After spending most of the session at Northbrook, Neil asked if I wanted to check out Chicagoland’s oldest concrete skatepark located near by in Deerfield, Illinois. He said it was janky, but they used to call it home before Northbrook existed. I’ve never been one to pass up some jank and/or history for a quick photo or two.

One of the highlights of my trip was getting to skate with House of Neil again. The two of us started Skate and Annoy together, and it was his idea actually. We have a long history together. He had a surprise for me, and when I arrived he presented me with the skateboard he said I was riding the first time he met me.

I got back from vacation and found a free monthly neighborhood paper sitting in the pile of neglected mail. The cover story of the Sentinel is Skateboarders Without Borders. It’s about local D.I.Y. project that is not so much of a secret, but still, the article pretty much gives the exact location and shows a landmark photo that all but draws a map for you. On top of that, the author interviewed the current land owners. I heard there was a “bust” of sorts during construction but that there were no real consequences. If they weren’t already numbered, my guess is this spot is about to become extinct. I hope the guy in the interview used a fake name.

I hooked up with House of Neil and his friend Mark to skate one of the newer concrete parks in Chicagoland. Northbrook is also a well off suburb, and they took a different approach to building a skatepark for their community. It’s part of a massive athletic complex that you pretty much have to drive to get to. There’s baseball fields, batting cages, soccer fields, a golf course and a fishing pond. You can even get pole on loan from the golf pro shop if you want to drop a line in. So theyt spent some money on this park, but how does it skate?

My sister said there was a skatepark by her house. I asked her if it was concrete and she said it was. I drove over to check it out. There was a lot of concrete, a big slab of it sitting under some prefab ramps. Metal frames with some sort of black masonite-type surface that was delamming like waxy masoninte left out in the rain. I made my way past the high school lurkers with their longboards loitering under the shelter and entered the park. The slab of concrete was indeed massive, dwarfing the paltry selection of ramps. They had a nice miniramp though, maybe 4 feet tall and at least 24 feet wide. I dropped in and did a 50-50. My axles got unnaturally squirrelly and I almost wilsoned. The coping was slippery as snot. Someone had waxed the hell out of it. I rubbed my shoe on the coping and big cornflake size pieces came off. Absurd. I spent 10 minutes trying to clean off the coping and took a couple runs, but there were some slick spots on the surface from residual wax I’m sure. A shame. You don’t see many miniramps that wide. Kids on scooters…

Welcome On Board is for skateboarders, not BMX, not graffiti. Public Sculpture by Guillaume Ségur who describes the project: When I consider skateboarding in terms of the production of forms or spaces, it is the Möbius strip that comes to mind. Looping, twisting, inversion and continuous motion are all figures performed by the skater in the space surrounding him. The form is also of particular interest because it has often been utilised in public sculpture projects. It is one of the stereotypes of 1970s public sculpture. In this particular context, the work acts as a pattern, code, a recognisable symbol.

Not completely out of touch with what the Members sang about, but in this case it’s the “Ka-chunk. Ka-chunk” sound of wheels rolling over the metal plates of prefab ramps in suburban Chicago. I skated my former hometown’s Centennial Park Skate Facility in Naperville Illinois. It’s about 4 years old and prefab, so I was expecting the worst. The surface was in surprisingly good shape given the weather extremes in the Chicago area, have I been mislead about the evils of prefab? No, it turns out they are replacing the surface annually, according to one local. So much for saving money by going prefab.

In Calgary there’s an Aryan Guard member who lives within eyesight of a skatepark and makes regular visits there trying to recruit kids for white supremacist causes. He allegedly uses cigarettes to bribe underage skaters! It’s kind of like a (more) bizarre skate church. You’d think he’d want the white kids to live longer and not die from lung cancer, but then again, there’s not a lot of logic to white supremacy in the first place. Well, old Willis (That’s lil’ Hitler’s name) went down to physically confront a multiracial group of youth from Anti-Racist Action Calgary at the skatepark and got beat down. The graphic above comes from an article on the web site called the 325 Collective. There’s no definition of the collective anywhere and the site is pretty amateurish and mixed in message. Somehow they’ve got anti-fascism and anti-racism mixed in with a pro-graffiti message. Oh those little anarchist rascals. It looks like they modified a graphic from a Czech organization called Good Night White Pride that seems to be about ridding hardcore (punk) music from the influence of neo-nazism. Everyone knows the best way to combat violent ideologies is by threatening violence. It worked for Ghandi,…

From Dennis the Menace, August 7th. I guess I should have tipped off MC. Although I’m not sure this is the type of skate comic he’s interested in. Dennis’s unnamed friend must be sporting clear grip tape.

Okay, this might be of more interest to Rollerbladers but a few of our brothers out there need to pull their pants up. I believe Kilwag is heading to the Great Lakes region this weekend. If he decides to head over to Michigan he might want to pack a belt or maybe some bikini briefs, because underwear visible above the pants is now a crime in Flint Quick we need to make some bumper stickers. 93 days to a year in jail?! Got this off the Black Label blog.