XFF a few days in the life

Video streaming by Ustream

Mythos Media, center table (of 4)

We have written a great deal about this event, and hopefully some of you made it out. Hopefully almost as many returned in one piece!

Negativland, SRL (survival research labs), Lydia Lunch, Transhumanism-- much, so much more It was two days packed almost two full of content. But what can we take away from it all? 

Well, let me give you my little sliver of the pie. Certainly I met a few new faces and saw a few I recognized, and really hope that I will hear from at least a few of the hundreds of you that insisted with certainty and emotional depth that you would be writing me (after taking a card or three).

 

I was running a table as both artist and vendor. You can find more of what you missed on our end at Mythos Media, which gives you  access to many transmedia works that, even separate from the works they are meant to be connected to, provide what we hope is a multi-layered cosmology, a smattering of lyrical devices, and a touching-off point toward your own inner (hidden) depths. To put it in less flowerly language, we all create in the hopes to leave the world a better place than it was when we joined it, and we can only do so with your help. 

Yes. That's the long and short of it, and there's really little else I can say about "transhumanism" that should have any more meaning whatsoever. All of us should be here to live and grow and love and contribute and give more than we take, and if we succeeded at those seemly simply maxims, all the manifestos wouldn't make a damn - maybe they don't either way - but it is proof that we are not living up to it that we are in the mess we are in.



You either have to agree, or claim a flaw in my initial premise, but I'm not here to argue logics and semantics. I'm here to talk about an experience, or rather an experience that almost-was-, a hope and a moment in time that never-was, like an internet romance that never comes to fruition. We had ourselves a wonderful beginning, and many possible new connections formed, but there is a great deal to be done before we can start clapping ourselves or anyone else on the back, and the next time around I hope we give a little more space and time and credit at once for hedonism (properly umderstood), and the arts, which in this event I felt were kind of displayed without discussed, presented without being explored, they were just thrown out there without any real consideration or curation, which at this phase of a festival is simply the result of too few people and resources pushed to their limit (I know this for a fact from behind the scenes), but in a few years if it is a trend that continues it would be an unconscionable oversight since it is exactly the merging the fusion of art and technology, man and machine, that is at the heart of this event--

My view of the festival. I shit you not. Sad?

SRL getting ready to do their thing.

So those are a few thoughts but they are tossed out there without context, I admit. What of this festival, #XFF 2012? I honestly can't speak to it in a sense, because I witnessed almost all of it from behind the Mythos Media table. or my shut eyes as I tried in a vain hope to catch 5 minutes of sleep.



I am not a noob to the fest, the con, the "melt your brain in the desert" TAZ events that have become a sort of standard coming-of-age,  2000 - 2012. I am used to doing festivals as an artist and vendor as a wandering networker, since 2006 as the co-owner of the Mythos Media brand and often as a paid reporter for Alterati (as the once-upon-a-time senior editor, back when it was funded), and we often have assistants that have helped us keep down the table.





Well.... Not this time. This time I carried everything, despite my long litany of chronic illnesses, and I single-handedly managed the sales, despite the fact that I am no salesman. As an artist and author I found myself over and again trying to cut short the 20 minute long diatribes about pre- and post- production, and the challenges faced by making decisions about paper type verses cost and how hard it is to FILL the hole in a niche that you so astutely identified. Well, I did my best to sell. I really did, because I believe in these projects about as much as I believe in my left testicle  I have put every ounce of my savings into it and have put myself into debt 3 times over my cost in gold because I believe in it, and because it is the one real value we can bring to this planet. This is the reason that to the saying "If you want to sell something you just need to believe in it" I say: BULL FUCKING SHIT.

This is Chris. You may not have seen him because he was

often behind the scenes but he worked HIS ASS OFF for this event.

In my $.02? Event couldn't have happened without him.

Other people too, but especially him.

This almost fanatical belief is also the reason that the event organizers put themselves in well over their head as EVERY event organizer does when they start something like this, trust me (this isn't my first circus)-- and I just hope that from your side of the glass you understand that none of this has been a dog and pony show invented just to give some shits and giggles. It is real people that put their life savings and health and sometimes their very lives on the line to make these things happen. I'm not asking you to pity us. Please, not that. I am asking that you realize that indie festivals and art aren't Paramount or Disney, and when a 14 year old shrugs to their mother and says "I liked Pirates of the Caribbean more," I'm sorry but I want to break a lot of laws and rip their heads off. (Yes, I heard that very thing.)

Shayna Why

So, the point of this rambling diatribe is that I hope you took something away from the experience that money can't buy, and I hope you took either one of our books or the incentive to pick up a few more, not because they are relatively cheap in the grand scheme of things but because of what they represent. And you know, because I'm not pretending to be against the survival of indie artists: please pick up a copy if you never made it to the festival. Many options. 

Me? I've already shared why I'm into it. I would not so secretly like to get some hedonistic benefit out of it too but that happens less often than we (or I) would like of late. Well, we all have our stories of yesteryear at the least. And I suppose SRL was cool to watch though for their going rate I could have a time in the bathroom you are about to hear about that would make all their robots dissassemble themselves in fucking shame. And I could share that experience with more people than we could safely fit in that bathroom. I'm just sayin'. 

While helping the other staff dot the i-s and cross the t-s, I slept a night or two in the Hollywood hills and had my peremptory cell phone meetings with business partners and artistic collaborators and writers such that this backdrop, of all the things pictured here, was not entirely wasted. It makes us all feel so... well... so Hollywood! (This has nothing to do with the rest of the article but I just had to mention it, ok?)



So what was my experience, aside from the conversations that I got to have from behind the Mythos Media vending table?



Well... Can I be honest? I sure as hell have been so far. I had my share of weirdness, thought not nearly as much weirdness as I would like. I am I guess just, quite simply, spoiled by Dragon*Con and Pennsic and maybe even my day to day life.



I expect festivals and conventions with after-parties where you having just finished an awesome 3some that was broken up by an angry wookie, to find yourself protecting two making-out slave leias from an army of horny Storm Troopers. I've been squirted in the eye with an LSD solution by a hunter s thompson look-alike and then a year later had almost the exact same thing happen at my own house-warming party by someone that looked nothing like HST but instead like a burner from mars.



So, when I was offering lines of oxycodone to Lydia Lunch and talking about the philosophy of mythology with someone and I got a bunch of weird looks because he used to work for NASA and is apparently a foremost mind in AI (or possibly something else? I'm unsure), I was really confused at their confusion. THIS IS A FUCKING CON, people! Apparently I am from a different breed. Because what is acceptable to my people is apparently confusing to theirs and frankly I don't entirely give a fuck. But I do think he should've tried his line. That stuff was offered to me at a premium and aside from my 'head stash' which keep me from being in so much pain I can't move, well, it's considered not polite amongst my people. But we also don't care too much about politeness. Sooo. Fuck it.

Oh also, there was a giant FOOT in the room, which I imagine was for fucking (I tried out several positions on it, and they were all quite comfortable though I'm sure more so if you have a cunt that's being drilled at that moment by a giant black cock.) OK, and can I say that I am VERY VERY disappointed that I didn't get to enjoy the tub in this room with some attractive women? Talk about a fucking waste! It's almost enough to make me wake up in tears. No I am not being hyperbolic. I see it as a waste on a level that I can't even express. I could have had such a time in this bathroom, and could have blown quite a few minds while I had my mind equally blown, and it was 100%, 100% and completely fucking WASTED. And not in the good way. God. I want to cry just thinking about it. For all the good that may have been accomplished by this festival, and I hope it was, it can hardly be balanced by what was lost in that bathroom, filled with a sausage-fest of nerds incapable (I can only imagine) of even imagining what it should have been used for. God, I hope it is being used up to its capability as we speak. I want to cry. Maybe next time?

Oh yeah, and while thinking and speaking of wanton- excess, Merry bullshitmass. !

And let us all hope that this is just the very beginning of something so incredibly freakishly mutant, that any conjecture that I might spin here will be considered quaint and even a little pathetic by comparison!



(And let me please present at this future festival and get my own room, eh?)









(This has been the opinion of me and no other. Fuck off, and all that, lovers.) 

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

A few images, a day in the life

As I prepare to make my way out to Los Angeles for the Extreme Futurist Festival, I wanted to share some of the sketches I've been making at the cafe, and images from the work I'll be debuting at the convention. I will also be unveiling the first of a series to be released on canvas... stay tuned on that, they will only be available to purchase at the events or at the galleries they wind up in.

Look for the first official launch party in Philly in January on that note... and please support the work. I already tried to go into hiatus once but the work just drew me back in. However, my back and the fibro does make certain demands. I'll keep fighting. I'm just too stubborn to stop, and too stubborn to not keep up the fight. But this work needs to reach a certain level for it to be closer to sustainable. ("Closer to" -- all of us die. Nothing in terms of a single human life is "sustainable.")

And for now... 3 and 1/2 hours before the taxi arrives and I make my way to the Philly airport. Wheels up at 6am. Expect a pretty regular chronicle of the event on the Mythos Media twitter. I hope to see some of you at the Mythos Media table at the convention, at the parties that are sure to follow, or at the to-be-announced gallery releases in Philly!

Extreme Futurist Festival

Extreme Futurist Festival 2012

Are you a Futurist? Are you assured that we are going to burn ourselves out as a species in the next century? Are you an artist set on using these tools we have while we have the time, or an optimist set to create an army of Nanobots (or Nanobats, if you live in Gotham) that will cure cancer?

There is room for all these perspectives and more at this years Extreme Future Fest (EFF for short) being held in Los Angeles. And December 21 and 22 2012! What a time for it. End of the world, man!

This even will feature:

•  Speakers (Randal A. Koene, Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Dr. Ben Goertzel, ...)
• Music (Lydia Lunch, Negativland, ...)
• Art (Kevin Mack, Shayna Yates, James Curcio, ...)
• Films (H+ the Digital Series, Surf Now Apocalypse Later, Tragos, ...)
• Vendors (Grindhouse Wetwares, Re/Search Publications, Mythos Media including the recent Words of Traitors and Rachel Haywire's Acidexia, ...)
• ...and, you guessed it, a great deal more.

Not one to miss no matter your outlook. Find out more on the website, and show up if you can. You don't need to be a "believer" to show. Just pick up a ticket, bring equal parts skepticism and wonder, and the rest will be history.

See you there.

Schoolgirl Blues (excerpt)

Here is a free glance at one of the stories within Words of Traitors: 7 Lives In Transition. Which I am pleased to say is available in both print and digital formats! 

Suffice it to say that as a fully illustrated, full color book, half of the experience is visual, and this free text can't transmit that. You can see some  more of the imagery and layout in the previews to the pay PDF versions. 

I hope that you support the project and your own curiosity and order a copy. But either way, here's a short snippet of one of the more playful stories:

Model: Jaded Kitty Kimiko

---------
Lola Rose Parsons. Even back then she went by Lilith. 

I still try to envision her face. It's like trying to draw blindfolded. Of course I could just look at a poster—she went and got famous, or infamous, while I stayed in this same slowly-bloating suburban town—but I wanted to remember not what she had become, but instead how she was back then. I wanted every tiny detail, like the force of my will could peel back time if I gave it a little attention every day. I would get the arch of her eyebrow—just an eyebrow could telegraph such mischief and vulnerability—but which was the act? And then I'd move on to her eyes and get lost, or I would second-guess the eyebrow. 

It never came out quite right, so I had to start all over again. 

I guess memory is no great artist. Or maybe it is a far greater artist than I know. How could I be sure that I hadn't invented her, or constructed that week we spent together like I did her face in my mind, trying to turn these jigsaw pieces into a coherent image. And where was she in all this? Absent. 

She must have known she was trapped on the other side of the sob stories of so many ex-lovers, the one that changed everything and got away, giving that enigmatic Mona Lisa smile except when the façade broke at that practiced moment. The self-aware Manic Pixie Girl, sixteen and already typecast, using the role for all it was worth. She used us all, and did it selflessly. I can't imagine how lonely she must have been. 

Let me actually start with some general observations that I’ve made. You know, in my “studies.”

Catholic school girls are pantomimed with the uniform, especially the skirt, and the stale virgin-whore affectation, but that’s costume. What is less well known: at least in our town, the Catholic girls always had the best LSD. They wanted to show you God so you could piss in his eye. 
So while most people think that the allure of Catholic school girls is the uniform, the image of them on their knees, supple supplicants—well, I can’t entirely deny any of that. But when all is said and done, you’re the plaything, not them. Those who know the fetish through porn only see a poor stereotype, generally portrayed by actresses in their twenties that don’t know a word of Latin, who couldn't shoot straighter with an AK-47 with a headful of acid than most mujaheddin with a headful of Allah. 

The playful, dead serious malice for paternal authority defined the real Catholic schoolgirl. FUCK GOD. Or so Lola had taught me, and since then she has built such an army of them that you could almost say she wrote the book on the subject.

One week was all it took. One week was all I got. She was fucking good, changing lives in ways that seemed reckless but I know now that there was a method behind it all—well, you'll see, if I do my part and get that eyebrow and eye right and can move on to the lips. 

The first week of September 2001 I was a sophomore. A virgin, which really meant less to me than it seemed to for others. I had never taken a drug stronger than amoxicillin, never committed a crime, and most definitely never been in love. It was August. The month before planes started flying into buildings.

By late September, I had broken 120 mph in a stolen car—she called it “borrowing,” and coaxed me into topping out the engine on a straight-away by pulling away her mouth whenever I relaxed on the pedal or showed the slightest slip in concentration. She watched me all the while, wide-eyed and gleeful, waiting an eye roll, a sigh, and she would stop. Everything was a test, a challenge. How close can you get to the edge and not topple over? It was Jedi training with blowjobs.

I had been party to a carjacking. Subcutaneous ketamine injection. That's a long story. I'd seen a shooting, felt true rage—just punching and punching until you may as well be pounding sirloin. By October, and for the first time, I'd had my heart broken.

The first time you fuck can mean a lot or it can mean very little. The first time you have your heart broken, or at least think it is, I think that changes a person. Always.

It was all a lot for a week—or was it two?—and this is the only excuse I can give for the fact that I’m still obsessed with a girl that I haven’t seen in a decade.

Order the book now: 

 Digital Copies?

$5.99 for Words of Traitors / $2.99 for Nyssa #1 (included in Words of Traitors.) 

Internal Arts, now on Alterati

Internal Arts, a podcast / web video series will be running on Alterati over the next few months (possibly longer):

Internal Arts will be a series dealing with the creative process in its various guises: from meditative techniques to anecdotal material from independent artists. 

Whether you are a writer, musician, visual or film artist, or just want to learn a little about the ins- and outs- of the creative process from those who struggle to make a living at it, this show is for you. We will also often explore meditative and movement practices that might not necessarily seem connected with creativity or the arts at first glance. 

These are quite possibly more important than all the discussions we will be having about independent arts and media production, as they get us out of the 'the chair,' out of our heads, and back into our bodies. It is in and through our bodies, and nowhere else, that the true creative process begins. We are not brains in bottles. 

It's our hope that you will find these practices and conversations an indispensable part of your own practice.

If you would like to contribute to the show, contact James Curcio.

Subscribe on iTunes to this and other Alterati shows.