WAKE ISLAND

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 K

This 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 
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David's Twitter: @raviddice  
Derek's Twitter: @HillbillyBijoux  
Derek's IG: @derek_mccormack

In this season-ending episode of Wake Island, guest co-host BR Yeager—author of Negative Space and Burn You the Fuck Alive—joins us for a hall of mirrors conversation. Together, we get into David Leo Rice’s latest book, The Berlin Wall, using it as a lens to examine violent cusp figures like Anders Behring Breivik, Timothy McVeigh, and the Columbine shooters.

We take a gut check for 2024, exploring the height of disenchantment that drives us to embrace disharmony in a world where consensus feels out of reach and history feels at once stuck in place and spiraling out of control. Along the way, we nosedive through historical inflection portals and terroristic moments that warp our perception of reality and linear time.

Europe, 2020. Some claim that the Berlin Wall, once a living entity, is coming back together, its scattered pieces seeking reunion on the far side of history. The European continent trembles on the edge of total war, either in reality or deep in its own feverish imagination. Part present-tense apocalyptic satire and part neo-medieval phantasmagoria, David Leo Rice’s new novel presents an alternate history of the present where the Internet has become a territory unto itself and unstable factions obsessed with nationalism, liberalism, and romanticism drive one another toward a clash that could turn the very notions of refuge and culture into the ravings of a lunatic.

With The Berlin Wall, David Leo Rice has produced a text that feels totally sui generis: he has achieved the rarest of writerly feats and become his own genre. No other writer I know embodies simultaneity so cleanly or marries the aesthetics of gnosticism, decadence and pop-culture with a clarity of prose. If The New House was a bildungsroman from alternative dimensions, The Berlin Wall is an allegorical history of the present. It is as if Rice presents an archaeology of time, dusting off human chronology to reveal the multiplicative source of life in all its writhing self-contained logic beneath. He charts how forms form and the way the gross larval simplicity of fascism invades and reproduces in bodies.

— Thomas Kendall, author of The Autodidacts and How I Killed the Universal Man

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.


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David's site: raviddice.com