As of my experience at the Electric Daisy Carnival this summer, I can’t say the latter opinions have been all that much altered. What has been altered is my sense that rave is dead. I was astonished by the phenomenon that flooded the downtown Coliseum. You can tell a lot about a culture when 70,000 young people show up barely wearing anything . Teenage rave is a massively developed subculture that I had no idea about. It was a 12-hour teenage pop-culture Halloween.

SYNOPSIS
Journalist, James Stanley, is faced with the imminent birth of his child. Having decided to forego the test that would determine whether his child is carrying the all-important “Super-S” gene, which differentiates the genetic makeup of a superhero from that of a normal person, James sets out on a quest to interview forty-five super-powered individuals in the hope that their experiences may better prepare him for the birth of a child that is potentially gifted with extraordinary abilities. On his journey, he encounters characters from all walks of life; from single mothers struggling to raise gifted children, to rebellious super-teenagers, all the way through to those reaching the end of their lives. But what starts as a voyage of personal discovery becomes something far more ominous when he crosses paths with an organization known as XoDOS.

Echo Park was where I grew up

And where Tom Waits sat drooling bourbon drunk
And cocaine heavy in the 70s
And where in the 90s chinks stood atop grocery markets with AK-47s
And blacks ran down streets in a glorious show of the power of mayhem
And it was like watching hundreds of fingers coming together as a fist
Pulling men from trucks

I was born
to live a single day
lived it as long as I could
My childhood was my first hour
and I cried it into a second
hour when I wrecked all that I touched
In the third hour

J: Well, thanks, Matthew for coming and taking an interview. So where did you learn to write. These are sort of the standard questions. Where did you learn to write?
M: Well, I started wanting to write in high school. I read Fitzgerald when I was 15. I was a pretty early reader and like a passionate reader when I was a little kid. But then when I was 14, 15, I read The Great – not Gatsby. I read This Side of Paradise. And that was the book that made me want to be a writer. Not a very good …