The road ahead. Challenges facing the skateboarding community in the coming year over at skateportland.org

SkateGirl is a one hour long documentary about the movement of professional women’s skateboarding. There is a showing of SkateGirl on February 3rd in Vancouver BC’s Antisocial shop, but it’s not on their web site right now. Update: It’s up now. Susanne Tabata is in your extended network is the director. You can check out a clip after the jump. [Source: Skull Skates]

In an article titled Granny’s donation fuels funding for skate park, The Sarasota Herald-Tribune reports that Jean Berlin has donated $200,000 to an Englewood Florida skate park fundraising effort, helping to fulfill a long time dream she shared with her late husband. No only is she Oyster Creek Skate Park’s largest benefactor, she’s also topped the previous record private donation (that we know of), which was a mere $161,000 in stock. As well it should, the donation has made her a local celebrity with skaters, earning her a spot as a judge in a contest. She mentioned she wasn’t really qualified, but it didn’t matter since nobody landed on their feet anyway. Sounds like kickflip syndrome to me! She also stopped the contest to chastise an entrant for dropping the F-Bomb. Speaking of grandmothers, Have you seen the AARP commercial with a Buzzcocks soundtrack?

Believe it or not, that’s an actual CNN headline and not something I made up. With the news that Miami’s Cubans in exile are planning to celebrate the impending death of Fidel Castro in the Orange Bowl (WTF?) now is a good time to bring up the Subvert Cuba Project. Probably due to in part to our embargo, Cuban skaters are really, really hard up for gear. That’s hard to believe considering Rodney Mullen insists China makes the best skateboards. The Subvert Cuba Project is like a bizarro Berlin Airlift, transferring skate goods from Germany to Cuba. You can buy decks from which a part of the proceeds are donated, or you can send used gear. Now seems as good a place as any to mention that Cold War Skateboards has a Fidel Castro and John F. Kennedy model called the Detente 2, of which absolutely none of the profits are donated to Cuba or

Yeah, we cover the local beats just on the off chance that someone official in Bonner Springs Kansas might read this. Hey, it’s happened before! Mayor Clausie Smith is running for reelection. One of his past term accomplishments was the construction of a skatepark. I couldn’t turn up a picture of the park anywhere on the web. The parks web site describes it as “Skate Park – 90′ x 60′ pad with speed ramp, quarter pipe, Euro-gap, and grind rail.” Hmm. Speed ramp? OK. Sounds fun, but not according to Escapist Skateboarding: DESCRIPTION: Pretty much identical to Rosedale Skatepark, same playground equipment “skatepark” company. Although miraculously this one manages to be even worse due to the asphalt surface so you don’t even get the flatground blissfulness of Rosedale. PROS: Uhhh…it’s free? CONS: Artists. PADS: None. COSTS: They should pay us to ride it Skaters of Bonner Springs! Arise and join the revolution by voting out Clausie Smith. Suggested chant: “Ditch Bossy Clausie!” Slow news day.

As reported in the Evening Courier with the succinct title of Back my bid for new skate park, Daniel Murch is 10 years old and TCB! The rest of you, get on it! I wonder if any of your readers like me think a skate park should be built in Halifax. I’m 10 years old and I think skateboarding is good fun and exercise. Calderdale Council has provided a number of skate parks in the area but none in Halifax, where I live. This doesn’t make any sense because Halifax is bigger than any other town in Calderdale. I have written to the council and also to a number of local firms asking for sponsorship to help meet some of the cost, which is £70,000. I am starting a petition to present to the council. If any of your readers would like to help by signing it or collecting signatures they can contact me by e-mail at Dan@frizinghall.cix.co.uk. Daniel Murch

Every city has a core skate spot. It may not be perfect, but it embodies the heart and soul of scene. When you visit that city, you already know about the spot and you make a point of hitting it. For Vancouver that spot may be China Creek. It’s got a lot of history outside of skateboarding too. It used to be the site of an actual creek, as well as a velodrome in the 50’s and 60’s. In 1979 China Creek became Vancouver’s first public skate park when two mellow coping and edge-free 70’s style bowls were poured, and that’s about the last time the city did anything with the property. The Jaks have held a contest there for years. In the meantime, some of the surrounding areas “lost their luster” and the overall park location filled with the usual assortment of characters that homeowners find disconcerting. The future of the skate park looked grim when the parks department came up with some cash for a facelift of the property. There were three options presented for the skate park part of the park: Leave it where it is, bulldoze and move to a different corner, or bulldoze and move…

That’s right. Sperm donor’s wanted, Herby closing up the last chance we had of slipping through the content filters where you work. This is a benefit show for mounting medical bills accrued by Dreamlander and the Oregon skate fixture (affectionately?) known as Sperm. Not sure, but this may be a Shrunken Head production.

The ‘Skate To School’ auction for The Patrick Kerr Skateboard Scholarship has 14 custom decks available for bidding until December 13th. Signed decks include: Dave Chappelle, Former World Heavyweight Champion Joe Frazier, Ray Barbee, Shane MacGowan, as well as original painted decks by renowned skate artists. The The Patrick Kerr Skateboard Scholarship honors the memory of the 15 year old Patrick Kerr,  a LOVE Park activist who was killed on his skateboard by a hit and run truck after LOVE was closed to skaters. Check out the auction which ends December 13. I’ve heard that Chappelle skates. I wonder if he brought his stick with him when he went to South Africa.

Even if you don’t live in our neck of the woods, this interview with the board of Skaters For Portland Skateparks could be of interest to you. Sonny Robertson and Tom Miller founded the organization and are pretty much the reason the Pier Park rebuild is actually skateable today. Highly recommended if you wnat to know how it happened, and especially if you want to get the wheels spinning in your town.