The other day in SF my old friend R. U. Sirius interviewed me for his Neofiles “radio” show on the Mondoglobo network. To hear the forty-minute show as an mp3, you can dig around on the site under “Neofiles”, or you can click this direct link. We talked mostly about Frek and the Elixir.
The studio was in a party-pad near Eddy street in the Tenderloin, just a few short blocks from Union Square, but complete with neighborhood guys passed out in doorways. R. U. had a young assistant who lives there, Jeff. It was good to see R. U., good to use my voice. Afterwards we had lunch at the Mason Cafe nearby, an upscale diner with a loud jukebox playing crappy oldies, and every song that played, R. U. and Jeff would insist it wasn't actually the “real” band playing it. “That's not the Monkees. That's not Creedence Clearwater. I don't think that's really Sinatra.” Like, why? But the food was good and R. U. paid. A generous guy; he gave 80 cents to a very forceful crackhead on the street as well.
[Ceiling in the Mondoglobo studio]
I worked a bit on the magazine Mondo 2000 in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and helped R. U. Sirius and Queen Mu put together a “Best Of” book called The Mondo 2000 User’s Guide To The New Edge.
Those were exciting times. We even made the Feb 8, 1993, cover of Time magazine for our West-Coast version of cyberpunk.
I was reminiscing with R. U.
“We really were riding a new wave of the future, the whole computer thing was just coming together,” I said.
“That’s what we said back then,” he pointed out. “We always said we were the big new thing.”
“Yeah, but I thought we were lying.”