THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF LOUIS JAMES IOCCA!

So what’s this damn site about? I dunno, you tell me, your reading it after all!

I started this blog way back when on Salon.com’s blog service. It was place to rant and rave without having to send out an email where I’d cc every contact in my Outlook program, then get blocked by some of my dearest friends. Salon stopped supporting their blog site, so I moved to Blogger. But then I decided I did not like Blogger. I then moved to WordPress. SynFlux lived there for a while. I like the WordPress platform a lot. But their TOS does not allow Google Ads to be included on blogs they host, so I created the syndeticfluxion URL to place Google Ads on SynFlux and still use WordPress software to manage the blog. And here we are! Enjoy!!

At the time of this writing I’ve made a grand total of $5.71 with Google’s AdSense: yay!

Anyway, SynFlux is still a way for me to blow off steam without spamming people.

Here’s something I had up on the Salon SynFlux as a “bio” . . .

About me Louis James, the man behind the SynFlux curtain:

My father’s family name being Pirrip, -wait that isn’t me.

Born in the 1940’s, my parents couldn’t vote, -nope not me again.

Call me Ishmael. -that’s someone else again.

Shit, how does one start to write about oneself? Get into “all that David Copperfield kind of crap?”

Yeah, this isn’t going to work. I’d better call in a “semi”-professional:

Louis James is one crazy-ass bastard, a real slick-dick muthafucka. His life seems to careen between the bumpers of extreme creativity and extreme laziness, like a silver ball in some wak pinball machine. The natural ebb and flow of riding the tides of one’s passions, perhaps. A common dynamic encountered in most of the semi-artists I’ve profiled. However he seems a little better (and I mean just a little better) at handling the conflict of being an independent artist type living in a society (America) of conformist, mass-consumption reductionism. I’ve known the cat on and off for most of my life and oddly he’s never had any substance abuse issues, though he has every excuse to: dysfunctional home, troubled youth, alcoholic father, creative frustration, societal dissatisfaction, etc. But hey, who hasn’t dealt with these issues? A lot of people, actually.

Born and raised in small-town central Jersey, he has transcended the small-town formative environment to become an open-minded spirit. “It’s New Jersey,” he notes with attitude and perhaps a bit of pride, “Jersey is an Island in the English Channel.” Sure, man, whatever. “New Jersey, not Joisey!” Okay, okay, my bad! He spent his entire childhood, 0-18, in the same house in the same town in Belle Mead, NJ. (Can I use NJ, is that permitted?) The town then was a semi-rural, semi-suburban area, before blossoming into full-scale suburban paradise. A bedroom community to New York, Philadelphia, Princeton, and New Brunswick all at once. With the Fortune-500 route 1 corridor running right along side it. You know, the American dreamland. “Belle Mead put the sub in suburban,” Louis notes, whatever that’s supposed to mean. “You know, sub, as in below or inferior,” he adds after a follow-up question. I’m still not 100% clear (but say 99%) about this bit, and I let it slide. “The best thing about growing up there was that is was so maddeningly dull and conservative, yet was an easy one-hour train ride to either New York or Philadelphia. So life was relatively easy back home and you could get your urban cultural fix without much effort.”

Upon graduating high school there, Louis attended Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY. You know, Long Island. “That was weird and I’m not sure it was the best place for me to go to college, but it worked out okay overall. It was close to the city, so that was good. I was really into the punk-rock scene and into taking pictures, photography, at the time. We’d spend the afternoon up at say the Met or ICP, then go downtown to CB’s or somewhere and catch a set or two. Also, I learned how to play guitar and bass from friends at Hofstra. Well sort of learned how to play, essentially I’m a hack. Well my bass skills are good, but it’s straight-up major chord and power chord shit on the six-string for me. None of those ‘Beatle’s chords’ as Steve Jones put it.” He left Hofstra with a B.S. in communications, and a minor in fine art.

After a short stay back home in Belle Mead, he immediately moved to New York City once landing a job as an assistant on-line videotape editor. “I put a few hundred bucks in my pocket, loaded up my friend Thom’s pick-up truck with most of my worldly possessions and moved in with three, sometimes four, other guys my age, complete strangers, into a railroad apartment in Greenwich Village. It was frightening and liberating all at once, the kind of dynamic that seems to either plague or bless my life continuously.” In the eight or so years Louis lived in New York City he talks of having lived in six different apartments in as many neighborhoods. He currently resides in Jersey City, NJ. “The dodgy part.”

The day job led him to a “career” as a full-time video on-line editor by the age of 23, a rare feat for someone that young at that time. “Most of the other editors were about ten years older than me.” So while this job paid the bills, music and photography remained constant artistic endeavors on the side. “I really wanted to be a rockstar, just like everyone else, so I took my meager musical skills out on auditions and actually wound up in a band.” After two more bands, he gave up it up, after playing every dive club joint in town. “That last band I was in was great, we almost got signed. Our lawyer called with a minor offer from a minor label in Germany, but only after we had broke up and two of the main members moved back to L.A. Then a day or so after our lawyer called, a booker called and offered us every Saturday night at Webster Hall, and the two guys nearly moved back to New York. But they didn’t.”

Louis’ story continues like many others I’ve heard. “To tell the truth, I was a little glad the band disbanded. But just a little. It had been a rough winter that last year, non-stop snowstorms here in the big city. And I was getting tired of playing two to three shows a week and having to schlep my rig all around town through all that snow. Plus the day job was getting really demanding too. I would literally go from the edit suite to right up on stage within an hour or less sometimes. It was a lot to manage. But looking back, from where I am now, I’d do it all over again in a second. It was a real formative experience. Worth the effort. I gave it my best shot and got as far as I think I could have reasonably expected, given the circumstances. So I quit playing in bands without any real regrets. Had I been a trust-fund kid with money, maybe I’d have kept it up. But I’m not, so I didn’t.” Yep, I’ve heard this one before, except for maybe the part about the snow. So he matured into a career in video and made the best of it. “Fortunately the film and video day job shit was becoming artistically rewarding at last. And I was still taking photos when time allowed and things got dull.”

Eventually Louis left the full-time gig to go freelance to try to create more free time in his life. The film and video industry was undergoing major changes as the digital revolution caught up with it. The price point to start up a video editing company had fallen dramatically. And then so did the prices companies could charge for editing services as competition grew. Staff editors were being laid off, and freelance editors were being hired ad-hoc more and more. A lot of companies died and a lot of companies were born during this transitional phase in the industry. One of the new companies born was Singularity, which Louis started with a friend in the late 1990’s. “With the Avid [a digital editing system], I guy like me could actually buy an edit system, well lease one anyway, and set-up shop. So that’s what I did. I found a partner and started a very small company that worked out of her apartment at first. I parlayed some of my staff and freelance clients into a small business base on off we went. Our first job was an MTV gig, this back in the days before MTV went to shit.”

Even with the clients from previous work experience, Louis talks of hard times for a while. “My plan to create more free time for myself failed completely. Don’t ever start your own business, it totally changes your life as you know it. It takes over your life. Especially when your business partner lets you down, but hey, that’s for a whole ‘nother interview!” After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, business slowed dramatically for Singularity.

Sidebar: Louis speaks about volunteering for the Red Cross in the days right after to 9/11, upon a friend’s suggestion and commitment to volunteer. “That was quite a time, we saw some shit, and helped some people out. I’m proud of my friend for making us do something. I probably would not have on my own. But it was tough work. Little sleep those days. We spent one night on the USS Comfort. That was . . . interesting.” I feel Louis doesn’t want to go into a lot of detail about this, so I leave it be.

“Work wise I was forced to go back to freelancing to make ends meet, and take the Singularity jobs if and when they came. I’d throw the freelance money into the Singularity bank account to keep everything paid up. Eventually I found myself working freelance for The Maury Show.” It is a daytime talk show along the lines of Jerry Springer’s show. “A real sleaze-fest. Plus most of the people working on the show were totally inept. A lot of the senior level producers had been interns only a few seasons back. So let’s just say it was challenging to fit in there, never mind the show’s exploitative content. But I needed the bread so I stuck it out.” After time Singularity got back up on its feet and was Louis was able to quit The Maury Show and eek out a living with Singularity.

Professionally things have remained that way ever since, with the company growing slowly each year. At the time of this interview, Louis is completing a split with his business partner. She wanted to pursue a producing career, and started to neglect her Singularity responsibilities, as he tells it. It seems like it was an ugly split, and again I sense Louis does not want to go there, and again I do no push him to. Another time, maybe, as he said.

These days Louis seems more at ease with himself on some levels, and more dissatisfied on others. He speaks of a desire to create some work or a body of work that will affect people and live beyond his mortal existence. Maybe it will be photography maybe it will be filmmaking, but it seems it will be something. “I’m just not satisfied with the everyday stuff that most people seem to be seeking. You know a marriage, a home, kids and all. A regular job. There has to be something more. I seem to be blessed with this crazy imagination and urge to create, but I often have trouble focusing it on a particular thing. And then when I do get something going on my follow-through often leaves a lot to be desired. But art, music, cinema, photography, all these things I owe a great debt to. They are the things I live for, the things that have gotten me through the insanity of life. Things that have shown me the way through. Made me feel more connected to the world at the times when I felt so lost and depressed. And just to take from this body of human artistic creation and learn lessons from it to help me out personally, and not leave something behind, you know, to contribute to it, just seems like I’m taking advantage of it. There’s a certain guilt I feel by not giving back. And to see America give less and less a fuck about art as it focuses more and more on marketing and profit margins really gets me down. I’ve been saying for a few years now that America’s latest greatest art form is marketing. And that’s a rather sad thing to notice. We seem to be regressing on so many levels, especially artistically and politically. It’s like the last four decades never even happened. We’re reliving the ’50’s all over again with our naive neo-conservatism. Have you turned on the radio lately? Just listen to the top-40 and the talk radio. It is really scary. It’s bubble-gum and duck-and-cover all over again.” Straight up shit brother, I do not even know how to respond when he says this to me. All I can do is quote it and share it with others.

All in all, I like the guy, this Louis James character. I know him to enjoy the following leisure activities: bicycling, skiing, kayaking, and movie-going. And other things I’m sure I’ll remember in a week or so. As I’ve said, I’ve known him awhile and always find him good company. He keeps up the conversation and often goes off on these funny riffs about whatever happens to be getting under his skin at the moment. I wish him only the best, and expect great things from him. That is if he can only find time to devote to photography or the screenplay he tells me (in the last few minutes of our time together) he’s writing. If he can stay focused on just one thing, and stop the pinball nature of his life and set it on a more linear track, he might just acheive that which he so desires. Yes, yes: that’s what it will take; easier said than done.

- Faro Aumundson