WAKE ISLAND

Roddy Bottum is a co-founder and keyboardist of Faith No More, one of the most singular and important bands of my lifetime. I'll never forget how mesmerized and spooked out I was by Angel Dust — how it made everything else on the radio sound so bland by comparison. I'm genuinely grateful that a creative force like that was running wild during my teenage years.But his memoir, The Royal We, isn't really about Faith No More, or Imperial Teen, or any of the other projects Roddy has been part of. It's about the city that made him, San Francisco in the 1980s. Back then it was a genuinely singular place, in its post-hippie trajectory of punks and queers and bike messengers, before the tech boom flattened it.We get into this during the conversation, but there's no great book that properly mythologizes that counterculture, that specific San Francisco and the people who lived and died inside it. In some ways The Royal We is that book. Roddy came up inside that world as a young man, and we get into all of it, the cruising, the addiction, what it meant to be openly gay in a genre dominated by hair metal. It didn't occur to me while we were talking, but sitting with it in the edit I came to see the book as a eulogy for a city that was so formative to some of my favorite art and music.Outro music: The Vault by Trigg & Gusset.“This memoir of a rarefied world made me realize I was so lucky to live through it on the fringes—San Francisco in the eighties during the glory days of punk rock, written as if Salinger was there, queer, and started a band. A band I was actually in, but they rarely admitted! Roddy has been an incredible influence on my life, love, friendship, and language. A brilliant and gorgeous book—just like Roddy Bottum.”—Courtney Love“Thump, thump, thump went my heart as the words popped and the pages turned and I fell more and more in love with Roddy Bottum. Written with the right amount of flourish and punk abandon—what a treat.”—Chloë Sevigny“The Gen X Cancerian daddy king of California rock has delivered to us an oral history of a time when queer boys who rocked still played hard and RULED the underground. Emotionally charged, but never reckless (okay, maybe a BIT reckless), this book flows with an emotional IQ that only Roddy Bottum could give us. All the grit and grime aside, this is a story based in wisdom, recounting, and, above all, beauty.”—Brontez Purnell, author of 100 Boyfriends

Enter the Amity-verse with Wake Island. In this episode we get into channeling dark energy from the media vortex surrounding America’s most infamous haunted house in Amityville, Long Island. In addition we also talk about: Hauntings as a manifestation of trauma, the mythology-making behind the nearly 50-year Amityville horror house phenomenon, demonic media spectacles, the allure and menace of the suburbs, and the reality and fantasy of demonic possession. Jack Riccobono’s new series, Amityville: An Origin Story, is now streaming on MGM+. Riccobono has written & directed a wide range of narrative, documentary and commercial work across the five boroughs of his native New York City and around the world, from Moscow to Shanghai to Freetown, often exploring hidden subcultures and the complexities of the human soul. His critically acclaimed feature documentary The Seventh Fire, from executive producers Terrence Malick, Natalie Portman and Chris Eyre, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and received a New York Times Critic’s Pick. Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius SOCIAL: Jack's site: All Rites Reserved David's site: raviddice.com Wake Island Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Wake Island Instagram: @wakeislandpod David's Twitter: @raviddice

James Pogue is a journalist and essayist. His first book is called Chosen Country: A Rebellion in the West.  James recently wrote an article for Vanity Fair called Inside the New Right and it’s not only a great piece of journalism but it struck a cultural nerve. Not only did it go viral but it even got a shout out on Twitter from the likes of Jeff Bezos and Glenn Greenwald.  In this conversation we discuss everything from MMA’s connection to the right, to diagnosing what is happening at the margins of our flailing empire. We also get into: the Dillon Danis controversy, bro science/Rogan’s appeal, being skeptical of liberalism, how the left loses dynamic & questioning men, constantly beating back the devils at the gate, alienation leading to chaos, the system spinning out of control, reading the tea leaves of history and seeing techno fascism, Curtis Yarvin as a historian analyst of the left, social revolution, the aesthetics of the new right, and cool kids adopting a religious pose. SOCIAL: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod  Instagram: @wakeislandpod David's Twitter: @raviddice James Twitter: @jhensonpogue James Instagram: @jhensonpogue

Adam Lehrer is a writer and an artist living in New York. He is the founder and co-host of the System of Systems podcast, and the founder and curator of the Safety Propaganda collaborative media platform. Communions is Adam's debut book - out now from Hyperidean Press. Communions: Channeling hallucinated versions of dead artists and junkies, these fragments access the uncanny allure of shared experience. Elements of speculative fiction, criticism and encrypted auto-biography merge to form a disconcerting portrait of the artist as addict. Neither denunciation nor valorization, Communions is an attempt to probe the haunting singularity of opiate addiction and its ineradicable influence on art and culture. As a writer, Lehrer covers topics such as contemporary art, horror fiction, noise and experimental music, cinema, and left politics. David and I talk about the Truman Show in the intro. Interview starts at 19:25. Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod  Instagram: @wakeislandpod David's Twitter: @raviddice System of System Twitter: @SystemofSystem3 Safety Propaganda Twitter: @SafetyPropagan1 Safety Propaganda Instagram: @safetypropaganda Adam's Instagram: @adamlehreruptown

We speak to Dr Dylan Mulvin, Assistant Professor in LSE Department of Media and Communications, about his book Proxies: The Cultural Work of Standing In, which examines the ways in which proxies shape our lives, the histories of their production and how we delegate power to represent our world.  You can download a free copy of Proxies: The Cultural Work of Standing In at https://dylanmulvin.com/  In the intro David and I talk about Strange Days (1995)  The interview with Dylan starts at 26:58  Visuals referenced:   29:01 -- NTSC color television test slides (Fink and NTSC 1955) 34:09 -- Vancouver as a non place (X-Files) 35:14 -- Indian-head test pattern 36:29 -- UK Test Signal  38:58 -- Cleaning the Kilogram  45:43 -- The Lena image  51:53 -- Yodaville 53:28 -- Middletown  1:08:44 Hito Steyerl, How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013 Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius  Follow us on social at:  Twitter: @WakeIslandPod  Instagram: @wakeislandpod     David's Twitter: @raviddice     Dylan's Twitter: @dwmulvin

In this episode with Jonathan Greenaway (Theology, Horror and Fiction: A Reading of the Gothic Nineteenth Century & The Horror Vanguard podcast) we arrive at the New Flesh while peeling back the layers of a nightmarish society in stasis.   We get into: necro-neoliberalism, depressive hedonia, unspent energy mutating into gothic maw, our struggle to be and remain human, nostalgia neutralizing hope/fear instead of bringing us closer to history, the internet as a profoundly haunted and haunting device, Paul tells a dumb story about seeing Beyond the Black Rainbow on acid and the glorious weirdness of "Titane"  Jon Greenaway is an academic, writer and teacher based in the North of England. He’s currently working on a PhD that focuses on philosophy, theology and the gothic literature of the nineteenth century.  He’s also behind @TheLitCritGuy, a social media project that aims to bring critical and cultural theory away from its academic enclave and to the widest possible audience. He writes for a variety of publications online and blogs at thelitcritguy.com.  He tweets @thelitcritguy.  Find Jon on Youtube at Jon the Lit Crit Guy Theology, Horror and Fiction: A Reading of the Gothic Nineteenth Century Surpassing scholarly discourse surrounding the emergent secularism of the 19th century, Theology, Horror and Fiction argues that the Victorian Gothic is a genre fascinated with the immaterial. Through close readings of popular Gothic novels across the 19th century – Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Dracula and The Picture of Dorian Gray, among others – Jonathan Greenaway demonstrates that to understand and read Gothic novels is to be drawn into the discourses of theology. Despite the differences in time, place and context that informed the writers of these stories, the Gothic novel is irreducibly fascinated with religious and theological ideas, and this angle has been often overlooked in broader scholarly investigations into the intersections between literature and religion. Combining historical theological awareness with interventions into contemporary theology, particularly around imaginative apologetics and theology and the arts, Jonathan Greenaway offers the beginnings of a modern theology of the Gothic.  Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius  Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod     Instagram: @wakeislandpod  David's Twitter: @raviddice

James Grauerholz is a writer and editor. He is most famous as the bibliographer and literary executor of the estate of William S. Burroughs. He worked as Burroughs’ assistant, and became his friend, business manager and editor until the author's death in 1997. Grauerholz wrote biographical sketches to a Burroughs reader Word Virus, and edited a posthumous release of Burroughs diaries Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs. Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod

Rosecrans Baldwin is the bestselling author of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles is a provocative, exhilaratingly new understanding of the United States’ most confounding metropolis—not just a great city, but a full-blown modern city-state. America is obsessed with Los Angeles. And America has been thinking about Los Angeles all wrong, for decades, on repeat. Los Angeles is not just the place where the American dream hits the Pacific. (It has its own dreams.) Not just the vanishing point of America’s western drive. (It has its own compass.) Functionally, aesthetically, mythologically, even technologically, an independent territory, defined less by distinct borders than by an aura of autonomy and a sense of unfurling destiny—this is the city-state of Los Angeles. Deeply reported and researched, provocatively argued, and eloquently written, Rosecrans Baldwin's Everything Now approaches the metropolis from unexpected angles, nimbly interleaving his own voice with a chorus of others, from canonical L.A. literature to everyday citizens. Here, Octavia E. Butler and Joan Didion are in conversation with activists and astronauts, vampires and veterans. Baldwin records the stories of countless Angelenos, discovering people both upended and reborn: by disasters natural and economic, following gospels of wealth or self-help or personal destiny. The result is a story of a kaleidoscopic, vibrant nation unto itself—vastly more than its many, many parts. Baldwin’s concept of the city-state allows us, finally, to grasp a place—Los Angeles—whose idiosyncrasies both magnify those of America, and are so fully its own. Here, space and time don’t quite work the same as they do elsewhere, and contradictions are as stark as southern California’s natural environment. Perhaps no better place exists to watch the United States’s past, and its possible futures, play themselves out. Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius Follow us on social at: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod