Tag: Follow for Now

For my fellow University of Texas at Austin students who have yet to get a copy, Follow for Now is now available in the library. Check it out. Continue reading “Follow for Now available at the UT Library”

Tomorrow, I’ll be doing a guest lecture in Mike Schandorf’s “Writing for New Media” class at the University of Illinos at Chicago. I’ll be talking about Follow for Now, the philosophy behind the book, and how it all came together. If you’re around, come check it out. I’ll be speaking from 3:30 to 4:45 on Thursday, February 18th. It should be a hoot.

Now you can get Follow for Now for your Sony Reader (or other non-Kindle eBook device) via Google Books. Their format allows you to read books on the screen of your choice.

Of course, it’s also still available for Amazon’s Kindle and, if you prefer, as a good ol’ paperback 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.
• MonkeyWrench in Austin, TX.

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.

Thanks for your continued interest,

-Roy Christopher

My tireless publicist, Jessie Duquette, found another review of Follow for Now today. It’s on HEX Records’ website, and it goes like this:

“Follow for now, power to the people say, make a miracle. D pump the lyrical. Black is back, all in, we’re gonna win, check it out. Yeah y’all c’mon, here we go again!” Instantly those old Public Enemy lyrics came to mind upon seeing the title of this book. And to my great pleasure I discovered that this book was named after those very same words. That’s a good start. So what lies betwixt the pages? Well, this is a collection of various interviews done between 1999 and 2006 for different publications that emphasize people pushing the envelope with music, culture, science, technology, literature, and media. Through these different people there seems to be an attempt to connect a lot of these folks and their ideas with similar undercurrents to a bigger picture. At times I’m not feeling it, and other times it makes total sense. While the author interviews DJ Spooky he shoots off his influences as computer nerds and philosophers who are interviewed elsewhere in the book. Meanwhile, interviewee Brian Coleman discusses his own book about forming a collected history of hip-hop. Shepard Fairey admits to the influence of punk music on his work while Futurama co-creator David X. Cohen shares how half the show’s writers have advanced degrees in science. Some of these people have great ideas and visions for how they interpret culture while others go right over my head. Others just sound like flat-out new age weirdos. About half the time this book works, but the overall picture is that it is indeed an interesting look on tying together all these differing aspects of society as a whole. In total there are about 45 interviews that range from post-punkers Milemarker, to author Adam Voith, to hip-hop group dälek, to writer Bruce Sterling, to skateboarder Tod Swank, to actor/writer Sean Gullette, and a whole bunch of other weirdos and kooks.

Thanks to HEX for the attention and to Jessie for everything.

——————

As always, Follow for Now is available from Powell’s, Amazon, on The Kindle, and directly from me.

David Baker over at 410 Media just posted a nice review of Follow for Now.

Here’s an excerpt:

The interviews are as far ranging as they sound. They range from Mark C. Taylor discussing The Philosophy of Culture, to media guru Douglas Rushkoff to Al Burian and the rest of Milemarker and the author Philip Dick. The cool thing is most of these interviews are by Roy Christopher so you follow along as he explores the intricacies of his own interest and in doing so makes them interesting to you. As you read these seemingly unconnected interviews you start to piece together parts of Roy Christopher’s personality as much as you find out about the subject being discussed. What do I think I have found out about Roy Christopher? I think he is all about new ideas and trying to figure things out. I think he is about trying to make connections between things that no one else has connected. At least to me, after reading a few of these interviews you start to see the connections between people like Douglas Rushkoff and Al Burian.

Read the full review here.

Many thanks to David and 410 Media for the attention.

I’ve been redesigning the Follow for Now site because I don’t have enough to do and because the old one wasn’t yellow enough.

Check it out and let me know if you see any glitches or have any suggestions. I’m just trying to make it work for both people who have the book and people who’ve never heard of it.

Also, I’d like to unload the rest of the inventory before the world goes “all-digital.”

As if you’re not sick of hearing about it yet, Follow for Now is now available on the Kindle. Now you can get all forty three interviews, all the pictures, all the goodness, in Amazon’s digital format. So, if you’ve made the jump from atoms to bits with your books, you can now add Follow for Now to your collection.

For those who don’t know, Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes is an anthology of forty-three interviews with minds of all kinds.

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).

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.

And now you can get it on the Kindle.