☆James Champagne Interview☆

an adult from Rhode Island

The first of our contributors to be interviewed is Rhode Island-based “provocateur” and crypto-Traditionalist James Champagne…

IN SPITE OF THE NUMEROUS OPPORTUNITIES FOR SEXUAL GRATIFICATION IN THE STATE OF RHODE ISLAND, YOU'VE CHOSEN A LOVELESS AND VIRGINAL EXISTENCE FAR REMOVED FROM ANY CONCEPT OF HUMAN INTIMACY. IS THIS DELIBERATE REFUSAL OF EXPERIENCE SIMILAR TO THE REJECTION OF ‘LIGHT, HOPE AND LIFE’ IN THE VILLIERS DE L’ISLE-ADAM PLAY ‘AXËL’? IF GIVEN THE DIRECT OPPORTUNITY, WOULD YOU SEXUALLY PENETRATE OTHER RHODE ISLANDERS?

Just to be clear (and for the record, though I know of the Villiers play in question, I have not actually read it yet), I would like to make it known that, unlike some individuals on Reddit who wear their virginity like some badge of pride, I do not think this state confers upon me some sort of innate or morally superior virtue (jesting references to an admiration for Sir Galahad aside, he being my favorite Knight of the Round Table). It’s merely stating a fact of my existence, though amongst my friends it’s become a bit of a running joke that, being a good sport, I generally play along with. And I would argue that there’s a good amount of love in my life, just not of the romantic kind. The problem with “human intimacy” is that it requires you to first care about other humans, and that I have trouble with. Frankly it seems like a lot of work that could be better spent on other, more productive activities, and the concept of skin hunger/touch starvation is as foreign to me as the notion that aural pleasure can be gleaned from attendance at a Kid Rock concert. I suppose it also doesn’t help matters that, despite being 44 years of age, I still haven’t settled on a preferred sexual orientation. I do not quite care for the choices Nature has provided us. Most men are loathsome swine and most women are empty vases (well, all American women). Ooer miss, how rude! As the smiling President once said, “Don’t believe a word I say. I’m making it all up.”

YOU COME FROM A FAMILY WHERE ALMOST EVERY MEMBER IS A WRITER, AND YOUR SEVERAL BROTHERS HAVE ALL WRITTEN NUMEROUS EXTREMELY LONG NOVELS WHICH THEY HAVE MADE NO EFFORT TO PUBLISH. ARE THERE ANY SIMILARITIES BETWEEN YOUR RESPECTIVE PROJECTS, AND WHICH OF THEIR WORKS WOULD YOU RECOMMEND?

It’s true that all three of my younger brothers (Tom, Bill and Andrew) have written books, but as you noted in your question none of them have ever pursued publication, and thus it’s hard for me to recommend their books because they’re unavailable to the general populace (also, I don’t really detect any overt similarities to what I do; none of them have ever done short story collections, for example). I do greatly enjoy the Kremlin books and also the Magical Fantasy series (currently up to 16 volumes!) that Tom has written, and Andrew has written some good novels like BRIGIT, AFTER THE FLOOD, and THE SEVEN HEARTS OF ABBY LEAH (among others). I haven’t read any of Bill’s books yet (I think he’s written two), but he’s really more of a musician than a writer: if you want to hear his work, he has a music link on his website: https://www.billchampmusic.com/music or you can just go onto YouTube and search for “Bill Champagne” and a bunch of hits should come up.

THE WORLD BEFORE ABOUT 1997 WAS UNHYGIENIC AND FULL OF UGLY PEOPLE, BAD ARCHITECTURE AND QUESTIONABLE ‘MUSIC.’ IN SPITE OF THIS YOU ARE INTERESTED IN THE ‘MIDDLE AGES’ AND HAVE READ NUMEROUS BOOKS AND RESEARCH MATERIALS ON THE SUBJECT. WHAT IS THE SOURCE OF YOUR INTEREST IN THE DISTANT PAST?

Partly it’s because History was (along with Art and English) one of the few subjects that I was always proficient at in school, though I should say that the first historical era that truly cast a spell on me (during my grade school days) was Ancient Egypt. I suppose it was in high school that I really started getting into the Middle Ages, as in the tenth grade that was the period we covered in Social Studies. I remember we had a big textbook full of colorful pictures of medieval artwork, castles under siege, knights jousting in tournaments, people expiring from the Black Death . . . I just fell in love with it all. Tenth grade was also the time in my life when I started getting into the Super NES FINAL FANTASY games (which, of course, employ a lot of medieval iconography), and it was also the grade where, in English class, we began studying Shakespeare, who set many of his plays in the Middle Ages and who was also heavily influenced by medieval thought (for the curious, I recommend Helen Cooper’s book SHAKESPEARE AND THE MEDIEVAL WORLD). If memory serves that was also around the time that I read Lloyd Alexander’s PRYDAIN CHRONICLES Welsh fantasy series. So it was a confluence of all those things, really.

The thing is, this interest remained dormant in me for some time post-college (though still briefly flared up when I would read things like Umberto Eco’s THE NAME OF THE ROSE or the works of J.-K. Huysmans), but when I got to my 30s I started to slowly become interested in that era again, partly from exposure to the GAME OF THRONES TV show and the books that inspired them, and then when I started to play the Sid Meier CIVILIZATION computer game series, which you could say reawakened my interest in history as a subject in general. It was in December 2019 that I first began reading nonfiction history books, starting with Ancient Egypt and the Classical world, and then in the summer of 2021 I began reading books about the Middle Ages. Since then, I’ve now read over 50 books that are either about the Middle Ages or which were written by people living in that time period.

I don’t know, it’s hard to put into words, I guess I just like the vibe. I wouldn’t have wanted to actually live back then (I’m not even comfortable in this era), but I’m just happy it existed. There were just a lot of cool things about it: kings and queens, knights in armor, castles, heraldry, the Black Death, the Mongol invasion, Viking raids, all of the different Crusades, the evolution of plainchant, not to mention many of the interesting things happening in the Christian world: saints performing miracles, the formation of monasteries, heresies and schisms, all of the intrigue with the popes . . . in any event, I should stress that while the Middle Ages is my favorite time period, there are still others I love a great deal, including the aforementioned Ancient Egypt, Rome, 19^th-century France, the Oregon Trail and the California Gold Rush . . . more recently I’ve also developed a big interest in the 16^th-century Holy Roman Empire, and also Elizabethan and Jacobean England (the latter partly a result of my interest in Shakespeare).

“The Middle Ages, my child, are a vast church such as we shall never more see till God returns upon Earth—a house of prayer as vast as the whole western world, built with ten centuries of ecstasy that recall the Ten Commandments of Sabaoth! It was the Genuflection of the whole universe, in adoration or in awe.”
—Léon Bloy, La Femme pauvre

YOUR NOVEL CONFUSION, ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN 2006, HAS BEEN DESCRIBED AS ‘STILL THE WORLD’S PREMIERE GAY OCCULT BASKETBALL THRILLER.’ WHAT LED YOU TO MASH UP A CONVENTIONAL SPORTS NOVEL PLOT WITH KENNETH GRANT-DERIVED TYPHONIAN OCCULTISM AND GRAPHIC ANAL EROTICISM? ARE YOU PLANNING TO REPUBLISH THIS WORK FOR A MORE DISCERNING AUDIENCE?

I wrote that book when I was around the ages 25/26 and at the time was reading a lot of Bret Easton Ellis and also a lot of Kenneth Grant, so when I was working on the book it was only natural that such influences should rear their head (as a lot of my projects tend to reflect what I was into at the time of their conception and creation). You’ve in the past referred to me as a “fanfiction writer” and I think that’s a pretty astute observation, and I don’t even really see it as an insult, because in many ways you could argue that Shakespeare was a fanfiction writer, in that very few of the stories of his plays were original: he just took preexisting stories that he liked and made them better with his own additions and through his own skill. In regards to CONFUSION, certainly the mashup wasn’t a conscious decision on my part, and it didn’t seem strange to me at the time, I just instinctively rolled with it. Sometimes I think about trying to get it republished (especially as its 25^th anniversary approaches) but then I pick it up and read a few pages and just cringe and put it back down with a horrified shudder. I do enjoy its sense of humor and it does have a sort of manic youthful energy that I would probably have trouble conjuring again now (though I think I did a reasonable job at recapturing its voice for my contribution to the MAN FROM DÜSSELDORF anthology), but I think the text is very problematic and immature.

IN ADDITION TO SEVERAL SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS AND HARLEM SMOKE, YOUR COSMIC HORROR/HIP-HOP THEMED NOVEL, YOU’VE WRITTEN AN AS-YET UNPUBLISHED NOVELLA SET IN 19TH CENTURY FRANCE; THIS SOUNDS LIKE YOUR MOST ‘NEO-DECADENT’ WORK TO DATE. PLEASE INTRODUCE THIS WORK.

It’s called PULP FIN-DE-SIÈCLE (Or, La Ville empoisonnée, if you want to be pretentious about it). Originally it was to have been the opening story of my (still unpublished) third horror collection COMETH DARKNESS, but as the years went by I kept adding material to it and it eventually reached short novel length, so I decided to separate it and make it its own book. The project can be (with tongue-in-cheek) described as MONSIEUR DE PHOCAS meets THE CANTERBURY TALES, and is kind of a tribute to all of the 19th-century French Decadent authors I’ve been reading and enjoying over the last 20 years or so (in particular, Jean Lorrain, J.-K. Huysmans, and Leon Bloy). So yeah, more fan fiction. It’s set over a period of 24 hours on an April day in Paris in 1893, and is divided into seven 10-15 page sections, each of which revolve around a stock character from the books and stories of that era: a Priest, a Symbolist Artist, a Dandy, an Actress, a Prostitute, a Diabolist/Occultist, and a Decadent Novelist . . . but all of the characters drift in and out of each other’s sections/stories (much like the film PULP FICTION), hence why I somewhat jokingly gave the book the current title it has. Of course, even though it’s something of a mosaic novel, the true main character of the book is Paris itself (or, to be more exact, a highly stylized version of Paris, written from the perspective of someone who has never been there and who only knows it through books), with its churches and cafés, its opera houses and artist studios, and so on and so forth.

YOU SEEM TO BE UNDER THE IMPRESSION THAT LADY GAGA IS MORE RELEVANT THAN RIHANNA, AND WILL REMAIN SO IN THE FUTURE. PROVIDE EVIDENCE FOR THIS CONJECTURE.

I think my main issue with Rihanna is that she doesn’t seem to do all that much musically-speaking these days. Her last studio album, the somewhat underwhelming ANTI, came out in 2016, almost a decade ago now. Since that time, Lady Gaga has released three studio albums under her own name, numerous collaborative and movie soundtrack albums, and so on. She’s also made a name for herself as an actress, appearing in such high profile films as A STAR IS BORN, HOUSE OF GUCCI, and JOKER: FOLIE A DEUX, and also with a role lined up for the upcoming second season of the popular TV show WEDNESDAY (whereas I see that Rihanna’s next big film is *checks notes* SMURFS). I read online that one reason why Rihanna stopped recording was to focus on her beauty line, but I’m not sure that’s a very good excuse, as Gaga also started her own beauty line (Haus Labs) as well, and still finds the time to get shit out.

I could also go on to mention the 423 awards Lady Gaga has won (as of May ), compared to Rihanna's 184 (and bear in mind her career began a few good years before Gaga's did, so she had a big head start), her14 Grammy awards (Rihanna only has a mere 9), 13 Guinness World Records (Rihanna just has 6), her Academy Award and her 2 Golden Globe awards, and also point out that Gaga's also hosted her own Thanksgiving Special, her own Muppets show, has hosted SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE twice (Rihanna's never been a host, just a musical guest). Then there was the FRIENDS Reunion in 2021 (which I still have not seen, but I am informed by reliable sources that her duet with Lisa Kudrow of "Smelly Cat" was quite poignant), the commercial she did for Barnes & Noble with Tony Bennett (one of many commercials she’s done), and the limited edition line of cookies she did with Oreos in 2020-2021. More recently, her single “Die with a Smile” (a duet with Bruno Mars) has become, among other things, the longest-reigning daily number-one song in Spotify history, and a recent free concert she played in Rio de Janeiro has become the most attended concert by a female artist (with a crowd of 2.1 million people). Gaga is also one of only 4 acts to earn #1 Billboard sales in the USA in each of the 2000s/2010s/2020s decades (the other three being Maroon 5, Taylor Swift, and Miley Cyrus). In 2011, she was also awarded the key to the Taiwanese city of Taichung.

While I will concede Rihanna’s supremacy over Gaga in some areas (for example, her net worth is inexplicably higher than Gaga’s, in the billions compared to her millions), I think the best thing one can say about Rihanna is that her music is perhaps best suited for people who go to clubs, whereas Gaga’s records are meant to be listened to as a whole, from the first song to the last, in proper sequence, which, in this era of disposable music and short attention spans, is, I believe, a more laudable quality. One could also point out that Rihanna can't play any instruments (unlike Gaga, who is a classically trained pianist), doesn’t write her own songs (again, unlike Gaga, who not only either writes or co-writes much of her own material, but has also even written songs for other artists), isn’t generally regarded as a great dancer (even by her own fans) and who is also seen as a lazy or lackluster live performer (accusations I’ve never seen applied to Gaga, who tends to give it her all in live shows, even when battling fibromyalgia) . . . to sum things up, I would say that Gaga is more of an artist and Riri is more of a businesswoman.

Finally, I would like to bring attention to the fact that Lady Gaga got her own Little Golden Books Biography in January 2024, whereas Rihanna did not get one until May of this year . . . obviously, the creators of Little Golden Books considered Gaga to be a higher priority.

THE NEO-DECADENT REFORMULATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE CONTINUES APACE. WHICH AREAS OF ART, WRITING, FASHION AND INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS ARE YOU MOST EAGER TO SEE ALTERED?

Art, writing, fashion and interpersonal relations are all interesting areas in and of themselves (well, maybe not interpersonal relations), but these days my chief area of concern are the generic office buildings in generic office parks or industrial parks that are currently sitting around unoccupied. Whenever I go past these buildings and see the empty parking lots around them and the “for rent” banners hanging on their sides, I become very depressed, and long for the days when they were occupied and bustling hives of activity. I think it’s crucially important that we get people back to work in the office buildings of these office parks, even if it’s not doing “real” work. So long as it’s at least a facsimile of work (perhaps people playing solitaire games on the computer, hanging out in the break rooms, discussing American sitcoms around water coolers), that would placate me.

While on the subject, I would also like to see a rejuvenation of shopping malls.

art by Dan Heyer