Zines, well, mostly skateboard and BMX zines, defined my formative years. They were our network of news, stories, interviews, events, art, and pictures. It’s very difficult to describe how an outmoded phenomena like that worked once such epochal technological change, one that uproots and supplants its cultural practices, has occurred. FREESTYLIN’s reunion book, Generation F (Endo Publishing, 2008), has a chapter called “The Xerox was Our X-Box,” and that title gets at the import of these things. As I said in that very chapter, “Making a zine was always having …

The skate zine show There Is Xerox On The Insides Of Your Eyelids is headed to Southern California at the Torrance Art Museum. The show opens July 24th and runs until September 4th.

I need to get in on this…
With thanks to Andy Jenkins and The Skateboard Mag.

Directed by Johannes Gamble and Federico Vitetta, this one-minute clip of Rick Howard, Mike Carroll, and Spike Jonze quickly captures the spirit of skateboarding with your friends. Its handful of brief vignettes illustrate how sessions out on the board are as much about clowning on each other and dorking around as they are trying to land genetically enhanced, “molecular” kickflips — even though the latter is what people will be talking about.

In the late 80s and early 90s, skateboarding started a transition from a five-company economy to an independently-owned, skateboarder-run, hundred-company industry. All of the sudden everyone had a company, a brand, a team, a video. Most of them are long-gone, but for a few years there, it was difficult to keep up (Foundation’s Tod Swank tells the story best).
Alien Workshop was one of the original skateboard companies to emerge from the cacophony of skateboarding’s new-found independence, and for twenty years hence they’ve maintained a uniqueness that sets them apart from …

Nick over at In the Gnar wrote a nice review of my zine from last summer called “labcabinalabama.”

Thanks to Nick for the kind words. Check out his review, and check out the rest of In the Gnar.

The old Level Magazine was one of those titles that put the Life in “lifestyle” magazine — and it’s back online starting today! Editor/publisher/leader Chris Noble invited me to contribute, so I’ll be posting bits over there on a regular.
Here’s the history of the magazine direct from Chris:
In 1999, the magazine Level was born. Brothers Mark and Chris Noble, publishers of a BMX magazine and a core MTB magazine, got bored of going into their local newsagent and seeing nothing on the lifestyle shelves for them or their like. The …

So, I was bumming around in San Marcos, Texas over the Go Skateboarding Day weekend, and I ran into this skateboard kid who used to live in Austin. He told me about this secret, outlaw spot in my neighborhood in Austin, and gave me some sketchy directions to it.
When I got back, I checked it out, and sure enough: a hidden concrete playground with lumps and lips and pool corners — less than a mile from my place!
Below are the surveillance photos I took of it upon my return:

It’s on… …

All good things must come to an end, and sadly in this first week of 2009, the Club Old Man Ramp Compound (or “The COMpound” as it was called) has come to its final, flaming days. After four years of harsh South Alabama sun and sporadic barbecue sessions, proprietor Greg Siegfried put the torch to the beast’s big belly.

With all of this digital stuff, sometimes it feels good to go back to the analog world. I find making a real, honest-to-paper-pulp zine every once in a while keeps things in perspective. As many of you know, I spent the summer of 2008 in my old haunts in southeast Alabama. Well, I made a zine to commemorate the last few months of skateboarding, correspondence, and heat.

In the early eighties, American hardcore brought extra speed and confrontation to the DIY punk-rock game. Radio Silence: A Selected Visual History of American Hardcore Music (MTV Press) documents a big chunk of the beginnings of this genre and its culture. Authors Nathan Nedorostek and Anthony Pappalardo opened up their archives of letters, original artwork, records, tapes, fliers, t-shirts, zines, and photographs — all the the sacred ephemera of the movement.