Holy balls, let’s talk back-in-the-day type shit here!

Hokay, so…

Blading.info, Jon Julio via his latest Tumblr page, and a shitload of other places have been dipping their hands heavily into the sport’s hayday, especially retro ads from our classic magazines

ONE had slew of déjà vu-type journalism trend with some great pieces put together by Ben Rogers.

But the latest part of old-school news turned today’s news was Mushroom Blading’s podcast with former Daily Bread head Angie Walton.

If you haven’t listened to it yet, you’re about as far behind the news as this column and I feel sorry for you and it.

Check out the interview here:

How to be Unpopular Episode 86

Since you have about two hours to kill while you listen to it and since you have an internet attention span like the rest of us, here’s something to watch while you listen:

All you really need to know, as I’m learning with each and every How to Be Unpopular podcast, as that you should pull up and chair because…

As you listen—or recall if you already have—and you’re as big of a blade history nerd as my 30-year-old ass is, you’ll be listening to the most scandalous part of the whole ordeal and the one thing that’s only been floating around as rumors for so many years: what happened to Daily Bread?

Well, according to Angie, she felt like she was the backbone of the whole ordeal and when she needed some support, she felt she didn’t get enough.

The crux of it was that the last few people on the magazine—Justin Eisinger and Wes Driver—took content for the magazine, demanded their last paychecks, and walked the fuck out of there.

Then there was a lawsuit—which I can’t find as I’m not very familiar with the California legal system—that followed when ONE’s first magazine was on its way to print.

Listening to it, with all the juicy gossip and history, my face was stuck like this…

Then again, when Angie mentioned it, she did say so-and-so said, in rollerblading, “there can only be one magazine.”

Now there is ONE Magazine and no Daily Bread.

If one—no pun intended—were to view the whole ordeal from solely Angie’s perspective, you’d probably assume that some fucked up shit has been afoot.

As a person with a journalism degree and 10 years of journalism experience, if I can give you a complete 100-percent money back guarantee on anything in life or events that happened prior to this moment, it is this: there are way more than two sides to a story.

Angie made hers very clear.

It was scathing, it was endearing, and god damn if it wasn’t entertainingly well-told.

All we know for sure is that shit fell apart, Daily Bread died, ONE Magazine was born of it, and this was the last issue…

The question of ONE’s birth is as complicated as people who believe President Obama was born in Africa or wherever stupid shit they come up with—you either know the truth or are stuck somewhere else.

Still, that interview started some shit. Or reopened it. Or opened it for the first time. Or whatever.

Either way, shit was said.

The one thing we were all waiting for was to see Justin Eisinger, Editorial Director of ONE who was named many, many times in the interview and not once in a flattering way, had to say about it.

He initially made one post and somehow, for the life of me, cannot find it. It used to live at this URL http://www.oneblademag.com/blogs/counterpoint/, but there doesn’t seem to be anything there now.

The post was merely something like this:

You can find the exact same photo by yourself by Googling “horse shit.” It’s the first result.

When Justin posted that photo, I’m sure it was supposed to be all like…

But his comments that followed—which again, you can’t find anymore—showed that inside he was all like…

Then Wes Driver, who was also named in the interview and a founder of ONE, made a statement on the ONE site. He responded to Angie’s claims with such things with a let-shit-be-over tone like:

And damn it there’s that sick fucking part of all of us who want that, in the terms of the post-modernist poet Fred Durst, “he-said-she-said bullshit” to play out in public over and over and over.

Fuck it, I’ll say it. To a certain extent, the whole cat scratching shit from years ago makes me go…

But enough of that shit.

Really.

There was a lot of shit going on back then and the only people that know for sure are still clouded in a whole lot of emotion that is still to fresh to pick at.

Thinking about what could transpire for the longest time about who did what when and why would be like an painfully tortuous re-hash with an ex-girlfriend that you have absolutely no emotion for her except for the one that makes you want to see her cry a lot.

The whole idea of it, well…

And enough of this gif shit. Looks too much like Tumblr in this bitch and it’s impossible as hell to read my mammer-jammer.

The long and short of it is…

Everyone Misses Daily Bread.

Yeah, I’m sure that shit is raw with a whole bunch of people—namely its readers. Fuck man, I sent in my $18 for a subscription, got one issue, and it happened to be the last one. That shit hurts, yo.

Daily Bread was more than just a magazine: it was an instruction manual on how to be a blader.

As a wee lad, I would buy a copy from my local bookstore and page through it each and every study hall until the next issue came out. People would repeatedly ask me how I could look at the same magazine every day, but I was studying it. I was looking at what tricks people were doing, what the emerging styles were, and where I would be spending my Wal-Mart paycheck.

And no doubt such an influential publication would create some animosity amongst the ranks when they printed their last issue.

But the real story of Angie’s interview, all those old feelings brought up—some bad and the rest great—wasn’t what was going on behind the scenes, but memories of those shimmering glossy pages and hynotically toxic fumes from all the chemicals made to produce it.

It was unhinging the staples to make a new bedroom poster. It was that great series of photos of Erik Burke backside UFOing the roof of a building and dropping nearly two stories to the parking lot below. It was that being the last thing you saw at night hoping that someday you might be that good.

It was looking and what people were wearing, knowing that’s what you’d be shopping for next.

Culturally, nothing helped progress the sport like Daily Bread. It didn’t harness its true spirit and juvenile nature of blading quite like videos—especially the VG sagas—but damn if didn’t take iconic moments and plaster them forever into our memories.

It was Disinformation and editorials you didn’t want your mom to see. It was nonsensical gibberish and insightful musings.

It was art and photography and writing and attitude and style and posture and pose and grace and anger and fulfillment that is serious lacking in a rollerblade media.

Everyone who ever contributed to Daily Bread were the keepers of blade history and the gods that pushed its future.

The funny thing about the controversy of the print media is that it was done on entirely digital medium. It wasn’t like the hayday of print journalism when newspaper and magazine publishers attacked each other in the pages of their own magazines or papers, no this was done via podcast by a Canadian dude in his home.

So fucking fitting.

Print couldn’t have handled that story because of the amount of space it would have taken up and the cost to print such long-tail answers. And if it would have been a pissing match between blade mags now—say ONE and Be-Mag—well, their publishing schedules would leave us with a two sided argument that would take decades to pan out at a rate of four issues a year.

As someone with a little experience in the printing world, shit’s fucking expensive and if you do it you’ll never make any money.

Deciding to do anything in print in the reigning era of instant digital communication is a brave endeavor to keep with the traditions and fond memories of those center staples, that smell, and the chance to really make a lasting piece of history.

Let’s take this website for example. I’ve written 70-some columns on here, amassing a total of more than 140,00 words—about the same as a 400-page book—and one missed payment to Go Daddy and they’re all gone forever. To get rid of all the history Daily Bread recorded in those important years, well, you’d have to plan a shit load of house fires. It’d be like burning the baby book of blading.

Soon, and this will be the saddest day ever, there may not be skaters vying for their first photo in a magazine, their first profile, or their first cover. While I’m sure that’s a long ways a way, the pervasive attitude of digital media is that magazines aren’t as important.

But, as Angie said in her interview that smaller, more localized publications are reigning over the printing world. You would think that blading could at least put one magazine together that could come out every month, but with the price tag the price tag that would come with it, blading, in its current state, cannot support such a thing.

That’s why digital magazines—websites or blogs, as you kids call them—are having a longer, lasting effect on blading. Sites like IRollNY.com or Iowa-Connection.com are focusing on their scenes, their backyards and coming up with a better, more comprehensive look at blading merely by focusing on their own front yards. They offer free content to the user while providing them with the information they want and need. Their business model, well, let’s just say they’re more likely to file as a 501(c)3 than anything with a business license.

Print is expensive, plain and simple. Digital is free.

Digitial didn’t kill print, but it sure did shove a gag in its mouth.

Before I go on, I want one thing incredible Windex-polished crystal clear: I love the printed word. If you ever see me sporting a Kindle or some other e-reader, don’t creep up slowly behind me and slit my throat, call first and use a shotgun so I and everyone else know why there’s going to be a hole between my shoulder blades.

Now, blading has two major magazines—ONE and Be-Mag—and neither have an ounce of flavor, spirit, and spite that filled the pages of Daily Bread. Mainly, because each comes out with only a few issues a year, releasing articles on major competitions like BCSD and Winterclash a year after the contest is over. Now, by its very nature, magazines cannot compete with the speed of instant tweets on competition events and what have you, but with the right vision, a magazine could guide the sport not in a reactionary way, but in one that tells everyone which way the future is going.

I’ve heard numerous times that Europeans complaining about the lack of overseas coverage in ONE and Americans complaining about the lack of stateside blading in Be-Mag. Maybe that’s the problem. Both magazines seem to be vying for the title of the next Daily Bread, but neither the editorial policy, content, nor the subscriber base can support something like that in such a limited media.

But print is dying not because of the internet, but because it is failing to do what magazines do best: tell their readers what to like.

The major dominant blading media seriously lack a vision that represents not only captures the heart of the sport, but pushes it as well.

Our two main magazines—with other publications like Clac in France coming in distant ties for third—have their each and own editorial perspective, yet neither really have much to add to the conversation.

The last magazine piece—and I’m focusing on words here because, well, they’re my thing—I honestly felt that the writer had blades on his feet while typing it was Tommy Boy’s piece about the Colorado Road Trip in the last issue of Be-Mag. It was road trips and stupid shit and raw and captured that moment in our sport amazingly well.

It was what magazines should be completely about.

While I may write for Be-Mag and previously for ONE, I can’t honestly I could ever fully back either with a conviction I’d kill to have in a blading publication. When people complain about either magazine, I mostly nod my head and say, “You have a point.”

The hard part is that both are staffed by people who work really damn hard with a flaky culture of people because no one can afford to pay anyone anything. There’s no money it it, yet someone is always busting their ass to put the next issue out. That’s journalism. That’s print. That’s rollerblading.

Either rollerblading’s magazines and major websites lack what blading is truly about or I have no idea what blading is about anymore. I hope it’s the latter and this dumb fucking column is yet another scrap in the pile of digital junk that is the chaotic wasteland of the internet.

Rollernews doesn’t count as a worldwide media agency. It counts as a plague, like the Huffington Post to real news sites: they only pull the life from their sources, yet never give anything healthy back.

There have been numerous attempts at a rollerblading social media site, one like Facebook where users decide their own experience, yet there’s always something new to see, but not a single one has gained enough traction to stick around.

So thank God for Mushroom Blading and their How to Be Unpopular podcasts.

Todd and Joey at Mushroom Blading (seen below center and right in the greatest groomsman photo I’ve ever seen) are providing an invaluable service to blading at-large: their lengthy interviews allow for people in blading to really dive into the subjects of interest.

What’s the most impressive is Todd’s interview style. He’s amazingly talented in getting his subjects to share stories, discuss hypothetical situations, or get to the bare balls of what’s really going on. He’s like a combination of Walter Cronkite and Stephen Colbert and we’re all better off because of it.

While that magazine cover photo might be a dying dream, the new goal of rollerbladers just may be to have a two-hour Skype fest with some crazy Canadian skaters.

Then again when they’re digging into the demise of Daily Bread or interviewing the love-him-or-hate-him Julian Bah, maybe NOT being interviewed by Todd McInerney could be a damn good thing. You might end up saying a lot and starting some shit.

Angie Walton’s interview was a prime example of the podcast’s ability to allow a subject to tell his or her perspective into such an important subject: the demise of Daily Bread, blading’s most influential media ever.

Hell, it’s not too long ago—Daily Bread still has a Myspace page.

Oh Jesus Mary Mother Joseph that’s a lot to consider. Fucking MySpace.

In hindsight, it was insane to think you could pick up a copy of a rollerblading magazine at most major new stands. It’d be a total mind fuck to see that again.

I had an amazing time this week thinking about all the good times reading all of those magazines, keeping the latest copy in my skate bag, and passing them around to my homies.

Whatever bad things happened in the past, I hope we can let the sleeping dogs lie and let it all be over.

Sure, there might be some bad blood between a few key storytellers in rollerblading, but I hope we all can all seek couple’s counseling and let it be over.

To anyone who has ever contributed to Daily Bread in any way, shape, or form, thank you so much. You helped spread the word and no matter what happened, rollerblading was better off because of your hard work.

But we’re all part of it.

Without something like Daily Bread, we’re all the parts of blading and help guide its image, voice, and future. The status updates, the tweets, the photos, the edits, and everything else all matter.

Thanks to everyone who makes sure we all find out about cool stuff we couldn’t see in person.

Angie and the rest of the former Daily Bread staff, thank you.

Justin, Wes, and the rest of the ONE family, thank you.

Oli, Chris, and others at Be-Mag, thank you.

Blade or Die,

— Brian Krans

P.S. — I don’t know if I say this enough, which means I probably don’t, but I can’t thank everyone in the rollerblading industry enough for supporting what I love to do as much as I love to blade: write. You all fucking rule.

Also, I love print and I never want to see it die. I’ll never own a Kindle and will always print my books, even if my books are available on Kindle.

What can I say? I’ll be a slut for a buck.