austin skate notes

Kristin and I returned late last night from our third-annual Colorado camping expedition. Sadly, when I arrived at work this morning, I was greeted with news that Randy "Biscuit" Turner was found dead on Thursday. Just one day after gracing the cover of the Austin Chronicle in an article promoting his art opening scheduled for Friday. The event was re-cast as a wake. For more information on Mr. Biscuit’s influence on Austin, skate punk, and the art world, check the article in this week’s chronicle.

According to the coroner’s preliminary report, he died of stomach acid eating through his stomach and digesting his insides.

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As soon as I finish typing this, I’m jumping into my pickup and heading out to Colorado with Kristin for 9 days. The route is undetermined, but we’re probably going to hit Amarillo, Carbondale, Santa Fe, Salida, Trinidad. That kind of off-the-matrix stuff. Camping. Fires. Rafting. Biking. Skating.

Been pretty busy preparing for this trip. Tieing up lose ends and such. Here’s a project Kevin and I just finished. What may signal the end of the backyard ramp era, we just completed the world’s first backyard street plaza.

Speaking of street skating… I received a phone call on friday from the guy at the city who helped me get the Red River Slab opened for skating. He said the city is working on getting the lights turned on so people can skate there after it gets dark. He also said he was looking forward to the skaters following through on their part of the deal where we maintain the spot. I took this to be a subtle reference to the return of various tags that have reappeared there and also how we haven’t cut the weeds or anything. I told him we (Nathan) had purchased and installed a trash can there and that we’ve been dumping it in the dumpster. He said there’s no way for the city to come empty the dumpster and that we should leave it near the gates for the regular maintenance folks to empty. So, it would be great if someone could bring a weedeater out there and chop down all the weeds that are around the skating slab part and also get some solvent at Home Depot to remove the tags. This dude also told me there was a fine amount of wax on the manual pad and no one should have problems doing blunt slides.

Two Texas vert veterans will be gone from Austin sometime next week. Hubba has already moved to Victoria, TX with his wife and Travis Burke will be moving to Corpus to attend grad school. Burke’s forecast for this chapter in his life: sober and boring. Mancub, Josh, and another Louisiana immigrant named Shannon have taken over the Banana Farmhouse. No word on the anticipated destruction of the ramp per the request of the landlord. Adam has been over there welding down seams in the steel and also bondo-ing some chunks in the coping.

An unconfirmed eye witness report has indicated that while the Zero team was in town this past week, Jamie Thomas pulled a frontside rockslide over the stairs in the shallow end of a pool where to date, no one has even carved or grinded over. Kevin is doubtful, but I want to believe.

Mark your calendars. The city has scheduled a public input meeting September 6th for an upcoming bond election. This bond is potentially going to include funds for two skateparks and a BMX park. This is not related to the Travis County bond input meetings a couple months back. This is an entirely seperate bond to go before City of Austin voters. It’s also not the meeting where the design of these facilities will be decided upon. The board members don’t know jack shit about skateboarding, BMX or anything like that. They’re just looking to find out what kind of stuff people are wanting. You can bet there will be people asking for a bunch of stuff to be included in this bond, so it’s important skaters show up to these meetings to advocate for their facilities to be prioritized.

By the way, I spoke at the last of the Travis County bond meetings this past week. From my discussions with the County reps, it looks like we’re well-positioned to get a nice piece of that bond package dedicated to a skatepark in NE Metro Park. They said the skaters and BMXers did a great job representing.

Oh, last week’s art opening for the show curated by Tim Kerr at Camp Fig was great. The show is still up for viewing on saturday afternoons. After the opening, I went with Kevin to the Art Palace for another opening featuring works by Michael Sieben and Andy Coolquitt. The latter of the two artists had a video installation running of himself jacking off on a toilet then finally smearing doo-doo on his face (protected by a mask). If you don’t know the distinction between ‘former’ and ‘latter’ or I’ve misused this english construct, then I guess you won’t know whether it was michael or andy in the video. Kevin shot this cool photo of me talking to this guy named Bob who had just punched out a sellout guy who had taken Bob’s programming work and helped Paramount Pictures use it contrary to the vision Bob had. Somebody broke up the fight yelling, “This is an art opening!” Hey, when you do what that other guy did, don’t be surprised if you get punched when you show up at an art opening. Bob had developed the software that was used in Richard Linklater’s movie, “Waking Life,” and is now being used in the Keneau Reeves film based on a Phillip K. Dick novel, “A Scanner Darkly.”

When I get back from Colorado, I’m going to migrate Austin Skate Notes to a new structure. This current one has been running for the past year, and I’m pretty sick of it.

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Camp Fig is hosting an art opening curated by longtime Austin skate-punk legend, Tim Kerr. Starts around six and runs till you’re done. Adam Young and Lee Brooks have some stuff in the show. So do a bunch of folks. Here’s some info about the opening.

A zombie film will be shooting at Wheatsville Coop this evening at about 11:00 pm. I particularly like that a movie about eating human flesh is being filmed at what’s ranked as one of the best vegetarian restaurants in town. The filmmakers are looking for extras, so show up if you want to be in it.

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I got a letter from Donnie D the other day. It’s a 4-pager. He answered my request for what are the Top 10 Most Popular TV Shows in Prison. Here’s the list:

1. American Idol
2. Price is Right
3. 24
4. Jerry Springer
5. Desperate Housewives
6. Big Brother
7. Maury Povich
8. WWF
9. Any brainless bullshit you can think of

Looking at that list and thinking about how there’s only one tv set being shared among like 30 guys and knowing I’m not really tough enough to change the channel, I’m not so sure the ass-raping is the worst thing about going to prison. BTW, Donnie has 3 years and 10 months left.

Starting Friday is the annual tax-free clothes weekend at all Texas retailers. Buy your shoes, pants, shorts, or whatever at your local skate shop without paying sales tax. I’m planning on stocking up on a few pairs of those iPath Kenny Reeds at the only store I know of that sells them– Find and Grind. Here’s a list of the types of garments that qualify for the tax-free program. Football pants and golf gloves do not qualify, but lingerie, basball caps, and diapers do(o).

Yesterday evening I stopped by the Red River Slab to shoot photos of people skating the new manual pad. There was a pretty healthy turnout. From the photos, it looks like people mostly just do nose grinds on it, but in reality, there were a bunch of different tricks going down. I just happened to end up with a bunch of nosegrind shots.

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Ok. So the server is back in running order. Sort of. Austin Skate Notes has been away for the past week while I upgraded the server to Mandrake 10. There are still some config issues to be ironed out, but mostly things like articles and pictures are working. Email is still krunked, so if you need to get a hold of me, call me on my cell- (512) 789-0009. It will ring with the beginning of the Turbonegro song, "Age of Pamparius."

Much like the Austin Skate Notes server, Mancub underwent an upgrade yesterday. Foot surgery will leave him on the sidelines for approximately the next three months. This procedure is intended to correct a modification that was applied to Mancub’s foot at James’ customer appreciation party at the SPoA during a backside D in the over-vert. Makes sense that he’d be injured. He’s moving into the Banana Farmhouse to replace Mike Kelly.

On Sunday I met up with the Bowie High crew out at the Red River Slab. These are the same guys responsible for digging out the PK pool over a year ago. Together we built the manual pad I had intended to construct a few weeks back before the spot was designated as an official public skatepark. The manual pad should be pretty smooth on top, even though the rest of it looks completely janky. It’s made entirely from recycled (free) materials with the exception of the $25 in concrete that was purchased with donated funds. The main edge to it is curved tubular steel. None of us have ever constructed a thing like this, so it’s something of an experiment. The concrete should be ready to skate on wednesday at 6:00 pm. Please don’t screw with it until then.

Here are some photos of the manual pad construction.

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