Features

Wikipedia has you tagged as quite the infamous industry figure... Editor In Chief of Big Brother Magazine, one of the original creators of Jackass, "Career launcher" to Knoxville, Steve-O and Pontius, and current editor of Jackass.com... But why don't you give yourself a proper introduction for those who may not know?
Yeah that Wikipedia entry is kind of weird. It’s true I was nearby when those guys’ careers (among other things) launched, but I can’t take credit for launching anything except the occasional turd out of my ass. For those who don’t know, I was a writer and editor at Big Brother magazine. I started contributing to Big Brother in issue two and eventually worked my way up to editor in chief. I enjoy white wine.

Official word on the street is that Big Brother Magazine is back. Realizing that there is an entire generation of kids who have no idea what Big Brother is/was, can you break that down in a nutshell?
Well in the late 80s/early 90s, when the Bones Brigade was dying out and street skating was taking off, skateboarding totally changed. At the forefront of this new movement was Steve Rocco and World Industries. Unlike the magazines at the time—TWS and Thrasher—Rocco had a sense of humor and he made fucked up ads that poked fun at other companies and had adult humor in them. They also looked like complete crap, an aesthetic we continue to use to this day. Thrasher and TWS refused to run his ads. So Rocco said, “Fuck it, I’ll start my own mag.” And Big Brother was born. I think the best way to describe Big Brother was that while the other mags focused on skateboarding, BB was more interested in what went on around skateboarding. And that, naturally, put us in some very naughty situations. It was a pretty stupid magazine.

What actually happened to the original Big Brother?
Simply put, no money. Skateboard companies don’t have huge advertising budgets and when you’re the third place magazine, there’s not much left over. And the industry was in a slump at the time, or gearing up for one, so even our trusted advertisers were having trouble. And then of course because of our reputation, there was a whole slew of companies that simply wouldn’t advertise ever for moral reasons. Another reason was that Flynt wouldn’t help us with marketing. We had no budget for tshirts, stickers, etc.. So it was just a magazine on a newsstand in a sea of magazines. The magazine literally had to sell itself. Which works with porn, but not a skateboard magazine. There were a lot of reasons why it died, but I think the main one was there wasn’t any support from the industry.

Do you think the initial news of Big Brother's return got some of the skate mags shook?
Yeah, no one said anything directly to me, but I heard some rumblings. I think that’s pretty funny.



Why is Big Brother completely cutting out it's presence in print, and publishing the mag strictly online?
Well it’ll be online at first, and we hope to get some stuff in print down the line. Mostly because we’re retarded and don’t have our shit together.

So do you have to pay for the online subscription or how does that work?
No. It’s totally communist and free, brother. Positronica vibes, man.

Is the original cast and crew behind the relaunch on the mag?
Yeah everyone is here except for Marc McKee. Tremaine, Kosick, Cliver, Dimitry, Nieratko (well he’s in New Jersey), even Earl Parker.

What kinds of things are going to different about the new Big Brother? What will be the same?
At first it’s going to function as a kind of archive. There’s going to be new stuff going up—just anything skateboard related that doesn’t fit into jackassworld.com—but we’re not trying to fool anybody into thinking that we’re making a skateboard magazine that can compete with what’s out there. (Kind of like what we used to do.) And that’s the one thing that’s going to be so much more fun about it now: we don’t have to care about skateboarding. Before, it was a business and we kind of had to know what was going on in skateboarding and make sure we got interviews and tours and shit with the pros that all the kids care about. Now? Fuck that. I’m not a fan of sitting around watching the latest videos and worrying about who’s hot and who’s not. We’ll be hanging out with skateboarding monkeys all day. But it’ll function as a magazine and a video hub. There was actually about half a video that was unfinished when Flynt pulled the plug, so we’ll be rolling that out in pieces on the site as well.

BB was always down to talk shit where need be. Does anything bother you about the state of skateboarding right now?
I don’t think there’s anything about skateboarding that BOTHERS me right now. Skateboarding is skateboarding and it’s going to go where it goes. I think you could argue that the competition/jock element has whittled away at the original spirit of skateboarding—it’s certainly become “cool” in some circles—but it’s not hard to avoid. It’s kind of analogous to how people who transplant themselves in LA like to complain about LA. I moved here in ’97 and, yeah, I’ve met some pretty shitty, sleazy people, but there’s shitty people everywhere. That’s why I keep to myself. And that’s the beauty of skateboarding: it’s about you and your board and nothing else. Unless you want to worry about that shit. Actually I’ll admit that there is one thing about the state of skateboarding that bothers me: I suck at skating now.

What voids will BB be filling that is currently lacking from the skateboard media?
Skateboard media is a funny term. For one, it’s a joke. If there was a skateboard media they’d be reporting on shit in skateboarding that really matters, instead they just do fluff pieces every month. No one calls bullshit when bullshit needs to be called and everyone is so nice to everybody else because you don’t want to offend the wrong person and lose their advertising dollars. I think that’s why we just focused on ourselves and our little world. There really isn’t any news in skateboarding, so we created our own. “Skateboard media” is funny also because a skateboard is a toy. It’s like saying, “hopscotch media.”

Skateboarding has changed a lot since the last run of Big Brother. How will that change the direction of the mag (If at all)?
Well I understand the kids these days don’t use lappers anymore? I’m not sure how we’re going to be able to get up curbs now, but we’ll manage. I guess the new fad is the “oilly,” or the “ally” or something? I think once we learn to ally, we’ll be right back in the swing of things.

Were you bummed when that gay, unrelated Big Brother reality show came out on CBS?
Yes, but not for the reason you think. I never saw the show, actually. I heard American audiences didn’t really get into it? Anyway, before that show even came about, we told Flynt that we needed to trademark, or copyright or whatever you have to do legally to make the name Big Brother skateboarding ours. As I said earlier, LFP wasn’t very interested in our marketing ideas and they continually brushed us off. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” the lawyers would say. Well by the time they finally got around to it, that damn show was on TV and they had swooped up all the trademarks related to Big Brother. So for the last few years of the mag’s existence, we couldn’t make any merchandise while our lawyers were embroiled in legal proceedings…actually “embroiled” is too strong of a word, because they weren’t doing shit. So, really, I can’t say I’m as bummed on the TV show as I am on Flynt’s lawyers.

Will the new BB still show tits?
If you know where we can get some tits to show, we’ll show em.

Anything else we should know?
The site was supposed to have launched by now, but we’ve realized there’s a lot more work to getting a site up than we had thought. I think we’re tentatively looking at an August launch. Penis. Vagina.