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.]

Fallen Nation: Free Chapter

I've been getting back into the spirit of giving away writing for free. Which probably means that the summer heat has been getting to me. All the same, feel free to take advantage of the temporary insanity.

Today's offering is the first chapter of Fallen Nation: Party At The World's End.

Fallen-Nation_PATWE-free by Jamie Lee

Download the PDF.

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Reality, Fiction, and Terrorism

Well, it's happening.

An 18-year-old high school student from the Boston suburb of Methuen is facing two decades in prison, charged with “communicating a terrorist threat.” The young aspiring rapper, Cameron D’Ambrosio, a/k/a Cammy Dee, reportedly posted the following to his Facebook page on May 1, 2013: “Fuck a Boston bomb wait till u see the shit I do, I’m be famous rapping, and beat every murder charge that comes across me!”
Of course, lots of songs have violent lyrics. But that doesn’t make the people who sing them a public menace. (Full article.)

Can't say any of us were especially surprised. Although there's some irony to the fact that he got bagged for those lyrics when rappers like Immortal Technique have been saying things like--

...for years.

This is also one of the themes for Fallen Nation: Party At The World's End and its standalone novella followup, 404 Documents.

Here's a little snippet of chapter 1 from 404 Documents: 

My ‘friend’ Bradley the Buyer once said to me, “If you want to get press attention, don't write a good book. Blow up a mall.” 

It's sad that he was right. Not that I blew up that mall, mind you. I mean, I didn't set the charges. I wouldn't have any clue how to do that kind of thing. I was always zoning out in science class, staring at the dingy floor, eyes unfocused, thinking instead about the broken thermostat in our culture. There was clearly no self regulation. Or maybe that’s where The Buyer comes in. 

I'm getting off topic, right? Because you probably want to know more about this mall, bomb scare thing that made the news, and less about the systemic dynamics of a culture. But that's just how my mind works. Everything is numbers and patterns to me. 

Say you're wearing a plaid shirt, right? And you notice I can't pay attention to a word that you're saying. That's not because I'm addle-minded, though a lot of people think so.
It's because I'm thinking about the mathematical topology of the patches on your shirt, their surface area, the possible relation of numerological and linguistic categorization systems and those deformed surfaces. Your plaid shirt can teach you the theory of relativity, see? But you're not thinking about that. You're thinking about the news stories, the broken glass, the wall of shrieking housewives. 

We live in different worlds, you and I. 

I thought I'd let you know that, if you want to really understand what happened. It wasn't about politics. It was about physics and fate. This is my account of a bombing that never occurred, and the way it ruined my life. Maybe it's a cautionary tale and maybe not, but I assure you at least this much: this is the truth, so far as I recall it. Proceed with caution.
I’ve got to say, I learned a lot about myself, these past few months. All it took was an act of terrorism. ...Or at least, the story about an act of terrorism.

Pick up the eBook for $2.99.

The lines between fiction and reality blend more easily than most people realize, because, after all, all of our "reality" is turned into narrative before it ever reaches us. 

It is a sad reality that literary misunderstandings lead to prison times, to murder, to holy wars. This is the world we live in. 

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Dionysus' Dream

One of the many scenes cut to bring Fallen Nation: Party At The World's End down to its fighting weight. Still a worthwhile entry point...

Brown water spurted out of his mouth, splashing to the grungy deck beneath him. He could place himself even before his eyes opened. The sharp scent of salt on the wind, the sound of seagulls wheeling overhead, the perpetual rocking; how, he didn’t know, but he was on a boat.

Dionysus lay helpless on the deck, his arms and legs mostly bound, looking up at the wheeling seagulls and three of the dirtiest men he had seen in his life. They spoke to each other gruffly but easily.

“Th’ bastard’s gonna live, looks like,” said a scratchy, thin voice. Dionysus cracked open a stinging, briny eye, to see a man in a stained wifebeater kneeling over him. The rubbing of rough hands rattled like dried corn husks in his ears as they bound him with waterlogged rope.

Fallen Nation: The SINopsis

In a world where guilt-by-association is enough to convict for terrorism, two rebellious young Americans are locked in a mental asylum for a crime they didn't commit. Though not terrorists, these two are outsiders in nearly every sense of the word: a transsexual and a transgressive philosopher capable of driving even psychiatrists insane. They are found without ID, only going by the monikers of Jesus and Dionysus. It seems that their stories will end here, wandering the halls and living on anti-psychotics, but for the help of their ingenious friend Loki.

Dreams and circumstances collide as soon as they hit the road. At a bar, they meet a woman who Dionysus insists was in a dream he had in the asylum. Curiously, she introduces herself as Lilith. Thrust onstage through an odd series of events, the bar erupts into chaos. After the show she names the band Babylon, and sets them on a path of debauchery worthy of the name.

Former cop-turned-Marshal Adam Trevino tracks the trail of debauchery they cut across the country. Charged with observing them and reporting their activities back to the shadowy agency that recommissioned him, Trevino begins to wonder who the good guys really are. This uncertainty only mounts as more fans flock to Babylon with cult-like fervor.

This is no peace, love and happiness 60s revival, however. Lilith turns their rock act into the platform for an outright cultural war, with Loki as her chief architect. They steal a mobile TV broadcast vehicle and use it to launch a viral propaganda campaign. Lilith hunts the countryside for other “demigods,” prepared to awaken to their true nature and break the shackles imposed upon them by the forgetfulness of reincarnation. Dionysus also begins to wonder if their monikers are just a coincidence. This feelings grows even stronger as he falls in love with Ariadne, a fan and quickly recruited maenad-in-training. The two of them share a bond that makes them recall fragments of past or future lives together.

When a show leads to a bloody clash between authorities and civilians, Trevino is forced to make up his mind, and leads a group of hired mercenaries into the desert to remove this burgeoning threat to the American way of life, permanently.

However, he doesn’t understand the nature of what he’s up against. The more American blood that is spilled, the more likely a true revolution. To Lilith, believing herself the avatar of an immortal goddess, starting a revolution that will forever change the world just seems like a damn good time.

During this battle, and its aftermath, Trevino discovers the secret behind the nature of these “demigods.” As the story closes, we are left to consider a world very much like our own, but poised on the brink of a great transformation.

Part Fear and Loathing In Los Vegas, part Fight Club and Natural Born Killers, Fallen Nation: Party At The World’s End questions many of our cultural assumptions, makes us re-examine them, and hints at where they might lead.

Get the:

Paperback.
E-book.
Microsite. 

Related: 404 Documents, Words of Traitors. 

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

A Question of Art, Aesthetic, and a Body of Work

From An Interview over at The Dharma of Don talking about writing, publishing, and everything in-between! (Check out his blog) 

Don: The Words of Traitors is published under Mythos Media which is your imprint, if I am not mistaken. What other houses have you published under, and have you succeeded with Mythos Media where you felt you struggled with branding under your own name?

.

The Olde Occult Daze

James: My first book was released through New Falcon Press, who published Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Aliester Crowley, Israel Regardi -- it was because of them I think that I got branded an "occult author" although that isn't really entirely accurate. I've worked on several books since then that have been released by Weaponized, which is a UK based imprint.

You will see most of those books also on the Mythos Media website. We are a brand but it isn't restrictive in the way a traditional publisher might be. For instance, several of the books with the Mythos Media imprint have other publishers, and the film we worked with was through another production house. Mythos Media at the moment is about 90% projects that I've been heavily involved in, but that isn't a rule either.

So there's essentially two things that help me decide what I want to bring in, aside from sheer circumstance. The first is the basic definition:

Mythos: (n) A story or set of stories relevant to or having a significant truth or meaning for a particular culture, religion, society, or other group
Media: (n) Tools used to store and deliver information.

That's probably the one thing we take literally. Mythos also originally meant "by mouth," it is that which is conveyed culturally, as opposed to logos. Any form of media, any story could theoretically come on our radar.

So then there's the 2nd question, which is whether it fits in with the others as sort of counter-culture media. In other words, would they make more sense being listed with a major publisher, or is it a story that would likely show up on prime-time TV? If so, then it's probably not Mythos Media material. There's a bit more about the history of the project on the About page. ( http://www.mythosmedia.net/p/rather-than-avoiding-unsettling-unusual.html )

Band Photo for "EgoWhore"

Don: Can you tell us about your publishing process and how you made decisions on The Words of Traitors? I'm particularly interested in why you chose the size you did, the paper quality, and the type of cover.

James: The print size was a very conscious decision, based on the standard for art books -- though it's within several millimeters of standard magazine size as well. It's funny to me that the standard for our supposedly least and most disposable print media are almost the same, but most standards are historically arbitrary, anyway.

That decision was arrived at as a result of the nature of the art. A lot of it includes dioramas that quite frankly are only fully revealed in their detail at poster size -- I've been running an art show for Words of Traitors that includes canvas prints at 16" x 20" and 20" x 24" size, as well as some of the originals, some of which were larger than that.

A GONZOMENTARY?!

There's no way that it would work at standard paperback size. If it could've made any sense I would've liked it to be even larger than A4, but 11" x 17" is really only feasible if it's hardbound.

What else was intentional... Well, I wanted to make a book that was more about the book itself rather than just the text -- in other words, a book that wouldn't translate well into Kindle format. It's kind of a reaction against the trend, in that way. Not all of my books are like that, certainly, but it was what made sense to me for this one.

I was actually pretty happy with the interior print quality, and that was something of a surprise. I was afraid it was going to be too glossy. It was printed by Amazon directly, and that was the part of the process I had no say in if I wanted to get it out. Paper stock and print process isn't a choice, and full color is so incredibly expensive that at $29.99 our cut is a smaller % than any of our other books. That's how it had to be -- our Indiegogo campaign raised about 1/3 of the goal, so we had to cut back -- a lot of people might have just pocketed the money and said "We'll put it out later," but that's just not how I do things. It did mean that we had to consolidate as much as possible, and it did restrict the scope of what was initially planned.

The full process involved in the book, though. That would take a lot more time and space than the average reader would probably want to take. A single piece of art in the book might have gone back and forth between myself and the artist many times before it was finished. For other pieces, I took art that was sent to me, printed it out myself, and worked it into collages or dioramas that included art I'd made, lit and photographed that, brought it into Photoshop, did a lot of digital painting with the Wacom tablet, and then maybe I'd blend it with one of the textures I'd made.

But I will say that like several Mythos Media projects before, it began with an open call to the internet, as well as to those I've worked with before, in terms of you know, here's a new project we're working on, here is the concept, do you want to collaborate? So there's always an opportunity for new blood. And it starts there...

Fallen Nation: Welcome to the Apocalypse

Welcome to the Apocalypse. A free mini comic based in the Fallen Nation world. 

Illustrated by P. Emerson Williams, written by James Curcio.

Get the mini Free comic. 

The Internet and Counterculture (Acidexia Intro)

As all the chatter about the “2012 end of the world” dissolves back into the white noise from whence it came, we are still presented a unique vantage point. We can look at once backward and forward on cultural trends, cresting and falling so quickly that in mere decades we can see patterns emerging that may have taken hundreds of years to arise before the advent of digital communication.

Of course, there’s no way a thorough investigation of any trend is going to happen here in the length of an introduction, within the time it takes me to sip my way through a mocha. But that is telling of these times as well. As Palahniuk observed through the mouthpiece of Tyler Durden in his seminal book Fight Club, we are all “single serving size friends, here.” (And is it also a sign of counter cultural mentality that a reference to a book and movie just a decade out of the gates might be considered hackneyed or out of date?) Our observations must also be single serving size, crammed into a 140 character tweet, or a 350 word blog post.

All Good Things...

It may have been the 120 oxycodone. It may have been being punched in the throat by a total stranger.It may have been the day I was raped by 10 15 year old boys that laughed when I shit blood. It may have been a thousand other things. But I died yesterday.

Rather... Who I was died. Go to http://www.partyattheworldend.com - go to http://www.joinmycult.org - go to http://www.citizen-y.com go to 404 Documents and start to put together the pieces before writing your own books, making your own movies, paintings -- or whatever it is that you are going to go on to do.

We kill ourselves every day and ask to be re-assembled in the pieces? Please let that life mean something ... but who i was today died today and like all deaths he is not ever coming back no matter how much you wish otherwise. there is nothing more to create here. all the pieces are for you to find in those places. and if you care you will find them there and become one of the children of the new aeon. but this, here, ends right now.

I don't know who comes next. And this flesh may be reborn in new forms. Life is amazing like that. But who I was is no more. So search for him in the pieces I've left for you.

9/11 to High Tide

I'm told our parents celebrated 9/11 like it was some kind of holiday. Fly a plane into a building, years later they'll be having Macy's sales around it. I imagine that if scientists announced that a meteor was hurtling towards the Earth, a whole industry would spring out of it. Pharmeceutical profits would skyrocket. Meteor pills would be all the rage. And the parties. Holy fuck, the parties.

That's now how it happened though. High tide just came on coming, a little each year. We worked our way around it. When the subways flooded, we made barges. Marketplaces moved from street level to the second floor. We banded into groups. I've farmed on rooftops, built windmills out of metal scrap. Not everyone, of course. The transitional generation got it the worst. Unprepared and generally worthless, a lot of them withered away to nothing in the darkness over skinned knees and bruised prides.

I guess we were lucky to be born amongst the garbage and scrap cities. We banded together. We improvised, or we died. I was seven when the news media started reporting the 404 Attacks. Eight when the ever encroaching sea was half-jokingly called High Tide. Fifteen when I decided to be a joiner, changed my name to a number (79, if you're wondering), and started pranking corporations.

And I was twenty one when I met my first demigod. That will take a little explanation though, huh? It started when I met a runaway along the side of the road. The rest I'll piece together from what she told me, and what little imagination I have. Grant this old man some poetic license and come along with me, I've got one bottle of old Scotch left, ...

Fallen Nation Audiobook

Calling all cars!

I've set up the bandcamp to begin releasing the chapters of the Fallen Nation: Party At The World's End audiobook as unique albums (one per chapter). Some old albums and collaborations that tie into the narratives of the novel are included on that page, but the real purpose of that page is for the audiobook albums.

These will have a great deal of original soundtrack material. I already have many hours of material from my work and past collaborations with many other musicians, but there is still plenty of room for new material- your own, or for us to work on together.

I am not aware of anyone else having done an audiobook like this before. (Though it wouldn't stop me if someone has.)

Contact me if you have material you'd like included. It is preferable if you can provide it as .wav or .aif though high res .mp3 can work.

It'd also help if you are actually familiar with the book.

I would also consider voice actors though if you're interested in that, I need reliability. It'll be a real hassle if someone is reading a chapter and drops off the face of the planet halfway through. So if no better and fully reliable options present themselves I'll be reading a lot of it.

Music will all be used under a creative commons license. I'm asking permission to use submissions, not rights to own it. PLEASE include your name as you'd like to be credited in the title of the files, and contact me immediately if when these are released I manage to miss crediting anyone in the shuffle. I try to be very careful on big group projects like this to credit everyone on each relevant item but as these credit lists can get very extensive, a second pair of eyes can't hurt. I look forward to seeing what we can do together!

Time-frame: I'm aiming to have at least the first album released in 2012. The sooner the better.

[Check out some of the books, albums, and soon movies produced by Mythos Media and our various media partners.]

Homeland Security: The Nuke That Wiped LA 404 Attacks

The following is one of the many parts from Fallen Nation that wound up on the cutting room floor. But it still makes for quite an interesting little snippet, especially given that it was written in 2005 ... (Order a copy of the final novel on Amazon.)

Art: P. Emerson Williams

Don hadn’t been to an airport in the past year. It wasn’t an experience he much missed. He wondered how they managed to combine the feeling of a checkout line at a supermarket, a doctor’s office, and a gulag. It was well executed, though to what end was never entirely clear.

For better or worse his mission had been accomplished. He had a nice little chunk of change set aside for himself, so long as he could get out of dodge before someone found out that without his aid, all the social viruses that were biting the establishment in the ass now would have starved themselves to death long ago. It was time for him to find a nice plot of land to lie low in for the next millennium. Thailand seemed ideal. No questions, no pesky laws if you bought off the right cartels.

Lines of people shifted, clutching briefcases close to their bodies. Cordial, preemptive cavity searches had become standard. So had random DNA testing and crosschecking. Cotton swab brushed quickly across the tender inner cheek was all it took, and they could trace almost anything, if the system determined there was cause for a full query.

The group brusquely wading through the crowd was far more troubling.

He warily watched them pass from over the brim of the magazine he wasn’t reading. Ten of them, in black. No badges. Walking proudly, confidently, the pad of their boots on the carpet promising a near eternity of red tape followed by an abrupt death. Definitely a DHS mercenary group. They’d started seeing regular use in the conflicts in Iraq, but had been called in regularly for Homeland Security missions in the time since.

Party At The World's End Video Trailer

New trailer for Fallen Nation: Party At The World's End





Music "Nothing Is Sacred" from HoodooEngine's album Murder The World.

Video/motion and some still work by Daniel Warwick, other still visuals by James Curcio,
rest of the credits at the end of the video. Enjoy, and show your support by picking up a copy!

December 23rd, 2022

(From Fallen Nation: Party At The World's End. Pick up the eBook for $2.99 or paperback for $16.99.)

It would seem Judgment day came nearly eleven years late.
I woke up this morning with the certain knowledge that it would be my last. I have fallen my entire life, as if through empty air. Now I can see the ground rushing up to greet me, and I am almost eager to make its acquaintance.
But it isn’t just me. The world is changing: the tide rises a little each day, never receding. There are terrible floods, fires, hurricanes. Solar storms. The constant catastrophe numbs you to the end result. Then one day you realize you’re about to eat asphalt.
Of all the people in this crumbling city, I had the most warning. I could have fled and started yet another life from scratch. Maybe I could have stood out on the sidewalk wrapped in three layers of thrift store trench coats, showering passersby with prophetic warnings and a plume of spit.


We all had our warnings. This end has been prophesied in our religions, in the newspaper headlines, and in the countless feverish dreams we choose to forget upon awakening. It has even happened before, and it will happen again, when the next civilization comes to its own grinding halt.


At the end of the lifespan of a universe, a culture, a life, it is destroyed, and a new one born. But for it to be born, and for life to be renewed, a divine sacrifice must be made. On the other side is a new dawn, and a new world.

The Party At The World's End Begins... NOW

It's finally here:

• Fallen Nation:
  Party At The World’s End
  is a mad ride past the event horizon of sanity with a group of young, escaped mental patients that come to realize—or believe—that they are demigods.
• They form Babylon, a band that captures the spirit of the age as sex, drugs, and chaos reign in the final years of the American Empire.
• This is the beginning of a modern mythology that spills off the page: the ticket to the Party At The World's End is inside, if you dare to search for it. It starts right here, but it won't end here--
• $16.99 paperback.
• $2.99 eBook. 

Expect more media across various platforms as this thing grows- although there is already an assortment of related myths strewn across the Internet, waiting to be re-discovered.

Fallen Nation: Party At The World's End paperback

The Fallen Nation: Party At The World's End paperback proof was accepted -- looks good! It'll be a few days to a week before the first edition shows on Amazon, another week before it appears through extended distribution networks. I'll announce when it's on Amazon. I hope many of you order a copy, and take this first trip into an alternate history, modern mythology.

(If enough take the first trip, it'll certainly help ensure that there's a second.) 

If you want to order a copy right away, click here. ($16.99) This has the added benefit for me that it puts the most money in my pocket, though I'm not sure if you care about that sort of thing, and I care most about getting people reading it myself. 

And of course, the eBook is available in multiple formats for $2.99. 

Calling On Reviewers!

Got your attention?
Good. 

In the next three weeks, we are putting two books on the market: The Immanence of Myth published by Weaponized, and Fallen Nation: Party At The World's End.

Here's the deal: If you agree to read and review one of these books, I will give you a free eBook version of it. It's an honor system.

We make no stipulations on what that review contains, though I suggest you keep "I love it," "I hate it" out of it. A good review tells people whether they, in particular, will enjoy it or get something useful out of it. If you write a solid review of a book that you hate, it could just as easily tell someone else that they'd love it as hate it. There's no accounting for taste.

Post your review on the relevant Amazon page, Smashwords page (for Fallen Nation), on Goodreads. Any and all of these, and your own site if you have one. By the time you're finished reading it, these sites should all be updated, and the right product should be easy to find with a quick search.

Interested? Email me!

NOTE: The Immanence of Myth will be ready for review in 2-3 weeks. Fallen Nation: Party At The World's End is ready for review now.

Fallen Nation eBook 35% off

2012 Is Just The Beginning.

Fallen Nation Party At The World's End is a mad ride past the event horizon of sanity with a group of young, escaped mental patients that come to realize—or believe—that they are demigods.
They form Babylon, a band that captures the spirit of the age as sex, drugs, and chaos reign in the final years of the American Empire.

Metaphysical spoiler: this book is a modern take on the Bacchae of Euripides, or a practical how-to guide for hedonistic end times cults.

Available now as an eBook in multiple eBook formats
35% Fallen Nation eBook ($1.94) Good for 3 days, get it now!

Coupon Code: ZD88R

Note about reader formats: Though I have tested this version in all the formats by computer, if there are any major errors on your reader - an error that makes it unreadable for you - please report it to me immediately and I will look into fixing it and getting you a fixed version of the book.

Paperback version coming soon

Revolution and Notes From The Underground

By James Curcio
I've written some about how Euripides' The Bacchae was an early inspiration in the writing of Fallen Nation. However, there are many more, some of which have only become more clear to me at the end of the writing process. I'm not sure exactly how that works, but I've found time and again that I stumble upon something that seemed to inform a project I was working on, which I was in the past only loosely aware of... and now I've finished the thing and suddenly these cultural pointers are there, tangible to me as my hand.

So this leads me to ask if any of you know about the Weather Underground? Named after that line from a Dylan tune, ("You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows") the WUO were a "radical left" organization that seemed to use white guilt to crystallize the need for revolution. Not so much on the methodology, but culturally, the forces that created the WUO couldn't have been far from our minds when dreaming up the fictional side to the Mother Hive Brain.

Here is a rather good documentary on the Weather Men which is available free online. Watch the whole documentary on YouTube, it's also available on Netflix On-Demand.

Skilluminati Research has an excellent write up on a figure that had connection with this organization, using more methods sanctioned by the need to counter fascist order with blind chaos, Ronald Stark :

"He had a mission, he explained, to use LSD in order to facilitate the overthrow of the political systems of both the capitalist West and communist East by inducing altered states of consciousness in millions of people. Stark did not hide the fact that he was well connected in the world of covert politics." ("article.)

Perhaps this Batman-esque weaponized hallucinogen campaign tickles our wicked imagination, however, when a rebellion is fought as a reaction to violence, violence seems a paradoxical choice. My stance on this issue is not a straightforward one. It's doubtless that not only is there a "time and a place" for revolution, but more importantly, there are times where to do anything but revolt is a crime against one's own humanity. That said, most of the options available to the average citizen amount to petty crime, and are unlikely to result in positive change. As toothless as pacifist rebellion can be, violent rebellion will always spiral out of control or burn itself out, leaving rubble in its wake. We say missiles and bombs can't bring freedom to Iraqis - they can't bring it to Americans, either.

Escape Artist

By James Curcio

This past year, I've completed three book-length projects. I've blogged I don't know how many pages of articles on this and other sites. Though I have many other writing projects on my mind for the future, I have been feeling my brain changing gears. Or maybe it isn't my brain, maybe it's little robots or aliens that control my creative output. How would I know? I wouldn't.

Regardless, whatever it is that controls these things, I can feel the frequency shifting. I'm burned out on writing for the time being and am feeling my auditory and visual circuits turning on.

That's not to say that they've been off - the past two years I've worked on two albums for HoodooEngine and a bunch of early material for the soundtrack for a movie that didn't make it to post production. But I've really been focused on writing. It's where my head and my heart have been at. And suddenly, they're just not.

Shifts like this tend to go across the board for me. I find myself humming melodies and harmonies along with the music I'm listening to more, I find myself bursting into tears seemingly spontaneously from particularly beautiful pieces of music. Writing and even speaking have become more of a chore.

This isn't new to me. I think it goes along with having your head in so many places at once. The bulb burns out if you focus too much on one area, and you need to give it a little time and replace it.

This past week I went to see Zoe Keating at World Cafe Live in Philly. While waiting for her show, I had the luck to happen upon Dustin O'Halloran and several other musicians performing his pieces. (His was one of the pieces that has recently made me cry, if you're wondering. The other is Beethoven's 7th 2nd movement, which Zoe randomly "covered" in her show, though it had been stuck in my head for nearly a week at that point.)

Rather than give you a lot of words, here are some samples of their work:

Dustin O'Halloran - Opus 28 from Dustin O'Halloran on Vimeo.

Opus 28 Dustin O'Halloran live in Berlin

Zoe Keating performing Escape Artist

My posting here may show this shift of focus, consisting more of media and less of long passages of text. We will see. I named this post after Zoe's piece because the theme is similar. She explained at the show that it was about being evicted from a shared studio space in urban San Fran, and moving to the country, and wondering what she was doing there... and moving back to the city... and wondering what she was doing there. I feel a bit like that right now. And I also know what it is like to lose group spaces. I used to be part of a collective in upstate NY that had several rather large shared A/V studios. Many days I think, if we only had access to that space and that equipment now... But space and equipment is expensive to keep. Art rarely pays what it costs. It's an addiction that some of us can't help but feed, or learn to feed. Or die. So, moving on--

If you're curious what I'm looking towards...

As many of you know Citizen Y: Blueprint Of A Ritual Experience has already been released on Amazon. An eBook version will be available on Weaponized shortly. The Immanence of Myth is down to the wire now, and should be on Amazon by August at the latest. There is a fair chance I will have an announcement to make shortly about the publication of Fallen Nation: Party At The World's End and the release of HoodooEngine's Murder The World. All of that combined represents the substantial bulk of my focus the past few years, and will free me up to look towards new projects -- when I'm not trying to promote those works, of course.

I'm thinking about starting a new music project that allows me more freedom of emotional expression than HoodooEngine does. Don't get me wrong, I love working on HE, but I wouldn't describe any of it as particularly beautiful, or haunting. HE songs aren't landscapes, they don't breathe. They are by design like an angry locomotive or hive of bees, buzzing in your head with unrelenting hate. BEE HATE. I'm hoping I can collaborate with some old friends on this new project, including Molly Zenobia, whom I played guitar for back in college. (Or maybe I'll join up on something she's working on already. I don't know yet.)

Maybe I'll only collaborate with women on this next one. It'd be some sort of weird inversion of the energy of HE. It's too early to say.

I will also be giving more attention back to Nyssa, the prequel to Fallen Nation, once I can get FN off my plate. It is another modern myth, with more of a dark fairy tale feel to it. At the same time, I intend to begin a web video series for FN as I look towards trying to get a related feature film produced.

Finally, I will be helping Daniel edit season 1 of the Gonzomentary: Clark so we can release it on DVD and re-release the episodes online, and look towards working on season 2, "Tito's Place."

Oh yeah. Of course, we will continue to run content here, however the nature of that content shifts over time.

Amidst all of this, as if that wasn't enough, I need to figure out how I'm going to be eating and paying rent in months to come. All in all it looks to be an eventful summer, though whether it is productive or a complete catastrophe always remains to be seen. I hope you continue along for the ride, and help support the work we're all doing here with your pocketbooks as well as all the complements. (Much as I love them, they don't keep the lights on.)


Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011. (Or sign up to be notified of its release on Amazon.com)