Real Rad Magazine : Summer Quarterly 2015

A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
One of my friends stated to me the other day that it’s a great concept to
release a seasonal collection every three months that consist of a new magazine, a
new music sampler, fresh apparel designs and a new look to the Real Rad website
but considering the scope of the endeavor, the time frame, and the available time
from contributors, maybe Real Rad should consider scaling back. The argument was
that we always seem to be dropping our collections at the tail end of the season.
I thought for a brief moment that yes, this is a grand undertaking and often times
I think others tend to assume that a ton of people are involved. While we do have
some great individuals that make up our team of artist, writers, photographers,
producers and visionaries, we are still very much a smaller entity than people outside
of our bubble realize. I’ve been told on more than one occasion by a newly formed
acquaintance that they thought we were affiliated with some big major label and that
affected the way that they thought about Real Rad. An acquaintance even told me
that we are held to a higher standard in the minds of other independent labels in our
region and that we aren’t embraced like a grassroots type of movement because of
Real Rad’s professional demeanor that the brand communicates. It seems that we are
caught in a middle ground between the enthusiasm of being an niche, independent
company with only a few thousand likes on Facebook, that is ready to take on the
world and being viewed as a well equipped, all business permeating, organization.
As I contemplated these thoughts and attempted to conjure up a response
to my friend’s advice, I was struck with a memory from a “work cation” I had recently
went on with my girlfriend. I was hired to film the Viva Big Bend Festival as well
as collect footage in Marfa, Alpine and the Ft. Davis area of West Texas for a
documentary on Cowboys and the last frontier. In those brief moments where the
thoughts from my head drifted to the beautiful scenery of Brewster County, I was
flooded with nostalgic images. That’s when it hit me. My girlfriend is an established
independant photographer and a published photojournalist. I freelance as a
videographer and photographer for many local companies throughout the DFW. I
don’t have to rely on distant mirages in my mind. We captured some great photos
and filmed some amazing motion pictures that I can pull up and look at directly on
my phone. I can see the mountains and the endless sky, I can gander at the gorgeous
sunflowers and vivid cacti with my own eyes because we collected those memories
ourselves.
That’s when I knew what Real Rad’s Quarterly Collections are all about. They
are like the photographs of a vacation. The collections are literally what we collect
along the way in this journey of building this brand. The music is the soundtrack to
the experiences, the images are the moments, painted by light and digitally archived,
the magazine is the manuscript of the season. I told my friend, it does take a massive
effort by a lot of great and talented people to make these collections happen and it
definitely takes it’s toll but we are building something. We are building the proof of
our very existence. Life is continuously happening and as big as a world as it is and
in an even bigger galaxy, sometimes it feels like we are just a speck of dust traveling
through infinity and it’s just nice to look back and appreciate what we’ve been
through.
Editor,
Francisco Leal