415 Zine's Fredo and Laine, Part 2 (S7E13)

Part 2 picks up where we left off in Part 1. Fredo and Laine had worked for the same company for a minute, but both left eventually. That social group they’d formed with a few other artists they worked with kept in touch. Some years went by.

Fredo attended a workshop for artists at Hunt and Gather in the Sunset, and let Laine know about it. She says that he asked her to be his “accountability buddy.” He says it wasn’t a question, but more a half-joking demand.

Fredo shares what an “accountability buddy” is, in this sense. At the workshop, each attendee set up goals for the next year. Your accountability buddy helps you stay on-target for achieving those goals. For Fredo and his buddy (Laine), part of that meant meeting almost once a week to go over what Fredo had been able to cross off his list and what was ahead. One vital area he felt he needed her help with was networking.

With Laine holding him to task, Fredo knocked out most of his 20 goals for 2023 by August of that year. But, because his networking goal didn’t have a metric, per se, it proved trickier.

And so they got together for coffee and sat in the parklet outside of Gus’s on Haight. Fredo brought a newspaper with him that day. He’d noticed that he kept hearing about art shows after the fact. Because he wasn’t really part of a larger scene (yet), he wondered how people found out about these events. His idea was to create a publication to do just that, and more. And then a funny thing happened. Laine had had the idea to make an art magazine that very same week. Kismet!

They took that as an obvious sign that this was something they had to do. And so they started hanging out even more, talking and talking and talking about what they wanted their publication to be. What kind of paper? What would it look like? How do we make it free for artists to be featured? Do we want advertising?

They answered those questions with several notebooks and a lot of caffeine. The first issue of 415 Zine took them seven months to make. Over that time, Laine came up with the idea of tying the title back to the structure of the publication—it could be four of something, one of something, and five of something. They did their due diligence when it came to researching the media landscape, especially when it came to art journalism. They settled on having their boundary be a geographic one, rather than having an artistic-genre focus.

The “4” would be short features on artists—two pages of full-color examples of their work accompanied by brief write-ups about them. The “1” would be an in-depth interview with a single artist, with several samples of their art to go with the interview. And the “5” would be spots around San Francisco for folks to go experience art. Places like Madrone Art Bar, where we recorded this episode.

I ask Laine and Fredo to talk about those seven months, from conception to the first publication, and the ups and downs they experienced in that time. Laine says she was in “no looking back” mode, and Fredo concurs. The only questions that popped up were around content. They were in it, and nothing would stop them.

Though that first issue took them a little more than half a year, the