Without doing actual math (I went to art school), I’d say I’ve probably ridden BMX bikes with Jim Cavanaugh more than any other person in the last 25 years. And that takes into account that I haven’t ridden with him in close to 10 years. When I was going to school in Boston I rode flatland, and occasionally street at Turtles, nearly every day with Jim. For years prior to that I would drive into town with him on weekends. And before that I had my dad drive me up there on weekends. It was a solid 8 or 9 years I rode with Jim all the time.

This is one of the first photos I shot of bike riding where I remember thinking “this isn’t a complete piece of shit.” Looking back, I still like it. It was shot with a Konica TC-X that my parents got for free at a pharmaceutical conference. I still had/used that on occasion until my car got broken into a few years back, but I used that thing for years with no clue or regard for what the hell I was doing. In the shot he’s doing a “forward deathtruck.” There’s motion, but it’s sharp. It’s got a bit of a “Freestylin’ magazine” sort of close in feel to it. I processed the Tri-X film, and printed this one in the darkroom at the Art Institute of Boston. The photo never got used for anything… It was before I started making magazines on my own, or got a job at a magazine, and it’s been sitting in a box of prints that I occasionally dig through, for the last 15 years.

Jim still kills it, and recently won the annual King of New York contest in NYC. One of these days I’ll get around to sorting through the video footage I’ve got sitting on Hi-8 tapes from this era.

In early 1996, while I was in design school in Boston, I took a Graphic Design internship at a magazine called Stuff. This wasn’t the macho/meathead Stuff that arose later, this was a Boston-based culture/fashion/music/literary monthly that got distributed (for free) at hip Northeast locations, including boutiques, galleries, record stores, book stores, etc. It was an over-sized, predominantly black and white magazine, printed on paper that was a couple steps above newsprint.

A few months later my internship was up, and they hired me as a freelance designer. A few months after that the art director left. As the only one involved who knew the production process, and nuts and bolts of the magazine, I ended up filling the position temporarily… which came to mean about two years. I had some sense of what I was doing. Some.

My time at Stuff was the tail end of when magazines were still made the “old way.” These days, everything is done on a computer, and layouts barely see paper until it hits a press plate. Printers don’t even have a real pre-press (film to plate) phase anymore. Everything is direct to plate. For this reason, it’s gotten a LOT cheaper to make a magazine.

So there I was, waxing layouts to boards, shooting things with a Stat camera to halftone them, and repeatedly stabbing myself with X-acto knives (not on purpose). But, somehow, I was making a magazine. The old fashioned way. As time went on I started pushing things farther and farther with typography, bringing things as far as the publisher and the parent company would let me. I had a lot of leeway. This was a time when Neville Brody, David Carson, Art Chantry, Martin Venezky, P. Scott Makela and others were making some really progressive typographic magazines. The Face, Beach Culture, Blue, Speak, Raygun, Bikini, Sweater, etc. These were magazines that where pushing visual interpretation as far as they could, offending a lot of design purist, and making a lot of others happy.

Stuff went all over the board as I had pretty much open reign to fuck things up. Some of it, looking back is really terrible, but most of the stuff I hate is the stuff that wasn’t experimental. Some of it is still some of my favorite work that I’ve done. I was blowing things up on the copier, running things through the fax machine, even taking other people’s trash from the Stat camera room and reusing it. I started learning photography at Stuff as well, so really, that magazine was my education. There is no better way to learn than doing something. While I was going to school during that time, the real stuff I was learning was at the magazine. In school you learn the rules. At Stuff I could break the rules. Sometimes people got in arguments over it.

In the middle of 1998 they hired a full-time art director. I continued to design the poetry page (Re:Verse) for a few months, but I otherwise focused more on school, and the magazine I was starting with Brian Tunney, Nine-Ninety. Later that year the publisher who gave me all the opportunities along the way was fired, and ultimately the magazine was rolled into a nightlife publication called Stuff@Night. This is a collection of work from “The Stuff Years.” Still some of my favorite work, over ten years later. Thanks to Robert Birnbaum and the rest of the crew for some good times.

Throughout the 80s and most of the 90s, Turtles (named after two concrete Turtle shaped playground elements) was a legendary skateboard and BMX spot on the outskirts of Boston. Sitting on the edge of the Charles River, this children’s playground was accidentally designed to be one of the most fun spots on the east coast. An accidental skatepark. Its wading pool (only full of water a few months out of the year) provided some perfect grind ledges, rails, as well as a small set of stairs… and of course the infamous turtles. A snake run of banks ran through the playground, ending in a five foot tall pyramid/hip with tubes on top (designed for kids to crawl through). Aside from a few swing sets, turtles actually wasn’t much of a playground, especially by 90s standards, when every McDonalds in America seemed to have a giant built in playland.

By the mid-90s the park was run down. The swings were falling apart, the slide was broken, there was graffiti all over the bathroom building, and there were more skateboarders, BMXers and Mountain Bikers in the place than little kids. At that point, if you were a small child you stood a good chance of getting crushed by a speeding bike or skateboard, so it wasn’t a great place to “play.” I had been riding Turtles for many years by the time I went to college. But in ’95 I moved right down the street from the park, and rode it pretty much every day until it was demolished in ’98.

To the average person in Boston the name Turtles meant nothing. It was just that run down playground along the Charles River. But to BMX riders and skateboarders around the country who had ridden the place, or seen it in magazines (Chris Lashua had some amazing pictures riding the place in Homeboy magazine and Freestylin’) or videos, it was a famous skatepark. It may have been an accidental skatepark, but it was better than some of the intentional skateparks we see today.

Jumping the tubes on top of the banks at the bottom was almost a mythical feet. Skateboarders rolled over them, people fastplanted them and tail-tapped them, and rumors flew around about people jumping them. But in ’96 Dave Muggleston was the first person I saw start to jump them on a regular basis. He would just roll around the park and jump them like it was nothing. By today’s standards it’s a normal hop, but no one was doing it back then, despite the big names that had ridden the place. Above is a photo of Dave just a few weeks before the park was bulldozed in 1998.

Now, ten years later I made some hand-pulled two color silkscreen posters of the same image as seen below. Also, you probably noticed the trash can theme on the redesign of this site as well.