transmissions from a compromised antenna

New Article on Graduate School and Staying or Leaving

2008-04-15T14:31:14Z

Please check out my new article that's up on the website of the CUNY Advocate. It raises questions about graduate school and presents current students with some questions that might help them determine whether the academic path is the right one for them. Feel free to distribute widely and wildly!

—James

lazy period

2008-03-27T20:10:35Z

I'm going through sort of a dark phase right now... And I don't mean dark in a good, sexy way with pounding electronic bass, either. I just can't seem to motivate myself to do all the stuff I should be doing. Finding it very hard to write, although I'm trying to force myself to. In a really sick way I miss working for the various groups who tell me what to do and then I follow orders. What I want to develop is the ability to follow my own orders.

Article on No Rio fundraising up

2008-02-26T18:45:33Z

One of the interesting things about magazine/newspaper journalism that's different from the fiction world is that you almost never write the title of your piece. I really like the one that the Indypendent came up with for my recent article on the dilemmas of fundraising at what they called "ABC No Rico." I'm liking the humor of that.

In other news, I'm too busy these days to eat or sleep so please forgive my absence in the usual circles. I'm working full day shifts at the upcoming Left Forum, where I'm the art director, and then late nights at a freelance gig. I'll be back in a week or two.

Dracula's Ball So-So / Philly Cops Bust A+ Party

2008-02-20T20:17:00Z

Great time in Philly as usual this weekend, although things went a little different than I expected. One of the most fun and exciting things was just going to the Digital Ferret store. The whole record shop is dedicated to dark electronic stuff with a bit of old-school industrial, neo-Celtic, ambient, power noise, and so on. Also great selection of t-shirts, magazines and DVDs. New York City, for some reason (and I do have my theories as to what that reason might be), just can't support subcultural institutions like Digital Ferret, Relapse Records, and the rest of the Philly scene. There's plenty of jazz shops and weird old record shops, but they don't cater so much to weird, marginalized cultural forms.

I picked up a big wishlist of older stuff I should have owned but didn't, including the Psychic TV "Towards the Infinite Beat" double album that covers a lot of great acid house from 1987 to 1992. Also CDs by Switchblade Symphony, Cenobita (another band from that Mexico City EBM scene I'm obsessed with), And One, and the first half of the "LoLife" remixes by Headscan. Mars made the amazing find of the day, however, with the new release by The Threshold Houseboys Choir, a current project of Sleazy from the groundbreaking early industrial band Throbbing Gristle. The new album and DVD, "Form Grows Rampant," consists of wailing, ceremonial voices over five tracks of eerie music. The trick is that none of the voices in the choir belong to humans at all—the vocals are generated digitally using different types of software. When it comes to art projects I've seen that address the relationships between technology and beauty, technology and emotion, technology and intimacy, Sleazy's effort to create an army of "houseboys" using strictly digital means is one of the most arrestingly conceived.

Later we showed up at Dracula's Ball and saw And One play. Sort of like Depeche Mode but way German and with a slight '20s chanteuse feel even though the singer is male. I preferred the faster, more aggressive tracks to the pretty and romantic ones but the whole show was good. The dance floor later on was like a 7.5 out of 10. The DJ kept fucking around and playing rockabilly tracks when I wanted pure dark electro like at the Castle. Oh well... it can't always be Tom Gold behind the turntables.

We took Mars's girl home (she had to shoot a public service announcement about the dangers of leaving your baby unattended in a car the next day) and rolled into the PEX party around four in the morning. Just as I predicted. This party had more flow. Vast spacious warehouse and you wander down wide steps into a room as big as a cathedral, where a big boned girl shrieks laughter as she soars on a swing fastened to the ceiling. Firedancers move in the distance, their faces melting into the darkness leaving only whirling flames to trail across the eye.

We must have spent two or three hours drinking and dancing before the mood suddenly shifted, the sexy glitter on everything melting off as people shouted "The police are here," "Look out everybody, the police are busting up the party." And sure enough they were. I doubt Mars or I will ever forget this big fat Philly cop with a starsky moustache marching across the warehouse yelling "Get off the fucking couch asshole! Get off the couch right now or I'll kick your piece of shit ass off it." The sudden transition from bliss to macho cop repression was a real downer. Outside the warehouse I was amazed to see at least twenty police cars and a number of arrests being made. It was like the World Economic Forum protests outside the Waldorf-Astoria or something. Fucked up.

Dracula's Ball / PEX Parties tomorrow

2008-02-15T16:41:14Z

In Philly tomorrow for Dracula's Ball and then, later, the Philadelphia Experiment party. Should be totally amazing. I'll let you know.

"Defenders of Love" Single Mom Benefit Wednesday

2008-02-11T15:44:35Z

For those in NYC, my friend Jessica Ryan has organized a benefit for the Brooklyn Young Mothers' Collective this Wednesday. Benefit will take place at 7:30 pm at the Cake Shop. That's 152 Ludlow in the Lower East Side.

As Jessica writes: "Raffles could win you a fake chocolate cake autographed by Amy Sedaris and other sweet prizes or get your Valentine a real cake at the bake sale. Enjoy musicians, comedians, poets & a ventriloquist all performing to honor the Love of the Single Mom."

I have a class so you won't see me there until a little later but I hope some of you can make it.

No Rio Piece Up at Brooklyn Rail

2008-02-07T15:49:12Z

Hey All,

This came out in print a few days ago but just appeared on the Web today. Unlike some of the other things I've put in print lately, I really slaved over this one, which tells the history of ABC No Rio through the imprints that remain in the grimy details of the building on 156 Rivington. Comments welcome as always.

Piece on NYC Latino Vote Up on Huff Post

2008-02-05T15:51:00Z

So my first real piece of reportage on the election is now up here.

There were some interesting elements of the reporting process that didn't make it into the story. The one that most sticks with me is that the Obama people resisted the category of "Latino," which my editor had pretty much told me to run with, saying "We don't put a label on everyone." The guy at the Obama office was also proud to tell me one of his primary Latina organizers had also worked for Pataki, a Republican. All the people in the Clinton camp were much more comfortable with the categories: Yes we're out canvassing Latinos, and yes we're all Democrats.

"Nerve Gas" Published in Hebrew

2008-02-04T14:51:24Z

It's snowing outside today. Beautiful but a little inconvenient. In other news, my story "How Lonesome a Life Without Nerve Gas" just appeared on the Israeli science-fiction site Bli Panika (Don't Panic). It's the first time my work's been published in translation.

Really getting schooled now

2008-02-01T18:02:45Z

Had my last class with Sam Tanenhaus of The New York Times yesterday and seeing him straighten out myriad tiny flaws and errors in my classmates' writing really brought home the obsessive attention to grammar, sound, and narrative one has to bring to bear if you want your writing to hold up. It's so easy to relax and let weaknesses slip though.

I went home and looked over a couple of my recent published works, desperately wishing that I could have one more go-around on them. But then, even Ballard says he never reads over any of his own books or stories because he finds too many mistakes. So at least I'm in decent company.

I'll be at the big Evolver party at Jivamukti yoga tomorrow night. If anyone's planning on going drop me a line

My Review of Love and Sex With Robots, by David Levy

2008-01-25T20:28:30Z

Is up here.

Feel free to argue or add your own thoughts in the comments.

Uh-oh

2008-01-24T14:20:43Z

http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/pwl/james_trimarco.php

Chechen War Novel

2008-01-15T17:33:04Z

I was leafing through the new Harpers last night and came across something that really threw me for a loop. A set of little vignettes about Russian soldiers stationed outside of Grozny in Chechnia. Harpers titled the section "The Things They Ate," in dark allusion to Tim O'Brien's Vietnam memoir "The Things They Carried" and each of the three sections details an incident of eating something you wouldn't have wanted to eat unless you had to. If you thought the U.S. treated its soldiers like shit, just have a look at this.

The work has a combination of hardness and sensitivity that can only come from experience. But he takes control of the material by off on key bits of information until just the right time, sculpting the stories into the shape of jokes, although the horror of the scene transmutes the humor into a more existential sort of sensation. Memorable sentence: "He was well fed, but not as well fed as the other Grozny dogs that went out of their minds as they gnawed on corpses in the ruins."

Probably it's the first time in years I've read a selection of someone's writing, looked at the writer's name, and known I would remember that name for the rest of my life.

Arkady Babchenko's novel One Soldier's War will be published in February by Grove Press.

Pathetic presidential stunts

2008-01-12T16:31:34Z

So yeah... after seven years of invading, bombing, threatening, torturing, and detaining Muslims—fostering waves of anti-West sentiment unknown since the Crusades—our President decides that in his last year he's going to solve the Israel-Palestine problem. It's nice that he's calling for an end to the 1967 occupation, but can either side really take that seriously coming from him? You can just feel him reaching for the history books. Best of luck with that.

Smooth Jazz is the New Death Metal

2008-01-07T17:53:27Z

Are you hardcore enough?

back home

2007-12-28T03:38:15Z

Back in New York and everything is gray or brick brown. It took an hour and a half for the cab to get me home through endless BQE traffic. I came home and ate and passed out into a sort of coma and only now, some ten hours later, are the myriad things I need to do taking form and reality again. Things are good, though. New Years in New York should be amazing this time. Many friends will be here. Year of the snake, I hear. Auspicious...

Dance Implosion at the Castle!!!

2007-12-23T22:03:26Z

Holy shit, peops!

Last night was a big whirlwind tour of old-school Florida fun. Bhall's family was having a little family get together, so my sister and I drove up to Largo to sip home-brewed beer and look at these hilarious glamour shot pics of Brian in high school, beaming at the camera from under a huge curly afro. Some old friends who I hadn't seen in ages came around from their digs in LA, and around 10 my sister went home and the rest of us went to visit a local artist who lives in St. Pete now. We picked up the gifted songwriter Alex Hooks and drank and talked some more, until around midnight when Merc and Syd came up and asked me if I still wanted to go to the Castle.

Yes I did yes I did yes I did. There is no club in New York like it. The people there are all about the culture and the music and the fetish stuff is wild and for real but anybody can feel accepted. I got up on that dance floor and shook it to the dark sounds with some graceful stranger in pigtails and black lipstick and hours went by in a state of pure techno-gothic bliss. It might have been nice to talk to more people but it was one of those nights when I communicate with movement and not with words. Alex had never been to the Castle before and it was awesome to see him get down too. Merc drove us home and we ate gnarly Taco Bell nachos with Alex's dog, which he says is 150 years old in dog years.

Fucking amazing night. Thanks to everybody who made it happen.

Gated Communities / Spinal Meningitis

2007-12-20T15:37:03Z

I encountered some drama this past week when, just as my sister and I were supposed to leave for Florida she was admitted to the hospital with what looked like spinal meningitis! My mom flew up the next day but told me to keep my flight so I could see my dad in New Tampa. They took a spinal tap and speculated that she might even have Lymes meningitis, which is when the Lymes disease pathogen infects the spine. Suffice it to say I was extremely worried. After the spinal tap she couldn't lift her head for a couple of days. My dad and I were calling my mom every couple of hours from the surreal, deeply Ballardian gated community where he lives.

Turns out she's pretty much okay though. She has the viral type of meningitis but they've treated it and declared it basically harmless. It's the bacterial sort that hits the brain and kills people. In other news she got a great job as an invertebrate zoologist at the Museum of Natural History. Spinal cords and un-spinal cords everywhere these days!

Saw a flock of geese today

2007-12-05T04:57:28Z

Flying in triangle formation over Williamsburg, Brooklyn. So weird.

In other news, I got drunk the other night and made a complete horse's ass of myself. Man, put the booze in the cabinet. M.I.A. was totally kick-ass on Saturday though. Like a cross between Madonna and Che Guevara. Then we had a great time in Philly driving around listening to Dulce Liquido and turning sharp corners. The next day, we went to the original Relapse Records store (independent metal) and to a goth fashion shop called "Armed and Dangerous." Between all the Christmas gifts I've picked up so far, it's looking to be a gothic, satanic, even fascist Christmas.

So little boys and girls, I hope you've all been very nice!

Any big M.I.A. fans out there?

2007-11-27T21:43:44Z

Because I MAY have a free second ticket to see the British-Sri Lankan rap phenomenon in Philadelphia on Saturday December first. I am trying to get a date, sort of, but it's really more important to me to go with someone who actually listens to and digs M.I.A. My roommate's an obvious choice but he'll be busy stocking shelves at Wal-Mart in New Jersey Saturday night.

So if you live in Philly or NYC and you like the M.I.A thang, let me know.

In other news, current writing projects include:

A memoir of some adventures in Prague revisited through the lens of Google Earth, moving towards a concept of the "techno-memoir"
A New York Review of Books-style book review of two non-fic books about the near future, one of which is almost entirely about robot sex. Or I could review two recent books about Sputnik and the Cold War space race. My teachers have told me to try to write more concretely and avoid abstractions so I might pick the second and then write the first one later for a funkier audience.
A propaganda piece urging graduate students to consider a series of hard questions about whether staying in graduate school will bring them anything resembling happiness and satisfaction.
Also contributing research to a piece on political caucuses for the Huffington Post. I'll make a note here when the piece appears on OffTheBus.

Sci Fi Geeks and Creative Non-Fiction Writers: Who's Friendlier?

2007-11-15T04:02:34Z

Answer: Both groups are really friendly but the SF geeks win, hands down! Why is SF so friendly, after you get past the initial Con snobbery?

I miss you guys!

DeKom Last Night

2007-11-04T23:43:07Z

Huge Decompression party in the Queens Museum of Art last night. Costumes were just amazing and people very beautiful. It was great to see my friends from the Hungry March Band playing in the park out back: a meeting of two subcultures that fit messily but well together. Of course I was lame and didn't really put a costume together because I've been working and working on my writing instead of sewing myself a giant furry red bunny suit or whatever. We all have our priorities.

One of the nice things about this party was its location in an art museum, so you could always take a break from the scene and just look at the art. Two standouts were Yue Minjun's "Symbolic Smile" paintings and the to-scale model of New York City:

As far as the Yue paintings, I'll leave it up to you to imagine the feeling of leaving a dancefloor full of gyrating people in full-body fishnet outfits or chainmail and then to stroll through halls where pink-skinned Chinese guys grin grotesquely from every canvas. Like most incredibly focused artistic projects, Yue's methodology is extremely simple and her message powerful and yet somehow, simultaneously, ambiguous. I chatted with a museum guard for fifteen minutes at one point (she was very bored) and asked if the museum, perhaps, picked the paintings to go with the party? I mean, the resonance seemed almost too strong to be a coincidence. But the museum hadn't planned it.

The to-scale model of New York City is mind-bending, and everybody who loves the city needs to see it. I spent a few hours in the viewing room—it's the size of a movie theater—identifying all sorts of patterns in planning I'd never noticed before. The apartments along Central Park East and West, for instance, are taller than the buildings on all the avenues further out so they form a sort of wall around the park. I also noticed several gated communities north of Brighton beach that are surrounded by vast moats. Someday I have to visit those. A model of godzilla was charmingly approaching downtown Manhattan from the sea.

Who's gonna change the channel?

2007-10-16T23:48:37Z

Tomorrow I turn thirty. As a friend just informed me, I have the same birthday as Eminem.

It's weird that I can remember very clearly being about twenty and looking forward to being thirty, thinking by that this point I would have all kinds of stuff figured out, would have found the shining path, and the whole rest of the way would be easier because all I would have to do was follow it.

I'm afraid I'm still lost in the jungle, blazing a crooked trail towards a clearing where I will meet a god with the head of who knows what beast? In other words, the channel did not change. That doesn't mean I'm in the same place I was ten years ago—-on my twentieth birthday, for instance, I awoke to the feel of cold water seeping through my sleeping bag as I slept under the bushes outside City College. They were watering the plants. And the day pretty much continued on along those lines; I think I treated myself to some Korean bar-b-cue for a birthday meal (yes this was before I went veg—that happened about a year and a half later), and took shelter in the library when it rained.

I'm glad I have that moment thrust down into the settling soil of my mind, a little red flag to mark the distance as the years go on. Not just the distance in terms of achievement. Like, "Oh I live in an apartment now instead of under a bush SO I'VE MADE IT!!!! WOO-HOO!" My illusions about what it would mean to be thirty, that I would be this opaque personality that had everything figured out, are perhaps a better point of comparison. I mean, I suppose I know now that when I'm forty I'll probably feel more or less the same, even if the situation of my life is very different: confused and focused, bitter and hopeful, proud and self-hating, defeated and struggling, alive and dead. Sometimes all at once. Sometimes nothing at all. Still capable of hearing a song like "nude" on the new Radiohead album and collapsing with a kind of orgasmic grief. I just can't expect anyone to reach down and change the channel anymore. If anyone's gonna do that, it's gonna be me. But I couldn't even take a step towards a different channel I would actually like without my friends' love and support. So thanks to everybody who's been good to me. I'll try to be good back.

Cool day yesterday

2007-10-14T23:45:08Z

Yesterday I got a chance to see Larry Harvey, the founder of Burning Man, speak in a panel about applying lessons from Burning Man to urban planning. I hope to post the comments of all the presenters in more detail here over the course of the next few days—they were all very compelling—but for now I'll just give my initial reaction. OMFG if only real urban planners thought like this our cities wouldn't be so fucking hellish!

Yeah well, at least there are a couple people out there who can talk about the need, for example, for places that might disorient a citizen so that they might wander into a new neighborhood and make new contacts. Or about the need to give communities the final word on what happens where they live. Or about the need to acknowledge the validity of uses for space besides trade. The planner who made all these comments also repeated over and over again that "streets are for people, not just for cars" and I was looking around like "How can we put this person in an Amanda Burden costume (NYC Department of Planning chairwoman) and get her in charge of this town?"

Well, maybe in my dreams. This town is probably doomed to its fate, anyway. But she's building communities in Europe and the Middle East and I think it's amazing.

Later I went to see Uz Jsme Doma at Club Europa: a seedy Polish nightclub that has about eight bouncers milling around the door. The band was amazing. They are still one of Europe's best punk bands and maybe the best drinking band from Europe you're gonna see. People were running all over the dance floor spraying beers on each other. At the same time, their music is smart. Smart and drunk at the same time. How can you beat that?

Hardt & Negri on Star Trek and Politics of Contemporary War

2007-10-10T18:26:41Z

On Daniel Pinchbeck's advice I picked up a copy of Hardt & Negri's Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. It's a sharp yet optimistic take on political possibilities today and opens with a thorough discussion of post-Fordist war. It comes down to a debate between advocates of the "Revolution in Military Affairs" (RMA), who believe war should now be run mostly by drones and information technology systems rather than by embodied, expendable soldiers. This group is sometimes called "technologists" and includes Donald Rumsfeld. On the other side there are those who believe that human soldiers will always be essential and should be there getting killed anyway in order to preserve and strengthen the population's willingness to accept casualties. This group is sometimes called "traditionalists" and includes people like Gen. Shinseki and Rep. Murtha who criticized Rumsfeld for invading Iraq with such a small force.

Then I came across a passage that might be of interest to friends of mine from both the political and SF communities--not, of course, as if those are mutually exclusive.

Since the technologist dreams of automated, soldierless war machines often border on science fiction, it is perhaps appropriate that we take a lesson from Captain Kirk to illustrate this contradiction. In an episode of Star Trek called "A Taste of Armageddon," the starship Enterprise is sent on a diplomatic mission to a planet that has been at war with a neighboring planet for more than five hundred years. When Kirk and Spock beam down to the planet the local leader explains that battles in this war are conducted with computers, in a kind of virtual game, which, he emphasizes, is the most advanced way to conduct war, allowing them to preserve their civilization. Captain Kirk is horrified to learn, however, that although the computer battle is virtual, those designated as killed in battle must subsequently report to "disintegration machines" to be killed. This is not civilized, Kirk exclaims, with his characteristic indignation... War must involve destruction and horror, he explains. That is what gives us incentive to avoid and put an end to war. ... Kirk and Spock thus destroy the computers to force the planets back to actual combat, hence compelling them to begin negotiations that will eventually put an end to their protracted war.

This adventure of the Enterprise illustrates a contradition of the RMA's technological dream of a civilized, bodiless war. Without the horror of war there is less incentive to put and end to it, and war without end, as Kirk says, is the ultimate barbarity. There is an important difference between the ideology of RMA and the Star Trek situation, however, that further exacerbates the contradiction because, today, the two sides in battles are not equal. When U.S. leaders imagine a bodyless war or a soldier-free war they are referring, of course, only to the bodies of U.S. soldiers. ... This assymetry makes the contradiction even more difficult to address, since only one side lacks an incentive to put an end to war.

(Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 45-46)

I like how this dream of the future, more than thirty years old now, can help us think through the present. As usual, however, the author underestimated the problems and inequality that accompany the application of technology. That's something that deserves consideration.