Jessica Herman

J.C. Gabel has set up shop in Kinko's. Sweating, soaking up the fluorescent interior light, Gabel paces around with his cell phone attached to his ear, manning the next issue of Stop Smiling, his magazine for pop-culture mavens. His assistant Chris Stapleton is busy making flyers for their upcoming exhibition at the Old Town School of Folk Music. "I'm an expert at cutting and pasting," the founder and editor of the magazine brags to Stapleton as he waits on hold.

He's had years of experience in the fine art of scissors and glue. Twenty-eight-year-old Gabel first began wearing down Kinko's carpeting when he started Stop Smiling eight years ago in his dorm room at Columbia College while majoring in journalism and marketing. Now the Chicago-based arts and culture magazine is the leader in a pack of self-published local publications, along with grrl-friendly Venus (launched in Amy Schroeder's dorm room at Michigan State) and punk digest Punk Planet (started by Dan Sinker while at the School of the Art Institute), that are navigating the transition from Xeroxed zine to a more professional enterprise. Stop Smiling has raised its circulation from 500 to 50,000. Starting this fall, you will be able to find the publication that bills itself as "the magazine for high-minded low-lifes" at your local Barnes & Noble and Borders. They have an advertising staff based on the West Coast and an art office in New York; this fall, they start adding foreign correspondents. The bimonthly (also as of this fall) publication has morphed into a full-color, glossy with an Absolut Vodka ad on its back cover--a long way from a dorm-room cut-and-paste job.

But has Stop Smiling's grassroots philosophy changed as it tries to fit into the world of mainstream magazine publishing? "When we wanted to sell the magazine we had to put it in the 'Lifestyles' category, but it's not that," says Gabel. "If you look at magazines now, it's sort of a cookie-cutter niche they're selling to, this sort of Maximized world." Stop Smiling, says Gabel, fits more into the era of New Journalism, when writers like Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson, inspired by the Beats, broke the mold of objective reporting, with lengthy literary ethnographies of subcultures. "We try to make it as timeless as possible without really tying into the PR machine," he says. The self-described "magazine geek" collects old copies of classic magazines like Playboy, Esquire, Interview, Spy and Creem that he snatches up on eBay. "Most of these magazines don't really exist in a way that they used to," Gabel says. "We're going back to the glory days of magazine publishing when the editors, writers, designers and illustrators were in charge and not the advertising and management."

This indie spirit inspires Gabel to publish lengthy interviews, like the 8,000-word Q&A with "Coffee and Cigarettes" auteur Jim Jarmusch, "for no particular reason other than we had enough material to do it." Sometimes they do profile folks touring on the promotional circuit, like upcoming cover subject Jeff Tweedy, who fits into next issue's theme, rebels and outlaws. (Gabel organizes every issue into a loose theme. Past themes have been comedy, New York, and fanaticism.) "A few months ago, you saw Tweedy everywhere. When our story comes out, it's maybe a few months after the hype," Gabel explains. They've also published a tribute cover to late Paris Review founder George Plimpton, along with one of his last interviews before his death. Famed political correspondent Christopher Hitchens is September's cover subject, who Gabel and managing editor James Hughes interviewed on a recent trip to D.C. "He drank us under the table," Gabel remembers. "He was going to the re-opening of the Iraqi embassy, so he went off to drink more and we went off to pass out."

Back at Kinko's, Gabel's is anxiously anticipating the show that opens a week from now at the Old Town School of Folk Music's Lincoln Square campus. Stop Smiling will be the first to exhibit their distinctive magazine covers in a fall series that will frame books and magazines as forms of folk art. Stop Smiling is known for publishing two or three covers every issue. The most recent issue features the Flaming Lips with a disco ball and bunny suits, Jim Jarmusch pulling coolly on a cigarette and a statesman-like Lou Reed--all posing on their respective covers. "Yeah, I like to keep people guessing," Gabel explains of the multiple-cover format. Although he recently sold out a Stop Smiling comedy show at the Bowery Ballroom in New York featuring hipster patron saint David Cross, the Downers Grove native is nervous about getting a bad turnout in his hometown for the opening-night concert, which will feature Lonesome Organist, Plush and The Zincs. He's concerned that the web editor in San Diego hasn't already emailed invitations for the opening. Chicago, he says, has been extremely supportive for the nascent indie magazine industry. Here, "Nobody's trying to outpunk one another or be too cool for school or anything like that."

Besides worrying about those details, Gabel's also in the center of the chaos of putting out the next issue of Stop Smiling. "(The business) is so labor-intensive it makes you want to throw up. We're not booking agents, just kids with a lot of ideas." Before hooking up with Hughes and company, Stop Smiling was basically Gabel's one-man show. Gabel calls the publication's first four-year chapter the "fanzine years." "It was a high-falutin' hobby, organic and not stressful." It took Gabel ten issues after the official re-launch in 2001 to get people to identify Stop Smiling as a magazine and not a zine. "It's my biggest hangup ever," he vents. "I mean, it doesn't help us sell copies, which is what I'm trying to do all day." He doesn't mean to sound ungrateful but gripes about his latest accolade, being named "Best Zine" in Chicago magazine.

"I think when people hear zine, they think, `Oh it just comes out whenever.'" Associated with a DIY culture, the term can connote a degree of sloppiness or lack of sophistication. "Why not call it fruit?" Gabel remarks.

"But we like zines," Stapleton clarifies.

"Yeah, we go out of our way to champion zines," says Gabel. "I collect tons of zines."

In the Old Town exhibition space, he and Hughes pick through their memorabilia--stuff that offers a peek into Stop Smiling behind-the-scenes, or rather, a brief anthology of Stop Smiling jokes and inside jokes. "Do you think we should include the NBC photo?" That's a photograph they took posing at the NBC desk during their trip to D.C. "Making fun of (something like Fox News) has become our livelihood in a weird way." Standing in front of a framed, pencil-drawn dummy of an issue, Gabel volunteers for not the first time, "A good word to describe us is overzealous."

Looking around the room, he notices the lack of tools. "A rock?" he spots a large pebble on the floor. "We only have a rock? No hammer?" He's actually not kidding. This is kind of a throwback to Gabel's past life, getting creative with the materials at hand. So far, three unfinished geometric shapes cover the main wall. Grouped in their twosomes or threesomes, a handful of previous Stop Smiling covers form a crossword puzzle on one end. Beside that is a full issue laid out in all its text and glory. It is a masterpiece in scale. And to the right, a dense, evenly packed square of prints: multiple versions of the same recognizable characters, seen from unconventional, distorting angles. Music students who pass by see the usually quiet and sparse hallway now cluttered with a raucous group laying out their art-project-turned-business-venture for show-and-tell.

Gabel enjoys the absurdity of his caveman-era tool. He becomes increasingly giddy as he tells anecdotes about the items that he hangs. Every once in a while, Sybil Perez, the associate editor and Gabel's wife, urges him to censor himself. "This is like me emptying my junk drawer on the wall." Some of the ephemera: a sheet of handwritten commentary he solicited from the Beta Band in response to salacious media about the band; an eager letter of response to a Star Wars trivia contest; a list of people who died during the Clinton administration. "They let me do a day in the life of The Daily Show, and I spent fourteen hours with them," Gabel proudly points at his favorite part of a photographic series. "See, they're wearing stickers over their mouths that say `As read in Stop Smiling.'"

"Did you come up with a statement yet?" the Old Town curator asks when Gabel returns the handy rock. Gabel's been saying for hours that the curator wants a statement about the exhibition, like the purpose or main idea of Stop Smiling. He deflects the question by complimenting the curator on his hair. Maybe Gabel does this because he doesn't want to be boxed in or because he hasn't had time to think of something. Or maybe it's because Gabel doesn't know how to explain Stop Smiling in one sentence. If he's like the gonzo journalists whom he admires, "his shtick is also his lifestyle." And that says it all.

The Stop Smiling exhibit opens August 7 at the Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 North Lincoln, (773)728-6000, with a concert by Lonesome Organist, Plush, The Zincs, and Slicker featuring DJs John Hughes and John Dugan. 7:30pm. $12, $10 for Old Town members.

(2004-08-03)

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