This week Willamette Week recommends Pier Park as a good outdoor destination. They include a photo of Ben Wixon by Daniel Root. Strange to see skateparks in the listings of things to do in the newspaper.

Skate Daily has posted some disturbing news, on 6/21 6 skaters crossed the path of Officer Joey Williams, a mistake. Joey took it upon himself to choke out a 16 year old skateboarder and in doing so, was filmed. Thanks to Youtube, the entire world can now see what happened on the streets of Hot Springs, Arkansas. After you watch this disturbing video – please email a civil statement to the Cheif of Police Bobby Southard (bsouthard@cityhs.net) demanding the firing of officer Joey Williams. MORE UPDATES: EMAILS FOR CITY COUNCIL NOW POSTED ‘pege1947@aol.com’; ‘direlainejon1@sbcglobal.net’; ‘srsmith12003@yahoo.com’; ‘sable@hsnp.com’; ‘td7965@aol.com’ UPDATE: emails no longer work, please use this contact information to get your message accross: Phone: (501) 321-6789 Fax: (501) 321-6708 This is unacceptable behavior by anyone wearing a badge. UPDATE: Officer on leave after tussle with Hot Springs skateboarders! [Photo: Skylar Nalls]

Last night was the meeting for comments on a revised Gabriel Park skatepark design. Turnout was weak, about 20-25 actual park users at best, a couple of them being BMX riders. There is an online comment form on the parks web site, but it’s kind of premature to comment on the park unless you were at the meeting. The single render available is not very good for understanding the actual design. At the meeting we saw it rotated and zoomed in, and it’s actually a lot different than this picture would lead you to believe. For instance, from this view it looks like it’s all covered in coping, but it actually only has coping in some spots. Update: More renders available here. Parks will add them as soon as their schedule permits. It’s important to note, the double funnel is still a possibility, either as is or in combination with alterations from the second design. Double funnel renders after the jump as well. Please try to think of the big picture when you make your comments. Street Skaters: A street plaza is planned for the very next project, which is Ed Benedict Park. Please refrain from comments like “This should…

I was going to lump this in with another renegade concrete post I have coming but It’s just too cool for that. The Babyskulls crew of guys in Sweden (I think) has a project called Sewerside going that although slow moving, appears to be destined for great things. It’s not really organized in any way, so the best thing to do is let the whole page load and scroll down to the bottom to view it from the bottom up in chronological order. Sewerside is in it’s infancy. Looks like money is the biggest holdup right now. Besides showing how they made their own coping mold, they are auctioning off the Carlsberg beer cans they used to make it. Near as I can tell, this spot is out in the middle of nowhere. The name and a few pictures leads me to believe it’s near some sort of industrial waste. Fun! Check out Babyskülls – Sewerside and let me know if you figure out a way to buy a shirt. And because I like gratuitous computer skateboard animation lately, I’ve reformatted a rather large pool coping animation after the jump. [Source – Bowl Surgeon]

I had an idea to make a basic skateboard photography tutorial for our DIY section. Not that I’m the greatest photographer or anything, but a few simple tips can really go a long way for the beginner, especially in this day and age of relatively cheap digital SLR’s. Heck, the best photo advice I ever got was from Kevin Thatcher when he was at the helm of Thrasher. He sent me back an envelope full of negatives with a hand scrawled note that read simply “Use a faster shutter speed and your pictures won’t be so blurry. – KT.” In the spirit of that advice, I present this link to Heyday Skateboarding’s Shot Composition Basics tutorial that features a lot of solid tips. Of course all of these tips are hard to remember when you are trying to capture fleeting shots that aren’t set up or have some technical difficulties, but that’s what separates the guys who don’t get paid for skate photography from the guys that don’t get paid very much. Heyday also has some video editing tutorials and a lot of other content to boot. Some people will try to jealously guard supposed industry secrets while others aren’t…

Back in January, Local IQ: Albuquerque’s Intelligent Alternative included an article about their new skatepark. The article Skate City is available on their website and includes a feature about and photos by Mörizen Föche formerly of Thrasher Magazine. Looks like a cool setting if the pictures are to be believed, they did a good job referencing the local architectural and skate heritage. Too bad they obscured the photos with their fancy graphic designs.

After finally seeing a snakeboard in action a week ago, I noticed that the movement looked a lot more like old school rollerskating than skateboarding. I thought that if you were into that, you would probably want to have sideways rollerskates so you wouldn’t have to point your toes at 180 degree angles like some circus clown. I chuckled about the idea of someone trying to bring to market a pair of sideways rollerskates, or even more improbable, small skateboards for each foot. Well it turns out it’s already been done. I know this company will be in business forever, but I’ve taken the liberty of preserving some pictures from thier web site just in case the unthinkable happens.

I get bombarded with press releases about the Dew Tour that I usually ignore. Thanks to Edison Carter of the now defunct (?) Flakezine for wrapping this up succinctly. Now if I could just get more people to do all my writing I’d be set. In the Mike Judge film Idiocracy an army librarian is accidently frozen for 500 years. When he finally makes it out of his pod he is in America in the year 2505. Everything has devolved. Stupid people have reproduced, while smart people haven’t. Everything is jacked up and dumbed down. People wear clothing covered in corporate logos, and mention their sponsors in everyday conversation like they’re on the podium at a Supercross race. While watching this film and cruising the web I noticed that Ryan Sheckler had just won the first stop of AST Dew Tour, the Panasonic Open. And look at that logo’d out shirt. It’s exactly like the one retarded lawyer Frito wears in Idiocracy. Skateboarding: living in an idiotic action future now.