WESTERN CULTURE, 2000 AD

by Guido Mina di Sospiro 

Prophets are the incarnation of a dilemma. Their message is quintessentially esoteric, yet they are driven to make it exoteric. As all dilemmas, this cannot be solved, and the usual outcome is the immolation or downfall of the prophet, unless exceptional circumstances temporarily suspend this predicament. Moreover, that there should be the initiate (the prophet) and the uninitiate (the disciples), has become a rather indigestible concept.

Indeed, traditional values such as the teacher-disciple relationship, training, patience, methodicalness, and constancy, have been lost in the sacred and profane spheres alike. For example, in the figurative arts, think for a moment of Jackson Pollock, who based his life’s work on trying to reproduce in paint the patterns made by his long-lost father urinating on stone. Such paintings, to which I used to refer, perhaps flatteringly, as “unappetising spaghetti”, are on display in many major museums the world over. Clearly, this is not the environment for Cimabue to say to his pupil Giotto, “You have surpassed your teacher.”

And yet, a “prophetic” forum such as this, one that rethinks one’s basic assumptions, feels the duty to promote and divulge esoteric ideas into the public domain. But, what is the state of  popular western culture in the year 2000?

The Theater of Ultra-Violence

On last Wednesday, a man approached a couple talking on a patio, a man and a woman. It became apparent that the two were News reporters. How they spoke, the too put-together clothes and makeup all gave it away. We see the scene in the first person, as if we’re watching Half-life or Call of Duty. This sense is increased when the point of view pulls a guns and fires repeatedly into the bodies of three reporters.

So runs Bryce Williams’ video footage that was discovered on social media minutes after the shooting. Traumatic real world violence, performed for the camera both on live TV and social media. We discovered his account moments before CNN did, so I didn’t know what I would find when I clicked it.

When I saw it, for a moment, I couldn’t believe it was real. This is a common reaction even in the midst of real violence — somehow the surreal cuts in. But soon I lost myself in my job as an editor — getting the story up, seeing it’s updated, pushing to social media, reacting to the reactions…

Nevertheless, this troubling sense of cognitive dissonance grew through the day. Especially as I heard all the same narratives over and again on CNN that always follow a violent tragedy. When we talk about psychology we are always talking about the killer’s motive. Were they a loner, a disgruntled worker, a jilted lover? But we never hear a dialogue about mass psychology, or about our relationship with violent media that gets past this surface level. We never talk about how we are all a part of this theater.

So, I don’t want to talk directly about what happened yesterday. Instead, I want to explore the related, larger issues in a way that never seems to get on the news. And maybe that’s because it’s too complicated, or that it doesn’t have simple answers. Those aren’t good enough. It’s a conversation we should be having.

Let’s begin not with the violent act itself but in the fall out, and how we talk to each other about traumatizing media.

Full article

All It Takes Is The Right Story. Mythos Media

Beyond the Black Rainbow

Beyond the Black Rainbow

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Hollywood Garbage: The Mechanization of Desire

I might be in the minority on this, but so many movies these days feel like they should at least be mindless fun, but instead they're just mindless.

Pacific Rim, Superman, Transformers part who-gives-a-fuck, Teenage Mutant Ninja Whatever, etc. It's a little depressing that we're all hailing Guardians of the Galaxy as the artistic and spiritual apex of humanity because it wasn't just a 3 hour long lens flare, though it does serve as a terrific case-in-point for how the vacuity of recent Blockbusters is not in the concept. Even a talking Raccoon can be relate-able if handled right.

This is where "long form" (what else can we call TV shows that often aren't aired on TV?) has been stepping up to the plate. True Detective, House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, etc. have been capitalizing on the desire for stories that are, well, stories. Something more than a Pavlovian repetition of set up, conflict, resolve over and over again.

That is all most pornography aspires to, and that's what makes the new normal tent-pole movies pornographic. Clearly it's not nudity or cum shots. No, it's the reduction of desire to a machine like repetition. The mechanization of desire is its own annihilation. The same metric that is being used to gamify all human behavior creates the deep structure of Hollywood screenplays. There's a reason, after all, that all these movies begin to feel the same, despite the fact that the concepts are different on paper. The underlying structure is fundamentally the same, with increasingly minor variations.

Of course we can expect this, with the amount of financial risk that is presented by movie production. Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to reduce that risk, by falling back on predictions we can make from our own hard-wired responses? This basic idea is of course nothing new, it goes back to Aristotle, possibly before. And there is, thankfully, a great deal of uncertainty about the big picture in terms of those hard-wired responses. What, after all, is "human nature"? That's a surprisingly complicated question in the macro-scale abstract, but it's fairly straight-forward and easy to test on a micro- scale.

Adorno was skeptical about the implications of myth and propaganda, as all of us ought to be. And yet when you search for analysis of gamification, script writing, and game design, you will mostly find Utopian visions of gamification as method of "hacking our own nervous system." Yet, restrictive as it may be, we may want to look to Adorno's analysis of television and ideology, critical models, myth and the Dialectic of Enlightenment before we proclaim our ability to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps in such a way. (There is nevertheless some irony in the "long form" being one of the most open and creative entertainment mediums at the moment, considering stereotypes of television that existed, and which were more or less accurate, as recently as a decade ago.)

Flipping this on its head, we might wonder about literal pornography. If it is the application of mechanical commodity that makes pornography, rather than the presence of sexual content, then we have a handy shorthand for the much sought after dividing line between erotica and pornography. It is not the presence of sexual content, it is not whether ones desire is engaged, but rather whether that desire is an end in itself, and whether that end, ultimately, has been mechanized as the root commodity of the media-as-product. There's some difficulty in discussing erotica, let alone producing it, without some patina of pretension, and yet there it is: erotica exists as something more than just its own ends. Perhaps what that is will remain as nebulous as the distinction between self, soul, and brain matter. But if we ignore it, then there is nothing in this world to keep us from nihilism, and nothing that might keep us from the horror of the simulacra, the anonymous self-less repetition, every one of us nothing more than a mask strapped atop a void.

Also, it's pretty hard to argue with a good pair of tits. Even the most craven pornography has that on the average PG-rated Hollywood Blockbuster.

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The Act of Killing

“Behind every work of art lies an uncommitted crime” 

― Theodor W. Adorno

For once, actually true. 

Fiction can often get us closer to reality than the approach of non-fiction. Narratives so often conceal, and the very meaning of the word myth has been subsumed by this idea of the "narrative that is a lie." But, as we've so often explored on this site, this isn't the whole picture.

In fact, it's deeply misleading. Because the reality we live most intimately inside is the world of our own narrative, it is through narratives that we can be brought closest to the prima materia, without ever being able to fully say what it is outside its own context. A narrative exists only on its own terms. The further you are removed from that, the less vital it is likely to be. The more removed, the more easy to use it as a tool of deception.

For as much as narratives can bring us close to the blood of life, it is less of a mystery how they can be used to distort, to deceive, to fabricate. The tarot symbol of the Magus (and Hermes, the God most cognate) can lead us into greater understanding of both sides of this bi-valent truth. It is with logos rather than mythos that the Magus creates the illusions that form the world, but it is nevertheless world from word. The most primal and fundamental magic.

This bi-valence is intrinsically linked to what Horkheimer and Adorno called "the dialectic of Enlightenment." They were speaking more specifically of the rise of Nazism when they said “Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology," but it was nevertheless to this truth that they were speaking, that myths create false histories, they support the very sort of premises that served as justification for the now famous genocide that happened in factories of death such as Auschwitz and Dachau.

Similarly, there is a narrative that has been used to cloak the true history of a less famous genocide, that of Indonesian communists in the mid-60's. The sheer genius of the hard-to-watch, essential viewing of The Act of Killing is a recognition of this dialectic, that narratives can both conceal and reveal.

How so? The director, Joshua Oppenheimer, approached some of the very people that collectively murdered hundreds of thousands of people—erased them so completely that their side of the story could not be told. They understood the grim truth behind the saying, "history is told by the victors." Yet so often the murderer must give themselves away because if there is no one left to speak, then who is there to gloat? Oppenheimer, it would seem, recognized the banal egoism that lies at the heart of those that kill for personal gain.

He approached them, and he said: let's make a movie. Rolled into that would be the true story of what they did at the time. What resulted is one of the most disturbing, one of the most surreal, and one of the most effective documentaries I have ever seen.

Later, Kongo, ....was surprised to find that his "Arsan dan Aminah" had reportedly been renamed "The Act of Killing" by Oppenheimer.
"Oppenheimer has never contacted me about changing 'Arsan dan Aminah' to 'The Act of Killing'. Frankly, I found out about it only recently, after the film had already been shown in the Toronto Film Festival," said Kongo with irritation, smoking a clove cigarette. The tall and slim man pointed out that he and Oppenheimer had agreed not to widely publicise the film, because in the beginning it had only been intended as part of the latter's thesis. (Article)

(For those having a hard time tracking it down, it can be viewed at here. For those who have Netflix, the full movie is available free streaming.)

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Strange Factories: The Imaginari

Strange Factories 2014 tour details coming soon...

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Bedlam Stories, (origins)

After my upcoming move back to the Hudson Valley, I'm going to be digging into the 'origins' story for Pearry Teo's movie / transmedia franchise Bedlam Stories. If you'd like to follow along with the project -- and/or have an interest in a horror take on myths such as Oz and Alice In Wonderland -- then like the Facebook group!

Here's some of the concept art so far (click the images for credits and more project info):

This Is Going To Make Marchel Duchamp's 'Fountain' look like a urinal.

Gonzomentary Selected for Philadelphia Independent Film Festival

"Clark: A Gonzomentary is a whole bucket of crazy, and I really enjoyed it for all of its insanity."
- Filmthreat review.

Clark: A Gonzomentary, a movie that keeps growing (like a cancer) and from which I can't escape (like a tiger cage in Vietnam), has been officially selected to screen at the 6th annual Philadelphia Independent Film Festival, June 26th - 30th, 2013.

Trailer: 

Can't make it to the screening? 

Why not watch the early-release cut of the movie on YouTube. 

The version to be screening has been shortened ~10 min and the sound has been improved.

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Words of Traitors (trailer 1)

ORDER THE BOOK NOW

A full color illustrated book available now from http://www.mythosmedia.net -

Hope and faith, sex and death, excess and deprivation, loss. An illustrated collection of treacherous memories. These dark modern fairy tales will stick with you long after you've put the book down.

"Beautiful!" -David Mack, (Kabuki, Daredevil, Dexter.) Full color art by an international collection of artists.

Trailer 1:
Editorial: James Curcio.
Art: James Curcio. Alexey Andreev.
Music: Scott Landes.

Muscles, Fire, Guns, the New Frontier and Inner City Savages! - the Right Wing Mythology of Eighties' Action Films

By Jimi Thaule

"We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it's obscene!"

Colonel Walter E. Kurtz - Apocalypse Now

The eighties was the last decade of the Cold War, a decade dominated by the presidency of Ronald Reagan and his second term vice president George Bush – elected as Reagan's successor in 1988. Another significant feature of the decade was the American action film, which had its golden age in the eighties and nearly died out once the Cold War ended. As the nineties and the Clinton years progressed action films were reduced to action comedies, and only recently have we seen a resurgence of the type of action films we saw in the eighties – in particular with Stallones' tribute film the Expendables and its anticipated sequel.

There have been rumors that Expendables 2 would be rated PG13 to ensure Chuck Norris' involvement. Chuck Norris of course is known for his right wing conservative christian politics as well as his involvement in several classic action films – notably the Missing in Action series. While wholesale slaughter seems to be fine with conservatives, blasphemy is not.

Before turning to politics Reagan was an actor, and while he mostly starred in b-comedies it seems fitting that the decade dominated by his policies would also see a great number of films espousing conservative ideals and myths. Some of them far to the right of even the most conservative Republican.

Let's take a look at the action films of the eighties, to which Expendables plays loving tribute. While the action film is as old as the Tinsel Town itself eighties action was unique in its portrayal of steroid enhanced muscle men fighting small wars single handedly, and espousing conservative values. We're talking Sylvester Stallone, Charles Bronson, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Chuck Norris of course -as well as Jean Claude VanDamme, Dolph Lundgren and many others. In order to understand the action film of the eighties we have to start about a decade earlier, with Clint Eastwood and his lauded interpretation of the role "Dirty" Harry Callahan in 1971 - a movie that spawned a handful of sequels and changed the face of action films forever.

Outsider Artist Gonzomentary Free Movie

The free movie length version of "the world's first Gonzomentary" has been released! (Rough cut).

“Gonzomentary” is an ongoing web series project which began as a gonzomentary “reality” show surrounding the struggles of an independent artist who influences change in the art underground with his phallic art.

Get out the popcorn and crack pipes, and share it round.



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

The Story of a Transmedia Revolution: (Part 2) The Story Wars

The Rise and Fall of a Story-Showing Empire

By Peter Usagi

The Transmedia Revolution has begun!
Which side will you join?
An empire of greedy corporate media cartels?
Or an ancient and mysterious order of storytellers...
Image via Panicposters

After years of study, I've come to realize that contemporary storytelling—books, film, television (and to a significant extent, even live theater)—are a completely passive medium.  They are narratives that lack interaction and any kind of participation from their audience.  These mass-produced mediums of entertainment are more appropriately labeled "story-showing,” then storytelling.

People often wonder why there isn’t anything "new" in Hollywood.  Why is it that every movie, TV show, and most popular literature, tastes like reheated "leftovers" disguised with some kind of mystery sauce?  It’s because after a century of industrialization, we've become indoctrinated as a species of “story consumers.”

We’ve been raised to passively swallow the shallow narratives presented to us in our extended childhoods; schizophrenic mythologies filled with stories that have no depth, meaning, or purpose--other than to entertain (or perhaps more sinisterly, distract).

All of our modern entertainment (all of our stories) are almost entirely mono-active.

Our “entertainment industry” is simply a convenient medium for a 24/7 multimedia stream of consumer subconsciousness—peppered every fifteen minutes with commercials, product placement, and other forms of materialist propaganda.  Even traditional literature has become a victim to this malaise.  

The Lost Art of Storytelling

Parents who "tell” stories to their children, usually aren't really “telling” them.  They’re reading them word for word from a book; an example of modern mono-active story-watching.  Unless the child occasionally takes control of the narrative, thus making it interactive (I.E. "No, Red Riding Hood had a cell phone, and she called the cops on that mean nasty wolf!") the true immersive, and transitive aspects of storytelling are neutered, or even entirely absent in our modern fictions.

Is modern media a "big bad wolf" that
devours creativity and imagination?
Image via Wikipedia

If you put your book down, and “tell” a story to your audience (instead of read it), something about your story will always change, each and every time you tell it.  Unless, of course (as you’ll find in live theater), you have your lines memorized.

This is because even when you tell the same story (with the identical characters and plot),  you’ll always be a different person each time you tell it, and so will your audience (even if they’re the same people):

If you told a story to a group of recent college grads (while they were partying around a campfire in the middle of the wilderness) the crazy things you did to get into your career field…would that story be identical to the one you told to a classroom of second graders, the day after you lost your job?

If this is the case, does "storytelling" in its interactive sense, still exist in today's society?  Perhaps...

Thanks to new combinations of divergent media platforms, a new kind of storytelling is on the rise.  One that recognizes the importance of engaging an increasingly distracted and impatient audience: transmedia.

What's Your Story?

What's Your Story? - Aryan Kaganof from one small seed on Vimeo.

I first encountered Aryan's work when I was editor for Alterati.com. Every now and then he sends me what he's up to- he sent this to me a few months ago but I've been so immersed in working on all these modern myth projects that it got lost in the shuffle. And resurfaced today, and woah.

Enjoy.

A definitive leader in the digital revolution in cinema, he was the first filmmaker across the globe to produce a digital feature film on video up to 35 mm with his release of naar de klote / wasted in 1996. Three years later, he took this process to Japan to produce the first-ever Japanese digital feature, entitled Shabondama Elegy aka Tokyo Elegy.

Aryan is also famed for making the world’s first mobile feature film sms sugar man in 2007. Recently he has produced the highly controversial The Uprising in Hangberg; a documentary that presents substantial evidence that metro police used unprovoked force when arriving in Hangberg on 21 September 2010 to tear down informal houses built on a fire break.

At times suspended naked, blood smeared and silhouetted by hostile global images, Aryan Kaganof’s work reminds us of the fragility of humankind. A subjective voyeur, he’s prolific. And he’s watching YOU.

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

Climate Change? Or Unburied Dead? Going Beyond Science to Understand 'Twisters'

By Wes Unruh


It is impossible to look through the images of the Joplin tornado aftermath without a sense of withering smallness - the landscape is rage and tinder, a barren warzone and is photographed as such again and again.

I know the running debate is - essentially - that this is either a result of climate change or somehow associated with the increase in temperature from the gulf of Mexico as a result of the oil spill changing the water's refractivity or some such scientific shit. But the truth is it's ghosts. Angry, bitter, and unburied dead raging and raging across their lost lands.

Bear in mind that I'm making poetic, intuitive leaps in the paragraphs below, tied together with the barest threads of balderdash and shinola - and I do not want to make light of anyone's suffering - in fact I'm promoting Denver Band Relief and their communal effort to put together music shows to benefit a number of victims. This isn't about blaming the victims, it's about laying to rest the unburied dead.

This is not 'fact' in the strictest sense, but it has a kind of truth, something classified in other blogs as a synchromystical truth, which here I will relay only as a kind of modern myth - unmoored from djinn and religion and anchored in the very rooting sense of the fabric of this United States cultural dementia and hallucinations in honoring and sealing away the dead improperly: I do not know this but I feel it, and it overwhelmed me enough that I put that raw sense into poetry to capture, honor, and lay to rest the violent unburied ghosts who's dance is erasing whole cities from the landscape; a laser-tight eraser marking out the suburb, the rural, broken and betrayed landgrab, this ghost dance raises storm giants, thunderbirds. Capturing this in prose is hard enough, I warred with the tumultuous nature of these visions to hold it down in poetry as 'Outcry This Dark Story' which is a significant portion of the poetry contained in 'The End of the Word As We Know It' (coming out soon thanks to Weaponized.net)

If this is true, there must be some reason. I started with the impossible hypnagogic hallucination of a vortex intermingling, where narrative bleeds through that fourth wall familiar to magicians and actors which blows to smash the tradition and rote of assigned roles and can even falsify memory, a maddening space where nature re-asserts itself as thee primal mover, and driven by the void - a void of memory, broken treaties, and trails of tears.

A Rupture in the Continuum of Time: To Transcend Without Transcendence (kairos)

The essay entitled “In the Time of Fascist Desire,” written during my first semester of graduate study, was not only significant as the first time the problematic of kairos took center stage in my work. Rather,  the task of “the constructing a secular concept of kairos” answered to the exigency of proposing an answer to the following question posed by Deleuze & Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus:

What makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or micropolitical power…only microfascism provides an answer to the global question: Why does desire desire its own repression, how can it desire its own repression? ...It’s too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective.[1]

Thus, from the outset, kairos had to be thought in connection to desire – eros – a conceptual linkage for which there is much support – for the answer was to claim that the experience of time toward which all desire tends is the interruption of indifferent, chronological time, by a qualitatively distinct moment, kairos. Furthermore, in Eric Michaud's “Nazi Architecture as an Acceleration of Time” (1993) and The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany (published in French as: Un Art de l'Eternité: L'image et le temps du nationale-socialisme: 1996;  English translation: 2004), and in Klaus Theweileit's Male Fantasies (Volume 1: 1977; English translation 1987), there was much to be found that suggested a linkage to the domain of aesthetics – art, architecture, photography and film appeared to be instrumental in evoking such an experience of time and in providing some amount of satisfaction to desire. According to the logic of kairos, first presented in the essay in question, this evocation can only ape kairos, for the architecture of Nazi Germany, for example,“ made the monument as messiah for an impatient community, the heralded new man who came when summoned to liberate the community from time, who came to put an end to its waiting.” [2] If, however, a moment worthy of the name kairos cannot be objectively distinguished from any other time, how then can it be distinguished with certainty from pseudo-kairos? The true from false messiahs? Furthermore, this indicates that kairos is not only emergent but effective in history and in politics, as Paul Tillich writes:     

Kairos ...was used not only by the religious socialist movement in obedience to the great kairos... but also by the nationalist movement, which, through the voice of Nazism, attacked the great kairos and everything for which it stands. The latter use was a demonically distorted experience of a kairos [3] and led inescapably to self-destruction. [4]

Strange Factories

FoolishPeople is proud to announce the production of their first feature film Strange Factories, a psychological thriller written by John Harrigan and directed by Richard Webb and John Harrigan.

In an unnamed country, a storyteller possessed by an idea for a new fable searches for four lost friends, all refugee performers of a theatre destroyed in a mysterious fire. Sam, who is obsessed with dangerous stage effects, Jessica, a glamorous femme fatale, Hettie, a clown who hides a secret and Rose, who has sacrificed her life to art.

Victor believes their unique skills will help him complete work on a story he fears is fast becoming a paradox.

He finds his friends in a remote, pagan village founded by Stronheim; the owner of a Strange Factory hidden deep in the local countryside, infamous for the frequencies of sound it emits. Inadvertently, Victor enters into a dangerous pact when Stronheim makes a proposition to build a new theatre for the performers, if Victor reaches the heart of his story in time for it to be performed at the village festival.

The key to the group’s success lies in unravelling the truth of a mysterious fiction and learning how it relates to the customs of the villagers: bizzare rites practiced under influence of a hallucinogenic effluence siphoned out of the Strange Factory and served at the local pub.

Emotional geography and psychologically fractured history merge in a landscape haunted with dreams and nightmares of kidnapped actors, hideous monsters, invisible escape artists and ghosts of audiences past, present and future.

All milestones lead to Strange Factories.



Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.

Modern Pop-Culture Identity: 30 Seconds Myth and Mima

By James Curcio

In a world where we are expected to play a variety of conflicting roles, in which our lives are all interconnected, broadcast and dissected, we invariably develop situational identities. We are not one person, we are many people who go by the same name.
Though all of us deal with this in varying ways as we go through life, nowhere is it more of an issue than in pop culture. The long list of psychologically and emotionally fractured ex-teen stars is ample proof. “Who are you?” Mima asks of herself, in Perfect Blue. It is her first line in our ‘play within a play.’ It is a question that really seeks no answer, instead expressing the complete lack of a frame of reference.
Over a decade after its release some of the devices of this film may now seem old – websites pretending to portray the ‘real life’ of pop idols, obsessive paparazzi, frothing J-pop fans – however, many of the questions explored by Perfect Blue remain as vital as ever. In fact, it is possible they have become even more so as the line between reality and fiction continues to blur.
This is no new phenomenon. Consider 30 Seconds To Mars. The only good thing about their myth, or their "modern myth," are the wild gesticulation a sane mind has to go through to make sense of the explanations that have been given for the band's name. 

"[The band's name] actually comes from a thesis that the band found online that was written by a former Harvard professor. And one of the subsections of the thesis was titled 'thirty seconds to mars' and he goes on to talk about the exponential growth of technology that relates to humans and saying that we are quite literally thirty seconds to mars. What it means to us is, we thought it best described our music, in short."

Huh. So they're transhumanists, from the sound of it? That seems... improbable. If you take five seconds to listen to the music, and if the capillaries in your head don't pop and swell in a desperate attempt to seize hold of your brain and for the love of sanity STOP, it's hard to imagine they've evolved beyond human. Not that any of us have. Leto tried to explain it another way on their website, 

"For us, the name 30 Seconds To Mars has little to do with space, the universe or anything like that. It is a name that works on several different levels. Most importantly, it is a good representation of our sound. It's a phrase that is lyrical, suggestive, cinematic, and filled with immediacy. It has some sense of otherness to it. The concept of space is so overwhelming and all encompassing I doubt there is a song written that doesn't fall within it."

Maybe what they mean is that if you attain enough caffeine in your bloodstream, you feel like you've reached that singularity. In July 2010 the band won "Best International Band" at The Relentless Energy Drink Kerrang! Awards 2010. That's the name of an award now? Holy fuck. I think I should've won that award, too. 
I'm not trying to bash on Jared Leto's acting, or on the fact that "modern myth" hasn't evolved outside the manufactured pop alt culture it grew in, I just want to understand what it is about the boy band formula that still works after all these years. 
I know that'll get 30 Second To Mars fans railing. I know you have your Echelon, but look, the mechanism of attraction is the same. The thing that brought you to them is the same idol and icon worship that takes place in boy bands, it's just shooting a few years older and to a different demo, which includes boys that want to identify with their protagonist: the lead singer. 
How is it that the same things can be tweaked and recycled for so long, and still hold a grip? That, maybe, is the modern myth in their song: "To buy the truth, And sell a lie." As each generation grows, corporations get a better insight into what they react to at various stages of development. The marketing process can be refined. To the old and enfeebled, it seems like it is a dumbing down, but more likely, they are instead seeing themselves slowing down. The mechanism of desire and identification remains the same. 


30 Seconds To Mars is just another one of those bands, you know? It isn't 30 Seconds to singularity, though. It's 30 seconds of fame until their skin is flayed off and sewn over the next flavor of the moment. Except Jared has an exit strategy with a solid acting career, and maybe that's another little tidbit to pull from this: these days, even rock stars need an exit strategy and a backup job. It also helps to have a cult, I mean uh, street team. (Jared Leto said the following "Some people ask us if this is a cult, I say this,it's something special, it's not for everyone, it's only for those who understand.")

However, it is rare that we take a step back and think about how all of these things are symptoms of underlying identity crisis, a crisis that actually transcends most of our other sexual, cultural or racial boundaries. The teen idol, acting out the pre-scripted, cut-out role, and their screaming fans are united in their lack of intrinsic identity. The former plays to the expectant dreams of the latter, yet neither of them actually are that illusion. When it shatters, there is nothing there. Playing to the expectation of a lover is ultimately no different than playing to the hopes of the audience. It is all acted in the mirror.
Is she Mima the pop star? Mima the actress? Mima the shy girl who loves her tetra fish? Unless if pantomiming is all it takes, the answer is “no.” She is none of the above. What about Jared Leto the actor? Can we say the same of his Modern Myth? 
“Who are you?” Mima asks herself, never really finding an answer. Everyone in the film is united in their desire to be this perfect idol. This is the reality Perfect Blue gives us a glimpse of, although you see it anytime youturn on the television. Japanese or American, all of our cultures seem to meet at this crossroad: we are a planet of voyeurs. (An extended version of this piece will be in The Immanence of Myth.) 
 Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.

Y: AN IMMERSIVE MEDIA EVENT

We encourage all good citizens to sign up for the show. You will be housed within a wonderful Haze Treatment Facility and undergo unique psychological treatment, which will clear away the illness of individuality. This reprogramming will be broadcast to the eyes and ears of citizens in our New World, populated with previous contestants and patients. This is a reality show unlike any other!

There is a secret that haunts Haze01, the original treatment facility. Two patients, locked deep within its walls, contain archetypes that reject all reprogramming. They channel portents and omens of another future, a world where myth and divinity remake reality, manifesting a planet fit for Gods.

In this season of the Y show, the doctors of the facility make their final attempt to process these two patients, before they break free and unleash total anarchy. Tune in.

TICKETS AVAILABLE NOW

Presented by:

DPRGRM, PILOTLITE, MYTHOS MEDIA & FOOLISHPEOPLE PRESENT Y

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

DPRGRM, PILOTLITE, MYTHOS MEDIA & FOOLISHPEOPLE PRESENT

"Y"

In a post-apocalyptic world, Y is a documentary-style reality show where the grand prize is the future of our species on planet Earth.

Mythos Media and FoolishPeople will join with DPRGRM/Pilotlite to create 'Y', a feature film that starts shooting in Los Angeles July 2009.

LOS ANGELES, CA 02/27/09 – DPRGRM/Plotlite announced a project today that forges a new path in independent cinema by bringing together real world experience and film in a unique way. 'Y' brings an audience inside the creation of a modern myth. The audience will become actual cast members, and be immersed in the story in real time. The film crew will also be part of the story as well as part of the cast, therefore creating a total immersive experience that bridges the traditional proscenium of audience/performer.

The ambitious staging and shooting technique is enhanced by the premise that in the future, government facilities, such the as one depicted in this film, will have to turn to unorthodox means of funding, such as contracting the facility out as the subject of a reality based TV show. The actual crew will be made up of news, reality and documentary style cinematographers and the production will be filmed entirely in the Cinma vrit style.

Written by John Harrigan and James Curcio, and directed by Joseph Matheny, Y is a unique production fusing characters from Curcios second published novel, Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning and Harrigans screenplay GraveLand, currently in pre production.

DPRGRM will finance and distribute the film, working alongside online media corporation Pilotlite, a joint venture between Joseph Matheny and Michael Mailer Films.

Joseph Matheny, founder of DPRGRM and Pilotlite co-founder says: We will be employing cutting edge production, post production and distribution techniques that have been gestating for several years while the technology caught up to the vision. We chose this project and this team specifically because the project lends itself to the medium and the people can keep up.

James Curcio, Creative Director of Mythos Media, says: Mythos Media was founded specifically to work on projects like this, and modern myths have been my life passion. I am eager to dive in and create this world, both as production designer and producer of the soundtrack. However, even more, I am eager to collaborate with all of the creatives that are already lining up to become a part of this truly one-of-a-kind project.

John Harrigan, Artistic Director of FoolishPeople comments: Members of FP and I are extremely excited to be working on a project with such a talented and unique team. 'Y' will redefine what is possible in film production and I'm looking forward to taking on the role of Performance Director.

About Y:

Civilization has fallen. In the rubble, we at the Y Corporation have developed the ultimate solution to save society: the Y Show.

We encourage all good citizens to sign up for the Show. You will be housed within a wonderful Haze Treatment Facility and undergo unique psychological treatment, which will clear away the illness of individuality. This reprogramming will be broadcast to the eyes and ears of Citizens in our New World, populated with previous contestants and patients. This is a reality show unlike any other!

There is a secret that haunts Haze01, the original treatment facility. Two patients, locked deep within its walls, contain archetypes that reject all reprogramming. They channel portents and omens of another future, a world where myth and divinity remake reality, manifesting a planet fit for Gods.

In this season of the Y show, the doctors of the facility make their final attempt to process these two patients, before they break free and unleash total anarchy. Tune in.

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Notes to editors:

About DPRGRM/Pilotlite: DPRGRM was founded by auteur Joseph Matheny to meet the new age of media convergence head-on with cutting edge media projects like Y and Pilotlite, which Matheny co-founded with Michael Mailer of Michael Mailer Films. For more information visit:jmatheny.wordpress.com

About Mythos Media: Mythos Media was founded by James Curcio, Peter Emerson Williams, Michael Szul and Tovarich Pizor in 2006 to produce modern myths. In the past, these have taken the form of comics, novels, and albums. For more information, please visit: HYPERLINK "http://www.mythosmedia.net/"www.mythosmedia.net

About FoolishPeople: FoolishPeople was founded by John Harrigan in 1989, taking its name from one of the major arcana of the tarot, card 0: The Fool. FoolishPeople create weaponized art, ritual theatre, collaborative events, books & film to raise a numinous experience within the witness. FP engineer immersive, open source experiences that become a catalyst for positive change. For more information, please visit: HYPERLINK "http://www.foolishpeople.org/"www.foolishpeople.org

Press Contact:

Joseph Matheny

DPRGRM

jmatheny@dprgrm.com

310.928.6959

http://citizen-y.com