Pentagram’s Luke Hayman, designer of, among others, Time, New York, and Travel + Leisure, was asked how this new format would change the world of magazines and came up with five ways off the top of his head.

A reversal of a decades-long trend

“For as long as I’m been alive, publication formats have been getting smaller. First, oversized magazines like Life and Esquire either disappeared or switched to conventional formats to save money on paper and mailing. Then editorial content started moving online, shrinking to fit computer screens and then even smaller for PDAs and 140-character tweets. The iPad represents the first time this trend has been reversed. Instead of smaller, more low-res content, we have the chance to get bigger, brighter, sharper content. Designers used to making it smaller may have trouble learning to go the other way.”

The end of frequency

“Say goodbye to the idea of monthly magazines, or weeklies, or dailies. Print publications, already under siege by the Internet and 24-hour news cycle, will have to learn to adapt to a world of instantaneous updates. This is most obvious for news and business

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So another person we have in issue #2 is Clayton Patterson, photographer, documenter and long time resident of the L.E.S.  A lot of you have probably seen clips from his DVD called Captured.  Captured is a collection of his video footage from the Tompkins Square Park Riots. We met up with Clayton….shit, probably like 6 or 7 months ago to interview him.  I think we only got to ask him two questions and he talked for over an hour.   It always amazes me when someone has such a good grasp on their ideas and beliefs, that they can just spit them out.  I can’t do that at all, I need to think everything over and over and over and then I have the worst time explaining things, which is probably why I am having such a rough time with this article.  Clayton talked about so much interesting stuff that I don’t want to exclude any of it, so I am having a rough time trying to figure out what the focus of the article should be.  He obviously talked about The Tompkins Square Park riots, documenting the Hardcore scene during the ’80’s and ’90’s, how he changed the history of the hat..yeah Clayton made that claim..crazy right?  But I think this dude might actually have done that.  He talked about the NYPD and the changes they made as a result of his tapes, he talks about the shift in technology and what effect it will have on subcultures going forward???????? What the fuck.  I want to print his views on all of this.  So here I am writing an intro for his interview and trying to work everything down to give this some direction.  I am locking myself in my office and not coming out until I am done.

It is great though because Clayton is totally working with me on this.  I am going to give him the first round of our interview along with my intro and he is going to kind of fill in any gaps, elaborate on stuff, touch on stuff he may have left out etc.  I think being able to work with people in this way is going to make the content so good.   We have been doing this with all our interviews/articles, doing like 3 or 4 rounds of interviewing so that the content is on point.  Anyway I need to get back to work on this so until next time….peaceeeeee.

Another snow storm in New Jersey and I just bottled 250 bottles of merlot in the basement.  This much snow in jersey reminds me of a snowboard video a friend left at my house in high school.  The Meltdown Project by Mack Dawg films used Dead Kennedy’s Holiday in Cambodia as an intro that instantly gets you hyped.

Joe and I were in Detroit I think around 2000.  A friend and artist Drew Bachrach was showing us around his home state of Michigan. (Dearborn / Detroit) I was shocked by the abondenment of houses all around Detroit.

I found this photo series called 100 Abandoned Houses.

“The abandoned houses project began innocently enough roughly ten years ago. I actually began photographing abandonment in Detroit in the mid 90’s as a creative outlet, and as a way of satisfying my curiosity with the state of my home town. I had always found it to be amazing, depressing, and perplexing that a once great city could find itself in such great distress, all the while surrounded by such affluence.” by Kevin Bauman

The first time I heard Kill Holiday was in 411vm. I could never get the CD in Jersey until my friend Mike O from the band Endeavor got a copy for me from Carl / Ferret Music. I think Ferret was distributing the CD or something.

Here is the 411vm Section

I stumbled upon the site These Americans through American Suburb X.  I am fascinated with the times of my grandparents and American culture from the 30’s to the present.  Check out some photos from These Americans and take a look at American Suburb X as well.

Fred Gall from Issue #1 of The Art of Storytelling Magazine gets “First Look” at the Thrasher March 2010 Issue.

Here is a little piece from the video, but check out the entire video at Thrasher.

For some reason last night I ended up on youtube watching clips from Vietnam movies, specifically Apocalypse Now.  I ended up coming across the trailer for a DVD  about soldiers who surfed during the Vietnam War.  The DVD is called Between The Lines. Looks like it could be real good.  It is narrated by John Milius who I believe was in Apocalypse Now

Synopsis:

BETWEEN THE LINES explores the Vietnam War through the prism of the surfing sub-culture. The film offers unique insight into the dramatic effect that the Vietnam War and draft had on young American men who rode waves.

Between the Lines explores the choice that most draft age surfers faced during the Vietnam War era: either go to war or evade the draft. It was one or the other. Between the Lines delves into the lives of two surfers who choose opposite paths. Pat Farley and Brant Page.

While following the lives of these two surfers the film chronicles the impact of the Vietnam War on the surfing lifestyle. From the peaceful shores of Hawaii to the canopy jungles of Vietnam, Between the Lines excavates the surfing cultures response to an extraordinary circumstance.

The first time I could remember seeing a guy on a Harley was on the New Jersey Turnpike at around the age of 9 or 10.  It was raining really hard and this dude was going about 70mph.  He looked so cool just not giving a fuck about the rain or the danger around him.  I have always been fascinated with bike culture, but in the last week I found some black biker gang photography that I fell in love with.  The stereotype is some crazy white dudes in the Hell’s Angels, but these photos show the great black biker clubs of the 60’s.

“When you talk of the Outlaw Bikers you automatically think of ‘Them Crazy White Boys’ doing what a lot of folk wish they could do. Live Life Like You Want & F*ck You And Your Rules. Well Guess What? There was some crazy Black bikers who felt the fame way, and didn’t give a F*ck. Thus was born the Black Outlaw Bikers ! ” by theselvedgeyard

On Saturday night we finally linked up with DALEK for an interview.  Due to conflicting schedules we thought we were going to have to push him to another issue, but everything worked out.  It was real cool because Chip who apprencticed for DALEK for a couple of years is the one who conducted the interview.  This worked out real well because Chip knew all the right questions to ask to really make this interview different from anything DALEK has done in the past.  Probably the most interesting part to me was talking to DALEK about the designer toy industry and his experiences in that field.  DALEK had a ton of success with the vinyl toys, but he had a lot of real interesting stuff to say about oversaturation of that market. He also talked about his graffiti days and being down with NAA.  He  gave us a few good top 3’s for 80’s flicks and music albums and he talked about traveling and moving all around the world as a kid and the influences that had on his art work.  The interview was over 1 hour which means I will be transcribing like a mother for the next few days but it will be worth it for a good finished product.  DALEK sent us over a grip of images and photos this week.  We have also decided to do a split cover, so 1,500 copies will have a cover designed by DALEK  and 1,500 copies will be a cover designed by JOR.

So I want to fill everyone in on the course we are taking with the mag.  We are getting a lot of emails asking when issue #2 is going to drop.  Well we decided to make The Art of Storytelling  a book format, kind of a magazine/book hybrid.  We are increasing the page count to 200 pages and stepping up the paper stock.  It is going to be real thick and hefty and is going to be limited to 3,000 copies, released twice a year.  Our decision to go this route is two fold.

First off we have been developing articles and interviews that, in our opinion, are way more in depth than what other magazines are putting out.  We have been taking the time to get vintage photography and structuring the feature stories more as retrospectives and really digging in the past to give you a historical look at the subcultures that we cover.  For instance issue#2 features Zephyr, The Getup Kids, Shut Skateboards, and Joker Brand clothing amongst others.  All of these people went into their personal photo albums and pulled out photos going back some 10 -15 years, no stock or publicity photos were allowed, that to me is a waste of space…save it for the blogs.  Some of these people literally went into their mothers attic to get us the photos we needed. The result is completely original content and photography.  I would rather see all this hard work put into a more permanent type of publication.  On top of that, in terms of presentation, the book format gives us more pages to work with to give these articles the space they deserve.

Second,  the print industry is changing by the minute.  With the new “tablets” being released relatively soon we recognize that content will get even easier to deliver to the public.  If people are going to drop their hard earned money to actually buy content,  and advertisers are going to spend money to advertise then they want a solid, original product.  That is what we are producing with these books.

All that being said, we are super excited with the content we have compiled for issue #2.  There is no doubt that when people open this issue it is going to be a “what the fuck” kind of thing.  Post some comments regarding the new format, I would like to hear what people have to say.

Over the next few weeks I am going to do a series of posts about each of the feature’s stories for this issue.  I am going to talk about the process behind putting that section together, what problems we encountered, why we decided to cover a particular person etc.  I am going to talk to Chris and Justin and have them do the same for the design side of things.  It has been a fun process learning how to put a magazine together from scratch and I think by bringing everyone into our process will be a cool way to run our blog.