Agent Orange is playing Sunday 28th at Slabtown Bar in Portland, along with Grindline, the Band. Meanwhile, John Egertson was converting some old vinyl to mp3’s and pulled out this mail order sheet from Agen’t Orange’s This Is the Voice, their ill-fated 1986 semi-major label debut on Enigma records. I think these guys even had an appearance in a movie around this time. Flyer for Staurday’s show and a chance to go back in time to order guitar picks, t-shirts and skateboards after the jump.

– Thanks and happy birthday to Steve Turner for the tip.

It’s skateboard polo in the Laff-A-Lympics,There’s a caveman, but no caveman slides, and everyone pushes mongo. That’s 1977 for you.

– Thanks to Kevin Cann for the vidcap.

Yes.

Thanks to an update from MC, you can now view the animation outtakes from the surf movies this graphic was taken from.

Since we’ve already discussed the merits of natural and synthetic wine corks, I feel we can confidently add modern landscape design our list of high brow topics. I’m not talking about skate plazas or the appropriation of public spaces. I’m talking about how Thomas Dolliver Church, the acclaimed author of Gardens are for People and the father of modern landscape architecture (California Style) who was widely credited with influencing garden and pool design with his influential free form pool in his most famous work, El Novillero. Truth is, he didn’t invent the kidney pool though. He most he was inspired by a visit to FInland’s Alvar Aalto Villa Mairea, which also featured a free form pool. That’s El Novillero above left, and Villa Mairea on the right. So there you have it. Kidney pools were invented in Finland in 1937, not in California, circa 1948.

[Source: Intercontinental Gardener] – Thanks to Jarno Väisänen for the tip.

This has been stated so many times before that I don’t even know how to say it any other way now, but my primary impetus for beginning work on what would eventually become The Disposable Skateboard Bible was to tie up a few loose ends that I wasn’t able to find or include in the first book—several of which were only made possible in the years following its publication. For this reason perhaps that’s why I dragged my feet for two and a half years to compile material for the Bible, because just when I was about to theoretically call it done I would inevitably find one more board or story to follow up on, e.g. the random time I met Rich Harbour’s daughter at a backyard Banta party. I could have gone on indefinitely in this manner had I not finally committed to a delivery date with the publisher in April 2009, and it was an oddly bittersweet moment to at long last say, “It is finished.” Not only that but I kind of felt like a dink for calling it the “Bible” when I knew there were still a few outstanding historical pieces to the puzzle. Seriously, God left Himself a really, really big loophole with that ambiguous book of Revelations.

It doesn’t get much purer than this. You have to build it before you can play. That’s your barrier to entry. Also worth mentioning, non-athletic shoes. VIntage Life magazine.

– Thanks to Andy Wylie for the tip.

I was checking out plastic skateboards on eBay and I found this old GT that someone was auctioning. These things are a dime a dozen, but this one had axle extenders on them. The auction was very matter of fact about the phenomenon, as if it was commonplace. So I tried to research them and didn’t find anything about vintage axle extenders, only new ones for sale at Surf Rodz. Not only can you get them in differnt lengts, but you can get them in a larger axle size that in turn requires non-standard bearings, spacers and washers. I’m not sure what the point of that is, maybe someone can enlighten me.

There are a few architectural relics left standing from the 1964-65 World’s Fair in New York, but unfortunately the Kodak Pavilion isn’t one of them. This would have been at or near the height of the skateboard craze in the 60’s, so it;s possible a few pioneering street skaters may have gotten away with hitting the tranny.

– Thanks to Bill Helene for the tip.

Bob Biniak died from complications related to a heart attack last Thursday. Top left photo courtesy of Glen E. Friedman. Board photo from Disposable. I might have to start reading my Google Alerts again.

Never fails. In the months to follow the publication of Disposable: A History of Skateboard Art there were a number of decks that I’d failed to find after years of searching that suddenly surfaced out of the dusty blue. Fortunately, I was able to go back and make a few of these key additions with subsequent reprints, but this time around with The Disposable Skateboard Bible there will be no such editorial shenanigans (well, aside from the one previously noted here).