Katie Medred
Urban culture magazine Crude pulls from Anchorage roots to create something new.
Cover image by Sebastian Garber.
Twenty-six-year-old Cody Liska slides the newest issue of his magazine, Crude, across the table. On the cover is an illustration by contributing artist Kevin Marrese, depicting a handful of rappers and hip-hop artists, producers and OGs from the Anchorage scene. Subliminal logos and hidden meanings linger in the background. It’s a good-looking cover.
Inside “Arrogant Minds,” the third issue of Crude, an attempt at first-person storytelling and urban journalism is unfolding.
What Crude is attempting to do is genuinely different from anything else Anchorage has yet seen. It’s like Vice Magazine and Snowboarder paired up to create a high quality ‘zine featuring actual Alaskans, not caricatures.
“There’s a lot of things I can’t say. There’s a lot of shit involved in this magazine that’s too crude [for most publications] to print,” Liska says. “That, itself, speaks to the type of content that’s in here,” he taps on the cover to emphasize his point.
Crude is young and thematic. The magazine’s first issue, “A Product of Our Environment,” dealing with the topic of growing up Alaskan, was released in February of this year. Although it was imagined as a traditional quarterly, the release of the second issue, “Slope Rich,” was delayed after Graphic Designer Sebastian Garber’s car was broken into this spring in Portland, Oregon. His laptop, which contained the finalized pages, was stolen. Garber, 27, lives in Oregon full time.
“Slope Rich” did eventually go to print, but it put a dent in the four-issues a year model Liska was striving for. Now, in mid- December, issue three, “Arrogant Minds,” has just been released along with an accompanying EP (read more on the EP here), Liska says. It’s the last issue of 2014. “I already have Issue 4, ‘Legacy,’ in the works,” he adds, “but it won’t be something we get to until after the New Year.”
The majority of the magazine’s content comes from personal essays. Contributors to Crude weave stories around the issue’s theme chosen by Liska and Garber. Take for example “Arrogant Minds,” which deals with a cross-section of hip hop/rap in Anchorage. For this issue, Liska curated and edited stories by local rappers and people in the scene (with help from producer Alkota) supplementing that content with articles, interviews and Q&A style write-ups of his own. This method and presentation has become pretty standard for the publication, Liska says. Besides, having contributors really helps fill out the mag.
“Right now, there are two people doing it, basically. Just me and Sebastian,” Liska says. “I do probably 90 percent of the work: contacting, people, editing, and then Sebastian puts it all together. Then there’s contributing illustrator Kevin Marrese and Carrie [Hambach, who acts as a contributing editor].”
Because of the first-person approach, sometimes the content can get a little real. Unconventional stories and ones that may not find another avenue for publication often end up here, in Crude. And the magazine certainly doesn’t hold back.
A story written by Arctic Flow Records founder, Akream, begins “You’re 19. Freshman in college. Moderate partier. Founder of an online hip-hop ‘zine. A few things are understood: you agreed to cover a moderately scaled annual Midwest music festival put on by an independent record label and several alcohol venders. Also. As kind of a twofer, you planned not only to interview an independent hip-hop artist that is on the bill for the festival, but to also share a hotel room with him in furtherance of saving money as well as building a rapport that might not be afforded through any other dynamic. Simple.” Akream is, of course, the aforementioned emcee. “It’s morning and upon opening your eyes and gathering a sense of what’s around you, you realize immediately that there is no sense to be gathered … There is a crushing sound coming from the desk next to the TV, which turns out to be emcee buddy crushing up some sort of opiate-based pill and you find yourself wondering, not why, but how he’s still awake after the amount of alcohol he consumed the previous night. He’s not tired. He’s bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. … On the other bed is a sheet with countless blood stains, streaks and handprints.”
From here, the details get a bit graphic (you’ll have to pick up a copy if you want to find out what happened), but Liska recognized it added value and character. To cut it out would be censorship, Liska feels. If it happened, it happened, he says.
“That type of shit,” Liska says, referring to the event in Akream’s story, “I can’t imagine you guys publishing something like that. It would just be too much; just too much information. And same thing with the AND, but that’s just cause I think those guys are pussies.”
Thankfully missing from the pages of Crude are the disappointing, gimmicky half-baked reality T.V. personalities that Outsiders have (unfortunately) begun to associate with “us,” and there’s a real reason for that which has to do with Liska and Garber’s upbringings.
"Culturally, I believe Crude can do great things for Alaska. Representing more than your television can,” Garber wrote in an email. “Touch emotions that MTV can’t. There is so much natural beauty, culture, and inspiration in Alaska. Why when I say I'm from Alaska do people immediately think: reality shows? (Nothing against the individuals on television, but you’re putting your Subaru into the ditch because your producer told you to.) Alaska is a beautiful place to be from. I love saying so. It has influenced me in so many ways. It is important to compare yourself to others, but in my opinion taking influence from our home can be so much more powerful. Our culture is our own to create.”
Liska and Garber were both born and raised in Anchorage. Liska’s father, Scott, owned and operated Boarderline Snow and Skate Shop, one of the most influential in the city. Anyone involved in the snow and skate scene during the 15 (or so) year span between the 1990s and the early 2000s knew it well.
The store was, at one point, the foundation of an entire generation of rippers. It was a community within a community and the place that kids like Liska and Garber came up. A whole culture was formed around what the shop represented as well as the extra things it provided—an annual snowboard camp at the top of Alyeska, an indoor skate park, shop sponsorships for skate and snowboarders, and facilitation of video premiers and parties. Nothing quite like Boarderline had ever existed here in Anchorage, and perhaps nothing like it ever will again.
“Snowboarding takes me away from this world. Sets my mind free. I know I'm not the only one that feels this way,” Garber said. “I've never had guidance or rules in my snowboarding. I bring that same attitude to our magazine's creative direction. I believe the saving grace of snowboarding is it is not bound by rules, or has a set cookie cutter attitude, its built on young punks, cuss words, and hauling ass. It's where I came from: open minds push culture forward. ”
Liska talks warmly about the influence Boarderline had on him and his peers. His father’s entrepreneurial spirit and willingness to take risks fueled his own ambitions to develop something meaningful for the community.
“I like to call Crude a magazine for the nostalgic progressive,” Liska says as he thumbs through a copy of Issue Three. “So when you look through something like this, you’re like ‘oh yeah, I remember [rapper] Josh Boots!’ But then you get to someone like Snarley Brown or Keezy, or this newer guy Elan Brio and your just like, ‘oh OK, these guys are new.’ You’re kind of meshing the old and the new.”
But before there was Crude there was Rewind to End, a snowboard-skateboard culture blog founded in the early 2000s before blogging anything normal people recognized as profitable. It was created and run by Liska and Garber and their two friends Clayton Linden and Andy Halverson. The four-some put the project into motion via Dreamweaver, a code heavy web and design processor and predecessor to contemporary “web logging” sites like Blogspot and Wordpress.
“It was really just our medium to talk shit,” Liska jokes. “But we posted videos on there and did all this stuff and it just started to pick up. Which surprised me—us.”
Blogging has really only been around for about 20 years. Back in the early 2000s making money off a blog was nearly unheard of, but Liska says Rewind to End was popular enough to attract unsolicited inquires.
“People wanted to advertise with us. [But] we were 16. We had no idea what that even meant. It was 2004 and we were like, ‘how do we even do an ad on a website?’”
Eventually, Rewind to End died away as the various members moved on and went to college, but Liska says the idea behind it never left him.
In 2011, after graduating from the University of Nevada, Reno with a newly minted degree in journalism, Liska returned home to Anchorage and set out to find that golden ticket 9-to-5.
He found it within the ranks of Anchorage Printing Inc. where he was able to get some experience editing and writing for the Alaskan wholesale catalogue, the GreatLander Bushmailer, while brainstorming the birth of Crude.
Garber, on the other hand, went to work for the snowboard journal Frequency, before taking time off from the publishing world and working on a boat outside of Seward.
About a year into his job, Liska says it became clear he was ready to commit 100 percent to Crude. “Sebastian, Carrie and I had been talking about it and things were starting to happen, at least ideas were, and I just couldn’t focus on my job.”
One night Garber brought an issue of culture publication Frank 151 over to Liska and Hambach’s house to show them another way to approach the concept.
“Crude really came about on Cody's kitchen table with a bottle of whiskey and a dream to have a creative outlet,” said Garber. “[Cody] had the name, and we both had worked in publishing. I brought Frank 151 over and showed him why I loved it.”
Liska quit in October of 2013 and announced his plan to debut Crude in early 2014, shortly thereafter.
Since its inception, and almost solely through word of mouth and social media, the magazine has been able to pull in more and more advertising, including local businesses like the 49th Supply Co., Alaska Surf Adventures and Boarderline Legacy in Juneau, as well as more nationally known operations like Dinosaurs Will Die, Grassroots California and Thedrumbroker.com.
Liska says the magazine, which is printed in town, is able to fund itself through ads, sales of merch—including t-shirts, posters, stickers and, obviously, the magazine (which is print only, no online version is available) and subscriptions to it—and its rather successful release parties.
The first two parties were held at Brown Bag Sandwich Co. in downtown Anchorage. For the release of the third, Liska says he wanted a bigger space for both performers and the anticipated crowd. The “Arrogant Minds” release, at Chilkoot Charlie’s on December 12, was a resounding success, Liska says. Having that kind of backing in a community this small is crucial to floating an idea like Crude, he added.
Liska uses each financial bump as funding for the next issue, and as a way to grow and create a more sophisticated product. His plan is well-illustrated by this third issue, which saw the magazine graduate from a “saddle stitch” to “perfect” binding. It may seem like a small detail, but the switch has a huge impact on the product’s presentation, he says.
As the magazine moves forward, Liska says it’s “all about the small goals.” Staying focused and trying not to become overwhelmed have been challengs, but he leans on routine and the help from Hambach and Garber to steady it. Keeping the bigger picture in mind is also chief. There are established ideas about how he’d like to see Crude look and feel in the very near future.
“If there’s a Vice flavor its ‘cause I really like Vice. Vice popularized this new kind of journalism: ‘immersion journalism.’ That’s what I want to do. It’s a new way of thinking about investigative journalism. Like, if you’re gonna write, say, a story on a drug … you should probably do the drug,” Liska laughs. “You might have to smoke some Spice. If you’re gonna write a story about it, you should probably know what it actually does.”
Crude Magazine’s Issue #4 “Legacy” will be out in 2015, in the meantime you can purchase back issues at crudemag.com.
On the Cover