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The Road to Europe #1: Mode Freestyle Board

Inspired by my friends Tommy Harward and Sean Burke, I am doing a series of posts about my preparations to go on a skateboarding trip to London this summer, to skate with my friend and podcasting partner Tony Gale for the first time, and road trip with a bunch of British freestylers to the Paderborn contest, in Germany.

My posts will not be as funny as Tommy and Sean’s videos. Sorry.

That being said, I’m practicing my various English accents like a madman in order to fit in. I’m using the word “lovely” a lot. And “bollocks”.  I’ll get up to speed on inappropriate phrases in German soon.

Since buying my tickets, there has been exactly one day in which I have had good enough weather to get out and do a little freestyle practice.

Anyway, I decided to try out a slightly longer freestyle board than I normally ride. I say “normally” because sometimes over the last few years I’ve chosen to ride a standard 7.75″ wide newschool street board for freestyle from time to time. It has room for my feet, and the 14″ wheelbase seems to lend itself better to the way I ride. My friends mostly seem to think my skating has better flow on a board this size.

However, there are certain aspects of the newschool board that are not ideal. The nose and tail are really too long for freestyle. Not only do you not need them to be that long, but they get in the way.

click image to embiggen
click image to embiggen

Sooooo… I ordered the Mode Skateboards double kick, the board my friend Terry Synnott designed and rides. He’s refined this shape over the last 10 or 12 years, over various sponsors, until finally he started Mode Skateboards and produces this board. It’s the one on the right that says “Mode’ on it. Compared to my older Small School “Sarge” model, the wheelbase is a little longer, coming in at 13.75″. That may not look like much difference, but it is significant. The board is also a bit wider. The nose and tail are symmetrical, and 5.75″ long. This is a good length, as it provides sufficient leverage, but is short enough I can raise the nose/tail high during wheelies without scraping the ground too quickly. As you can see, the ends are blunt/square, which helps with a lot of freestyle tricks.

Also relating to leverage of the kicks; the kicks don’t start right after the truck bolts. There is a little distance between the bolts and where the bend of the tail/nose starts. Obviously this is because it is made on a newschool mold, but I have come to like this. It keeps the nose and tail from seeming excessively steep. I don’t think you want a really steep tail/nose for freestyle, and until we can get some custom molds going out there, this seems to be a good alternative. So, my point is that the nose and tail really work well, providing the right amount of kick and leverage without making your feet feel too locked into place.

As you can see, I don’t use a front skid. This board is symmetrical, but I still prefer to have a nose and a tail, with the trucks adjusted a little differently on each. I don’t like the feel of a tail skid when I do fingerflips, so I just sacrifice the nose to get the feel I like. This also allows me to lift the tail higher on nose wheelies and g-turns without scraping the ground. It is a trade-off.

I’m using some old Destructo Hi trucks. Looking at the Destructo website, I don’t see that they even make the Hi models anymore. Tony Gale has been preaching the superiority of “high” setups to me, and this feels pretty good. My first inclination is to go low, but I think I do that more out of desire to skate like Terry than out of a realistic view of how I actually skate. I’m using the hard purple Khiro insert bushings. I like them. They’re hard. Depending on some lines I work out and how these break in, I may go to the next softer one down. Trying to balance the stability of a hard bushing with the fact that I like to turn and carve, even in freestyle.

The wheels on the Mode are the Seismic Focus 97a freestyle wheels. I’d like to thank Dan Gesmer for making these wheels. I really like these wheels. They look really big and wide, but the slide and break free for shove-its really nicely, while retaining appropriate traction at other times. I got the wheels and bushings from Decomposed. Witter has excellent fast service.

That’s about it for my current setup. I don’t do any weird modifications – though I do cut the “freestyle hole” in the middle of the grip to help with footwork. Of course I have a little grip tape in the casper spots.

OK, so I took the Mode out for my first serious freestyle session in quite a while, and immediately tried a 360 shove-it, and immediately made it. So that’s good. After a couple of hours, I determined that I am not totally sucking, and with some practice I should be able to give a good accounting of myself at Paderborn. I have some ideas for a unique approach to my runs that I will work on over the next few months. If it ever stops raining.

Here’s one of those first 360 shove-its. Pretty much perfect. I just need to make it a 540.

 

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Encounter With Evil

The other night on the way home from Aikido our town was enveloped in an excellent and creepy shroud of mist and fog. As I drove home I snapped some pics with my iPod, and got some really good shots of some new buildings under construction. This was was particularly cool, so I boosted the green in the image to increase the spooky effect.

Click the image to embiggen.

green

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The Mike V Show, Kung Fu, and Emotional Content

This will be kind of a non-linear post, I think.

Just finished listening to Episode 3 of the Mike V Show, Mike Vallely’s new podcast. As most of you know, I am a Mike Vallely fan. I like it when people do their own thing, their way, and forge their own path.  That kind of thing fascinates me. In this episode, Mike is joined by Daniele Bolelli, of the Drunken Taoist Podcast.

As an Aikido practitioner for going on nine years, and a skateboarder for 40, I found their thoughts about “kung fu” – people who have kind of an emotional/physical presence about them – very engaging.

I am far from a master of Aikido. Aikido is so hard to do well that most people give up within two weeks. Even among martial arts enthusiasts Aikido is often misunderstood. That’s a huge topic and I’m not going to write about it. What I want to talk about is how it changes you. I think this is true of most martial arts, but I only know Aikido, so that’s what I will discuss.

Like most activities, when you start you don’t know shit. It’s the simple truth. When you walk into the Aikido dojo, you may think you know something. You may have seen some videos on youtube and thought “that looks easy and soft.”  You may think you are in good shape. You quickly find out that 1)It isn’t “soft”, 2)it isn’t easy, and 3)you are not in good shape.  Then, if you are among the small percentage that come back after limping away from the dojo that first practice, you go through a couple of other transitions…

  1. You realize that you don’t know shit. Everything you thought you knew about what you were getting into is totally wrong. What you thought was happening in Aikido isn’t happening at all.
  2. Some time later, after a significant amount of practice,  you realize you know even less than you thought you did when you first realized you don’t know shit.
  3. After more time and practice, it begins to dawn on you what you are actually doing. You don’t really understand it, but you have a glimpse. Something happens in class that gives you a small “a-ha!” moment.
  4. Then you see more new people come into class, and you see their confusion, and see that they are where you were months or years ago. Then you look at your Sensei, who has been practicing or 30 or 40 years, and realize it is a long road, and you will always be learning.
  5. At some point,  you start to notice that the long-time students have something that you don’t. They are more “there” than you are. When you take hold of their wrist, even though they are light people, they feel like they weigh 1000 pounds. A half-ton, but a half-ton that can turn to liquid in an instant, move with quick fluidity, or exist in both states simultaneously. Then you realize that to the new student, you feel like that. You are on the path, but it’s a long path. You need to stay on it. But it has to be your path.

So, back to my original line of thought. People who have that presence. When I heard Mike and Daniele talking about this, I remembered the feeling of being at an Aikido seminar, with black belts of various degrees all lined up in front, sitting in seiza, taking up the first 3 rows as we bow in at the start of class. That is heavy. That is emotional content. When that heaviness and presence first dawned on me,  I understood what you actually get from Aikido. You can get it from other things. Some people, remarkably, seem to be born with it, but that is what you get from Aikido. You begin to appreciate and cultivate a centered strength that you can depend on and eventually others start to notice, and you learn to bring others up, as others lift you up.

 

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Nimoy

It was a snowy day in Dallas the day that Leonard Nimoy died. That’s how I’ll remember it.

I’ll also remember feeling like a close friend just died. Honestly. I just found out, and silly as it may seem, I could cry a little.

Like so many others, I grew up watching Star Trek. Before there was any “Next Generation”, before it was necessary to say “the Original Series”, I watched Star Trek every afternoon for years. I don’t claim to be a scholar of the show, but through sheer repetition of episodes I know it pretty well.

spockThe “Big Three” on that show — Kirk, Spock, and McCoy – played by Shatner, Nimoy, and Kelly — brought a compelling humanity to every episode. Without a doubt, the character of Spock is the greatest science fiction character of all time, and it was Nimoy’s nuanced and deep portrayal of Spock that made the character complete. When Spock mind-melded with the Horta, you believed the Horta was real. When he struggled with his powerful but locked-away emotions, you felt it. Nimoy’s talent made that possible.

Today I will remember Leonard Nimoy, the greatest SF actor of all time.

 

 

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Rocco

Most modern skaters know Steve Rocco as the guy who changed/ruined/saved skateboarding, depending on one’s point of view. I tend to think of him as the freestyler who’d been pissed on enough that he decided not to take it anymore.

Rocco really came of age in freestyle before the video era of skateboarding began. There is precious little footage of him available from the late 70s and early 80s.

I found this on Youtube a couple of years ago – go to 6:03 to see Rocco’s run start. This was 1978. Dude was WAAAAAY ahead of pretty much everyone else. The speed and flow of his run was fantastic. I love this. This video was uploaded, and guess owned, by Maurice Meyers, brother of former Santa Cruz freestyle pro Ray Meyers. Actually, the other guys all have really nice style and flow too – but nowhere near the tricks.Rocco was just a lot more advanced.

This next video is 7 years later. Rocco is still on it. No longer the top dog in the freestyle world, Rocco had been usurped several years earlier by Rodney Mullen. In this video he’s 7 years old, a little heavier, his footwork a little chunkier, but he still brings it. What I like about this run, and all his runs, is that there are spots where he is rolling fast, barely in control, on the edge of losing it, but he snags that trick and hangs on and makes it – the essense of RIPPING – on flat or vert or street.

If you compare his run to this one, by Pierre Andre of France, there’s a huge differnce. Pierre is great – super controlled and accurate – but I think in that precision he loses something. Skateboarding should always be a little on the edge, even in freestyle. I have no proof of this, but I suspect the difference is that Rocco is also a street skater. In fact, he is one of the grandfathers of street skating.

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Podcasting setup update

I thought this would be a good time to update the info on this site about my podcasting rig.

I’m currently using a Rode Procaster Broadcast Dynamic Vocal Microphone. I’d been wanting to get a really nice mic, and was fortunate enough to meet podcasting magnate Adam Curry at a party last year. Adam recommended the Procaster. I must say — I love it. It gives a nice, rich sound. I use it with a shock mount on a swing arm. So thanks, Adam, for the recommendation.

I’m running the Procaster into an Alesis Multimix 8 USB mixing board, which I frankly am not crazy about. The problem is that the USB out on the mixer does not supply enough volume, and you have to jack the gain and all the levels way up to get enough signal into the computer, which of course sounds like shit.  Luckily, the 2007 Mac Mini I use for editing, and my 2006 13″ Macbook, have a normal audio-in/mic port, so I can go from Main Mix Out of the Mixer into the Audio-In on the computers, and not even use the mixer’s USB port. The good old analog connection supplies plenty of volume with a nice clean signal. No gain noise. No weird hum from the USB port.

When I have people in my little studio for interviews, I use the Audix OM2 Dynamic Vocal Microphone, plugged into the mixer for my guests to use. These are great mics, meant for performance, so they don’t pic up much handing noise. They give a nice rich sound for my guests.

For recording the Freestyle Podcast, I use an application called Audio Hijack Pro to capture my Skype conversation with my partner in England, usually running on the old 2006 Macbook. So the mixer is plugged into that machine. For editing I use Garageband on the Mac Mini, and I also use the Mac Mini for solo podcasting, recording directly into Garageband.

My partner on the Freestyle Podcast uses the Audio Technica AT2020 USB condenser mic. This is a great option for getting into podcasting for a low cost. It’s a fantastic microphone, and a very reasonable price, and since it’s a USB mic you don’t have to worry about mixers and the other expenses.

 

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Another TV Post

Yes, another TV post, from the guy who doesn’t “really watch that much TV.”

Well, this is more of a Netflix post, really.

Back in the 1990s and very early 2000s, my wife and I looked forward each week to watching the X-Files. What a great show. Nevermind that a lot of the alien conspiracy story arch details didn’t really make much sense. All that stuff was creepy and weird, and everyone loved it, and so did we.

A couple of nights ago I started watching the series again, in order, on Netflix. I’ve watched the first three so far, and it’s just as good now as it was then.

The show went nine seasons. Even Star Trek: the Next Generation only went seven seasons. It is rare for a show I like to go very long, but the X-Files continued to deliver right to the end.

That’s about all I have to say about it…just digging it a lot.

the-truth-is-out-there

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Brothers

I have three brothers-in-law. The husbands of my wife’s sisters. I like them all. Hell, I love them all. I’m an only-child. These guys, and my sisters-in-law, after almost 25 years of marriage, they’re my siblings. I love ’em. I love their kids. I don’t have kids, and their kids mean everything to me.

One of my brothers-in-law just lost his father. The man was in a bad car crash, and after a month long battle he finally just gave out. I met him a few times, and he as a good man. One of those salt-of-the-earth sort of people who just typifies “the Good”. Hey, I know that no one is perfect. Not meaning to deify the man, but he was a good, good man. He raised a good son.

The crash was over in Louisiana. He’d been on his way over there for his birthday when the crash happened. His wife came away OK, but he got really messed up. Lots of broken bones, some internal damage. A month in ICU resulted in some resistant bacterial infections. Hospitals are just not the best place to spend a lot of time.

My brother-in-law was over there for nearly a month. What a rough month. He did what he needed to do. He was there for his mom and dad. Not everyone can work it out when stuff like this happens, but he was able, so he did, and I admire that.

Thank you, Henry, for raising a great brother-in-law. You live on in him.

 

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My World View

Important media sources of the evolution of my world view.

  • Captain Kangaroo
  • Frankenstein Junior
  • Fantastic Four cartoon (early 60s)
  • H.R. Puffinstuff
  • Lost in Space
  • Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
  • The Time Tunnel
  • Land of the Giants
  • Star Trek – Original Series
  • Doc Savage novels
  • Carl Sagan – Cosmos series
  • Nova – PBS series
  • All in the Family
  • Original Planet of the Apes movie series
  • The Andy Griffith Show
  • Gomer Pyle
  • DC Comics from the 1970s, especially the Flash. I like all the time travel sciency stuff he could do with his powers.
  • Skateboarder Magazine
  • Mark Gimarc’s Rock and Roll Alternative (thanks to my friend Paul for making me remember this — it was CRITICAL!)

 

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Falling Down

Two weeks ago I was skating the little ditch near my house — the one I’ve been skating since about 1978 – and I ate it. Rolling in, about halfway down the wall, I hit a little rock and got pitched.

So to the concrete I went. Both hands out in front, I naturally went to my leading side and slid to a stop. I got a little bit of a hipper, scraped my palms a bit, but got up and kept skating.

I’m 50. Yeah, I know I mention that a lot. I think it is often relevant. You see, I got up and kept skating. The slam pissed me off. I got back up, kicked that goddamn rock out of the ditch, rolled right back in, and skated for another hour. Most dudes my age can hardly get out of their chair. So that’s why I mention my age.

I’m not going to lie. I don’t like falling. I don’t like getting hurt any more than the next guy. If someone says “You know, I hate falling and I’m done with this” I totally understand. There have been plenty of times when I slammed harder than this and just packed it up for the day. Slams that just knocked the fight out of me and reminded me that gravity and the concrete are actually in control. Frankly, I’ve taken shots in the shin from my freestyle board that dropped me right then and there to the ground gasping for air. BUT — getting back up and continuing to skate two weeks ago was killer. I did, in fact, think about just leaving. But I didn’t. I got mad and kept skating.

After taking that slam, and surviving, the rest of the skating was better. All day it was better. For the rest of that ditch session I was looser and faster. At the parking garage where I sometimes go to street skate I skated better. Getting the shit knocked out of you, shaking it off, and continuing to skate can really put you in the right frame of mind and give you the right perspective. You fall, it hurts, you didn’t die, and you keep skating. Some slams are worse than others, but after many years, I’ve decided that if you can go on skating, you should.

You see, most normal humans live in mortal fear of getting hurt. They avoid injury even if it means avoiding fun too. This is natural. This is the survival/breeding instinct in action. Survive to live/breed/raise kids/grandchildren another day. Seek pleasure avoid pain. But that doesn’t mean it’s always the right course of action.

There seems to be very little in the basic survival programming about accomplishment. Sometimes you have to just say “fuck it” and keep doing the possibly injurious thing, because even that fall will lift you up in the end.

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The Problem with getting all 1999.

The problem with doing things all back-to-the-basics, as I have decided to do on my new blog, is that when you write something you generally want at least a few people to read it. But of course, by getting all 1999 you will not have your stuff read.

And there is my dilemma.

So after 24 hours of working on the site, I think I’m probably done with it. I just am not strong enough to write stuff and post stuff that is going right out into the black hole of the internet.

So…I’m going to cross post stuff here for a while. If the other site gets any traffic, cool. The only traffic thus far, other than two friends who know about it, is from Russia. No doubt some scumbags trying to figure out how they can hack my pages.

So, we’ll just see how this goes….