Cubicle Commandos
The first mainstream national magazine piece on the amazing Hong Kong toy phenomenon, from Wired. "These action figures emerge directly from the minds of their artist-creators, and they're intensely cool - funky fusions of surrealism, urban fantasy, and punchy design that are at once arty and in-your-face. For a certain breed of niche collector, these toys have become the new sneakers."

The Matrix Way of Knowledge
An esoteric review of The Matrix Reloaded posted on Salon. "It's silly to squeeze too many meanings from a cyber-chopsocky flick; as in the anime tradition the Wachowskis draw from, metaphysical puzzles are more for atmosphere than answers...Like the overly complex plots of film noir, which ultimately serve only to increase the vibe of claustrophobic paranoia, The Matrix Reloaded's fractured chatter is in service of an old Gnostic hunch: There is a crack in the cosmic machine, and we are the crack."

Waking Dream
An interview with filmmaker Richard Linklater about the ultimate head flick Waking Life. " I think what these things are getting at is to point out how your brain really flows, or how thoughts follow thoughts, or how the narrative of your own thinking unfolds, or the narrative of your own life. This process is very digressive and it has no set path, and it does fold in on itself...I was trying to get closer to my feelings of how the brain worked, and how this shit kind of unfolds."

The Fellowship of the Ring
A massive Wired feature on Tolkien fandom and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Ring movies. "For millions of contemporary readers, Middle-earth serves the function that Eden once did for the common man, or that Dante's Inferno did for the literate elite: It has become a collective map of a moral universe, a fabulous landscape that, in its depth and detail, floats just beyond the fields we know."

Dub, Scratch, and the Black Star: Lee Perry on the Mix
An essay on Lee "Scratch" Perry, Rastafarian dreams, and dub's fusion of music and machines. "Dub music not only drums up the ghost in the machine, but gives the ghost room to dance."

Roots and Wires: Polyrhythmic Cyberspace and the Black Electronic
A philosophical study of West African polyrhythm and its marriage to the machine in dub and jungle. "Drum'n'bass is on the verge of unfolding some strange new non-Euclidian dimension, as cyborgs like Photek, 4 Hero, or DJ Peshay painstakingly engineer an abstract space-time architecture from nano-beats that have been spliced and diced in a digital cuisanart."

Songs in the Key of F12
A dip into the strange and marvelous world of software-driven electronic music. "Most mainstream music production relegates the computer to a behind-the-scenes player. The digital processes that help create the sense of presence and authenticity are smoothed out and kept in check. The Share crowd wants to let those techniques loose. For them, the PC is no longer simply a playback device or an inexpensive home studio. It has become an instrument in its own right."

The Gone World: The Secret Museum of Mankind Ethnic Music Classics: 1925-48
A review of Pat Conte's amazing CD compilation series of early "ethnic" 78s. "Falling in love with these tunes can be dangerous - one risks both the politically dubious spell of exotica and the postmodern heresy of recognizing universal emotions in these distant sonic subjects."

The Future Mix
"Human beings are born into the world almost as wired for music as we are for talk. From lullabies and rope-skip chants to national anthems and pop tunes, music is one of the primary ways that consciousness get shaped by the culture around us. "

Only a Northern Song
A review of Opeth and lesser black metal acts, later collected in De Capo Best Music Writing 2002. "By combining bummer vibes with righteous gloom, black metal’s evil pose could become as extreme as its sound, leading to a dark aesthetic so fantastically over the top that it neutralizes all attempts at satire from the get-go."

The Collectable Unconscious: The Sacred Art of Star Wars
"The first two arrays of doll-like figures and sacred bric-a-brac were devoted to Haiti's two main groups of gods, the Rada and the Petro. But the final altar, bathed in black and purple, gave viewers a peek into a far more creepy and esoteric world: the secret society Bizango, a kind of mafioso that traffics in black magic and Masonic ritual. And there, among the skulls and candles, the coffins and chains and phallic canes, stood a foot-high figure of Darth Vader."

Game Over
A brief history of the evolution and decline of one of the twentieth century’s liveliest machines. "In retrospect, pinball was only a bridge between the machine age and the digital age. Like it or not, we have reached the farther shore."

Klingon Like Me: Travels into the Dark Side of Trekkerdom
Beaming up with Klingon Trekkers. "No matter how much you allegorize Klingons, as Russkies or black nationalists or creatures from the id, they are compelling because they retain a certain nomadic volatility-what the zine Katra calls 'outliness.'"

Terminal Beach Party: The Burning Man, USA, 1995
Dispatches from Nevada's jerry-built art brut nomad town. "I found myself going native as well, and though I basically restricted my pharmacological diet to alcohol and cigars, I kept bumping into deja vus, flashbacks, and dreamscapes."

My Favorite Martians: A UFO Epistemology
An overview of Ufology and its literary subgenres. "The UFO is part of a package deal--a rumor of god stitched into the dark web of our military-industrial-media complex."

Sampling Paradise: The Technofreak Legacy of Golden Goa
A firsthand report on India's psychedlic trance techno scene, circa 1994. "'I'm using this party situation as a medium to do magic, to remake the tribal pagan ritual for the 21st century. It's not just a disco under the coconut trees.'"

Future Schlock: Antiques Roadshow
From bamboo furniture to decorative brooches, old junk fetches big money on Antiques Roadshow. But what gets lost when we put our possessions on the auction block?

The Musical Genius of the Magnetic Fields
Stephin Merritt sinks his teeth into myriad facets of love, and he does so with the wit of a Wilde, the exhaustive eye of a Proust and the clever empathy of a Phil Spector.

Days of the Dead
A Review of Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead's American Adventure, by Carol Brightman.

Love and Anarchy: Hippies, Faeries and Hoboes at the 20th Rainbow Gathering
One of my earliest features, this 1991 article prompted High Times' Steven Hagar to call me "an intellectual twit." But I still like it. "Beneath its crunchy veneer, the connections drawn between young and old, gay and straight, homeless and rooted, god and partying, all begin to resonate in a great tribal rush."

Melancholy Machines
An early review of Boards of Canada's classic Music has the Right to Children.

Half Japanese: The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers
A cultural overview of the hottest media meme/kiddie-toy infection of 1994. "If you wanted to mount the argument that afternoon television is breeding an army of insatiable kick-boxing schizo-consumers, the ammo is there."

The Jungle: Leafy Green Celluloid
An eco-critical look at the role the rain forest plays in films and in popular environmental consciousness. "The jungle: a space of ecological racism, an amalgam of colonialism, Joseph Conrad, Edgar Rice Burroughs, safaris, voodoo, and Vietnam. If the West fears and distrusts its own Mother Nature, it really demonizes the tropics."

Look! Listen! Vibrate! SMILE!: The Apollonian Shimmer of the Beach Boys
An overview of the Boys' career on the occasion of Capitol's reissue of their catalog on CD in 1990. "Brian Wilson's...music sketches the mythopoetic becoming of California itself, from surfing to cruising to God to terminal mellowness."

The God Squad: Pop Stars Search for the Spirit in the Material World
"Though pop music has always percolated with weird religious energies, we haven't found ourselves this far into the mystic since the time of George Harrison, Mahavishnu Orchestra, and hirsute Jesus Freak bands. Indeed, as we face down the millennium, the dividing line between the spirit and the entertainment industry is becoming increasingly tough to draw."

Spirits in the Sky: A review of Japanese prog band Ghost
"In some sense, this music should be impossible: a fresh and sometimes numinous font of acid folk that succeeds on its own terms without irony or false nostalgia."

The Big Playback: Indian Film Music
An exploration of the weird and wonderful world of Indian film music. "When Asha Bhosle slides up to a note, she seduces the ear the way a sitar does. When she starts in with the hiccups, coos, and raspy breaths, she just seduces."

The Vagabonds
A review of Edward Whittemore's Jerusalem Quartet. "The Jerusalem Quartet is rich with homegrown theology, and leaves you with a mystic taste for the empty network of all things: 'All lives are secret tapestries that swirl and sweep through the years with souls and strivings as the colors, the threads. And there may be little knots of tangled meaning everywhere beneath the surface, tying the colors and threads together, but the little knots aren't important finally, only the sweep itself, the tapestry as a whole.'"

The Gods of the Funny Books: An Interview with Rachel Pollack and Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman later told me that, of all the interviews people had done with him, this three-way discussion with SF writer Rachel Pollack about mythology, comics, and the occult was his favorite. Right on!

Now and Zen: Kung Fu: The Legend Continues
A television review of Kung Fu, fils and pere. "In the early '70s, [Caine] briefly unified the counterculture's split desires, both their cultic quest for inner peace and their lingering urge to put a foot up the Man's ass."

Magic Men: Led Zep Memories
Reminiscences of an adolescent Zephead. "If only I could decode those sigils on the nameless fourth record, or turn that dumb wheel on the cover of Led Zeppelin III in just the right way!"

Toon In, Turn On, Drop Out: The Sacred Wisdom of Bugs the Elder
An essay on American animation, on the occasion of Turner's launch of the Cartoon Network. "Wile E. Coyote...is the Ahab in all of us, his universe becoming more vengeful and bizarre in exact proportion to the extremity of his urges."

Earth's Most Wanted: The X-Files
One of the first sustained reviews of the TV phenomenon. "The foxy Mulder's sustained attempt to open up his foxy partner's mind not only eroticizes this tension between common sense and speculation, but nails a truth that most buffs completely miss: that the paranormal seduces you into seeking it."

Nothing Is Real: Wild Palms
"If Twin Peaks always kept a smirking distance on its world, Wild Palms jumps in head-first, knowing that the only way to grok the ontological vortex of future media is to give into the undertow."

Terminal Dreams: Voivod's Schizometal
This visit with Canada's weirdest metaphysical heavy metal band was one of my earliest profiles. "Don't be fooled by MTV or K-Rock: the secret history of heavy metal is the interior life, the solipsism of power, the danger of being 14, alone, and thinking very strange, very fucked-up thoughts."

Hare Krishna Hard Core
The phenomenon of Krisha hardcore, from the Cro-Mags to Shelter. "Youth of Today transformed the punk ethos of refusal into a puritanical revolt, and it wasn't long before Cappo started dabbling with the ultimate alternative lifestyle: a committed religious life."

Pain Pals
A review of The Metaphysical Touch, by Sylvia Brownrigg.  "... when Net text becomes the main vehicle of an encounter between souls, the liquid play of writing can get mighty magnetized indeed."