February 2009. Much as in January, the economy might suck, but you wouldn’t know it on eBay. There were some BIG auctions that went off this month, and a lot of cash thrown around. Tax refunds really come to bear at this time of month, with collectors throwing their “free money” at any grails that happen to come up.

And there’s something else I want to repeat from my January column, and this is dedicated to 2 sellers in particular: “classicadsfromthepast” and “vintagogaga”. ENOUGH ALREADY! Stop cutting up old mags and selling the individual pages on eBay for $10! Nobody is buying your crap, so just stop! Your crap is overrunning EBay! Do a search fro Steve Douglas. You might find one deck, but I can guarantee that you will get about 5 ads come up in the search; all ripped out of 80s skate magazines. One of the sellers has very little feedback, and all that there is is from the same buyer that apparently can’t get enough of Tony Hawk ads, and who hasn’t figured out that he could buy the original mags and do the cutting out himself. Fuck me! This is as lame as all of those ads for the Yocaher aluminum decks from a few years ago!

You would think that being a reporter for the Wall Street Journal would preclude you from writing about skateboarding, but one man found a way to make it happen. Conor Dougherty contacted me in reference to the New York Times piece of failed mortgages and pool skating. Over the phone he mentioned that he’d been trying to figure out an angle to get the WSJ on board with a skateboard story for a long time, and it looks like he finally swung the deal with a piece called Skateboarding Tourney Stirs Its Own Midnight Madness and another called The Economics of Skateboard videos. The first piece is about the recently hyped game of SKATE put on by the Berrics, and the second one is essentially a recap with some information about professionally produced online video, including the fact that you can usually find recently released skate videos on YouTube. I wondering how he pitched the first story, as far as usefulness from a business standpoint. I’m not pointing this out to be critical, but rather to say “way to make it happen.” Both articles use the same video, which you can watch courtesy of the Wall Street Journal after the jump.

[Source: Missouri Film Info]

A museum in Helsinki, Finland had an indoor installation of a styley mini ramp, but incredibly enough, there seems to be only two [ 1 – 2 ] online pictures of it anywhere. Kiasma has some sort affinity to skateboarding. They also did a major outdoor mini ramp for a while as well. I am still not sick of skate-ramps-as-art. I say, bring it on. Who has more shots of the indoor ramp? Up top, Anna Kangas photo by Satu Pulkki

Epicly Later’d is dissecting the Lakai Fully Flaired video. I picked up on this segment that mostly concentrates on Guy Mariano over at Mumble. Lot’s of people think of different things when they hear his name, for me, I can’t get past the “High Guy” Garbage Pail Kids knockoff graphic. This section of video even has an interview with Stacy Peralta, as he was the “guy” who put Guy, Rudy Johnson, Gabriel Rodriguez and Paulo Diaz on Powell, their first major sponsor. It’s fascinating stuff that should appeal to older and newer skaters alike, and is really only incidental to the Lakai video. What strikes me is mutual respect and general lack of shit talking that usually accompanies the history tales from that era. You can watch the first part of the Guy Mariano focus after the jump. If you’re keeping track, it includes a lot of outtake footage that never made it into the old videos. If you really have some time to kill, watch the whole series up to now over at VBS.tv.

[Source: Mumble] (Note: Link removed, original site is gone and appears to be malware now.)

This week’s Shot of the Week is BJ Morrill on a jersey barrier somewhere in Socal. It’s a feeble to fakie shot by a mysterious character named Hurvey. I guess that’s no more mysterious than Kilwag. Check it out.

Swell! It’s 60’s week over here… or at least 60’s couple of days. I save these tidbits on a whim and then sometimes a few of them will bump into each other and make enough meat for a post. First up on the left is a shot from Max Schaaf’s 4Q Conditioning, some vintage hang 10 action. It may be early 70’s though, hard to tell. In the middle we have one of James A. Turners personal photographs from when he was an architecture student at the University of Michigan. This shot is in Detroit, circa 1965. “If life could have been all yo-yos and skateboards, I would have been King.” Turns out he’s a professor of architecture there now. He’s no king, but that’s not too shabby either. Last up, Life Magazine has released some photos into the public domain of sorts, for personal use only. There’s a set of skateboard shots from the 60’s that I found through the Wesleyan University blog. It turns out that Wesleyan University was the host of the first intercollegiate skateboarding championships in 1965, probably the last one too. The Life shots are available at a decent resolution if you click on them. They aren’t all campus shots either. If you are going to follow one link in this post, make it this one.

That’s right, “Skurfing.” This is a short clip from a 1965 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation piece on skateboarding. The reporter interviews a gal who says she had to form a “Sidewalk Skurfing Association” to keep from getting kicked off campus. It’s got lots of Peanuts-esque light jazz piano and the soon to be archetypal reporter flailing on a skateboard. Best line, hands down:

Do you think this will be obsolete in time, like the hula hoop?

There a short excerpt on YouTube, but to see the whole thing you have to go to the CBC Digital Archives. At the end there is a gratuitous shot of the original skateboarding dog with a dire voiceover about the current skateboard sales trends in major Canadian cities. Love the visual quality of that vintage video tape. It looks like it’s ready to catch fire.

– Thanks to Curtis for the tip.

Just a reminder to go to the Benton County Skateboard Alliance benefit if you are near the area in Oregon. The Corvallis Gazette Times wants you to go too. Another flier after the jump.

From the sketchy free online translation, I gather that fashion photographers Claudia Knoepfel and Stefan Indlekofer shot some supermodels (that I don’t recognize…) for a series of skateboards put out by Swiss skateshop Doodah. By the way, this is Friday T&A on S&A.

Surf and Skate historian extraordinaire Scott Starr turned me on to this clip from Green Acres that originally aired in 1967. There’s a community play production of The Beverly Hillbillies that Oliver and Lisa have to step in at the last moment when the leads get injured. Jethro finds a skateboard by the “cement pond” which was what the hillbillies called their pool. This is probably the first time a skateboard was ever used as a plot device on a TV show – the inevitable “unsuspecting tv character gets injured on a skateboard.” I believe there were earlier skateboarder appearances on talk shows and game shows such as What’s my line?, not to mention some ABC sports action, but if this aired in 1967 it was probably after the skateboard fad had died a seemingly overnight death. According to Starr, 1965 was the big commercial year for skateboarding, and Christmas catalog research seems to validate this. Watch the skateboarding segement after the jump.