Sean Cliver
Mark McKee
Songs Illuminated
Issue 3 Make it ’til you Break it Last issue I talked a lot about accepting false starts and failures, and this one started out with heavy helping of putting the money where my mouth is. I had gotten back into a groove of skating four days a week when I took a hard step off some wheelbite at speed, dislocating my big toe. An injury that’s still refusing to heal, I channeled my time and energy into this third issue. More trips, more photos, more contributors, bigger print run and nearly three times the pages as the first. Thanks to a run of extra-blazing days this summer, I’ve even managed to put some time into legitimate writing again. Long story short: anything can be what you make of it. Inside SloppyCo Does It. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Brain Johnson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Ryan Rocha . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Gnarly Angels Comp. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Alex Fuentes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 SSSB in Ripon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 The Bunny Years. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Binocular Monovision 1 ��������������������������������������������������� 26 The 25-Year-Old Video ������������������������������������������������������� 30 Senders. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Outside A little crust ain’t stopping Tristan Moss. Caught clean at SloppyCo.’s jam at the West Sac DIY. Inside My personal Mt. Rushmore of Skate Artists. I didn't get here without them. Soulsides Right now I’m stoked on Kyle Beachy’s book, all the new skaters I’ve met the past few months, my first fisheye lens, and Magenta’s Santa Cruise video. Sorryside Shout out to @veganskatenerd for identifying last issue's cover as Enjoi pro Zach Wallin. That buttery frontside nosebluntslide was definitely more than worth the drive up from San Jose.
La-Z-Boy Colin Barton @co1inbart0n couchsurfing a suede slide’n’roll. Joe’s Skatepark, Placerville.
First Part
DIY May 9
Cody back-180º flippin’ in the ghetto, on a dirty mattress.
360 º Pop Shuvs
w @tervvnn Terran Harlo
/ Heelflip
@radxxmadi
Brian Johnson Canon Elan7e + Ultra Fine 400
Friends Section @runningclocks
@nateverr
A.J. Frick @aj_frick
Birthday boy Gary Lemmons @garyhiradelli
Ryan Rocha @Peace.On.The.Sun Original Artwork for Zane Timpson’s first pro model on Heroin Skateboards.
march 27, 2021 power inn
It’s no Janet, but you can call Kaylee Bullan’s @smallzzzzzy lapped-over back Smith a Monty Grind if you’re nasty.
ABOVE: Don’t mess with Medford. Rayann Brower-Aishanna @lil_rayskates18 Texas Plant over the spine and into first-place.
HERE: Grace Dudley @gcdudley / Tailb
lock Transfer
THERE: Layback Front Boa rd’n’Roll Transfer
Friends Section
Asher Cummings @ashercummings ABOVE: Front Smith. BELOW: FSO. Placerville. OPPOSITE: Ollie / Carson City
Friends Section Alex Fuentes @fuezphoto Why did you start taking photos? It's the only tool in the world that stops time. Influences: Atiba Jefferson Prefer to Shoot: I enjoy film and digital, they are both unique.
Favorite camera? Canon Mark 5D Mark 4 Years Skating? 8 … Shooting? 11
Save Souls Skate Bowls’ Ripping in Ripon May 16
Jared Albright @jaredalbright_ / Front Blunt.
Michael Justice @justachio209 / Frontside Ollie to Smith.
Darin Harrison @sk808darin / Boosted FS Air
Darin Harrison @sk808darin / Spinal Flippage.
Jake Felt @_jakefelt / Grasser over the hip.
Ryan Carpenter @meatjuice / FS Crooks
HAND CRAFT
@build_sk8boards
Friends Section J. Anthony Nathan @thebunnyears thebunnyyears.com Years: Skating 20
Designing 5
Clients: PLA Skateshop, 35th North Skateshop, ALL GOOD Apparel Influences: Skate Every 28th & B skatepark local from 2001–2014. You know who you are. Design Benny Gold, Paula Scher, Ian Johnson, Evan Hecox My dad had a skateboard laying around the house, so I learned to push early, but I didn’t learn how to do any tricks til the other kids at my school started taking notice too. Definitely a child of the Tony Hawk Pro Skater generation. Stopping has never occurred to me. I don’t skate everyday like I use to, but beside my family, it’s the longest constant in my life. This shit is just too much fun. As soon as I started skating, all I ever wanted to do was participate and contribute. For the last 5 years The Bunny Years has been the most mature extension of that. I take the work seriously in order to encourage more of it, but I always try to make the final product fun. DON'T SLEEP ON YOURSELF.
100% bone-free Nigel Cooke @the_chocolate_saiyan
PART ONE The overly-educated, ultra-conservative guy in the office came in one Monday so incredibly annoyed. His wife had bought him a painting at some charity thing they’d gone to over the weekend. He had made the mistake, he complained, of saying he liked one of the pieces. Unbeknownst to her, he had said this only to make conversation — the kind of thing you say when you don’t know what to do with your hands. His reaction to the office that morning was “What am I supposed to do with it now? Look at it?” “Of course you do,” I thought, shrugging, if only in hopes of backing away from the conversation. I mean, that is what art’s for, isn’t it? To be looked at? Art is possibly a hobby, but rarely a sport. It’s sometimes a lifestyle, but ephemeral — a captured moment in time, or at least a vehicle1 for taking note of time’s fleeting emotions, ideas and movement. To quote your most-lifted roommate, “The true artist just, like, captures this all to purge the mind ’n’ shit. The eventuality of showing it later, even if just to themselves as a point of reflection is secondary, followed only then by some sort of financial- or attention-based profit economy, bro.”
Both art and movement collide during the act of skating. Much like dance and trees-falling-inforests: when we aren’t there to see it go down, did it ever exist at all? If a concept or feeling only becomes art once it’s made tangible, then it follows that observation/consumption of the act of skateboarding is what converts it from personal activity to the social good many conclude is Art. Because all skaters “just know it when they see it,“2 this finds skating more tradition3 than hobby through its cohesion to the way in which the visible objects of these actions are collected, seen, and evaluated. Still, the existence of a collected mass of communal values —the subculture — continues only to better define not the why, but the what.
We can debate how accurate that is, but the same question arises in relation to skateboarding — this What is it for?. Skating is also “Subculture qualifies as art in evolutionary movement and context. It’s not timeless, not a sport, really, but an undeniably physical with set criteria of appreciation.” exertion if not expression. It’s sometimes — Dick Hebdidge called a lifestyle, and often considered an artform, but those are still metaphors, not statements of purpose. Similarly to everyone’s “Video, or it didn’t happen,” right? There’s this favorite F-word, part of the trouble is dissecting slack-jawed astonishment that strikes certain why skateboarding is both a noun and a verb, skate media types when confronted with the and which you more agree with. mere mention of how much groundbreaking
1. We value ‘style’ which, in effect, is what Walter Benjamin deemed The Aura: “the value created by the presence of an original (not) captured or transmitted.” There is a certain magic to Video Days’ simplicity (and The Gonz in general) that isn’t described by technical merit or achievement. It can’t be recreated verbatim, if it could, Mark (as the man in his mid-50s) could not carry the reverence he does. 2. Or, in other words: “if you don’t skate, you don’t relate.”
3. Cultural critic Neil Postman describes tradition as “the acknowledgement of the authority of symbols,” such as when skaters respect our peers more should their name be printed on a deck, with tiers of legitimacy assigned along a spectrum of wack to core, depending on the brand to issue it. Some traditions (like pro status) can (and maybe should) be revised over time. The “trivialization of the symbols that support the (cultural narrative)” — like calling yourself pro based on a monetized YouTube follower count — “will accompany (its) decline.”
"When did it become necessary to watch each other so closely that watching each other closely became part of skateboarding’s drive?" — Kevin Wilkins, Timbre #16
When it’s not about pants, skateboarding is often as much about the act of watching as it is about the act of doing. Though this may change with the Olympics, there just isn’t a codified, industrialized mindset in skateboarding like there is among the recreational football fan light years removed from an NFL field. Even when one may have played at the collegiate level, there is no analog to the inclusion of the spot in “organized” sports.
skateboarding went down in the ’90s off-camera. Their reaction isn’t about the feats being realized at all, but that they were never captured. The ahistoric as insult — the audacity to jump the Gonz gap or yadda-yadda’ed JKwon without a filmer present?!? — as if the skater simply doing something rad for and by themselves is offensive and without val“Am I skateboarding when I take a break from the activity to sit ue (except Gino’s push, evidently). down in the grass and watch my friends? I holler encouragement. We may have missed so much I react. My body reels and rolls as they try and fail and fail and of Penny, Sanchez and Cardiel by fail and when they land, I exalt. How is this not skateboarding?“ merit of their priority having been — Kyle Beachy, The Most Fun Thing on skating, not making a show of it.4 When Iain Borden explains In the ’80s-90s, the obsessive ‘watching’ required that, through their actions, “skateboarders use to dissect still photography enough to even imagery less as pure image, and more as a … learn to ollie demanded psychotic dedication. lived representation,”5 he would seem to point It’s no accident that the dawn of progressive to the existence of the act itself as art, uncapstreet skating and cheap camcorders nearly tured or otherwise. Does this further confirm overlap. Watching Shackle Me Not or Video Days the evidence-of-skateboarding as skateboard(and their very existence) was a game-changing ing-itself? Is the verb the noun? Are we really experience for all. But for the garden-variety down to toss the entire thing down the wellskateboarder (possibly even the hometown worn path of Plato’s Cave, the simulation, red hero) to accept them as truth was to be perand blue pills, and … just: no. Let’s start over. petually positioned six months to a year behind where the pros were at.6 Access to real-time By most standards, the artist and the audience progression was a privilege requiring a move to are rarely one in the same. Skateboarding is NYC, San Diego, or San Francisco. Except in rare one of the only activities whose fanbase is also exceptions, the quality of the observation drove almost entirely made up of its participants. the quantity and quality of tricks being done. In that way, "In those moments of grinding, no matter how many hundreds watching took on an even bigI’ve done, my mind is clear. I’m not thinking about Instagramming, ger role during the big-pantsrecording, representing, or recalling in the future.” — Ted Barrow small-wheels lull in popularity.
4. Part of the legacy of these skaters are in the myths surrounding them. Had they been better-documented, would they hold the same gravity in the culture today? 5. Iain Borden, Skateboarding and the City, 120. 6. But where is no lag, we now see three and four-yearolds on Instagram performing feats that rockstar pros couldn’t accomplish 35 years ago. 7. Depending on your age, you may know is better as the “post-Back To the Future,” “Pop-Punk ’90s,“ or “Kylie Jenner x Thrasher hoodie ’10s.“
8. Posers haven’t ceased to exist outside those windows, it’s that skaters/artists are too busy making and doing to care, ignoring the Brailleskater rather than kooking on them. “Live and let live” is one of the major shifts today, as it sets the stage that it is far worse, socially, to be ignored than it is to be identified (even negatively). Through fashion and the social media gazpacho of subculture, there is no shame in fandom now even as it overtakes the ability (or desire) to participate.
This was merely normalized back into the mainstream as the internet took root. Ironically, the era(s)7 of peak-Poser8 coincided with when watching was such a functionally small part of the culture by volume. With such a finite well to peer into, the only option was to try.9 To be watching and not participate circa(ish) ’87-94 was actually uncommon.10 It showed far more dedication to and interest in the scene than its passive, modern equivalent. This type of intense watching / studying / decoding could almost be considered another discipline, like freestyle or slalom before it. You became your own answers.
Skate Brands Ranked
On a scale of James Franco-to-James Franco
Creature
Habitat
Deathwish
Plan B
Girl
Hockey
SkateMafia
Frog
Magenta
WKND
“The only true authentics are the obsessed." — Andrew Potter, Surfing and Sushi At some point, watching skateboarding stops being about viewing and consuming and instead becomes an essential form of empowerment. The existence of two For?s — one, described by Bill Strobeck ‘filming skateboarders’ for non-skateboarding Supreme shoppers, and the other by Greg Hunt ‘filming spots’ for his fellow skaters.11 The first creates a throughline of association-by-association, similar to Art Haüs patrons who appreciate and financially support the creators, who the latter is both Of and For. The reason why skateboarding has progressed so quickly over the past 15 years is entirely due to the amount of skateboarding that we see on behalf of both, regardless of what we choose to do with it. For the proactive doer, watching shows potential, possibilities, while the reactive watcher underwrites a feedback loop. It lets skaters ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’; the volume of input resulting in a greater multiplier of output.12 Part 2 Next Issue
9. Being outside the rainshadow has been responsible for significant advancement: the Boneless One in Ohio, a ton of vert tricks in Texas, Canadian Flyouts, etc. 10. Unless you were female, then it was enforced by toxic layers of bros at every turn. 11. To borrow Kyle Beachy’s comparison (TMFT, 130). 12. Boorstin tosses in something to chew on as you feed the feed: “One picture is worth a thousand words. But a thousand pictures, especially if they are of the same object, may not be worth anything at all.”
youtu.be/S9KpaG2p_zI
Sometimes the numbers get to you. 30 years ago, Pat Swayze chased the 50 year storm in Point Break. 40 years ago Iron Maiden dropped Killers, the same amount of time it took Steve Carrell to pop his cherry in 2005, a year when maybe some of you weren’t even born yet but are still better at skating than I’ll ever be. Part of what comes along with nostalgia is the realization that there are things that tend to get idealized, and others that get forgotten.1 If you think it’s easy for footage to fall through the cracks in the always-on content flow today, it helps to remember that videos were released by the month (or six), not the minute, with nowhere near the distribution of a YouTube or IG. So many incredibly relevant parts —shit, skaters’ entire careers and legacies — were lost just by merit of our local shops not getting a tape or two.2 I think everyone saw Questionable and Hokus Pokus, but definitely can’t say the same about A Soldier’s Story.
Somewhere in the middle of this phase-shift was Greg Carroll’s3 Think skateboards. Their video, Damage, fit squarely between the pure revs of Fucktards and the numbing weight of Mouse’s ten million crooked grinds. As a brand, Think doesn’t have the lasting reputation of its peers due to some latter-years’ obsession with rave culture and other bullshit, but Damage-era Think is something that truly should not be overlooked.
All said, Damage is far from the best skate video of all time. I doubt it even cracked the UWT’s top 10, and it doesn’t make those lists for its malignant Vert Button bump towards the center. However, due to the magic of digital scrubbing, that shouldn’t stop anyone from missing an essential chapter that includes: • Classic footage at Santa Rosa and downtown Sacramento. • Joe Sierro’s front smiths at The Grind. • Joel Price: an all-but-forgotten forever-Am that was surprisingly tech and worth a revisit. • Phil Shao does what very well may be the best frontside bluntslide ever performed on a ledge. RIP the real-deal GOAT. • Drehobl’s part set to The Dead Kennedys is at once one of the more creative, powerful, fun, and gnarly parts ever committed to tape. If you are of an age to have never seen him in his pre-Krooked prime: blowing it. I’d put money on someone on Polar re-creating Dan‘s part trick-for-trick in 2021 and not even know it.
Last year, @UselessWoodenTrivia ran a survey of best skate videos of all time. Not surprisingly, early favorites Video Days, Welcome To Hell, and Mouse turned conclusive winners. And neither is a wrong answer. Very different sides of a coin were shown, even then, proving that skateboarding was no longer the single-sided Stacy Peralta-vision or even Steve Rocco‘s stranglehold. Things fragmented, and the bigpants-small-wheels-era drew to a close, thanks, in part, to the EMB crew relocating to Los Angeles and the subsequent rise of the Girl/ Chocolate style of plaza and ledge skating. Simultaneously, it was shaped from the other side by the gnarlier, bigger, faster Toy Machine under Jaime Thomas and a return to transition led by Antihero and Creature 1.0. Now we know where this heads, into the glorious mashup of today where wallies, Welcome and Willy grinds are just as TL;DR: The opener by peak-Phil Shao and ender by Dan much of a thing as Hubbas, hammers, Drehobl bookend a quintessential Matt Pailes part that feels and heel flips. like a stolen chapter from Stereo’s majestic A Visual Sound.
Don’t get me started: 1996 was not any more like the long-after-the-fact Jonah Hill version than the one Larry Clark laid out in ’95. 2. I personally didn’t see Brian Lotti’s Now’n’Later part until maybe 2018.
1.
3.
Greg, like Mike, was also really fucking good at skateboarding. Just so happens when your brother is a multi-platinum GOAT-y legend, you too might settle for Venture TM or another behind-the-scenery role like running a punching-up third-tier
board brand. (That’s an important distinction against, say, Santa Cruz, for example. Once a first-tier brand, it managed to punch its way downstairs, while Think was rising, just never quite got there.)
PROPER BACKSIDE
Shawn Rodriguez / 360º Kickflip / Mainline
(S)ender
Skater Owned Ed Syder, UK 48pp / Color / Perfect-bound / Ads
Highlight: Hand drawn caricatures of shop owners.
Chris Lipomi Chris Lipomi, Los Angeles 36pp / Color / Perfect-bound / Book
Fine art catalog by the mastermind behind Dear Skating.
Skart (2018) Romain Hurdequint 320pp / Color / Perfect-bound / Book
A more sophisticated Disposable, more art-on-boards than boardswith-art.
Willow #6 Ari Morris, Portland 60pp / B&W / Stapled / Ads
ManBaby Sean Sanford, San Francisco / Grass Valley 100pp / B&W / Perfect-bound / Book
Skate Witches #15 & #16 Shari White & Kristin Ebeling, Seattle 24pp & 36pp / B&W / Stapled / BP Ad
Thrasonal Geographic
Consistently pro-inclusion plus DIY empowerment and increasingly good skating.
Richard Pepper 24pp / Color / Stapled / No Ads, Words
Chimpanzine #6
Collection of skate-related collages.
Atlas Jai Tanju, San Jose 32pp / B&W / Stapled / BP Ad
Highlight: Sketches in the back showing the process behind how these images were made.
Sneeze #48
Wesley Chmielowski 64pp / Color / Stapled / No Ads
Highlight: Paky Callahan, p43.*
Turkeyneck #7.5 Oakland 32pp / Color / Stapled / No Ads
Highlight: Multiple Raney and Eli Williams sightings.
48pp / Color / Folded / Ads
Cemental #13
If you’ve ever wondered what a 3 ft. tall photo of Kader’s face might look like, I know a guy.
Tyler Hopkins, San Diego 36pp / B&W / Stapled / BP Ad
Highlight: Brandon Perelson, p12.
Lowcard #69
Oh So #6
The Most Fun Thing
Rob Collinson, San Francisco Thick / Color / Perfect-bound / Ads
90pp / Color / Perfect-bound / Ads
Kyle Beachy, Chicago
Hadn’t seen an issue in a few years; it’s like it hasn’t changed at all but got better in the process?
The Other Skaters Maddy Nowisad & Em Rafnson, Manitoba 36pp / B&W / Stapled / Ads
Sweethearted, ‘for the love of it,’ and #inclusiveAF
Vague #20 & 21 Reece Leung, UK Thick / Color / Perfect-bound / Ads
Highlights: (20) Story on artist Chloé Bernard. Photo of Alex Hallford, page 46.* (21) Zine inception unlocked: story on Stoops’ Eby Ghafarian.
Interesting look at an international group of very different kinds of female skaters.
Solitude #2 & 3 Devon Cooper, SoCal 52 & 48pp / Color / Stapled / Ads
Highlight: Back cover photo of Nick Walker, Issue 3.*
Stoops #8 Eby Ghafarian, Charlotte NC 84pp / Color / Perfect-bound / Ads
Highlight: Story on Magenta’s Leo and Vivien, not one but two pics of my current favorite frenchman Soy Panaday.
100pp / B&W / Perfect-bound / Book
The kind of smart-but-notimpenetrable series of short essays on skateboarding that doesn’t even mention the word for the first four pages but instead asks insightful questions like “Do you think that a work of art, a poem, or a story, or a sequence of musical notes, or an arrangement of brushstrokes on a canvas, or, I don’t know, video of someone riding a skateboard, can affect us in ways that alter our sense of who we are and what we’re up to for the brief time we’re alive?“
* First person to be able to identify what is the common thread between these three images wins a Songs Illuminated tee. DM @songs.zine.
Mirror Line
Ryan Patrick Plate @ryanpatrickeg
eniL rorriM
Hurricanes, both ways. No rain in sight. Sacramento.
Ender
Dre Lara @dre__lara / Front Feeble. Full exposure.
Jim Phillips
Andy Howell
IG: @songs.zine
Ron Cameron
