Skateboard Fieber had another Made for Skate shoe exhibition, this time in London. More interesting that that, however, is The Mags We Read exhibit on skateboarding magazine. The top image above from the flyer is appropriated from an old Transworld Skateboarding Magazine subscription card. The guy in the car is Per Welinder, and I swear the kid in the nut huggers standing with the totally awesome girls is Anthony Michael Hall. The Mags We Read looks like an interesting exhibit. One cool thing is that they have color copies of some of the old magazines on display so you can flip through them. There are a lot of the usual suspects as well as some of the obscure Europe only publications from days gone by. Poweredge is noticeably absent from the photos of the exhibit. If you guys needed one all you had to do was ask… Then again maybe it just wasn’t shown in the pictures. I wish these exhibits would come to the states. Check out Faux Ami’s coverage of The Mags We Read.

Veterinary Economics magazine has a feature called You do what else? where they interview wacky veterinarians about their outside interests. Dr. Brad Krohn (who has been bugging me to post this since it came out, be careful what you ask for!) was featured in the March 2007 issue, talking about his love of skateboarding. I’m going to heckle him here because I resent the indirect inference as one of his “group of aging friends” and I can’t remember the last time, if ever, that one of us has “longboarded around campus.” Ironically, they say he’s a sidewalk surfer, but nowadays the only actual sidewalks he skates are the ones that run up to the entrance of a skatepark. They used a somewhat weak three year old photo that I took of Dr. Brad at his suggestion, probably because it’s one of the few that didn’t have some old punk band graphics or other questionable logo that he would have had to explain countless times to his respected colleagues. The press at large is a little bit infatuated with old skate punks that grew up, got jobs, but still skate. You can read the profile on Veterinary Economics or see it…

It’s another case of designers with too much time (or LSD) on their hands. This time it’s Acconci Studio with their concept for a skatepark in San Juan Puerto Rico. I came across this in Dec/Jan 07 issue of Dwell magazine. It was on a page talking about the Cooper Hewitt 2006 National Design Triennial. The design evokes a 70’s snake run mixed with a waterpark. It may be fantastic to look at, but it shows a complete lack of practical skateboarding knowledge.

Outside Magazine? At first I thought this was going to be some real news, Tony Hawk coming out of the closet as the first highly successful openly gay skateboarder would certainly be news. Yeah I know there are other openly gay skateboarders out there, but nobody at Tony’s level. Turns out I was thinking of Out Magazine. Outside Online has an interview with both Tony Hawk and Shaun White, comparing career moves and their relationship as mentor and.. mentee? Err.. One of the best quotes: HAWK: Someone came to me once and wanted to do a signature Hawk cologne. I was like, “Of what? Sweaty pads? Am I wringing out my pads into a little perfume bottle?” WHITE: I’ve been sent like 20 movie scripts. And the first lines are always “What up, brah?” Nope, nope, nope. It’s a good interview that shows a bit of the human side of these two larger than life personalities. At four pages long, this interview is still way too short. I wish they had made a longer version available instead of just mirroring the print edition, which is what I’m assuming they did. we like to poke fun of some of (well most,…

13 years of highbrow Maximum Rock and Roll punk journalism has come to an end. Chicago’s Punk Planet is ceasing publication due to “bad distribution deals, disappearing advertisers, and a decreasing audience of subscribers.” You can get Punk Planet at my local hippie grocery store for cryin’ out loud. Those hippies must not be paying their bills. So it goes without saying (except I’m saying it anyway) that Punk Planet’s other title, the skateboard/culture magazine Bail, will officially die as well. Although I haven’t seen a new issue of Bail in what seems like years already. It’s got to be hard to keep an independent magazine in print. As one star fades out, another is in ascendance, so go on over to Razorcake.org and help them make it. [Source: Time Out Chicago]

When not teasing other people who write about skateboarding, I’m poaching their work. Concrete Wave has made their current issue available for viewing online at a site called Banquet Action Sports Video Community. Even though it says it is the full issue of Volume 5 number 5, it’s actually missing about seven or eight spreads in the back of the magazine that contain an artist spotlight and a lot of the smaller ads. Personally, the back is one of my favorite parts of the mag. I like checking out the small companies to see what interesting or weird new products have come out. The interface is OK, you can click on a page to make it larger, and most of the larger ads act as web links to the companies in question. One annoying thing is that linked ads have a pulsing glow that distracts from the reading experience of the page next to it and prevent a clear view of the ad itself. A better way to implement that would have been to activate the glow on rollover only. Come to think of it, a better way to implement it would have been to make the whole thing a…

As seen in the May 2007 issue of People Magazine, this advert for the Chevy Cobalt features street skating prominently. Some publicist or team rider over at Powell ought to be getting a fat check for this product placement. Usually company logos are not so readily identifiable. As for the Devil Dogs lyrics to Brand New Chevy… Devil Dogs? Never heard of them, but according to Last.Fm “People who like The Devil Dogs also like New Bomb Turks, Radio Birdman, Supersuckers…” Really? OK, Sounds good, but going against their credibility is the fact that they released the song in 1989, which would not have been an especially noteworthy year in the annals of American car design. Is anyone in this day and age excited by new Chevrolets, Corvettes even? I doubt the Devil Dogs would find the Cobalt that inspiring, but I’m sure the publishing rights inspired their bank accounts. Enlarge the advert after the jump.

A copy of TokyoLOCO from 1999. I’ve seen other Japanese magazines and websites like this. Chock-full of shots of what people are wearing on the street. I think people over here do that too and call it cool-hunting but I think here, people use it as research to try to find something to market. They don’t just serve up the images. The New York Times had a column called Street Fashion that would point out a certain trend through a series of photos but I’ve never seen a whole American magazine like that.

Stock imagery of skateboarding was stock in the 80’s until the last couple of years. Sure, the cheap and free online resources still have a lot of cheesy clip art believe me, I have collected a lot of it, but most stock imagery of skateboarding has gotten a lot more current. I think there was one photo session of an 80’s vert dog skater that was used forever. I recall in the 90’s and early 00’s he was on everything from watch packaging to toys and more. Here are two recent examples of stock houses advertising in consecutive issues of the design magazine Print. Hey Masterfile, that elbow pad probably hasn’t been available for sale in over 10 years.

I was surprised to find an article on older Australian skateboarders in the May 2007 issue of the United Airlines in-flight magazine Hemispheres. After reading it something reminded me of an earlier post I made in February titled A civilized way to spend an evening. It turns out this article is almost a word for word reprint of a 2006 article in an Australian publication called The Bulletin. They changed the title, the intro, and little else. One note of interest is the “Cyber Sidebar” feature for this article, which is a link to a United Airlines hosted excerpt of the NCP production Tent City. They also recommend checking out Fruit of the Vine. Well, don’t we all? I hope Rick and Buddy got a good chunk of change for that. United Airlines certainly isn’t spending money on in flight meals or removing extra seats to create more legroom. I was flying back from Florida late last night after spending an entire week’s worth of splendid weather not skating due to a separated shoulder and a jacked elbow. I couldn’t even get motivated to get some local coverage, which might not have been a bad thing since shooting skateboarding in…