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One of the founding fathers of rivethead culture, Jared Louche, has resurrected Chemlab after seven years of dormancy. He?s hoping there is something left to say in the machine rock vein, and no one is better suited for the challenge. The road back to the music has been filled with many obstacles, however. Louche, nearly ten years removed from Chemlab's East Side Militia, is currently without co-founder Dylan Moore. In many regards, Louche is starting from scratch with new contributors and a new label, yet Oxidizer still retains that lyrical savvy as if Moore had never left. Regen?s pHil.PTI crosses wires with Louche by e-mail?

Was there any thought to releasing Oxidizer under a different name than Chemlab?

Sure, and there were a handful of pros and cons involved. The pro is that it would've allowed me to do two things:

1. It would've allowed me to avoid having to explain a million times how it is that I think that I can put out a Chemlab record without Dylan working at my right hand all of the way, how dare I, and,

2. It would've allowed me to take this supernova detonation record and shop it to labels without them having any preconceptions tied to it because of the band's history. The record wouldn't have been freighted with any of the bruised and potentially lethal baggage that inevitably comes with putting the name ?Chemlab? on it. It would've gotten past the sniffer dogs in the same way that the new PIG record's going to try to eschew them by calling itself WATTS? though that's pretty close to home too, and now that it's being released through Sascha's label, it's all a little obvious.

The cons really were that the name is a known quantity in the market place, it has a recognition factor that is undeniable and the band's got a dead-rabid and dedicated fan base of beautiful freaks and wireheads: the Blackout Tribe who've been plugged into the scene for ages and help make the whole machine burn rubber. The fans have been wanting another record for many years and, in the end, since the record was clearly a Chemlab record and not some other unnamed beast, it made sense to call it by its proper name. Besides, that's what I wanted, so fuck the detractors!

It seemed like the abrupt break-up after the GWAR tour in 1997 prevented you from saying all the things you wanted under the Chemlab moniker.

That's true, and that really made me want to do another Chemlab record and resurrect the band. There are a number of lyrics and sounds and ideas that really only fit within the framework of the band. Some of the tracks could've come through as alien songs, but mostly the lyrics are very much Chemlab. Some of them have been kicking around in one form or another for a few years. Some of the segments have got roots and barbs that plumb all the way back to ideas that I was shifting and shaking at [Chicago] Trax as we were finishing ESM [East Side Militia]. Some of them have sprung out of the scorched earth that was life in New York City in '96/'97 as the band was taking its swansong and making a howling, full flame nose-dive through the stratosphere. Some of the writing has come out of those hunks of wreckage and bits of shrapnel that lodged in my flesh. Much of it has grown out of my side in the intervening years, some as scar tissue, some as bandages and some of it as wholly new flesh. I'm regenerating and reconstituting; my structure is overhauling and rebuilding itself. The lyric parts that I incorporated from the wasteland of the late '90s have gone through some serious shape shifting, but there are pieces of ?Mega Hurts? and ?Scornocopia? that are mutations-on-a-theme from the ESM period. ?Scornocopia? actually evolved from out-takes from ESM that then became lyrics that I wrote for a Pigface song for the last record. Atkins asked me to work on a song (Keith Levine on guitar) and he sent me the track. I dropped a ?Scorno? variant down with my collaborator-robot Goteki-san (8-Bit Barbarella) in his studio. It turns out that Atkins didn't use it, but used the music for the ever-crowd pleasing 'fuck list' instead, thus leaving my lyrics homeless again. The initial germ of ?Scorno? came from an idea that I had been tossing at Trax one night after having learned that Super Viva had just disappeared one day. It felt like we would find her on the front page some day, a horrible picture, a frightening story, a sad statistic, but, as far as I know, she just disappeared, probably back living with her mother or something. It then grew further in 2001 when my best friend died; our last conversation was from behind his oxygen mask across 3000 miles, me in London, and he in New York City. In Chicago, in the Crack Nation studio, it finally took shape and became the strange beast it is today, dragging its sack of tools and mangled heartbreaks with it.

I love the guitar work that Greg ?Cool Hand? Lucas did for that song, all of the record, in fact. He was very much the missing ingredient for me, the thing that made the record less metal, more weird, more rock 'n' roll, more Chemlab and much less predictable. He helped push the record further towards what I always wanted to Chemlab sound to be, with more of a rock edge to it. Now, for the next record, we just need to get more of the sampled, looped guitars as beds and we'll be killing.

What that has to do with the disc being called Chemlab is anyone's guess.

What really happened to Super Viva?

I'm really not sure. It was also during a time when I would have to admit that a lot of people seemed to fall through the cracks and weren't missed for quite a while. Much of that was due to the fact that we were out on the road a lot and even when we were home it seemed often that we weren't plugged in to the world around us. There was also a number of people who were like Shades, they seemed half-tethered to the world and not totally there. They were often the most interesting people to be around, the ones who were always pushing the envelope and willing to scar themselves and jump through windows just to see what happened next. But that meant that when you didn't see them for a week or a month it wasn't so out of the ordinary. They might simply have split town, or been in hiding, or rehab, or decided to finally finish that sex change and you'd been walking past them for weeks and didn't know it. When you're in a loose crowd, if some of the strings come unraveled or fall off the knot completely, you don't always notice. Sometimes I'd catch sight of a long-lost face in the saddest or strangest places; turning tricks outside of the very beat-down Jane Street Hotel, or, like me, hustling a straight job on Wall Street, wearing a three-piece suit. Sometimes it wasn't romantically decadent and broken, it was just a civilian scene, having to get it all together and get a job at a sandwich counter in another neighborhood, cutting off all of the old friends and nights. Certainly in New York, a city where you can find everything that your little black heart desires in one small neighborhood and you never need to go anywhere else, if someone moves on without telling anyone, they might be uptown making the secretary world or working the rope at some Harlem after-hours club with a totally new set of faces and you might never know because you never leave the neighborhood? because you never have to. Who's going to know? Vera Blue, what happened to you?

How did your friend's death in 2001 affect you on a personal level and how did that filter into your songs?

When Bobby Ross died it really took a piece out of me. I've had a number of really close friends die. Anyone that knows the Chemlab music has read in the liner notes and in the credits about Craig Albertson, my friend with whom I started Fifth Column Records. When he died it really shook me badly and was reflected in a few of the songs on ESM and a lot of my writing at the time. There's also a Vampire Rodents song called ?Low Orbit? that I sang on a few years later that was influenced by my having had a series of dreams involving Craig and another friend who had died of a brain tumor around that time. They were haunting the orbits of my dreams. Bobby Ross saved my life at one point, and there were a few times that I saved his, and we were about as close as you get. Some of the lyrics on OXO [Oxidizer] are reflections and remembrances of him. One of the last times I saw him was after I'd carried him for blocks and finally tossed him into a cab, and I was sitting with him at the hospital. He came back to consciousness and I started telling him some jokes and generally acting light and cracking wise, and, as we laughed, he motioned to me with his hand, 'Come here, come here.' I bent down and he wrapped his arm around my neck. I pushed the oxygen mask out of the way and gave him a kiss and we stayed like that for a few minutes, quiet and breathing. I left for London not long after that and then he died my second summer there. Some of the lyrics on OXO are sung to him, and to Craig and to Tucker, about how much I miss them and their general foolishness and zest for life. I write things into some of my lyrics in their voices or as ways of reminding me of them, ways of keeping their voices alive in a world they never got to see, holding up the broken mirror. Losing Bobby Ross was also another signpost along the road that made it clear that it was time for me to clean out my tubes and the graveyard of my head and stop being totally drug addicted and a lush. It seemed that my scope was narrowing so much and that the only way that I was going to get any of the things done that I wanted to get done was to stop abusing myself and get back to work. So I did.

What eventually led to the fallout within Chemlab?

With the exception of one aspect, we wanted different things all across the board, and, sadly, that aspect of life that we were both so interested in, where we overlapped most, was heroin and swallowing in as much damage as we possibly could night after day after night, our lips wrapped around the tail pipe and sucking that rusted steel dick, that gritty glass pipe loaded with rock, bullets for the brain and the heart. We fell out for so many reasons. Yes, the drugs were a major part of it, and the biggest mistake we could've made at the time, but there were lots of other little things that tugged at the fabric and kept us from taking over the world. We wanted different things from the whole Chemlab experience. Dylan had no innate love for rock 'n' roll, for instance. He was a dance kid and wanted to write music that was more atmospheric, more off the grid and experimental in a kind of Chopin-informed idiom. This made a lot of sense to me in limited doses, as an aside, as a possibility for the fifth record or as a side project (possibly what his Los Angeles project SuperDrug was going to be?), but not as the main thrust for Chemlab. That didn't interest me. Guitars didn't interest him nearly as much as they interested me. We had different musical backgrounds. He was raised on the piano and I was raised on banging out idea in rehearsal space. For someone whose fave records were Tangerine Dream's soundtrack to Blade Runner and Skinny Puppy's Mind? (a great record, but not the most aggressive of fare) he made great Machine Rock, but he didn't get a lot of the things that I did; didn't understand a lot of the things that I wanted to do with the band and why. We were really different creatures and often didn't meet on the same plane except when that plane was Chemlab. Although I can be very isolationist, my natural tendency is to create a tribe around me, a coterie of people whose instincts I trust and can give in to and enjoy when they're running wide open. He preferred to be more closed off and quiet though we met up a lot at the bar where his girl was a bartender (Sidewalk) and riffed a lot of bullshit there. Funny thing is though, he'd be at Sidewalk and I'd be just diagonally across the street at 7A, each of us in our own scenes. A perfect illustration of our relationship. We were a weird pair. He hated touring, and, as anyone who's ever come and talked to me after a show knows, I love being on stage and love being on tour and am wildly passionate about soaking in the surroundings, even if it's just Toledo. We were in different worlds, and when the last two tours went out so hard and we really had a tough time on both of them, it seemed like a good time to let things sleep in the dark for a little while? and so we did. In a remarkably short period of time it had all become a burden instead of being a turn-on, sadly, and so we let go instead of fighting. We should have fought. I've very few regrets, in the face of every nightmare and agony in my weird life, but not fighting for the band is one of the few regrets that are real.

With Dylan out of the picture, who approached whom with the idea of Jamie Duffy and Jason Novak from Acumen Nation to help out?

FJ and I had been talking about the next album for a while; he let me riff out a long thread of ideas over a few months about how I saw the thing coming together. I also talked to him about all of the dead-ends that I'd steered myself down or come up against and finally he mentioned that Jason Novak might be just the person to work on this record and actually be able to pull all of its disparate pieces into some kind of form that would make all of us happy. It made sense. We've talked about working together before and this was the perfect opportunity. Out of the few people that I was interested in working with and had actually talked to about the idea, Jason and Jamie were the most keyed up about the record and seemed really ready to go. Another deciding factor was the Plague Inspector, FJ himself. He and the Cracks have worked together before as well and his input is invaluable to me, exposure to the blackout allowing the film to come clear. He's the long-hidden member of Chemlab, lurking in the dim-blue shadows, a code-thread streaming from the open slot-mouth in his orno-chromium mask. His noise is broken computer and has the kind of snagged sheared-off edge that makes my clockwork interior sing and whir. He has a well-honed hook sensibility that matches the Cracks well. FJ pushed hard for me to work with them, and he was right.

Being a "noise poet," where else can your writing be found?

Noise Poet. I'm going to steal that one, just so you know. The Hydrogenbar Web site will have a whole section of my writings that are connected to the records as well as random stories, clips and other shards of broken word. I perform all around London all of the time as well as some around the country and in Europe. I quit the Pigface tour early because I'd had a previous engagement to perform and lecture in Vienna for three days. Paid better than the whole tour. I've got a book called "A Handbook On How To Wreck Other People's Lives" that came out in '88 and is, mercifully, out of print now. Bits and pieces of my writing are floating around the world and will be collected at some point in the not-too-distant future. Life at the moment has gotten very complicated, but I'm still trying to get together with Mark Spybey to record a collection of my stories and songs. That will be out on Invisible in a little while. I'm really looking forward to that one. We've been talking about doing this record for a long time now and I think it's actually going to come together soon. We've tossed a lot of ideas back and forth about what we want to do and how we want to approach it, but I think that it's going to come out to be weirder and with many more unexpected corners than what we see of it right now. It won't be Machine Rock, I don't know if there will be dance elements to it or not. We may pull in a few other people to collaborate on it, hard to say.

One of the most interesting parts of the new Chemlab Web site that is about to be revealed is the Plague Inspector section. It's where a lot of my writing will live and mutate. There is loads of material that has yet to see the light of day, jars and jars of strange experiments sealed forever behind glass, floating in formaldehyde. I do a lot of performing around London, solo shots that are showcases for my fractured non-music work. The shows are a mix of poetry, vignettes and stories told in broken word, and occasionally I'll toss in some music from different people that I know here, people that make sense to me and that can help soundtrack the most recent mistakes I'm making. I'm not really a known quotient here in London and most of my fan base is still over in the States, so there's a wide swathe of people who really don't know me as a musician in this town, and a lot of Chemlab fans in the States who have absolutely no concept of the performance-ranter side of me and don't have any access to it. Although the Plague Inspector section of the site won't get people any closer to seeing my solo shows in the sweaty flesh (and, yes, I do give lap dances when the mood so moves me), it'll be an outlet for my writing and riffing that will provide a window in from elsewhere. There are also going to be some vid-clips on the site that are from a few of my solo shows as well. I've even got one of a version of "Codeine, Glue and You" that Pigface did on the last tour, taken in this strange blue light in Austin, Texas. It's pretty damaged and divine. It, and all the rest, will be up for download in the not-too-distant though holding your breath will only incite derisive laughter. You'll turn blue, I promise you.

Another broken word project I'm working on, that may or may not get folded into the Spybey record, though it's been discussed as something totally separate and should really have the room to grow its own wings, is with FJ, a record called Shatterpieces. Essentially, it's a disc of sutures. I've wanted to do a record like this for years. Dylan and I talked about the idea of putting together a collection of the sonic shards that came as the by-products of the paring and stitching and face-lifting and riffing attendant to writing songs the way we did. We had collected a slew of them and were going to put them out when the band finally fell apart. That obviously never happened and the idea has festered in a wet and fetid corner of my mind for ages now, but I never really had anyone that understood the concept of the suture as intimately as FJ who could actualize it all: studio and programming skills and passion galore. That was one of the ideas that I wanted to pursue in getting the band back into shape. The sutures have always been fascinating to me and it's one of the most conceptually interesting aspects of any of the Chemlab records. They're a place to experiment and bend the predictable album construct some and they're a strong hold-over from my days in Peach Of Immortality, Furnace and the other harsh-noise experimental units that I was in for many years before people knew me as ?Jared of Chemlab.? I'd love to release that material at some time. Sadly, there's only one Peach record re-released on CD, the one that I put out through Fifth Column/Fused Coil Records, entitled Talking Heads '77. It's not bad, but it's very laid back and much more akin to the contemporary classical experimentation of John Cage and David Tudor than the brutal wall-of-noise of Masonna and Hanatarash that we became later on. Talking Heads '77 doesn't evince the industrial strength abrasion of the second record, Jehovah my Black Ass, R.E.M. is Air Supply!!, a record that I really enjoyed making and is easily one of the more speaker-destroying noise records around from back in the days when I played treated guitar. Anyway, I digress. The sutures are the place where the programmers can shred noise, balance on the head of a static shard and piss people off. I know a lot of people who've never ?gotten? my concept of the suture, and to them the very idea of doing a whole album of sutures is anathema. Fuck 'em.

What is your vision for Chemlab or your goals with your music?

My goals for music are the same as my goals for Chemlab, and that is to use as many avenues as possible to get my writing and my music and my performances out into the air as possible. The problem with the way I'm wired is that one band or project never seems to be enough for me and I'm constantly trying to nail down something else. Some of my writing simply doesn't fit in the context of Chemlab and some of the things that I'm going to be using for the Spybey record would never float on an Aliens disc. I've always been like this. I've always had a couple of bands on the go, always wanting to do ten different things at once, always wanting to work with 20 different people. I'm hungry to experiment with different combinations of talents and am rarely satisfied. So, Chemlab is an important avenue of experimentation for me and I'm going to continue using it as I see fit. I want to push the Glam aspect of the music more and make a return on the next record to more of the sampled guitars as a bed and build on top of that. I want to get the band back out on the road. I want to incorporate unexpected instruments into the mix. I also want to incorporate more of my own material as well, my music and my bizarre approach to writing songs as that's an aspect that has never really come to the fore in the past. You name it; I want to do it.

What do you believe the role of the artist is in public life?

To piss people off, mainly. To follow whatever it is that they need to do to release that pressure that builds up behind the eyes. To look into the future as well as rewrite the past.

I don't know, does the artist have a role in public life? Do they need to have one? I think one of the best parts of being an artist is the interpretation of one's work that arise out of people absorbing what you do, but that's not necessarily my role per se. I don't know that I have one. I don't want to be a preacher. Not a lot of politics in my material. I teach, but that's in a much more defined educational context in the writing workshops I hold in prisons and schools. I suppose I'm just a living example of the fact that you can beat the living daylights out of your body and come back from the edge, but I'm always concerned that people are going to look at my life and think that they can push it that hard and still come back from the edge as well, and a lot of them can't, and won't. In some ways I've been really lucky and not everyone is that lucky. Don't try this one at home, kids.

Several years after the breakup of the band, Invisible Records re-released Burnout and ESM along with the Suture album of rarities and b-sides. How did this relationship come about?

I was working ?on Wall Street?no, we don't have the time for that story here right now either?and I was between jobs when Atkins called me up and asked me to come out and sing for Pigface. I had been deeply missing the music biz at that stage and wondering if there was a way for me to get back into a studio and work on some of the ideas I had rolling around in my head for a covers record (called, at that time, Re-Mask, Re-Model). I was lurking in some dark studio corners with friends, recording random ragged shards and singing on a few tracks by friends, but nothing of consequence clicked. Martin's call made me re-think/remodel my relationship to Wall Street and after sleazing the Lowest of the Low tour with Pigface it was clear that, although the Wall Street cash was addictive as liquid crack, the financial district wasn't feeding me, it was sapping me and that I had no choice but to return to the abject poverty of making music on an independent record label and the continued deep-hole knife-digging to get the wriggling demon-barb out from under my skin and release it in the sanitized form of albums. So I split New York City and Wall Street and came back into the dark. Once I was back it was pretty clear that there were really markedly fewer labels that might be interested in what I wanted to do than there were even five years earlier and, since I already had a working relationship with Martin, I decided to sign with his label. It made sense at the time, and that's how the Chemlab records came to reside at Invisible where I'm sure they will stay for better or worse for all eternity.

What was your time in Wall Street like and why did you choose to get out of it?

Wall Street's a long and weird story that I really can't give more than a thumbnail sketch of here. I quit the music biz because of the way the idiots who had control of the checkbook over at Fifth Column Records were running their end of the business. They weren't paying any of the artists or the magazines or the manufacturing plants and I didn't want to be involved with a bunch of scumbags with that kind of reputation. So I split. I was broke and by chance fell into a situation where I had the opportunity to work in an investment banking firm selling shares for private placements. Essentially, I was selling shares for the stage of the investment before a stock starts trading in the open market. It's the step before the IPO. I haven't got any business background, but I hustled my way in on charm and bullshit. I'm good on the phone and can talk to anyone at all, so that made me perfect for the job. You definitely have to be sharp and know what you're talking about as you're pitting your wits against those of the investor on the other end of the line and that was a constant challenge. What was it like? Weird, and I've still got the burn marks to prove it. I worked in an office full of guys from Staten Island and Brooklyn; guys whose fathers are ?important,? if you know what I mean. They were hard-working guys who like hiring hookers and snorting lots of coke, waving their revolvers around and eating steaks and drinking a lot of champagne. So, it's really no different from the rock scene in many ways. We'd close a deal and go celebrate at the Windows On The World restaurant on top of the World Trade Center, hire a limo and cruise the night city. They were generally pretty crazy and violent characters, but they seemed to like me a lot and let me have pretty much free reign to work the way I wanted to. I heard a lot of stories about Sing Sing and Attica and the neighborhood and how ?He was breakin' my balls and I had to set him straight. So I busted his fuckin' kneecaps.? It's a very interesting world and chock full of strange and surreal moments. I would've stayed there for quite a while and really left the music scene behind, but there was one problem. I brought my whole collection of addictions with me when I split the music and arts world. All of a sudden I was making some good money, and my habits rocketed through the roof. I was spending $200 a day on crack and smack; scoring in the morning on Hester Street as my driver waited for me out in the car, hitting the pipe in the bathroom during lunch, having Astro come and deliver more dope and some coke to me after hours because my crew and I liked to work late, like midnight or 1:00 in the morning. And then there was a bottle of vodka a day as well, and I was going through at least two packs of smokes a day too. I'd pace and sell and chain smoke all day and night, but I was hustling and making money so what the fuck did I care. I was eating sushi most nights of the week and wearing some nice three-piece suits. Oh yes, I dressed swank. Drape coat and chic tie, alligator shoes and classy cufflinks. The whole nine, and a bundle of dope packs in one pocket and a glass pipe and lighter in the other. Nobody in my old neighborhood recognized me. I was civilian, but very sharp, real sharp. Yet I was still chasing the dragon in cramped nightclub bathrooms like some stupid kid and furtively snorting coke off the table in restaurants thinking that the drugs were what made me cool and suave instead of the total dope-fiend wreck that I was, sweating and talking shit all night. It was a laugh for a few years, but it was clear that there was an undercurrent of destruction and corrosion growing stronger every day, its wings spreading further and further, occluding more and more of my view of the world and, in the last, either it had to end or I did and I certainly wasn't willing to let it be me. So I quit one day when Atkins made me an offer to come out on tour with Pigface and I never went back. New York had been eating all of the wrong pieces of me and it had to stop. So, slowly but surely, it did.

What did you want to accomplish by pressing the Machine Age EP to distribute during the Pigface United II tour?

It made sense for me to get the record as exposed as possible before the proper release of the full-length album, and since I was going to be out on the road with the 'Face, it seemed the perfect machine to use. In many ways that was the motivation for going out on another 'Face tour, to help set up the record in different ways, get it out there in front of people. My main concern is that people have forgotten about the band. Now that we're signed to a small label with a much more restricted budget than I had to work with on FCR, creative ways of promoting are essential. Being in front of hundreds of kids every night was an excellent way of re-introducing the band. There's been so much talk about Chemlab, so many lies, so many rumors and so much uncertainty about the future that I used the tour as a springboard to launch Oxidizer and to prove to people that the band was not only undead but releasing new material as well. Selling the Machine Age EP allowed kids to get a taste of what the record was going to sound like. It was also a way for me to alert the fans of the existence of some demo material for ESM and Burn Out that may be seeing the blight of day at some point? keep an eye on the H-Bar, freaks. Besides, I love limited edition releases, it feeds the ravening collector in me. Kids like collectable items and it was a cool way to put out something that was immediate and limited and not only with a track off the new record, but some unreleased older material and a remix from main-threat FJ. Seemed foolish not to give the Blackout Tribe a taste of what was in store. So I did. The artwork's also designed by FJ as a variation of the burnlab.net Oxidizer artwork. It was another way of promoting the Hydrogenbar Web site that had only just come into being, and I wanted people to know that the H-Bar was there too.

Who coined the term ?rivet head?? Was that you or Chase at Reconstriction?

Not quite sure and don't really care. There was so much going on at that time that was cool and interesting, and there were so many bands that were popping up and recording great music, and so many cross-pollinations of ideas and collaborations of bands that it's hard to pull apart who did or said what during that whole '90 to '95 period. Chase and I were on the phone and writing back and forth and exchanging ideas all of the time, as I was with loads of other people throughout our scene. I wrote the lyrics for "Rivet Head" in the studio as we were pulling Burn Out together, but the title is one that had been floating around in my books for ages. I had a song called "Rivet-Driving Head" that I wrote for my band that was falling apart as Chemlab was starting up, a band called Furnace (that was also the band for which I coined "fuck art"). The title was too ungainly and so I shortened it.

Why do you think that visionaries like McLuhan, Gibson and Crowley have been so influential to industrial music throughout the years?

Because they're tapped into the broken mind that can visualize the things that are happening tomorrow afternoon. They have the interesting gift of vision that allows them to write predictively. What's happening in their minds then happens soon after on the page and then soon after that it takes place for real for the rest of us in the world. I remember reading JG Ballard's Crash one summer in the early '80s and thinking that it was the most sexual thing that I'd read in ages, that the confluence of metal and glass and flesh was the future of sex and the quintessence of all things erotic. One late night as I was walking home from the club that I was managing at the time, I came across a massive car wreck at this tri-point intersection just near-by. It must've happened moments before I arrived as the heat and weird distortion of accidents was still hanging in the air and I realized that it was suddenly somehow sexual, arousing and deliciously erotic, and that I was seeing this scene in a way I'd never done before. I wanted to strip down and crawl into the back seat of one of the cars so that I could take part in the ritualistic aspects of this scene. I wanted to stroke the faces of the victims, look out at the street and watch the reaction of people walking by, catching sight of my naked body arranged there inside this framework of damaged steel and broken glass. The confluence made sense to me as a pornographic playground as never before because of that book, and it felt totally modern, and totally right. Pretentious? Maybe. So what. I was influenced by something that made sense to me within the context of the world around me, a world that was mine and felt, in that moment, totally devoid of history, tracing a trajectory into the future. It seemed to gleefully destroy history while speaking directly to me in the heat of the moment. These writers have a conceptual optic line that allows them to think outside of the norm, along particular parameters of reference that others haven't traveled yet but that make sense to those of us who are predisposed to such avenues, that makes sense to those of us soaking in the New, those of us searching for a different and more relevant way to define the things that happen around us all of the time: the glitch on the screen, the noise on the phone, the black vans on the street, the flickering image on the security vid-cam. Searching for the god in the static. These writers define aspects of the future that are about to happen, and become clear, to only a few of us right now, and to the rest of the population later. They define what the future will be, and for many of us that's a total turn-on as we're always pushing forward, inward, looking for what the next wave will be and be the first ones to ride it. These writers are our divining tools, our dowsing rods for what's next.