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SET YOUR GOALS

Check the walls of your local music venue and there’s a good chance you’ll find a Set Your Goals sticker plastered somewhere. It’s a visual reminder of how much things have changed since the band joined the Epitaph Records roster. “On our old label, we would get, like, 100 stickers and they would be in black and white,” singer Matt Wilson explains from the back of band’s tour van. “Now Epitaph asks us if we want stickers, and the next day we have 10,000 of them.” The differences go much deeper than stickers, but it’s a good metaphor for the progress this California band has made since their formation in ...

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JOSÉ MANGIN

The new host of MTV’s Headbangers Ball, José Mangin, got his first tat- too at 16 (Pantera’s famous Cowboys From Hell logo) and was hooked. But it was his encounter with the band’s late, great guitarist, Dimebag Darrell, that got him addicted. “I walked up to him and said, ‘Scarred for life, man,’ and he totally tripped out! Dime gave me a Coors silver bullet—I still have the can!—a black-tooth grin, and some hits off a killer bomber he had going around. I was never the same since.” Mangin was raised on “a healthy diet of tacos and metal.” He’s quick to profess his love for both, as well as ...

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ZOO YORK

From the outside, the offices of skateboard and clothing company Zoo York look like any other dull, gray building in midtown Manhattan. The inside is another story. Up the elevator and through a conference room decorated with skateboard decks, down a hallway lined with clothing racks and a few used and abused skateboards is a stairwell covered top to bottom in graffiti by renowned artists such as SP One, Skuf, Stay High 149, and Cinik. The faint smell of spray paint permeates everything. It’s a fitting passageway to the upstairs world of Zoo York, a company that shunned the warm California vibes of other skate companies for the tagged-up grit ...

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NATE APPLEMAN

Nate Appleman, executive chef at San Francisco’s acclaimed A16 and SPQR restaurants, didn’t inherit his culinary chops from his parents. “They don’t cook,” says the chef. However, Appleman’s father did pass on another lifelong passion. When Mr. Appleman, a physician, returned from a business trip with a small spider inked on his leg, the future chef, then only 4, was in awe. “It made such a huge impression on me. I wantedone right away,” says Appleman. He had to wait 13 years, though, until he had a tribal mask the size of a basketball inked across his back at 17. “Of course, it’s the only one I don’t like,” he ...

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BURN HALO

When Orange County hardcore band Eighteen Visions ended their 11-year run in 2007, frontman James Hart had mixed feelings. He was disappointed but excited by the prospect of starting anew. Since the 2004 album Obsession, Hart had been pushing the band in a more hard rock direction, and some members had pushed back. Now that he was on his own, there was no one to protest. "This is the record I've always wanted to make," Hart says of the self-titled debut by his new band, Burn Halo, which blends intoxicating '80s-style power riffs in the vein of Guns N' Roses with repeated guitar hooks redolent of The Cult and swaggering ...

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RICH SANDOMENO

"The thing about fads is that they'll come and go," says L.A.-via-Brooklyn jewelry maker Rich Sandomeno. "But I'm into shit that's gonna last forever. Even the work boots I own have lasted me 15 years." Whether it's footwear, the engines he rebuilt during his former career as an industrial diesel mechanic, his handmade Spragwerks jewelry line, or his extensive tattoo collection, Sandomeno knows a thing or two about what's built to last—a sensibility that was forged early on by his blue-collar upbringing. It was among the postindustrial landscape of northeast New Jersey that, as a teenager, the creative but unfocused Sandomeno stifled his artistic longings and instead followed his father ...

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BANGLADESH

Music producer Shondrae Crawford, a.k.a. Bangladesh, is known for creating beats so original that they sometimes cause a problem—no one can rhyme to them. "I never thought of my sound as that unique," admits the 30-year-old music producer. "But people kept telling me it was like nothing they'd ever heard before. It's foreign to their ear; it's different. It's Bangladesh." Born in Des Moines, IA, Bangladesh has spent the last decade in Atlanta, where his keyboard-centric beats and rhythms steadily confuse and captivate artists and listeners alike. "Things were hard at first," he explains. "A lot of people liked the stuff I was doing but artists were having trouble writing ...

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CHASE KUSERO

Imagine you're a Hollywood hairstylist working on a movie with Colin Farrell, whose hair you've been shampooing, blow-drying, and keeping reasonably coiffed for weeks. When the time comes that Farrell needs a cut, would you go near the boozy bigmouth with a pair of scissors? No, you'd probably call in reinforcements. And that's how Los Angeles stylist Chase Kusero got his first celebrity client. "Stylists on movie sets aren't really used to cutting hair," says Kusero. "I guess this one called me because he didn't want to piss Colin off." Luckily, Farrell was happy with his trim, and word of Kusero's skills spread through Hollywood. Today, as a stylist at ...

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