Bombastic Truth

The Bombast Chronicles: Rants and
Screeds of RageBoy collects the best of EGR into one
convenient hardbound volume. EGR is
Christopher Locke’s ‘zine which consists of equal
parts industry insight, comedy and reader
abuse. Chris is a good friend of mine, and mocks me
at several points in his book. Now that
we’ve gotten that out of the way…

Christopher Locke is a brave writer. Despite the
book’s subtitle, this is Chris’ book as much as it
is Rageboy’s, and not because Chris is the person
behind the persona. The Bombast Transcripts is
RageBoy and Chris Locke by turns. It’s RageBoy
interviewing Mr. Ed (yes, the horse) about ecommerce
and
post-modernism and RageBoy ranting about the demonic
master he served (known to the rest of us as IBM).
But it’s also Chris trusting us with his heart, as
well as with his art. It’s Chris falling in love.
For real. As in love poetry:

sitting in the lobby
of the Grand Wailea
there is no inside or outside.
the sky comes right through
it’s a breeze.
everywhere clouds
water flowers
one world continuous
no edges.

so much
so much has happened here
and on the way to this place
which has taken a lifetime
to arrive at.

…

And there’s Chris also writing in a lovely way
about the Buddhist prayer flags on Mt. Everest. And
there’s Chris reporting on his trip to Denmark in
which we feel him falling in love, but just for a
moment, with one of the organizers of the event that
brought him over. It’s in that essay
that he tells us flat out what we realize we’ve been
waiting for him to say all along:

What’s going on has nothing to do
with ecommerce or broadband or any of that. Those
are just tools. Like the horses we painted in the
caves at Lascaux, like the bone axes and bows we
made, the religions and mythologies we invented, the
literatures, arts, intellectual disciplines. Just
tools. What they are for is to help us fall in love
with the world again, and again, and again
forever.

The Web is the sound of us falling in love with
the world again. RageBoy is just tough love.

The Bombast Transcripts is a tour de
force. It is as right about the Internet as anyone
has been. But that story is entwined with Chris’
own. As he’s throwing acid in IBM’s face, he’s also
invoking his months of meditation, his decades of
debauchery, his years of geekhood. Bombast
risks everything in order to be true. Chris is
willing to embarrass himself and to embarrass his
readers if that’s the way to say what’s needful. No
one will like all of this book but if you can’t feel
the gust of truth blowing through it, then, well,
may RageBoy take your soul.

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