This web comic from The Book of Biff is followed by a tale of woe featuring bike on skate action. There but for watching where I’m going, go I.

Sean Cliver has a short interview over at Cool Hunting that is focused on his book Disposable. At the time he gave the interview he had no idea where and when it would show up. I’ve never really trolled Cool Hunting, but it seems like a site for people suffering from really short attention spans, the really lazy or terminally bored. It’s compilation of completely unrelated things that someone has determined “cool.” Disposable has been re-re-released on Ginko Press with minor cosmetic changes and factual corrections making it different from the last version published by Concrete Wave Editions. But of course, if you are a collector, you’ll need to get this one too. Cliver is working on a follow up to Disposable that he hopes will be released in Spring of 2008.

Yes, much to my wife’s good humor, for the past 10 months I’ve been working on another follow-up book of sorts. This one will be more “collector” based, and my main intent is to showcase a big gallery of deck images from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and just a smattering of the 00s. I’ve pillaged/shot a number of heretofore unseen collections and archives, so I promise lots of nice new eye candy, but I’m also using this as an opportunity to tie up a few loose ends from the first book, with quotes and stories from artists that were either MIA or just didn’t fit in.

There are a few mostly half-assed or narrow in scope books out there on skateboard graphics. Disposable is the only one you need, and unless he totally blows it, Clivers’ next book should be just as good.

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.

If you are bummed out about skateboarding not making it to the olympics, you can still get your roller-jollies from the the International Federation of Roller Sports. FIRS is planning on holding the first Skateboarding World Championship at an undisclosed location on an undisclosed date in 2008. Must be top secret. Here’s how they define skateboarding:

This is a show of the emerging roller disciplines which are day by day reaching the same importance of the “historical” official roller disciplines. Much appreciated by young people, these sports are stylish, aggressive, acrobatic, in a word: modern sports for young people.

SKATEBOARDING: Acrobatics on half pipes or specific skateparks on the renowned four wheeled platform. Recognised different styles: Freestyle – Aerials – Flip tricks – Slides and Lip Tricks.
First FIRS world skating Championship is scheduled in 2008

Hmmm… I can hear the controversy now. Do we want our renowned four wheeled platform acrobatics performed in unspecific or specific skateparks? Thank god we are approaching the same historical significance as the other official roller disciplines.

No word yet on who is on Team USA for skateboarding, but I hope they are as balanced as a certain Team USA figure skater who has this fascinating bio excerpt:

Most Prized Possession: My bass guitar

Hobbies: Playing bass guitar in my band.

Music Listened to During Training/Competition: Me playing bass guitar in my band

Unique Quality: I play bass guitar in a band called Currently Unknown.

Go Team Bass Fish Guitar USA! Let’s see, what else? Oh yeah, looks like they swiped a pic of a female street skater for use on their web site, but there are no credits.

[Source: Skate Daily]

Transworld Skateboarding reports (See how I gave you guys credit there? It doesn’t even hurt.) that skateboarding will likely not make it into the 2012 Olympics. The got it from a subscription only web site about the business of the Olympics called Around the Rings.

Plans to bring skateboarding to the program for the 2012 Olympics are headed for a crash landing, sources tell Around the Rings…

…As part of a play to make maximum use of the BMX half pipe track, UCI was also willing to consider bringing skateboarding into the federation for a double-barreled shot at attracting younger sports fans for the Olympics.

UCI sports director Olivier Queguiner, who met recently with IOC officials to discuss the situation, now tells Around the Rings that the “no decision about skateboard” will take place during the UCI Congress in Stuttgart later this month. A vote of the UCI Congress is a must to bring a new discipline into the sport of cycling. Failure to act this year effectively kills the chance of adding skateboarding to London.

Around the Rings also claims that most pro skateboarders would rather have street skating in the Olympics instead of a vert event, I’m guessing because there are about 100 times more street skating pros in the first place. Regardless of your stance on having skateboarding in the Olympics, or your skateboarding terrain of choice, it’s kind of obvious that a halfpipe event will fit in better in terms of the whole Olympic style spectacle and judging. There are no events where competitors can use completely different terrain and be judged on the difficulty and style of their maneuvers. Street skating would be too hard for the uninitiated viewer to comprehend, unless they turned it into a gymnastics like exercise where there was one single runway and an obstacle at the end for every competitor to hit, as in the case with the vault in gymnastics. I’m pretty sure nobody wants to see or partake in that, although it’s a pretty funny idea for a video. “And here comes the dismount from the 15 step rail… Oooooh! It looks like he broke his ankle. He didn’t fall completely off his board, but “rolling up the windows” is certainly going to subtract some points. Ryan Sheckler has left the arena crying again, what a brave competitor.”

Look for the furor to start up again for the 2016 Olympics. Yes, this is one of the lamest intro graphics I’ve done. There’s a host of links to now, mostly moot articles on skateboarding in the Olympics after the jump.

Want to turn into a professional skateboarder like Ryan Sheckler? Who doesn’t? Now you can avoid all the “paying your dues” BS and get the inside scoop in the Go Pro Book from the good folks at Skateboarderpro.com. It covers such topics as:

How do you become a professional skateboarder?

How do you get sponsored?

How do you make a good “Sponsor Me” video?

Where do you send “Sponsor Me” videos?

Where do you even start?

GO PRO is the one and only STEP BY STEP method that can show you EXACTLY the right plan of action you can start TODAY to take you on a direct path to getting sponsored!

GO PRO defines a precise daily, goal oriented system that you can work at your own pace to achieve “levels” that position you in exact ways so that you can become “Sponsor Material”.

I can’t wait for the informercial. It turns out they can even help you get a college scholarship. And to think I dropped out of college because of skateboarding.

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]

Are you sick of Oregon Trifecta coverage? You’d think we would be. After I made a flippant comment (Who, me?) about the conglomerated Extreme™! sports nature of the Banquet web site, I heard back from the site’s content manager Cody Whitman:

We started banquet as a resource for filmmakers and photographers (we sell downloads of DVD’s and are in the process of helping photogs sell stock photos) and this is why there are a variety of sports on our site. It is true that “conglomerate” sites don’t make sense in a lot of ways within action sports (or whatever the hell you want to call them), but in some respects they do. We are all filmmakers, photographers and writers as well as participants in our respective sports and whether you are shooting skating or skiing there are commonalities. We understand the differences between the cultures, clearly there is no such thing as a shared lifestyle across these sports or even within them for that matter. But the truth of the matter is skating is a three man sport, the skater, the photog and the filmer…. Maybe there aren’t similarities between a skater and someone riding motocross but there are between the people creating the media surrounding those two sports. And we are trying to be an outlet for those people.

So Cody has a point there. Banquet is not really aimed at the individual audiences that enjoy those activities, but more so at the kinds of people that enjoy documenting them, or want to buy and sell that documentation, I guess. So enjoy banquet’s photo and written coverage as provided by Kyle Bunker, who took all the photos above. I think Screech pukes at every contest.

Lincoln City
Portland, Pier Park
Battle Ground Washington
Bonus: Colin Bane’s Oregon Trifecta editorial

Be careful what you wish for. If you spend the time and money to make something worthwhile online, you want people to read it. If you get too many people reading, it can become quite expensive and time consuming to maintain. I used to spend a lot of time on Concrete Disciples and Sleestak. As I started to develop Skate and Annoy more, I gradually chose to spend more time creating on SNA and less time reading other sites. Maintaining these things can be a bitch, just ask the guys who do it. Adding forums generates a headache of a different level of magnitude. Imagine every jackass commenter you see on this site multiplied by 100 or 500. Flame wars, server overloads, spam posts… I know, cry me river right? I haven’t been following it in detail, but I know Jeff Greenwood over at Concrete Disciples had some health issues for a while, and I think he’s turned over the reigns of CD for the most part. A while ago they made the decision to contract an online advertising agency to help generate ad revenue and pay for the heavy usage the site gets. At first there were a lot of “crossover” ads for action sports related companies, you know, lifestyle stuff. Buy your surf trunks here, etc… I was over there the other day and got a little bit of a shock when I pulled up a page and found geographically targeted ads trying to sell me a car in Portland, as well as ads for Verizon. Basically, non skateboarding related in any sense. It kind of bummed me out a little, but I know they aren’t “selling out”, they just need to pay the bills.

This Tigard Times article on the skatepark from July had some background on the park. Also check out some of the old info including a plan drawing at the Tigard City website skatepark page.

A story has been circulating about how the changes to the original design came about. The Tigard City government folks have been pleased with the professionalism of the Dreamland crew and the progress of the skatepark. When Dreamland said they could save a couple of the big trees on the site by altering the design, they were pretty much given the go ahead to make what changes they saw fit.

This is how it has been done in the smaller towns and has been a great boon to skaters. Design/Build just makes sense. Those guys get on site and discover lines as they build. If they can improve flow by altering the design, they should.