After the fantastic weather we experienced on saturday and sunday, it’s painful to look out the window this afternoon. Don’t let the intermittant sunshine fool you, either. This is one of those stay-inside-unless-I-have-to-go-outside days. To remind us all of the beautiful weekend we just had, here’s a link to some photos I shot on Sunday. They’re from a session attended at the Banana Farm Ramp by Daniel, Ryan, Johnny Walker, Mandon, Adam, William, Sean, JD, Kevin, Alternator, Joe Rich, Michael Sieben, Mike Milligan, and Sewing Machine. Eventually I’ll get the lighting situation nailed down at the BFR. For now, please forgive the harsh fill flash. Highlights of the session not recorded in this gallery include Mandon triple-carving the briar patch and steakhouse, Adam lipsliding up the escalator to rock-fakie into the kicker ramp on the platform, and Daniel pulling a 360-boneless on the 45-hip.

I was so inspired by all the energy around me at the session that I conceptualized a new line called “Damien’s Trilogy.” I haven’t actually completed the line, but I’m close. Very close. It’s an homage to the Omen horror films. The line follows in the tradition of many other famous film series- the first two are perfectly executed, but that third one is really tricky to pull off right. Where they failed with Omen III: The Final Conflict, I’ll soon correct the score with Damien’s Trilogy.

by Carter Dennis
We had a great turn out for Saturday’s contest. 71 people entered and there were well over a hundred spectators. The best part was seeing how much the local riders have progressed from when LBJ first opened. We are working hard to further that progression by adding more skate terrain at LBJ and for the rest of the city.

On Saturday we raised over 1100 dollars. This money will be going towards Phase 2 for LBJ and for more skate equipment at Springtime Park. Come check out Springtime Park next weekend. Myself and the Rex Ramps crew will be out there installing new skate equipment on Saturday.

I would like to thank the following people for helping out with the LBJ contest:
Reagan Beres for organizing everything, Goodtimes Skateshop for providing the prizes, Gracie for the drink donations, Andy Beres for announcing, the judges for judging, the LBJ staff for allowing the event, Doug and Tracy King for everything,
Miles with Red Army Clothing, Afroman Skateboards, Chuck Van Zant and Scott Stover of Parks and Rec., Taco Cabana, HEB, The City of San Antonio for providing this facility and all the skaters who showed up to support the cause especially the out of towners. It was definitely a good time!!!

11 and under
1-Willie Mux
2-Bryan Valle
3-Andrew San Miguel
4-Arthur Brewer

Girls
1-Karyssa Hernandez
2-Destiny Canedo
3-Vanessa Torres
4-Cherie Canedo

12-15
1-Evan David
2-Nick Schwab
3-Jordan Swan
4-Armando Garcia
5-Zac Saunders

16 and over
1-Ryan Florig
2-Brandon Jackson
3-Jared Nichols
4-Dylan David

Old Dude
1-Patrick Smith
2-Marty Karnage
3-Curtis Hiatt
4-John Carlos

Sponsored
1-Raney Beres
2-Max Contrerras
3-Brian Rogers

Links

Carter’s photos from the contest.
My photos from the contest.

In all forms of publishing, you can tell editors are throwing filler at you when the content gets review-heavy. Reviews are easy to churn out because they doesn’t require much legwork or for anything newsworthy to happen. “Journalists” just pick a product and pull some thoughts out of their asses, and turn them in as a story.

Austin Skate Notes’ reviews are a little different. Nobody’s getting paid over here and I’m not even getting free stuff. In fact, for every story I write, I’ve got to sacrifice my own time and such to do them. So for me to publish a review of something, the subject has to have inspired me to do it. The other day, I was pretty ticked-off about the Hot Chocolate video, so up went a review. This Sunday morning, I’m putting fingers-to-keys in order to express my thoughts about my reaction to another new skate video– Consolidated’s Behold.

Consolidated’s past video releases have been known for their strong skating, chaotic editing and low-fi production values, which has helped cast it as an “anti-hype” company. With Behold, the company has obviously laid down some money for professional editing and third-party footage. They haven’t gone bezerk with it, though. The skating is the strength of Behold and the production is limited to doing what’s necessary to present it to the viewer in a clear and interesting manner. No drama bullshit. Just great skating.

Behold is culminated from skate sessions all over the world. Most are in America, but there’s recognizable footage from Ecuador, Japan, and Australia. There’s a lot of great super 8 work from Rick Charnoski and Coan Nichols. Some clips look like they were sourced from 16mm as well. The camera work is consistently good in this video without any shots through those annoying fisheye lenses that make your tv screen round with black corners.

One of the things I was glad to see was all the skatepark footage. I hear a lot of people criticize shooting photos and video in skateparks. In San Antonio, for instance, Carter Dennis installed benches in a city park for people to skate and some kid complained to him that they looked too similar to skatepark benches and he didn’t want to shoot his ’sponsor-me’ video there for fear a potential sponsor would mark him off. It seems that the Consolidated folks don’t give a shit if that kid marks them off for skating skateparks in their video. I recognized parks in Arizona, Japan, Australia, Quito, Oregon, Maryland, and Washington.

The video is also a good testament to how versatile their team is. In addition to skateparks, they also ride fullpipes, pools, ditches and all manner of street spots. The street skating is especially strong when they’re riding stuff that’s pretty damn difficult to ride… like where you have to snap an ollie to get onto something that you then have to snap another ollie off of. One of the coolest examples of this was where there was a jumbled pile of concrete slabs and a guy ollied onto one slab, kickflipped off the edge, and landed on another slab at another angle.

Standouts? Steve Bailey, who needs to wear a helmet, ripped everywhere. Jub, from the first Black Label video, was great. Most remarkable was his backside lipslide off a 7-ft ledge. He was riding on top of the ledge before the lipslide. Two cool clips of Pete the Ox. Danger does a McTwist on the big wall at Burnside. Oh yeah, there’s more Burnside footage in this than any other video I can think of. Karma Toschef had a cool part as well. Alan Petersen skated to Napalm Death and rode huge steel fullpipes with an elbow. Would have liked to have seen more footage of those pipes…

So bottom line, how good is Behold? Well, I’m pretty turned off to Consolidated as a company since I found out their decks are made from the same wood, glue, and concave as those World Industries Walmart boards (They’re made in the same factories in China. The only difference is the graphics and perhaps dimensions). My mood was also really brought down in the video when they killed a rodent with a pellet gun. It’s just not that fun to watch humans hurting animals, which doesn’t fit in with how fun the rest of this video is. So in spite of those two things, I’m still compelled to say this is an excellent, must-see video. That’s how good it is.

Links:

Consolidated Skateboards
San Angelo teens arrested for beating a dog with a skateboard and video taping it.

Several years ago at the SXSW film festival I saw a movie some guy made about how his mom had been killed in a freak accident that occurred in her driveway. Basically the family car dropped out of park and mashed her between the car door and a tree. To tell the story, the guy laid out tens of thousands of dollars renting film equipment and crew to operate it. Then he probably paid a few dozen more thousands of dollars processing the film and editing it. He mailed it out to the SXSW folks, flew to Austin, and sat in the theater with a couple hundred cinema enthusiasts while the film played. Afterwards, he hung around for a Q & A session.

I didn’t. After the first 45 minutes, I started to look around the theater wondering why we were all there. Mostly it seemed to be out of courtesy because this guy was dumping on us about his dead mother and people were polite enough to sit there and listen. What I seriously wanted to know is why this guy thought we should care. Yes, it was tragic that his mom died while he was still a youngish child. That really sucks. But this world is full of much greater tragedy. I thought about sitting through the rest of the movie just so that I could ask him during the Q & A how he thought the audience would benefit from spending an hour and a half listening to his sob story. Instead, I decided to simply cut my losses and walk out of the theater.

I found myself in a similar predicament yesterday when Mikey and Adam sat down with me to watch the new skate video, Hot Chocolate. They warned me up front that the video has already found criticism due to its format. They said it came across as a documentary. I love documentaries, so this made me more interested in the video. Documentaries can be great when they’re about real exciting topics. The best, I think, are the movies that are about seemingly boring topics, but the director fleshes out the topic so it becomes interesting and new facets are revealed to the viewer. The Hot Chocolate video falls into neither of these categories.

High production values at the beginning caught my attention. Then the video slows the pace down while different members of the Chocolate pro team talk about what it was like when they were invited to join the team. Discussion centers on the comaraderie shared touring in a van together. I became less patient waiting for the real skating part of the video to begin. They spend like a minute or two talking about how difficult it was for this guy to land a flip trick onto a bench and then flip out and how amazing the skater felt when he made it and the cameras captured it both on video and still photography. Oh, I can imagine almost imagine the ecstacy! Shortly thereafter I left the room.

Yes, the new Chocolate video is light on skating and heavy on interviews. This wouldn’t be such a bad thing except the interviews are all about their unremarkeable selves. Spike Jonze, who collaborated on the making of this video, is a great filmmaker. I’d have expected him to at some point call bullshit on the project and ask them the critical question: “Why should the audience care?” Since he obviously didn’t reality-check these guys out of their masturbatory self-indulgence before it hit the shelves on DVD, I can only guess he contributed his couple of segments then turned away to focus on his real projects. Or maybe this is the result they were after…. Mikey said he thinks 14-year-old kids gobble this kind of celebrity bullshit up. Fuckin’ figures. This Hot Chocolate video is essentially an episode of the Ashlee Simpson show on MTV, but with a lot more people walking around with skateboards in their hands.

It’s been pretty difficult these past few days to distinguish Austin from Portland. The weather has been heavily overcast with cold rains for the last 48 or so hours. Fortunately, the evenings have been similarly (to Portland) filled with interesting things to do and see. Camp Fig hosted an opening for artwork by Michael Burnett (San Franciscan Thrasher photo editor), Dan & Bean Gilsdorf (from the afformentioned Northwestern city), and Austin’s Adam Young and Michael Sieben. It’s a great show with many cool pieces priced to move. You can still see the art at the gallery on Saturdays for the next two weeks.

Sunday night featured the Stitch Fashion Show organized by local designers at Emo’s. The event was a neat glimpse into the ‘handmade revolution’ waged locally among people making clothes and accessories. The collection was largely couture, so these weren’t the types of outfits a woman would wear to Tropical Transitions Tiki Bar. The clothes were also exclusively women’s wear. I would have enjoyed seeing some men’s clothes, but I suppose this also prevented me from having to look at male models, so maybe this limitation was a plus. Amy Kessler, Jessie, and Rachel, were some of the models I recognized. My single complaint is that the show is just held once a year. From the huge crowd in attendance, it looks like demand might also support multiple shows per year.

In more directly skateboarding-related news, somebody took notes on the Gator movie’s strongest points and is working on a movie about Jason Jessee. For those of us who count Jason Jessee among their heros, this looks to be a must-see video. A trailer is viewable at the official site.

I’ve also finally posted photos from the Halloween mini ramp session and party at Tom and Jerusha’s house. The link is below.

Links for this story

Camp Fig Photos
Stitch Fashion Show Photos
Tom and Jerusha’s Halloween Party

Due to the very nature of wheatpaste poster art, the works are changing by the minute. In Austin, it seems there’s been a resurgence in the medium with several different artists contributing pieces throughout town for the pleasure or displeasure of passing motorists, pedestrians, and skateboarders. This afternoon I rode my bike around Central Austin in an attempt to capture what I could find and present it here.

Back to the change I mentioned earlier…. One of the things I like about wheatpaste posters is that they’re always changing. They’re completely biodegradable, so even beyond the modifications that passersby may apply to posters, the sun and rain also affect them over time. Which makes it cool to see a poster resist those forces and remain in place for a long time. I also like the interactivity of wheatpaste poster art. The medium lends itself to feedback from the viewer which can be measured by corners torn off, the whole poster removed, drawn upon, or improved with additional artistry. So change is one of the key elements I see. Even with the fundamental motivation that drives someone to create these posters and travel around the city pasting them on walls, trash dumpsters, and traffic light signal boxes. These artists are intent upon changing things. Whether it’s the regime in control of the government or just how people perceive their own relationship with art and the urban environment, these works are intended to spark a change.

How much longer can this anti-Taco Bell poster cling to this light box on the 3400 block of Guadalupe Street?

A lot of people just go about their daily lives and never notice posters of food affixed to metal boxes. Some people don’t see them because they are blind to subtle details. Others are just plain blind.

Check out the rest of the Austin Wheatpaste Poster Roundup photos in the gallery.