My friend and colleague Mike Schandorf required Follow for Now for his Writing for New Media class this semester at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He snapped this shot of the stack of copies in their bookstore. I’m stoked.

Many thanks, Schandorf. See you soonly.

Is this image in the Public Domain? If anyone knows anything about it, I’d greatly appreciate it.

Thanks.

I am very stoked to have my work in MonkeyWrench. As their website says, “MonkeyWrench Books is more than just a bookstore. It is a library and educational resource. It is a place for meetings, film screenings, talks, benefits and book readings. It is also a relaxed space to network and make connections over a cup of organic coffee or tea.” They’re located at 110 E. North Loop here in Austin, Texas.

Follow for Now is also available from the following fine places:

• Powell’s in Portland, OR.
• Reading Frenzy in Portland, OR.
• Skylight in Los Angeles, CA.
• Last Gasp in San Francisco, CA.

If you are near any of these stores, support the independent: Buy my book there. If not, it’s also available at Amazon and at its own site.

Thank you,

-Roy Christopher

Spanning over seven years, Follow for Now includes interviews with such luminaries as Bruce Sterling, Douglas Rushkoff, DJ Spooky, Philip K. Dick, Aesop Rock, Erik Davis, Howard Bloom, David X. Cohen, Richard Saul Wurman, N. Katherine Hayles, Manuel De Landa, Rudy Rucker, Milemarker, Steve Aylett, Doug Stanhope, Paul Roberts, Shepard Fairey, Tod Swank, dälek, Eric Zimmerman, Steven Johnson, Mark Dery, Geert Lovink, Brenda Laurel, and many, many more (click here for the full Table of Contents). It includes interviews by John Brockman, Erik Davis, Mark Dery, Paul D. Miller, and myself, among others.

Published through my own Well-Red Bear imprint, Follow for Now is an eclectic, independently-minded snapshot of the intellectual landscape at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It also includes an extensive bibliography, a full index, and weighs in at nearly 400 pages. Click here to look inside on Amazon.

Follow for Now is also available from Powell’s and several other fine retail outlets across the country. You can also join the Facebook Group or find out more.

Thanks for reading,

-Roy Christopher

The snapshot includes voices ranging from Howard Bloom (a pop music PR star who’s become a biological science fanatic) and DJ Spooky (an aspiring science fiction writer who’s become a hip hop music star), to Howard Rheingold (the virtual anthropologist who interpolates the present through a futuristic lens) and Bruce Sterling (the etymological founder who extrapolates the present into futuristic fiction). Follow for Now thus drops sufficiently many known and intriguing names in its table of contents (and on its cover) to stay on the shelves of both snooty philosophers and free-thinking subculturalites for decades. But the nuggets those names provide are intriguing enough to justify that stay, on those shelves and others. In short, the content is as intense as the cast.

The full review is here. Founded and directed by my friend and colleague David M. Silver, The Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies is an online, not-for-profit organization whose purpose is to research, teach, support, and create diverse and dynamic elements of cyberculture. I am damn proud to have Follow for Now acknowledged by them.

Follow for Now is available from Amazon, Powell’s, and directly from me.

To celebrate and commemorate the book’s release, Paul’s doing a reading in New York with Jonathan Lethem. Here’s the announcement from Paul:

Sound Unbound is a manifesto about sound art, digital media, and what I like to call contemporary composition. It has essays and interviews from people as diverse as Brian Eno, Pierre Boulez, Moby, Chuck D, Saul Williams, Jaron Lanier, Pauline Oliveros, Naeem Mohaiemen, and others. The audio companion to the book has super rare material from Sub Rosa Records, one of my favorite indie labels. I got rare material from Allen Ginsberg, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Iggy Pop, Jean Cocteau, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and lots other others. I guess you can think of the book as a kind of literary mashup.

We’re having the Sound Unbound book launch event at McNally Robinson, a great bookstore. The launch event will be between me and Jonathan Lethem, the legendary writer.

The event is as follows:

Who: Paul D. Miller and Jonathan Lethem

What: Readings from new books. Sound Unbound and Jonathan’s new novel You Don’t Love Me Yet.

Where: McNally Robinson Bookstore
52 Prince St, just off of Lafayette

When: Friday May, 2nd 2008, 7pm
Cost: FREE!!!

If you’re in the area, check it out.

Also, you can get Sound Unbound from Powell’s here.

And here are some blurbs about it:

“What a marvelous collection! This provocative and wide ranging book is packed with a vast number of facts and theories: the sound of creation in the Vedas, the Muslim influence on early hip hop, mathematical permutations of bell patterns (Eno), the term ‘Emptyv’ (Chuck D). The essays criss cross over many aspects of sound–cosmic, chemical, political, economic. It sparks questions (Can sound be translated into light?) and presents bits of information like the name for Jamaican sound systems (‘Houses of Joy’). Plus you get to meet fascinating characters like Alex Steinweiss (album cover artist), Motown’s Berry Gordon and synthesizer pioneer Raymond Scott. And you get to consider how Bach’s style might have been influenced by his job copying Vivaldi scores. Reading Sound Unbound also invites you to reconsider techno hype, as when Bruce Sterling describes laptops as ‘colorful, buzzing cuddly things with the lifespan of hamsters.’ I love this book!”
– Laurie Anderson

“Paul Miller has grabbed disparate philosophies and references from the past five hundred years and tied them into a neat and interesting narrative on music, sound, and current thought in our time. Sound Unbound is an excellent reference on art–in the popular context–in the twenty-first century.”
– Branford Marsalis

“It’s a lovely eclectic collection that is a nice antidote to the usual way music and the history of music is often categorized into high/low, pop/classical, or black/white. I like Sterling’s analogy between our beloved high-tech media and inscrutable indecipherable archaic media like Incan quipus. From Raymond Scott to the hidden racism in digital circuitry to a history of easy listening, there is enough inspiring weirdness here to fuel some musical fires for a good while.”
– David Byrne

“Everything must be about one thing first, then it can be about many things. Paul Miller’s collection of texts is about one thing: the use of scanning in music and more generally the world around us. He gives us a single structure to put very different experiences and theoretical constructs into an overarching context. The result is always interesting and often illuminating. These essays by thinkers and practitioners range widely and produce their own static and interferences, but they fall into one perceptible rhythm. A good staging of an opera uses what you see on stage to make you hear better. Similarly, these reflections make it easier to tune in to the sometimes confusing soundscape of our dislocated, interrelated, networked times.”
– Robert Wilson

“For the maverick rhythm scientist Paul D. Miller, sound is liquid; it spills over and slips under categories, firewalls, case law, and legal codes to find us and move us. In the same way, his important collection of sound thinkers and sound ideas calls us to remove the fake ‘security’ imposed on us by capital and state, and, more crucially, to reimagine freedom and reclaim our creativity.”
– Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation

“Paul Miller is one of the best cultural radars in the world today. He always picks out the most relevant people working today and reveals previously unseen connections. If you want situational awareness about the world of sound, music, performance, computers, and ideas, read this book.”
– Lev Manovich, Visual Arts Department, University of California, San Diego

Brian Tunney conducted the following brief interview with me regarding Follow for Now for Issue 58 (May/June, 2007) of DIG BMX Magazine. Thanks, Brian.

Roy Christopher is a Seattle-based man about town that’s been on the BMX scene for as long as anyone’s bothered to count at this point. We first featured Roy in issue 48 of Dig, discussing his interview-based website frontwheeldrive.com in the “Do You Compute?” section. Since then, Roy’s split his time between Seattle and Alabama, taking time along the way to compile an anthology of interviews he’s collected over the years, and self-publishing his work in the recently released book Follow for Now. The book compiles interviews with luminary and challenging personalities from all walks of life, including musicians, artists, and cultural theorists. And Roy was nice enough to rush me some answers to some wise ass questions about the book. Take some time off from the message boards and read on…

Brian Tunney: What’s the book about?

Roy Christopher: Follow for Now is an anthology of interviews with authors, artists, musicians, emcees, scientists, and Hal Brindley. It is arranged topically according to six rather fluid categories: science, technology, media, music, culture, and literature. What it’s “about” tends to emerge from the spirit of the time over which these interviews were conducted. It’s what one kind reviewer called, “a crisp and substantial remix of the major memes of the last decade or so.”

BT: Who’s featured in it?

RC: Some of the names include science fiction authors Bruce Sterling and Philip K. Dick, musicians Milemarker and Aesop Rock, scientists Terence McKenna and Howard Bloom, cultural theorists Douglas Rushkoff and Erik Davis, Futurama producer David X. Cohen and founder of Foundation skateboards Tod Swank, and contributors include smart folks like DJ Spooky and MC Paul Barman. There are forty-three interviews in all, and it’s an eclectic bunch to be sure, but the themes and ideas are what hold it all together.

BT: What made you want to produce it?

RC: I’ve been doing an interview-based website (frontwheeldrive.com) since 1999, and a friend of mine suggested I try to get it published as a book. So I took the best of the interviews, edited them, arranged them, and compiled them. Selfishly, I wanted a concrete document of the best interviews that had been on the site.

BT: How difficult was it to self publish?

RC: It was way more work and took much longer than I’d anticipated, but there are certainly easier ways than the way I went about it. I insisted that the text be as flawless as possible (so I hired a copyeditor), as well-designed as possible (so I hired a designer), have an index (so I hired an indexer), and printed with quality (so I paid more for printing). I couldn’t be happier with the results, but as I said, self-publishing can be a lot easier than it was in my case. It just depends on what you deem important.

BT: Why would the average BMXer want to read Follow For Now?

RC: I like to think that the average BMXer is an individual thinker. BMX is a huge part of my background and my day-to-day, so I am hopeful that that spirit shines through in the book. There’s also the Hal Brindley interview, of course.

BT: How many chicks have you scored with since the book was published? Has it helped?

RC: I lost count within the first week. Now, I keep a big stick next to the books to beat them away.

BT: How can interested parties find a copy?

RC: Follow for Now is available through its own website, followfornow.com. It’s available through a few others, but that’s the direct line.

Note that Roy Christopher has recently authored a must-have collection of his interviews, Follow for Now — order from roychristopher.com or frontwheeldrive.com This is possibly the most “cutting edge” grouping of folks on the intersection of futurism/technology/art yet seen. We couldn’t recommend it highly enough! Check out pages 120-121, 242, 265 as an example…

Many thanks due, and be sure to check out my comments on Vale’s recent book, Pranks 2.

The following blurb appeared on Erik Davis’ blog yesterday (Thanks, Erik!):

“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 technoculture’s intellectual pulse — which in Christopher’s case is primarily sensed through dialogue. The thirtysomething Christopher has a rich background — skateboards, 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 interviews — usually 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 (here’s 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.”

Spanning over seven years, Follow for Now includes interviews with such luminaries as Bruce Sterling, Douglas Rushkoff, DJ Spooky, Philip K. Dick, Aesop Rock, Erik Davis, Howard Bloom, David X. Cohen, Richard Saul Wurman, N. Katherine Hayles, Manuel De Landa, Rudy Rucker, Milemarker, Steve Aylett, Doug Stanhope, Paul Roberts, Shepard Fairey, Tod Swank, dälek, Eric Zimmerman, Steven Johnson, Mark Dery, Howard Rheingold, Brenda Laurel, Terence McKenna, and many, many more.

Published through my own Well-Red Bear imprint, Follow for Now is an eclectic, independently-minded snapshot of the intellectual landscape at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

For more information, see here.

This is a limited-edition publication, so order yours today to make sure you get your copy. It includes an extensive bibliography and a full index, and weighs in at nearly 400 pages.

Thank you to everyone who pre-ordered the book: Your copy is on its way.

And thank all of you for your continued support,

-Roy Christopher