The past week has been a hectic one. Aside from getting ready to leave for the next 50 days, I’ve spent countless hours in the dungeon-like computer labs of various universities around the city pumping out free copies of the latest Sick People zine. With the assistance of borrowed ID’s and pass-codes, 500 copies were printed, assembled and distributed around the city and mailed out to different parts of the world. This second volume is now sold out online, but you can still find a few copies at the following locations around New York City:
KCDC Saturday’s Pilgrim Dashwood Books Desert Island Academy Records Shut Skates Variety
As I mentioned previously, I’m going to be travelling for the next couple months so expect things to slow down here a bit. If you live and Europe and want to hang/skate, shoot me a message so we can figure out a way to link up. Thanks to everyone that picked up a zine and, as always, feel free to email us if you have anything you’d like to submit!
We’re excited to finally present the second installment in the Sick People series. 80 pages of photography, skateboarding, stories, illustration, collage and more.
Featuring work by Doug Aldrich, Chris Bernsten, Terrence Doyle, Madison East, Alexis Gross, Blair Kemp, Caroline Levasseur, Reggie McCafferty, Nelson Offley, Kelsey Parker, Adam Rossiter, Jesse Sanes, Nick Sethi, Rob Soucy, and Sammy Winston.
Fanzines hold a special place in the heart of most punk and hardcore kids. They’re the textbooks of a disenchanted generation, the entire history of a movement written between pages that are cut and pasted together, scanned and photocopied to a point of illegibility and beyond. We grew up with them, dissecting lines from interviews with our favorite bands and reading about stories from the road. There was a feeling to the whole thing then that can never again be replicated. It was like stumbling into a new world that suddenly rendered everything outside of it completely irrelevant, and zines were our windows into it. Life had meaning again, and just in time too.
Over the course of our lives, almost every one of us involved has attempted to do a fanzine at one point or another. The process is long and arduous, and many of us quickly realize that it’s something we’re not quite cut out for. And yet, whether we gave up halfway, or actually went through with it, the idea that every single person is entitled to write, speak and be published is what matters most. That process of physical creation has held out against a world that’s increasingly digital, the number of zines in circulation certainly no less than when I found hardcore more than a decade ago. That being said, it’s not easy to make a zine that stands out. For each zine that I’ve read religiously, there’s been dozens more that I’ve skimmed through and tucked away into a box beneath my bed.
Ricky Singh’s fanzine “Moment of Truth” is one of the few that sticks out from the rest. He and I spent a lot of time sitting next to each other in shitty vans over the past few years, and although we had our quarrels from time to time, I like to think that I got to know him better than most. He likes to sleep, and he likes to party, but he’s also the sort of person that can get good at anything when he really works at it, and that hard work comes through in this latest project. “Moment of Truth Vol. 2″ is a good read from cover to cover. What it lacks in grittiness, it more than makes up for with hi-res photos and and cool spreads. Featuring interviews with Judge, Kill Your Idols, Down to Nothing, Turnstile and more, it feels and looks like an actual magazine.
The zine is 36 pages, printed full color on gloss paper with design work from Doug Aldrich, Make sure to grab a copy from the “Moment of Truth” webstore before they’re all gone.
Riley and I had talked about doing an interview when Power Trip played an after show at the Acheron a few weeks back. After watching him fall off the stage to land on his head during their set, I suggested that we reschedule it for another time. We wound up speaking on the phone for about an hour and a half a week later. Check out the following transcription and read all about life on the road, the new record, fine art and everything else.
Last time I saw you was a couple weeks ago in New York. You guys had just done some long drive and then you fell off the stage and landed on your head.
Yeah, the day before that show was in Buffalo. It wasn’t too bad, but yeah I’m still fucked up from that man. I hurt myself real bad on that fall. I definitely screwed up my sciatic nerve and I may have fractured a vertebrae too. I’m pretty jacked up, that was not a fun fall by any means. I was half expecting to just piss blood and die. I could taste iron in my mouth, that can’t be good, it was pretty brutal.
We played with you guys at that fest in St. Louis in the fall. You guys drove like 15 hours to get there and then I remember some story about it taking you like two days to get back.
Yeah we drove straight to St. Louis and back. It’s only like 12 to 14 hours from Dallas so it wasn’t that bad of a drive. United Blood this year was way worse. We did the biggest U-turn across America, it took about 22 hours to get to Richmond. Then we were so tired that when we had to go back everyone would go to sleep in the van and whoever was driving would pull over and go to sleep without telling anybody. So like 6 hours would pass but we were only two hours outside of the city or whatever. It took us forever to get home. I think the trip to St. Louis while it should have only taken 12 or 14 hours it took like 18. But the drive home from Richmond ended up being like 30 hours. I hated it, it was crazy.
Plus it seems like you guys always have the van packed with so many people.
Yeah we try and just fill the van with people who want to go and have fun. I’ll sacrifice some comfort if it means a good friend of mine can get in the van and hang out with us for the weekend or whatever. When we did UB I think we put 10 people in the van, so it was pretty packed. On that tour we just did, we had Sherwin, Hood and RJ for most of the time. We like to roll with a crew. I think it works as a buffer between the rest of us, you have somebody outside of the band to chill with in case everyone is kind of pissed at each other. It really helps lighten the mood when you have Hood and Sherwin in the van to kind of mess with or telling jokes with or whatever.
In anticipation of their forthcoming “Bodegas” release, Steady NYC has put out this “behind-the-scenes” look at the making of the issue. The launch party is this Saturday May 4th from 8 PM to Midnight at the Red Door at 140 East 24th Street. Come out for art, music and, as always, free beer.
From Steady:
bo·∙de·∙ga – from the Spanish la bodega meaning grocery store
Elsewhere in the world they may be known as corner stores, delis and groceries but in New York, these sell- everything party stores are famously (and fondly) referred to as bodegas. They are a vital institution of the city, stretching all five boroughs and selling New York’s roughly 8.3 million residents everything they need from milk to magazines. Their heritage may vary between neighborhoods- Italian, Spanish, Polish and Korean- but the product offering remains more or less the same. Shelves lined with rows of dusty cracker boxes, canned soups with thirty days until expiration, half-ripened produce and a refrigerated section of Good Humor ice creams and single-serve beer cans of an assorted variety are all familiar staples. No matter if your vice is alcohol, gambling, nicotine or sugar, bodegas have a fix for every kind of fiend. You may go for garbage bags but you’ll leave with a few scratch- offs, a new lighter and a bag of chips too.
Even more than the wide selection of goods and local delivery service offering for a nominal fee, it is their 24-hour operation that makes bodegas most convenient. This is also the reason why store owners and register clerks end up getting to know their neighborhood residents on a personal level- because it is those purchases made in the harsh, early hours of the morning that can be most revealing of one’s identity. Most New Yorkers aren’t embarrassed by this phenomenon though, instead they come to trust these people, know them by name, and look forward to seeing them… even if only to talk about the score of the Knicks game last night and find out if anyone hit the Powerball jackpot. Put simply, bodega employees develop into the most comforting kind of friends who remember the way you like your turkey sandwich, have no problem letting you owe them a few dollars from time-to-time and are happy to serve you.
Vivian Maier, Selected Photographs from the Maloof Collection
John Maloof’s life changed forever when he stumbled across a box of negatives at an RPN Auction house in Chicago in 2007. He’d never heard of Vivian Maier, in fact hardly anyone had, but he was hoping to find some images he could use for a book he was putting together. The box contained more than 30,000 negatives, black and white street photographs taken by Maier in her spare time. She’d spent most of her life as a nanny, working in both New York and Chicago. By the time of her death in 2009, she’d amassed a body of work consisting of over 100,000 negatives, capturing the lives of the well-to-do and marginalized alike, documenting historical landmarks and street scenes. Maier’s story is one that continues to unfold as her photography is catalogued and archived. A number of projects are currently underway to document her life and work, see the Maloof Collection site for more information.
We have a few copies of the photo booklet from last week’s opening up in the webstore. It’s full color and perfect bound with a cardstock cover. Limited to an edition of 100. Pick up your copy here!
In an oldie but a goodie, Adam Rossiter compiles over 100 photographs of LA’s Trash Talk smoking weed around the world. His zine, “Punks is Hippies”, features photographs by current and former band members Garrett Stevenson and Sam Bossom in addition to himself. Whether in Tokyo, Sydney, Paris, or Brooklyn, Rossiter attests that those basic human cravings still call for satiation. And even if marijuana isn’t your passion, “Punks is Hippies” still serves to document the daily routine of a full-time band, offering an intimate glimpse into life on the road, with all the highs and lows that come with it.
The photos were taken over the course of 3 years and a handful of tours, each captioned by location for archival purposes. Published by the SF-based Palm, the zine comes complete with gold foil pressed titles, silk-screened hang tags and a complimentary pack of rolling papers.
The first edition of 200 is out of print, but a second pressing is in the works. Check the Palm site for more information.
New York-based photographer Chris Berntsen has a show opening at Culture Gallery this week that runs through June. From the gallery:
Chris Berntsen in a photographer based in New York City, when he isn’t running away from it. He takes photos of friends, acquaintances, landscapes, whatever is in front of him. In 2012, Berntsen published his first book in Montreal entitled The Ritual of Nothingness.
The opening reception takes place this Wednesday May 1st at 7 PM where Chris will be playing music and projecting slides. The gallery is located inside Culture Espresso at 72 w. 38th Street in Midtown Manhattan.
In collaboration with RIPE, we’re excited to announce this photo show and zine release party featuring Julio Pardo currently of Valencia Spain and Reggie McCafferty of Brooklyn New York, each presenting a selection of their photographs from their travels throughout Asia. Both photographers have an incredible transcendental quality to their work, which takes the viewers and instantly inserts them into the moment that the photo was taken, giving them access to a world that would never be described in a travel book. The zine will be limited to 100 copies, available April 26.
Punk and hardcore scenes have always seemed to have a knack for incestuality and present-day New York City is no exception to the rule. Nuclear Spring is a Brooklyn punk band compiling past and current members of CREEM, Nomos, Sucia and La Misma amongst countless others. The band features dual male-female vocals with a very early-80’s UK vibe. Think Blitz if they’d lifted their leads from the Templars.
The self-titled record has been circulating for a while now, but the Brooklyn-based Hysteria Records is finally giving it a proper release. It was recorded more than 8 months ago with Will Killingsworth at Dead Air Studios in Western Mass. The vinyl comes in a silkscreened sleeve and is priced at an absurdly reasonable $7. Hysteria offers a complimentary download, but you should probably just buy the record anyway.
Listen to “Mos Maiorum” below and check out Nuclear Spring as they head to Europe for the first time this spring with CREEM.
