Today’s guest is Dr. Teodor Mitew. He’s a systems thinker, historian, and digital media scholar at the University of Sydney, and the author of a new book called The Red Queen Trap: Complexity, Collapse, and the Myth of the Future, along with a volume of Balkan Neogothic short fiction called The Samodeva Queen and a newsletter called Turbulence, where he focuses on complexity, systemic transformation, and the emerging architecture of the near future.We discovered his work through a recent essay called “The Gated Age,” about the war in Iran and how it is likely to fracture whatever remains of the old Enlightenment dream of universal consensus, pushing us back toward a New Dark Age of mutually incompatible fiefs and sovereign realities. He argues that the Local -- material reality, food, plumbing, geography, and actual bodies -- always eventually wins out over abstract universalist ideology, no exceptions in history. Universalism, he argues, was always a kind of con, Enlightenment reason just replacing God as the guarantor of truth for a period of time that is now drawing to a close.Now that the trapdoor beneath this waning universal order -- the sea lanes, the payment rails, the energy flows, the mutually incompatible eschatologies -- is finally visible, we’re moving from a world of sovereign equality into a world of gate permissions, a neo-medieval world of madmen, fools, and wanderers. A new Renaissance, if we're lucky. Whoever controls the gate controls the future. As Teodor will now demonstrate, this isn't altogether a bad thing...Outro music by Teahouse Radio: “Dreaming Splendid Spaces.”

Our guest today is Derek McCormack, a writer, artist, and fashion connoisseur who's spent three decades turning nostalgia into something profane and elevated.His new book, a catalogue called The Sh*thole Opry Collector's Guide, imagines Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren as hillbilly vampires designing punk-influenced jewelry for other vampires visiting the Grand Ole Opry, the emanation point of family-friendly country music, which grew out of a live radio barn dance first broadcast from Nashville in 1925 and officially became the Grand Ole Opry in 1927.In Derek's vision, the church of country music takes on the air of the avant-garde. It feels like walking into Dover Street Market or Barneys in its heyday, but with an aesthetic that honors the clean-cut facade of the Opry while perverting it into contemporary high fashion accessories.Most of all, the Sh*thole Opry is a parody of the way fashion designers pirate the past for inspiration, while posing the question: what if the past stole from fashion the way fashion steals from the past?In addition to The Sh*thole Opry Collector's Guide, Derek's first book of short stories, Dark Rides, was recently reissued by Pilot Press.Enjoy the show? Buy us a coffee.

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

Wake Island is back. It’s been a long hiatus, a lot of life changes and transitions... the usual upheavals that seem to have hit everyone over the last year or so.We’re kicking things off with past guest of the show, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, a philosopher, writer, and teacher, and a vector for a lot of the ideas that shape the tone and approach of Wake Island. What I love about listening to Jason is that he comes at things from the perspective of the avant-garde, whether it’s the after-dark, mania, or the apocalyptic imagination, he brings a level of sophistication to these ideas that I admire.This episode we’re talking about his latest book, Evil: A Study of Lost Techniques from Scarlet Press. Jason doesn’t moralize evil in the ways we’re accustomed to. He treats it as a set of techniques that operate below the threshold of cognition, things that bypass your defenses, in the same way a lullaby ushers a child out of consciousness into the realm of sleep, or doomscrolling steals hours of your life before you realize they’re gone. It’s less a study of bad behavior than a diagrammatic map of how evil reclaims the world.Also thank you to Matti Bye and Mambo Noir Trio & OONA Recordings for letting us use “Noir” to close out the episode.

Written by David Leo Rice and Paul KThis is the final entry in our Substack project, which set out to explore the energy, sickness, and imagery of 2025.If you enjoyed this entry, feel free to go back and read our previous passages.We’re hoping to release more podcasts and Substack posts in 2026.

Derek McCormack is a small town pervert and the author of The Well-Dressed Wound and Castle F*ggot, both published by Semiotext(e). His most recent book is Judy Blame's Obituary. This collection brings together for the first time McCormack's fashion journalism. He writes about and interviews fashion figures that fascinate him, tracing the ways they inspire and inhabit his novels. The result is a sort of memoir in essays: as he writes, "My tribute to [Judy] Blame is about him and about me—there are lots of my own tales woven in with the topics I touch on. The writing here is a sort of autobiography, a life seen through a scrim, or a life as a scrim—my moire mémoire."   Judy Blame's Obituary contains twenty years' worth of reminiscences, reviews of fashion shows and books, interviews with writers about fashion, and interviews with fashion designers about writing. He talks to Nicolas Ghesquière about perfume, and to Edmund White about which perfume he wore as a young f*g in New York City. He inspects the clothes that Kathy Acker left behind when she died, and he summons the spirit of Margiela in a literary seance. He traces the history of sequins, then recounts the cursed story of Vera West, the costume designer who dressed the Bride of Frankenstein. These pieces were all previously published, some in Artforum, some in The Believer, and some in underground publications like Werewolf Express—what binds them together is a sense that though fashion victimizes us, this victimization is sometimes a sort of salvation.  In this Wake Island holiday special we talk about: my butthole, revealing the real Derek through writing about fashion, turning our ashes into jewelry, clothes as ectoplasm, Dodie Bellamy’s “Kathy Forest,” Vivienne Westwood’s imperial years, an outfit based on an advent calendar, sequins implantations, Margiela, being a small town pervert from Peterborough, our hometowns vs the hometowns of our minds, fistulas, Guy Maddin, the sadomasochistic beauty of being a writer, and we investigate - why does fashion abandon us?    Judy Blame's Obituary: Writings on Fashion and Death here.   Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius   Additional music by TRG Banks  Follow us on social at:   Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod  David's Twitter: @raviddice   Derek's Twitter: @HillbillyBijoux   Derek's IG: @derek_mccormack

Daddy’s back.
ROOM TEMPERATURE, haunted houses, video games, childhood memories, publishing with an indie press, supportive teachers, Flunker, and more
Dennis Cooper's Blog.
FLUNKER, six fictions, 124 pp., c/o Amphetamine Sulphate: orders open. UK/Europe: orders open. 
SOCIAL:Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpodDavid's Twitter: @raviddiceDavid's site: raviddice.com







In this episode with Steve Finbow, we tease out the point at which a body ceases to be considered a person and chart the development of trauma over time, tracing the fine line between disgust and desire. We get into the motivations behind necrophilia and corpse desecration, examining the boundaries of how taboos can become normalized. We discuss the role of the soul or consciousness in elevating necrophilia to a mythic realm and the pursuit of the death drive in objects of beauty. We also consider art as both a method and a way of life, and whether societal breakdowns due to acceleration will increase instances of necrophilia in the future. Necrophilia has shadowed humanity throughout its existence, from ancient Egypt, to the Moche culture of Peru, the exploits of the renowned Vampire of Montparnasse, the sexual murders of the Weimar Republic, through to serial killers such as Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer. This new edition of Grave Desire – with artworks by Karolina Urbaniak – delves unflinchingly into the myths, art and practices surrounding this taboo subject. Finding Juliet’s catatonic body and believing she had poisoned herself, it could have crossed Romeo’s mind to act out the unthinkable. Maybe Juliet, seeing Romeo’s corpse, considered a little sexual frottage before she stabbed herself with the phallic dagger. Repulsive yet real, disgusting and disturbing, this is an erotic book of the dead. Buy Grave Desire from Infinity Land Press. Steve Finbow’s non-fiction includes Allen Ginsberg: Critical Lives (Reaktion), Notes from the Sick Room (Repeater), Death Mort Tod (Infinity Land Press), The Mindshaft (Amphetamine Sulphate), Polaroid Haiku – with Jukka Siikala (Infinity Land Press), The Life of the Artist Niccolò di Mescolano (Alberegno Press). Sanbashi – a biography of the postwar Japanese photographer Toru Nakagami – will be published in 2024. SOCIALS: Twitter: ⁠⁠@WakeIslandPod ⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠@wakeislandpod ⁠⁠ David Leo Rice: ⁠⁠www.raviddice.com⁠⁠ David's Twitter: ⁠⁠@raviddice

From the critically acclaimed author dubbed “one of today’s finest practitioners of nonfiction” (The New York Times Book Review), a breathless true crime tale of sex, religion, and murder in the deep South. Mike and Denise Williams had a tight knit, seemingly unbreakable bond with childhood friends, Brian and Kathy Winchester. The two couples were devout, hardworking Baptists who lived perfect, quintessentially Southern lives. Their friendship seemed ironclad. That is, until December 16, 2000, when Denise’s husband Mike disappeared while duck hunting on Lake Seminole. After no body was found, everyone assumed that Mike had drowned in a tragic accident, his body eaten by alligators. But things took an unexpected turn when, within five years of Mike’s disappearance, Brian Winchester divorced his wife and married Denise. Their surprising romance set tongues talking. People began wondering how long they had been a couple, and whether they had anything to do with Mike’s death. It took another twelve years for the truth to come out—and when it did, it was unimaginable. Now, the full, shocking story is revealed by Mikita Brottman, acclaimed true crime writer of the “enthralling” (San Francisco Book Review) An Unexplained Death. Through tenacious research and clear-eyed prose, she probes the psychology of a couple who killed and explores how it feels to live for eighteen years with murder on the soul. A fascinating page-turner of modern noir, Guilty Creatures is destined to become an instant true crime classic. Mikita Brottman is a writer and psychoanalyst living in Baltimore, Maryland. Her most recent book, An Unexplained Death, was shortlisted for the Gold Dagger Award for nonfiction by the Crime Writers Association of the UK. She has a DPhil from Oxford University and is a professor of literature at the Maryland Institute College of Art. SOCIALS: Twitter: ⁠@WakeIslandPod ⁠ Instagram: ⁠@wakeislandpod ⁠ David Leo Rice: ⁠www.raviddice.com⁠ David's Twitter: ⁠@raviddice

Christopher Zeischegg is a writer and filmmaker who spent eight years working in the adult industry as performer, Danny Wylde. He is the author of The Magician, Body to Job, The Wolves that Live in Skin and Space, and Come to My Brother.  His latest book CREATION spans a decade’s worth of writing on art, violence, sex work, and friendship. Acclaimed author, Christopher Zeischegg, confronts his past narratives, cruelty in auto-fiction, pornographic ambivalence, and transformative relationship to artist, Luka Fisher. "Creation is a stunning new collection by one of the most exciting living writers. Reading a Christopher Zeischegg book is like stepping into a dream in which anything can happen—his particular combination of sex, death, beauty, and horror often feels downright transcendent." —Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I'm Someone Else Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius SOCIALS: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod  Instagram: @wakeislandpod  David Leo Rice: www.raviddice.com Chris's Twitter: @chriszeischegg Chris's Instagram: @chriszeischegg David's Twitter: @raviddice