Above Coping is seeking skateboarding themed art for a benefit show at Commonwealth Skateboarding on August 30th. See the flyer for details. What is Above Coping? “Above Coping is a non-profit that brings skateboarding to youth with chronic health conditions and life threatening illnesses. AC has two major programs: “Skating Through It” art clinics where children paint their own blank skateboard deck, and “Getting Over It” skate clinics where children paint decks and we set up complete skateboards while teaching the basics of riding them. The programs are conducted in partnership with hospitals (Doernbecher Children’s Hospital, Shriner’s Hospital for Children) and child serving non-profits in Portland, OR (Children’s Cancer Association, Children’s Healing Art Project, Hands and Voices, etc.).”

In this edition of counterfeits we have 2 fake Sims decks. The blue one on the left is an almost exact copy of the Kevin Staab ‘Mad Scientist’ model from 1986, designed by John Lucero. The ‘Pirate’ model on the right was based on a Staab pro deck from 1987, designed by Lance Welborn. The pink complete says ‘Aims’ instead of ‘Sims’ and ‘Ataab’ instead of ‘Staab’, very clever … Thanks to Matt Bass for the tip.

Gold Cup Skateboards comes to you from the mind of Lance Mountain. The boards are all made in U.S.A. and distributed by NHS. The product looks fully flushed out, right down to the “Power Slider” tail blocks. It’s not all retro nostalgia. Well maybe it is actually, but they do seem to be built with functionality in mind, as long as you are OK with a bizarro Streets of Fire ( Note “of” not “on” fire ) scenario where the technology of the future is wildly available in the past. It’s as if somebody forked a parallel universe on GitHub where certain niche technologies and fashions remained the same while the rest of the world advanced. Maybe they can get a young William Dafoe on the team. It’s a strange but interesting time in skateboarding. You can basically buy skateboard technology form any past generation right now. I can’t think of a similar scenario in any other sport. Imagine a football team where everyone decided to wear the old leather style helmets. I suppose you can still buy a basic wooden tennis racket. Maybe it’s just that skateboard styles and technology are more distinct through the ages.

Tesseract from Loaded Boards. Laminated to the bottom of the board is a layer of cork which provides vibration damping and (as we learned to our surprise during testing) a significant level of durability. The granular, non-directional structure of the cork helps prevent abrasive damage from propagating (in contrast to a traditional wood or bamboo veneer with long, oriented fibers). I’ve got cork floors in my kitchen, which ended up being a very poor choice. It’s just not durable to abrasion or water. I can’t imagine why Loaded added cork in the first place, and how they quantify the accidentally discovery of damage resistant properties, but I am highly skeptical. (Big surprise, right?) It seems like the first curb you bottom out on is going to shred the bottom of that thing. There’s also going to be a lot of tear and pinch potential where the trucks mount. I hope Loaded did more thorough testing with cork than Powell did with Bonite™ construction. Aesthetically though, it looks sharp, like something out of Metropolis magazine.

UPDATE: This post dates back 2013 and a lot of the content and comments have to to with Skatemaster Tate (Gerry Hurtado) who didn’t really have an internet presence at the time. Gerry did eventually surface in the online skating world through social media (actually commenting on this site too) as well as having a skateboard released through Flood Control and a flexi-disc release in an issue of Pure Fun. Sadly, within a week of being diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer, he passed away on October 13th, 2015. I’ve been sitting on some recorded rebroadcasts of SK8 TV from around the turn of the millennium. I’ve been hesitant to post them online because I figured between Viacom and Stacy Peralta, I wasn’t in a hurry to get kicked off of Youtube again. In my head, these belong to the 80’s but according to IMDB, the first air date was in 1990. SrArcade has a channel and blog mostly dedicated to restoring and playing old video arcade games, but he’s also uploaded a healthy chunk of the old Nickelodeon show. There are 51 uploads to date, each a segment instead of a whole episode, but all of them are included in…

On a recent east coast sweat safari,the GVK’s had a 6 hour layover at Reagan International in D.C., so we hopped the Metro and headed to see the sights. As we exited the Metro station Jack spotted a rad little skate spot with a federal government-sized skate stop. This did not deter him from trying to skate it, even though it was really close to the guard tower. One of the guards actually said, “He’s pretty good. How old is he?” I’m always surprised with what Jack gets away with from airport terminals to the Holocaust museum. If you and I tried to ride the places he rode, House Speaker John Boehner would have us thrown into Git-mo. Barge and Destroy – GVK

In this episode of I Can’t Make This Stuff Up, author Tyler Stallings reviews a photography show titled “Backyard Oasis: The Swimming Pool in Southern California Photography, 1945-1982;” Two Los Angeles-based photographers captured the action: the beefcake photography of Bob Mizer and his peers from the 1940s-1960s published in his Physique Pictorial magazine, and Craig Stecyk’s photo documentation of the DogTown Z-Boy skateboard team for SkateBoarder magazine in the 1970s. Each focuses on a redefinition of masculinity in relationship to the swimming pool towards a new vision embracing hedonism. This shift in values associated with the masculine–from a man as hardworking breadwinner for his family to the single, unattached, self-obsessed, and leisure-seeking man–accompanies a cultural shift from the early 1950s to the late 1970s from an economy based on production to one based on consumption.

Do you remember the catalogues that came with the old JFA records? Most of them also offered JFA skateboards in various sick shapes. I always wanted one of those, but they don´t pop up that often nowadays and I am pretty sure that I don´t want / can´t afford an original one.

LaSalle Park, currently under construction by Evergreen Skateparks. I want one of those things in my town.

One more in our series of indoor commercial architecture waiting to be barged. This one from Addicted to Retail shows the Ayres store by Dieguez Fridman in Buenos Aires. Free t-shirt skateboard (deck) to the first photo (or video) of this place being skated. That’s legal in Argentina, right? No Photoshopping please. My apologies if you sent me this tip, It’s lost in my email.