Recently I posted some construction pics of a new upgrade to the old Bellingham Washington park. I remarked that the digging seemed to be a bit deep, considering than the plans on the city’s web site only showed a shallow street park. Reporter John Aguilar got the scoop. I had a little chat with Sage today. He said the deep end of the bowl would be around 10 to 10.5 ft deep and then a shallow end and a over vert pocket, and on the other side of the existing sk8 park is going to be the street course that is the actual concept image that shows in the city web site designed by Grindline. So the street area is the one in the city of bellingham web site , but as Sage said the bowl is the bonus hehe!! Very nice, indeed! Sometimes you get more than what you pay for. It’s not as sweet as it could have been, but it will certainly be better than the steaming pile of Purkiss-Rose that they have there now.

Dave Richardson on the cover of Morris Eaddy’s ‘zine Just Skate circa 1986. Before PhotoShop we had to do special effects by manipulating the Xerox. Lien Air at Chuck’s Ramp – Clearwater, FL. 10ft. transitions with 1 1/2ft vert. Yeah!

Orezona pointed this out in response to my post about the Hot Topperz plastic mohawk helmet decoration. He says helmet flair is the new pink. I wonder what he means by that? &Sane Helmet Spikes

When he’s not busy impregnating his wife or defending helpless kids at skateparks, Portland transplant Marek Liitnsky spends his time puking in old Czechoslovakian skate videos like this one, Stramplovy Strudl. I would have thought it was the loud shirt he was wearing that made him sick to his stomach, but the I’m guessing “alkohol” in screen crawl doesn’t roughly translate to a Shirley Temple.. I don’t know when this video was shot, but it looks like a couple years have passed. I can tell you it’s 37 minutes long. They even put 22 minutes of bonus material as a separate file. It starts off with the U.S. Bombs on the soundtrack, which took me by surprise. I don’t know what I was expecting, maybe Czech folk music or official Communist Party themes. Watch the vid after the jump. [Source: Cold War]

I’m not sure what the barometer is for art and skateboarding, but the difference between eccentricity and just plain crazy is often a matter of how rich the person in question is. Likewise, you can bet that if Dan Gesmer had put on this performance instead of Mark Gonzales, it wouldn’t have been as well received in the skateboarding world. Jason Schwartzman (the lead in the excellent movie “Rushmore”) has a solo record out and a video for the song West Coast which is made entirely from footage of Cheryl Dunn’s film documenting the Gonz’ 1999 art installation at the Abteiberg Museum in Germany. You can watch the video and read Paper Magazine’s original 1999 article covering the event after the jump.

I have been interested in drawing comics for a long time. But I have never been able to do a long-form piece like a comic book, My comics have always been more like newspaper comic strips or sunday funnies style one or two pagers. For me at least, the story has always been the challenge. Victor Giannini commented on one of my comics and pointed us to his project. The web samples of Skatefast Dyephun originally seemed crude and juvenile to me. Kind of reminded me of this. The website had a couple of problems too but after I read through the sample pages I found the project crude and juvenile but in a really compelling way.

Dave Tobin sent this photo of Jay Meer painting a sign for Glenhaven. Jay is the artist responsible for the mural work at Burnside over the years. Five more days and the sucker is open!