About Me:

I marshal the middle between Mathers and McLuhan. I’m an aging BMX and skateboarding zine kid. That’s where I learned to turn events and interviews into pages with staples. I have since written about music, media, and culture for everything from self-published zines and personal blogs to national magazines and academic journals. I hold a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. As a child, I solved the Rubik’s Cube competitively.

Deeper background: After over ten years of making photo-copied zines (e.g., The Unexplained and Front Wheel Drive), I registered frontwheeldrive.com in 1997. A few false starts later, it evolved into an archive of interviews and reviews that explored the peaks of theory and technology and the depths of the cultural underground. Scott McCloud described the site as “nicely designed and packed with ideas (a rarity on both counts),” and Mark Dery called it “brutally cool.” With this site, I established myself as what Disinformation called, “One of the Internet’s leading interviewers of subculture and new-science icons.” Though frontwheeldrive.com ceased operations in late 2007, the best of its content is archived in my first book, Follow for Now.

Prior to graduate work, I spent over twenty years working as a writer, editor, and designer both on- and off-line. I have written about music, media, and culture for everything from glossy national magazines and regional weeklies to hometown newspapers and homegrown ‘zines, and I have written, edited, designed, and consulted for such diverse organizations as Microsoft, Nike, The MIT Press, WIRED, MSN Music, Explorations in Media Ecology, Human Recreational Services, ESPN, The Journal of Hip-Hop Studies, DIG BMX Magazine, X-Games, SLAP Skateboard Magazine, Fallen Footwear, Vulture, Ride BMX Magazine, Xbox, and Zero Skateboards. I have also guest lectured at several universities, as well as spoken at events like SXSW, SF MusicTech Summit, DMA 2011, and Geekend.

 


 

Photo by Nick Thomsen.