My sister said there was a skatepark by her house. I asked her if it was concrete and she said it was. I drove over to check it out. There was a lot of concrete, a big slab of it sitting under some prefab ramps. Metal frames with some sort of black masonite-type surface that was delamming like waxy masoninte left out in the rain. I made my way past the high school lurkers with their longboards loitering under the shelter and entered the park. The slab of concrete was indeed massive, dwarfing the paltry selection of ramps. They had a nice miniramp though, maybe 4 feet tall and at least 24 feet wide. I dropped in and did a 50-50. My axles got unnaturally squirrelly and I almost wilsoned. The coping was slippery as snot. Someone had waxed the hell out of it. I rubbed my shoe on the coping and big cornflake size pieces came off. Absurd. I spent 10 minutes trying to clean off the coping and took a couple runs, but there were some slick spots on the surface from residual wax I’m sure. A shame. You don’t see many miniramps that wide. Kids on scooters and scooter hybrids outnumbered the skaters. A couple carloads of kids show up and I thought the session might get started. Then I realize nobody has skateboards. The lurkers are cruising circles on longboards in the parking lot. The parking lot is about a mile from a street that isn’t just a connector for other parking lots, sitting way in back of an athletic field complex. The suburbs suck. I start trying to transfer from one quarterpipe to another with ends touching, tilted in a 45 degree angle. I fail miserably because I can’t backside ollie without some sort of hip. Some kid named Joel notices my repeated failures and shows me up by hitting multiple frontside ollies. I take his picture. You read about it. A booming and wealthy suburb named Naperville can’t build a decent skatepark for the kids.

Welcome On Board is for skateboarders, not BMX, not graffiti.

Public Sculpture by Guillaume Ségur who describes the project:

When I consider skateboarding in terms of the production of forms or spaces, it is the Möbius strip that comes to mind. Looping, twisting, inversion and continuous motion are all figures performed by the skater in the space surrounding him. The form is also of particular interest because it has often been utilised in public sculpture projects. It is one of the stereotypes of 1970s public sculpture. In this particular context, the work acts as a pattern, code, a recognisable symbol.

Q spotted this and Dave Tobin told me about it. It was a newspaper insert advertising Qwest high speed internet.

Not completely out of touch with what the Members sang about, but in this case it’s the “Ka-chunk. Ka-chunk” sound of wheels rolling over the metal plates of prefab ramps in suburban Chicago. I skated my former hometown’s Centennial Park Skate Facility in Naperville Illinois. It’s about 4 years old and prefab, so I was expecting the worst. The surface was in surprisingly good shape given the weather extremes in the Chicago area, have I been mislead about the evils of prefab? No, it turns out they are replacing the surface annually, according to one local. So much for saving money by going prefab.

In Calgary there’s an Aryan Guard member who lives within eyesight of a skatepark and makes regular visits there trying to recruit kids for white supremacist causes. He allegedly uses cigarettes to bribe underage skaters! It’s kind of like a (more) bizarre skate church. You’d think he’d want the white kids to live longer and not die from lung cancer, but then again, there’s not a lot of logic to white supremacy in the first place. Well, old Willis (That’s lil’ Hitler’s name) went down to physically confront a multiracial group of youth from Anti-Racist Action Calgary at the skatepark and got beat down. The graphic above comes from an article on the web site called the 325 Collective. There’s no definition of the collective anywhere and the site is pretty amateurish and mixed in message. Somehow they’ve got anti-fascism and anti-racism mixed in with a pro-graffiti message. Oh those little anarchist rascals. It looks like they modified a graphic from a Czech organization called Good Night White Pride that seems to be about ridding hardcore (punk) music from the influence of neo-nazism. Everyone knows the best way to combat violent ideologies is by threatening violence. It worked for Ghandi, right? OK, let me make this clear for our slow readers who can’t decipher sarcasm. I find anarchists groups amusing and I am anti-white supremacy or any other type of supremacy besides Skateboard Supremacy. I’d like to give a shoutout to anyone flying the SHARP flag.

Nooo! you could have sold those on Ebay!

A crafty use for those old skate decks. There’s some math in there but also a bonehead version. How to make a skateboard frame on Instructables. Hmmm, maybe with some biscuit joinery you could make that thing strong enough to ride, or a non-skid toilet seat!

I’m in the burbs of Chicago for about a week for my grandmother’s 90th birthday. I didn’t get a chance to get anything scheduled before I left, so the updates from yours truly are going to be infrequent and brief. If any of the other contributors want to stage a coup and step up the posts, now’s the time. What’s the picture relevance? Those are vintage Chicago Trucks, harder to find a decent picture of than I thought. Couldn’t score a close up. Left: Current eBay auction. Right: A Bahne setup with Chicago Trucks via Surfa Sam’s 2005 Australian eBay report.

I’m in Naperville, actually. Since I last visited there is supposedly a new concrete skatepark in addition to downtown’s prefab park. I’m going to check them both out, but let’s face it, I’m not going to hold my breath.

From Dennis the Menace, August 7th. I guess I should have tipped off MC. Although I’m not sure this is the type of skate comic he’s interested in. Dennis’s unnamed friend must be sporting clear grip tape.

Okay, this might be of more interest to Rollerbladers but a few of our brothers out there need to pull their pants up. I believe Kilwag is heading to the Great Lakes region this weekend. If he decides to head over to Michigan he might want to pack a belt or maybe some bikini briefs, because underwear visible above the pants is now a crime in Flint Quick we need to make some bumper stickers. 93 days to a year in jail?!

Got this off the Black Label blog.

Lot 346
Jeff Koons
Monkey Train (3)

2006
Skate Decks
Each signed verso

Dinosaurs and Robots reports that these decks arted up by Jeff Koons were expected to sell for $3-4K. I think they mean each.