Michael Sieben Sieben's things
His name is Michael. He’s an artist. And all this stuff belongs to him.
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You are not the car you drive. Or so that great existentialist Brad Pitt once said. But what if you are the things you surround yourself with - the weird shit you choose to collect because it reignites a memory.
Michael Sieben keeps little pieces of himself all over the place. They sit on his desk when he’s painting monsters and getting wistful for the past. They stare down at him from a notice-board when he’s writing his column for Thrasher magazine and telling the world to lighten-up. They crop up in the Internet Shack, the weekly online show he films in his gallery, Okay Mountain, that promises “a spastic variety of camping, skating and Internet flub”. They live in drawers, on shelves and in boxes under the bed, like a scatterbrain library documenting his thirty-five years on earth. And guess what? He’s not the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world – despite what that anti-consumerist cliché Tyler Durden may say – because his possessions tell stories, and collectively those stories make him who he is.
He’s the Austin-based artist who helps skateboarding stay tuned in to the simple stuff in life – like ’zines, and kooky stickers, and the beauty of making shit for fun. He’s Michael Sieben and these are his things.
Lilelephant patch
My buddy Lance Norman and I started a little T-shirt company in the mid ’90s called Lilelephant. We never printed more than about a dozen shirts of any one design. All of our buddies were ‘sponsored’ – meaning they could come over and print their own shirts in our backyard. We printed the shirts on an ice chest and used cereal bowls to mix inks. High tech.
Roger Skateboards sticker
I own a small skateboard company called Roger that I started with my buddy Stacy Lowery in 2008. This is one of the stickers we ordered right when we started the company. I just wanted to include it in this magazine because we can't afford to take out real ads so I try to sneak this logo into anything I can.
Fucked-up Blind Kids stickers
Blind Skateboards sticker pack from 1989 drawn by Marc McKee. One of my favorite skateboard illustrators and heavy nostalgia from my formative years on the board. Steve Rocco was killing it during this time.
D.H. Pendleton drawing on an envelope
When I graduated from college in 1999 I had absolutely no idea how to start looking for work doing anything art related, so I emailed every artist that I could find online and asked for advice. D.H. Pendleton was one of the only people that emailed back. It really meant a lot to me – and still does. I ordered some stickers off his website around the same time and the envelope showed up with a rad drawing on it. It's been hanging up on my bulletin board ever since. Thanks Don.
Fake Moustaches
After Keg Party ’zine I made a little ’zine called Programmed from India. I was writing under the pen name, David Dittmeyer – a forty-something alcoholic who couldn't hold a job down. He wore a leather jacket with no shirt on underneath and had a moustache. I bought a lot of fake moustaches around this time.
For the full interview check out HUCK#021, out now.
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