“Oh,” replied one of the faithful, “you say that Jay Leno is still on the air? Is it true that they use a wide-angle lens to photograph that lantern jaw of his? Just wondering.” “Letterman has more comedy in his little pinkie toe than Leno will have in his wildest dreams,” said another Davite, “and if Letterman is so ugly, who has all the models and top actresses flirting with him and asking him to go out—it certainly isn’t Leno.” _That_, not the official Letterman area, was the true Net. Just what might await the world if the inmates actually ran the asylum and themselves mounted a major entertainment effort rather than trusting the corporate world. It had happened with the Internet Underground Music Archives, and I liked the results. IUMA The normal story is that IUMA began when Rob Lord and Jeff Patterson, the co-czars, met in a newsgroup devoted to supermodels. Both liked Kate Moss, a waify Calvin Klein woman; strutting down the runways, she was lost amid the big, bosomy knockouts favored by so many young men on the Net. It turned out that Lord and Patterson were both from Valencia, California, a far-north suburb of Los Angeles. They knew each other slightly from William Hart High School, both had worked in record stores while teenagers, and both had both been attending the University of California at Santa Cruz. That’s the story, and it’s true. IUMA, however, in another way, may have started not on the Net but in the corporeal United Kingdom. Thousand and thousands of Brits were dancing to synthesized _bleeps_, _conks_, _cooonkks_, _clunks_, _bomb-bombs_ and _tssss-tsss-tssses_, and odds and ends that I could never even come close to reproducing here. The name of the music was Rave, as in “raving mad,” and by the time Lord was in high school in the 1980s, the craze had found its way to Los Angeles. Middle-class white suburbanites, Latinos, Blacks, they were all _bleep_ing and _conk_ing together, thousands of them, risking the wrath of the fire department, overcrowding the halls, going at it from 11 P.M. on, some dancing twelve hours on into the morning. “No place in Los Angeles,” Lord said of the Rave halls, “had such a peaceful coexistence as between these three groups. They didn’t say anything. They shared the beats and feelings and the technology. And on the Rave scene, the person in charge is the DJ, and they’re sort of the cultural funnel. The DJs were in charge of finding these odd records that would come from Belgium and from the UK and from Chicago, and there were some made-in-Los Angeles things. They were hard to find, but the DJs were responsible for scouting them out and bringing the very latest _bleeps_ and _conks_ together.” “So,” I asked, thinking of IUMA and Lord’s chance to bring the world to his listeners, “you liken yourself to those DJs?”