Placebo Girlfriend
The film adaptation of a novel.
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
The Big Payback*
Yesterday (Christmas), my brother Patrick and I were trying no-complies in the driveway when a cat colored like an alpaca sweater picked its way into our yard from among some pine trees.
"Hey look at the cat."
"Hey yeah. It kind of looks like that sweater I got from Aunt Nancy."
Back in DC, we fed a couple alley cats who would show up in our backyard, climb up on the steel bars that protected our back door, and paw at the glass like a couple of hungry orphans. In DC, I'd yell curses at the cats so they'd leap from the bars and quit smudging the window. But today, hey, we were in Milwaukee, it was Christmas, and this cat literally looked like a gift, so I figured I'd just leave it to the pines and keep trying flatland tricks with my brother.
After a few more laps around the driveway, I rolled up to Pat and told about the buttery no-complies this old-school skater Ray Barbee used to do back in the day, and he was awed. Then, after a few tricks:
"Hey look, is that the cat?"
"Where?"
"By the side of the road."
Over by the cat, there was a small puddle of viscous-looking blood. It lay prone, all four legs stretched out as far as they could go. Its eyes were open, its mouth agape, turned up at the corners in that triangular way that cats open their mouths to hiss.
Pat said, "Oh, God," and we stood there for a minute. A red pickup rolled by slowly, and a woman called out the window:
"Is it dead?"
"Yeah." So she drove away.
Eventually we decided to check its tags. The cat's name was Tess and she had a phone number.
"Should we call them?"
"I don't know. It's Christmas."
"Well maybe we should get it off the side of the road." I grabbed Tess by her tail and dragged her toward the curb. Pat said something about not being able to watch the blood smear on the street.
"I'm going to go get Dad."
Inside, we told Dad. He called the family immediately and left a message. He's good at breaking this kind of news; he's a doctor. He suggested we grab a cardboard box and put Tess inside it so if the family comes back they could pick up its remains in a receptacle. "You know, if they want to bury it," said Dad.
As we hunted in the basement for the box, we wondered where we were going to put Tess.
Pat said, "Whatever you do, just don't put her in a brick wall, like that Poe story about the Masons."
Back outside, three people hovered over the cat. After a second, I recognized one of them. It was Mike, a high-school acquaintance, with his family. Mike had wound up at NYU, studying theater I think.
"Hey Mike. How's it going," Mike asked.
"So-so. How about you."
"Sad," he said, in a sort of theatrical way (convincing, though; not overdone), and he looked at the dead cat, who was still laying stretched out on the grass. "I called the owner." Then he looked back at me. "Well, merry Christmas." And he turned around and walked off with his family.
My dad picked up the cat and put her in the box, taking her around the side of the house.
"You aren't going to put her on top of the recycling, are you?"
"That's what I was thinking, yeah. But maybe I'd better put her in the recycling so the animals can't eat her."
"You're going to recycle the cat?" Patrick was a little freaked out.
"Yeah, they'll just melt her down, re-mold her, and sell her: 'This cat 90 percent post-consumer waste.' She'll be a little browner and granier than the new kind, but it's good for the environment."
"Gross. I'm going inside."
Dad took some time to peel the postage label off of Tess's coffin. Then he opened the lid and set her inside the recycle bin.
I went inside and talked with Mom for a little bit, then checked my bloglines and read the news. A little later I was playing pool with Pat listening on the new Ghostface joint, when Ghost of Christmas Present dropped this down my chimney:
"Like James Brown / It's the big payback."
RIP to all, and to all a good night.
*see also http://riffmarket.blogspot.com/2006/11/hypnotize.html
Yesterday (Christmas), my brother Patrick and I were trying no-complies in the driveway when a cat colored like an alpaca sweater picked its way into our yard from among some pine trees.
"Hey look at the cat."
"Hey yeah. It kind of looks like that sweater I got from Aunt Nancy."
Back in DC, we fed a couple alley cats who would show up in our backyard, climb up on the steel bars that protected our back door, and paw at the glass like a couple of hungry orphans. In DC, I'd yell curses at the cats so they'd leap from the bars and quit smudging the window. But today, hey, we were in Milwaukee, it was Christmas, and this cat literally looked like a gift, so I figured I'd just leave it to the pines and keep trying flatland tricks with my brother.
After a few more laps around the driveway, I rolled up to Pat and told about the buttery no-complies this old-school skater Ray Barbee used to do back in the day, and he was awed. Then, after a few tricks:
"Hey look, is that the cat?"
"Where?"
"By the side of the road."
Over by the cat, there was a small puddle of viscous-looking blood. It lay prone, all four legs stretched out as far as they could go. Its eyes were open, its mouth agape, turned up at the corners in that triangular way that cats open their mouths to hiss.
Pat said, "Oh, God," and we stood there for a minute. A red pickup rolled by slowly, and a woman called out the window:
"Is it dead?"
"Yeah." So she drove away.
Eventually we decided to check its tags. The cat's name was Tess and she had a phone number.
"Should we call them?"
"I don't know. It's Christmas."
"Well maybe we should get it off the side of the road." I grabbed Tess by her tail and dragged her toward the curb. Pat said something about not being able to watch the blood smear on the street.
"I'm going to go get Dad."
Inside, we told Dad. He called the family immediately and left a message. He's good at breaking this kind of news; he's a doctor. He suggested we grab a cardboard box and put Tess inside it so if the family comes back they could pick up its remains in a receptacle. "You know, if they want to bury it," said Dad.
As we hunted in the basement for the box, we wondered where we were going to put Tess.
Pat said, "Whatever you do, just don't put her in a brick wall, like that Poe story about the Masons."
Back outside, three people hovered over the cat. After a second, I recognized one of them. It was Mike, a high-school acquaintance, with his family. Mike had wound up at NYU, studying theater I think.
"Hey Mike. How's it going," Mike asked.
"So-so. How about you."
"Sad," he said, in a sort of theatrical way (convincing, though; not overdone), and he looked at the dead cat, who was still laying stretched out on the grass. "I called the owner." Then he looked back at me. "Well, merry Christmas." And he turned around and walked off with his family.
My dad picked up the cat and put her in the box, taking her around the side of the house.
"You aren't going to put her on top of the recycling, are you?"
"That's what I was thinking, yeah. But maybe I'd better put her in the recycling so the animals can't eat her."
"You're going to recycle the cat?" Patrick was a little freaked out.
"Yeah, they'll just melt her down, re-mold her, and sell her: 'This cat 90 percent post-consumer waste.' She'll be a little browner and granier than the new kind, but it's good for the environment."
"Gross. I'm going inside."
Dad took some time to peel the postage label off of Tess's coffin. Then he opened the lid and set her inside the recycle bin.
I went inside and talked with Mom for a little bit, then checked my bloglines and read the news. A little later I was playing pool with Pat listening on the new Ghostface joint, when Ghost of Christmas Present dropped this down my chimney:
"Like James Brown / It's the big payback."
RIP to all, and to all a good night.
*see also http://riffmarket.blogspot.com/2006/11/hypnotize.html
Monday, December 25, 2006
I had some ideas a-baking in the back of my dome. Unfortunately, I'm on my mom's iMac (complete with single-clicks and apple keys) thanks mainly to my PC laptop's wireless card's case of cold impotence; problems have arisen. Safari, that mac-ganked version of Explorer that even carries on the navigation symbolism with a cute cartoon compass on the "dock," can't handle any kind of google- or blogger-enabled boldface or whatever. All I can do is post pictures (see below) and check my spelling (see all over).
This is a top-25 Google Image search result for -=50 Cent Christmas=-. I watched "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" with my lil bro and lil sis to ring in the new baby. But the post has no clever title, because of boldface. So I'm just gonna go listen to Ghostface, cause I got "More Fish" (no italics either) from my brother for Christmas. Be back later with musings on Ghost and the Father from Uganda who delivered the Christmas Mass at 11 am today.
Happy Holidays!
This is a top-25 Google Image search result for -=50 Cent Christmas=-. I watched "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" with my lil bro and lil sis to ring in the new baby. But the post has no clever title, because of boldface. So I'm just gonna go listen to Ghostface, cause I got "More Fish" (no italics either) from my brother for Christmas. Be back later with musings on Ghost and the Father from Uganda who delivered the Christmas Mass at 11 am today.
Happy Holidays!
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Seth Beckhardt Big-Ups the Mundane World
This appeared in the NYT in response to their article about Bob Burnquist's megaramp.
A lil reactionary, not to mention the weird supposition that there are two "worlds"--one "high-adrenaline" and the other "mundane"--inhabited by skateboarders and normal people respectively. Would that it could be so, Seth! Skate Planet! I'll write a letter to NASA asking them to keep the Hubble searching. I'm sure they have time to poke around the galaxy; they're probably really bored - or convinced that the mundane world is too difficult to handle - to conceive of such an idiotic, wasteful, and valueless pursuit as the world's largest telescope.
This appeared in the NYT in response to their article about Bob Burnquist's megaramp.
A Ramp to Self-Indulgence
To the Sports Editor:
Re “A Skateboarding Ramp Reaches for the Sky,” Nov. 1: Clearly, Bob Burnquist can be described in many ways: risk-taker, athlete, committed and passionate come to mind. But the one word that is never applied to his high-adrenaline world of X Games participants and their fans is bored. After all, one has to be really bored — or convinced that the mundane world is too difficult to handle — to conceive of such an idiotic, wasteful and valueless pursuit as the world’s largest skateboard ramp. Seth Beckhardt
A lil reactionary, not to mention the weird supposition that there are two "worlds"--one "high-adrenaline" and the other "mundane"--inhabited by skateboarders and normal people respectively. Would that it could be so, Seth! Skate Planet! I'll write a letter to NASA asking them to keep the Hubble searching. I'm sure they have time to poke around the galaxy; they're probably really bored - or convinced that the mundane world is too difficult to handle - to conceive of such an idiotic, wasteful, and valueless pursuit as the world's largest telescope.
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Big Blog Trumps Slutty MySpace Warmup Edition
Apparently there's a new skateboard company called Mentality Skateboards, a company whose only video, Skateboarding Explained, features Dan MacFarlane, a counselor a skateboard camp called Lake Owen. That is, Mentality's pro is a guy who teaches six-to-eight-year-old kids how to ollie.
Mentality's selection of MacFarlane as Skateboarding Explained's featured skater introduces a new and (hopefully) singular type of professional.
Most skateboard companies build up their credibility and mystique by creating videos and ads featuring athletes who jump down enormous flights of stairs, fly upside-down in halfpipes, or get in fights with security guards. The skateboards they sell basically signify the tricks they capture on film, and their brand identity relies heavily on whether their videos feature hip-hop, punk rock, fighting, drinking, weed, girls, grimy spots or smooth picnic benches. The attitude portrayed is all or nothing, land or crash, there is no between.
The more typical companies that do create "how-to" videos for skateboarding like The Basics of Skateboarding or Tony Hawk's Trick Tips have generally relied on the skills and expertise of seasoned pros; when a kid pops in a tape, he still gets to watch Geoff Rowley do a manual or Andrew Reynolds 50-50 a knee-high ledge. It's not amazing stuff, but at least the pros' smoothness teaches the kids to get comfortable on a board. Seeing Ed Templeton, whose parts normally feature noseblunts on steep banks, just ollie onto a curb gives a sense of ease, comfort, and bridled talent. More than that, one gets a sense of the months Templeton probably spent tripping the back trucks on the curb and faceplanting right when his pretty next-door neighbor came out the front door to walk her dog.
Mentality's model is different. They built a company around instruction, demystifying skateboarding, being famous for being accessible, for being the opposite of Greco/Daewon. For Mentality, just landing the trick is enough. MarFarlane doesn't look comfortable doing any of the tricks he lands, and one gets the sense that he is totally letting loose to land a kickflip on the flatground, that he pulled out all the stops just to stick that boardslide on the flatbar. When someone buys a Mentality board, they're buying the brand of mediocrity. And they get a free wallet with every purchase.
The result feels sad, for MacFarlane and for the kids who'll watch his video and might even buy his decks. The message of Mentality is style doesn't matter, just learning the next trick--the end result of a lifetime of skateboarding can yield a mediocre role in how-to videos. "Those that can't do..." "blogger.com," "The Believer," "Lupe Fiasco," and all that. The floogates are open but the filters aren't tight enough, the semen's leaking through the condoms, the editorial department is the news board, everyone's reporting, nobody's hating. In the aughties--the age of TMI--you gotta hack through the hackery to get to the gems.
And so:
Skate More!
Friday, September 08, 2006
Grew Up a Screw Up
This track brings the fuego in the sense that it has Luda rapping on it about how he was as a baby. He was pretty much the same as a baby.
Jeezy and Luda---GUASU Via Still Listen to Gagnster Music.
This track brings the fuego in the sense that it has Luda rapping on it about how he was as a baby. He was pretty much the same as a baby.
Jeezy and Luda---GUASU Via Still Listen to Gagnster Music.
Friday, August 18, 2006
Ships Ships Ahoy
People been up in the crow’s nests peerin out to the horizon looking for the next Hold Steady joint (due October), because during these bleak times they’re the only ones who indicate there’s even a drop of sweetness to be squeezed out of the lattices of today’s empty and cynical pop from the dance floor; people are panicking at the disco and everything’s gotten so sad that my friends are starting to write personal essays again.
Pitchfork has the dibs on the latest MP3 from the Hold, but the track shouldn’t be new to the devoted few. They definitely played it at their landmark show at the Warsaw this past July, and we were definitely more excited about it then than we are now.
But seeing the Hold Steady live is a religious/rebirth thing, and not just because of their overt Catholicism-dropping or the community displayed amongst the 30-somethings who hired a babysitter so they could go to the show, and it’s safe to guess that from now on the album tracks are always going to pale in comparison to the heat of the live performances.
Here’s why.
Almost Killed Me and Separation Sunday laid the groundwork for what the Hold Steady have been searching for the whole time; enjoyable pop music in the vein not of their obvious musical influences (Thin Lizzy, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and every other musical influence critics were clever enough to see name-dropped in the lyrics), but rather in the vein of the two of rock’s greats: the Ramones and the Beatles.
Finn and co. were smart enough to realize that “And Your Bird Can Sing” couldn’t exist properly without the context of the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” and “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” wouldn’t have made sense without “Gimme Danger.” It’s the contrast between the squeals of joy and the wails of sorrow that give rock its get-you-high vibe. The contrast is what rock used to be about. No band knew that better than Nirvana, whose dynamic changes forced nearly every song to live in the tantalizing space between the dregs and the cream.
Rock has two tonal poles that have been nearly completely neglected in this era of stylistic mimicry and cute postmodern allusion. We have well-worn grooves to get into now that rock is creeping towards being a hundred years old (if you count my way), but the tension between pure joy and pure agony is what separated the classic behemoths of the genre (the aforementioned Beatles, Ramones, Stooges, Stones) from the mere sonic vehicles bands ride nowadays in an effort at getting there (Queen, Led Zeppelin, pretty much everyone else).
No band in recent memory has so deliberately and carefully built towards the sweet side. Witness “Chips Ahoy.” Lurching in this direction has been their goal all along. Forget the 80’s and its dances. We’re going for a drive. Pretend this matters.
(Credibly) couching hard drug references in a song with whoa’s should be every rocker’s dream. Listen to them yell “Ahoyahoyaho.” Then hear Craig Finn singing now, not shouting, but doing his damndest to make that shitshow of a voice squeak out a couple notes, sometimes even hit them.
“How am I supposed to know if you’re high if you won’t let me touch you?” Finn’s not setting a scene; a guy cares about a girl, they’ve been through hell together, and now it’s all coming an ambiguous end, but an end all the same.
Tilting toward a belief in anything external is the ultimate goal for the children of the aughties. For all the sadness and confusion of our times all we’ve gotten so far is Indecision by Ben Kunkel and a bunch of decent R&B tracks. And Indecision was only good when it was sad, and the R&B hasn’t been anywhere besides inside the comfortable confines of sexiness and groping on the dance floor, big butts etc.
But that’s where “Chips Ahoy” wins the race. The music had been hard rock, now it’s pop. We’ve gotten through the E, the gutter, the bars, the taxis, all the youthful American stuff our parents laid down so firmly for us to tread upon, and now the two of us are laying down together, one grey and cold, on a bad trip, the other just trying to reach for it. The “Whoas” are the only way to get there, and it’s in the franticness of this simple and anti-intellectual space where rock and roll has always thrived.
There’s still a little hope.
October awaits.
_____ ______.
People been up in the crow’s nests peerin out to the horizon looking for the next Hold Steady joint (due October), because during these bleak times they’re the only ones who indicate there’s even a drop of sweetness to be squeezed out of the lattices of today’s empty and cynical pop from the dance floor; people are panicking at the disco and everything’s gotten so sad that my friends are starting to write personal essays again.
Pitchfork has the dibs on the latest MP3 from the Hold, but the track shouldn’t be new to the devoted few. They definitely played it at their landmark show at the Warsaw this past July, and we were definitely more excited about it then than we are now.
But seeing the Hold Steady live is a religious/rebirth thing, and not just because of their overt Catholicism-dropping or the community displayed amongst the 30-somethings who hired a babysitter so they could go to the show, and it’s safe to guess that from now on the album tracks are always going to pale in comparison to the heat of the live performances.
Here’s why.
Almost Killed Me and Separation Sunday laid the groundwork for what the Hold Steady have been searching for the whole time; enjoyable pop music in the vein not of their obvious musical influences (Thin Lizzy, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and every other musical influence critics were clever enough to see name-dropped in the lyrics), but rather in the vein of the two of rock’s greats: the Ramones and the Beatles.
Finn and co. were smart enough to realize that “And Your Bird Can Sing” couldn’t exist properly without the context of the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” and “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” wouldn’t have made sense without “Gimme Danger.” It’s the contrast between the squeals of joy and the wails of sorrow that give rock its get-you-high vibe. The contrast is what rock used to be about. No band knew that better than Nirvana, whose dynamic changes forced nearly every song to live in the tantalizing space between the dregs and the cream.
Rock has two tonal poles that have been nearly completely neglected in this era of stylistic mimicry and cute postmodern allusion. We have well-worn grooves to get into now that rock is creeping towards being a hundred years old (if you count my way), but the tension between pure joy and pure agony is what separated the classic behemoths of the genre (the aforementioned Beatles, Ramones, Stooges, Stones) from the mere sonic vehicles bands ride nowadays in an effort at getting there (Queen, Led Zeppelin, pretty much everyone else).
No band in recent memory has so deliberately and carefully built towards the sweet side. Witness “Chips Ahoy.” Lurching in this direction has been their goal all along. Forget the 80’s and its dances. We’re going for a drive. Pretend this matters.
(Credibly) couching hard drug references in a song with whoa’s should be every rocker’s dream. Listen to them yell “Ahoyahoyaho.” Then hear Craig Finn singing now, not shouting, but doing his damndest to make that shitshow of a voice squeak out a couple notes, sometimes even hit them.
“How am I supposed to know if you’re high if you won’t let me touch you?” Finn’s not setting a scene; a guy cares about a girl, they’ve been through hell together, and now it’s all coming an ambiguous end, but an end all the same.
Tilting toward a belief in anything external is the ultimate goal for the children of the aughties. For all the sadness and confusion of our times all we’ve gotten so far is Indecision by Ben Kunkel and a bunch of decent R&B tracks. And Indecision was only good when it was sad, and the R&B hasn’t been anywhere besides inside the comfortable confines of sexiness and groping on the dance floor, big butts etc.
But that’s where “Chips Ahoy” wins the race. The music had been hard rock, now it’s pop. We’ve gotten through the E, the gutter, the bars, the taxis, all the youthful American stuff our parents laid down so firmly for us to tread upon, and now the two of us are laying down together, one grey and cold, on a bad trip, the other just trying to reach for it. The “Whoas” are the only way to get there, and it’s in the franticness of this simple and anti-intellectual space where rock and roll has always thrived.
There’s still a little hope.
October awaits.
_____ ______.
Thursday, August 17, 2006
burnz
Ed. Note: Ideelz fact checkers have been all on my case about the Hosoi post because the VA Beach Skatepark MT Trashmore has burned to the ground (via Art of Skateboarding).
We stand by our story because of a "rising from the ashes" lead-in angle that will make next week's made-up coverage/liveblog of the event easier to write.
For All My Friends Who Used to Exclaim "JESUS CHRIST ON A BIKE!"
In spite of the onerous responsibilities of blogging/living life, I would nevertheless be remiss in my duties as a commentator of ideelz if I neglected to mention the [c]upcoming tour/documentary [video preview sort of] about meth-dealing, Bible-slinging Christian “Holmes/Christ” Hosoi narrated by Dennis Hopper of E-Z Rider fame and featuring commentaries from all the expected skateboarding legends.
The path of Hosoi’s career starts, for ideelz, back in 1988, when my parents bought me Skateboard Superstars (Holy Goddamn this Google Video provides nearly all of life's necessities), a video featuring mainly Rodney Mullen and Christian Hosoi, but also some New York groms who skated downtown and did handstands on Broadway because it was the 80s and no one really knew how to ollie yet. Despite the lack of Gelfland-inflected skate style, the video marked my first foray into pro-skater admiration/envy and helped to cement skate aesthetics as a primus motor for most of my adolescent and even adult actions/activities/critiques.
In the video, a narrator explains that Hosoi is the biggest thing ever to happen to skating, and that he’s a role model admired by many. Although my critical faculties were pretty good at age 5, I didn’t know that at that time Hosoi was also busting chops à la present-day-or-late-90s artiste-heroes/degenerates like Dustin Dollin, Ali Boulala, or Jim Greco (who is now supposedly and awkwardly clean). The video wisely airbrushed the druggy haze that was also part of Hosoi’s life for the benefit of its young audience, parents still bought kids boards, and everything went along pretty well.
By 1997, when I got back into skateboarding due to an exit from frustrated middle-school nerddom/not sure what girls were/weren’t, Hosoi had already plummeted out of the picture, due to the ollie revolution, Koston, Daewon, tech, baggy pants, 540 flips, and picnic benches. I’d forgotten about him anyway, because I’d picked up a Transworld and saw people skating handrails.
During this time, Hosoi was presumably crawling along the dark underbelly of lapsed fame and drug-addled torment. By 2000, he was arrested in Hawaii for bringing to the airport enough meth to erupt a volcano. In jail, he underwent a Malcolm X-style conversion, except he found Christianity instead of Elijah Muhammad and, thanks to his preaching to other jailbirds, was released early for extraordinarily good behavior, thanks in part to a letter-writing campaign. (Eventually there will be a blink piece about born-again skaters, a powerful and unlikely segment of the legendary lineup, which includes most prominently Hosoi and, of course, Jamie Thomas, but isn’t limited to them [I think Austin Stephens is also Christian].)
This ties in nicely with the whole 5vs1, lapsed Catholic, Hold-Steady, fame as depression and vice versa, get saved, fast revulsion and redemption theme, of course.
Anyway now Hosoi's out and he skates again, and like such other vets as Alva, Caballero, and definitely Dwayne Peters (who probably will garner his own post eventually, whether or not there is a time peg to render it “meaningful”), he’s got a world-weary edge to his skating and just oozes “respect this life I’ve chosen.”
This documentary promises to bring legit footage, and to promote it, Quicksilver is also sponsoring a tour with free screenings and demos by such incredible pros as Arto Saari and I believe Holmes himself. If you’re near a town that is carrying this tour, I highly recommend a visit. Cover it for your local alt-weekly etc.
Tour Sched (cribbed from Skateboardermag article):
8/17: Huntington Beach, CA
8/19: Wilson Skatepark, Chicago, IL
8/20: River East Arts Center, Chicago, IL
8/22: Mt. Trashmore, VA Beach, VA [!!!! If you live in DC and have a car and read this please email me or comment so we can road trip out to DO THE THING!!!]
8/23: Fairman’s, West Chester, PA
8/23: Chester County Historic Society, West Chester, PA
8/27: Knitting Factory, NYC, NY
8/29: 3rd Lair, Minneapolis, MN
8/31: Bluebird, Denver, CO
9/1: Denver Skate Park, Denver, CO
9/3: Pacifica Skate Spark, SF, CAli
9/3: The Log Shop, SF, CAlicious
Keep in Touch BABY!
IDEELLLZZZZ out.
In spite of the onerous responsibilities of blogging/living life, I would nevertheless be remiss in my duties as a commentator of ideelz if I neglected to mention the [c]upcoming tour/documentary [video preview sort of] about meth-dealing, Bible-slinging Christian “Holmes/Christ” Hosoi narrated by Dennis Hopper of E-Z Rider fame and featuring commentaries from all the expected skateboarding legends.
The path of Hosoi’s career starts, for ideelz, back in 1988, when my parents bought me Skateboard Superstars (Holy Goddamn this Google Video provides nearly all of life's necessities), a video featuring mainly Rodney Mullen and Christian Hosoi, but also some New York groms who skated downtown and did handstands on Broadway because it was the 80s and no one really knew how to ollie yet. Despite the lack of Gelfland-inflected skate style, the video marked my first foray into pro-skater admiration/envy and helped to cement skate aesthetics as a primus motor for most of my adolescent and even adult actions/activities/critiques.
In the video, a narrator explains that Hosoi is the biggest thing ever to happen to skating, and that he’s a role model admired by many. Although my critical faculties were pretty good at age 5, I didn’t know that at that time Hosoi was also busting chops à la present-day-or-late-90s artiste-heroes/degenerates like Dustin Dollin, Ali Boulala, or Jim Greco (who is now supposedly and awkwardly clean). The video wisely airbrushed the druggy haze that was also part of Hosoi’s life for the benefit of its young audience, parents still bought kids boards, and everything went along pretty well.
By 1997, when I got back into skateboarding due to an exit from frustrated middle-school nerddom/not sure what girls were/weren’t, Hosoi had already plummeted out of the picture, due to the ollie revolution, Koston, Daewon, tech, baggy pants, 540 flips, and picnic benches. I’d forgotten about him anyway, because I’d picked up a Transworld and saw people skating handrails.
During this time, Hosoi was presumably crawling along the dark underbelly of lapsed fame and drug-addled torment. By 2000, he was arrested in Hawaii for bringing to the airport enough meth to erupt a volcano. In jail, he underwent a Malcolm X-style conversion, except he found Christianity instead of Elijah Muhammad and, thanks to his preaching to other jailbirds, was released early for extraordinarily good behavior, thanks in part to a letter-writing campaign. (Eventually there will be a blink piece about born-again skaters, a powerful and unlikely segment of the legendary lineup, which includes most prominently Hosoi and, of course, Jamie Thomas, but isn’t limited to them [I think Austin Stephens is also Christian].)
This ties in nicely with the whole 5vs1, lapsed Catholic, Hold-Steady, fame as depression and vice versa, get saved, fast revulsion and redemption theme, of course.
Anyway now Hosoi's out and he skates again, and like such other vets as Alva, Caballero, and definitely Dwayne Peters (who probably will garner his own post eventually, whether or not there is a time peg to render it “meaningful”), he’s got a world-weary edge to his skating and just oozes “respect this life I’ve chosen.”
This documentary promises to bring legit footage, and to promote it, Quicksilver is also sponsoring a tour with free screenings and demos by such incredible pros as Arto Saari and I believe Holmes himself. If you’re near a town that is carrying this tour, I highly recommend a visit. Cover it for your local alt-weekly etc.
Tour Sched (cribbed from Skateboardermag article):
8/17: Huntington Beach, CA
8/19: Wilson Skatepark, Chicago, IL
8/20: River East Arts Center, Chicago, IL
8/22: Mt. Trashmore, VA Beach, VA [!!!! If you live in DC and have a car and read this please email me or comment so we can road trip out to DO THE THING!!!]
8/23: Fairman’s, West Chester, PA
8/23: Chester County Historic Society, West Chester, PA
8/27: Knitting Factory, NYC, NY
8/29: 3rd Lair, Minneapolis, MN
8/31: Bluebird, Denver, CO
9/1: Denver Skate Park, Denver, CO
9/3: Pacifica Skate Spark, SF, CAli
9/3: The Log Shop, SF, CAlicious
Keep in Touch BABY!
IDEELLLZZZZ out.
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Skate=Takes=Slates
Ed. Note: At anewyorkthing.com, you can see t-shirts that say such quotes as "Crack is Back...Again!" and feature pics of arms with legs. I would've posted these illustrations but they use flash to show off their designs, probably mostly so bloggers won't copypaste and make fun of them.
On to the story...
Where I went to high school, there was a kid named Dave. Dave had played soccer since he was five, he was handsome, and he had a sharp tongue that betrayed—through the veil of his horrendous academic performance—genuine, well-greased gears churning constantly and rapidly inside what should have been a drug-addled and useless head. Not entirely incidentally, Dave could skateboard.
Dave got laid by the waifs, anorexic hippie girls who smoked pot and came to the homecoming dance high as hell. He himself was into acid, mushrooms, and, of course, marijuana, which he and the wannabe rastas at my school would smoke during the lunch hour in an alcove between two of the buildings.
Dave liked me ok, and we even skated together a couple times. But I was too sensitive, angry, and into math to ever really hit it off with the guy. When I couldn’t land my kickflips, he’d say “Don’t turn your body,” then nail a perfect one down the seven steps leading to the pool building. He’d roll off silent and clean, walk back up the stairs, and light a cigarette. He’d give me a look that seemed to say, “You’ll never do what I just did now.”
During those years, my face and body fell short of the pretty portrait Dave cut, and I’m not entirely sure, but I don’t think I ever believed I could get laid by the waifs or crack a knowing joke just because I could pop an ollie over a 20 oz. Coke bottle. I knew that, for some reason, skating was cool, and of course it wasn’t bad that I could at least say “Hey” to guys like Dave in the hallways, but I also knew that I had motivations for skating beyond the elusive and probably hopeless possibility of losing my virginity or garnering the respect of awesome athletes before I graduated from high school.
The simple explanation is that skateboarding is intensely physical. Each session yields extreme results: personal injury, the pure mental symmetry of landing a kickflip in the driveway, or board-smashing frustration at landing primo. For the college-bound, high school is essentially a half-decade of preparation, and, in the context of constant slogs through Charlotte Bronte or asymptotes, skateboarding offered immediacy: pleasure or pain.
Skating offered Dave another way to exert his dominance over the angry nerds, and it offered me one of my only ways to break up the monotony of the M-F test-prep-kit disaster that was my high-school existence.
This Times Magazine piece from Sunday posits a different set of motivations for the current hip set.
Apparently, getting pretty rich and somewhat famous has supplanted the effortlessness of the knowing look or the life-affirming agony of the broken toe. Having an anti-commercial lifestyle is now commercially viable. What’s more, anyone can cash in on any counterculture. All they need is a Comcast subscription and little start-up capital. And skateboarding figures big into their marketing strategy.
All this makes sense; possessed of blogs, pitchfork, thefader, New York City, hipsters, ripsters, our very rich society, packed to the gills with savvy, overeducated minorities of every possible description, is currently mass-producing countercultures that are just as hip and alluring as all the ones of the past, only now, everyone gets a piece of the action. Don’t like the Canadian indie bands? Fine, you can like the guy who sings about states. Don’t skate? Fine, get a funny haircut and design a t-shirt. With so many different products available for purchase, countercultural images have never been more accessible. And it’s never been easier to be a maven. And, possibly for that very reason, the whole catchall pop-indie hip-hop outdo-your-neighbors hip NYC-is-everywhere scene seems to be getting more hollow by the second.
Several things separate the high-school kids at the skatepark in Shaw by my house who wreck themselves trying to hit a pivot on the 8-foot quarterpipe from the Hundreds jokers who flunked the bar but still make cash by creating exclusive and somehow skateboard-like designs.
First, there is no cash in cool for the Shaw kids, who wear white tees and smoke Marlboros and spend the money they scrape together on tattoos and weed.
They will not be taking the bar exam; they don’t have opportunities to squander. So they’re doing their own thing, spending their time after school smoothing out their flicks, hoping to catch the perfect trey. They are bereft of the sense that there is anything else for them. Like all rebels from Bob Dylan the Hell’s Angels to the Zephyr team to Rocky to the Ramones to the 90s Zero team, they carry an aura of desperation. For musicians and skateboarders, each note and every trick is an ideel to be treasured and sought after more than money or fame. At least, that’s how the story goes.
Beyond that, though, there lies an even simpler distinction. Skaters actually skate, and skaters are skaters because of what they do, not because of what they buy or sell. They aren’t upset by the idea that their aesthetic sense might never lead to rock-star parties or pseudo-fame. They don’t feel entitled to those things because they don’t even want them in the first place; at least they don’t want them any more than they want to skate.
Meanwhile, one wonders if the would-be lawyers who sought meaning in designing t-shirts ever thought that, given the lifestyle horrors of corporate law, they might have been better suited doing something with actual meaning, instead of creating luxury goods for the upper and upper-middle classes. Given a chance to crack into the top echelons of a culture they view as mildly corrupt and grossly superficial, these kids take the easy way out and churn out some pictures to put on some stretches of cotton for the very conformist classes they despise for being fake and clueless.
Where is the allure of authenticity in something so completely devoid of meaning as t-shirts that do nothing other than signify upper-class taste? Why the preoccupation with the tangential elements?
Because the tangential elements are easier to imitate and sell. Maybe in the future, no one will even have to skate or play music. We'll just get rich making t-shirts that allude to legitimate activities as historical phenomena.
For the moment, at least, the joke’s still on these mauvaise-foi t-shirt weinerhogs. Because who buys their expensive, counterculture cache goods?
Corporate lawyers. Corporate lawyers who read Slate.
I promise to start the next one off with a positive jam.
Until then.
Ed. Note: At anewyorkthing.com, you can see t-shirts that say such quotes as "Crack is Back...Again!" and feature pics of arms with legs. I would've posted these illustrations but they use flash to show off their designs, probably mostly so bloggers won't copypaste and make fun of them.
On to the story...
Where I went to high school, there was a kid named Dave. Dave had played soccer since he was five, he was handsome, and he had a sharp tongue that betrayed—through the veil of his horrendous academic performance—genuine, well-greased gears churning constantly and rapidly inside what should have been a drug-addled and useless head. Not entirely incidentally, Dave could skateboard.
Dave got laid by the waifs, anorexic hippie girls who smoked pot and came to the homecoming dance high as hell. He himself was into acid, mushrooms, and, of course, marijuana, which he and the wannabe rastas at my school would smoke during the lunch hour in an alcove between two of the buildings.
Dave liked me ok, and we even skated together a couple times. But I was too sensitive, angry, and into math to ever really hit it off with the guy. When I couldn’t land my kickflips, he’d say “Don’t turn your body,” then nail a perfect one down the seven steps leading to the pool building. He’d roll off silent and clean, walk back up the stairs, and light a cigarette. He’d give me a look that seemed to say, “You’ll never do what I just did now.”
During those years, my face and body fell short of the pretty portrait Dave cut, and I’m not entirely sure, but I don’t think I ever believed I could get laid by the waifs or crack a knowing joke just because I could pop an ollie over a 20 oz. Coke bottle. I knew that, for some reason, skating was cool, and of course it wasn’t bad that I could at least say “Hey” to guys like Dave in the hallways, but I also knew that I had motivations for skating beyond the elusive and probably hopeless possibility of losing my virginity or garnering the respect of awesome athletes before I graduated from high school.
The simple explanation is that skateboarding is intensely physical. Each session yields extreme results: personal injury, the pure mental symmetry of landing a kickflip in the driveway, or board-smashing frustration at landing primo. For the college-bound, high school is essentially a half-decade of preparation, and, in the context of constant slogs through Charlotte Bronte or asymptotes, skateboarding offered immediacy: pleasure or pain.
Skating offered Dave another way to exert his dominance over the angry nerds, and it offered me one of my only ways to break up the monotony of the M-F test-prep-kit disaster that was my high-school existence.
This Times Magazine piece from Sunday posits a different set of motivations for the current hip set.
Apparently, getting pretty rich and somewhat famous has supplanted the effortlessness of the knowing look or the life-affirming agony of the broken toe. Having an anti-commercial lifestyle is now commercially viable. What’s more, anyone can cash in on any counterculture. All they need is a Comcast subscription and little start-up capital. And skateboarding figures big into their marketing strategy.
All this makes sense; possessed of blogs, pitchfork, thefader, New York City, hipsters, ripsters, our very rich society, packed to the gills with savvy, overeducated minorities of every possible description, is currently mass-producing countercultures that are just as hip and alluring as all the ones of the past, only now, everyone gets a piece of the action. Don’t like the Canadian indie bands? Fine, you can like the guy who sings about states. Don’t skate? Fine, get a funny haircut and design a t-shirt. With so many different products available for purchase, countercultural images have never been more accessible. And it’s never been easier to be a maven. And, possibly for that very reason, the whole catchall pop-indie hip-hop outdo-your-neighbors hip NYC-is-everywhere scene seems to be getting more hollow by the second.
Several things separate the high-school kids at the skatepark in Shaw by my house who wreck themselves trying to hit a pivot on the 8-foot quarterpipe from the Hundreds jokers who flunked the bar but still make cash by creating exclusive and somehow skateboard-like designs.
First, there is no cash in cool for the Shaw kids, who wear white tees and smoke Marlboros and spend the money they scrape together on tattoos and weed.
They will not be taking the bar exam; they don’t have opportunities to squander. So they’re doing their own thing, spending their time after school smoothing out their flicks, hoping to catch the perfect trey. They are bereft of the sense that there is anything else for them. Like all rebels from Bob Dylan the Hell’s Angels to the Zephyr team to Rocky to the Ramones to the 90s Zero team, they carry an aura of desperation. For musicians and skateboarders, each note and every trick is an ideel to be treasured and sought after more than money or fame. At least, that’s how the story goes.
Beyond that, though, there lies an even simpler distinction. Skaters actually skate, and skaters are skaters because of what they do, not because of what they buy or sell. They aren’t upset by the idea that their aesthetic sense might never lead to rock-star parties or pseudo-fame. They don’t feel entitled to those things because they don’t even want them in the first place; at least they don’t want them any more than they want to skate.
Meanwhile, one wonders if the would-be lawyers who sought meaning in designing t-shirts ever thought that, given the lifestyle horrors of corporate law, they might have been better suited doing something with actual meaning, instead of creating luxury goods for the upper and upper-middle classes. Given a chance to crack into the top echelons of a culture they view as mildly corrupt and grossly superficial, these kids take the easy way out and churn out some pictures to put on some stretches of cotton for the very conformist classes they despise for being fake and clueless.
Where is the allure of authenticity in something so completely devoid of meaning as t-shirts that do nothing other than signify upper-class taste? Why the preoccupation with the tangential elements?
Because the tangential elements are easier to imitate and sell. Maybe in the future, no one will even have to skate or play music. We'll just get rich making t-shirts that allude to legitimate activities as historical phenomena.
For the moment, at least, the joke’s still on these mauvaise-foi t-shirt weinerhogs. Because who buys their expensive, counterculture cache goods?
Corporate lawyers. Corporate lawyers who read Slate.
I promise to start the next one off with a positive jam.
Until then.
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Neckz/Facez
Not exactly as promised, a non-live blog of Disk 2 of Krooked Kronichles...
Rarely does a special-features disk actually outweigh the actual product in kilos of entertainment. If it weren't for the annoying problem of playing the disk on my roommate's slow Compaq without a remote control, having to get up and mouse over to the next segment, I could say that the special features, possessed of a shotgun, would put Disk 1 into a trap-and-skeet machine and send it sailing gracefully over a river, granting it glorious flight its life shortly before disintegrating it into pixie (more like fairy) dust.
Why? Well, apologies again to Mark Gonzales. But Disk 2 confirms that he ruined Krooked Kronichles his creative input. The initial segments of the special features include guest edits by punk rock shitshow/incredible Australian talent Dustin Dollin and others. And they're much better than the flimflam the Gonz put together on the first dvd. The skating is better showcased, there are more bails that make the viewer realize how fast and injury-prone skaters really are, and we havent even gotten to the actual "extras."
But now we have. Neck Face's segment of the "arty graffiti vid-features" dominates (in terms of power but not time, because it's less than 5 mins long) the entire disk. We see him throwing a molotov cocktail at a tag, skating a full pipe messily and falling, bonelessing a sketchy bank not seen in any other part of the video, and otherwise being a nighttime menace to the sleeping squares. My friend, whose driver's license was recently revoked and who has done enough stretches in jail to slightly improve his flexibility, walked in when this segment was playing and said "This guy breaks so many laws!" He sat down until it was over, and then went to put on his pyjamas.
He did this because the remainder of the DVD focuses on the dubious artistic achievements of Krooked's friends. They also do graffiti, but their graffiti is boring, a bunch of photorealistic eyes smattered on some plywood and set against a wall (probably so they won't offend anyone). One of the guys wrote a good song on the piano but it wasn't worth it to be subjected to so many photos of sunglasses piled on each other.
Essentially, the artistic "vision" Krooked mounts together is subverted effectively by the contrasting elements of the DVD. Every time a punk upstart takes the helm at the editing booth or at the molotov cocktail vending machine, the video springs to live. Krooked makes you want to watch videos by more interesting skateboard artists, whether, like Neck Face, they appeared in short segments or, like pornographic alien designer/noseblunt slide popularizer Ed Templeton, they didn't appear in the video at all. It's not the fact of Krooked's cerebral elements that destroy it outright; it's the fact that the cerebral elements are boring and distracting enough to take away from skateboarding's primary allure: visceral thrills--cheap, illegal, and explosive.
Monday, July 17, 2006
Birthz/Krookz
For my birthday I was basically doused in technology (a phone and a dvd and the less-newfangled invention: bookz). My cell phone had had Mahoney disease, which is when you take off your pants to get busy and your phone cracks on the floor creating a supernova-looking phenom on your display screen. My sis and pops got together to float me a new one and it is simply fresh, complete with photo-taking ability and even Internet poker.
The real prize though was that I got a new skate video thanks to my little brother. Back when I was in High School my two brothers and I pretty much could just go to the skate shop to get a gift for either (or both) of the other two.
Since college, things have gotten complex and it no longer suffices anyone to receive a series of stickers, t-shirts, and videos of guys spinning tornadoes down seventeen flights of stairs. Intellectual growth meant more books for birthdays and more rap CD's for Christmas...so nostalgia is necessarily on my mind when I look at this vid.
The thing is, Krooked is run by oft-name-dropped-as-influence Mark Gonzales, who basically turned 80s powerpink lightningbolt halfpipe skateboarding into the cool hiphop ledgelord bluejeans streetcruising skateboarding it is today. He skated on Blind for Video Days, a video that taught kids everywhere that 360 flips could happen and was one of the first commercial video appearances of pro-actor-pro/Earl Jason Lee.
Somewhat ironically, Gonz wants Krooked to bring skating back to an era he helped destroy. He skates one-directional boards, reprising stuff from his early career, and often commits smooth Koston/H.A.M.M.E.R. skating no-nos by picking up his board and running around with it or jumping down stairs in just his shoes, with his skateboard nowhere in the frame. This is all cut very fast and smoothly, and, along with cameos by Neck Face and other skateboard "artists," contributes to the feeling that this is a creative skate video.
Gonz used to kickflip fakie in pools on banana boards and it looked silly but there was a gravity to it, like no one used banana boards to do semi-jokey tricks, whatever soul skating might have had in the Dogtown days had surely been defeated.
Fine, and I love Tiltmode Army videos and the Baker franchise's series where they are all just skating around drunk in some summer heat, smashing beer bottles with their skates, skating on plywood in the backyard, etc. And I like Gonz's spastic style on the board. But his non-sequitur-laced monologues in between parts and the unforgivable obsession with loafers that drag us through the interludes reek of strained effort, which is the opposite of why anyone would watch skateboarding (or maybe anything for that matter), least of all for over a half an hour.
This weekend we were drinking in a circle, chatting about DC real estate and the future of our assorted and non-existent careers when a young undergrad held up his cigarette and said "I think I might be an alcoholic." In reply, I asked him, "Then where's your drink?" Two years ago I was skating the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and this kid was doing monster 180s (maybe even switch) into the fountain but looked around after he landed to see if anyone saw him. As if to say, "I think I might be a skateboarding legend," Gonz keeps looking for the camera to see if we saw/admire him, killing the post-skate-trick/orgasm emptyheadedness that every amateur skater knows and is the reason that landing silly tricks is worth it. It's like he's hoping that his spazoid antics will bring back the moments of yesteryore when the camera seemed to just be on him at the right moment and it was only joy that fueled the whole eccentric tic-tac crazed phenomenon.
Jury's still hung until later, when I watch the apparently more Neck Face-centric Disk 2. Maybe I'll liveblog it.
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