Production History

James’ career as a creative polymath / dilettante began in 2001, upon graduating Bard college with the world’s most lucrative degree (Philosophy & Integrated Media Arts). He co-founded his first art and media collective (the “Evolving Media Network”) shortly after. Inspired in part by underground art scenes like The Factory, EMN took over and re-purposed a combined 15,000 sq ft of facilities in Upstate NY into A/V production studios, cranking out for-hire media production by day, and avant-garde weirdness by night. The corporate work soon began to take over, so like any other sensible 22 year old, he left for Los Angeles and started Babalon, a band / faux occult-indoctrination vehicle loosely based on Jack Parson’s “Babalon Working.” This ultimately worked out about as well as it did for Jack, albeit thankfully with fewer literal explosions.

• His first novel, Join My Cult!, was released shortly thereafter (2004) by New Falcon Press, also publisher of Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, Aleister Crowley, and many other counterculture figures. In this fictionalized mixture of satire and gothic melodrama, based on growing up in and around Philadelphia in the 1990s, a group of suburban teenagers create a secret society, and are shocked to find their rituals work. (At least well enough to leave the protagonist in a mental asylum by the end.)

• After this release and the dissolution of the band followed a decade of couch-surfed “book tours", festivals, Cons, and general malfeasance. Most of the projects from this period were a reflection on a counterculture or “occulture” that was probably already on the wane by the time it was featured in Disinfo’s anthology Generation Hex in 2005. Nevertheless, it was hailed by Grant Morrison as “Your invitation to the party that might just bring the house down.” Launched at Alex and Allyson Grey’s CoSM in 2005, James and the other Gen Hex authors spoke to a packed house.

• Another developmental near miss followed, in the form of an intended mythology-spanning graphic novel series Fas Ferox , on which he served as creative director for two years of development, described by Warren Ellis as “a 21st century mythology worthy of the term ” and Neil Gaiman said, “I cannot wait to see how the world of Fas Ferox will feel when it arrives on our computer screens, for people to interact with, to explore, to inhabit.” It never did make it to anyone’s screen; however, much of the pre-production collaborative team and world-building process between 2004-2007 served as training and inspiration for the Fallen Cycle, a decade later.

• He continued with various creative A/V projects during this time alongside freelance work, for instance with Elektroworx, an unfortunately named electro-occult act that featured a visually packed live show including bombardment with meticulously executed sigil-laden projections. In 2006, he took what would become a very long hiatus from musical live performance following opening for famed Belgian Industrial Front242. He continued co-producing and playing music (bass, guitar, and/or percussion) on various studio projects, including subQtaneous: Some Still Despair In A Prozac Nation, Veil of Thorns’ Cognitive Dissonance, and HoodooEngine’s Skinny Puppy and Ministry inspired EgoWhore and Murder The World.

• Speaking, vending, and producing art installations at various festivals and Cons led to a number of new collaborations, such as with John Harrigan and the occult-performance group Foolish People, P. Emerson Williams, and Joseph Matheny and Dave Szulborski, two pioneers of transmedia, through projects including Chasing The Wish, Greylodge, Alterati (“Inside Scoop On The Outside Culture”), on which he served as senior editor, and co-producer for their affiliated podcasts. These featured twice per month interviews with a long list of artists and luminaries from the known to unknown, including Saul Williams, Jared Louche (Chemlab), David Mack (Kabuki, Daredevil), Amanda Palmer (Dresden Dolls), Laurie Lipton, and many others. Several of these projects saw over a million visitors a year during their peak (2006-2008), and podcast episode direct downloads frequently got significant traffic, all before the supposed “podcast revolution.”

• In 2007 he co-founded Mythos Media with several other independent artists and programmers, a hybrid digital/traditional publishing platform aimed at releasing the numerous transmedia projects that were proliferating around this time. Some early releases included a comic from Reality Hackers/Mondo2000 and Wizards of the Coast alum Rudy Rauben, and a vampire novella written by Lycia vocalist Tara Vanflower, lushly illustrated by horror artist Daniele Serra. Mythos wound down by 2012 for lack of funding, becoming mostly an imprint for personal releases.

• Freelance journalism and analysis also led to various personal publication projects. Once a popular fringe webzine (2-10k visits/day) in the 2000s, Modern Mythology gradually contracted through the latter 2010s until finally returning again to its original form, of glorified personal blog with occasional guest writers. It still features interviews, reviews, guest podcasts and essays, although releases are now handled in an ad-hoc, “whenever it’s ready to run” manner.

• Apocalyptic Imaginary was his second anthology on myth and culture released in conjunction with Modern Mythology in 2011, after The Immanence of Myth was released by UK based Weaponized Press, Harrigan’s imprint. Both became curriculum materials for several 300-level lit and philosophy courses at SUNY Binghamton.

• He co-starred in a 2012 independent film and web-series, Clark: A Gonzomentary, a lo-fi DV “gonzo” dark comedy dealing with the parasitism of the art world, which received an Outstanding Lead Actor Award, and Outstanding Writing Award for the web series version from LA Webfest 2013, and was nominated for a Best Documentary award at the Sixth Annual Philadelphia Independent Film Festival for the full-length film version.

• In 2014, he published the final edition of Party At The World’s End, after various limited serialized runs of early editions 2004-11 were released at Cons as “Fallen Nation,” “Words of Traitors,” and the “404 Documents”. The final version was based on an optioned screenplay that itself had been adapted from an abandoned sequel to Join My Cult!, and features art by Philly-based artist Chris DiSalvatore, who he would go on to work with in several subsequent projects.

• He continued to team up on media and journalism startup projects, such as a two year stint as acting editor-in-chief of the now defunct Rebel News, an independent news outlet he founded with several partners including Gregg Housh, unwitting Anon spokesperson, activist, podcaster, and sometimes TV consultant on shows such as House of Cards. (No connection to the far Right Aussie outlet that can now be found at our former URL.)

• A major creative focus in recent years has been expanding development within the creator-owned transmedia Fallen Cycle universe that began with Party At The World’s End: Tales From When I Had A Face, a full-color illustrated “modern fairytale”, which had a successful hardcover limited edition Kickstarter, and several nascent comics, podcast, and RPG dev projects. The overall project remains independent, until such a time as a suitable publication partner is found.

• He expanded several of the essays first published on Rebel News in 2015 into Narrative Machines: Myth, Revolution and Propaganda (Mythos Media), his first solo full-length non-fiction book. Although an exploratory and theoretical work (dubbed a “zeroeth edition”), it anticipated many of the themes that would become headline news during the Trump years— memetics, how our narratives define the limits of our political and personal identity, how they can be controlled, how the era of humanity may be consigned to myth just as it was defined by it.

• A lifelong fascination with Bowie and the relationship of artwork, fame, and persona led to MASKS: Bowie & Artists of Artifice an in-depth anthology with a mixture of established scholars and working artists including Slavoj Zizek, John Grey, Gary Lachman, former Bowie collaborator Davide De Angelis, and many others. It was begun shortly after Bowie died, and was released by Intellect Books UK in January 2020, distributed in the United States by University of Chicago Press.

• Tomorrow’s Forgotten Relics, an EP / demo, inspired in part by the creative process of past Bowie/Eno collaborations, composed during the Covid-19 pandemic, and described (semi-sarcastically) as “a retroprogressive non-concept album,” was released on Bandcamp September 2022, with extended digital distribution (iTunes, Spotify, YouTube Music, etc) following in the winter.

He has returned to his hometown of Philadelphia after having lived and toured across the US for many years.