DJC: Why is Cell Stories going to work better or differently than Punk Planet?
DS: Punk Planet was on top of the world. There weren’t a lot of people to partner up with - they just didn’t exist at that level. With Cell Stories there are tons of people who’ve been at this longer than I have, are incredible writers and have an incredible amount of knowledge.
DJC: Cell Stories came out of something – the fellowship. So, did Punk Planet come out of some other project?
DS: For me, the real motivation behind Punk Planet was complete frustration at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago [where Sinker completed his undergraduate work]. I felt like my peers in the punk world were all busy making incredible things. Then I went to school and had all these peers sitting around waiting - waiting for a grant or waiting for permission from instructors. Why can’t we just do this shit? If you’re waiting for validation, fuck it.
There was a single publication that was covering punk at the time on a national scale – a magazine called Maximum Rock ‘n Roll. They went through a period of time where they began very narrowly defining what they were going to cover. And that meant a lot of interesting stuff had no space in any magazine and so, no national recognition.
DJC: Don’t you need to define a publication like that?
DS: That’s the problem. The feeling of a lot of people, though, was that this was just taking a vibrant and progressive culture and basically saying that we can’t progress. It was just that they felt that that was how punk should be.
DJC: And that’s why MRR still looks like it’s photocopied. So, when you started Punk Planet did you want to get away from that aesthetic, because it was what people expected?
DS: I wanted to get away from that aesthetic because it’s ridiculous to look like you’re cut and pasted, lo-fi and xeroxed when you’re not using any of those tools. So, if we’re defining aesthetics, why don’t we define a new aesthetic? That [low-rent] aesthetic came out of necessity. It came out of the tools at hand and what was readily available. Now we have different tools.
DJC: You’ve said that after issue 12 is when you believe Punk Planet became more consistent. Why’s that?
DS: I would say that throughout our teens we got steadier. The first few issues were this volunteer staff – no one had ever done a magazine before and very few had done any sort of real writing and no one had touched a page layout program. We were spread out all over the country - this was before broadband so everything was being mailed back and forth. It was just a process of messing up and saying, “Why didn’t that work? And why does this [other magazine] look alright.”
We got a whole buncha people that were interesting and passionate about various subjects who’d throw stuff to us and we’d throw stuff to our readers. That’s everything about social media now – people being excited about stuff and wanting to tell other people. That was ‘zine culture for twenty years. And now you can do it by cobbling together this as-hoc group of people on Twitter.