Are you in the mood for some 70’s funk and a lot of vert skating? What about a guy in a hotdog costume on a miniramp? Check out Dan Bourqui’s Highland Showdown edit.

New video from Dan Bourqui: “insane vert skating and some tricks, riders and runs that were not in the other videos, plus a full demo on how to skate a vert ramp padless, by Chris Russell”

Station ID for France 3, one of France’s state owned television channels. It actually dates back to 2013, and so French readers, I’m disappointed in you for not letting me know earlier. – Thanks to Nick Dawson for the tortue de la planche à roulettes.

It’s got big airs, lip tricks, flip tricks, and circus tricks. Tony’s new video part titled “Perched” has some amazing footage as well as an interesting remix of the Dead Kennedys song Police Truck. I can honestly say that I haven’t worked on a skate video this hard since The End. I never want to do some of these tricks again, but I am proud to have completed them and hope that you enjoy the outcome. And thanks to Z-Trip for resurrecting two classic songs from THPS… I love my job. -Tony Hawk I especially like some of the traveling foot plants, not really traveling in the conventional sense of a vert trick, more like sliding. Just watch the video, you won’t regret it. Old man Hawk still has it. [Source: Ride via Kingpin]

I was out of town last week in an area with zero phone/internet access, and thus there were no posts. And now I’m back, and miracles of all miracles, I skated an honest to god vert ramp in Portland over the weekend. It’s 40 foot wide with 9.5 foot transitions and 1.5 feet of vert. Instead of kickass skate photos, I took a few of an uncooperative goat that calls this ramp home.

Grover is working on his life’s ambition, which is to get a proper vert ramp in the Portland area. He’s got a line on an old portable setup used in a primitive version of an Extreme!™ sporting event that was called the X-Games, or so I am told. He has almost reached the 20% threshold in commitments for the funds he needs to acquire it, but there’s no place to put it right now. Let’s build some buzz about getting a vert ramp in Portland, so you can make little Grover’s dreams come true.

Artist Gerry Judah and Rune Glifberg collaborated on some skateable sculpture as part of an event tied in with… Formula One racing? I thought I heards that somewhere in one of the videos, but I’m not seeing it in any of the articles. So this event has already passed, and there are some videos, part of a 5 part series, but I can only spot 3. It looks pretty cool, although it’s pretty much just a halfpipe that looks like it was squashed and stretched a little. Still, as far as skateable “art” goes, Gerry should be tutoring those guys at Red Bull. The post title? The project was part of something called Burn Yard, a marketing event/effort by Coca Cola’s Burn energy drink. [Source: Artlyst, Fad] – Thanks to Heath and Boy for the tip.

The thing I like (second) best about this video from Roger Skateboards is the way they described it: …check out our Token Older Vert Skater, Paul Zitzer, performing a vert demo for two children sitting on an extension. We expect big things from Paul in the next few years. And by “big things” we mean we expect him to skate a vert ramp at least once a year and to film it for us. Watch Paul hitting the Louisville, KY vert ramp after the jump. I wonder if this was filmed on the drive down to the SPOT Tampa Pro vert session that got rained out?

This weeks Shot of the Week is near and dear to old GVK’s heart. It’s Payton Moriarity wearing the vert mantle and forging ahead for the youth of skateboarding. It brought a tear to Steve’s eye, mostly because he realized he’ll never be that good. Full frame after the jump, bonus shots at Cold War Skateboards. Photos by Marshall “Stack” Reid.

This week’s Shot of the Week features Larry Martin circa ’88 or ’89 out in the Mojave desert. There were better “skate shots” to pick from his batch, but I wanted to showcase the ramp and not necessarily the action or the photo. Here’s a little more on the subject from Larry: I built this ramp on poached land in the Mojave desert near Lancaster, Ca. around 88… I had moved there with my wife after living in Ventura/Fillmore Ca. all my life. There wasn’t many ramps in the Antelope Valley at that time. The Palmdale one from the “Great Desert Ramp Battle” was toast. So, I made some new street/ditch skater friends and enlisted them in my idea to just build a halfpipe in the desert for anyone/evryone, and hopefully the police would leave us alone. They did, and we had it for about a year/half before the High School party crowd ruined it. We cut the templates with a jig, but the rest was all done without power tools. The wood of course was scavenged. This was during the savings and loan scandal, and huge housing projects were closed everywhere in the valley. Signs were just the easiest,…