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Paderborn is coming up

The annual freestyle contest in Paderborn, Germany is coming up in early July. It, quite simply, the best freestyle contest. The ground there is magical and holy. It’s a grassroots gather. No corporate bullshit, no parades. No prize money. Just a great event, like a family gathering.

I’m starting to think about my contest runs. A run at Paderborn has to mean something to me. It isn’t just a bunch of tricks strung together. Corny as it may sound, it’s my art, and I care about it. I’m not that good, but what I do out there is all mine. We all skate like ourselves. No one skates like you, and no one skates like me. So when you do a contest run, it should come from within you. It should represent you — your emotions. I don’t give a fuck what tricks someone does. A run must not be hollow. Even a run where you mess up a lot can still be a beautiful thing.

So I’m working on a list of tricks and an approach to the run that I think exemplify me, and picking some music that will mean something to me, and I hope I can make it a gift to my friends there and connect with them.

Competition sucks, but like all grassroots skateboarding events, this isn’t so much a competition as it is a celebration.

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Soul Searching

Maybe Soul Searching is a little bit dramatic a term, but I’ve been thinking a lot about how I approach freestyle skateboarding this week, and about taking my own advice about always skating like one’s self.

It was percolating (I almost wrote “gestating”) just under my surface thoughts for a while, and I think yesterday’s Alva post really brought it to the conscious mind. In particular, skating my own way at Paderborn this summer, rather than emulating someone else. Truth is we can’t help but skate our own way, and when we try not to, well, the results are horrible. I have this long list of tricks I “want” to learn. They are mostly tricks that lots of other people do. Not original. A list of check-box stuff that will frustrate the hell out of me and not really make me very happy. They will be removed from the list. Going to work on my own stuff. My own ideas. That must be good enough. It is. It is more than good enough.

Yes, I probably spend a little too much time thinking about things.

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Style through the decades

The other day on Instagram, Tony Alva had one of those “story” posts in which he did a 2 foot nose wheelie where one of his feet is way to the side, and as he carves around he moves it almost to a G-Turn and almost to a 1-foot nose wheel position before he finishes the move. I really like the way he does them. There’s not a lot of footage of him skating, but at this point in this dumb video from “World of Playboy” he does the move. I say dumb because they obviously wanted him to talk about being a “renegade”, and TA does his best to accommodate them, and well, it’s kind of blabbering. I really think Tony is a better than that, and the editing and questions were probably dumb. But really, the move is awesome. Here he is doing it in a Van’s video, under cramped conditions.

So I did a little interwebs research and found some other images that I really like, because they show him back the early 1970s doing it the same way, then a couple of shots from more recent stuff (including this video). Kind of cool to see him still doing this move. I like that.

All photos stolen from the interwebs. Thanks to the photographers.

 

Alva two-foot nose wheelie style from days of yore.
Logan Earth Ski days.
More recent image of the now middle-aged but well preserved Alva doing the move.

 

Detail of foot position and delightful knee style from the dreadful video linked to above.
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Make your own scene

One of the things I love about being a skateboarder, besides skating, is the tradition of doing things for ourselves. Making our own scenes, creating our own publications, etc. But I really really love the art created by skateboarders. From my friends Jeremy Elder (elderhousearts.com), and Mike Moore (http://www.mikemoorestudios.com), to widely known artists who came from skateboarding like Shepard Fairey and Michael Sieben, skateboarding fosters a lot of creativity. The list is long. Anyway, here are a few things I’ve got on my walls…

Owl, by Jeremy Elder.
Alternative Tentacles Jello Biafra board – graphics by Shepard Fairey, board manufactured by Powell.
Fist, but Jeremy Michael Elder.
Sun and bird, by Jeremy Michael Elder.
Skateboards. Photo by Tony Gale.
Various stickers, by Jeremy Michael Elder.
Cockfight skateboard deck, graphics by Michael Sieben.
Fickle Skateboards Austin Motel/Stupidfest 2018 graphic, and Sphinx cat graphic. Both will be on the wall after I finish riding them. Not only is the art cool, but the decks themselves are works of art — totally hand built. Laminate layed up in Lew’s workshop, glued, pressed, cut, finished. Only thing he didn’t do was produce the veneers.