I never heard of him before today, which doesn't mean much. But this is a really cool skate segment, so check it out.
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Showing posts with label skateboarding. Show all posts
Showing posts with label skateboarding. Show all posts
Saturday, August 1, 2026
Monday, December 1, 2025
Greyson Fletcher's new "Hellion" segment
Just watch this video.
I remember going to the Action Sports trade shows in San Diego in the mid 1990's and seeing this little kid running around. "That's Christian Fletcher's son," someone said. He's a fourth generation member of the Fletcher surfing dynasty, Great Grandpa Fletcher was a surfing and big wave pioneer. Grandpa Herbie Fletcher is the well known surfer and legendary surf filmmaker Herbie Fletcher. Grandma is a really good artist. Dad Christian Fletcher took short board surfing vertical, airing off waves, and ripping in general. Uncle Nathan Fletcher pushed surfing even further.
Coming up in that family, we could definitely understand if Greyson found it hard to forge his own path, and make a name for himself. But he just tore it up in his own way, found his own path, and in his mid-30's now has this absolutely insane new skate segment. Just watch the video.
When I was driving a taxi in Huntington Beach in the 2000's, I had Christian Fletcher in my cab twice. One time he was pretty blitzed, and decided he wanted to autograph the dashboard. I talked him out of that, since I didn't own the taxi, and had him sign my taxi permit instead. That autographed permit was in the storage unit that got auctioned off when I wound up moving back East in 2008. I'm still bummed about that.
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Tuesday, August 19, 2025
Illegal skate contest in the L.A. River bed
This event happened on the DL about a month ago, somewhere in the L.A. riverbed. This informal contest video just has a lot of damn good skating in it, and apparently was sponsored by Gorilla Energy Drink (never heard of it) and Keen Ramps. It's just a cool, solid video if you're into street skating.
I stumbled upon this video, while checking out a BMX video. This came up on the side, as things do on YouTube. As some of you may know, I worked at Vision Skateboard's video company, Unreel Productions, way back in the olden days. We did a street skating video shoot back when street skating was a really new thing. It happened in an empty parking lot, right on the corner of 17th and Placentia in Costa Mesa, caddy corner to the bar that had once been the legendary Cuckoo's Nest.
In this Vision Street Wear commercial, one of the obstacles was a 4 foot high quarterpipe up against the wall of a building. You can see 3 or 4 quick shots of that shoot in this commercial. Kele Rosecrans was doing loud, wheel squealing, six foot high, front side power slides above that tiny ramp that day. It was amazing. So the quarterpipe against the wall, under the bridge, reminded me of that Vision shoot, way back in the day.
These skaters go off, and it's great vibe for the jam/contest. Check out the video.
For most people of Generation X, this location looks familiar because the L.A. River bed was where they filmed the iconic race scene for the movie Grease.
Sunday, February 18, 2024
Trey Jones' & crew's Swampfest 2024 (#8)
Here's the Dig BMX intro video to Swampfest 2024 above, the build. Pirate ship halfpipe and a full concrete bowl? No problem. And a whole bunch of other stuff. It's flat out amazing how much stuff they build for this event. It looks amazing. Then comes a weekend of fire, bikes, and mayhem, to quote one of the former FBM slogans. As an Old School Has Been BMX industry geezer and blogger, far outside the loop these days, I'm just going to compile links to most of the best videos here. Watch one, watch 'em all, do what you want. Looks like another crazy fun time at Swampfest 2024.
Video editor tip (from a guy who made BMX videos back in the Dark Ages of S-VHS/Hi8)- If you put people's names in yellow, it shows up better on almost any background. Just sayin'.
Swampfest Unclicked- Our BMX- 83 minute podcast on the whole Swampfest series- 2/2024
Our BMX Day Zero- Swampfest 2024 (practice day- Cameo by Old Schooler John Paul Rogers who has an actual alligator to cook. How'd the gator bar-B-Q turn out?)
Bloom BMX- Swampfest- Waldo, Florida- 2024- 17:32- I think this is my favorite video yet. While the guys were shooting Roman candles, lighting shit on fire, and shooting phone video, the Bloom crew women were actually riding the trails. Little interviews with Robbie Morales and Chris Moeller, and different angle of the mayhem with really funny commentary throughout. All that's missing from this edit is L7's "Everglade" playing in the background. Oh, and don't grab a woman's ass at Swampfest.
Our BMX- Swampfest 2024- Bowl Jam- They built a cool permanent (?) concrete bowl for this event
Check out Our BMX site for their "The Best of Swampfest 2024"
Check out Dig BMX for their final edits
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Sunday, January 22, 2023
Little known Venice Beach street skater Tim Jackson- 1990
When I first moved to Southern California, Venice Beach was the place you went to see the crazy side of California in one afternoon. It was the freak show people in the rest of the world expected of California. The boardwalk area had the weirdest, craziest, coolest range of people anywhere. There was no skatepark back then, but there were curbs, short walls, and open sidewalks. Here the cameraman and editor of what I think is a Santa Cruz/OJ's wheels video, re-cut the footage of Venice local Tim Jackson. For you Old School BMX freestylers watching this, the 1984 and 1985 Venice Beach AFA contests were held on this same sidewalk area.
Although he won't take credit, Mark Gonzales is generally considered to have sparked street skating in about 1984. Boards were big and wide for those early years, and a bunch of skaters, inspired by the skating of Gonz, Tommy Guerrero, Natas Kappas, Mike Vallely and others, began to see what was possible to do with a skateboard on the urban freatures around them. Tricks were simpler, generally, but more creative and with a wider diversity, every skater had their own ideas, style, and usually a few original tricks.
Also in 1990, when this footage was taped, the skateboard hype bubble of the late 80's had popped, and sales and interest in the mainstream was going down. The skateboard and BMX industries were going into recession, as was the whole country. The long recession of the early 1990's found the hardcore skaters going underground, and street skating blew up, and grew exponentially. This era is also when the big dogs, Vision (who I worked for) Powell-Peralta, and Santa Cruz, lost their stranglehold on the business, and new companies like World Industries, New Deal, Black Label, Plan B, Blind, and a slew of other small companies, rose up. By the time ESPN decided to jump on the action sports bandwagon in 1995 with the Extreme Games (renamed the X-Games in '96), skater run companies were the norm.
This video is a great edit of that time just when the posers were fading from the scene, and street skating was evolving in many places.
Saturday, January 7, 2023
BMX, action sports, and the 2023 recession...
Here's a really good look at where the bike industry is, as things slow down going into 2023. Recession? We're probably in one. Maybe. But this guy from Top to Bottom MTB channel does a really solid job of explaining the wild ride of the whole bike industry since the beginning of 2020, how it got to where it is today, and where things seems to be heading. It's a 7 minute video, well worth checking out if you ride any bike on a regular basis.
As a Generation X, middle-aged geezer now, I remember being part of the BMX/skate industry in early 1989. I was working at Unreel Productions, the video arm of the Vision Skateboards and Vision Street Wear empire. Yep, kids, "street wear" happened about 35 years ago. Anyhow, I was basically a production assistant at a company that sponsored skateboarders, snowboarders, and BMXers. I used my business card to get into the big bicycle industry trade show in Long Beach, in January of 1989. At that time, BMX freestyle had peaked in its first big wave of popularity, BMX racing was peaking in its 2nd big wave, and skateboarding was peaking in its 3rd wave of popularity.
As I walked around, I literally heard the same mantra over and over, in several booths, and in small talk between industry people. "BMX is DEAD! Mountain bikes are the new thing." I was a hardcore, if not that great, BMX freestyler, riding every night, just for the fun of it, at that point. I kept thinking, "What are all of you talking about? BMX IS NOT DEAD!" It wasn't dead to all the hardcore riders around the U.S., and some parts of the world. But it was dead to the major bike companies, and to the corporate sponsors form outside the sport. They declared BMX dead, and money drained away from the sport. The fad was over as far as they were concerned. Almost every BMX freestyle brand dropped their teams that summer. Top pro riders were left without sponsors. All of the hardcore riders, regardless of what level our riding was at, went, "What the fuck, dudes?"
The bad news was that it was really hard to get paid to ride a freestyle bike, even for many top pros. GT and Haro kept their teams going, and toured their guys all the time, to sell bikes where they could. This is what causes the waves (roughly ten year cycles) in BMX and skateboarding. The major bicycle corporations that ride fads pulled their money out, along with corporations that sponsor from outside the bike and skate industries. They are about profit only, and they ride the "fads" like surfers ride waves. When one wave is over, they're on to the next one. In 1989-1990, that meant money flowing out of BMX and skateboarding, and into the new things, mountain bikes (BMX bikes for "adults") snowboarding, and inline skating.
The good thing about these downturns in the waves, only the hardcore people are left, in the sport aspect, and in the indsutry. Vert skating was still ruling skateboarding in 1989, but street skating had been slowly rising in popularity. In the down years, the long economic recession of the early 1990's, World Industries rose up, sponsoring street skaters only. Many skater-owned companies popped up, like New Deal, Black Label, Blind, Birdhouse, Plan B, 101, and others. In the BMX world, S&M Bikes was just really getting going as the downturn hit. Soon after came Standard, Hoffman, Eastern, FBM, Kink, and other rider-owned companies. In both BMX and skateboarding, the riders and skaters took over their industries.
Riding and progression didn't slow down, it sped up. Contests became local events, the big glam events ended. The main sponsors of BMX and skateboarding in the early 1990's were ramen (23 cents a pack), Del Taco (49 cent tacos), Taco Bell (59 cent tacos), and in the Huntington Beach area, What-a-Lotta Pizza, with $4 cheese pizzas and $5 pepperoni pizzas. We ate so many of those pizzas at the P.O.W. House, that when no one ordered a pizza for three days, the manager of the local What-a-Lotta Pizza called us up to see if we were alright. Seriously, that actually happened. We promptly ordered 4 or 5 pizzas.
If you read my blog on any regular basis, you know I'm an amateur futurist, I write posts about economics, recessions, and shit like that. (Thank you to the 7 people who read each of those posts). I think we are now going into a Big World recession, and it will last a while. A lot of action sports companies will downsize, some good riders and skaters will lose sponsorships, some will get smaller deals, and some industry people will be laid off. This is already happening in the high tech world.
But these sports are like a fungus, they never really go away. They go underground. Events like Steve Crandall's DIY comps, and Trey Jones' Swampfest will probably be the norm for two or three years. All the sports will continue to evolve, and a lot of the idiots will wash out of these sports (sorry, not me, I keep blogging from way outside the industry). The people who really love action sports, athletes and industry people, will stick around. A lot of crazy ideas will be tried, and really cool new shit will emerge on multiple fronts. But you might have to get a day job. Or flip stuff on eBay to help survive. When you run out of food, ask one of us geezers who survived the 90's, we all have at least 7 different recipes for ramen meals, most that can be made for under a $1 each.
In a surfing metaphor, the big set of waves has passed, in the business world. Now we wait, and try new ideas using very little money. In a year or two, things pick up some, in 3-4 years, big money will probably flow back in, much more than before. That's a rough timeline, The Fed is pumping and dumping the economy these days, and they set the time schedule. Generally, every wave of these sports gets bigger than the last. Except inline skating, fruitbooting just kind of fizzled.
This is a BIG recession in the Big World, like nearly all of the world, the big shots who run political parts of the world, and the financial world, are battling it out, and all of us regular people get sloshed around in the meantime. The world will look quite a bit different in 5 years. Those of you who try out new ideas, and build some good new shit, will be rewarded down the road, most likely. All of these sports are much, MUCH larger than they were in the 1990's, so BMX, skateboarding, and other action sports can't totally die, like they nearly did back then. But things are slowing down. This happens about once a decade. Now is when it gets fun. Learn to live cheap, and think about where you would like to see things at in 5 years. Then do some DIYing and make something cool happen. Ride on!
Tuesday, December 20, 2022
Vicky Vickers, Deanna Caulkins, and Robin Logan- Skateboard Hall of Fame women with my drawings
1970's era skateboard Hall of Fame women Vicky Vickers, Deanna Caulkins, and Robin Logan, with drawings I did for them. This happened a while back, but I just found the photo, misfiled in my hard drive.
About 4 or 5 years ago, a friend of mine, who was also a friend of Robin Logan, had me do a drawing for Robin's birthday. Robin is from the Logan family, that put out the Logan Earth Ski skateboards in the 1960's and 1970's, and they are still putting out boards. Robin later had me do a couple of other drawings for her, including one for older brother Bruce. She also had me do these two drawings from classic photos of Vicky Vickers and Deanna Caulkins, when they got inducted into the Skateboard Hall of of Fame. I was stoked on this project, because these women were teenage girls, already top skaters, tearing it up on skateboards, back when I first got into skateboarding, during the 1970's boom. It was just a really cool project for me to be a part of. So that's Vicky, Deanna, and Robin above (L to R), the day she gave them the drawings.
As I improved, and became a bit better known for my Sharpie Scribble Style, after I started seriously selling drawings in late 2015, I began to get a few special projects. Yes, they're all cool, but I was asked to do 2 or 3 drawings for people's birthday's, a couple of memorial drawings for people's friends who had died, and then projects like this, for women who were defining skateboarding when I was a kid, just getting into it. Those are the projects that have more weight, where I really wanted to do my best.
Like any artist, I'm never 100% happy with any drawing I do. There are screw-ups in every one, in most cases, that only I notice. I shade in ink, and I very rarely use any whiteout to touch up. So I have to blend in any tiny mistakes I make, or start the drawing all over if it's a big enough mistake. The pressure is on, artistically, in every drawing. But certain projects hold a bit more pressure.
In any case, I just found this photo above, misfiled in a folder, and wanted to share it, since it's cool to see women that had a lot of influence in early action sports with my work on their walls. Thank you Robin Logan for tapping me to do these two drawings.
Video as we know it now didn't really exist in the 1970's, and there isn't a lot of film of individual skateboarders then. But here's an intro piece of Deanna Caulkins from her induction into the Skateboarding Hall of Fame.
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Monday, April 25, 2022
New Geoff Rowley skate clips- 2022
,Flip Skateboard's video, Sorry. is one of my favorite skate videos of all time, and Geoff Rowley was a major force in that video. But that came out in 2002, twenty years ago. Can Geoff still skate at a high level. Uh... yeah. Not sorry.
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Tuesday, February 11, 2020
The Bones Brigade: fucked up kids that changed the world- Part 1
Bones Brigade: An Autobiography, the epic 2012 documentary by skate legend and original Zephyr Team skateboarder, Stacy Peralta. I finally found it free on YouTube, and watched it. It got to me. These guys were big influences on me, like all skater/punk/action sports kids in the 1980's.
The Powell-Peralta Bones Brigade team was legendary in the skateboard, punk rock, and action sports subcultures in the 1980's. This is the guys behind that crew, telling the parts they didn't tell along the way.
While mostly known as a Has Been BMX industry guy, I actually started skateboarding in 1976, three or four years before I even knew BMX bikes existed. I lived in the small, rural town of Willard, Ohio. My friend showed me a pressed aluminum skateboard his dad made at the shop at work, with steel roller skate wheels and no grip tape. I thought he was lying when he said his dad made it, it looked factory made, like a lawnmower. But I've never seen another board like it.
His name was Jeff. Jeff put it down on the flat rocks of the walkway, in front of his house. We didn't walk out to the actual sidewalk, for some reason. We were on the walkway through their front yard, made of big flat stones, most were a foot and a half, or two feet across, and there was grass growing between the rocks. Jeff put the skateboard down, put one foot on it, and pushed off with the other. He rolled across one stone, then onto the next stone, rolling about three feet. I said, "Whoa." So he let me try. I put my left foot on top, pushed off with my right foot, pulled my right foot up on the deck. I rolled about a foot, and the front wheel hit a crack in the stone. The board stopped, I got thrown forward, and fell to the ground, slamming a knee and scraping it. I was a complete wuss as a kid, I hated pain. I stood up and said, "Skateboarding is dumb." That was my introduction to skateboarding, the first time I ever saw a skateboard. I walked away with a scraped knee and turned off on skateboards. It was the corner of Laurel and Clark streets, I just looked it up on Google Maps, bottom right corner there, It looks like those big flat rocks are still in front of that house.
That was during fourth grade for me, I lived a block and a half away, down Laurel Street, from Jeff. A couple months later, another friend got a plastic skateboard, with urethane wheels. I tried that board, on a smooth piece of sidewalk, and found that riding skateboards was actually fun. Another friend got a skateboard, it was the mid 1970's, when the skateboarding fad swept across the United States. That was the second big wave of skateboards, after the 1965-66 rise, a decade earlier. Skateboarding turned into one of those things we did as 9-year-old kids. We played backyard baseball, football, swam in the city pool a couple blocks away, and we rode skateboards.
We didn't have magazines to look at then. There was one book, a hardcover book, about skateboarding, in the Willard Library. We took turns checking that book out, which had a bunch of the late 60's and early 70's skaters. We looked over each other's shoulders as one kid flipped through the pages. Those were the only tricks we knew existed. 360's. Wheelies. Daffys. The Coffin. Sitting on our board sideways, with our feet on our friend's board, and his feet on our board, going down a big hill.
I decided I needed a skateboard. I got 50 cents a week allowance from my parents... sometimes. After buying some penny candy downtown, that cost 2 cents each, I saved up my extra change. For nine fucking months, I saved quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies. I saved up to buy a green plastic Scamp skateboard, at the Western Auto store on Myrtle Street, the main street in "downtown" Willard. That was the first thing I ever saved up money for in my life.
Finally I had a board, and my friend Steve and I wound up at the parking lot of my Lutheran church, which had a decent sized hill, by 10-year-old standards. Steve's board was blue plastic, and had a double kicktail. We figured out that we could put my board backwards, on top of Steve's board, and then took turns trying to make it all the way down the hill, riding the stacked boards. We both made it to the bottom of the hill within an hour. That was skateboarding for us, then 10 year olds, in Willard, Ohio, in 1977. Like old guys always say, skateboarding if it was ever mentioned on TV, it was nearly always compared to hula hoops, and called a "fad," like the hula hoops our sisters had.
There were no skateboard videos, we only had three main channels of TV then. Us kids only got to see skateboard magazines twice, I think. One of Jeff's older brothers skated, and had a few skateboard magazines. But us"little kids" never got to look at them. A couple of times, that brother gave us little kids five or ten minutes to look through his skateboard magazines. There were four or five of us, we each grabbed a magazine, and flipped through them like maniacs, as fast as possible, so we could find the coolest photos during those few minutes. That was the first time any of us saw photos of kids in California riding skateboards in pools. But it was just this quick glimpse of some kids, way out west in California, skateboarding in pools. We didn't know that there were skateparks. We weren't sure where those pools were, or why there was no water in them. But those were those far away kids... way out in California. We didn't know any of their names. They might as well have been on the moon.
The next year, in 1978, my family went to a flea market, in a parking garage, in Mansfield, the city my mom was from. We had a booth, selling random stuff, like a garage sale. I had a lot of time to wander around and check out the other booths. I found some high school kid in his parents' booth who was selling a skateboard he made, for $2.00. It was made out of a 3/4" thick oak board, about 5 1/2" wide. No kicktail, it was flat. It had a pointed nose, curved sides, and a narrow tail. It had GT trucks which were really narrow, but, the maroon wheels were each 2 1/2" wide. The wheels stuck out over the edges of the board. That became my skateboard, and I skated that thing for a decade. I took it down to the Huntington Beach Pier, in 1987 or early 1988, when I was a BMX freestyler, hanging out with Pierre Andre, Don Brown, Hans Lingren, and the HB local skaters. We all took turns trying to ollie my old $2 board, and finally broke the trucks.
As my family moved form town to town, I would go out on the street, and do rock walks, toe drag 360's, and backside G-turns, which I didn't realize were called G-turns. Every new house we lived in, I met the kids in the new neighborhood on that $2 skateboard. I would go skate in the driveway, and down the street, and that's how I started meeting the neighbor kids.
When we first moved to Boise in 1981, I would put Joan Jett's "I Love Rock n' Roll" cassette on my cheesy ghetto blaster in our garage, and do rockwalks and G-turns for hours. I'd still never bought a skateboard magazine. Our house was a incredibly psychologically tense place, and miserable, by and large. Skateboarding wasn't a sport to me, because I sucked at sports. It wasn't anything that I ever imagined to do after high school. It wasn't a thing that anyone made money at, as far as I knew. For me, skateboarding was another escape, a physical way to cope with my constant depression and the drama of everyday life. As a screwed up teenager, in a family that was more fucked up than most, I would read, run off and wander the woods (later he desert), ride my bike around, or skateboard. Those were my escapes.
Skateboarding had died, it wasn't cool anymore. I didn't care. Skateboarding was a way to cope. That's who rode skateboards in those days, fucked up kids from families that were more dysfunctional that most. It was never something that was going to lead to anything else. Skateboarding was a way to cope with daily life. That's it.
This video took me back to those early days. As my life wandered in weird directions, I wound up working in the BMX and skateboard industries, and the Bones Brigade riders were a huge influence on me in my 20's, and since. I was in that world, met a couple of them, and this story they tell touches my story, like tens of thousands of other kids and young people in the 1980's, and millions of kids in the 1990's.
None of this was supposed to happen. We weren't supposed to follow that weird intuition that drew us to bikes and skateboards, and the other action sports. We rebelled, we bucked the system. We just needed to follow this other, weird thing, and see where it led. It led us to places that none of us could have imagined back then.
But then that's the thing about creativity, it leads to brand new places, brand new things, and new "sports," new businesses, and new industries. Those weird little things have now spread to so many people around the world, that the fucking Olympics has added, is adding more BMX and skateboarding. None of this was supposed to happen. But, then again, it was supposed to happen. The Universe likes to fuck with the status quo every now and then, using weird, fucked up, driven, creative goofballs like the Bones Brigade, and all of us who followed.
More to come...
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Monday, November 4, 2019
What Makes Life Worth Living?
The Man in Black, the coolest country singer I heard growing up, singing the Nine Inch Nails song "Hurt." With this bittersweet cover, nearing the end of his life, Johnny Cash touched a generation who was largely unaware of him. This song sent thousands back into his life of songwriting about the struggles of life we all face and try to cope with.
From 1982, riding my BMX bike nearly every day was the main thing that helped me cope with the stress and pain and craziness of life. As I got more into riding, first racing, and then freestyle, I did what most BMXers did in the 1980's. I told my family and friends it was all about winning a race, or winning a trophy at the next freestyle contest. I told them I was "practicing" to win a "competition." Average people understood that. That's what mainstream sports were for. You practiced to become a "winner" by beating another team on a certain day.
But BMX riding wasn't about that, tough I managed to convince myself that it was, for a few years. Really, like most BMXers and skaters and surfers and snowboarders, I was escaping. My bike was the vessel that took me away from the craziness of the world for a couple of hours. I could do whatever I wanted. I could go fast and just pedal to blow off steam and vent frustration. I could practice a flatland move over and over and over, a moving meditation of sorts. Some days I would just ride around the Jeep trails of the desert outside Boise for hours.
BMX was never really about "winning" for me. It was about survival. I think that's why so many riders are still doing it now, in their 40's and 50's. That's why it's a lifestyle sport, using the term "sport" very loosely. It's not a hobby. It's something we need, something simply necessary, no matter our age, to deal with this wonderful, terrible, incredible, painful opera called life on Earth.
Loser and Bitch... a love story
In the late 1990's working at Cirque du Soleil, I met a woman several years younger than me. She was a petite little thing, really cute, but with a huge attitude. One of our first days working in the box office, she came in and started bitching about something at her other job. After venting about someone getting pissed at her there, I said, half jokingly, "Doesn't he know you're bitch?" She jumped off her stool stomped over to mine, and punched me in the arm. Hard. It actually hurt. "Loser," she snapped, as she walked back to her spot. But she smiled a little. We ate lunch together in the Cirque cuisine that day, hit it off, and became friends. From that day on, she called me Loser and I called her Bitch.
On one hand, she was like a second chance at the little hotties I'd never hooked up with in high school. She was smart and funny and cute and feisty as could be. We became really close friends, but never did hook up. Yet we could talk about anything. We both came from families that were more dysfunctional than most. Between us, we had more issues than a magazine rack at Barnes & Noble. We both had sick senses of humor, and made each other laugh a lot.
But she was also a cutter. One three occasions, I called her when she was in her room at home, dragging the a razor blade lightly across her wrist. One night, the first, was worse than the other two. She didn't seem to fit in anywhere, much like me, freaks even in the crazy world of Southern California. She was in the depths of depression and saw no future. She was completely suicidal, something the majority of people don't understand, though half think about at some point.
The popular belief is that suicidal people want to kill themselves. In most cases, that isn't true. In my experience, most of the time, it isn't that a suicidal person wants to die, what they really want is to escape the incredible pain of living that they just can't take anymore. They want away from it, out of the pain, and killing themselves seems the best way to do that at times. In those times, depression envelopes them, like a dark, humid, tangible cloud of pain, depression, and self-loathing. That's where Bitch was on those nights, the razor blade nights.
On the first of those, the worst one, I knew by talking to her on the phone that I may never see her again. The cloud of darkness was worse than ever, and that really bummed me out. I loved that crazy little chick. So I did the best thing I could think of, knowing her pretty well at that point. I fucked with her, I helped her plan the perfect suicide.
"So how you gonna do it?" I asked. "Please tell me you're not going to do the whole razor blade in the bathtub thing, that is so fucking cliche'." "Fuck you," she snapped. Then she told me she was sitting next to the tub on her bathroom floor. "Are you naked?" I asked. "What? No," she replied, "Fuck you." I continued, "You're hot, I mean you have to kill yourself naked. You aren't going to care, but at least the ambulance drivers get to see your hot body as they clean up the mess." "Fuck you," she replied, a tiny bit softer than the previous ones.
"You don't have to do it tonight," I prodded, "you could do it tomorrow. You could go BASE jumping somewhere, and just forget the parachute. Are there any tall buildings near you?" "You're an asshole," she snapped back. "An asshole you've never fucked, by the way. That's another reason you can't do it right now. I mean, I'm a Loser, but if you're going to off yourself, you might as well let me fuck you first. I never get laid, I'm terrible in bed, you'll be more motivated to die afterwards, I promise." "Fuck you," she said, a little slower. And a little softer. I thought I heard a whisper of a smile on that "fuck you."
I kept pressing. Several tense minutes and about 20 more fuck you's later, she started laughing. The spell broke. The thick dark cloud of pain and self-loathing and despair dissolved quite a bit. "God dammit, I'm trying to commit suicide here," she said. "I know," I responded, "I'm your friend, I'm trying to help." She broke into more laughter. We talked a few more minutes. She was still incredibly depressed, and although she told me she had set the razor blade down, I knew it was still only a 50/50 chance I'd see her alive again. She might fall right back into the deep spell of despair later that night. And she wouldn't call me. We hung up our phones. I didn't have a car, and she lived 15 miles away or so. Going there wasn't really an option. I hoped things would be alright. They were.
We helped each other through tough times for 3 or 4 years, and then went our separate ways. We needed each other to work through certain issues we each had, for a while. That's what all relationships are ultimately about. I realize that now. We are drawn to the people we're drawn to for a reason.
On that particular night, and a few more like it, I helped my friend Bitch break the spell of suicidal depression. I was able to do that because I'd been there myself, thinking about suicide, and I knew it was a spell. When someone is suicidal, people think that they need to give that person a reason to live for the rest of their lives. What people need is help breaking the spell of the dark cloud of depression that has been woven by all the horrible words and actions they've experienced, and then repeated in their own thoughts until it seems impossible to escape from. You don't have to help a suicidal person find a reason to live to 40 or 50 or 60 more years. You just need to help them find a reason to live for ten more minutes. And then ten more. Then an hour more.
That is exactly what BMX freestyle did for me for the 20 years I rode nearly eve;ry day, from 1982 to 2002. That's why I want to get a bike again, as soon as I can, to get that ability to blow off steam back. There are some financial hurdles to make it over first, though. But that ability to vent and escape and ride, that's why surfers surf, and skaters skate, and snowboarders board, and all the rest. This is a part of why artists make art and writers write and musicians play. Those are other forms of creative outlets. And it's works of art, often created in dark times by their creators, that help everyone else get through their tough times. That's one of the biggest reasons society NEEDS art and artists of all kinds.
I came to McDonald's tonight more depressed than I'd been in a while. My life is somewhat challenging right now, and I was tired and frustrated and a bit of depression set in. I set a goal today for the little business I'm trying to build up around my Sharpie art and writing. And I did amazing today, several drawings sold. But I didn't reach the goal I really was aiming for. Being tired and frustrated, I started thinking about all the things that could go wrong. I started weaving my own little spell of depression. So I came here, got something to eat, clicked onto the wifi, and did what I often do when kind of depressed, I listened to "Hey Nonny Nonny" by The Poxy Boggards. Yeah, try staying depressed while listening to that. Afterwards I listened to this song, and then this song. My little spell of minor depression was broken, and I got back to creative work, which happened to be writing this blog post.
There are times when we wonder what life's about. Then there are times we're doing things we love, like riding a BMX bike for me and many of my friends, or a skateboard, or creating art. We don't question life while doing those things, because while doing them, life is worthwhile. It feels worthwhile. There's no need to question it.
The challenge of being human is to create a life where you spend as much of your time as possible doing the things you don't have to question, the things that are inherently worthwhile to you. Ride, skate, play with your kids, paint, write a song, take a walk in the woods, whatever. So start building that life. It's not supposed to be easy. That's the whole point, to learn to handle whatever life can throw at us.
Monday, March 11, 2019
Chris Moeller in "Leg Muscles": The Chain Wallet
The S&M Bikes 30 year book, Behind the Shield, is coming out soon. So I figured it's a good time to tell a few of my stories from the days of being part of the S&M posses and longtime roommate to Chris Moeller.
In 1990, as Vision Skateboards was collapsing, and Unreel Productions, their video company, where I worked, was shut down. Since I was the cheapest guy on staff and knew how to work most of the equipment, they kept me around and moved me to the Vision main headquarters building in Santa Ana, California. Oddly, that's a block from where the S&M (and Fit) Bikes headquarters is now.
Anyhow, tired of being a peon on all the kinda goofy Vision videos, with no say in how they were made, I decided to self-produce my own BMX freestyle video. I wanted to show the actual riding we did day after day, no uniforms, lots of street, and no riding on minature golf courses. I shot footage all year long, put all my money into it, borrowed a grand late from Mike Sarrail to finish it (which I did pay back, just for the record), and The Ultimate Weekend came out in October of 1987. As one of the first rider made videos, it was good for its day. I spent $5,000 making it, of my own money, and made maybe $2,500 back over the next six or eight months. I went into the project thinking I'd make like $20,000 or more back. Yeah...sure... I was still super shy, and a horrible salesman, and I let a surf video distributor do most of the selling.
I didn't pay off all my credit cards, and soon was working at a video duplicator in North Hollywood for $8 an hour and had $7,000 in or so in debt. In the days before crippling student debt was a normal thing for people, that seemed like a lot to me. I worked all the time, rode solo in the San Fenrnado Valley, and was depressed by the "insurmountable" amount of debt I had.
In 1991, while working that duplicating job, Chris Moeller found me somehow, and called up saying he wanted to make a video for S&M Bikes. The entire company then was housed in the single car garage, of a one bedroom apartment, on Alabama street in Huntington Beach, California. The BMX industry had "died" a year and a half earlier, and times were tight in the 20 inch world. I was initially hoping Chris wanted to spend $2,000 or so to make the video. I could have some fun, and pocket a good check. When I asked him what budget he had in mind, he said, "like maybe $200." After working at Unreel, where the budget wasn't ever a factor, $200 seemed like nothing. But it sounded like fun, and I started going down on the weekends to H.B., and shooting video of Chris and the crew.
It's hard to imagine now, but dirt jumping wasn't even a sport then, it was something we all did to some extent, and Chris and a handful of lunatics, did to an insane level for the time period. They'd have a jump contest at BMX nationals every once in a while, with one, single double jump, and that was it. But Chris, Dave Clymer, John Paul Rogers, the P.O.W. House guys, and a few others were pro racers who spent a ton of time jumping for fun, and were pushing the progression at the time. Most of the top jumpers were then S&M riders. Chris couldn't pay them, but the bikes were stronger, and no other companies had a budget, or even the idea, to steal riders from S&M then. Basically, S&M Bikes WAS dirt jumping in the minds of most BMX racers and freestylers in 1991.
Chris Moeller, being the guy he was, wanted to fuck with everyone when we made the video. First was the whole thing of using the bad acting from porn videos in it. Then, he started the video with flatlander Perry Mervar's section. He wanted hardcore jumpers everywhere to get the video, pop it into the VCR all excited, and go, "Flatland? What the fuck is this shit?" In addition, dorking around and practical jokes have always been a part of BMX, and the whole hardcore punk mentality we had back then. Basically, we we being jackasses a few years before the Big Brother videos came out, which turned into the Jackass TV show, and ultimately, the Jackass movies. That first S&M Bikes video, Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer, is basically a prequel to the Jackass stuff years later.
I crashed out on the floor of Moeller's apartment one weekend night, and the next morning he said, that to start his section, he wanted to start with skating. Again, he wanted to do that just to fuck with people. He said he had this funny idea to make fun of old school skaters, who'd taken to wearing biker-type chain wallets then.
So he grabbed his board, I grabbed the camera, and we rode our bikes down to a little park, Manning Park, on the corner of Delaware and Detroit. There Chris got the big car tow chain he came up with somewhere, stuffed one end into his front pocket, and the other end into his back pocket, and started skating round the basketball court with it dragging behind. At first, I thought it was just dumb. We did the little intro part, where he talks about wearing the beanie ("stocking cap" in my world), another skater trend then, and the old car thing, then leads into the chain wallet. I didn't even know Chris could skate at all then. I knew him from a few years back, and had seen him around from time to time, but didn't really know much about him, other than he was a pro racer, about the craziest jumper of the day, and had somehow started a bike company at 16-years-old.
This was one of the first video pieces we shot for the video. I had my big, full size, S-VHS camera, and shot footage as Chris started skating around, doing little tricks, with the massive chain dragging behind. The longer it went on, the funnier I thought it was. That, goofy, dorkin' around, sarcastic sense of humor that morning set the tone for all the video shoots we did for Leg Muscles. Things got weirder and crazier from there, the opposite of my video a year earlier, where I was trying to be professional. Even more funny, the kid playing basketball just kept playing, pretty much ignoring us, which made the final video look funnier. And that's why Chris Moeller started his first real video segment skateboarding.
More weird tales from the S&M Bikes world of the early 1990's coming soon...
I've got a new blog going, it's about building an art or creative business, or any small business. You can check it out here:
WPOS Kreative Ideas
Thursday, November 29, 2018
Welcome to Level 50 Tony Hawk
Skateboarding legend Tony Hawk decided to land 50 of his original tricks in celebrating of his 50th birthday. You know what that means. Yeah, he has really good health insurance. Freakin' amazing stuff. Go back and watch the 720 again. Watch the ending.
My 50th birthday was not this cool. Yet, oddly, I was really stoked to hit 50 for some reason. That was almost two years ago, I'm creeping up on 52 right now. I've never met Tony Hawk. But in the action sports world, "meet" means actually having him knowing who I am at some point, that's what I've never done. But I was in the same realm as him over the years. Here's a few of my stories about Tony Hawk.
I first heard of Tony Hawk in a BMX Plus article about a BMX skatepark contest at the Del Mar skatepark keyhole bowl. They added a sequence of some local skater kid doing a 540 in the bowl. That kid was Tony Hawk, and that was probably in 1984.
When I moved to Southern California in 1986 for the job at Wizard Publications, my new roommates/workmates, Gork and Lew, had a VHS copy of the second Powell-Peralta Bones Brigade video, Future Primitive. I used to watch that video every Saturday morning and every Sunday morning and then go on solo street riding sessions all day. That's where I first saw a bunch of Tony Hawk footage. Tony does a 720 in the intro of the video. That was 1985.
When I worked at Unreel Productions, Vision sponsored the NSA contests, and I was the guy who made VHS dubs of all the raw footage that came in. At that point, as a BMX guy who hung out mostly with skaters, we were still mostly focused on getting ready and skating /riding in contests. But deep down, it was just fun, we new there was another reason we kept doing it, but I never heard anybody put a name on that reason. In a quick interview by our cameraman at some contest, Tony was asked what skateboarding was all about. "Progression, it's all about progression," was his answer. It suddenly clicked to me. Yes, we practice for contests because that's how you play the sponsorship game and that means something to family and outsiders. But the continual progression was why we really did it. I never forgot that.
Getting ready for the huge (at the time) NSA finals in 1989, aka Skate Escape, Tony Hawk came by Unreel to share ideas on what would make the contest better. I came back from lunch one day, saw his blue car in the parking lot, and got all stoked, "I'm gonna get to meet Tony Hawk, finally." I saw him walk by with Don Hoffman and the other guys, but I was the lowly "Dub Guy" at Unreel, so I wasn't cool enough to be in the meeting, and definitely not cool enough to get introduced to him.
Another time that year, I got to go with Don Hoffman to Tony's Fallbrook house to shoot video of both Ken Park and Tony's roommate at the time Joe Johnson (the skater, not the BMXer). Both times, Tony was off doing demos somewhere. You can see me in the back ground of the Ken Park's section (in all white at :17, :26, :42, 1:34, 1;41) of Barge at Will, a few times. If that music in the second half of Ken's section sounds familiar to you BMXers, it's because that's "No More Cheap Talk" by The Stain, which I used as intro music in The Ultimate Weekend.
That was a really cool day, because Frank, Tony's dad was there, and he had me run to buy us all sandwiches and drinks at some little liquor store nearby. Then I sat in the bed of his pick-up as he and Don Hoffman sat on the tailgate talking about "the old days," of skateboarding. That was one of those epic moments to just shut my mouth and listen to these two guys who'd seen it all before.
Sometime in the early 1990's, H.B. local Brian Jordan of J'Lofty hired me to make a video promo for the Action Sports Retailer trade show. I managed to get to the deck of the demo vert ramp to shoot some photos. It was mostly skaters on it at that point. Just a big ol' jam session. As luck would have it, Tony Hawk popped out right next to me at one point. In the bike skate world, formal introductions are all that important, so I wasn't going to just act like a fan and introduce myself in the middle of a session. So I stood there next to Tony watching guys skate. Some newcomer to the scene, a kid named Bucky Lasek, dropped in and started to skate. I'd never heard of the kid before. That kid was Bucky Lasek, and on one run he did a backside 360 ollie right in front of Tony and me. I thought that was amazing, I'd never seen anyone do that before. It turned out to be far more amazing than I thought, because Tony Hawk started freaked when Bucky did it, and started slamming his trucks on the coping in appreciation. Bucky does a backside 360 ollie in this video at :25.
Oh, and then there was the time I nabbed a press pass to the 1999 X-Games. I ran into Maurice Meyer, who I hadn't seen for years, as BMX vert practice was ending. We started talking, and the skate best trick contest started at the skate ramp 100 feet away. So we walked over there and kept talking. By some weird bit of luck, we saw this happen. We were standing right behind the rows of chairs 20 feet from the side of the ramp. We could see the look in Tony's eyes after the 3rd or 4th try as he walked off the ramp. We realized he was either going to land it, or go to the hospital from trying. As luck would have it, I had my Sony Digital 8 camera in my hand... with a dead battery. I'm kind of glad, though. Because I just stood there and watched history take place, soaking it in. That's pretty cool.
Maurice ran out with the guys to congratulate Tony on the ramp. At 6:04, you can see him in a white hoodie with sunglasses, right behind Tony. I stayed where I was and just watched. That was a moment to always remember.
Monday, October 29, 2018
The most exciting skateboard video I've seen in a long time...
Launch ramp jam in 2018? This popped up on my YouTube feed a little while ago, and I decided to watch it before writing the blog post I had planned. I watch a fair amount of skate clips these days. For some reason, I've always liked watching skating and snowboarding more than BMX. But then, I rode with skaters, and did skate tricks on my bike, for much of the time I was riding seriously. Nollies, backside bonelesses, no comply's, and half Cab's were standard bike tricks for me.
This clip just keeps blowing your mind. Why? It's not just a launch ramp. The ramp is at the top of a gnarly hill. Launch ramp to hill bomb. Wanna watch it now?
When I moved in the San Francisco Bay area in 1985, I knew about it's crazy hills. But I didn't know what that meant for skateboarding. Those hills bred skateboarders who saw the whole city as one big skatepark. When I made it up to Golden Gate Park on a weekend, along with the BMX guys like Vander, Drob, and all, there was the other side of the Curb Dogs. Curb Dog and Powell Peralta Bones Brigade member Tommy Guerrero, and the other S.F. locals were sessioning launch ramps near where we used to have our BMX freestyle jam circle. I'd always go watch and shoot photos of them on my Kodak 110 camera. They were amazing. A couple years later, in SoCal, I'd roll by Pay-n-Play in Huntington Beach and watch the launch ramp sessions, and ride with them. This is old school street skating taken to a new level, and these guys fucking rock it. Mostly.
Thursday, August 9, 2018
Daewon just keeps the progression coming...
Long, weird day, today, and I needed to watch some skating to chill a bit. This new Daewon Song video popped up on my YouTube feed. The music completely freakin' sucks, but that's typical of skate videos these days. But it's Daewon, the skating is completely off the chain. There's a few bits from earlier videos, but most of it is new to me, and I watch his videos a lot. High tech, skateboard style. Just watch.
Friday, November 24, 2017
Meet Leticia Bufoni... THIS WOMAN CAN SKATE
NSFW (Not Safe For WIFE) OK old school BMXers, are you ready to feel old, lame, AND creepy?
Meet new school skater Leticia Bufoni, a 24-year-old pro skater from Brazil. She manages to combine the looks of a model, the body of an aerobics instructor, and the street skating skills of a hardcore pro skater. In this clip above you can see Leticia playing the model role. If you only watch this clip, it's safe to assume that I'm just some creepy old HAS BEEN guy.
This clip shows Leticia proving that she could beat you in a game of SKATE, unless you routinely take out guys like Nyjah Huston Chris Cole or Ryan Sheckler. Seriously, watch this clip, it's nuts. So what does this have to do with BMX? In this clip, she learns how to backflip a BMX bike into a foam pit... in four tries. Really. OK, Daniel Dhers is coaching her, but still. Look out world.
Tuesday, July 18, 2017
Journey of The White Bear 1990
In the late 80's, skater Christian Hosoi was known for his high airs and style, and always battling Tony Hawk, the technical vert trick master, for the win in vert contests. Christian teamed up with Vision Skateboards in 1990 and did a company called Tuff Skts. It didn't last that long, but it gave me a chance to shoot video of him and his crew for three days, and then edit a promo video. The original promo was 7 minutes long, and had music from Bad Brains and Muddy Waters, two of Christian's favorites. But the women in the Vision promotions department told me that it made them look like hoodlums. So I edited it down to four minutes they approved of. This little clip of that from Sk8-TV is the only part that survived. Bummer.
I got a great education about video production at Unreel Productions. But I didn't really like most of the videos they produced while I was there. The weird thing about Unreel, was that it didn't have to make money. We were basically going out and shooting all kinds of events, and every video would sell 3,000 copies or so because of all the shops that carried Vision. But we didn't have a TV series contract like big production companies. So we'd just shoot all this footage, and then months later, someone would say, "let's make this kind of video," and we'd go through the archives.
The reason that bugged me is because skateboarding and BMX freestyle were progressing like crazy, but our videos weren't on top of that progression. Plus everything had to have a million Vision Street Wear clothes and logos in it. So in early 1990, I got an S-VHS camera of my own, and I started shooting footage of my friends and riders that I knew. I wanted to produce my own video of what riding was actually like. Nearly every weekend, I went one place or another and shot whatever riders I could find that were up to something cool.
As fate would have it, the Vision empire was collapsing. It just got too big too quick, it was micro-managed, and key people were bailing like rats on a sinking ship. At one point, we were having two or three going away parties for good people every week. So it wasn't completely surprising when there was a meeting in early 1990, and we were told that Unreel was being dissolved. Don Hoffman, the head of Unreel, kept working as a freelancer. I was still the lowest guy on the totem pole, which meant I was cheap and knew how to work most of the equipment. So the woman just above me and I were moved to the Vision main office in Santa Ana. She found a new job on a real TV show soon after. From then on, I sat in an office with nothing to do, and read through all the computer files of my former co-workers, and watched videos all day. That sounds great, but I was bored out of my mind. So I quit around the first of July.
On my last day, one of the women in the promotions department (where my office was) asked me if I had any plans for the next few weeks. I didn't. "Do you want to drive the mini-ramp rig cross country on a little skate tour?" she asked. Here's the funny part, one of my goals as a BMX freestyler was to go on a summer tour doing shows. I never did it with a BMX team, but I jumped at the chance to drive/manage the skateboard tour. The next Monday I hopped in the dually pick-up with a skater named Mark Oblow, hitched up the ramp trailer, and headed east towards Atlanta.
In a great bit of luck, it turned out to be over 100 degrees every single day, wherever we were. On top of that, the blue Ford Vision dually was geared to pull trailers. It chugged up hills, not even whining, while pulling the 24 foot ramp trailer. But on the flats, it did 55 miles per hour. Period. Maybe 60 on a long downhill stretch. In case you didn't know, the American West is huge. It's ridiculous at 55 mph.
Mark and I left the hotel a couple hundred miles west of San Antonio on the morning of day 3. We had to be in Atlanta the next evening. We weren't going to make it. On top of that, we had to stop in Houston and pick up a couple of 15-year-old skaters named Mike Crum and Chris Gentry. As soon as we pulled away from the house, they asked if I could buy them cigarettes. As the responsible "tour manager," I said, "No." So I pulled over at the next 7-11 and made Oblow buy them cigarettes.
We headed east through Texas, and I wound up driving 24 hours straight to make it to Atlanta by Friday evening. I finally let Oblow drive for three hours, so I could get some sleep. But I couldn't sleep with him driving the rig. So I took over for the last three hours. 27 hours of driving in 30 hours and I ended up by doing head nods while stuck in Atlanta's Friday night rush hour. Don't ever do that. It was stupid. But we made it on time.
We met old school vert skater Buck Smith in Atlanta, and did a week of demos at Stone Mountain, and then headed back west, doing demos all the way to El Paso. It wasn't the craziest tour ever, but it definitely had its moments.
After the tour, I started doing some work for a little surf video distributor called NSI video. That fall, I finished my $5,000 self-produced video, The Ultimate Weekend. The video had a lot of firsts in it. The first handrail slide down steps by Keith Treanor. The first ice pick handrail slide by John Povah. The first mini ramps in a BMX video. The first spine ramp in a BMX video. The first 360 over a spine in a BMX video. The first footage from the Nude Bowl (an empty pool out in the desert) in a BMX video. I only made about $2,500 back, so it was a financial failure. But every rider around saw the video, and it made it around the world to some extent. So in that context, it was a success. Here it is:
What I didn't realize at the time was that I was one of the pioneers of the "rider-made" video movement, which spread through BMX, skateboarding, and snowboarding in the 90's. A handful of us riders, Eddie Roman, Mark Eaton, and myself in BMX freestyle, made our own videos the way WE wanted them to be. Soon every little start-up company in action sports was doing the same thing.
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