Recycled Gonz

I’m not sure what the barometer is for art and skateboarding, but the difference between eccentricity and just plain crazy is often a matter of how rich the person in question is. Likewise, you can bet that if Dan Gesmer had put on this performance instead of Mark Gonzales, it wouldn’t have been as well received in the skateboarding world. Jason Schwartzman (the lead in the excellent movie “Rushmore”) has a solo record out and a video for the song West Coast which is made entirely from footage of Cheryl Dunn’s film documenting the Gonz’ 1999 art installation at the Abteiberg Museum in Germany. You can watch the video and read Paper Magazine’s original 1999 article covering the event after the jump.

Mark Gonzales Skates a Ballet

Here’s the video for the Coconut Records (aka Jason Schwartzman) song West Coast. According to Wikipedia, Coconut Records is an old German record label, but that may be some kind of a marketing scam since the footage in the first video was from a German performance, or maybe I’m reading too much into it. Schwartzman was in the band Phantom Planet, although the band’s web site seems to want to forget that now that they’ve gone on to bigger fame after having their song chosen as the theme for the now cancelled Fox show, The O.C..

Update: Sorry, this video disappeared with the death of Shockwave and Flash technologies.

Hey Conahan, what was the orginal source for the music video tip off? Probably Skate Daily. The interface for the Spinner.com embedded player has one major drawback. The progress bar color of the “played” section is the same color as the “unplayed” section of the video. If the streaming is slow, the slider covers the portion that shows how much you have buffered, so you are left with what looks like a just a slider and no indication of how much is buffered. Your best bet to watch the video without stuttering is to hit play and then pause right away to let the player build up a healthy buffer.

The Original

Now go watch this excerpt of footage from Cheryl Dunn’s documentary of the event, complete with music scored by Gonzales and Thomas Schaeben for a totally different vibe, even though it’s mostly the same shots.

The Gonz in Deutschland

When my wife asks why I have boxes of eight year old (and older!) magazine clippings and skateboard toys cluttering up the basement, I try to explain my greater vision of Skate and Annoy. She is blind to the important public service that we provide, and somehow still doesn’t recognize it as being of the scale of the great public works projects benefiting mankind. I put us right up there with Thrasher Magazine making the first twelve issues of Thrasher available as a free download. Below is a scan from a Paper Magazine article on Gonzales’ installation in Germany. The scan has a creation date of March 2000, so the article was probably written some time in 1999. The Paper web site doesn’t have the article archived, hence the enormous importance of the work we do here at Skate and Annoy. Someone, please nominate us for an award. Click the article to make it bigger.