I made an unexpected last minute trip to Hood River on Sunday afternoon. When I go there I recognized a few people from the Portland/Vancouver area, and as I was leaving about half the locals from Pier Park showed up. Hood River is turning into a really nice little park. They keep adding onto it and have plans for more. The new small bowl setup is fun and can be linked to the rest of the park via a couple transfer spots. I hear more street features are in the works for Hood River. (While in Hood River, visit IPS for all your skateboarding needs…)

These are pics of a semi new skatepark in Harbor City, Florida called The Park of Melbourne:

12,000 sq. ft. indoor skateboard park. Features a 9 foot vert wall. Indoor bowl with mini taco and half cradle, with wall ride. Large street course with moveable elements. Full audio system with large projectors playing skate videos and cameras throughout which can be logged into to pull clips of your sessions.

That’s a new high tech twist on skateparks, cameras that record the session and then you can log in and see the pics or video. I’m not sure how well it would work as far as framing and the quality of the shots. Not-so-good is my guess, but if you’ve ever witnessed (or taken part in) a spectacular slam or collision and wish you’d had a camera on it, this system might grant that wish. Well, it would if it was working. I got the pictures late last year. Five months later and the web site seems to still be mostly under construction with the exception of a some overview shots. (Sorry no direct link)

UPDATE: I like that mural, as goofy as it looks. However, I think that the influence of surf-style on popular skateboarding has largely disappeared, aside from a brief resurgence after the Dogtown doccumentary. Anyone?

Here’s a few more pics I misplaced when posting the St. Lucie skatepark construction progress photos. As usual, they are courtesy of Tito at Team Pain. That snake pit/zone looks fun.

Update: Turns out this is close to St. Lucie County but is actually located in Fort Pierce, so it’s the Fort Pierce skatepark.

Unbeatable Banzuke is a physical obstacle course Japanese game show (Kinniku Banzuke) that airs in reruns on the G4 network in the US. Apparently the original show was cancelled in 2002 after two contestants suffered serious spinal cord (OK, cervical vertebrae) injuries. The “Skeboarder” episode features a skateboard obstacle course that looks like Grover’s wet dream. An enterprising individual has captured some of it in the time honored fashion of pointing a video camera at the TV. Check it out after the jump. G4’s site has some footage but they don’t do anything to make it easy for you to find out when a particular episode will be on. “TV that’s plugged in?” Hardly. The course looks really fun, actually. One of the contestants has his occupation listed as “Skateboard Salesman.” I wonder if he goes door to door. – Thanks to Rich for the tip.

Yesterday in Portland, Cal Skates sponsored a skate jam as part of the 6th Avenue Street Fair that seemed to be taking place in front of Cal’s and that’s about it. I’m always complaining about a lack of artsy fartsy ramps in the states, but we had some here for sure. The big quarter pipe was covered in tiles on the top third, tiles that continued to break and fly off through the course of the session. It looked like it was giving everyone a bit of trouble, but at the same time they seemed to enjoy the added challenge. Another cool feature were two launch ramps that had been done up rather nicely to make it look like they were split from a cross section of a giant Northwestern tree. Kudos to whoever it was who realized that concept. Well done.

As folks in Mexico City set up the discarded refuse tax deductible ramps donated by the X Games, a couple of thoughts occurred to me. Who actually took possession of the ramps? What I’m getting at is will kids have to pay a private entity to skate these, or are they part of parks program now? More importantly, the X Games should have a highly visible foundation set up similar to Tony Hawk’s, whose primary goal is to facilitate the construction of free, public skateparks, either through financial contributions and/or arranged corporate sponsorships. Let the suits actually give back to the sport in some other way besides paying the salaries of a small group of competitors and propagating marketing stereotypes in commercials and advertisements.

It looks like the vert is nearly completed, and they will begin setting up the “street course” very soon. Apparently there hasn’t been a decent skate park in Mexico City since 1993.
– Thanks to John Aguilar for the tip. [Source: ReSkate]

One of the most visited areas on this site is House of Neil’s eBay Watch. You might say it’s beloved, actually. There are two main types of people who read his column; Those who just like seeing all the old and obscure boards, and those that use it as a tool for finding out how much something is worth. A few months back some people in “the collector’s community” got upset with Neil because he reported how much a board sold for at an auction, but the buyer never actually paid for it. Some people felt Neil was practicing irresponsible journalism that would somehow influence the outcome of future auctions. You can probably guess which forum that discussion took place on. As part of an ongoing campaign to keep people from getting their panties in a bunch, Neil does not comment on the value of skateboards that are currently in auction or otherwise for sale, or thinking about being sold. That means you should not ask us how much you think a particular board is worth. We won’t tell you. Not because we are elitist snobs or dicks, (well…) we just can’t do it without pissing someone off. And besides, Neil has a life, you know. There are already two good resources for this, Art of Skateboarding and Skull and Bones Skateboards. Of course you might have to put forth a little effort by signing up as members.

That being said, check out these old Variflex boards that someone asked us to appraise. Nice stash.

Here’s another post about ramps at work. Maybe I need to start a Fringe Benefits category. This is Bobcat at the massive Sleestak corporate headquarters, as shot by long time skater Scott Mosher, the guy behind Morrow / 5150 Snowboards. (Wait, shouldn’t his name be Morrow?) Actually, this ramp is at the K2 facility and used to reside at Mt Baker for Kamp K2. Want a job at K2?

We mentioned Tom Fain in a piece about the defunct Skatepark Magazine since he was on the cover posing with his eight wheeled skateboard under the caption “Why every community could use a Tom Fain.” and I made the joke “Really? Every community could use a guy who is seemingly completely out of touch with skateboarding culture?” because he was on an 8 wheeler, and most kids can’t relate to a board that is wider than 8 inches, let alone an eight wheeler from the 70’s. Well Tom eventually saw the post and wrote to me. He’s got a good sense of humor and wasn’t annoyed by the post at all. He sent in a bunch of pictures of him not being out of touch with skateboarding culture, as well as some scans of the article about him in Skatepark magazine. Tom has a web site devoted to his ministry and skateboarding called SAP Skateboards if you are interested.

Coan Nichols and Rick Charnoski’s newest film Deathbowl to Downtown is a documentary on the history of skateboarding in the sprawling giant New York City. They are celebrating a screening of it with a photography (and art) show titled The Moving Image – A Photographic History of Skateboarding in New York at the Etnies Show Room (29 Greene St., NYC). The opening reception is invite only, but there is a public viewing on May 10th and 11th from 12-6pm and 12-5pm respectively. I don’t know if this means the film is has been released or not, but it must be getting close. If you’ve never seen their work, the word documentary doesn’t do them justice. May I suggest starting with Fruit of the Vine and then moving on to Northwest? It ought to be obvious to anyone that New York City has a rich history of skateboarding to draw from, so the NCP films treatment is essentially a guaranteed winner. And who knows, if you look real close in the credits you might see a certain web site mentioned. I contributed some commercials from the SnA archives that they had intended to use in painting the big picture. Of course it took me forever and a day to actually get it to them, and I haven’t seen the film so they might not have used anything. Regardless, head on over to the film’s official site for more photos, a trailer and some more clips. My favorite one features Steve Quentin.