
30 YEARS OF HOOFSIP
The Jesus Rivera Interview
by Jerry White Jr.
September 2024 / $1.50
This is the final installment of our HOOFSIP Retrospective. Jesus Antonio Rivera was there from the beginning of Hoofsip. Whether it was his flyers for 30MOM or the zine itself, cover art, Pezz Wurld installments, or pitching in on band interviews, Jesus was a major creative force in those 8.5″ x 11″ pages.
JERRY: Other friends just talk and make each other laugh, but we would sometimes turn it into a skit or a zine piece. We did the zine, you were a big part of it from the get-go, early on doing flyers for it and then you started doing cover art and then you did interviews and things. So, just generally, what are some of the things, all of these years later, that come to mind when you think of Hoofsip?
JESUS: What I think of is the behind-the-scenes stuff. I think of sitting in Kinko’s making art. And I think that was a very cathartic process. Sitting at Kinko’s for hours on end making shit, and then some of it would make it in there, some of it would not. It’s like so hard for me to remember anything that had to do with writing, I didn’t have a lot to do with that. A lot of it was more like making flyers, making art, making comics, making covers, drawing or making collages. That’s where my brain goes. It’s the passing of the art books around and how that kind of developed into art in the zine.
JERRY: I was talking to Pipper about this. I don’t think Hoofsip is some undiscovered piece of amazing literature, but I think it is an interesting snapshot of this group of friends and the subculture. While I do still appreciate a lot of the artwork — Stick Men or Pezz Wurld — ultimately though I remember those nights at Kinko’s too, or being at Denny’s, and the physical making of the zines and the cutting things out and scissors and all that, whereas in later years, it did become a lot more desktop publishing, and a lot more, like, “you go do your thing and get it to me by the end of the month,” and then it becomes a little less fun.
JESUS: Yeah. I’m still kind of in a similar way when it comes to my job, where like, if I have to do something that’s not organic, it’s hard for me man. When it was all like “hey, send me stuff, send us stuff, send us stuff,” I really wanted to, but I was like dealing with teenage depression and not being happy. That first wave, the whole going to Denny’s and going to Ram’s Horn, and drawing in books, making jokes, and then somehow it turns into an in-joke, and then it turns into a whole like piece, you know?
JERRY: Right.
JESUS: Like an extension of 30 Minutes of Madness.
JERRY: I don’t fault Dan, or myself, or anyone who wants to, like, up their game because if you’re always just looking to catch lightning in a bottle, it can take a really long time to assemble enough.
JESUS: Hundred percent.
JERRY: Dan did something that I never even attempted really, which was turn out something monthly for years. And he did the thing that’s necessary if you’re going to do that because, you know, he and I started it together, we were co-editing it, but then he went back to college in Mount Pleasant and was studying journalism and I think he just had more passion for it. So I was happy to have him be the full editor, but he had to deal with that thing where like, “Hey guys, I need such and such by the end of the month.” And if we didn’t get it to him, then he would just come up with his own copy.
JESUS: Yeah.
JERRY: So there were a lot of issues of Hoofsip that was mostly Dan. Overall that zine was mostly Dan’s baby.
JESUS: Oh hundred percent.
JERRY: We helped out for sure. But Dan made sure that it got fucking done month after month, year after year, which is crazy.
JESUS: That’s why the vibe would always shift too. Like it would always kind of flow a little bit different because you can tell the issues where we would be more hands on.
JERRY: For sure.
JESUS: And then you can tell the issues where he’d get guest people that maybe we weren’t familiar with. Or maybe you were, I don’t know. They were just different people and there’s nothing wrong with that.
JERRY: Right, because it had to get done.
JESUS: Yeah.
JERRY: I talked to Pipper too about it and he echoed the same thing. I was such a fan of his Stick Men, I thought they were so fun. I loved what I was seeing, you were doing comics and Dennis were doing comics before I even met you guys and I talked to Pipper and Stick Men came out of a place where, like, he was bored at school. He already had most of those done, so when we were starting up the zine, he had a backlog and we’re like, “oh, can we put this in the zine?” He’s like, “yeah, I don’t fucking care. Fuck it! Go ahead.” But then we got through his existing comics so then it was Dan saying “Hey, can you do a new Stick Men?” And that was the beginning of the the end of Stick Men and he even said he’s like, yeah, because then it wasn’t about doing something for fun. It became like work and he didn’t want to do it anymore.
JESUS: Right.
JERRY: And that’s when it got handed off to Pezz Wurld.
JESUS: Yeah, and that’s different when you’re an adult with accountability, you know? But when you’re a teenager, it’s more about the instant gratification, so you want to do things that are fun. You want to have fun. You want to get away from your house. You want to do things with your hands and I think that, one it’s like once things turn into almost like a job. . .like when you’re in a band, it’s a little different because, when you’re a teenage band, you have these gratifications where you go and play shows, interact with people, kind of like hanging out.
JERRY: Right, but even the bands can start becoming that kind of work.
JESUS: It can be. But also when you’re making publication art, you’re like names without faces.
JERRY: Yeah, and I think there’s again that symmetry with 30MOM. It’s like we also wanted to turn it into a business, but then with that comes a whole other set of less-fun things.
JERRY: Since Hoofsip, have you ever put out a zine?
JESUS: Yes.
JERRY: What was that?
JESUS: I made three short films in relation to an installation piece and then I made a zine that was an accompanying piece to the films.
JERRY: How long ago was that?
JESUS: Seven, maybe eight years ago. It sold out really fast. People love that shit man. Funny enough, I have a folder on my laptop of ten zines. Like I have so many little zines — they’re mostly art and there’s not a lot of writing in them. It’s something that is still in me. I have a lot of friends in the art community that still make zines. Zines are kind of having a moment again.
JERRY: I did an interview with Ethan Minsker, because this guy’s been doing it since the 80s, and had a bit of an overlap with us and contributed to some of our stuff and vice versa. I was interested in asking him and you as well — because I remember that the moment in the late 90s where, well, you were part of this too where Hoofsip had a website. It was one of those seven fucking slash long, you know, dot com forward slash, page one, under a friend’s website. It was super simple by any modern standards, but we were so like “holy shit!” If you clicked on your name, then there’s your photo! And so it really started feeling like, okay, it’s all going to be about making websites in the future. And then I stopped being a part of it, but I also stopped working at Kinko’s so I lost that hookup. The bottom line is, I feel like I threw so many years down the drain on trying to make cool websites or then learning flash, all so that I could eventually try to get to something that I already had.
JESUS: Yeah.
JERRY: Which was cutting and pasting and I look at literally some of the first issues of Hoofsip and I’m like “yeah, this holds up,” and if we had had a website then, it would have been fucking geocities and it’d be gone. So could you speak a little bit to what you think we’ve lost with the internet and, people are still keeping zines alive, what do you really value in that physical medium?
JESUS: Well, for one I’ll say I value physical media more than any type of media and that goes to film, video, books, records, art, tapes, whatever that is — zines. I think of a world where you’re like ninety years old, like a great-grandfather, and you’re on your phone and you’re showing your great grandchildren and you’re like “oh, this is me hanging out in front of a sign. This is a picture I took of daisies. . .”
JERRY: “This is a lunch I had one time.”
JESUS: “I had these really good waffles at this restaurant one day.” It’s like, I just think of that concept. It depresses me to no end. So I think it’s really important to keep these things alive, to some extent, and I love that there’s still book fairs and there’s still zine fairs and I know MOCA does a zine fair. I think it’s really great that stuff happens because it’s important.
JERRY: Yeah, I was talking to Ethan about this idea of the promise of the internet. And sometimes the internet delivers on this promise, which is you could potentially reach millions of people all over the world. However, the reality of the internet, especially today when there’s just so much there, is it’s hard to get found. Making twenty-five to fifty copies of a zine, each one of those might find a home and each one of those people are actually going to read it and give a shit. But if you say “I want to build a website to reach fifty people,” everyone would be like “why would you do that?” It sounds ridiculous and too small, but the reality is those fifty people you reach, because it’s a physical medium, they might lend it to someone else and so it can live in this tactile way. It could also get lost or thrown away or burned, so it’s not forever, but Ethan was talking about this — and we experienced it with Hoofsip — especially Dan experienced this: zine trades. Making connections with people, getting physical mail, people writing letters, doing reviews and that meant a lot.
JESUS: Oh yeah. That’s funny that you bring that up because I do have a comment about that. People tend to forget that zines were pre-internet for subculture. So like, I want a comp tape of Marty Croft episodes, back to back with the little guy from Fantasy Island.
JERRY: Yes that porn, which Dan reviewed the porn of that guy, Hervé Villechaize, and the infamous Chuck Berry video. You’re right — it’s basically how 80s and 90s memes would pass. We don’t have to go far to get to Shepherd Fairy and his whole shtick coming out of the same kind of zine/sticker/Xerox/Kinko’s culture. So it’s like early memes, it’s how you’re discovering bands.
JESUS: It’s Shut Up Little Man! (the documentary about this has interviews with Hoofsip editor Dan Augustine! –Jer)
JERRY: Yeah, it’s cassette tapes, tape trades, prank call tapes.
JESUS: Yeah. I would find people from zines and they’d send me mixtapes, then I’d send them mixtapes back.
JERRY: One of my greatest sadnesses. . .I’ve been pretty good about keeping a lot of my stuff over the years, but there was a bin of stuff that I didn’t realize I had left at my parents house. Well they sold the house to my brother and he threw it out. In that bin were all these zines I’d gotten over the years. This was before Hoofsip, this was my own reaching out to people, and I had cassette tape mixes that random girls that I didn’t even know what they looked like, but we would trade mixes. It breaks my heart that that’s all gone. Because that meant a lot to me, I got into a lot of music that way. And sometimes I didn’t even know who the fucking band was because how am I going to look it up? If they wrote it in the liner, yeah, but otherwise it was just like some mystery tape.
JESUS: Yeah, the only way you would really find about obscure bands if you were into subculture music was either some random zine or looking at Maximum Rocknroll and its reviews.
JERRY: The last zine I made would have been the 20 Years of Madness zine, which is a zine, but it also feels a bit like a piece of PR. That’s what it was used for. But prior to that, the last real zine I did was in 2013, and it was a dream zine. And I’m proud of it, and it’s cool. But in thinking about this and talking to Ethan and Pipper and you, the issue with that zine was, I collaborated with a bunch of people, but it was all remote. So it was like, I have a thing, send me art. And they sent me really cool art, and I’m happy with the way I did the graphic design, but do I remember making that zine? Like, I was sitting alone in front my computer, that’s all that was. There’s nothing. . .
JESUS: [Laughs]
JERRY: I have so much material set aside for zines, literally dating all the way back to ’97, there’s more zines I’ve wanted to make. And I’ve often just thought I was being too lazy or something, and it’s like, no — it isn’t just the zine that I wanna make. I wanna recreate the environment of making a zine.
JESUS: Yeah.
JERRY: And that’s a lot tougher. Especially if you’re moving around all the time. So I can find people to collaborate, but I don’t wanna just collaborate. I wanna sit at Denny’s with them.
JESUS: [Laughs]
JERRY: Or maybe, you know, a slightly better diner than that.
JESUS: This is our midlife crisis.
JERRY: Yes.
JESUS: That we want go back to Denny’s and make art.
JERRY: I want Kinko’s to be 24 hours again, and it’s not, and it’s gone. So it is what it is. But I haven’t given up on the medium. It is something that I think I’ll return to throughout my life. But we have become middle-aged people that say, remember when, and it was different. Like we were amongst the last teenagers to have pre-internet. We had the internet, but in 94, 95, we didn’t have 24/7 access to it.
JESUS: No.
JERRY: And the porn was taking too long to download at that time, so I had a life.
JESUS: I make a lot of jokes about downloading a SVGA naked photo that took twenty-five minutes to get your hands on.
JERRY: For one photo!
JESUS: Yeah. For one SVGA photo.
JERRY: And this is also pre-Napster too, which Napster with the tape trade, that had an effect.
JESUS: I learned how to do certain types of art. Like, especially like when you had access to the color Xerox machine.
JERRY: Oh man.
JESUS: Which was a big deal, now they’re common.
JERRY: [Laughs] I know, it was such a big deal back then.
JESUS: A Kinko’s would have maybe one or two.
JERRY: And they were behind the counter at first.
JESUS: So when you worked there, it was cool because all you could do is sit there all day long and smear fucking artwork around to make it do some sort of psychedelic shit. And it’s a weird extension of, if you think about it, it’s an extension of a lot of things. If you think about, like, things that you discovered on accident —
JERRY: Video feedback.
JESUS: It starts with like video feedback and then it goes to when you get a public access license and you figure out, oh, I wanna do something weird and have like someone really big. And then there’s some sort of artwork in the background and someone’s small or maybe some sort of weird trickery. And then, figuring out to shoot the camera this way, through this, and then shoot here and then run it through the playback again and then add them again in the green screen, you can get this weird effect. And making zines was like the print extension of that. How can I make this art really different and really cool? Like start fucking with the medium and fucking with the tools and seeing what we can get out of it. And it’s not like we were like breaking new ground, I mean, like Man Ray existed long before us.
JERRY: Right, but we were finding it on our own without necessarily knowing who the fuck he was.
JESUS: Exactly.
JERRY: We didn’t know who Nam June Paik was, but we were doing stuff like that.
JESUS: Exactly.
JERRY: Yeah, I love that. It’s really, it’s literally like innocent experimental play, but we had this particular filter of, and again, it came from lots of different people, it came from Joe, it came from me, it came from you, it came from John Ryan. John Ryan was a little older, introduced us to some stuff that maybe hadn’t been on our radar yet. And the Beastie Boys were a big part of it too. Like Paul’s Boutique and then Check Your Head, like sampling culture.
JESUS: It’s collage art.
JERRY: Collage art, right. So we just started fumbling around in the dark with a few pointers here and there. And discovering shit that, yeah, had been discovered years earlier maybe, but we found it ourselves and it felt like magic.
JESUS: Right. And it’s interesting because a lot of that stuff, when some of those later zines or some of the zines kind of in the middle, like because I feel like the later ones was Dan kind of doing it more on his own. But somewhere in the middle, kind of around where we started doing color covers.
JERRY: Yeah.
JESUS: And like special editions or that sex issue. I feel like some of the best, cool, like textured patterns and art that are in there are an extension of video art. It looks like the print version of video art.
JERRY: Yeah. And I remember a big contributor to some backgrounds in that era you’re talking about, and a little earlier, was Molly Brodak. And she was going to the library and finding psychedelic patterns and either copying them or making her own and just drawing hers by hand.
JESUS: That’s right!
JERRY: So that was like a big thing that we used for a while.
JESUS: Yeah, she was finding like clip art patterns, like optical art.
JERRY: Exactly. And I had mentioned this to Ethan who didn’t know her, but she would be one of the people that we would be talking to now. To me, she’s another major creative force in Hoofsip, but then also she went off and did her own thing and, dude, she did so many zines. And then she started her own distro. And I know you were part of some of those zines too, like similarly to Hoofsip contributing and whatever, but she completely did her own spin and she did recipes and like, just again, it’s heartbreaking every time. She was another vector — an incredible creative mind and we just all found each other for those few years.
JESUS: 100%.
JERRY: Yeah. So I’m fond of that period. And again, me working at Kinko’s. I feel if you’re telling a 90s or 80s story with zines, eventually Kinko’s gets mentioned because somebody knew somebody. And I’m really thankful because, like you said, I was using Photoshop for the first time, Photoshop 3 doing the zine and then learning these other different techniques. I learned all this Aldus PageMaker and then Adobe PageMaker and then Quark XPress, but I kept on wanting to become so professional and clean, that I got too far away from what a zine is. To the point where regular zines, like being in black and white and being stapled in the corner, felt like a bummer to me. Just like being on VHS felt like a bummer to me.
JESUS: Yeah.
JERRY: I wanted to be 35 millimeter, because that’s a “real” movie. I wanted to be a print magazine or a print newspaper because that was quote unquote real. I do kind of want to go back and slap myself.
JESUS: [Laughs] I think we all have those, right?
JERRY: As much as we shot, I want to go back and be like “Dude, shoot more. Shoot more! Bring your color copy art into the studio. Like, get even weirder.” And I got to say we did well for what we had, but I’m like, oh my God. You didn’t know how good you had it.
JESUS: [Laughs] It’s interesting to hear you say that because when I look at Hoofsip, and look at the things I chose to make art about, and granted I’m like a young person in my, teens or early twenties. And going through that era of being like a punk kid, I’m like “Oh, like you got to do something with a guy with a mohawk, taking a dump,” you know?
JERRY: [Laughs]
JESUS: It was like, “That’s funny! Take a shit. That’s funny. Pee on something. It’s funny!” And I look at all the art there and my favorite art that I did was the more, kind of magical or trippier type of things. Cuz that actually came very natural to me. The other stuff was actually just me being a try-hard teenager, you know?
JERRY: Right, right.
JESUS: We’re all a try-hard teenager at some point, so I have those same regrets, right? Now I’m just kind of like, “Oh look at that funny shit that I made when I was a kid,” but there was a time where I’d look at it be like, “ew, why did I do that?”
JERRY: Well, the try-hard shit, I think of someone like Joe Hornacek or John Ryan had less of that. And I definitely feel like I had too much try-hard shit, but every once in a while, I made things that were not try-hard. So I’m like, “Oh dude, it was there.” And like you’re saying too, you had that in you then. So it’s just like, ah, kind of wish I would have leaned more there, but I won’t build a time machine to influence myself for that. As someone who appreciates a lot of things that were created at that time, I guess I’m a little, it’s so shitty, but I’m greedy. As much stuff that we made that was cool, I kind of just wish there was more.
JESUS: Yeah.
JERRY: I don’t think about it often, but in having a conversation like this, now, there were times the camera was running and if I had just turned it to the left and captured this moment — or instead of being try-hard I’d just talked to the person? Be like “What are you doing today,” and got a real moment. Cuz that was something we really, in making the doc, there are a few of those. And I’m so thankful because there’s so much more, instead of turning the camera on someone and saying, “What are you thinking about,” I turn the camera and I’m like [obnoxious babble].
JESUS: Right, it’s aggressive. You’re just being irreverent and you’re being aggressive. And like, we all did it. It was all kind of part of our schtick. You go run up to somebody with a camera, stick a camera in their face, and you’re like, “What do you think about 1981!?”
JERRY: [Laughing]
JESUS: And then they’re like, “What?” Which is funny, but in retrospect it could, you’re right, it could have been more interesting. It’d be like, “Hey, what’d you do today?” I don’t know if you ever saw the Beaver trilogy.
JERRY: Oh dude, I love it. I love it.
JESUS: I feel like that’s how that happens is that you find a subject, you find someone interesting. And we were doing that all the time. We were just going up to random people. And I think, I’m not trying to like tap into the minds of everybody else, but I almost feel like it’s a hive mind. I felt like. . .what we were looking for was gold.
JERRY: Yes.
JESUS: What we were looking for was that lightning in the bottle moment. And 90% of the time we didn’t get it. So I think that 90% of the time it just looks like we’re being assholes.
JERRY: Right. [Laughs]
JESUS: So it’s interesting when you watch something like the Beaver trilogy, this guy who’s like genuinely curious about this kid in a parking lot, he’s going to just ask him questions.
JERRY: Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying. Or another example, Heavy Metal Parking lot. We have so much footage that had the potential to be like a Heavy Metal Parking Lot. And I’m not going to blame myself too much because I’m guessing that the person who made Heavy Metal Parking Lot was maybe older in the 80s than we were in the nineties.
JESUS: Jeff Krulik. He was a lot older.
JERRY: So I have footage in line or at Lollapalooza — or in line getting tickets for Lollapalooza. These really interesting cultural zeitgeist moments. And I just want to pull the camera from young Jerry who is, first of all, moving the camera around way too much. Like, dude, just zoom out — stop zooming, oh dude, stop zooming in. And then I didn’t talk about anything. Or maybe I say something random. I’m like, oh dude, could you just pull back and talk to people? That would be amazing.
JESUS: Yeah.
JERRY: But I just wasn’t in that head space. And look, I wasn’t trying to be in that head space either.
JESUS: Yeah, I think that’s okay.
JERRY: But we were right there.
JESUS: We were right there. And if you want to mention Heavy Metal Parking Lot, you can full circle yourself back to zine culture because that’s another video tape.
JERRY: Oh, very true.
JESUS: Popular from mail-order zines.
JERRY: Yeah.
JESUS: Mail-order, tape trades, or whatever.
JERRY: But you know, another thing about that is, and this cuts myself some slack, Heavy Metal Parking Lot is so singular. And yet how many people had video cameras? I mean, there were still hundreds and thousands of cameras. So it was a very unique type of person, that wasn’t like an MTV news reporter, just a regular person that’s shooting these people as an anthropological study. That’s not most people’s go-to move, I guess. To bring this kind of back together with the zine, do I wish that I had spent my time writing a little bit more interesting things? Sure, whatever — but I’m very thankful for the time, like you said, those late nights at Kinko’s, Denny’s, Ram’s Horn, wherever the fuck — making each other laugh, coming up with stuff. And then, yeah, sometimes doing it solo and being like, oh my God, I can’t wait to show the guys this. Because not all of the solo work was a bummer, at least speaking for myself. There’s just a fine line of how much or what mood you’re in. But sometimes the solo work is like, “Oh my God, this is gonna be great. I can’t wait for them to see this.” So I love all of that. And I do think that, for me, proximity is a big part of this. So if I were to ever try to do a zine again, I would need to live somewhere and be part of that community. It would be like doing a role play, D&D. You can do it online, but for me, if you’re gonna do it, you need to be in person. That’s creating memories. So if I ever created a zine again — I mean, right now we’re creating this piece from this long distance, but like to actually make things, I would even wanna break out the scissors and let desktop publishing get far away from me. Cuz I’m on my computer too much as it is.
JERRY: If someone were to come up to you as someone who used to do zines in the nineties, and has done zines since then, what would your advice be to start doing like a regular zine?
JESUS: I’m gonna quote something that we say all the time: Just do it, man. Let’s go.
JERRY: Let’s go.
JESUS: I don’t think there’s a real training on it. Like here’s the thing: kids have the internet, they know how to go look up a YouTube video on how to cut paper to any size, any format they want to make a zine. That part’s easy. You get that right in front of you. But I don’t know, man. I find that to be a hard question because I have been surrounded by people who make zines for so long and I see new zines and I still buy zines. I bought zines like less than a year ago at like a book fair thing.
JERRY: I went to the Tucson Zine Fest earlier this year. Fucking love it.
JESUS: Yeah! I have zines where people take VHS tapes stack them in an order, so it’s like a poem, which is super clever. You know, “There’s Something About Mary / Over The Edge”.
JERRY: [Laughs] Like a refrigerator magnet poem.
JESUS: Yeah, but with VHS tape spines. And I see that stuff so much, so I’m like, you got this. That’s the advice — people are so clever. I think that people have always been clever, but with the advent of the internet, I think we’re seeing how clever people can be, you know?
JERRY: I guess once they’re at the point where they know what a zine is to even ask, they’re already through the threshold.
JESUS: Right.
JERRY: Being in LA surrounded by so much more creative culture, what I’m struck by when I visit Michigan is — and especially we have a lot of friends whose kids are in their teens or early twenties now — none of them are doing zines. Most of them are super into video games or they might draw, but what I see a lot is not a lot of like big friends groups. Or their friends are people they chat with online. So there is a lot of separateness. And so it’s just not on their radar as something to do.
JESUS: It’s an interesting conversation that, you know, I don’t want to go down a rabbit hole too far about the state of like kids and the manner in which they output any sort of content and how they interact with one another. I had this conversation because part of the online component of my screening collective is a chat room. And when was the last time chat rooms were really a thing? Like chat rooms with a bunch of people. Like AOL?
JERRY: They got overtaken by bots. Cuz I remember there was just a point where fewer and fewer real people were there and then it just died.
JESUS: Right, it did. But with properly moderated ones — what I’m saying is, I feel like a lot of kids are not doing a lot of things because they can’t afford to. I did a deck that had to do with how kids consume media. There was a study done by digital media trends back in 2023. I’ll just run through this really quick because I think this is an interesting conversation. For younger generations, online experiences have become a meaningful part of their lives. And meaningful online experiences are meaningful replacements for in-person experiences. When it comes to Gen Z or Millennials, 50% of them said that. For our generation, Gen X, or Boomers or above, like 20% said that. “I spend more time interacting with others on social media than in the physical world,” almost 50% of Gen Z and millennials say that. “I socialize more in video games than I do in the physical world,” same percentage. But do I get the same enjoyment as I do when I’m interacting with people in real life? No. So it’s a really interesting thing. And you have movie studios that are shortchanging the run between theatrical releases and home video releases, which is basically streaming now. That used to be what, like seven months?
JERRY: Yeah.
JESUS: Like you used to have to wait and cause anticipation. And that’s why it would do well in rentals again. You have movie theaters dropping movies and they’re wondering why these big IP movies are failing at the box office. Because guess what? People don’t have the money to take their partner on a date — it costs a hundred dollars to get two tickets and concession and then–
JERRY: You gotta drive and you gotta park–
JESUS: Yeah, like movies used to be the one cheap thing you could get away with doing. And now it’s like, if you take a family of four to the movies, it’s gonna cost $200 to go see movies. No one can afford that right now in this economy. So movie theaters are doing it to themselves. They’re doing this thing where they’re like, “Oh, we’ll just put it on streaming.” Well, guess what? When you train audiences it’s only gonna be four weeks until the movie comes out on Apple+, then they’re gonna be like, “I don’t wanna watch that at the theater. I don’t wanna pay money. I got a subscription to Apple+, I’m just gonna watch that at home with my big 60 inch TV and my fucking sound system.”
JERRY: And in addition to that everyone has a movie list or TV show queue where everyone’s behind. “Oh, I’ve been meaning to catch up on that show.” So like, if you have to wait three weeks, there’s so much shit to watch that you’re not gonna be dying to see it because you have already way more than you’re ever gonna watch in your life.
JESUS: And I think with all that being said, you have a lot of kids at home just interacting with other people online as much as they can. Yeah, they have their friends in real life, but they also can play video games with their friends P2P. People can play Fortnite together and talk — not to say that every kid is playing Fortnite and it’s not mostly like, you know, stoners and nine year olds, but my greater point is that I think there’s a craving from younger demographics to want to reconnect with the world again. And that’s why tapes became a thing again. That’s why there’s VHS labels.
JERRY: When I go to the zine fest dude, it is a lot of younger folks. It is Gen Z even more than millennials.
JESUS: Exactly. It’s funny, I work in marketing and you talk to these big studios and they’re like “Oh, we got to get Gen Z into this thing or Gen Z into that.” Gen Z is actually trying to not want to be on their phone because, guess what? They were born with a phone in their fucking hand.
JERRY: That’s right.
JESUS: So they’re actually like wanting to get out there and go to nature and do things that are cheap and inexpensive. And I think that handmade culture, handmade zines, handmade whatever, doing stuff that’s a little different — yeah, they already have the internet and they’re online, that’s just kind of inherent, but they are way more fascinated by either going to a movie or somebody curating something for them, or going in person and being in the world. I think that that’s coming back again.
JERRY: That makes a lot of sense. And I think it’s almost like, if you look at the environment of suburbia that helped shape us, there was a lot of rejection, not wanting to do — and we weren’t using this term then, but we would have, I think: normie shit. We rolled our eyes at a lot of normie shit, even if we were normie in other ways. We wanted to experience things that were a little different, we wanted to have unique authentic experiences, maybe because we were from middle class/working class and a mainstream culture that kind of bored us. And what you’re describing is, like, Gen Z being inundated with all of this shit, and they themselves getting a bit bored with it.
JESUS: We were into subculture for the reasons you just mentioned and also because maybe we were made fun of by the kids that were popular and normie, you know? We didn’t want to be like them anymore. We found people that were down the street that were open-minded to like a comic book, or being a nerd, or being a weirdo. And then it just kind of snowballed from there. But I think that with Gen Z, it’s like there is no subculture, everything’s subculture.
JERRY: Ah, yeah right.
JESUS: Due to the internet, you get kids that have purple hair, and they’re dressing in some sort of way, and it’s a hodgepodge of four different eras, but they also listen to Taylor Swift. So it’s like subculture, but they also listen to like slowdive, oddly enough. So it’s weird. It’s like everything is just kind of like this weird thing. . .I don’t know what I’m trying to say. . .
JERRY: Well, it’s also, it’s like everything, everywhere, all at once — not the movie, but like they literally are living in everything/everywhere/all at once. Think of one issue of Maximum Rocknroll and how thick that shit was, and their record and reviews section, like that was thick. So, of course, if you were gonna try to get something, you wouldn’t order all of them. You wouldn’t have been able to afford it — and that’s just one issue. But modern internet is: all of that is available, instantly, for free. A billion hours of TikTok, a billion hours of YouTube, a billion hours of Twitch, et cetera. So they literally have access — it’s so mind boggling. So I can see the impulse to unplug, but even when they unplug, that’s the brew that they were simmering in, that’s the vat of juices they were grown in: everything. Like, “What were you influenced by?” Everything.
JESUS: Yeah, and kids are also more accepting obviously of. . . [searches for a word]
JERRY: Like neurodivergence?
JESUS No.
JERRY: Queerness?
JESUS: The term for general, like people who are of a different race, color.
JERRY: Oh, diversity.
JESUS: Yeah, like kids are more accepting and it’s built-in to be more accepting of diversity too. So that’s kind of in the mix. When diversity was more like, us having diverse friends growing up that was like. . .
JERRY: You were our diverse friend as it turned out. You were like our one diverse friend, or one of the few.
JESUS: Mm hmm.
JERRY: While I think that there’s some cool pieces in Hoofsip, I don’t have the same emotions tied to it as I do 30 Minutes of Madness. And obviously some of 30MOM, especially earlier episodes, don’t even have much strong appeal. So in the end, I mean, for me, what they both have in common is stuff made mostly by a group of friends, mostly for themselves to amuse themselves, even if they were hoping to reach a wider audience. It was niche content, niche work, for that niche audience. And I’m still someone who really believes in that. But I know, like, if you’re trying to go viral on TikTok or anything, as soon as you try to go viral, you’re not trying to be niche, right? You’re trying to become mainstream. So my question to you is, whether it’s making movies or in this case, making zines — it takes a lot of time and effort to put something together, what do you think the worth of it is when it is something that maybe is only for you and like a handful of people and therefore isn’t going to make you money, isn’t going to get you fame, isn’t going to do anything other than be, like, something cool you do with friends. What do you think the worth of that is?
JESUS: I mean. . .it’s just different for everybody. But for me, it’s expression, you know?
JERRY: Is it something you still believe in for yourself?
JESUS: Sure. Even though I don’t practice it as much as I should, and I intend to in the future, it’s still a form of expression to me that, you know, when you put your heart and soul into physically putting your hands on something and handmaking something, it’s no different in my eyes than painting. You’re putting a lot into it. And I think people look at zines as art now, it’s an art form. I think it’s yeah, it’s gratification. It’s expression. It’s something that can live forever, you know. Like making a film. It’s timeless.
JERRY: If you did have to go on a limb and say specifically with Hoofsip, what value do you think it could have now as an artifact, if someone stumbled upon it? Do you think that it has anything? Because again, you and I both are kind of saying like, our favorite thing about it is actually the making of it less than the actual piece at the end of the day. But those pieces exist. Do you think that they still have worth now?
JESUS: Sure! I mean, it’s a time capsule. It’s a gateway, like, there’s stuff in those zines that don’t exist on the internet. It’s language and communication of a bunch of kids talking into the ether like from a voice that is thirty years ago or whatever. When I look at them, they’re a fucking time capsule. I don’t think anyone is looking for a interview with the band Lagwagon. . .
JERRY: But you know what, the members of Lagwagon — if they have any kids, they might be.
JESUS: Yeah they could be. But I think there’s like interesting takes in there. And the thing with Hoofsip is, it’s like it’s half traditional zine, right? So it’s got album reviews and interviews with bands, but then it has these weird comics and these weird art pieces and these weird, like nonsensical, tutorial pieces that are partly comedic, partly probably like referential to what was going on at the time. So yeah, I think that it has the value of being what teenagers were fucking around with decades ago.
JERRY: Cool. And you are still making things that, whether it’s videos, or whether it’s art, or curating things, without profit as your primary motivator. Right?
JESUS: Yeah.
JERRY: That’s something that is — when I was talking to Joe he was like “Yeah, you know, it just sucks because like, I have a lot of ideas for stuff and I would make a zine again, but I don’t know how to make money from it.” I was like, “Well, I agree with you in that I don’t know how to make money from it, but I still like doing it.” I don’t want everything I do to be about making a profit.
JESUS: Well, when you make a zine you’re putting a lot of things into it. You’re putting your artistic value into it and then you’re putting your man hours into it. And then you’re also putting your supplies into it. And so the best that you want to get out of it is to recoup your costs from making it. I didn’t put my zine for sale online because I thought that I was going to pay my rent with it. I put my zine online and put a cost on it because I just wanted it to get out there to people. But I’m like, well, I might as well sell it.
JERRY: Oh yeah, and I’m not saying selling it is always profit motive. Cuz we sold Hoofsip. But our goal, just like with your zine, was to get it out there. If we can cover postage or cover something, that’s great too.
JESUS: Yeah, you can’t be a martyr. But it definitely doesn’t begin with like, “I’m going to go on a hot date and it’s going to be funded by my zine.” It’s really just, like, I’m going to make a zine and I want people to see it. But also PayPal exists and Venmo exists and I can probably just throw a couple bucks on it and and get it out there. It’ll pay for the cost of me shipping it to people and my time and effort that I put into it. And it’s a win/win for everybody at that point.
JERRY: Right, yeah. And again, if your goal is just making money, there are way easier ways in this life. Just any regular job is going to–
JESUS: You’d be more successful getting a job at McDonald’s making money than you are making a zine.
JERRY: Right. So I think that’s something still, I know it’s an overused term, but it’s something very punk rock about it. There’s a purity that I appreciate, there is a camaraderie if you’re able to find people and it’s just harder as we get older, whether you go the family route or not. None of us have the same time or the same energy that we did.
JESUS: Well, it’s the rat race. So you wake up and if you have a job that pays your rent, like you have to do that first. That has to be your priority unless you’re a trust fund kid. And so you do what you got to do to survive. And if you have any extra energy and you have the spirit to go there, then you fucking do it. The best things that ever happened to me from making a film or making a zine or making a piece of art or curating something are the people that come up to you and are like, “Hey man, that was fucking cool.” Hey, man, that was really amazing. I love your shit,” or “You curated this and that and it’s saved my life because I was really depressed and I found a community.” Like that is more fulfilling than any sort of endeavor that is solely created for monetary gain.
JERRY: Oh, very well put. I feel that so much. And, you know, I’m a broke-ass because I feel that so much. I prioritize those things still and I don’t apologize for it. I actually feel very rich because of those kinds of experiences that I know you’ve had a lot as well, of just like connecting with people, sharing stuff. Because at the end of the day, we’re all going to be gone. It doesn’t matter how much money we had. I just try to curate more personal interactions with people where I’m being affected by them or their work or vice versa. That’s what it’s all about.
JESUS: Not about the pesos, man. It’s about the friends you made along the way.
JERRY: Fuckin’ A dude!
. . .
Aaaand that’s a wrap on the Hoofsip Retrospective! Thanks to everyone who participated in these interviews. Bonus thanks to Dan Augustine for the sticker portraits and to Pipper for new Stick Men. Thank you for reading — now go make a zine with some friends that you can talk about thirty years later!
Read the other interviews in the Hoofsip Restrospective Series!
Dan Augustine | Joe Hornacek | Ethan Minsker | Mike Pipper
Click here for the first THIRTY-SIX issues of HOOFSIP!