Talking with zine creator Scott Morton

Scott Morton is the creator of Eat the Bologna, a skate zine originally based in North County San Diego. I was interested in picking Scott’s brain since he’s been making his zine for much longer than I’ve been making mine, and we had a great conversation. We talked about his process in making his zine, his skateboarding upbringing, the nostalgia trap of getting older, and more. So yeah, enjoy the conversation!

Photo by Scott Morton. Photo originally in Eat The Bologna issue 7
 

So, how’d you get into writing?

I’ve always been really into reading tons of books. I don’t have the attention span to watch TV, but I could sit and read for hours. So, just from reading, I kinda figured that that’s the flip side to writing. And I never written fiction, but I’ve been able to write about skating, that just came naturally to me.

I noticed that your skate zine didn’t start on issue 1. Why’d you start on issue 0.7 and not issue 1?

It was to truly prove to myself that I could do it. I think that issue 0.7 is two pieces of paper total folded in half, so like 8 half pages. I just took a couple photos and I was printing them on my home printer. I had to learn to print them on one side and flip the pages over and print them so they lined up. I probably went through like a dozen tries of them just being reversed and backwards and upside down. I learned how to do that, so issue 0.7 was just proof of concept, like, “Oh, I did it. There’s a zine now.” Then after that I was like, “Now I’m going to really try to make issue 1.”

How long were you thinking about making a zine before issue 0.7?

Not very long. I kind of just went for it. I was into making little YouTube edits, and my friends would save their clips and really edit hard, and I’d just film with my iPhone and throw the clips on premier and put a song over it. I didn’t really care that the edit was bad, I just wanted to make an edit. And so, I kind of went with that same idea towards the zine, like I don’t really care. I don’t have any background in photography, and so I just thought it was probably going to be bad, but I wanted to see if I could do it.

Did you eventually develop a standard? Like the next one had to be better than the last one, or was it always like, “I just want to make this shit,” just for fun?

I think by issue 4 I felt pretty proud of what I had done, and I felt they had to be at least that good. So, there were a couple things, like I started to have sections that were in each issue where I wanted to write about music, I wanted to cover an artist, do things that are kind of outside of skating, because I used to really like Transworld. That was my favorite magazine. One of my favorite parts was that it had all these little sections. You knew each Transworld issue had a checkout section. So, I liked having sections, and I kind of went through it and decided each issue is going to have these sections. I’ll have photos I shot of this event, or here’s an interview with a person, but most of it was based around those sections. And so that’s what kind of made it easier. They’re sort of like a template that I have now.

Did you ever give yourself a deadline?

I haven’t. I know a lot of people are like, “You should get a subscription thing! And do one a year!” And I’m like, “Nah.” Because I’ll get really inspired sometimes and get half way done with one, and then I won’t work on it for like 2 months. So, it’s just kind of when I’m feeling it. I get a rush out of it when I’m enjoying it, and I put on the headphones and blasting music and clicking away and making it happen. I love that. It’s like a super big rush.

So, because Transworld was your favorite magazine, did anything specific other than the sections in Transworld make you want to start your zine?

Not particularly where I was like, “I want to do that myself.” It’s more that once I started doing it, I kind of started looking back at older magazines and thinking about what was special about those. What in these magazines made me feel something? I didn’t read Thrasher as a kid, I mean, in the early 2000s Thrasher was kind of bad, like it was not a good quality magazine. So, I didn’t really read Thrasher. I read a lot of Transworld, and their being kid friendly, like they were more PC, that’s something I tried to carry over in my zine to kind of make it for everybody. I don’t really get down with the Thrasher, “Skate and destroy! Fuck yeah! Hell ride!” That stuff is corny to me. I like to be more inclusive of everybody, inclusive of all levels of skating. I really love encouraging and taking photos of kids skate and me being like, “You 50-50’d this rail!” People don’t realize how sick it is when you take a fisheye photo. You can make really basic tricks look sick with the fisheye, so taking a picture of a kid that’s kind of nervous and showing them the photo and being like, “It looks fucking sick.” And they’re like, “Woah!” I know that that lights a fire in that kid, because they’re like, “I’m pretty good!”

From what I’ve noticed, the written articles have been less and less over the years, and magazines have focused more on videos. Have you noticed that too?

I don’t want to get too into the meat here, but Thrasher really exists to sale a product. We pretend we’re reading it as editorial, but really Thrasher is advertisements. So, those trips that are paid for by Nike, they’re advertising Nike shoes, so they may not be paying thrasher directly for the article, but they’re paying to send those writers and photographers. And then that article is going to send them to the video, which is the advertisement that skateboarding is selling. All those things being tied specifically to videos is the magazine getting you to watch the 20-minute advertisement for a company. And so that’s why I think you’re getting less interesting editorial and more advertisement.

It’s cheaper to produce zines nowadays by making it online only, so there’s a lot more zines being started now. What do you think about the new skate zines/magazines coming out nowadays?

Part of that is really influenced by Instagram in a way. Instagram really promotes that your voice matters, that you and your feed matter. I mean it’s kind of funny to do in San Diego, because it’s one of the capitals of skateboarding. But you think of like Skate Jawn and they’re like Philly, but they’re like hyper focused on Philly, and they’re like, “Look our scene matters. And sure, there’s other stuff going on. It’s cool, but we don’t care because we care about our scene and our locals.” There’s also an old mag I know, they stopped publishing in maybe 2013, and they were strictly east coast. I remember when I first found out about it and just flipping through it, I didn’t know the name of anyone in it. I saw dope photos from photographers I’ve never heard of, and that got it really spinning in my head like, “Oh, your personal experience in skateboarding matters.” I became less excited about shooting the best photos with the best skateboarders and getting interviews every once in a while. I was like, “No, I want to interview my friends and talk about my skate trips that I’m going on with the random locals.” That’s exciting to me and I hope that other people get that from seeing zines. I guess that goes back to growing up in the desert. The name of my zine Eat the Bologna, that was my crew. We were 13, us 5 guys in this tiny desert town where we skated every day. And as I got older, I was like, “Wow, that was actually really special.” And I know there’s probably 100s of little crews like that of just a couple of kids filming their progression and skating every day. That’s the essence of skateboarding, moments where you’re just hanging out with your friends and skating every day as a kid. That’s as pure as it gets.

Tell me more about your crew in the desert. How’d that start? How was that phase in your life like?

I was like 13 or 14 in a little tiny town. There were maybe a dozen skateboarders in the whole town and we had 1 skatepark. We would skate all day and then at night the lights would come on at the park, and we’d skate the park at night. It was just skating all the time. Eventually, we started convincing our parents to take us on skate trips. Maybe at 15, we did like a San Diego trip, and then we went to San Francisco, we went to Denver. We would go on a trip every summer. And when we went to Denver we took 2 cars, so we had all my friends driving out to Denver and just hanging out and skating. It’s funny, because we’d call it, “Going on tour.” Like we were some pro skate team when we were just a bunch of kids. But like those moments are special. I love those memories, the tricks we did, the places we skated, and it’s like all the stuff in between, the sitting in the car, the sitting in the hotel, those moments are so special. I can’t think of anything else that gives that sort of feeling. And I hear other people talk about their crews in the same way.

That totally resonates. If you’re a skater usually you have a crew. And then you get older and look back at those moments as the golden years, like, “this is my youth.” You know?

Yeah, and for a while I kind of got stuck in the nostalgia trap. Like, “Those days are gone. I’m not as good at skating. Some of my friends have moved on from skating.” And you know, kind of being bummed about it. But then I started going on trips when I was older. You know, you make a little bit of money and you can afford to go to Spain, go to China. I’ve been to China 3 times now, and I’m like kind of chasing that dragon of the skate trip, and I’ve realized you can still do that. It’s great.

How long did it take you to realize that? That that feeling is not stuck in the past.

I’m not sure. There was kind of like a few years where I transitioned from trying to be the best at skateboarding for other people to just enjoying my own progression, and it became so much more fun. I started learning tricks that I have never done before, and I took it less seriously. I just kind of accepted it for what it was, and that made me start to appreciate skating a lot more. Now, I swear every session that I go on I’m just smiling the whole time, and I’m so happy to be with friends out skateboarding. I didn’t used to feel that way, so there was kind of a transition period to where I kind of got like that. Now, I’m just soaking it all in, and then loving it.

What was it about San Marcos, California that attracted you to it?

I mean, I just thought the spots were crazy, and my friends had like a skate house in San Marcos, so we would stay at the skate house. And we were like, “Holy shit. This is the dream.” And initially I moved out with two roommates, but one of them left after two months, so I lived with the same roommate that I skated with for like 7 years. We kind of did our own missions and stuff and would hit up all the spots that we were discovering. It’s funny, because after living there, it’s really not that special out of the whole area. So, it was just because that’s where I knew people at the time, and we would like go and we would stay.

How old were you then when you first moved to San Marcos?

I moved when I was 20, so 20 to 30 years old in San Marcos.

Looking back at those moments, what does it make you feel?

Once they built Connor’s Park in San Marcos my relationship to San Marcos changed. Because the first time I moved out there, it’s not like I thought I would go pro, but I wanted to be doing the skateboarding. And then once I started skating Connor’s Park and seeing little kids go from young to good in like a year or two, it got really exciting to push the kids and be able to be like, “Oh dude, here’s like my old board.” And see the kid 6 months later still skating my old board. So, I got really hyped on encouraging the kids around me. Especially the apartment complex that I lived at. There’s been like multiple generations of kids that just came out of there that started ripping.

That’s pretty interesting, because I do feel like apartment complexes can have a little sub-culture in them, you know? They can have a little scene inside of them. What was that scene like in that apartment complex?

Right at the bottom of the hill where I lived there was a curb, and it was nothing special. It’s just a curb that you can ollie off of and you can grind it if you want. But that just became a meet up spot. There’d be kids learning how to kickflip and there’s was the slappy sessions going on. So, it was really cool to just be able to go down there and always have someone to skate with. I mean, I’ve probably played 100s of games of flat ground with random kids. And there’s like a couple spots in the apartment complex, and seeing those kids get good enough to hit those spots—Oh! This is a great story. One time, it’s like 6:30 in the morning and I hear click clack click clack click clack. And somebody is trying something, and I’m like, “What is going on?” I look out and there’s an 11 stair that you can see from my balcony, and this kid is trying the stairs on his way to school. They were skating to school, and he wanted to get a couple tries in. He broke his board and I’m like, “No.” So, I go out and give him my board and he ollies this 11-stair on his way to school. And he’s like, “I gotta go, I gotta go. I’m going to be late for class.”

That’s so sick.

And I shoot the photo from my balcony. That was just such an awesome opportunity to get to do something like that.

Was that around the time you began your zine?

I was making zines for a few years at that point. When I first started doing it, I had a friend and he filmed. He was the Vox filmer for a long time, and then he worked for Finesse for a while. And so, I would just go out with them, and there was nobody shooting photos. I wasn’t like skating a lot of the spots they were skating, so I came up on a camera from a friend for like 300 bucks. And I was just hanging, you know? The filmer was sitting at the bottom of the stairs, and I’d sit next to him. I got a fisheye and started shooting photos, just to kind of have something to do while they were skating the spots. And then I was taking journalism classes and I had this dream that I would work for Thrasher or something, so I got into doing layout, got really into the whole process while working for the school newspaper. And I was like, “Hey, I could kinda do that, make a skate zine.” So, I just kind of went for it. The first ones were definitely pretty rough, but I slowly figured it out.

Now that you’ve moved up to Oregon, are you going to keep making the zine?

Yeah, totally. Most of the next one that’s going to come out is content that I shot while I was still in California, so it’ll be my last California one. But yeah, as soon as I get my camera up here it’s just going to be the same thing and keep on rolling with it.

That’s fucking sick dude. I can’t wait to see it. But yeah, that’s all I got.

Hell yeah, dude. Thanks for doing this. I love to shoot the photos, and sometimes I forget that other people see it.

It’s sick, I’m a big fan for sure. We’ll have to do interview 2 once you get the Oregon zine done.

I have to interview you for my zine! We’ll have to trade them

I’m down. Hell yeah! Let’s get it man.

Well, thanks.

Interview by: Erick Carrada 

Scott’s Instagram: eatthebologna