JamesCurcio.com: Myth Brand Media Theory

It’s not a hobo beard. It’s a writer beard.

2012-05-24T23:22:00.000-07:00

This was actually the typewriter of demon frog "fame."

"It’s not a hobo beard. It’s a writer beard."

(This is a rough draft that mashes up some of my contributions here and other thoughts into what I hope to be the only piece I ever write 'On Writing,' for the next issue of Scree Magazine.)

I’ve got a problem and it’s about time I honed up to it.

It's hard to remember when my addiction started. I remember hammering awkwardly on an old-style typewriter about a demonic underworld that existed in the basement of a house we lived in. We had to go down into the basement in the cold and the dark and shovel coal to keep the house warm, and the story had something to do with the frog demons that lived down there and the boy that had to brave them every night to keep his family warm. Really deep stuff, clearly. I actually don't know if that is relevant to anything, but you've got to admit it's kind of cool I remember a story I wrote when I was eight or so.

I think it was my first time, but I could be wrong. Freud call these "screen memories," which basically means they are picture-stories that we use as memories. They are like the seeds of the story that we construct about childhood, because, you see, memories are a form of story. Everything about us is based on stories. Our sense of identity, all our beliefs even, are narratives, and this is why politics demands narratives that draw us in, whether they act on our intellect or our emotions.

I guess I’m saying we’re all story junkies. Don’t judge lest ye judge yourself.

Once I got past stories about frog demons, I started writing for a dual purpose. I wanted to gain a better sense of myself, and at the same time I wanted to communicate with others in a way that was deeper, than, well, the stuttery and awkward attempts at communication I try when speaking on the fly. In other words, there is an internal “me” that does not easily come out socially, in the moment. And I think that “me” has a lot more to say than the off-the-cuff, needs a tequila to be able to talk easily with a stranger... on a good day, "me." But maybe “he” doesn’t. Maybe he’s a psychopath. Guess you’ll have to read “his” stories.

Anyway, my point is, I'm smart enough, I suppose, but my brain always moves in twenty directions at once and it's almost impossible to cogently communicate with someone as clearly as I believe I can with text on a page. Yet after years of publishing books and blog posts, I've come to wonder if I have in the process proven myself to be the very source of the kind of alienation that set me on the path of writing in the first place. In other words, the better “he” gets at communicating, the worst stuttery-in-the-moment me gets. And there’s an interesting story idea right there: your writer self cannibalizes your brain until “he” is writing like Nabokov, but you’re otherwise a sweaty, neurotic, just socially worthless shrew. (Oh wait, that’s the plot of all of Charlie Kaufmann’s stuff. Oh well.)

There’s one little problem in my master plan of making a living off of my addiction. It has come to my attention that there are relatively few people who have even the slightest ability to find common ground with my way of looking at the world. Sure, it is a magical thing that I've changed some lives, or so I've been told, by selling words to strangers. In the process of being an indie author, I've met some of the Others, I've changed the minds of some of the youngins, and I've probably gotten my share of head pats and eye rolls from the elderly leaders of the counterculture. But when it comes down to it, the people I speak to are a very small market, and many of them have neither the time nor means to dole out hard-earned cash to spend their precious time working through hundreds of hours of the material I have myself slaved over.

Writer beard: being tested.
It has reached phase 2.

This isn’t meant to be a whine fest, but as a part of this personal intervention I feel like I need to be completely honest. Toward the greater market, just because something means a great deal to me does not mean it will mean a great deal to them - part of the magic of the arts in general is that the artform, whatever it is, is re-created in the mind of the audience. When you are an author sending your literally thousandth synopsis of your thousandth unanswered query to agent or publisher, you may discover the illusions you had about writing were just that.

But by this point, you can be fairly sure you are not just a hobbyist. You don't just have a habit. You are a full-blown junky. God knows you’ve tried to stop. It just doesn’t make any sense. So you need to stop. Please, for your friends, for lovers. For your health. It’s destroying you. Stop, just fucking. Stop. Get a World of Warcraft addiction or something.

Clack, clack, clack. In my case, this realization hit during the query process for my fifth book.
At this point you quite simply don't know how to stop. Or so you say. But it's like all the clichés about alcoholics. As neuroscientists are just starting to discover: addiction is addiction is addiction. Society may look down on it or lift it up. It may even do both in psychologically confusing and conflicted ways. But the neurology seems to be the same. I must underscore this: not hyperbole. Not even metaphor. Neurological fact.

(Unless all facts are metaphors. But that’s a pretty confusing option.)

I’ve made the point about the ubiquity of addiction before, so I’m not claiming this is an entirely unique point. But I was asked to write about writing, and this is the most honest scoop I’ve got for you right now.

Usually around this point in the addiction you promise yourself that after this next novel, you will go out and try to get a “real job.” Again. (That means you want to hold it down at least a week before it outs that you are a “freak,” this time.)

Not as easy as it sounds! Tell a Starbucks manager that you are an author, and their slack jaws reveal their feelings. You just told them you shoot junk and love genital wrestling.

This has nothing to do with
this article but DAMN that is a nice ass.

They may have no sensible reason to fire you. You showed up, you did your work. Granted, often that “work” involved moving around papers, and playing weird social games and moving around numbers representing other people's debts. None of it produced any real value in the world. But, God help you, you gave it your all, time and again. Yet every time you get “the talk.” They put a strangely clammy, almost corpse-like hand over your shoulder and told you that you it didn't work out.

Once, when I was sixteen, I was told that the work crew at my job was planning on beating me as a "faggot" (I'm not gay, not that it should matter) so he wanted me to get out before there was a possibly legal incident but the "corpse-hand" story sounds more archetypally likely. Far worse has happened to me, time and time again, each time further engaging an archetypal narrative that, some might say, drove Hemingway to drink.

Still, can you blame them for their shifty looks? No one likes a junky.

By this point with your habit, you don’t know why you write anymore but still, when you re-watch reruns of your favorite shows your eyes spark to life at the weirdest moments and you are - God help you! - back at it again. You speak in excited half-sentences to your lovers about this great idea you have, and everyone wonders if you're having a manic episode until they actually see the final product and realize that, though they actually don't understand half of what you're on about, it is clearly something, and that something might even be kind of insightful. Hell! It might even be brilliant. They can't really tell, entirely, but it seems possible. If only they were in your market, you see. If it sells any less than 5,000 copies I’ll stop, I swear!

Damn. After you've promised yourself and your family members you could quit the habit and you've been proven a liar, you've also probably now reached a stage of resigned unemployment where, if you're physically male, the scruff of your "writer's beard" is more or less indistinguishable from the "hobo" beard of the guy living on the street corner.

But the power of stories, do you see? We can tell ourselves and others that we are writers, and they will interpret your beard differently. A writer’s beard means something different than a hobo’s beard.

A little ray of sunshine. There is, in fact, one benefit to being a writer. You may never make a regular paycheck, but people who will probably never read anything you write will think you are the coolest kind of hobo that there is. You will continue to influence strangers you will never meet, and you are being true to what you are. Addict.

Winston Churchill quotes, whether real or invented.
are always good in a pinch.

You are railing lines of bug powder and sucking off mugwumps at the same time. If William Burroughs was a reptile capable of pride, he might even feel it for you.

This is the point of acceptance. You will keep doing this until your attempts somehow succeed by your own standards -- an unlikely prospect if ever there was one, especially if your standards involve making a decent living through writing -- or... or nothing! There is no turning back, you fucking junky. If you really know who and what you are, then you are bound to a certain... responsibility to the narrative. And if you were someone else, the changeover would have happened back in Chapter 1 or 2. We are halfway through the book. Only a bad author changes their mind about things like the protagonists motives halfway through.

Yes, I know, a comical value article may have had us lost on the fact that not only is it deadly true, but it describes far more of us than we would like to accept - and that is our one, our only respite. We are all writers who can write for writers became no one else understands. That's what's funny, that's what's sad, and it's because that's what's true.

There's nothing more to say "On Writing," when you get down to it, than "stop if you can, keep it to yourself if you can't stop, and publish it if you can't even do that."

So... hello fellow addicts, my name is Jamie, though I recently changed it to Sascha in the hopes of confusing a bunch of meth-heads that want me dead for reasons passing understanding. And though there are no twelve steps, I'm told that the first step has something to do with whiskey.

---

Jamie aka Sascha performs in industrial rock concerts, bitches incessantly on his blog, skulks about in dark recording studios, and writes dystopian novels for a generation of drug addicts. You can see his work at http://jamescurcio.com/

Arts and the 'Cultural Elite'

2012-04-23T00:47:00.002-07:00

This is really an article worth reading, in its entirety.

Of course, those who continue to work in the creative class are the lucky ones. Employment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show just how badly the press and media have missed the story. For some fields, the damage tracks, in an extreme way, along with the Great Recession. Jobs in graphic design, photographic services, architectural services – the bureau’s phrasing indicates that it is looking at all of the jobs within a field, including the people who, say, answer the phone at a design studio – all peaked before the market crash and and fell, 19.8 percent over four years for graphic design, 25.6 percent over seven years for photography and a brutal 29.8 percent, for architecture, over just three years. “Theater, dance and other performing arts companies” – this includes everything from Celine Dion’s Vegas shows to groups that put on Pinter plays – down 21.9 percent over five years.
Other fields show how the recession aggravated existing trends, but reveal that an implosion arrived before the market crash and has continued through our supposed recovery. “Musical groups and artists” plummeted by 45.3 percent between August 2002 and August of 2011. “Newspaper, book and directory publishers” are down 35.9 percent between January 2002 and a decade later; jobs among “periodical publishers” fell by 31.6 percent during the same period.
So why aren’t we talking about it?
Creative types, we suspect, are supposed to struggle. Artists themselves often romanticize their fraught early years: Patti Smith’smemoir “Just Kids” and the various versions of the busker’s tale “Once” show how powerful this can be. But these stories often stop before the reality that follows artistic inspiration begins: Smith was ultimately able to commit her life to music because of a network of clubs, music labels and publishers. And however romantic life on the edge seems when viewed from a distance, “Once’s” Guy can’t keep busking forever.
Yes, the Internet makes it possible to connect artists directly to fans and patrons. There are stories of fans funding the next album by a favorite musician — but those musicians, as well, acquired that audience in part through the now-melted creative-class infrastructure that boosted Smith. And yes, there have been success stories on Kickstarter, as well — but even Kickstarter accepts just 60 percent of all proposals, and only about 43 percent of those end up being crowd-funded.
Our image of the creative class comes from a strange mix of sources, among them faux-populist politics, changing values, technological rewiring, and the media’s relationship to culture – as well as good old-fashioned American anti-intellectualism.

Odd Duck Media

2012-04-19T16:39:00.002-07:00

As those of you who follow my Twitter or Facebook know, I've been hard at work the past few weeks setting up a brand management company with my wife, Odd Duck Media. (Dangling modifier. Odd Duck Media is the company, not my wife. If you didn't catch that.)

It's a new endeavor, but I see it as the culmination of over a decade of work in this space. I can't wait to see where it takes us.

We see your brand as a mythic story, a brand narrative. Though the channels may vary based on your budget and goals, the objective is the same: engage your audience with that narrative. Make it memorable. By engaging in an effective brand strategy online, you can build new connections, facilitate open communication between your company and your patrons, and increase your digital footprint.
We work with each client personally, tailoring a campaign to your exact needs.
Save yourself the hassle of a lengthy interview process and the cost of hiring a full-time social media and web marketing director. Make us your team.

Modern Mythology Virtual Classroom #1

2012-03-20T06:13:00.000-07:00

[From Modernmythology.net]

In this class we discuss many topics raised in The Immanence of Myth:

Sacrifice and the sacred, love, marriage and the apocalypse Bataille's The absence of myth Science and mythology Cosmological models and myths of progress World War II as a model for enlightenment reason Suicide and creativity The senselessness of the body and the unconscious...

Direct download

This is just the first in a series of classroom recordings from SUNY Binghamton in conjunction with this digital humanities project. Class with Rowan Tepper and James Curcio.Background recording be William Clark, with some performances by Adrina Marie, William Clark and James Curcio.

Gonzmentary free movie

2012-03-19T06:02:00.002-07:00

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.]

Nyssa Episode 1 Concept Art Update

2012-03-06T18:45:00.000-08:00

Got new concept art in from Alexey Andreev of the Krampus. I think it's terrific:

Check out the unillustrated version of issue 1 here. ($.99)

Bedlam Stories Concept Art Update

2012-03-06T15:56:00.000-08:00

Some more concept art from Bedlam Stories development. Words are building up in my scrawling handwriting in the handbound notebooks Jaz made for me, can't wait until the app takes shape. In the meantime, "like" the Facebook group and come along...

The Dope Show: 3 Rules To Live By

2012-02-28T05:42:00.005-08:00

Some random thoughts today, provided care of my subconscious.

First, I wake up with a song BLASTING IN MY HEAD. Does this happen to you? It happens to me a lot. I'll be deep in blissful - or not so blissful - sleep, when suddenly my brain will just crank a song at maximum volume. It will shock me out of bed. It will force me to blast it on the stereo at 6 in the morning, over and over again, in the hopes that externalizing the track, it will somehow stop haunting me.

Keep in mind that it is often a song that I haven't heard in years. This morning it was The Dope Show, by Manson:

And right after watching it, I thought for a moment about the philosophy I have been living by lately. If you want to call it a philosophy, since philosophy is so often what we talk about, and not what we live by. Well, maybe I'll lose a handhold, and then another, and in a month it'll be a distant memory. But I think maybe not. I think I'm onto something here. So bear with me.

I have been living as close as I can to two realizations of late. I hope I can stick to them with absolute focus- 1 month, so far, so good.

#1: only be concerned with What Is. (It is hard enough to know what that is. Takes years.) There are always a million things that could go wrong, and if you get caught up in that, you'll never actually get a chance to live. So many ways for everything to go terribly wrong, so few ways for it to go right. Don't sweat it though: it's just life. We say life is a gamble, but in gambling, you have to walk out when you win or the odds say you will wind up losing. Life is like a gamble where you never get to leave the casino. The House ALWAYS WINS. ALWAYS. And we always die. So don't worry about it. Invest in loss, and don't forget to smile through it all. Smile? you say. Yes. Why? Because no one likes a whiner. And everyone is as fucked and blessed as you are, whether they know it or not. (And yes, I know that is the one I have to work on.)

#2: Almost nothing that you do, think, say, or most of all worry about will mean anything to anyone in 100 years. So, enjoy that cigar, son. We're all going to hell.

I forgot #3. #3 is to recognize all of this with eyes completely open and STILL choose to love with everything you've got. Then you're truly fucking insane, and Welcome. You're one of Us.

And if not, well. Get out of Our way. We've got work to do. Being rockstars from Mars is a full fucking time job.

A clarification brought on by a comment from facebook:
If you miss the love part, you miss everything with any importance whatsoever.
I don't mean - or don't just mean - romantic love. I mean love- putting yourself completely into what you do, not because you have some delusional idea of it paying you back (see #1, #2), but because you are giving yourself to that process. That's love. Doesn't matter if it's a person, an idea, a project - though I will say that if it's a person, they do tend to make better company on cold nights. The love isn't about the person, anyway. It's about what they bring out of you, and what you bring out of them.

Another hint: So far as I'm concerned, devotion and love are the same. (Neither, by the way, demand fidelity. Much in life demands my devotion, and that's the best answer I've got to when people ask me "how do you work on so many damn projects?" I'm a slut, what can I say?)

How do you know if it's "love"? If you have a choice to not pursue your devotions, then it's a pretty shitty devotion. Devotion does not ask your permission. No more than you have a choice to fall in love when it happens. Something grabs you by the balls. (Or the... uterus?) You have two options: go along with it, or have them ripped off. Be uncompromisingly genuine. You have nothing to lose.

And on that note, enough preaching. Do whatever you like. That's just my "trip," right now.

Bedlam Stories Facebook Group

2012-02-17T08:29:00.000-08:00

Pearry has launched the Facebook group, so you can keep up with some behind-the-scenes development.

"Bedlam Stories is the fictional account of real life journalist, Nellie Bly, who was famous for an exposé in which she faked insanity to study a mental institution from within. Inside, she meets a doe-eyed teenager named Dorothy Gale who claims that a magical place called Oz exist. As Nellie begins to peek deeper into the secrets behind the walls of Bedlam Asylum, she begins to understand that Dorothy's Oz might have something to do with a terrible secret Bedlam has been hiding from the world... an experiment only known as Project:Alice."

Modern Mythology Pilot: Howard Bloom

2012-02-13T10:18:00.000-08:00

[LISTEN: direct link / soundcloud]

In this special Pilot episode of the new Modern Mythology podcasting series, Rusty Shackleford takes time to have a sit down chat with Howard Bloom. Many of you know Bloom from his books The Lucifer Principle,The Genius of the Beast and The Global Brain, in addition to his interviews and appearances on the Disinformation television series originally produced for the BBC.

In this interview, Rusty discusses Howard's role in helping to build relationships between artists such as Prince and Joan Jett and their public, touching upon the role of the artist as a modern day myth maker and the heir apparent of the shaman. Bloom's scientific and biological perspectives are also examined in conversation, particularly in reference towards the cultural myths explored and exposed in his newest book The God Problem.

Background music for this episode provided by members of Bradley The Buyer, HoodooEngine, Mankind is Obsolete, and Veil of Thorns. The featured tracks are In The Flesh from HoodooEngine’s album “Murder The World” and Bradley The Buyer’s cover of Prince’s “When Dove’s Cry”

How Does This Google Thing Work?

2012-02-09T22:32:00.000-08:00

Someone on Facebook publicly asked the following question,

"How does this google thing work? I understand that the most relevant link will pop up under a specific search, but if everyone suddenly googled "kangaroo" and clicked the fourth link whether or not it was relevant, would that link be bumped to the top or are most things just set there sensibly?"

Though my answer is in no way final, I thought it may be of use to more of you than just the person asking that question. Here it is:

"It's far more complex than that. Especially since the last major rollout (Panda), which incorporated weighted mechanisms derived from social media activity into their page ranking system. Let me try to give a sense of a fraction of what's going on 'under the hood.' In their proprietary system Google incorporates many things including other weighting from the duration of a viewers stay and even what their behavior is after leaving the page, if they return, how many links they visit within the site, and an analysis of that in relation to linguistic content (the actual organic search itself.)

And that's just what you can get from professionals in related industries, reading articles, and playing SEO cowboy. Google remains tight lipped for the greater part beyond what you can easy find - arcane mathematical formula and the like - so you have to pretty much reverse engineer based on results, and can have those results shifted on you overnight. Which is a real bitch when you're doing Black SEO ops. (Funny story there, that I can't tell.)"
So, there we are. One more person outside the black box tossing conjecture into the blogosphere. I hope you are entertained by this pseudo-information.

Transmedia and Social Media are Brand Tools

2012-02-07T23:13:00.000-08:00

For those unfamiliar with the territory, it can be surprisingly difficult to get a grasp of social media and web marketing from the perspective of brand narrative. SMM, SEM, PPC, PCP... (OK, hopefully not PCP.) Certainly there's a lot of buzz around the necessity of entering "the social space," if you are a company, organization, or even an artist or producer. But a lot of that buzz comes off as hype, and rather than being informative, much of it just amounts to the digital equivalent of a shady guy on the corner trying to sell you snowcrash snake oil.

So, without pretending that this is in any way comprehensive, I'd like to share a few resources and thoughts on this matter that may actually help you make informed decisions, whether you are looking to hire a consultancy or manage a small campaign yourself.

First, this talk from Ric Dragon of DragonSearch is a great start:

(Full disclosure: I worked with Ric in 2005 when he was CEO of Oxclove, and off and on before then.)

He brings up the topic of transmedia. If I were to use an umbrella term for all of the work I have and done and intend to do, it would be transmedia storytelling. Transmedia applies as much to the creative production of media within a franchise as it does to the building of a brand narrative. Supposing your customers interact with your product and service, there is already going to be a narrative there. Don't you want to be able to manage it - at least in an open-ended sense - and even bring the two together, so your product, company, service can actually engage the human beings we blithely call "customers"? To do so companies need to drop any false postures of austerity, and "get real," in one way or another.

As Ric Dragon pointed out, Old Spice used 4Chan of all things to kickstart one of their campaigns. Of course, that isn't appropriate for everything, but it would do us all well to recall that one of the demands of creativity is taking risks, and leaving our fear outside. People don't want to be "marketed to." They want to be engaged with, and they want it to meet them where they are at. Maybe it needs to challenge them, maybe it needs to make them feel comfortable, but contrary to much literature on branding, not many people actually think about what drinking Coke says about them as a person.

Check out these articles on the topic from Modern Mythology:

The Story of a Transmedia Revolution (Part 1 / Part 2)
Questions Toward A Philosophy of Gaming
New Questions Toward A Philosophy of Gaming
A Mythic Primer of Transmedia

On this topic of engagement and brand narrative, also check out this video from Rushkoff:

Douglas Rushkoff: Branding Doesn't Work! So Now What? from Portland Oregon on Vimeo.

At bottom, and despite the need for metrics and benchmarks, social media is as much customer service and PR as it is an advertising channel. You don’t look for direct ROI with customer service and PR, and ROI may not be the best metric for social as well.

In general, if you're looking to establish your brand through the web using social and search tools, let alone transmedia, you need to stop thinking like you're writing inter-departmental memos and instead focus on what will be interesting, engaging, or fun for your potential customers. You need to build stories, establish interactivity, and consider unique investments of human and technical resources: for instance, gamesourcing:

I had earlier suggested using games that are fun and popular to do useful work. The idea of such “game-sourcing” would be to make the most of human brainpower to attack forms of computation that computers are poor at, using games that are already hits to take advantage of the power of the crowd and accomplish something important.
It turns out that bestselling science-fiction author Neal Stephenson independently hits on much the same idea in his latest book “Reamde.” One of the elements of the novel is a massively multiplayer online game (MMORG) called T’Rain. Although the game is very much like World of Warcraft, it differs in at least two notable ways — it is designed to be as friendly to gold farming as possible so as to have a stable in-world economy, and it is designed to have the potential for real-world applications.
The game-sourcing idea in question is detailed on pages 131 to 138. The invention is named the Medieval Armed Combat as Universal Metaphor and All-Purpose Protocol Interface Schema (MACUMAPPIS). This is essentially an application programming interface or API — “the software control panels that tech geeks slapped onto their technologies in order to make it possible for other tech geeks to write programs that made use of them,” as Stephenson explains.
The first project carried out with MACUMAPPIS paid huge amounts of gold to players who caught goblins trying to sneak in through the exit of the mighty Citadel of Garzantum. All the video of goblins and other fantasy humanoids the players saw were based on real feeds of airport occupants to spot intruders going where they shouldn’t.

This also calls for a reframing of the concept of marketing vs. content. If you're in the position of making operational decisions, consider the value of hiring individuals or companies that do this for a living to help manage these campaigns, rather than simply tasking already busy employees with managing a content strategy in their "spare time." Of course, the best brand ambassadors can be employees. But they need a solid content strategy, or else, you're best off not giving them the podium in the first place.

(And not only so you can avoid so-called PR disasters like these--I say "so called," because they're nearly all forgotten by the next news cycle anyhow, let's be honest.)

Nyssa sketches

2012-01-31T23:10:00.000-08:00

Got all the sketches to date on my end scanned in tonight. I'll start working on them with the wacom tomorrow. Also got some of the early watercolors from Olga.

A few to w(h)et your appetite. In the meantime, why not buy a book?

(Small head, I know.)

Free eBook Editions

2012-01-30T07:56:00.000-08:00

Making myself blind reading on an iPhone

I wanted to make an offer to those purchasing hardcopies of the following 2011-2012 releases: Fallen Nation Party At The World's End, Apocalyptic Imaginary, and 404 Documents.

If you bought any of these books, hard-copy, and would like the eBook gratis, just contact me personally. I get order info from Amazon pretty frequently, but in general I'll take your work for it. As much as I like to make a living from my work, it's more of a drive to get the material read in the first place.

Busy Bees (Update)

2012-01-17T03:16:00.000-08:00

If you haven't noticed, I've been busy churning out the content.

The 404 Documents and Apocalyptic Imaginary: Best of Modern Mythology 2011 both made it to Amazon distribution today. They are also available as ebooks. Check them out on my writing page.

There you'll find a little about each of them--and as soon as I have a second, a link to a sample for each will join the lineup. Only so much time in the day.

Nate (aka Rusty Shackleford, aka Bradley The Buyer, aka ...) and I are presently working on solidifying the album, "Used People Using People," which is the companion piece to the 404 Documents. Did someone say transmedia? It's also some of the raunchiest music I've worked on in a while, and that's probably saying something.

So, yeah. Help out some independent artists and give some of these things a whirl. At this point there's a little bit for everyone with a bit of ideological adventure and an attention span. Some people still have those, right?

Next up after the album looks like full-tilt on Bedlam Stories and possibly a day job gig working in social media. I'll keep you posted. For now, I'm going to give my needy kitty Princess Galadriel some love. (Siddhartha is a bit more self-reliant.)

-J

Contextualizing Social Media (and Marketing)

2012-01-16T09:21:00.001-08:00

Doug Rushkoff is pretty spot on here, as he often is. (Though it's a little disjointed at first.)

Instead of adding another layer of commentary... just check out the video.

Douglas Rushkoff: Branding Doesn't Work! So Now What? from Portland Oregon on Vimeo.

404 Documents eBook

2012-01-15T02:10:00.002-08:00

ebook $2.99 on Smashwords.
print $8.88 on Amazon.com.

Adam Jones was living the life: good job, sweet girlfriend (a redhead to boot), car, house. But in just one year, he will be incarcerated for participation in a vast terrorist conspiracy. It all started with Bradley the Buyer, calling him from the annals of their sordid past. Bradley, a first-rate freak and self-proclaimed criminal mastermind. Maybe it was boredom or curiosity, but he took the call. Soon, Adam is doing "Ops" with his psychotic friend. When a reality prank goes too far, he tries to get out. But it is already too late. There is no way out but through. By the end, he finds out how deep the rabbit-hole goes, but not before sacrificing his body, soul, and his cozy suburban dream in the process. Written off the headlines, this modern myth blurs the lines between fiction and reality.

From the Fallen Nation world.

Cover for 404 Documents

2012-01-13T02:03:00.000-08:00

The rough cover for the conspiracy fiction novella I have been working on with Nate. It'll probably sit on the slate while I'm hammering out Bedlam Stories, and then will be polished and shot out into the world. It is a return to some old themes in a new way.

Nyssa Update

2012-01-10T18:07:00.000-08:00

As some of you know, I've been moving forward with issue 1 of Nyssa, a modern dark fairy tale. (Unillustrated text here.)

Drawing concept sketches, or material that can be scanned in and use as an underpainting of sorts in Photoshop.

I have also had some other artists signing on. Here's the first: Alex Andreev and Olga Sukhotinskaya.

A few of their pieces:

I intend for issue 1 to be something of an artist notebook, produced by the protagonist in his obsession of Nyssa.

Issue 2, which is mostly plotted but not written, I am hoping to produce in a more graphic novel style, as the story I intend to tell with that issue would work better in that format. This is what I love about transmedia as a concept, though of course sometimes we can't match medium with vision based on budget or other "real world" concerns.

Here's to trying, however.

Bedlam Stories Mad Hatter

2012-01-10T01:03:00.000-08:00

Some pre-production buzz from Quiet Earth:

We recently announced that director Pearry Teo was hard at work on Bedlam Stories, a twisted new take on Alice and Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz. We were excited.

Now, to add to the first two horrifically beautiful pieces of character art for the film (Cheshire Cat included), we've just been passed the first look at The Mad Hatter from the film. This is classic Teo stuff here, folks. Like if Hellraiser went to Wonderland.

Synopsis:
Set in the 1920s, in Bedlam Asylum, the story revolves around Dorothy of Oz and Alice from Wonderland as they are brought into the asylum to treat their fantasy land delusions. But doctors soon realize that the patients' imaginations may actually be real.

Nyssa, Part 1: Love Notes To A Stranger (Unillustrated)

2012-01-03T11:30:00.000-08:00

Photo: James Curcio, Rachel Reynolds.

A dark modern fairy-tale.

I am beginning work on putting together this piece as an illustrated story, but have released the text online eBook for those that want this (cheaper) version. Pick it up for $.99 on smashwords. ~~It'll be showing up in Amazon's store in a week or two.~~ It's live on Amazon's Kindle store as well.

Bedlam Stories

2011-12-15T20:58:00.000-08:00

Can't say too much about it yet, but things are looking very good for Bedlam Stories to go into production in 2012. Here's some concept art from Chad Michael Ward:

I'll be writing for it, and possibly contributing some other media. More here when I'm able to share it!

While you're waiting, why don't you check out one of the many projects I put out in 2011?

Apocalyptic Imaginary Early Edition Available as eBook

2011-12-06T23:15:00.000-08:00

This book captures and expands upon the unique commentary and analysis that has helped define the Modern Mythology project in 2011. Through the voices of many contributors, we collectively take a hard look at the blurred lines between narrative and truth, philosophy and literature, personal history and cultural memory. All of this is done with an eye towards the imagined apocalypse that is always just around the corner.

Available as PDF, .epub, Kindle and more on Smashwords.

$18 paperback.

Media and Monetizing The Container

2011-12-05T20:03:00.000-08:00

By James Curcio
Some of us still remember going to a store to buy a CD, a tape... a record! Or a book. Most of us don't want to buy just any book. We want to buy a book with certain content. A book associated with a certain author or idea we are attracted to.

A few of us bemoan the loss of quality that occurred with the containers themselves over the years. The decline of paper quality, the loss of craftsmanship in the process of mechanization, mass-market industrialization. They are the few who relish the feel of the material object in their hand, consider its craftsmanship a part of what it is. Books themselves used to be works of art. But this is unfortunately an even older perspective on media. Most consumers don't think much about the container, the packaging, or anything else. It is all to be discarded, it is all attractive junk. They want to devour the "good stuff" inside. Or maybe they just want to put the book on their bookshelf and make people think they read it.

You know the story of what's happened. Digital media doesn't require a container. You can download an album, a movie, and now a book, without needing a container. You can carry hundreds or thousands of them around with you. And so we have the advent of "piracy," because all these years we've been monetizing the container. This is not an entirely new point, even for me - I've weighed in on this subject many times in the past.

What I want to ponder - what I want all of us to ponder - is the conundrum facing both the producers of media and the companies that "support" them. We'll also look at some of the ways that these companies have failed to sufficiently understand the problem they're facing.

When you "steal" an album, there is one sense in which you are not "stealing" anything. It costs a band or label nothing for you to download their album, in terms of distribution. In fact, you've just saved them a lot of trouble. You got that music all up in your earholes without troubling them with distribution one bit.

But, the problem, of course, is that this stuff isn't "free" to produce. In fact, the number of hidden costs involved with producing media are pretty amazing, especially when you consider time and effort as the primary resources that humans represent, when viewed within the capitalist myth. As a producer of independent media in quite a few formats - not to mention working inside companies that have been burdened and seriously threatened by this change of paradigm - I think I can say I'm pretty well acquainted with the terror that drives labels to do idiotic things like suing potential customers.

They want to frame piracy as criminal in the way that punching an old lady in the face and stealing her purse is criminal. But the sad fact is, it isn't. Instead, it is the painful reality of what could be an amazing paradigm shift.

Oftentimes, growth hurts. And so many of these companies (and artists) want to curl into a ball and pretend nothing changed.

Listen, I understand. As much as you might think it's an indulgence, working on this site and organizing it is itself a job. I put a lot of time into it. The other contributors put their time into it. I do so because I'm passionate about it, and I prefer to do things I'm passionate about as much as possible. But sales and ad revenue don't even come close to putting a candle to the hours we sink into it. And we all have rents to pay.

Monetizing digital media calls for an entirely new model and no one has discovered yet. Little indie operations are facing the same issue here that the "majors" are facing, and this is one of the interesting elements of this paradigm shift. The playing field has almost been levelled in a few ways. Or so it would seem at first glance. Labels have become little more than banks with PR contacts. The value of an agent or producer might just be their virtual Rolodex and the fact that the person on the other end will take the call.
It has also become the media advertising to itself, and, often no one is paying for anything. I know my buying habits are not indicative of the "average consumer" (the hell is that?) but 90% of my shrinking income is put into "real world" things like rent, utilities, food, transportation and services like acupressure and massage. Who pays for media anymore? I've got Netflix, and go to libraries or once in a while buy a book. Even if I'm not indicative of the average consumer, I can only imagine that all but the most established media producers are feeling the squeeze.

The solution to this problem so far has been some combination of advertising and paid or premium memberships. These two can even be combined. However, I'm not convinced this is a viable solution for many enterprises.

Let's look at why.

Advertisements on websites are generally produced with a similar mentality to how they are produced for magazines or television. Many publishers have given up on using magazines as an advertising medium because the returns simply aren't there. This is what I mean about it not being a viable solution for some enterprises. Advertisement in magazines works well enough when it comes to products and services that solve common problems, especially those a reader (user) may be experiencing while looking. And they help in terms of brand awareness. But drawing a straight line between brand awareness and profit is hard. You need to have a lot of assets to really go in for the long game on brand awareness, especially when you consider your competition.

Some advertisers and distribution venues (consider YouTube a distribution venue, for instance) think that by forcing the user to watch advertisements, they'll gain some benefit. "Your video will begin in 20 seconds."

How many of you have felt like those 20 seconds were the longest in your life? You sit there and wonder, "is this video really worth sitting through this?"

How many of you felt inclined to buy those products? In advertising, there's an adage about annoying the user. Annoy them enough, and they'll remember you. There's also the rule of seven. (People don't notice something until they've seen it seven times.)

I'd like to call bullshit on both of these, but they have data. Fine. Can you remember the last advertisement you saw on YouTube? Can you remember the last ad you've seen on a website that really interested you? My guess is that, if you're reading this, the answer is- "I have no idea" and "Not recently."

That caveat is important. "If you're reading this." Some advertisers see great profits in a business to business market for instance, and then they'll advertise on a site with considerably more traffic and see no clickthroughs. I know this because I've witnessed it.

Know your market:

Hey Look, An Ad. Did You Buy It?
Does That Prove or Disprove My Point?

Again, you can't monetize every operation the same way. So really there are two challenges facing media companies today, both the paradigm shift I talked about earlier, and this element of differing user behavior by market. Also, I think it is becoming increasingly true that we're learning to simply edit out the ad placement on web pages. I often read websites and am simply not aware of the ads that are staring me in the face. My brain has been trained to avoid them completely. And then there's pop-up blockers.

No, "traditional" advertising is not a magic bullet.

Then we come to subscriptions, paid memberships, premium memberships, and so on. One approach to this ties into the ads: make the advertisements as annoying as possible, and then offer an ad-free premium membership.

This is potentially beneficial to the distribution venue, but I can't imagine it's actually of any benefit to the advertised products or services being run through their ad channels. In other words, the advertising companies are kind of being duped into paying the distribution venue money to annoy their users into paying them more money.

That's actually pretty slick. Or sick. You decide. (It is also, by the way, the only sensible answer to the annoying pre-roll ads on YouTube.)

If you generate enough quality content, paid memberships are still possibly an option for monetizing. But you have to be able to put in an incredible amount of assets and sweat equity before you reach that point. You have to build a lot of trust too, and keep in mind that people are paying $10 a month for netflix so they sure as hell aren't going to pay $29.95 for your comparatively little indie outfit. Plus, you risk alienating your entire market if you put up a pay-wall. (And people will find a way around it anyway.)

This was, by the way, something I brought up in a strategy meeting at a previous employer that was still using a pay-per-product model for digital content. You can't compete with Netflix like that. I got laid off due to lack of funds not too long after, and last I heard the media / IT department has been slashed by more than 50%. So, there you go.

Can you start to see why the levelled playing field is still no better for small outfits?

A new paradigm doesn't call for ad hoc, desperate solutions. It calls for a reconceptualized view of user interactivity, of creating real ongoing relationships with users, and, not to be creepy, entering into their lives. I know that sounds vague. That's because though I have a view of how this would work, it would take a considerable budget, though it's potentially a goldmine for the right projects.

I will say this much: transmedia is the future. But if corporations only think of it as an advertising channel or marketing method, not only have they missed the point, they will ruin their one long-term way out of total annihilation.

Have a good night.

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

How To Do SEO Write (And Not Be A Douchebag)

2011-12-05T01:49:00.000-08:00

By James CurcioSome of what I say here are probably occult "secrets" that shouldn't be shared. Maybe I'm decreasing my "market value." I don't know. I just want to clue you in on just a few of the things I've picked up essentially living with a console of some sort glued to my nervous system for the last decade and a half.There are, generally speaking, three kinds of SEO. I'm going to talk about two of them here. The third is "black magic" and I'm not going to talk about it. At least, not yet.
There's the kind of SEO that you learn as a part of web design.This is how I first learned it, officially. It is what tells you to create all of your "semantic" content in HTML, and keep all design elements as CSS and graphics. Why? So you don't confuse the search engines. It tells you to create a hierarchy of priority using things like page titles, meta tags, and header tags. It is actually not incredibly complicated. It shouldn't be. It's simply "best practices" designers should follow to make their sites easy to spider.
There is "SEO writing." This has two sides.
The first is the writing element of what I just described: understanding how to format a document so that it is easiest for machines to parse. Hierarchy. Headers. Bullets. Proper image tags. Don't bury your key ideas inside some arcane table. Look at what words you use next to which words. Consider using but not overusing certain combinations of words, especially in regard to core concepts.
The second is more complicated. This involves a mixture of timing, intuition, association, and having the kind of manic attention that can follow what thousands of people are saying at once. I'll talk about this last one first because it relates to the other three.

I'm not kidding. Every morning, I scan through a twitter stream created by thousands of people, and mirror that activity on several other services. I ask myself, after a minute or two of that, "What stuck out?" If something really stuck out, you can best believe that thing is a high priority on the cultural mind right now, within the core demographic that you've selected to follow. This is, by the way, a reason why it is important to create lists of people to follow that represent different markets, if you want to keep your fingers on the thoughts that exist within the domain of several different egregores.
Timing. Different stories have different lifespans. Especially on the Internet, the thing that is hot today might be boring tomorrow. If you scoop a story moments before it hits, you can expect to see tens or hundreds of thousands of visits. If you run it a day later, you will be lost in the noise. Signal to noise is a crucial concept to understand, and I think if you play with this stuff even for a little while you'll find yourself using a lot of "wave" and "surfing" metaphors. Comes with the territory, especially if you haven't been sober since 1995 like me. (Hey kids: don't believe everything you read on the internet.) Intuition. This is the part that comes from practice. Yesterday I was sifting through feeds and my wife asked me what I was doing. "Looking for a tech story to spin on Disinfo.com." "Why?" "I don't know. I just know it's what I need to do right now." Well, I never found the story that lit the green light. But I am fairly sure if I did, it would've been the right thing to run, right then. And knowing I didn't find it was part of that intuition, also. Instead I found a drug story which, by the time they schedule to run it, might hit too far behind the crest of the wave to bring in a real surge of traffic. So it goes. Keep going. (Edit: I underestimated. That one brought in several thousand views in hours.) This leads me to-Association. Say you manage to scoop that story of the minute. The things that you associate with it are going to help focus the traffic that you receive, especially on a story that's too large for you to hope to get top ranking. You can best assume that if you type in "xxxx + mythology," you will see modernmythology.net in the top 2 pages. That's because we work hard. (And/or are insane. You decide.)

Know What This Is?
You'll be seeing more of them soon.

This also can be the way to garner attention for a project that deserves attention but doesn't have it yet - and it is by the way the question that "old school" news reporters will probably ask you if you are trying to pitch your novel or album. "What recent story can we attach this to?" I have yet to master this. How can you tell? I'm not on CNN right now. There is one final thing to remember about SEO writing that is probably the most important. So important that it deserves the feared ALL CAPS:SEO GARBAGE IN IS GARBAGE OUTVery few of the people that pay for SEO work have any idea what they're paying for. And they don't pay enough and the result is garbage. This is the same problem I've seen time and again in web design. I'm not going to turn this into a long bitter rant about this subject but trust me, half of that sour feeling you get in your stomach when you hear the word "SEO"? Don't blame it on the writers or even SEO "Professionals." The blame also falls on the shoulders of clients. I've taken SEO hack jobs and it feels dirty doing it, but doing this stuff right takes a lot of time and a lot of time means a lot of money. And people are often not willing to put a lot of money into something that they don't even understand. If, on the other hand, you do understand the kind of campaign I could wage for you with an adequate budget: I'm not hard to get in touch with. A little demonstration of what I'm talking about. Layne Stayley. Myth. Charlie Sheen Polyamory. Adonis DNA. Of course, these will shift up constantly. But at least as of the moment of posting this, Modern Mythology is not only on the top page but often in the top 3 of these search terms. I could list a ton more search terms that were all trending for a moment, which is the point at which we set our crack team of midget coke whore psychopath douchebags loose on their keyboards.Look for "Crack midget coke whore psychopath douchebags" next week.
But seriously. This is the final takeaway for all of you: SEO does not determine what you say about something. I ran several stories off of the "Charlie Sheen craze." A lot of people came to me saying that I had give them insights they'd never considered before- not just saying something about Charlie Sheen (Good God) that they hadn't heard said elsewhere in the noise, but ideas about culture and personality that they hadn't considered before. Period. In other words, if you use SEO to help you determine what to write for on the web, that doesn't make you a good writer. And being a good writer doesn't ensure that you'll be a good thinker. And you've got to be all three, and keep pushing, to ever hope to be a myth maker in these times. Which is the only game in town, so far as I'm concerned. And I won't pretend I've "arrived" or that I'm "on the level." But I'm going to die trying, and to try to help define what that level is. What about you? Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.