I bought his book because I like to support independently produced skate art (and so should you…). Steve’s photos have even appeared Skateboarder, Thrasher, Juice, and the Surfer’s Journal, and most importantly (HA!) Skate and Annoy. I expected to be bombarded with photos of the Arizona pipes, and I was, but I wasn’t expecting all the additional content (pools, Love Bowls, skate parks) that qualify as the “& Beyond” in the title. I always thought these pipes were more or less in one location, but it turns out it was part of a massive project all over Arizona. One of my favorite things about this book is all the short oral histories interspersed in the various locals covered. Read the full review.

I can imagine that a lot of people (including myself) waited for a release like this by Wheezing Maniac, an obscure band out of San Diego that was featured on the soundtrack for H-Street´s Hokus Pokus video with two songs (“Dollar on a platter” and “Don´t come close”). Sadly, this is NOT an LP or CD release, but just a bunch of audio files that can be downloaded via iTunes and probably some other sources. It´s just my guess that this is the complete discography of the band, and hopefully it´s authorized.

Lots of days off over the holidays, lots of days spent entering in old reviews from the static HTML pages, and doing a bit of coding to present them nicely. Still a bit of tidying up to do, but you know the saying here in the S&A tech department. You don’t? Well here’s how it goes: Good enough for now! Re-uploading images and rereading some of these reviews made me chuckle. The review that came up last in the skateboarding section was from back in 2006! I think that’s right about the time I started blogging. Static HTML… what a drag! I thought about ditching the old ones completely but I decided to leave them in, they are sometimes sort of interesting from a historical standpoint. Some of the oldest reviews go back to when I was not getting much traffic on the site. Some date back to 1997! Timely? Hardly, but there’s something like 250+ reviews, so how else am i going to get people to send me new stuff? Needless to say, there are probably a lot of dead links for bands and websites that don’t exist anymore. I’ve got old ass static HTML features that I’m going…

The first half of the 1960s were the hey-days for Surf Music with a high percentage of bands being from California. Many of those bands also wrote songs about Skateboarding or what then was known as “Sidewalk Surfing” (I counted about 30 releases so far from that era, including bands from other genres). But there were also bands from such “exotic” places like Texas.

If you would ask me, what is the best-known song out of Germany with a connection to skateboarding, I´d say “My god rides a skateboard” by the hardcore/punk band Spermbirds from Kaiserslautern.

Konstantin Butz is probably the first person ever who tried to analyze the phenomenon skate punk from an academic point of view. He wrote his doctoral thesis about it, which – in a slightly revised version – became this book, entitled Grinding California (transcript Verlag 2012).

Gang Green out of Boston have been around since 1982, skating, rocking and drinking, splitting up and reuniting again many times. They have a new album in progress that was once announced for the year 2007! Last year saw a little teaser, a 7” single with the songs “I fear” and “The other place”.

I got this unexpected bit of joy in the mail a few weeks ago, and so now I’m using it as good excuse to start up the reviews section of Skate and Annoy again. Right now it’s just the old static content from the old site that’s sort of been hidden… since 2009!!!! The formatting on some of those old reviews is kind of janky, but rather than going back and fix everything first, I’m going to start adding new ones. I’m actually a good way through a major Wordpress theme design for the reviews but who knows when I’ll have the time to finish it. On that note, I’d love to have a few extra fingers on the keyboard for the reviews. Almost any product is fair game. We used to review things like bubblegum and beer back in our print editions. I’m thinking about reviewing Legoland in Florida. But that’s enough about reviews, on to Pure Fun. PURE FUN – West Coast Release Part on September 15th in Long Beach, CA. Flyer after the jump.