For less than $5 a month you can have space on a web server. For a few bucks a year you can have your own domain name. With a computer at the public library and a plain text editor you can then publish a website that can be seen more or less all over the world. THAT IS POWER. It just requires a tiny bit of knowledge and effort to do your own thing. You should do it.
Today I went out to Fort Worth my friend Mark (white shirt) to meet up with our friend Carter (yellow shirt) at a killer ditch to skate.
I am the old guy in the black shirt.
It was hot. Mark and I skated hard for about 1.5 hours before we gave out. Carter just kept hammering at a trick he wanted to get, and he got it.
I haven’t been skating much lately and it felt really great to get my legs back under me. Severely out of practice, but the legs feel good again and I feel the desire to skate, which is great.
This place, where I spent dozens if not hundreds of hours skating during and after the pandemic, has been destroyed as they totally rebuild the city hall complex. Yes, this was the south parking lot of our municipality’s city hall. It joins my freestyle practice spot, which was on the other side of the city hall, on the east side of the public library. They even destroyed the brick banks that ran along this sidewalk (yeah – the sidewalk is gone too),
Here is a picture of my poor old parking lot today…
Click for larger view of this fucking devastation.
To say I am unhappy about this does not capture the depth of my loss. I have no idea if any of the new shit will be OK to skate when it is done about 2 years from now. This place was about 5 minutes from my house. It was peaceful in the evenings and weekends. Both the freestyle spot and Pandemic Parking Lot gave me the solitude I really love for skating.
Yes, I’m being kind of childish about this. I don’t care. Fuck progress. Progress is bad. Change is bad. When things are good they should stay good.
I’m a 60-year old skateboarder and I am not – fucking – happy.
Now I have to find some other places nearby to skate. Places with some shade. Places with no damned kids running around. Places I can play my music loud through my bluetooth speaker and not disturb anyone. I will likely be forced to go up to Allen to the skatepark, which is annoying. It is a 20 minute drive under best conditions and there are people there.
One would think that finding a simple parking lot would be easy, but as my friends Chris and Brian have noted, a good skate spot is more than the concrete. It’s the energy of the place. The vibe. The way it makes you feel. It’s not that easy.
So, we shall see. Like I said, it will be at least two years until this complex reopens. I suspect it will be longer. Due to a bad fire in a server room a few years ago the entire city hall building was torn down and it is being moved to a different position on the land. The public library, which opened the year I moved here as a child, has been gutted and all the surrounding area has been ripped up. I can’t imagine the library will be done in two years. There’s just too much to do. And to totally build a new city hall? Longer. It has to be.
It’s silly to place too much value on a skate spot. We skateboarders know this, but we always do it anyway. It’s like getting a dog or a cat and saying “I’m not going to get so attached this time” and then of course you get more attached. This parking lot was my getaway. When the pandemic started I could go there and skate. When my wife got cancer a couple of months later it was a place close to home where I could skate and feed my soul, but get home quickly if needed. That semi-shitty concrete meant a lot to me. At this spot I reinvented the way I skate. A new way to skate for a time when I couldn’t end up in an ER full of Covid patients. A way I loved so much I still prefer it to how I skated before. Honestly, sometimes I would go there, skate, sit on the curb and cry, and then keep skating.
There’s lots of footage of this spot in my Vimeo library. This, however, is my favorite video I made from my time skating there. Simple, beautiful Fall sky. I think it captures everything.
I’ve been having a conversation with some of the guys on NeverWas Skateboarding about freestyle skateboarding and how back in the mid-late 70s and even early 80s skaters were more prone to being all-around skaters. By all around, I don’t mean “I skate transition AND street”. I mean skater who did vert, banks freestyle, slalom, downhill, as well as just skating in the street.
You’d have guys like Doug “Pineapple” Saladino show up at a pro pool event and place in it, then the next weekend he’d win the Oceanside pro freestyle contest. My friend Paul was on the local Wizard Skatepark team. I used to see them practicing. They all practiced everything. The legendary Jeff Phillips was on the team, and I remember vividly being at the park on a Friday night and the team was all in the freestyle area doing their routines one after the other, and I saw Jeff doing his.
In 1978-79 Skateboarder Magazine published a series of “Quivers” articles, showing the board setups of a number of current pros like Stacy Peralta, Gregg Ayres, Mike Weed, etc. They all had a range of boards for different purposes, including freestyle.
That’s how it was. I suppose as each form of skating became more difficult and more advanced specialization came more to the forefront.
The all-around era was really the formative era for me. As I could only go to the skatepark for 2 hours a week, freestyle and bank skating (at local spots near my house) were most accessible for me. It was easy to practice freestyle at the nearby school parking lot. The banked driveways in our alleys were my bank skating training ground. Occasionally one of us neighborhood skaters would build some shitty little ramp. But all-around skating was always my goal.
This new gallery is not technologically connected to this main blog. There is are no comment fields there. I want it to be a more oldschool organic thing. If someone wants to comment, the email address is right there. It can be easily followed using the RSS feed, which is shown on almost every page.
I’m looking forward to setting up this new Cockfight Skateboards Matt Money deck. It’s 9″ x 33″ with a 15″ wheelbase. Should be really good for parking lot style, ditches, and parks. I’m going to put Indy 169s and some 54mm 99a Bones STF on it. I’ve got a bunch of bank tricks I want to work on. Of course, we’re about to have an “arctic blast” hit the DFW area, so it’s going to get really cold. I always pick the best times to set up a new board. I also got some new New Balance skate shoes that I’m currently breaking in, before my current one fall apart.
My new friend Noah, who I met at StupidFest this year, sent me this video clip of me doing that same end-over to frontside fakie 360 at Zombie Baby ditch. Always fun to have stuff like this just materialize. I like this view – it shows the ditch really well.
I’ve had this Cockfight Skateboards deck for a few months. With the death of Frank Gardner I for some reason found myself compelled to set it up. Thanks, Frank. Seriously. I will seek to honor you with every ride on this beast.
Setup – can’t remember what they call this shape. Indy 169s, 1 thin riser, 54mm 95a OJ Nomads.
Found out yesterday that longtime Texas skateboarder, crafter of custom Texican skateboards, and wonderful son Frank Gardner has died.
Frank is one of the many people I knew online but have not met in-person. We chatted a lot, especially when our moms were both going through dementia. Of all Frank’s accomplishments – the skating, the creativity, etc. – I will alway remember him as a son who loved his mother and was devoted to her. Frank did the really heavy lifting during those days. That kind of situation is no easy ride, and Frank handled it with love and grace. That alone made me very happy to call him friend.
After Frank’s mom died he began a new lifestyle. During the horrible Texas summer’s he’d pack up the Texicamper van and head to the cooler Pacific Northwest, where he loved skating the many excellent skateparks up there. Then he’d return home and create fantastic skateboard decks for people. He pressed his own laminate, shaped the boards, and finished them. His decks were sought-after. Fine and solid craftsmanship was inherent and obvious when you touched one. Bullet-proof.
It saddens me that our paths will not cross in the future, in some awesome and perfect drainage ditch with all our friends sessioning alongside us.
My next ride will be in memory of Frank.
Frank at the Surfer ditch in Austin, flowing the way God intended us to. This is how it should look. Photo by the great Howard Dvorsky.
Years after I bought it, this 8.8″ wide 15″ wheelbase Cockfight pops still gets the job done. Obviously I have not used it constantly for the last seven years, but I always come back to it. The Ace 55 trucks fit it perfectly. It always feels super stable and while it’s a fairly large board it feels light when you pick it up and when you ride it. I put these 54mm 92a OJ wheels on it today.
This is a pretty good all-around board. It feels right in ditches and at skateparks, I can ride it for parking-lot-style freestyle. If I’m feeling particularly energetic I can do kickflips and 360 shove-its on it. The long wheelbase gives it a real nice flow. It has some inertia. I’m tall enough it frankly looks pretty good when doing footwork.
There is just something nice about being able to grab ONE BOARD when doing skating and feeling like I can do a little bit of everything on it, and feel nice and solid when going a little faster or when at a skatepark.
At great risk to myself of unintentionally joining the Cult of Andy Anderson, I have ordered some 54mm 93a Nano Cubics to try on this board with the slightly narrower Indy 159s.
This past weekend the London Calling skateboarding event happened in, you guessed it, London. A lot of big shots from the English and U.S. skate scenes were there. It’s kind of an old school event.
Alva was there.
I saw some shots on his Instagram page of him skating South Bank. That spot is no joke. My dear friend Tony Gale took me there in 2015 and it is gnarly. Even the flat is gnarly.
Alva posted this image on his Instagram page. It is everything I love in skateboarding, in one image. What a fantastic shot.
So here is the kind of thing I’m working on — the details.
This move is pretty simple. A backside 180 slide into a 720 spin, into two end-overs.
Here’s the thing that I’m working to get better. The idea is do use this to reverse the direction of travel. In this case, I’m moving away from the camera, and I want end up coming back to it. The two end-overs at the end of the sequence are critical, because they generate speed to return the way I came.
The problem? I tend to over-rotate the 720 spin. I should finish it pointed right back at the camera. That way I would be doing a FULL 180 end-over off the nose into a second end-over, which would generate a lot of speed and flow. By over-rotating the 720, I reduce the degrees of pivot in that first end-over, thereby reducing the speed generated.
Yes, I’m out of practice. My goal with all this, as with all my moves, is for this to be one continuous flowing motion that keeps speed throughout.
Video is really a helpful tool.
Some of you might find it amusing yet unsurprising to find out that when I do stuff like this I pick a seam in the concrete and pretend it is the top of a banked wall. So when I do this trick, for example, I’m pretending it is a banked wall that I go up and then come down. I do that a lot in freestyle, actually.
When I do this trick on a bank, of course, gravity allows me to change direction without thinking about it. Also, on a bank I don’t fakie carve into the 720 much if at all, so the exact 720 is easier to do.
I finally got out and skated Sunday. I’m fat. I don’t really care. I’m rusty. I do care about that, but I’ll get it taken care of. This is my first real session of the year.
I can’t remember if I have posted this here before. I have posted it a number of places. I just keep watching it over and over, not because I just love my own skating, but because of how the music just fits the video, and the sky. It makes me feel good.
After a pretty rough week — busy at work and losing our cat, Casper — I got out to skate a bit today. I was pretty worn out, but Pandemic Parking Lot is always fun. Didn’t really “work” on anything today. Just rolled around and enjoyed skating. I streamed it live on Facebook, and these are clips from there, thus the shitty quality. I need to take my push broom out there. There are a lot of acorns, twigs, and random junk up by the curb, under the trees.
It’s fun to stream sessions on Facebook. I like to check and see who is watching and talk to them.
