The new dope.

Maintain Fanzine Issue #1 - out this weekend. Get siked! I know I am. It's been a long while in the making, but finally it looks like it will be seeing the light of the day. I have no clue how many copies we will be printing off for this first issue. I'm thinking somewhere around 100-200, we will see. I still have a bunch of crap to do with it. The layout isn't finished yet, there's a bunch of mistakes in my writing and yea...dumb stuff like that. Ian is coming up to Bellingham tomorrow night to help me finish it and bring it to the printer. I still haven't decided if I will be handing it out for free or charging like $1 or something for it. I guess that depends on if we end up putting a lot of money into the first run of the issue. If we can find a sweet, sketchy way of printing these off for free, I see no reason to charge people for them. But yea, $1 isn't much. Oh well, we'll see.
Rain Fest this weekend is going to be off the fugging chain. Big ups to Pressvre and Sinking Ships.

Oh yea, I should probably get into the content of the first issue, huh?

Interviews:
Sinking Ships- Is this the last SS interview? Who knows. Danny has some interesting stuff to say. The interview had to be cut down for space requirements, but I will be posting the entire transcript on this blog in the next couple days.

Blacklisted- I interviewed George Hirsch right before the new record was set to drop and he is most definitely a great dude to interview. I got a lot more stoked on his band just by talking to him. Dude's all about the blogging.

Henry Rollins- I did this interview in 2006? I think. It originally aired on my radio show Dead Air. Rollins is intense and I felt like a 13-year-old fanboy when I asked him questions.

Essays:

Iraq War: A couple of my friends, Tom and Toby, wrote essays about their time in Iraq. With the distance that American mainstream media keeps from the war it's so easy to not think about. I wanted to give everyone a look at what the war is like from the perspective of a couple hardcore kids. You might not agree with their views or the war, but I'm so thankful these dudes wrote the essays for me.

A journey to Marshalltown and back: My homie Ian flew to Marshalltown, Iowa for Modern Life is War's last show a couple weekends back.Here's a full report. Great writing here.

+ a ton more (basically meaning a bunch of random reviews, Q&A's and articles)