painting a sympathetic or unsympathetic picture. The closest you can get to the facts would be to read out a list of data points — at this time, according to this source, this thing happened.

The further we stray from that, the more it's didactic. But I think that narrative speaks directly to how we actually engage with the world. We aren't, fundamentally logical creatures, so that "pure fact" approach is actually more alien in some ways than appealing to people through a narrative that you've constructed out of a *particular evaluation* of the facts.

The main issue with full out gonzo journalism is that it was often used to intentionally lie, or use people's ignorance against them. Like when Hunter S. Thompson went after Muskie by making a wild claim about ibogaine, knowing people take the mere suggestion of a possibility, frequently repeated, as fact. We can laugh about that, but I'm not sure there's much difference between that and what Fox News does, except that we might personally agree with Hunter's politics more.

So there's a kind of contradiction here, the understanding that we make sense of our day-to-day world primarily through narrative, that journalism should play to that, and yet on the other hand, recognizing that narratives are inherently misleading, if not outright duplicitous. There are many ways of dealing with this complexity. My inclination is to own a bias, rather than try to cover it up with feints toward "fair and balanced objectivity." But there is no one, or easy solution.

View all my reviews

All It Takes Is The Right Story. Mythos Media

The Conspiracy Against The Human Race

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Years of meditating and reading books on philosophy, psychology, years of lucid dreams and night terrors, do not make a person unique. But it is singularly unique to find what feels like your own thoughts reflected back at you when you didn't pen them. As I read The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, I had a strange feeling, as if deja vu and vertigo had somehow been blended together. Had I read this before, if I hadn't written it?

Yet that disturbing familiarity regards an utterly useless process. Reading or writing about philosophy has long had a negative connotation in the United States, thanks to a long anti-intellectual culture in some corners. But here the useless, and indeed the negative, have an absolutely finality that have nothing to do with anti-intellectualism. This is ontological uselessness, the nightmare of being.

Ligotti's core thesis — the self as we know it is a contrivance of evolution, self consciousness an accident. To be deceived into thinking we are a self, that's the situation we find ourselves in, without hope of reprieve or reprisal. Of course, he isn't the first pessimist to set pen to paper, but he is the first to do so starkly, with such uncompromising clarity, without back pedaling or that ultimate cop out, the happy ending, “it was all a dream.”

There is a certain intentional irony here, as indeed our waking lives are a type of dream, and the self we grant some sense of ultimate reality is nothing other than a character in that dream. But to the extent anything is real, that dream character's suffering is legitimate.

Our choice as he sees it is simple — self deception, or insanity. He shows us the basis of horror, rooted not in the supernatural beyond, but much closer to home. It stares back at us in the mirror. The supernatural in a sense gives us a glimpse of our own uncanny ghoulishness, without requiring identification with the absolute truth of the matter. We can close the book, and shake off that chill, for after all, it was just a story.

But this is not merely a thought experiment. It isn't satirical hyperbole, like A Modest Proposal. There is no hope or happy ending to soften the blow. Because the game of life is all fixed anyway, it couldn't matter less if you deceive yourself and write this book off as pessimistic belly aching. Whatever it takes to get you through another day, and prop up the illusion that you are a self in the first place.

Although some may argue about what constitutes “serious philosophy” — as Ligotti himself says, he eschews the circuitous argumentation that generally grants a work that unapproachable aura of seriousness — I would argue that this book belongs within any introductory study of nihilism and even post-modernism. To do so I'd like to demonstrate what I mean. Those purely interested in The Conspiracy Against The Human Race may as well stop here, but I believe this claim demands a little context and backtracking. You'll forgive me if I need to broaden the scope to come back to task.

First Tales From When I Had A Face Contributor Announced

The first contributor I'm going to announce here is P. Emerson Williams. He'll be doing storyboards and pencils for all the comic sections in the 4 issues of Tales From When I Had A Face: The Summer Tree, The Fall Tree, The Winter Tree, and The Spring Tree. I've worked with him on a number of projects in the past, and am very happy to have him help me navigate the immense scale of this project.

---

P. Emerson Williams is an artist and illustrator whose work takes shape in physical and digital media, and covers wide modes of expression. His passion is for embodying the mythic in visual media and melding visual art with narrative form.

He illustrated Bedlam Stories - The Battle for Oz and Wonderland Begins, a novel set in the universe of Bedlam Stories, a twisted world of horror created by cult film director Pearry Teo (The Gene Generation, Necromentia, Witchville). among a number of projects coming up for P. Emerson Williams in 2015 is Adagio Fine, the first in the Star Crossed Chronicles, a series of heavily illustrated novels penned by occult author Nathan Neuharth.

As a core member of UK theatrical company FoolishPeople, P. Emerson Williams took on many roles in London productions of The Basement - Ward 12 - in partnership with Secret Cinema, The Providence Experiments - co-produced with Mythos Media, A Red Threatening Sky, The Abattoir Pages - presented with Guerrilla Zoo, Cirxus and Terra:Extremitas, performed at Amsterdam's NDSM-werf. These roles includes creating a score for choreographer lohan Stjernholm as part of the production A Red Threatening Sky and a solo musical performance at the famed Horse Hospital in London, creation of soundscapes and scores for every production on which he worked, as well as set and graphic design and on top of all this, Williams was in the cast as both voice actor and live actor.

Williams straddles the worlds of industrial music and black metal, electronic dance to dark Americana to pure goth with Veil of Thorns as well as adding elements of his sonic alchemy as a spice to projects with Sleep Chamber, Manes and more extensively as half of the creative core of kkoagulaa with cern.th.skei from Manes. Recent collaborations include playing cello on UK black metal band Ethernal's upcoming third album, subverting the nature of guitar playing with industrial noise merchants Dead Skull and a collaboration with avant garde trumpet player Mark Cunningham.

He is the host of the Necrofuturist Transmission on Nottingham's Nightbreed Radio, was the editor and producer for Music Tuesdays on Alterati.com, and art director for Weaponized , the publishing imprint of FoolishPeople. Articles and reviews by P. Emerson Williams can be read online at Terrorizer.com, Modern Mythology, Disinfo.com and Intravenous Magazine. His visual art can be seen on book covers and interiors for Original Falcon, Weaponized, and Westgate Press, the pages of magazines including Culture Asylum, Isten 'zine, Ghastly, and Esoterra , album and CD covers for Rat King, Primordial, Katatonia, Ethernal, Ptahil, Lethe, Misanthropy Records, SLEEP CHAMBER, Veil of Thorns, Choronzon and kkoagulaa. In 2013, P. Emerson Williams was on guitar and vocals on tour with the legendary Jarboe that took them through the US, Western and Eastern Europe and concluded in Moscow.

[All It Takes Is The Right Story... Mythos Media]

Party At The World's End 2nd Edition

 "She went down beyond the mountains and disappeared between the crease of sky and land, like a great eyelid folding shut. No one knows what happened out in the Black Hills, but I imagine she lies buried in a rusty coffin under the stars. She had Marilyn's enchanting haze, Hendrix's cool, Morrison's smoldering insanity, but the grave was still surely bare. Not that it mattered. Her face was burned into all our minds, forever young, the mantra of every generation's counter-culture. And on nights when the desert crickets sing her tune, they say one day she will rise again. On that day, there is no telling the kind of vengeance she'll demand of us. Fair is fair.

They say, when she fell from Heaven she wore a crown of jagged stars that slit the skies throat. They say she loved them all, in the secret corners of their shallow sleep. Strangers, at the last. They say a lot of things. They’re all lies. Everything is already written."

Party At The World's End2nd Edition is Available NOW. 

(Print only, $11. eBook available but is 1st edition until next week.)

[Take a Trip with us... Mythos Media.]

Take a mad ride past the event horizon of sanity

Take a mad ride past the event horizon of sanity with the band Babylon, in the final days of the American Empire. First in the psychedelic occult, myth and fairy-tale laced urban fantasy series, the Fallen Cycle.

"Grant Morrison's The Invisibles meets Fight Club, with ...a completely unique take on what makes myth tick," said Underground Reviews, and that's exactly what you get with this lean book, no choice but look the void right in the eye. As Nietzsche famously said, "When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." He knew the storm is coming. The fabric of the self, the fabric of a society, of a culture, of a species, all may reach the point of rupture without recognition. Is that not even more true in the psyche that wishes to distract, to look elsewhere, to numb out the terrible truth, that we live in that void already. It is an absence, the myth of no myths, no meanings.

Which sounds fucking awful, doesn't it?

Who could have predicted it'd be a band on the road that set it all off, the mad Bacchae and their rock apocalypse?

So don't be sad. The party is going to be a blast, drinking and fucking to the edges of oblivion; riding off with Lilith and Ariadne, Dionysus, transexual Jesus and Artemis into that sunset, (because who wants to remain virginal at the end of the world?) They offer polyamory and LSD instead of jealousy and fear, spiritual transformation instead of a 9-5 grind. When they pull into your town and open the door, who in their right mind wouldn't hop aboard? The feds say "these kids have to be crazy to go with 'those people.'"

Machines shouldn't speak for men. You'd have to be crazy not to go.

The joy, the release, at the end of all things is absolute. It's the getting there that's Hell. We must find our way out together, or not at all.

Those who wander through life without knowing who they are: No more. Unlock the Fallen God within your sleeping self. All it takes is the right story. Contact the Order of the Hidden Path, begin your initiation now. There is no time to waste.

-Gabriel De Leon, 2012. OHO, OHP.

Party At The World's End

Party At The World's End unveils Free Chapter

Party at the Worlds End Free Sample by James Curcio

[Take a Trip with us... Mythos Media.]

Words of Traitors added to Powell's Books "Short List"

"This is a brutal, darkly funny, and, above all, honest collection of short stories crafted especially for lovers of physical books. Illustration styles and even typeface are carefully matched to enrich the unique narrative experience of each tale. Words of Traitors is a work of art unlike anything you've read before."
Recommended by Brian S., Powells.com
Check it out

Note: Words of Traitors is a limited full color short story collection which includes several stories that have been since integrated (along with 404 Documents) into a single edition of Party At The World's End to be released autumn 2014.

[Take a Trip with us... Mythos Media.]

The Hope We Seek (review)

The Hope We Seek by Rich Shapero
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It was an interesting coincidence that the publisher for "The Hope We Seek" offered an ARC right around the time when my general research was leading me back to the history and myth of the American West. This book fits very soundly within the current, as it is essentially an exploration of those symbols--mining, in some sense, for an American myth, rather than gold.

The prose is at its best when it describes the land itself as an outpouring of the human spirit; at times the craft actually reaches the sublime that the author is clearly reaching for throughout. However, the flip side of this is that at times it feels as though we aren't so much coming along on the journey as watching someone else's religious experience from afar. That goes a way toward saying that my experience of the book is that it isn't nearly as gripping or even interesting as it is good -- and this raises a big question for me of what "good" even means, in this context.

But that question will have to wait for another day. I applaud the effort invested in plumbing the shared psychological history of hope and loss which represents not only the best and worst of the West, but also all of our own personal journeys. That it doesn't seem to speak to the heart as much as it seeks, however earnest the effort seems, is the only flaw in what might otherwise be a five star effort.

View all my reviews

[Take a Trip with us... Mythos Media.]

A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History

If you haven't read this book already -- read it. It will likely take a while. I had to look up a great number of terms and details... in the process you will learn a lot about systems theory. But it is well worth the effort.

A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History by Slobodan Velevski

Pick up the book if this format is too hard to read. 

[Take a Trip with us... Mythos Media.]

The Drawings of Laurie Lipton now available

The Drawings of Laurie Lipton is a comprehensive survey of Lipton’s fantastical, meticulously detailed, hand-drawn images. 

Featuring more than 70 works, this is the most conclusive and ambitious publication about the artist to date. A conversation between Lipton and Begovich Gallery Director Mike McGee offers insights into her personal history, motivations and creative process. Lipton’s brief notes about several specific artworks offer further anecdotes and context.

Inspired by the religious paintings of the Flemish School, Laurie Lipton tried to teach herself how to paint in the style of the 16th century Dutch Masters and failed.

When traveling around Europe as a student, she began developing her very own peculiar drawing technique building up tone with thousands of fine cross-hatching lines like an egg tempera painting.

“It’s an insane way to draw,” she says, “but the resulting detail and luminosity is worth the amount of effort. My drawings take longer to create than a painting of equal size and detail.” “It was all abstract and conceptual art when I attended university. My teachers told me that figurative art went ‘out’ in the Middle Ages and that I should express myself using form and shapes, but splashes on canvas and rocks on the floor bored me. I knew what I wanted: to create something no one had ever seen before, something that was brewing in the back of my brain. What I wanted fell between ‘isms.’ It wasn’t ‘surreal,’ it wasn’t ‘real’... it was lurking between the two.”

“I used to sit for hours in the library copying Durer, Memling, Van Eyck, Goya and Rembrandt. The photographer, Diane Arbus, was another of my inspirations. Her use of black and white hit me at the core of my Being. Black and white is the color of ancient photographs and old TV shows... it is the color of ghosts, longing, time passing, memory, and madness. Black and white ached. I realized that it was perfect for the imagery in my work.”

Also catch some of Laurie Lipton's work in The Immanence of Myth and Words of Traitors: 7 Lives in Transition.

[Take a Trip with us... Mythos Media.]

The Complete Voynich Manuscript

At last! The mysterious Voynich Manuscript is available specifically formatted for tablets!

Using the highest quality images available, this complete copy of the codex is perfect for examining on your Kindle.

Custom resized to fit the dimensions of your tablet, will you be the first to crack the code?

[Take a Trip with us... Mythos Media.]

Murakami's The Elephant Vanishes

The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Murakami manages to keep the mind riveted in ways that I don't even fully understand. If most of these stories were pitched to me as an editor, I'd think they were somewhere between banal and stupidly fanciful in the way of a story that a seven year-old might tell. But in his hands, they're transfixing. They'd be transfiguring as well, except that sometimes he leaves you with so little to hold on to at the end of a piece that you're left just with a feeling like "what just happened?"

But then you come back to it a month or ten later and realize that it was transfiguring, and that oftentimes we are the last to know, when it comes to our own change. It is just more subtle than, say, an acid trip, which might grab your head and force you to look at what you'd rather not.

As a writer, I had long thought that the central method of the short story was the revealing, twist ending. "Everything was not as it seemed, but here's the big reveal." I'm happy I've had that illusion dispelled. In fact, with most of these stories, it's quite the opposite. Everything is not as you think it is, but you're left not with a revelation but rather a haunting feeling that won't go away. The depth of our uncertainty is itself unfathomable.

That is, maybe, one of the central themes in much of my own work, but it was only made clear when I had a mirror that let me "see around corners," in Jung's terms. That may seem like a leap for some, but you'll find that a Jungian reading of symbols is relevant for much of Murakami's surrealist ("magical") realism, as is discussed somewhat directly in his book Kafka On The Shore.

The bottom line is that if you are looking for a fascinating, troubling,
deep look at banal reality, this is a great opportunity for it.

View all my reviews

Read a translation online of one of my favorite short stories from this collection, Sleep.

[Take a Trip with us... Mythos Media.]

Summer Reading Offer

Wanted to read Fallen Nation, but never got around to it? Now's your chance. Here's some of what's been said about it (user reviews):

"Wow is my one word for this stunning novel." -Carrie Clevenger

"Fast-paced, well-written, with characters and imagery that grabbed me from the start." -Elizabeth Craig 

"The tagline says it best, "SEX. DRUGS. REVOLUTION. CROSSBOWS.", all things I'd've done well to have kept in mind throughout." -Xjane 

"An anthem for the mutant fringe, and a hell of a wild ride. The characters are instantly memorable, and the events inside are a projection of what could be all too real in the near future." -Tony Cancer

Order either an eBook ($2.99) or paperback ($15) copy of Fallen Nation: Party At The World's End anytime this summer, contact me with subject line "summer reading", and I will send an eBook of the companion piece the 404 Documents. 

[Take a Trip with us... Mythos Media.]

Monsanto vs. The World

Monsanto—one of the largest agriculture and biotech companies in the world—creates genetically engineered seeds and food, or GMOs. They've also brought the world toxic chemicals like DDT, PCBs and even Agent Orange.

But who is Monsanto really? Why do many see them as one of the most evil companies on the planet—and why did 2 million people worldwide just stand up and march against this single company?

Monsanto vs. the World puts to rest the myths and shows the shocking reality. In this meticulously researched, short ebook, which cites nearly one hundred scholarly journals, books, studies, articles, WikiLeaks and even Monsanto's own documents.

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Wittgenstein's Vienna

Wittgenstein's Vienna by Allan Janik
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It is somewhat of a surprise to me, but this may be one of my favorite works of philosophy. The reason why is simple: Wittgenstein's Vienna studies the thought of a particular individual not just on its apparent ground, but also, and possibly more fundamentally, within the context of the culture and history in which it arose. This is something that should be done with many of the thinkers and artists of days past, but Wittgenstein in particular almost demands this treatment.

The proof of this is given in how much he has been misunderstood.

Let me give an example:

"A whole generation of disciples was able to take Wittgenstein as a positivist, because he has something of enormous importance in common with the positivists: he draws the line between what we can speak about and what we must remain silent about just as they do. The difference is only that they have nothing to be silent about. Positivism holds--and this is the essence--that what we can speak about is all that matters in life. Wittgenstein passionately believes that all that really matters in human life is precisely what, in his view, we must remain silent about!" - Paul Engelmann.

I think it has more to do with my stance than some great intellect or anything that my initial reading of the Tractatus -- which in detail I barely understood upon first reading -- is in fact what Wittgenstein had intended, and precisely what many smarter and more famous individuals than myself had completely misunderstood. The last section of the book, which people like Russell though was a sort of throwaway addendum, is in fact the very heart of the matter. And W's later work (touched on in the posthumous Discourses) is not so much a departure from his earlier thought as a clarification about language, which does throw a serious curve ball in regard to the demarcation between that-which-can-be-spoken and that-which-must-be-passed-over-in-silence.

The Tractutus, in other words, is essentially not a work on logic and language, but rather a work on ethics/value/meaning. This thesis is presented very well in Janik and Toulmin's book, and their methodology is such that it wound up being one of the central books in our first investigation of myth, "The Immanence of Myth." (Weaponized.)

View all my reviews

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

The Grand Design - Model Dependent Realism

The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I was a philosophy major undergrad, I wrote several essays, and ultimately my senior thesis, on a premise that is here much more elegantly presented by Stephen Hawking as Model-Dependent Realism. He obviously understands the underlying scientific models better than I do or ever will, though his snide comment that "philosophy is dead" is somewhat ironic considering that this book is essentially a piece of populist scientific philosophy. The most pressing issues for philosophy have changed in the places where the academy isn't still navel gazing, or stuck in Heidegger's lederhosen.

Anyway, enough about that. To the book. My point is that this book doesn't present anything especially new for those of us who have already filled our heads with Berkeley, Hume, Feynman, Einstein, and so on. But that doesn't mean that it isn't worth reading. To the contrary, it is one of the most elegant presentations of the intersection of science and philosophy meant for the public that I've yet encountered. Again with the irony of "philosophy is dead." (Wittgenstein made a similar pronouncement in the wake of his Tractatus. That was published ~1921.)

I highly suggest reading this book because elegance is, as Hawking states, one of the highest values for a theory aside from conforming with observation. I also suggest it because model-dependent realism is a more subtle, more accurate interpretation of relativism that should be burned into the minds of everyone that wishes to work in the sciences, or humanities for that matter. It is not a conclusion or an end point, but rather the starting point from which we can avoid a great deal of wasted effort and ink.

View all my reviews

Want a summary of Model Dependent Realism? Check out this page.

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Our Kind (Book Review)

Our Kind: Who We Are, Where We Came From, Where We Are Going by Marvin Harris
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Marvin Harris argues with such an even-toned sense of consideration that he could probably make the outlandish seem plausible. However, that sort of radical sophistry doesn't seem his aim in this work. Rather, he lays out the varied topics of cultural anthropology along with his thoughts on those matters in a casual way that eschews even the radical framing of his Cannibals and Kings. I found all of his points both worth making and quite possible, even if there is always plenty of room to be incorrect in such matters, no matter how sensible you may sound. (Nor how correct your argument may be -- nature observes no particular need to heed all elegant arguments.)

Regardless of the relative "age" of this book, it is still in my opinion a must-read in any introductory course (academic or otherwise) dealing with the issues of the overlap of culture, biology, evolution, and environment.

View all my reviews

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Sex and Books

I'm happy to see that I'm not the only one with a "hot babysitter reading bedtime stories" fetish. This project is interesting, in addition to the obvious, for pushing ever so slightly at the boundaries of what is considered sexual media. In Philadelphia there is an ongoing project involving attractive women reading stories naked, but I find this project far more interesting, as they are clothed and the texts are chosen by the reader as some of their favorites, rather than being erotica as in the first instance.

Now we just need to figure out how to wire our brains to have orgasms from reading alone, and us authors will have a much easier time selling books!

It’s a beyond sexy project called Hysterical Literature, and the idea is as simple as it is brilliant: gorgeous, gorgeous girls are sitting down at a table, filmed in black and white by one fixed camera, fully clothed in nice outfits. They are reading a passage from one of their favorite books. Under the table, however, something else is happening.
“I’ve been told to dress as I would for a date with a man, not a boy”, remembers Stoya.

Full article. 

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]