All photos by Robin Amer; Robin has also produced a piece about the demise of Punk Planet an audio of it can be found here.

I LOVE Punk Planet. Honestly, I really do miss it! PP helped bring the world to my door step. I spoke to PP’s editor Dan Sinker right around the time PP was releasing their 50th Edition. Sadly on June 18, 2007, there was a post at PunkPlanet.com informing everyone that after 13 years Punk Planet’s final issue was being sent out. R.I.P.P. (Rest In Peace Punks!)

Is it true that Punk Planet headquarters is run from your apartment?

It was for many years but actually now a couple of years ago we moved into an office space. It started actually in my bed room and stayed in my bedroom for two apartments which was probably for like two years and then it actually moved into a small type nine by nine foot room in my apartment which was a little bit larger than a closet and finally a couple of years ago it just got to a point where the piles were such that you could barely even move in the room itself and we really had to get office space. So we’ve really just been in an office shy of two years now.

So you can’t sit in your pyjamas and do your work anymore?

I can but I’d look a little foolish getting there [laughs]

You did some other fanzines before you started PP, what where they?

I did but they certainly aren’t really worth knowing much about.

Isn’t that a bit harsh on yourself, doesn’t everyone have to start somewhere?

I was really young, they were really nothing like PP. One of them was a zine I did inhigh school, which the entire point was to write, layout and print the entire thing in a night and then you’d basically just give it out the next day. Then a friend of mine and I did more of a traditional half sized punk hardcore zine that really only lasted for one issue and that issue we took to go sell at a show in Madison, Wisconsin. We stashed that in my friends backpack in the front seat of the car and some fluorescent yellow liquid leaked out into his backpack for the duration of the two and a half hour trip so by the time we got there the zines were soaking wet and fluorescent yellow and highly toxic. So we ended up giving those away to anyone who I guess kind of wanted to shorten their life span by reading one and that’s about it.

I started PP when I was about 19, I was still pretty young and pretty naive about what it actually would take to actually do something like this and as a result PP has been an eight and a half year long public learning process. I still feel like I’m learning when I’m working on it.

Didn’t PP start partially as a reaction to discussions that were happening on (internet) message boards?

Yeah. It was me and probably a dozen other people were complaining about the state of national and international distributed punk magazines at the time, this is in 1994. We were basically just saying ‘look there’s all this amazing stuff happening, specifically the riot girl movement, and the early steps of what’s now known as ‘Emo’ but then was more just like this crazy stuff happening in San Diego and some other places. No one was writing about it and it seemed weird ‘cause that was the stuff that was really vital back then and was exciting back then and we we’re complaining about it and finally you know…no one’s quite sure who’s idea it was but I’m definitely the person that flushed it out the most. I said ‘why are we just complaining? Why don’t we just try doing this ourselves?’ because we were all on an internet message board it seemed that we were all spread out geographically at least in the US so that getting distribution we could just send the magazine to each other and take it to the local stores and hopefully build from that. It was a very idealistic idea and it didn’t work as well as planned but it did work, you know. After the initial idea it was only about two and a half issue before the first issue came out and it came out every two months since then.

Has PP always been a magazine as opposed to a zine?

It’s such a hard…Is it in its own category sort of somewhere between a zine and a magazine?

I guess. I guess it all depends on what you consider each thing. If Time Magazine is the definition of a magazine or People Magazine then PP is definitely a zine. But if the definition of a zine is a half sized cut and paste thing done by someone and sold for a quarter or given out than PP is definitely a magazine.

We kind of hold this middle ground that doesn’t really have a good term for it. I use the words magazine and zine interchangeably when talking about PP because we do have advertising and we do come out on a regular basis and everyone that works on it does get paid albeit small amounts and all of that stuff is like a magazine. I mean this thing runs in the most skeleton crew, backwards, head-up-your- ass kind of way possible that a normal magazine quote unquote “real” magazine would never be able to run. I mean this thing runs on virtually no one because there’s no way to do it any other way. You’ve got to be creative and real magazines aren’t lean or creative. There’s no good term for what we are and there are a number of magazines that fall into that category. It’s like ‘what are they?’

I read in a few articles that when PP came along they made punk rock look good. What are your feelings on that?

We definitely weren’t the first; I mean I remember being 16 and looking at Dischord Records releases and just thinking about how amazing those looked. There were other labels that were doing really beautiful record designs long before us. If anything we kind of took the thought and care that some record labels were putting into their records as well as the thought and care that graphic designers put into normal magazine pages and we put that on to a magazine. We did play a part in what is now a very graphically orientated underground. I mean now days everything looks good, everything looks like it was done professionally. We played a part in that but I wouldn’t say we were the only people doing that. We put it into a medium that of zines and fanzines that it hadn’t been as prevalent in before.

PP is renowned for its I guess you could say ‘smart, thinking punks’ articles. Did you find it hard to start to add politics into it or was it a natural progression? How did your readers react to it?

For me it was just something that always had to be there and that has a lot to do with how I actually came to punk itself. I came to punk ‘cause I was a political kid; I was political at a really young age you know, grade school and middle school. There really is not an outlet for kids like that I mean unless you want to join the Young Democrats or something like that which was not my politics even at that age. There were basically two options as far as youth culture goes at least in my town, you could either become a hippie or you could become a punk. They were the only two cultures that dealt with politics at any level but hippies always kind of struck me as being regressive, they’re always kind of looking backwards at a time that they are not a part of punks seemed like they were speaking to now.

Do you think some punks are regressive now days?

Yeah definitely. There are a number of punks that are looking backwards and it is becoming a little like hippies but there’s still enough folks which I would account myself a part that refuse to let it be stagnant. But I basically found punk because of politics, a lot of people find punk ‘cause they’re really into heavy metal and then they discover punk because it’s even heavier. I didn’t come in that way so when PP started I really, really wanted to include political stuff and non-musical stuff that even wasn’t political. Even things like filmmakers and things like that. It just took a while to be able to articulate that in an editorial way because I was learning as I went along. It took a really long time to find my voice as an editor to be able to have the kind of confidence in myself to say no I want this in the magazine. It’s difficult I still have trouble doing that but it took a while. I think issue 22 was our first cover story that didn’t really have anything to do with music.

I was going to ask about that. When did you realise or when did you think it would be okay to do a cover that didn’t feature a band on the cover?

Before 22 we had had stories that were marginally related to punk or in like issue 19 the cover story was heroin use in punk. We had stories inside the magazine before issue 22 that were more straight-out political stories that didn’t have some sort of a musical hook to it. Twenty-two we had a story were a women who wrote to us fairly regularly went undercover and disguised herself as a boy and took part in this thing called ‘The Promise Keepers’ which was this kind of religious men’s movement. They had this big rally in Washington DC and she had a part in it as a boy and wrote about it for a story. That was the first time and it really felt like we were taking a risk not putting a band on the cover with that issue. We saw no detrimental effect though and that kind of pushed us forward even more.

The first really hard, hard political cover story was probably issue 30 which was the ‘Murder of Iraq’ story about the sanctions against the people of Iraq. And that one…I actually think my distributor told me I was committing suicide, it was either my distributors or advertisers said we were committing suicide doing that, they really tried to talk us out of it. I just basically said ‘no I don’t think we are, I think this is important and I want to put it on there and if it doesn’t sell it doesn’t sell, you know there will be another issue that will sell’. It did great, it did amazing. We got more letters and more responses out of that issue then what we’ve ever gotten out of any other issue. People just connected. It’s really been really positive we’ve gotten a lot of good feedback. Now it’s kind of expected, I’d probably say that about a quarter of the people that read PP aren’t into music at all they’re reading it because of the cultural and political coverage we’re offering. That’s pretty cool.

How do you decide what current events and social issues you’ll write about for PP?

It’s kind of a mix of what me or some of the other folk that are working on the magazine at the editorial level want to get in there. Honestly it’s a lot of what just shows up. A lot of it is stuff that just shows up in the PO box and it’s a great story so it’s like yeah great definitely. It’s relevant, it’s well written, and it’s good. So it’s a combination of those two. Obviously there are some things like September 11 where you kind of stop everything and you really assemble it from scratch. A lot of the stuff comes in at least as an idea from a writer.

Does PP ever get into trouble over some of the articles they write, like the ‘Vans Warped Tour Exposed’ story or have you ever been threatened with legal action?

I keep expecting to be and thankfully it’s never happened. If we were to be threatened by legal action we’d been in a lot of trouble because PP is legally operated as a sole proprietor which means that the US government sees no difference and legally there is no difference between the magazine and me. So if someone sues the magazine they’re suing me which means that if someone’s pissed off about something I wrote then they could walk away with my car. So that’s a little scary and actually because of a couple of articles we’ve done lately where I feel that we really dodged a bullet by not getting in trouble, even though we were totally in the right people can just sue you because they’re pissed. If you don’t have the money to fight them you don’t have the money to fight them. We’re actually going to go through the motions to incorporate that PP is its own entity so that it does happen that we get sued for something it doesn’t mean that my entire life gets taken from me, which is definitely scary but there’s never been a single time where there’s been a story that we’ve thought might get us in trouble and we haven’t done it because of that – probably ‘cause I’m too stupid or something. If anything feels like it’s going to get us in trouble it’s probably going to end up on the cover like ‘alright we may as well not hide behind it and not hide it let’s just stick it out there for anyone to see’. Luckily I’m very strict about getting the facts straight and getting shit backed up and making sure that every quote is attributed to someone so that if someone is going to sue us it’s only ‘cause they’re a dick.

How do you survive getting ads only from indies and do major labels trying to palm stuff off as independent?

Yeah we do and they usually sneak in. It’s usually someone who’s reading the magazine that usually writes in and says ‘hey you know what? That’s actually a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a major.’ There’s no real way unless you have a full time person to track down who owns what ad and to really do it foolproof. It’s really not that much of an issue now, a few years ago back when the majors still cared about punk it was much more of an issue. Now days you know indie are pretty much the folks getting ads in occasionally a major will sneak something through it’s not a big deal. As far as we survive, it’s rough. It’s really hard to do it. It’s really hand to mouth basically the way that you survive…you know our half page ads are like $160 they cost nothing as far as ads go. You’ve got to really be creative you’ve got to do as much as you can and with as little as you can. That’s how we’ve done it. It means a lot more work but ultimately at the end of the day it means you’re clean you don’t have to shower repeatedly when you go home.

PP must get hundreds of things to review, does everything get reviewed?

We really try to review everything as long as it’s on independent record labels. That’s our only criteria. We don’t make any judgement as far as genre or that sort of thing. We really do try to get everything reviewed. The reviewers themselves sometimes make decisions on their own if they really don’t like something often in those times they won’t review it. We’ve actually just re-examined our review policy and decided its sound and so we’re redoubling our efforts to make sure everything gets reviewed. Our review section that just went to press in issue 51 is 19 pages long; it’s just out of control probably 400 records.

How do you think the Internet has changed zines?

Specifically to PP or in general?

Both I guess…

One of the things with the Internet specifically not relating to PP is there are a lot less shitty print zines being made. Now there’s shitty websites being made. Which I guess for the environment is probably a good thing. It just seems like now days that the folks that just had a whim about how high school sucks, or how their parents are stupid do that on the web now instead of making a little zine about it which is cool. In a way though it’s kind of sad I kind of liked those zines there’s something inherently charming about teenage angst and being really pissed off in high school and to make for some good zines but yeah you see a lot less real throw away thought kind of zines.

As far as how it’s affected PP, very early on we were on the web I mean the magazine itself kind of grew up on the internet but the actual presence of the magazine being on the web…I think we actually had a website starting in ’95 or maybe ’96 but pretty early as far as the internet talk goes and from that point I made a really conscious effort that we weren’t going to reproduce are content on line. I did that not because it would eat away at magazines sales but simply because I didn’t feel like we were paying our writer enough to own their content forever which is what happens when it’s on line. It can be reproduced anywhere it can be seen anywhere and it can be seen forever and you know I feel very strongly about the fact that you know we’re buying this stuff from the writer once, for one use and the copyright and everything reverts to them. They can put it on line if they want to we’re not going to because we don’t own that stuff. So what the internet has really done for us is that we’ve been able to extend the magazine in a way. We’ve been able to do stuff that other bi-monthly publications can’t do like having message boards and building a community or have music that people can listen to and download for free. It’s also been a huge, huge boom to us with selling back issues and selling subscriptions and getting information about the magazine out there. We haven’t really used the Internet as far as content.

Did you ever set out to be a music journalist or do you even consider yourself one?

No and no. Like I said I started PP when I was 19 I was half way through college and I was going to art school and one of my majors except the school I went to didn’t actually have majors my focus was in video. I was going to be a famous video artist and then I kind of got sidetracked along the way. Actually right after I graduated I had a video piece in a museum exhibition in Boston and I went out there and I kind of felt this was my big decision is it going to be punk rock or is it going to be art, is it going to be PP or is it going to be videos? They put me up in this hotel and they were all very nice people but I just felt really disconnected with that world. I remember sitting in this bar and someone turning to me and asking me if I’d seen any good shows in Chicago and I started talking about all these shows I’d seen at the Fireside Bowl and all these great bands and they kind of looked at me like I was crazy and they were like ‘no I mean gallery shows have you seen any art?’ And it was at that moment that I kind of realised that I was not doing art. I think I know were my allegiances lie and I kept doing PP. So do I feel like a music journalist? No.

One reason is because I really hold a lot of music journalism in contempt. I think a lot of music journalism is bad and really lazy journalism. I think a lot of people that are music journalists are into getting music for free and want to be close to people that are actually cool and I don’t feel like that kind of a person at all. Also because that the music journalists that are good are amazing and there are amazing because they either done this for a long time or they’ve been trained to do it.

When I was doing videos I was doing documentaries and I still feel like that I’m doing documentaries but just in a different way. I’m documenting life in this culture. The thing about music journalists even about good ones is that a lot of it’s about them. I’m not really interested in this being about me, PP isn’t about me it’s about these stories that people are telling and these articles that we’re getting out there and that’s what’s important that I get interviewed for zines in Australia or things like that is not my intention. It’s something I do but sometimes I feel like well why don’t you talk to some of these other people that we talk to ‘cause they’re so awesome. I’m not really interested in the limelight that I guess a lot of music journalists are.

To you, what makes a great interview as opposed to a not so great one? I’ve read in places that you said you try to have a conversation more so than interrogate the interviewee…

I mean I feel that there is a certain art to doing a real good interview. I really feel like an interview that I want to read and be a part of as far as the person actually performing it is a conversation and that the final written product is a document of that conversation. When I approach an interview I don’t go in with a list of questions I prepare myself with a broad outline of where I want the conversation to go. I act less like a police interrogator then I do a traffic cop. If I feel like things have gotten so far away from where I went it to go I can kind of back up and move over but often times my interviews go in directions that are totally unexpected and I think are way more fun. I think that going into an interview for instance with a musician that’s just had a new record out going in and immediately asking ‘so what was it like to record?’ you’re going to get the same fucking answer that everyone else gets. Or ‘hey tell me about this one song?’ Especially the song question which just drives me fucking crazy, ‘cause if I’ve never heard this dude I don’t care about the song.

I feel like you just have to approach things in a more creative way, you need to get at people as people and not simply as the sum of their latest release and things like that and the cool thing about going about interviews like that is that 9 out of 10 times people talk about that stuff anyway. Because they do care about it and you’ve approached them as a person and a person with a story to tell and eventually it leads them back to stuff that you want to talk about and the things that make them tick.

My kind of philosophy on interviews is let it flow; let it move in directions that perhaps you weren’t expecting. Part of that is knowing the subject really well. There are very few people that I interview that I don’t know inside out. I might spend two or three days at the library doing research on that person so I know a lot about them so if they bring things up I know what they’re talking about and that so that I can hold my own in a conversation with them on their terms.

Is there any memorable interviews for you?

There are basically two interviews to this day that I really go back to or refer back to in the general day-to-day living of my life. They’re the interviews I did with Kathleen Hanna and Ian Mackaye. The Kathleen Hanna one was actually all the way backing in issue 27 and the Ian Mackaye was actually issue 31. Those two people are probably the two people that are most responsible for me being here in the first place ‘cause they’re the people that kept punk interesting and relevant to me during times that I thought that I wasn’t all that interested in it. Doing the interviews with them I thought that they were incredible interviews and I’ll never forget them and I’m constantly remembering things that they said.

Way more recently issue 50 I did an interview with Sally Timms and John Langford from The Mekons that’s going to be one of those interviews to. One of those ones that years from now I actually remember something they said and go ‘yeah that’s totally right on and how I want to live my life too’.

If I can walk away from an interview and feel that it’s given me something I know that it’s a successful interview and that it’ll resonate with other people too.

In the Kathleen Hanna interview you did I thought it was interesting how she bought up the concept of artists actually getting paid for what they do! Why do you think people seem to have the mentality that art is not a valid career?

I think a lot of that has to do with this culture and where it’s priorities lies. Ultimately this is remarkably better than when PP started eight years ago but even still today….

It’s hard to get punks to read!

Yeah it’s hard to get punks to read, it’s hard to get punks to care about anything other than a record. It’s problematic it’s definitely a thing we’ve been fighting for some time. When we raise our cover price it’s a battle we have to fight all over again. People will say why should I pay $5 for your zine when I can buy a 7” for the same price. It’s like ‘okay wait a second, for $5 you’re getting 10 minutes of music out of that max, 15 if it’s recorded on 33 and really crammed together and your somehow saying that that’s worth more than you know 155 pages of magazine – that’s crazy!’ It’s really frustrating, that attitude is frustrating.

How does it feel to reach the 50th issue of PP?

Crazy! It was really crazy. We just had a party at Quimby’s on Friday for it and Sally Timms and John Langford played some music and I was kind of the MC and we had four people that have written for the magazine. It was really good, but the one bad thing was that Quimby’s air conditioning broke that day and it was 110 degrees in the shop. Reaching 50 issues though was pretty amazing and I didn’t expect that it would affect me the way it did.

I thought the 50th issue was just going to be like all the other ones, but it was a pretty big milestone a lot of work to get there. It really made me look at the run as a whole and look at my life over that time and ask ‘well has it all be worth it? Has the sacrifices I’ve made and other people to get this done has it all been worth it?’ It was a really interesting process to finally get to the point where the answer was yes! To be totally honest with you the first time through the answer was no I don’t think this has been worth it. There’s been a whole heap of opportunities missed.

So how often do you actually question what you’re doing?

On a daily basis, but I think that’s healthy. I really question myself all the time. I think it’d be really hard to do this in a culture that’s so orientated towards so not doing these types of projects without questioning it all the time. I think it’d be really arrogant not to question it all the time.

Does questioning it add freshness to it and help you to refocus on what you’re doing?

Yeah. I think that if you kind of say ‘yep this is what I do and it’s a good thing that I’m doing it there should really be no one questioning why it’s being done’. I think you would be producing something really stagnant really fast.

At what point did you realise you didn’t have to work a day job anymore and knew you could just concentrate on the magazine?

Probably a couple of years ago. A year and a half ago I stopped having any kind of regular pay cheque.

Was that scary for you?

Yes it was scary but it also felt like it just had to happen. The magazine started when I was in college and working three jobs and doing the magazine. I literally slept like four hours for years. When I got out of school I was working at a local alternative weekly newspaper and it was fulltime 40 hours a week and about three days. That freed up my time a lot to be able to write for PP. Over the year and half I was there I kind of culled that down to two days then one day and during that time I picked up a lot of freelance design work and I eventually quit that job and just did freelance design.

Do you still have the Collection Agency design company you started with a couple of friends?

No that went out in a blaze of glory a few years ago, then I was just doing freelance on my own. It finally got to a point where even the design work was getting in the way of the PP work. It had to be possible for me just to do the PP work now granted that means I live a pretty meagre existence. It’s hard, it’s really hard especially as I get older. Like my girlfriend and I want to you know have a family and that but it’s like how does this fit in and how can we afford it? She’s a librarian and she doesn’t make a lot of money so it’s like can we afford it? But it means that I’m pretty flexible to and I think I could pretty easily look after the kid.

How do you feel about the concept of bringing kids into today’s world the way it is?

I think it’s pretty awesome actually. I’m actually pretty behind it. I have a couple of friends that are my age and both of them have two year old and it’s really awesome to see these kids grow up and see these really smart, really right-on, very independent thinking parents raising these incredible kids. That seems really awesome especially now. I think it’s really important to raise kids that are going to grow up a question things and live exciting independent lives.

Does your girlfriend help you out with PP?

Yes she does. She’s always been a lot of psychological help but actually in the last year she’s become the subscriptions manager of the magazine and things like the party at Quimby’s she ran the merch table. She’s very willing to fill-in in a pinch, which is very helpful. It does eat into a lot of personal time.

Do you find that you get people sucking up to you or that because you’re Daniel Sinker from PP people are nice to you only because of that?

Honestly I don’t really put myself in the situation for that. For people to kiss your ass or put you on a pedestal I think you really have to play along with that, you have to be willing to have your ass kissed and put yourself in a position for them not to treat you like everyone else. It’s very rare if I’m at a show that I’ll introduce myself as Dan Sinker from PP, I’ll be like ‘hey I’m Dan I like your band’. You have to secretly want it to get that. I’m totally uninterested in that. I don’t hang out at cool bars; I don’t kiss up to cool folks; that’s not why I’m in this.

When you first started did you get star struck by people in bands and over the years did you work out that they’re just like everyone else or did you know it from the beginning?

The thing about it is that its punk…I would actually consider it a myth about punk is that we’re all the same. When I started out I wasn’t really in awe of anyone I can think of one or two though that made me kind of nervous to interview them.

Who where they?

Ironically Kathleen. We did an interview with Bikini Kill with issue five and I was really nervous to talk to them and because of that it wasn’t a really good interview and I ended up doing it over.

What’s the worst thing that’s ever gone wrong in an interview?

The worst was ever was when I interviewed this guy in prison who had been sent to death row who had, had this harrowing experience there. He had been framed by the cops for the murder of his parents and was sent to death row and after being sent to death row had his sentence changed to life in prison but was still in a pretty hardcore prison for a number of years and he was finally exonerated and I did an interview with him.

He was at a farm and I drove out and did an interview with him and the tape just totally did not work at all. I didn’t know that until I got home and he was like on the verge of tears you know and talking about the experience and I definitely pressed him about it more than I probably should have. It was a pretty rough interview as far as an emotional one and all of that and I got back and the fucking thing had not recorded at all. I had to call him back and was like ‘look Garry I’m really sorry and I know it was really rough and I completely understand if you don’t want to do it again but is there any way we could re-do this interview on the phone?’ He kind of just gave a defeated sigh and agree to it but the second run through the interview was nowhere near the first.

Is it important to you that you get interviews on tape rather than via e-mail?

I like doing it live better I just think because the way I like doing interviews I like doing them like a conversation it works out better. Trying to do that on e-mail is fairly difficult. E-mail is very just question answer, question answer that I’m not a big fan off. One thing that’s interesting putting the stuff together for the book (We Owe You Nothing) was that for some of the interviews I actually wanted to go back to the original tape and fill in a couple of blanks that I knew was missing from pieces and it was just like [insert loud static noise hear] it sounded like shit you could barely hear anything and it bummed me out. So much so that I went out and bought one of those mini-disc recorders.

A lot of people talk about punk as a community when it first started a lot of thing use to fly under the punk banner now days there seems to all these sub-divisions like emo-punk, pop-punk, hardcore-punk, street-punk why do think it all branched out into these different groups?

Ironically we here at PP do still classify it all still as punk and we cop a lot of shit as a result of it. I think people in general even us that exist outside the mainstream, people have this inherent want to belong to something and I think that things getting increasing chopped up into genre is kind of always going to happen. Because punk can sound like anything and you’re not going to like all of it you’re going to hang out with people who like what you like and you’ll go listen to the music that you like so it’s inevitable that things will break into smaller pieces. However I think it’s important that you recognize those pieces as being part of a whole – that they aren’t necessarily a whole unto themselves, although at times they can feel like it they add up to something much larger, it’s all punk which goes much further than musical genre. That’s one of the really cool things now – that people can make a D.I.Y punk film, or punk artists or punk books things like that those are possible and I think those things are only going to become more possible in the future.

This may be a really obvious question but why’d you call the mag PP? Is it important when naming a publication that it has something to do with its content?

To be honest I hated the name of the magazine for a long time. It wasn’t my first choice at all. Someone else had the idea for the name and when we started the magazine was much more collectively and voluntarily run then it is now. Enough people liked it so it stuck. I now like the title a lot ‘cause there’s so much more in it than what you’d expect for a magazine called ‘Punk Planet’. I do think it’s helpful that it’s blatantly titled ‘punk’, I definitely think that attracts some people to it immediately but in some ways I think it’s a burden to ‘cause I think there’s a lot of things some people could be getting out of it but they never pick it up because it’s called ‘Punk Planet’.

What issue has been PP’s bestseller?

It’s really hard to say what issue is the best selling. There’s one issue ever in the entire run of the magazine that sold out completely. It sold out so completely that I don’t even have a copy and that was issue twenty, which, was the Black Flag oral history. So you could say that was our best-selling one except back then we were only printing about 5,000 copies. Our actual best, best selling issue is… well it’s hard to say ‘cause each new issue sells better than the one before. As far as back issues the most order ones of those are the ‘design’ issues and then you could kind of guess the two issues with Steve Albini on the cover did very very well, the Ian Mackaye issue does well to this day, the Kathleen Hanna issue did well while we had it as did the Sleater Kinney issue. Definitely the issues with famous people on the cover sell better than anything else but stubbornly I don’t learn that lesson and so there aren’t famous people on the cover very often, which is fine. The issues without famous people also sell very well. We don’t have a problem selling issues which is very nice.

You’ve achieved so much thus far, is there still something out there for you? Still something for you to achieve? Do you ever think of going back to video?

I do think about going back to video, I bought a video camera about a year and a half ago…I literally have touched it once. There is lots I still want to do. There’s the concept of putting out an issue that I’m 100% happy with, which will never happen and if it did I don’t think I’d know what to do next. Honestly though I still feel like I’m learning and while I certainly know how to put an issue out on time and know how to get interesting things to put in there I still have much to learn. Last year was learning about how to work with other people which has never been my strong suit at all…

I bet your report card read: ‘does not work well with others’.

Precisely. I’ve been fired from jobs for not working well with other people. I still feel I’m getting a hold of that. This years been a lot about opening up conversation with the other folks that work on the magazine and really getting other people involved in the decision making process. Like I’ve been saying for many years now if PP stopped being a challenge I wouldn’t do it anymore.

Do you have any regrets?

Yeah of course. I don’t think that you can’t not have regrets. You’re always going to say ‘hey if I would of done this and this and this I would be an entirely different person’. You’re always going to have a pang of regret about that but not enough that it’s like ‘oh god I don’t want to be doing this’ not in the least. The regrets are pretty minimal as opposed to what the reality is. It’s pretty insane. It’s rare that a day doesn’t go by that I have a moment where I go ‘I can’t believe that I get to do this’. Really and truly there isn’t a moment that at some point in the day where it’s just like, ‘God damn it, this is lucky’. It’s great, it’s a great feeling.