Kevin Taylor, front blunt, Philadelphia City Hall, photo © 1995 Ryan Gee
My trip home soon and a bunch of good oldies on Facebook got me digging around the hard drive for this not-so-great scan of Journal issue zero.
Download Journal_zero
This mag is a teenager now, 14 years old. It was slapped together around the end of 1995, with special thanks to the Blizzard of '96 for a huge free-time boom.
In the mid-90s a bunch of us were really getting into the idea of skateboard companies on the East Coast, companies like Zoo York and Torque, and magazines like The Five (Atlanta) and Smag (Baltimore) before us. Journal Vol. 0, No. 0 was the mockup of our vision, and we wanted to take that around to show what we could do and sell it to advertisers. We assembled a decent cast of characters, but ran it like you'd expect a bunch of kids getting together to do something. We lived and worked in a crappy Section 8 skatehouse in Queen Village, Philadelphia, next to a recreation park with skateable benches and tables, where at night you'd see the red cherry of a crackpipe glow bright and get passed along. Up the street was a guy with two pit bulls named Chronic and Caine, and two days after we met him, there was a shootout in the direction of his place. The next morning, while we played gin rummy on the sidewalk, police ambushed the place and kicked the door in.
We spent ludicrous sums on Velvia and parking tickets, had a beeper sponsor (seriously), and would go get the best veggie banh mi and John's water ices while waiting for the Power Mac 7100 (80Mhz, 16MB RAM, 250MB HD) to render stuff. We output everything to chunky, 5.25" 44MB SyQuest disks that lost data if you picked them up too fast. The Cardonas sent us their check-out bios on notebook paper with doodles, and it took about five minutes to figure out there was no way to transcribe it and make it read normal, so we scanned it. Close to deadline we would practice "extreme sleeping": working the day job and the mag job for about 18 hours and then finding the worst possible position/place to lay down, the idea being that you would only sleep as much as necessary like that. I often crawled onto the middle tier of a shelving unit, and Nerd lined up a tunnel of chairs.
We remarkably did make it to the trade show with this issue, and in a week had just barely learned, wrote and uploaded a website too. The Nerdernet was young then, and our links page had four sites, plus Nerd's homemade warning to use Netscape 2.0, then the top choice in frame-supporting browsers.
We gave out mags with stickers and rate cards, and some T-shirts -- our very first one, a heather gray shirt with Journal in a plain serif font and a strikethrough. Our photog John Senesy made it in Microsoft Works. Works.
Over the next few weeks I'll try to scan the other two issues, and whatever shirts I still have. I think I have the nose grind sticker (it's not Jimmy Chung) but not the "split in half" sticker. If anyone reading does, please send a pic.
