Sisterhood of the Skateboard is ant article in the NY Times about a female skate collective in the Bronx called the Brujas, which is Spanish for “witches.” If “Skate Witches” sounds familiar, you might have seen it on S&A. The Brujas actually copped their name from this 1986 Super * film after it showed up on YouTube. You can buy this film on a DVD compilation Danny Plotnick movies titled Warts & All. As for the Bruma’s and the New York Times piece… the accompanying video is a little cringe worthy. Is skateboarding heteronormative? Skateboarding doesn’t care. We can agree Girl is not a 4 Letter Word, and there’s always room another organization, or collective, but maybe the NYT is making a big deal out something to fill some space. Maybe I’m just part of the patriarchal problem. The article actually made it into the print edition, which is cool for their crew and female skaters everywhere.

This Sunny Street cartoon dates back to 2012, and I may have posted it here before, but I can’t find it. For future reference: This is a post about an injured horse riding a skateboard.

StayTrueToYou.org is part of a public service campaign trying to convince teenagers in Oregon not to smoke pot. It’s likely funded by some of taxes imposed since the recent legalization of marijuana in Oregon. The trouble with running a campaign like that on social media is that allows all kinds of predictable commentary from the peanut gallery. This radical stock image posted on Instagram states “Pot can make it harder to learn new tricks,” but it prompted a response from an ever helpful young adult that said “Not really, I learned how to skate while being high 🙂” Earache my eye. This banner was spotted at the mall, surrounded by mall-grabbers. You know what else can make it harder to learn tricks? A bunch of girls with their feet hanging over the coping.

Thanks to Jim Thompson for these photos of Wee Willie Winkies. That’s “winkles” not “Winkles” as in Wee Willi Winkels. These disgusting looking, sickly pale, pink, fleshy appendages come from Scotland. Sausage skateboards probably require pizza grip to deal with all that extra grease.

Ryan Sheckler is still a thing, and he’s a thing for Lume Cube. Lume Cube is a wireless flash / lighting system. It’s a pretty cool device actually. They are tiny, waterproof, battery powered strobes you can link together and control with an app to use for discreet, highly mobile and quick photo lighting. In addition to using a smartphone to set up Lume Cubes for use with a DSLR, you can use an additional mount to supplement your phonecam’s lighting. After watching some of the tutorials I have to say that I’m impressed by the system. It’s expensive, but seems very well thought out. One thing that does seem needlessly obtrusive, to use a Lume Cube even once, you’re going to need to provide a valid email address and register the the cube (with serial #) via your smartphone. So what happens if you want to loan it to a friend, or share a cube amongst different phones? For instance, you may use different assistants on different shoots. Why should you have to provide a valid email address just to use the cube? What if the email address and serial # conflict with a previous registration? This is a major deal to me, can you tell? Another instance of needless overreaching by a tech company. An email address to register a product for warranty purposes makes perfect sense, but just to use a physical product? I’m calling bullshit.

This Barbie and Ginger toy dates back to 1997. Ginger is a battery powered dog that barks and walks, and can be used to tow Barbie on her skateboard, complete with little Hotwheels-style wheels. The top frame is a still from a creepy TV commercial. It may have been 1997, but the girl on the left looks like she’s stuck in a 60’s children’s book. The screen cap looks craptacular, but that’s as good as it gets. Someone digitized TV commercial in pre-hd days. The same low-res version with awful motion compression artifacts is all over the web under assorted watermarks. Unfortunately nobody’s uploaded a decent version of it, not that you’d want to watch it endlessly. It does have a sort of hypnotic quality to it, in a Jonestown massacre sort of way.

– Thanks to Goofyfoot Rff for the tip.

Sultana Yo Fruit packaging, made in the Netherlands with 90’s American marketing. I especially like the “What the fruit do I know?” tagline on the side of the package. I’m not sure what the little mascot actually is, but Matthijs thinks it’s a cellphone. Stranger things have happened. They look like miniature pop-tarts, but not meant to be put in a toaster.

– Thanks to Matthijs for the pics.

Normally I might push this post off to the Broken Kingpins section without comment but the Tubuloids video for It’s Getting Weird connected with me on a primal level. I think GVK missed his calling. Their album on Beer City Records doesn’t come out until October, but you can preorder it now.

Alright, we’ve got special behind the scenes access to Skateboard, the movie, courtesy of this July, 1977 edition of Wild World of Skateboarding magazine.  The article seems hastily written, and does not really offer much behind the scenes action outside of some photos from the set. However, it’s got lots of  poorly written press release action. It also offers an interesting glimpse of the state of skateboarding at the time, such as the lack of “established rules of Downhill in organized competition due to the infancy of skateboarding as a spectator sport.” Apparently, all the competitions in the film were staged. I haven’t seen it in a very long time, but I recall as a kid I thought this was a sort of hybrid of documentary and drama. The tone of the article is amusing in retrospect, as it treats the movie as, well, a film and not the kitsch time capsule it turned out to be.  Pics and full article text after the jump.

Jan and Dean’s 1964 song Sidewalk Surfin’ is pretty much the first skatesploitation song. I haven’t actually researched that, Doc Skaterock probably knows for sure. It’s easily the most famous one. As a young lad I remember buying a cutout Jan & Dean greatest hits compilation on cassette tape just because of this song. Before we were exposed to the larger world of punk rock and skate rock, we actually used to derive a bit of stoke from this cheesy tune, and later on would bust it out for a laugh and some nostalgia.