Feb. 21, 2007
Roy Christopher is the supersharp, humble, and very friendly guy who runs the website frontwheeldrive.com, which has long been one of my favorite spots online to feel the technocultures intellectual pulsewhich in Christophers case is primarily sensed through dialogue. The thirtysomething Christopher has a rich backgroundskateboards, BMX, zines, hip hop, Communication Theory degree from San Diego State (which is brimming with SF writers, by the way)and all this (or something else, perhaps an alien implant) has given him an acute zeitgeist radar. The heart of frontwheeldrive is scores and scores of on-target, and generally succinct interviewsusually conducted by Roy, but also by folks like Mark Dery and Paul Miller. Now, after what seemed like eons, Christopher has collected a mess of these resonant chats and encased them in Gutenberg form. The book Follow for Now is like a crisp and substantial remix of the major memes of the last decade or so.
The interviewees are just the sort of people you hope you might run into at a party when you have had enough dancing and want to get down to postmillennial conundrums: SF writers (Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker), hip-hop masterminds (Dälek, Aesop Rock), posthuman theorists (McKenzie Wark, N. Kathering Hayles), visionary bards (Terence McKenna), media sneaks (Geert Lovink, Eric Paulos). Roy invited me to the party a couple of times as well, and Follow for Now contains both a brief interview with me and an interview I did (sorta) with Philip K. Dick (heres the piece, if you are dying to see how I managed to interview a dead guy). Though Follow for Now appeared with the dreaded slowness of most books, its breadth, accessibility, and zine-worthy cover should give another kick in the pants to these already viral ideas and voices.
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