23/08/2016

L: Lee Spielman     S: Shawn Yates     A: Anthony Kwang

 

L:  My room mates are all freaking out because they just got all these industrial lasers that are illegal…you can hit     airplanes and shit.

S:  Why do they have them? 

L:  Just because they buy stupid shit. I guess they bought them and blinded the guy down the street…he was playing his acoustic guitar like maybe halfway down the block and shined him in the eye.

A:  Where'd you get the lasers from?

L:  You can buy 'em on these Chinese websites, like Alibaba and shit.

S:  Alibaba's got the craziest shit on there.

L:  I love Alibaba. We'll be at our house and get drunk and spend $10 on Alibaba, cause you can buy shit for 50 cents, like whoopee cushions and stupid shit...but then they don't ship it for like 3 months so you completely forget and we'll just get a little package from Alibaba with some stupid shit you forgot about.

But I guess our neighbour came over to the house like, "Yo, you blinded me!"

S:  What was he doing, shining him in the eyes?

L:  Yeah he shined him in the eye from down the street, like from here to SUPPLY…he came over and we have this one friend …you know that band "Iron Age"? He's like this 6'5, long haired bruiser and I guess he just walked off our porch and knocked this guy out.

S:  The guy who got blinded?

L:  Yeah, the guy who got blinded got knocked out after that.

How's the Babylon store going?

It's been good, we're just trying to keep it going. It's kind of turned into a clubhouse for kids. One second it'll be 20 kids, then school let's out and then it'll be 100 kids. It's pretty fun, just everyone skatin', hanging' out… kinda down whatever they want, but it's cool. They're civilised.

How about the label?

When it first started there was a lot of kids just figuring out about it, now the type of people that come in are so far across the spectrum, like skate kids to kids who like clothes to kids who like punk to kids who like rap. I think we just came up on our one year anniversary last week. But it feels like it's 5 years old after one year, so that's fuckin sick. It's one of those things that has a snowball effect, it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and now we're seeing more international people coming from Asia and Europe and Australia. It's just been cool to watch it grow, from just a crazy idea that we didn't know if it would work.

Can you tell us a bit about your old warehouse spot?

We did this thing for our band called Trash Talk for a while and we felt like the only way we could get work done is if we all lived together, so we just moved together to different regions in the world and try to take over. It was like "Oh, yo, let's all move to Richmond, Virginia and become an East Coast band for three months and destroy the East Coast…like let's all move to Seattle and become a North-West band and take over the North West. Then we're like, let's move to London and get a flat and just fuck up England, so we did that and then our lease was up at the very end of our England trip and we were like, 'Where should we go?' Garrett, my partner in Babylon, suggests we should just go to LA, but none of us knew anything about LA, so we just went on Craigslist and found the first warehouse that we could and we were like 'Alright, let's just take it', a thousand bucks a month we'll take it. So we landed from London to LA, then we started driving to the middle of nowhere and it was South Central and we were like "fuck, we're about to live here?". It was a full industrial district with crack-heads and warehouses. We didn't know where the fuck we were, we just wanted to build a place where could do whatever we wanted to do in it and live there, so we started to build lofts in the ceiling….next thing you know the whole place was covered in graffiti, next thing you know we got a mini-ramp in there and we started shipping our merch outta there. It became a creative space for us to do everything we wanted to do in one place. Babylon is almost kind of building on that idea, but making it more available to the public.

Cause that was a place where we would make zines and screen print shirts and do photography and skate and we had shows in there and shows in our alley, but it was just our crew of 20 homies and then we were like, "maybe we should take this idea and try to present it to everybody cause this is sick".

I let one homie paint graffiti in there once , these dudes from brazil Os Gemeos, and that fucked it all up. Then there was Neckface and next thing you know it's pretty much like a gallery covered in shit. I do miss that spot, because it was literally anything goes, like staying awake til 5 in the morning making noise and doing whatever so I feel like Babylon is a little piece of that but more open to the public. Babylon is like a cleaner version of that.

Has the crew changed since you guys moved into the new spot?

Nah, it's still the same homies, you know what I mean?

If we need to do a lookbook, we call the same friends. If we want to make a zine, we call the same friend. It's kind of been the same clique forever. They'll come on tour with us, come help out at the shop, it's just one of those things where we try to keep most our things in-house with friends. We all trust each other and like each other's creative outputs, so it's always worked that way.

Is the crowd you guys get on Highland different to the crowd on Fairfax?

When we were first about to open up, we looked everywhere, we looked on Melrose, Beverly, Fairfax…we were trying to look for something similar to the first warehouse compound we had. Like it's own freestanding compound with nothing else around it, so Garrett our partner found, basically like a house. Our walls don't touch anybody and we can do anything we want. Try to have one place that's all inclusive, everything inside of it. And it's one of those things where I feel like a lot of the shops on Fairfax just piggyback off that shit….you know like, "I'm just going to stumble in to this store because I was at Supreme and now bleh". It's just easy that way you know? And I like just being off the beaten path, cause it's like kids have to go out of their way to get there. It's not like you stumble in to this place; you know where you're going and you know why you're going there and we have our own clique. We don't just hang out on Fairfax and take pictures of each other's outfits, kids are actually being creative with skating, having fun, but I definitely feel like it's not a nice neighbourhood. We're on the tranny block of LA, you know it's a little bit grimy, but we have our own freestanding compound and we don't have anyone else around us and we don't need anyone else. I don't like the idea of piggy-backing off of all the other stores and being in the shopping district. If you can build something and it's gunna bring people, people are gunna come regardless. I feel like a lot of people think they need everyone else there to sustain instead of be their own thing. Our idea was to make our own place, our own world, which has been really tight.

What're the plans for Babylon in the future?

I mean the idea is to eventually try to take that vibe of having…the thing is, a lot of the kids who come to the shop, I don't expect them to drop a bunch of money on clothes. I expect them to hang out, have a good time, maybe learn something and feel welcome and then the clothes will sell themselves. I'd rather have a community. The idea is hopefully be able to take that idea and try to do it in other places around the world. Just try to build places for kids to come and be creative. Remember going to the skate shop as a little kid? And want the employee to like you? And think you're cool? And you're a little kid and if they're dicks, you go home and you're like "wow, that was a really awkward day and I don't feel comfortable going back there" With our shop, I try to throw that all out the window and more so have it like, this is our place, as much as it is yours. Everyone was that kid at one point, where you felt awkward being a kid, you know? And that sucks. In 10 years those kids are gunna have their own shops and they're gunna be the dudes so hopefully we can instil some sort of message in them to try not to be higher than thou and better than another kid. Take what you learn and pass it on to other people. Especially with my partner Garrett, we talk about building something we wished we had when we were little kids, like a place where you could go kick it, meet a friend there, go see maybe your favourite pro skater, skate the bowl, take photos, fuckin' look at zines, just try to make it more than a retail space because everybody sells clothes.

My favourite part of the store are the zines. It's cool that you try to promote kids making their own zines…

That's what I was talking to one of the homies about the other day, we buy a lot of zines, you know what I mean. We keep stock from publications that we like, but now a little kid will come in there and look at the zines and shit and we'll talk about 'em and he'll be like, "Fuck it! I'll just go and make my own!" and he'll come the next day and drop off his own. It's one of those things that's more important to me than making a million dollars. That kid now, is being creative and doing his own thing because he saw something. Maybe if he didn't see that, he wouldn't have done it. But, who knows? Maybe in 20 years that kid might run the biggest publication in the world because he went home and made a cut-and-paste zine after seeing one at the shop. It's one of those things thats more important than the actual retail space. We do love making clothes and the design aspect of it, but trying to give kids an idea of creative shit is way better. It's like, go do something, it's way better than sitting around taking photos of your outfits. Go do something creative, it's not all about the clothes you can purchase it's about what you can actually do.

 

 

Images: Courtesy of Jesse Lizotte

Interview by Anthony Kwang