The December January 2007 issue of Dwell had two separate skateboard related features. The first one was for an insane conceptual skatepark in San Juan, Puerto Rico. It turns out they actually tried to figure out if they could build it. The second more down to earth feature was in Dwell’s Nice Modernist column, and it was about Rob Dyrdek’s radical (no pun intended!) new approach to skatepark design, the skate plaza. Aside from the Kettering Skate Plaza, the article mentions his recent Shreveport, Louisiana venture which according to some people involved in the project, did not go as well as planned.

Juice magazine has a chunk of an older Jim Murphy interview with Ian McKaye where Ian talks about his skateboarding past. I always thought that Ian was in the Dogtown and Z-Boys documentary because Minor Threat was so important to so many skateboarders but he was idolizing that Dogtown stuff just like we were. Sounds so familiar. He mentions that he and Henry took a bus trip out to California to skate. That’s like, 2600 miles which would be several days on a bus right? Pretty hardcore for a 16 and 17 year-old. I wonder how they got around the release forms. The interview was in issue 50. You might be able to order a back issue from them if you want the rest of the interview.

Ian still runs Dischord records and the prices are very reasonable and the service is excellent.

Exotic Magazine can be found in strip clubs in the Portland area (or so I ‘ve been told, if my wife asks.) It’s pretty much an excuse to advertise strip clubs, lingerie and fetish wear, and about two pages of articles. They have a cover girl who is featured in the centerfold calendar of all the adult events for the month. The September 2007 issue appears to have been shot at a very famous skate spot in Portland. I for one, want to protest the way in which the skater in the photograph is objectified and robbed of his identity by not showing his head, as if he is just a piece of meat. It really burns me up inside.

[Source: Sleestak]

Hello, my name is Mark and I’m a recovering mongo pusher. I read Chris Yandall’s exhortation to Cut the Jive and Jog when it appeared in the June 1976 issue of Skateboarder magazine and it made sense to me. On a long distance push it helps to switch up. I push both ways to this day. Turns out he’s still er, pushing the idea with his Skogging! website. I figured I would add a personal confession to the Skateboarding Sucks parade of ridicule.

Yeah that’s the legendary Natas Kaupas hawking those incredibly crappy looking plastic sunglasses. Head on over to the Skateboard Archives and check out the, uh, print media archives. It’s a very loose collection of old skateboard magazine covers and assorted pages within those magazines. The real treasure is the funky old advertisements for long defunct or soon to be huge companies. There are lots of shots of pro skaters in questionable poses, a ton of vert riding with pads and helmets, obscure hard goods manufacturers (Rannalli Trucks anyone?) and all kinds of good stuff mostly centered on the 80’s and early 90’s. Also interesting are all the mail order shops with completes going for $99 and up. On the downside, the archives are not well organized or very consistent. The detail pages are not quite big enough to read everything, but it’s still a fascinating trip in the Way Back machine. Right, Sherman? Check out The Skateboard Archives.

This website says she’s a self-proclaimed skatepunk. This is from a fashion supplement to Wired Magazine. Does she really have an empty pool in her backyard? I take all the scorn back, can I come over April?

When Mark Conahan isn’t busy getting heckled for wearing pads or drawing comics, he’s appearing in magazines like Portland Monthly, where the richsters pretend to be hipsters. It’s not clear how Steve Grover got in past security, but he makes an appearance as well in the August Best of 07 issue that chose Pier Park as the city’s best skatepark. They try to imply that Pier Park is “gnarlier” than Burnside because it’s bowl is deeper, but that’s a pretty uninformed comparison. Who writes these articles? I mean seriously, your average Portland Monthly reader isn’t about to hop in the BMW and drive to the local skatepark, unless they are bringing their little kid. I’m sure a lot of them are going to drop in on the best place to get a tattoo as well. Yeah, I’m just jealous because we didn’t get chosen for Best Local and International Skate Coverage, even though that wasn’t one of the categories.

While browsing through coverage of The Mags We Read from the previous post, I noticed a skateboard on the cover of an old French “gentleman’s magazine” called Lui that, err, uhm, intrigued me. A little research on the internet pulled down not one, but two covers of Lui from 1977 and 1978 that featured skateboards as props.

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 here after the jump, because I’m not taking the scan of the page down until those deadbeats pay me for the photo usage. Dr Brad also made a recent appearance in GVK#18. We’ve been friends a long, long time. I kid him because I love him!