I didn’t get into the Beastie Boys music until they made the jump to the Left Coast and released Paul’s Boutique (Capitol, 1989) And, like most people, I didn’t recognize that record’s greatness until it’d been out a while. By the time they started running projects like Grand Royal Magazine, Grand Royal Records, and X-Large clothing, I had become a fan. Their undisputed comeback was with Check Your Head (Capitol, 1992). That record set the tone for the 1990s in a way that no other album did, and it shed new light on Paul’s Boutique, introducing a whole new crop of fans to the Beastie phenomenon. In the wake of the live instruments played on Check Your Head, a practice the Beasties had abandoned after Poly Wog Stew (Rat Cage, 1982), the sample-saturated Paul’s Boutique garnered new meaning. After the various sampling copyright lawsuits at the end of the 1980s, it was no longer a record one could make. Today it would be a free mixtape, and still have to dodge litigation from multiple parties. The Beastie Boys had moved on and on.

Their early success became a burden rather than a boon to their being taken seriously. Where Paul’s Boutique flirted with maturity, Check Your Head showed they meant business. It was still playful, still fun, and still silly, but it also proved that they weren’t a parody act, that they could downright rock things other than the mic, and that they were here to stay. Eventually these two records will get their due as two of the most important documents of the sound of their time, deserving their placement in the alphabet and their placement among music legends: right between The Beach Boys (Pet Sounds) and The Beatles (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band).

Grand Royal was a magazine that I wish had lasted longer than it did. Its pages were driven by the interests of Adam Horivitz, Mike Diamonds, and Adam Yauch. That meant that just about anything could end up in there. From a fold-out dedication to Billy Joel (a.k.a. “The Fourth Beastie”) to an interview with a not-yet-famous, basement-recording Kid Rock, and from Biz Markie flexidisc to a calendar featuring demolition scenes, all put together with the inimitable Beasties flair. Their record label of the same name boasted a varied roster including acts like Atari Teenage Riot, At the Drive-In, Luscious Jackson, Jimmy Eat World, and Techno Animal, among many, many others. Their extended family includes The Dust Brothers, Mario Caldato Jr., Money Mark, Spike Jonze, Andy Jenkins, Mark Lewman, Sean Lennon, Ben Lee, Kathleen Hanna, Kim Gordon, Kim Deal, Eric Haze, Q-Tip, Rick Rubin, and John Doe, just to name a few. The reach of this network of creative souls is utterly impossible to gauge.

After Ill Communication (Capitol, 1994), the Beasties’ music and I parted ways again. We grew apart just as we’d grown together years before. I always kept an eye on what they were up to, but it was never mine again.

All of this stilted reminiscing over the Beastie Boys legacy is just to say that they are important, much more important than the bands that get the attention as such. The loss of Adam Yauch is a huge loss for all of us.

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Here’s a recently unearthed, unaired clip of the Boys on Dave Chappelle’s show [runtime: 2:40] showing the raw sound they brought to the masses:

De La Soul’s 1995 record Stakes is High opens with various voices answering the question, “Where were you when you first heard Criminal Minded?” — knowing that moment was the door opening to a new world.

There was the one definitive moment
Well, did it mean it to you?
There was that one definitive moment
When it was something new.
– Pretty Girls Make Graves, “Speakers Push the Air”

Wayne Coyne once described this phenomenon to me as the “punk rock” moment, remembering the first time he heard something other than Foreigner and realized that Foreigner really wasn’t all that good. Listening to fans of The Replacements describe the way certain records changed them forever in Color Me Obsessed (What Were We thinking Films, 2011) is often painful. That moment is so difficult to describe without sounding stupid. So much so that many of them preface their testimonies with phrases like, “this is going to sound cheesy, but…” And it does. Mark Schwahn (creator of One Tree Hill) described the moment well in sober tones, saying that you know your life is different when you hear that sound than it was the moment before you did.

In that same movie, everyone also has a stoic opinion about which Replacements record was “the last good one.” In an old issue of Seattle’s The Stranger, Josh Felt wrote. “Authenticity is subjective. Case in point: The person who thinks Nirvana was the height of authentic rock and therefore disdains any post-grunge band for being phony is obviously someone who had an important moment along the lines of that day in their bedroom listening to Nevermind when they were jarred into consciousness about the homogenous teen culture surrounding them.” Once the moment happens, it often poisons the experiences that follow, some of which were potential epiphanies. The new is tired because it’s not like the old stuff. “Authenticity comes from the moment you’re living in,” continues Felt, “not from the product you’re buying.”

Psychologists call this “imprinting.” Certain experiences during certain times of your life just stay with you. Whatever you listened to in the decade somewhere between ages twelve and twenty-one is likely the most important music you’ll ever hear. Explaining what it means to you is one thing; making someone else understand, someone who didn’t have the same experience, is damn near impossible. Our experience with music is what my friend Josh Gunn calls “radically subjective.” We try and try to translate the experience with language and it always falls short.

I feel like I’ve had that moment many, many times in my life. Hearing Criminal Minded for the first time was one of them, and one that still informs my listening today. There’s no escaping the imprinting of the punk-rock moment.

When was yours?

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Here’s the video for Pretty Girls Make Graves’ “Speakers Push the Air” [runtime: 2:57], which I think captures the feeling pretty well: “Yeah, nothing else matters when I turn it up loud!”:

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Special thanks to Josh Gunn, Wayne Coyne, and Barry Brummett for the many discussions that informed this piece, and to Thomas Durdin for playing me the good stuff back in high school.

Writing Space: I am enamored of scenes of bands working in the studio. My musician friends tell me that being in the studio is no fun, so I know I’m romanticizing it. Maybe it’s just leftover boyhood dreams of being a rock star, but seeing the way that artists occupy the temporary space of the recording studio while making records inspires me.

I try to emulate the studio experience that I imagine with my writing space. The walls around my desk host white boards and butcher-paper mindmaps, as well as posters and images that inspire me to write depending on the topic. Books chronically clutter every flat affordance within arm’s reach, which can be a burden as well as a boon. If applicable, I also listen to relevant music. For instance, while working on a chapter heavy with material about Laurie Anderson, I put up my Home of the Brave movie poster and listened to a playlist consisting of songs from all of her records. Immersing oneself in the subject matter is one way to dip your writing deeper into it.

An Essential Tension: There is a tension between wanting to write and needing to write. I find that both are necessary, but neither is sufficient. Writing in a vacuum can be lonely, disheartening work, and writing strictly for deadlines can be just as soul-squishing. Writing for my website (I loathe the term “blogging”) has provided me a perfect tension between the two. I want to write because it is what I do, but having an audience makes me feel that I need to write as well. Maintaining this site maintains that tension and keeps me writing.

Get Critical: In a response to my previous piece, Howard Rheingold (who has a beautiful office/studio space himself) wrote:

Find good critics you trust. Much writing needs to be sheltered — don’t show it to anybody until you think it can live on its own, even if it will need minor or major surgery after reconsideration. Then get some smart readers — people whose intelligence and knowledge you admire, you are supportive of your work, but are unafraid of telling you candidly what didn’t work for them in your writing. You need to develop a way of judging criticism. Some of it needs to just bounce off. Some of it needs to be considered. Some of it directs you to make important changes. You need to develop a sense for criticism — and get accustomed to it.

This runs counter to my “Release Your Darlings” suggestion from last time, but it’s good advice. Find mentors who will give you solid feedback — encouraging as well as constructive. It’s essential for all areas of writing development. Now, which of your darlings you release and which ones you save for the private pressure of critical eyes is up to your own judgement. It’s a meta-skill that you’ll hone as you go.

Remember to Return: I spoke to a few writing friends who responded to my “write everything down” credo, saying that they never go back through their notes or journals. It’s not only helpful, but imperative for me to go back through my collected notes on a regular basis. I find myself digging through the latest one almost every time I write something for this site, looking for a half-remembered reference or quotation. I don’t want to go blaming the internet, but we seem to have a web-fueled obsession with the latest, the most current, the now. Sometimes the piece you need is tucked away in the archives. Remember to return to your notes; otherwise, why are you taking them?

These are just a few more things that have come up in the past few weeks. Again, no one can tell you exactly how to make it happen. You may know more than I do. What tips do you have for getting writing done? Feel free to leave some in the comments below.

Thank you. Write on.

I was asked to sign a contract for an essay I have written, which is scheduled to appear in an edited collection. Let’s leave aside the fact that I wrote the essay — it was solicited for this collection — in summer 2010, and yet it will not appear in print until 2013. I think that the glacial pace of academic publishing is a real problem. But that is not what is bothering me at the moment…

What’s bothering him is that the piece would have been “work-for-hire.” That the contract stipulated terms as follows:

WORK-FOR-HIRE. The Contributor acknowledges that the Publisher has commissioned the Contribution as a work-for-hire, that the Publisher will be deemed the author of the Contributior as employer-for-hire, and that the copyright in the Contribution will belong to the Publisher during the initial and any renewal or extended period(s) of copyright. To the extent, for any reason, that the Contribution or any portion thereof does not qualify or otherwise fails to be a work-for-hire, theContributor hereby assigns to the Publisher whatever right, title and interest the Contributor would otherwise have in the Contribution throughout the world.

Shaviro continues,

I found this entirely unbelievable, and unacceptable. Since when has original academic writing been classified as “work-for-hire”? It is possible, I suppose, that things like writing encyclopedia essays might be so categorized; but I have never, in my 30 years in academia, encountered a case in which primary scholarship or criticism was so classified. Is this something widespread, but which I simply haven’t heard about? I’d welcome information on this score from people who know more about the academic publishing situation than I do. But it seems to me, at first glance, that the Press is upping the ante in terms of trying to monopolize “intellectual property,” by setting up an arrangement that both cuts off the public from access and denies any rights to the henceforth-proletarianized “knowledge worker” or producer. I am unwilling to countenance such an abridgment of my ability to make the words that I have written more freely available.

In an update on the situation, Shaviro adds,

 I don’t think I have permission to actually reproduce the words of the editor from OUP, so I will paraphrase. What he basically said was that traditional publication agreements are insufficient because they only give presses “limited sets of rights.” In other words, he was openly confessing that OUP seeks complete and unlimited control over the material that they publish. The justification he gave for this was that old neoliberal standby, “flexibility” — OUP is seeking to do all sorts of digital distribution, and if rights are limited then they may not be able to control new forms of distribution that arise due to technological changes. Of course, the mendaciousness of this claim can be seen by the fact that, as was confirmed to me by one of the people involved in putting together the volume, the “work-for-hire” provision was in place long before the Press even got the idea of supplementing physical publication of the volume with a (no doubt password-protected and expensive-to-access) website.

I have exactly one piece “published” in an academic journal. It was a book review. It was due on November 15, 2008, and appeared in the September, 2010 issue of the journal – two years later. As much as I am thankful for the opportunity (my master’s thesis advisor Brian H. Spitzberg had passed the chance on to me), and I know that’s a normal publication period, it was a freaking book review. Why would I ever pursue that avenue again? My friend Alex Burns has a great post on how academia kills writing, which is a great fear of mine: I want to write books, and I want to write books that people actually want to read.

Alex Reid has an excellent post about why academics keep writing books that no one wants to read, which is because academics largely write books in the pursuit of tenure, not in the pursuit of an audience. Ian Bogost calls this “vampire publishing.” Their shared concern draws an important distinction between writing to be read and writing to have written (a distinction my professor at UT, Katie Arens, has drawn as well). In academia, there’s a strong push toward the latter. Bogost writes,

The reason there is no irony in my simultaneous support of Alex’s position and my continued participation in scholarly publishing is quite simple: people actually want to read my books. They buy them, both in print and electronic format. And I’ve tried very hard as an author to learn how to write better and better books, books that speak to a broader audience without compromising my scholarly connections, books that really ought to exist as books. Imagine that!

The problem doesn’t stop there though. As a scholar who pursues nonacademic or para-academic routes to publication, I am appalled at how insanely bad some of the channels outside of academia have gotten. Case in point: TED. TED, the “Technology, Entertainment, Design” conference originally envisioned by Richard Saul Wurman, has been watered down to the point of self-parody. If they hadn’t once done great things, this wouldn’t matter, but a once visionary site of Big-Idea exchange has become the Starbucksification of public intellectualism, what Benjamin Bratton calls, “the Thomas Friedman of Megachurch Infotainment.” If the following doesn’t make you lose your shit, then you should probably stop reading this post-haste [runtime: 3:47]:

“John Boswell, of the ‘Symphony of Science’, came to TED2012 and made this remix of the speakers onstage.” It’s a TED-sponsored promotional video! It’s not a parody, it’s a self-parody! (Have you ever seen the Bank of America “One Bank” video?) TED, once the bastion of non-academic public intellectualism, is now this. SMFH.

The problem — the real problem —  is that there should be a gate-keeping function to scholarship, but that the ones in place are currently failing us. TED’s former elitism wasn’t necessarily the answer, but their new openness is total, indisputable crap. Couple that with the aforementioned problems of academic publishing, and you’ve got yourself a crisis — a big one.

My main gripe with all of this is that Big Name people basically copyright ideas via TED (Bogost calls it, “American Idol for non-fiction trade books”). I’m all for openness, and I pretty well only synthesize the ideas of others (and I do my damnedest to cite and give credit where its due; I am self-conscious about it to a fault), but I’ve seen this happen so many times: One person spends years developing idea X and then one of The Chosen mentions X in a TED Talk™, and then it’s their idea. That is a problem.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a solution. If I did, this would be a very different piece. I have chosen to do what I do and hope for the best. I know many others who’ve resolved to do the same. None of this is to shit on those who do academic publishing or hope to do so, but we need to realize that the system is broken and that the alternatives are not much better. Here’s hoping we all find ways to get our ideas out there.

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Apologies to Doug Rushkoff for my bastardization of his book title for the name of this piece, and many thanks to Steven Shaviro, Alex Burns, Ian Bogost, and Alex Reid for sharing their thoughts.

I listen to the vapid resignation coming from capital-P publishing and to the stories of corporate awfulness my friends endure, and I think if we landed half the punches we’re pulling now out of misplaced deference and outdated political instincts, we would bury them. — Erin Kissane via Twitter, October 10, 2011

I published my first book, Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes (Well-Red Bear), five years ago, and I learned the process as I went through it. The tools for doing so have gotten much better, faster, and easier to use. I did Follow for Now largely “the hard way” at the time because I wanted control over every aspect of the book. I didn’t want it to look self-published. Due to advancements in the available technology, those concerns have lessened quite a lot, and I probably wouldn’t do things the same way now. Here are some of the things I’ve learned in the process, in the hopes that you can avoid some of the same issues now.

Design: As I said, I didn’t want my book to look self-published, so I hired a designer. I am also fortunate to have designer friends, some of whom have book design in their repertoires. I tapped Patrick David Barber and his partner Holly McGuire to do mine. I was originally going to hire Patrick to do the cover, but they took on the whole project, and I am very, very thankful that they did. It’s difficult to put a price on great design, and I didn’t pay them near what the job was worth, but I can confidently say — thanks to Patrick and Holly — that Follow for Now looks at home with any book on the shelves at the various bookstores, libraries, and homes that carry it.

Editing: Follow for Now consists of the best interviews from my old website frontwheeldrive.com. I spent a year and a half choosing, categorizing, and arranging the interviews into a form suitable for publication as a book. Once I got it pretty close to what I thought the final version would look like, I’d read those interviews so many times that I didn’t feel comfortable doing the final copyediting. I was simply too close to the content. I hired another old friend, Adem Tepedelen, to help me get the words all together. This was a step I didn’t anticipate when I started this journey, but again, I’m glad I did it. Adem found so many inconsistencies, misspellings, awkward sentences, and other holes that I’d never seen — even in all the years some of this stuff had been online. Get a skilled third party to help you get your copy tight.

Indexing: I cannot express how frustrating it is as a researcher to pick up a book, flip to the back to look up something that you know is in it, and find that there’s no index to help you locate it. Since Follow for Now contains so many people, ideas, books, records, and so on inside, I thought it was imperative that one be able to find the information in as many ways as possible. I was advised not to do the indexing myself (and I felt the same way I felt about the copyediting), so I hired Steve Connell (from the awesome Verse Chorus Press) to do mine. It was well worth it. There are rare cases when an index might be superfluous, but most nonfiction books should have one. Don’t skimp on the index. Your readers will thank you.

Distribution: I ordered a thousand copies of Follow for Now. They arrived on my doorstep in Seattle on a wooden palette. A thousand books is over forty boxes of twenty-four books each. It’s about half a standard palette. As a physical presence, it’s no joke. I’ve moved three times since then. Maintaining one’s own inventory at this point is absolutely ludicrous. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone unless you happen to have your own warehouse and aren’t planning on moving anytime soon. The print-on-demand services have gotten much better, and if I were doing a book myself right now, I’d certainly be looking hard in their direction.

I moved just a few months for a new job after that palette of books arrived, so I missed out on shopping the book to a lot of independent distributors. If you go this route, look into distribution before your inventory comes knocking.

Digital: Given the current battles over digital distribution, I am loathe to mention Amazon, but there’s no denying their power. If you have an ISBN (and you shouldn’t have a book out without one), then you can get your book listed on their site. I make no money from Amazon sales of my print book, but having it on their site has raised its profile. If you choose to use one of their services for digital and print-on-demand publishing, you get their distribution platform automatically. This is powerful stuff, but be sure check out all of the terms of service in full: You can certainly use their strength without signing over your soul. I hired Josh Tallent at eBook Architects to convert my book’s raw files to Kindle-readable ones. Google Books and other digital distributors have their own sets of legalese to sift through. Don’t sell yourself short.

Local: Check with all of your extant local independent bookstores. Most have consignment deals and many will buy books from you outright. See what they have as far as local events as well. A reading or talk from your book can sell a few copies and raise your profile in your own area, which, if done well, can lead to more exposure online as people post and Tweet about you and your new book.

Web: I am fortunate enough to  have a background in web design, so can build my own websites. If I didn’t, I know several people who could help in that area. Again, in the five years since Follow for Now, the technology has advanced enough that free sites can do the trick. Having a website to highlight elements from the book and press about it is invaluable, but at least a landing page with all the pertinent details about your book is imperative.

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There are many other things you can do to get your book out and raise awareness about it, but these are the basics. “Self-publishing” is a misnomer if there ever was one. It still takes a team of people to do it successfully. You should be prepared to do most of the work yourself, but chances are you have friends who can help where you fall short. I have told many classes that if you have a book written, you can have it out tomorrow. Just make sure you’re ready for the challenge: Be prepared for years of work. Having a completed volume in hand is only about half the job; it’s the end of one phase and the beginning of another. I’m still learning as I go.

If I were forced to pick a single answer to the question “What do you do?” I would probably say I’m a writer, though I never did well on writing assignments in school. In spite of my placement in advanced classes, I scored poorly throughout high school on writing-related projects. Hell, I made C’s in both English Composition 101 and 102, but In my second-to-last semester of undergrad, one of my instructors complimented my writing. We had done several in-class essays in her Abnormal Psychology class, and one day she pulled me aside and told me what a good writer I was. This came as a surprise, given my previous track record and the fact that I’d been an Art major for my first three years of college. Regardless, it stuck with me. I took a class on writing for social science research the next semester, and though I barely made a B, I felt more at home researching and writing than I ever had trying to do traditional art.

Typical me. (photo by Lily Brewer)

Since then, I’ve moved on to just about every type of writing, and the process intrigues me to no end. I find that writing in different formats and styles (e.g., academic, journalistic, poetry, online, etc.) breaks up any creeping monotony and keeps me writing. As such, I try to be a writer at all times. As Johannes Milner (1814) put it, “Poetry is not something to be activated and deactivated. It is a part of a process, a byproduct of simply being poetic” (p. 43). So, at its best, writing is not an activity unto itself, but a byproduct of being a writer. Here are a few tips for becoming and being the writer you want to be (which we will explore in-depth below):

• Find Make Time to Write: Unscheduled time is lost time. You have to give yourself breaks and let yourself enjoy them, but making time to write is essential. This is first and foremost.
• Always Be Writing/Write Everything Down: This does not always seem possible for the busy among us, but allowing for the opportunity is imperative. Collecting your most fleeting thoughts — on the bus, in the car, while trying to fall asleep, during any downtime whatsoever — is an important practice. Don’t assume you’ll remember them. You won’t. Write them down.
• Don’t Let the Blank Page Stop You: Being intimidated by the emptiness of a white page and a blinking cursor can be debilitating. Just type what you’re thinking. If you’ve jotted down notes, type them up. You can — and will — edit later. This will get you past the blankness. It has been said that writing is re-writing, so take advantage of the impermanency of your initial words.
• Release Your Darlings: I’ve posted about this one before, but it bears repeating. Don’t sit on your ideas. Get them out there. You’ll get invaluable feedback from blog posts, Tweets, and exchanging emails that you won’t get from a Word file withering away in the foldered hierarchy of your hard drive.
• Collaborate: The fruits we bare are inevitably due to the roots we share. Collaboration makes each one of us bigger. Read widely and exchange ideas with many. Even if it’s just having someone to bounce your ideas around with, the importance of sharing them cannot be overstated.
• Stay Positive: This stuff isn’t easy, but inspiration is all around you. I find it in books, discussions, stand-up comedy, Hip-hop, my fiancée, animals, staying up late, reading magazines, listening to music, etc. Don’t look for reasons to be discouraged. The world is full of inspiring things if you look for them.

From the page I feel a lot of pressure
I treat it like it’s too precious
Like there’s an audience saying, ‘Impress us!’
But it’s just my impression
– Roy Christopher, June 19, 2007

In his book On Writing (Pocket, 2001), Stephen King urges aspiring writers to turn off their televisions, writing, “Once weaned from the ephemeral craving for TV, most people will find that they enjoy the time they spend reading. I’d like to suggest that turning off that endlessly quacking box is apt to improve the quality of your life and the quality of your writing” (p. 148). Director Michel Gondry adds, “I stopped my son from playing videogames, and he began to develop all kinds of creative skills. It’s human to seek out the quickest reward, but if you get the reward immediately, you don’t go anywhere else. You learn that the delayed reward is more rewarding” (quoted in Thill,2006, p. 56). These two quotations get at the issue of distraction. Having time away from writing is also important, as is having a head-clearing activity. I have colleagues who can’t write at home due to things like dishes, television, roommates, spouses, etc. I know others who have their own “writing space”: a nice, secluded spot with a comfortable chair, and good tea. Still others are binge writers: They need large chunks of time to write anything of substance. I am sympathetic to all of these conditions, but I have found it important to cultivate the ability to write at any time, in any circumstance — even if it’s just collecting thoughts about something. I keep a pen and paper in my pocket at all times, pen and pad by my bed, notebook(s) in my backpack and all over the house. I do find that I need large chunks of uninterrupted time to surmount larger writing tasks, but the ubiquity of computers, portable or otherwise, makes writing anywhere a much more viable option.

It’s not always about making a fist, sometimes it’s about opening your hand. — Tom Waits

In Post-Continental Voices: Selected Interviews (Zer0 Books, 2010), Paul J. Ennis interviews seven scholars all working in and around new Continental Philosophy (e.g., Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, Ian Bogost, et al.). There’s a lot of solid writing advice in each of these. In his interview, Stuart Elden states:

The key thing is that there is no correct way to write, but ways that work for individuals. The problem is that people seem to try to write in ways that are not right for them, that are just not working. Personally I try to write everyday, even if it’s just typing up notes or work on references. I try not to get hung up over particular words or formulations; because I go over things so many times that I never think anything I write is the final version. For me that’s helpful in not getting blocked. I write a lot of “stage directions” into the text — “this link doesn’t work”; “need better examples”; “develop” etc. — and I move on. (p. 43)

He goes on to talk about reading a lot and how it inspires him to write, as well as writing cumulatively as opposed to on deadline, adding, “I do know people who claim to work that way, and they can ‘turn on’ the writing at that late point. It just doesn’t work for me — writing is more of a slow accumulation. I’ve written some shorter pieces quite quickly, but most pieces are built up very slowly, accretion over a long period of time. The other thing to note is that I work on several things — not quite at once — but in parallel” (p. 43). Billy Wimsatt once said that the first rule of writing is reading a lot, and I concur with that. Also, reading widely is helpful. Venture outside of your area of interest. Treat your mind like an ecology and diversify its literary flora and fauna. I also agree with Elden’s working on several pieces in parallel. When work on one project stalls, switching to another can jostle new ideas loose. The process is less about balance and more about tension.

In his interview with Ennis, Levi Bryant adds, “Too many of us labor over projects in isolation, never revealing them to anyone else until finally, at long last, they are masterpieces ready for publication. I think this is a tremendous mistake both in terms of prospects for professional success and intellectually. Attending conferences, talking to other academics, participating on discussion lists, and blogging all create countless opportunities and assist in your intellectual development. Nor should this engagement be restricted to established academics” (p. 79).

Waiting until the “right” time to write and toiling away at it alone might be our two biggest mistakes. One of my main correspondents with regard to writing is my friend Alex Burns. In a recent email exchange, he introduced me to the idea of “hot space.” That is, a quick snapshot of an idea that often resonates with an audience more so than something fully formed. The concept’s namesake being Queen’s 1982 album Hot Space, which was apparently recorded in very quick bursts of studio time. Again, sharing cannot be overstated. Don’t deprive the world of your ideas. Get them out there and see if they float or sink. This practice will also help you build a platform.

When she wrote about things, her sense of them changed, and with it, her sense of herself. — William Gibson, Spook Country.

A friend of mine recently lamented on Facebook, “I miss being able to write creatively. I feel like academia has ruined me. What can I do to jump start my imagination and start writing again? :( It makes me really sad.” This has been a fear of mine as well, and I find that constantly working on different kinds of projects helps keep my writing limber.

More to her question, there are many, many books on breaking out of these ruts and finding new grooves. In spite of its New-Agey style, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones: Unleashing the Writer Within (Shambhala, 2005) is one I return to regularly. Goldberg outlines a total plan for writing as a practice, which can be overwhelming if taken wholesale, but the book is rife with reminders of how to write through the fits and starts of any project. Daniel Pink‘s A Whole New Mind (Riverhead, 2006) has some great exercises for getting the creative process started as well. Ultimately, as Stuart Elden stated above, each of us has to find what works for our writing needs, but trying out the methods of successful writers is one tactic to finding your own way.

The best way of getting into something is to think of it as mischief.
― Steve Aylett, The Crime Studio

Being a writer is not an easy path to take, but it’s navigable. Don’t be afraid to test an idea, ask for help, or bounce ideas off someone. The more difficult it is, the more likely you will find it rewarding when you finish a project. Some people write all the time, and others are able to plow through when something is due. Experiment and find what works for you. Ultimately, if you want it, you have to find a way to make it happen.

References:

Aylett, Steve. (2001). The Crime Studio. New York: Thunder’s Mouth.

Ennis, Paul J. (2010). Post-Continental Voices: Selected Interviews. London: Zer0 Books.

Gibson, William. (2007). Spook Country: A Novel. New York: Putnam, p. 171.

Goldberg, Natalie. (2005). Writing Down the Bones: Unleashing the Writer Within. Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada: Shambhala.

King, Steven. (2001). On Writing. New York: Pocket Books.

Milner, Johannes. (1814). This Quotation is From a Dream I Had: Pull Inspiration from Everything. My Head: Dream Time.

Pink, Daniel H. (2006). A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. New York: Riverhead.

Thill, Scott. (2006, March). Keeping it Reel: Michel Gondry’s Block Party. WIRED, 14.03, p. 56.

Condense fact from the vapor of nuance.
– Juanita Marquez in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash

Alongside library science and other information archiving skills, forensics is a contemporary growth field. If we are to use our media as a sort of technological “Funes the Memorious,” what do we do when technological change outpaces its retrieval compatibility? You likely have (or have had) mass storage containers (e.g., cassettes, VHS tapes, floppy discs, etc.) that lack a device capable of reading them, ghosts of information past trapped in a black box forever. We’re all archivists whether we notice or admit it, but the gates to our archives have expiration dates. A recent trip to UT’s Harry Ransom Center revealed stacks of media unreadable by any technology on-site. William Gibson‘s electronic work Agrippa: Book of the Dead plays on this very trope of archival decay. The piece, set for a one-time reading, consists of a 300-line poem on a 3.5″ disc encased in a box made to look like a hard drive, is set to scroll once through and erase itself forever, a textual spectre set free from the archive after its single haunting episode. The pages of the included book version were treated with photosensitive chemicals which fade with exposure to light.

According to Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (The MIT Press, 2008; now available in paperback), There was one public performance of Agrippa. On December 9, 1992, at the Americas Society in uptown New York City, Penn Jillette read the poem aloud, which was projected on a big screen, exacerbating its scroll into oblivion. The event is fraught with rumor and lie, as the full text of the intentionally ephemeral Agrippa was posted online the next morning. The conditions of its hacking are detailed in full in Kirschenbaum’s book, and a collection of documents surrounding the work is available online. Another interesting artifact sprung from this event: Re:Agrippa, a choppy remix of videotaped footage from the single Agrippa public event, test patterns, and haunting voiceovers kludged together by the NYU students who “hacked” Agrippa‘s text for online consumption [runtime: 5:44]:

Our archive fever needs feeding. With its flickering signifiers and configurable nature, we consider the things on the screen temporary. But, as Kirschenbaum notes, in lieu of hard drives and other external devices (the main concern of his book), the visual display of the computer was originally considered a storage device. Now, crashed drives and outmoded media hide their secrets from everyone except those closest to the machine. Forensic scientists, not unlike those seen on that other screen, are more important than ever to our unstable memories. They can condense fact from the vapor of hidden nuance and open the gates to the archival entrails of dead media.

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It should be noted that my conception of the archive and the haunting thereof owes a large debt to the teachings of Josh Gunn. Oh, there’s some unacknowledged Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Dick Hebdige, Bruce Sterling, and Kate Hayles in there as well.

References:

Borges, Jorge Luis. (1964). Funes the Memorious. In Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. New York: New Directions.

Huyssen, Andreas. (2003). Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. (2008). Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Stephenson, Neal. (1993). Snow Crash. New York: Spectra.

Sterne, J. (2003). The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

We cannot understand and fight evil as long as we consider it to be an abstract concept external to ourselves.
– Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Evil, p. 231

Among the best of this mix of subgenres (e.g., Seidr, Panopticon, Deafheaven, Liturgy, Krallice, Falls of Rauros, et al.), the undisputed masters stateside are Wolves in the Throne Room. Their Cascadian Black Metal is as majestic as it is monolithic, mixing the forest and the trees, their epic songs can be as dense as they are sparse. In a 2006 interview, they explain the draw of Black Metal:

True Norwegian Black Metal is completely unbalanced – that is why it is so compelling and powerful. It is the sound of utter torment, believing to one’s core that winter is eternal. Black Metal is about destruction, destroying humanity; destroying ones own self in an orgy of self loathing and hopelessness. I believe one must focus on this image of eternal winter in order to understand Black Metal for it is a crucial metaphor that reveals our sadness and woe as a race. In our hubris, we have rejected the earth and the wisdom of countless generations for the baubles of modernity. In return, we have been left stranded and bereft in this spiritually freezing hell.

To us, the driving impulse of Black Metal is more about deep ecology than anything else and can best be understood through the application of eco-psychology. Why are we sad and miserable? Because our modern culture has failed – we are all failures. The world around us has failed to sustain our humanity, our spirituality. The deep woe inside black metal is about fear – that we can never return to the mythic, pastoral world that we crave on a deep subconscious level. Black Metal is also about self loathing, for modernity has transformed us, our minds, bodies and spirit, into an alien life form; one not suited to life on earth without the mediating forces of technology, culture and organized religion. We are weak and pitiful in our strength over the earth – in conquering, we have destroyed ourselves. Black Metal expresses disgust with humanity and revels in the misery that one finds when the falseness of our lives is revealed (quoted in Smith, 2006).

The urge to return to our roots is a prevailing ethos in Black Metal of all paints. In Norway, it’s about returning to the Norse traditions that predate the Christian and Western influences on the culture there. For Wolves in the Throne Room, it’s about a return to nature. “Our music is balanced in that we temper the blind rage of Black Metal with the transcendent truths of the universe that reveal themselves with age and experience,” they continue. “Our relationship with the natural world is a healing force in our lives” (quoted in Smith, 2006). Drummer and one half of the brothers that make up the core of Wolves in the Throne Room, Aaron Weaver was taken by Black Metal upon first hearing it. “… it’s more about creating a trance effect. It’s really got more in common with shamanic drumming and with noise music. It’s not heavy metal, it’s not riffs, it’s not head-banging music at all… It’s meditative music. Most heavy metal is very extroverted. It’s about putting on a big show and head banging and drinking a beer with your buddies. Black metal is the exact opposite. It’s all about gazing inwards and trying to discover things about yourself” (quoted in Moyer, p. 42). Having seen these guys live last year, I can truly say that their music is introspective to the point of turning one inside out.

Weaver discusses the connections between Black metal and the radical Northwestern culture he and his brother are immersed in, both of which are about “critiquing civilization, yearning for a more ancient sense of the world, a connection with tradition and nature that we’ve perhaps lost as modern people.” That’s not the whole of it, of course, he adds, “Then the darker side of it as well exists in both worlds. In both the Black Metal world and the ecological punk world, a hatred of humanity and a strong sense of misanthropy as we look around and see what humanity has wrought” (Moyer, p. 42).

We are going back to the future and forward to the past, engaging all of history’s villains and saints in quick time… Ancient ethnic sores are belching fire while transnational companies linked by satellites conduct their business oblivious to the fuedal past below. — Don Beck and Christopher Cowan, Spiral Dynamics, p. 18.

Aside from Lords of Chaos (feral house, 2003) and the documentary Until the Light Takes Us (2009), Hideous Gnosis (CreateSpace, 2010) is the most in-depth exploration of what Black Metal’s not-so-joyous noise might mean to fans and to theorists of same. Though it’s a compilation of essays, documents, and thoughts from a symposium by the same name, which took place on December 12, 2009 in Brooklyn, New York, the book stands alone well as a collection of academic work on the subject. Edited by Nicola Masciandaro, it brings together pieces by Steven Shakespeare, Hunter Hunt-Hendrix (of Liturgy), Eugene Thacker, Reza Negarestani, and Evan Calder Williams, among many others, as well as naysayers and haters from the blog’s comments section, “to bask in the speculative glory of the problematic,” as Reza Negarestani puts it (quoted in Masciandaro, p. 267). Whenever academics or nerds turn their attention to something so sacredly held as Black Metal, its fans are likely to be wary. But if you, like me, enjoy immersing yourself in as many aspects as possible of the things you love, this collection is a welcome addition to Blackened Theory, the literature, music, thought, and culture that is Black Metal — and the internal, eternal evil that drives it.

@1jamiebell: What’s the speed of dark? (Tweeted March 22, 2012)

Another symposium collection, Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium (punctum books, 2011) brings together scholars to discuss Reza Negarestani’s world-warping book Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (re.press, 2008). Not since Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (Pantheon, 2000) have I been so simultaneously intrigued and scared of a book. It is a return to the “hidden prehistory” (as Steven Shaviro describes it) of the dark global forces of the twenty-first century. It is at once philosophical fiction, nomad archeology, Middle Eastern occult study, object-oriented ontology, and straight-up horror, all centered on Western civilization’s lust for oil, the darkest of matters. Leper Creativity sets out to excavate this work’s dark secrets. Their own introductory language reads as follows:

Essays, articles, artworks, and documents taken from and inspired by the symposium on Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, which took place on 11 March 2011 at The New School. Hailed by novelists, philosophers, artists, cinematographers, and designers, Cyclonopedia is a key work in the emerging domains of speculative realism and theory-fiction. The text has attracted a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary audience, provoking vital debate around the relationship between philosophy, geopolitics, geophysics, and art. At once a work of speculative theology, a political samizdat, and a philosophic grimoire, Cyclonopedia is a Deleuzo-Lovecraftian middle-eastern Odyssey populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, and the corpses of ancient gods. Playing out the book’s own theory of creativity – “a confusion in which no straight line can be traced or drawn between creator and created – original inauthenticity” – this multidimensional collection both faithfully interprets the text and realizes it as a loving, perforated host of fresh heresies. The volume includes an incisive contribution from the author explicating a key figure of the novel: the cyclone.

More than worthy of a symposium as such, Cyclonopedia bridges and problematizes the divide between modern, global politics and the dark forces of ancient humanity. Claudia Card (2002) wrote, “The denial of evil has become an important strand of twentieth-century secular Western culture” (p. 28). To deny evil is to deny ourselves, to deny a part of our positive nature. Cyclonopedia digs deep into both sides. It is a triumph in both form and content. We’re dropped into the first hole in the plot as a young American woman arrives at a hotel in Istanbul to meet an online acquaintance with an unpronounceable name who never actually shows up. She finds a manuscript in her hotel room and begins culling its clues leaving her to wonder if her friend from afar was real at all (as Johnny did Zumpano in House of Leaves). “Meanwhile, as the War on Terror escalates,” the jacket copy explains, “the U. S. is dragged into an asymmetrical engagement with occultures whose principles are ancient, obscure, and saturated in oil. It is as if war itself is feeding upon the warmachines, leveling cities into the desert, seducing the aggressors into the dark heart of oil.” As Howard Bloom (1995) explains, ”Behind the writhing of evil is a competition between organizational devices, each trying to harness the universe to its own particular pattern, each attempting to hoist the cosmos one step higher on a ladder of increasing complexity” (p. 325). The Middle East is sentient, alive, proclaims the embedded manuscript’s author Dr. Hamid Parsani, dark forces its lifeblood, its story the evil of all of history — human and nonhuman.

“Evil is a by-product, a component, of creation” Bloom (1995, p. 2) writes matter-of-factly. To understand its legion forces, we have to look extensively at the edges between nefarious, non-human history, as well as the insidious inside ourselves. It is in this way that the draw of Black Metal and the study of its ethos is something we cannot afford to ignore.

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Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium is available as a free download from punctum books. Many thanks to Kenyatta Cheese who emailed me about Cyclonopedia almost two years ago. Sometimes I’m a little slow on the uptake.

References:

Beck, Don, & Cowan, Christopher. (1996). Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.

Bloom, Howard. (1995). The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.

Card, Claudia. (2002). The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil. New York: Oxford University Press.

Masciandro, Nicola. (ed.) (2010). Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Symposium 1. New York: CreateSpace.

Moyer, Matthew. (2011, Winter). Wolves in the Throne Room: From Mount Olympia. Ghetto Blaster, 30, 40-42.

Negarestani, Reza. (2008). Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials. New York: re.press.

Smith, Bradley. (2006). Interview with Wolves in the Throne Room. Nocturnal Cult.

Keller, Ed, Nicola Masciandaro, Nicola, & Thacker, Eugene. (eds.). (2011). Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium. New York: punctum books.

Svendsen, Lars. (2010). A Philosophy of Evil. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive.

@ibogost: Earnest, snark-free question: how did Deleuze get so popular? What is it about Deleuze that is so appealing to so many?

Assemblages, rhizomes, bodies-without-organs, repetition, difference… I can’t claim to have an answer to Bogost’s question, as I can’t claim to understand much of the Deleuze that I’ve read (and I’ve read a lot of it, and a lot of it more than twice). I do know that a lot of it is difficult simply by dint of the contrarian angle on subjectivity: These books challenge the fundamental way(s) most of us tend to feel that being in the world works. Holland (1999) opens his book with the obvious: “The Anti-Oedipus is not easy to read” (p. 1). About writing it with his coauthor, Deleuze said, ”Between Félix and his diagrams and me with my verbal concepts, we wanted to work together, but we didn’t know how” (2006, p. 238). And about A Thousand Plateaus, he mused, “Now we didn’t think for a minute of writing a madman’s book, but we did write a book in which you no longer know, or need to know, who is speaking…” (quoted in Nadaud, 2006, p. 19). On page 22 of the latter, they even write it out, in black and white: “We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is compose of plateaus. We have given it a circular form, but only for laughs.” How is one to make sense of bastard philosophy such as this?

I once asked my friend and mentor Steven Shaviro what path to take as I embarked upon the plateaus alone for the first time. He suggested using Claire Parnet’s Dialogues (Columbia University Press, 1987) as a sort of crib notes to the two major volumes mentioned above. Dialogues was compiled between the writing of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze talked about the book’s in-betweenness (i.e., its being between both the two books and the three authors), writing that what mattered was “the collection of bifurcating, divergent, and muddled lines which constituted this book as a multiplicity and which passed between the points, carrying them along without going from one to the other” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1987, p. ix). And so it goes. My Deleuzian delusion is that I’ll ever get a handle on this stuff.

Somewhat thankfully, there is now Gilles Deleuze: From A to Z (Semiotext(e), 2012), a three-DVD set of those liminal lines between Deleuze and Parnet. Covering topics alphabetically, from A for “Animal” to Z for “Zigzag,” it’s a rare and interesting look at the man and his letters. Unlike the film Derrida (Jane Doe Films, 2002) on Jacques Derrida, of course, this is not really a documentary. Parnet, a former student of Deleuze’s, knew him well, and director Pierre-André Boutang likens Deleuze and Parnet to a Jazz duo, playing off of each other in an improvisation of concepts and cons, using the alphabet as a grounding framework. “Deleuze had taken into account the fact that each reel lasted ten minutes,” Boutang (2004) wrote, ”which produced a rhythm. And the charm of 16mm film is that the sound reel lasts longer than the image. With some people, you cut once the image stops. You don’t feel like doing that with Deleuze” (p. 7). During the discussion about culture (C is for Culture), Deleuze says, “Talking is dirty. Writing is clean.” If you snuggle in to watch this DVD, get ready for four hours of dirty, dirty talking.

Many others have tried to make sense of Deleuze in book form, with various tropes and varying degrees of success. The most recent being Gregory Flaxman. Flaxman is not new to Deleuze: His previous book was The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2000). His latest, Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of Philosophy: Powers of the False, Volume 1 (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), uses the idea of friendship as an initial condition from which to reexamine Deleuze’s philosophy. Covering everything from Deleuze’s apprenticeship with Friedrich Nietzsche to his vow to overthrow Plato, Flaxman reintroduces aesthetics to Deleuzian studies, showing how Deleuze situated fiction in the center of a minor philosophy. He writes, “Deleuze declares no abiding loyalties: not only does he mingle with countless philosophers, but he flirts with just as many writers, filmmakers, and artists” (p. 181). This nomadic “promiscuity” is one more reason that the well of Deleuze’s ideas isn’t likely to run dry any time soon, and Flaxman’s is a deep and welcome reconsideration. Moreover, his focus on friendship is intriguing. Stivale (1998) wrote, “This rapport of friendship lies, I believe, at the very core of these authors’ collaborative engagement…” (p. ix). Nietzsche freed Deleuze from the arid areas of academe, and Deleuze focused Guattari without truncating his thoughts too much (which, if you’ve read any Guattari without Deleuze, you know they needed a trim here and there; though Deleuze might not agree with my assessment: He speaks highly and fondly of Guattari in A to Z [L for Loyalty]).

Speaking of friendship, if you’d like a more personal — and historical — look at Deleuze and his main co-conspirator, there’s François Dosse’s Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives (Columbia University Press, 2010), which, appropriately enough, is 651 pages long. The duo met shortly after the revolts of May, 1968 (to which Anti-Oedipus is largely a reaction: “Initially it was less a question of pooling knowledge than the accumulation of our uncertainties,” Guattari said in Chaosophy [2009, p. 69]). Guattari had just been passed over as Lacan’s successor, which sent him into a deep depression tempered only by throes of mania. With a milder manner and more comfort within his confines, Deleuze was the calm of their storm, a storm that still surges through classes and discussions in philosophy, postmodernism, post-structuralism, cultural studies, film studies, net criticism, and so on. So, what was their beef with Marx, Freud, Plato, and every other thinker (save Nietzsche and Foucault, of course) that preceded them? It’s all here. Dosse’s book is the definitive story of these two major collaborators, thinkers, writers, jokesters, and, perhaps above all, friends.

Desire is under it all, according to the iconoclastic French duo. The capitalism machine creates layers and layers of desires and subsequently splits selves into schizophrenia (hence the subtitle of both volumes of their two-volume work: Capitalism and Schizophrenia). William Carlos Williams (1923) once wrote, “The pure products of America go crazy.” That’s not exactly what they meant, but maybe that’s why Deleuze, along with Guattari, have such a hold on the academy’s mass mind: Our spirits are all spiraling apart in so many separate ways, just as they said they would all those years ago. But maybe, as they were, we can still be friends.

References:

Boutang, Pierre-André. (2004, February). Everything About Gilles Deleuze and Nothing About Gilles Deleuze. RevueVertigo, no. 25.

Boutang, Pierre-André (Director). (2012). Gilles Deleuze: A to Z, with Claire Parnet [DVD]. United States: Semiotext(e).

Deleuze, Gilles. (2006). Letter to Uno: How We Worked Together. In Two Regimes of Madness. New York: Semiotext(e).

Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, Gilles & Parnet, Claire. (1987). Dialogues. New York: Columbia University Press.

Foucault, Michel. (1995). [front cover copy]. In Gilles Deleuze Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press.

Guattari, Félix. (2009). Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972-1977. New York: Semiotext(e).

Holland, Eugene W. (1999). Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis. New York: Routledge.

Massumi, Brian. (1992). A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Nadaud, Stéphane. (2006). Love Story between an Orchid and a Wasp. In Guattari, Félix, The Ani-Oedipus Papers. New York: Semiotext(e), p. 11-22.

Stivale, Charles J. (1998). The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari: Intersections and Animations. New York: Guilford.

Williams, William Carlos. (1923). Spring and All.

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I am indebted to Steven Shaviro, Katie Arens, and Ken Wark for what little I understand about the subject(s) at hand.

The true gems of skateboarding zines include Andy Jenkins‘ Bend, Tod Swank‘s Swank Zine, Joe Polevy’s Rise Above, Rodger Bridges‘ Dancing Skeleton, Grim Ripper, and Power House, and Garry Scott Davis’s Skate Fate, the latter of which has just been collected into a fierce 320-page book, Skate Fate: The Best of Skate Fate: 1981-1991 (Blurb, 2011). In one of my own zines a while back, Rodger Bridges said of Garry Scott Davis,

GSD changed my life. He taught me design. Post-zine design. Pre-computer design. He made me perform leading on long-ass articles by hand, and checked my accuracy by pica. The progenitor of skeleton-less moves that changed skateboarding, skate zine and grunge typography/design. Way before what’s-his-name. In my book at least. And it don’t stop. He don’t stop. I’ve received multiple packages in multiple mailboxes due to multiple relocations over the years since our physical paths diverged. All of them filled with evidence of his creative continuum. CARE packages stocked with vinyl and plastic from his band CUSTOM FLOOR, back issues of Arcane Candy, and thick-ass zines chronicling life, Stingray obsession, and ongoing brilliant collaborations. My Skate Fate collection has survived hurricanes and flooded garages, sacredly stored in boxes and solidly kept dead-center. I can remember how it sounded when I shot Garry from deep within Mt. Baldy Pipeline — 10 o’clock or so at 4 p.m. some Friday (probably) approaching two decades in the rear-view and dead set on forward momentum.

A little closer to home, Greg Siegfried’s zine Need No Problem was a mainstay of our quaint, little Southeast Alabama skate scene. Hailing from Ozark, Greg was the first of us to skate and is still going strong. Need No Problem chronicled the comings and goings of ramps and spots and those who rode them not only in Ozark, but all over the Southeast.

Inspired by GSD’s The Best of Skate Fate book, Greg recently compiled all of the issues of Need No Problem into one volume. Like all of these collections, it’s a compilation of snapshots from an era that has long passed, the current incarnations of same having moved online years ago.

I have toyed with the idea of compiling my zines into a single volume, but alas having not been as diligent as Rodger Bridges, I am missing many issues. Mike Daily is putting together an Aggro Rag collection, which will totally rule… Anyway, I cannot overstate the importance of the experience of trading and making zines. As I said in Generation F, “Those first issues were the first steps on a path I still follow” (p. 117). Still true.