Volume 9, Number 4 by Color Magazine

art / fashion / music / film / life / skateboarding /

ISSN 1920-0404

CARLO

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no. 4

[ o ] PETERS

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Keep Me On Land (for as long as I can)

Dylan Rieder: Jump Rock Vaucluse, Sydney “There are always people coming through town to go skateboarding and get shown around. It’s rad racing around to spots trying to show everyone everything there is in your home town, but going spot to spot isn’t all there is to visiting a new country. It’s so important to see how a local lives in his city. This is my favourite watering hole. After a short drive and a 15-minute bush walk, you find yourself at this beautiful jump rock that overlooks Sydney Harbour. Luckily not too many people know about the spot and it’s normally completely deserted. Hopefully it stays that way next summer!” —andrew peters

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all it what you want—skateboarding existentialism even—but for years I’ve contemplated what importance all of this time toying with a skateboard has borne on my fundamental outlook on life. What would I be doing had I not got into something so free and unconstrained? Is there something wrong with me that I get a kick out of attracting disdain from my neighbours when I step off my back porch and charge hastily out into the street? How has this non-conformist lifestyle altered my relationship with the world around me?

Skateboarding, by definition, is all about moving forward. It has a tendency to somehow catch the people most likely to shut-out the rest of the world, those who burrow into their thoughts, and it forces them into a more involved and outwardly creative life. Skateboarding reaches us all on different levels, and whether it’s slaving in your studio editing a magazine or just out wandering, waiting for that next thing to inspire you, this issue shows that you’re always amongst friends. And like all good friends, we understand you in your complexities and respect you enough not to bring up your troubles but rather, introduce you to new possibilities and places along your journey. Prepare to let this issue speak to you. Observe the living

specimens like artist Patrick Cruz 80, the hard-up New York photographers 97, or the dirty English skater 102. Learn from the wisdom of two skateboarders who have lived and loved the dream lifestyle: the all-encompassing Mark Oblow 86 and the American werewolf in Paris that is poet/writer/ex-pro skateboarder, Scott Bourne 76. Watch as Dylan Rieder takes skateboarding around the world 90 and homies Dan Lutheran and Collin Provost keep it close to home 26. We belong to our own community, so you’ll find that no matter where you live, there are people just like you, doing and making things you’d swear were just for you. This issue is packed full of ‘what’s good’ about living in this world no matter where you come from or where you think you’re heading. It’s about enjoying the little moments and doing it for yourself. So what have I learned after 40 issues of Color? It’s good to be alive and still able to do what I love. Thank you to all the fine skateboarding folks who make this both possible and worthwhile.

Sandro Grison, creative director / editor-in-chief

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no. 4

ERIC CRUIKSHANK

LEX KEMBERY

BENJAMIN DEBERDT

guest typographer

contributing photographer

contributing writer/photographer

After spending a life bouncing around the globe, completing art school in Toronto, and then putting that art schooling towards pounding nails, cutting wood, and fiddling with concrete for a living in Vancouver; Eric settled on taking time off from manual labour to concentrate on putting paint to canvas. Eric can be found, most days, walking and meandering absent mindedly for hours before spending his nights injecting paper with ink, slathering canvas with paint, and for this issue producing hand-drawn typography.

Lex is a London-based photographer, who has regularly contributed work to various titles across Europe and further a field including Sidewalk, Kingpin, Grey, Soma, dank, Monster and The Skateboarders Journal. Lex has a strong interest in documenting London’s skateboard scene and the people involved both within and outside of it. For this issue of Color he has contributed a body of work with one of London’s finest skateboarders, Nick Jensen. See 102 for their collaboration.

We were going to run a regular bio on Ben in this space, but we felt like this Parisian bohemian warranted a more in-depth look, so we asked Andrew Pommier to tell us about his experiences with Ben. Find out how this European photographer has helped shape skate culture in an exclusive online feature. Head to colormagazine.ca to read it all. In this issue though, flip to 76 to see Ben catch-up with, and photograph, the illustrious Scott Bourne

ANDREW MAPSTONE

ANDREW PETERS

AARON SMITH

KARI CWYNAR

contributing photographer

contributing writer/photographer

contributing writer

Australian Andrew Mapstone’s first real board was a Reflex with a big, old powerpivot tailbone that he and his brother used to bomb hills, tail skidding down streets. Eventually, Andrew got sponsored and ripped hard for years, then snapped the ligaments in his ankle. With down time on his hands, he borrowed his dad’s camera and became a skate photographer. Over a decade later, he’s still skating with his bro and still taking photos, but now with a wunder-family in tow. In this issue, Andrew goes colonial as he documents Volcom’s Canadian-side 112.

Skateboard photographer Andrew Peters originally hails from Sydney, Australia. First published and exhibited at 16 yrs old, six years later Andrew now divides his time between New York and Sydney. Along with Australian legend Andrew Currie, Peters had his crack at the publishing world with the ‘zine Fuknoath, which made light of the ever-serious skateboarding world. Andrew currently works as a Senior Photographer for Slam Skate Mag and The Skateboarders Journal. Check out 90 as Andrew gets creative with his photos of Gravis team rider, Dylan Rieder.

Aaron Smith was born and raised in Kansas City where he grew up with the likes of Sean Malto, Ernie Torres and Ryan Pearce. A skateboarder for many years, but it wasn’t until high school that he picked up his first camera. After high school, Aaron moved to Atlanta to study photography, and then Long Beach, California with his girlfriend upon graduating. Now a professional photographer, he focuses on skateboard culture, portraiture and fashion. Aaron shot this issue’s Helter Shelter 26, and captured the skate shack that Dan Lutheran and Colin Provost call home.

ANDREWPETERSPHOTO.COM

ASMITH-PHOTOGRAPHY.COM

Kari Cwynar hails from Ottawa and now lives and works in Banff, Alberta where she writes and curates from atop a mountain. Kari holds an MA from Carleton University and a BA from Queen’s University, both in Art History. She has written for C Magazine, Canadian Art and Magenta Magazine, among other publications, and was the winner of the 2011 C Magazine New Critics Competition. Kari is interested in language and sincerity in contemporary art, and is organizing a series of collaborative curatorial projects in Banff and beyond. Read Kari’s work that documents a few handpicked artists participating in this year’s Nuit Blanche, 64.

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CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT BENJAMIN IN THIS FEATURE WRITTEN BY ARTIST ANDREW POMMIER BLOGREALBIG.TUMBLR.COM

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no. 4 lifestyle

skate

PROJECT 45

All Alone with Plenty of Company Montreal’s best new D.I.Y spot brings a community together.

112

HELTER SHELTER

Collin Provost, backside air.

Dan Lutheran & Collin Provost.

smithphoto.

LOOKING FOR A NEW ENGLAND

[ o ] OBLOW

Celebrity Status: Find out why Drew Summersides is signing autographs everywhere he goes. Joel Dufresne learns all about this mysterious ripper.

[ o ] DEBERDT

102

CELEBRITY STATUS

The Multi-talents of Nick Jensen

VHISTORY BUFFS olcom Lay Siege to Colonial Canada Follow along with Matthew Meadows and the Volcom team as they tour through the heart of Canada’s bloody past.

[ o ] MAPSTONE

90 THEY’re all but a home away from home: Dylan Rieder by andrew peters

NEXT/BEST Russ Milligan

TATTERED TEN Billy Rohan

I’m NOT A SKATEBOARDER

131

MR. MENTOR

138

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Mark Appleyard

RED FLAGGED

You might think Scott Bourne sounds bitter in this interview by Benjamin Debert, but he’s not. He’s a poet.

Photographer. Team manager. Icon. Mark Oblow has been living the life for decades now and Dan Post explains why he still matters to the world of skateboarding.

No Billy, we don’t think you came off sounding like Michelle Bachman. It’s pure gold!

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FOLLOW MATIX ON:

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no. 4

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Contents

(middle) Collage #2 (Vol. 8 No. 2 Spring 1989), 2011 inkjet, 36" x 24", Lucien Durey fashion

film

[ o ] OLSON

[ o ] POMMIER

SOMETHING BORROWED Behind the scenes of Unbeleafable

Mike Christie tells the story of how a famous Scott Pommier photo became the inspiration for Ty Evans’ newest marriage of high def-skateboarding and nature.

music [ o ] ELIJAH

102

ABOUT FACE Two NYC Photographers Turn the Camera Around

CMY

arts

42 36

PURE X Get High On Ecstacy

Saelen Twerdy talks with these Austin, TX rockers about their philosophy of chill.

102

SPEAKING TO ALIENS.

Don Bolles heard voices that told him to make music. Justin Gradin heard voices that told him to interview the leader of the Fancy Space People.

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SARA CWYNAR It’S HISTORY NOW Jai Tanju

INTRO CONTRIBUTORS CONTENTS INSPIRATION BOUND CMYK ANTHRAX PRODUCT TOSS

84 FACES ‘N SPACES 124 FOTOFEATURE 130 TRAILER 132 SOUNDCHEQUE 134 LAST NITE 140 CREDITS 141 over ‘N out

NUIT BLANCHE Art of The Night Trust in Kari Cwynar’s advice as she previews four must-see art events from the hundreds produced this year in Toronto, ON.

102

12 14 20 28 30 38 44

DISTILLING EXPERIENCES Patrick Cruz, Andrea Lukic, Lucien Durey

Everyday life and art are inseparable. Jenn Jackson interprets these unique artists and the original works they did for us.

on the cover

SAM LIND The virgin crest of this monstrously steep and narrow drop-in remained untouched for years until Ottawa's smallest ripper stepped up (literally) and rode away all limbs in tact. woronaphoto.

Please recycle this magazine.

distributed by Ultimate DISTRIBUTED BY ULTIMATE

FEATURING: LETTERMAN TEE & WORKER PANTS

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NICK TUCKER

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vol. 9 no. 4

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Castle Lutheran

words and photosby aaron smith

ne of the most well-known skateboard households in Long Beach, California, is that of Dan Lutheran, his brother Drew, and Collin Provost. They’ve all lived together for years. Their two-bedroom apartment is only minutes away from the famous Cherry Park, as well as lots of good bars, cafes, and local medical marijuana facilities. Their place reminds one of a normal skate-house with the persistent smell of weed, the dark curtain drawn to block the light, and the routine houseguest who’s always over. Although, amongst the customary skate-house amenities, their humble abode is sprinkled with personal mementos of family and friends, reminders of home, and their own weed plant. Dan and Andrew Lutheran share a room that contains the New Mexico State flag, posters of The Doors and Bob Dylan, and a framed photograph of their parents. Collin’s room has a little less personal feel, but has matching black bedding and dressers. Both rooms however have an abundance of memorabilia from their home at Toy Machine. There are Toy Machine boards on the walls, and old boards that hold for them certain memories. The Lutheran/Provost household also houses the Transworld “Best Team” award from the past year. Everyone knows that the Toy Machine team is a family, and their place certainly proves that.

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1. From left to right: Collin Provost, Drew and Dan Lutheran. 2. The household’s pride and joy, the weed plant. Somehow through constant travelling and unintentional neglect, this plant has grown up nice and healthy. They plan on harvesting it very soon. 3. What household would be complete without one of these things? 4. A fan of Dan Lu’s mailed him a drawing. He really hopes Dan uses it when he finally goes pro. 5. Dan and Andrew Lutheran share a room which contains the New Mexico State flag, posters of The Doors and Bob Dylan. Collin’s room has a little less personal but has matching black bedding and dressers.. 6. A framed photograph of their parents. 7. Dan Lutheran’s colourful mini bike. Most would think you would look ridiculous riding this thing but Dan Lu pulls it off with style. 8. Another creation by Cody Hager for Collin’s going pro party. 9. The Transworld “Best Team” award. They’re still stunned to have the award. 10. Their friend Cody Hager builds lamps out of reused materials. They are always very unique and abstract. This one is complete with a dimmer switch that is the red faucet wheel.

10.

J O S H

H A R M O N Y

A U S T I N C A I R O C O R Y

K E N N E D Y

D A V I D E D

S T E P H E N S F O S T E R

R E Y E S

T E M P L E T O N

J A M E S

H A R D Y

J U L I A N

D A V I D S O N

K E E G A N K E V I N L E O

L O N G

R O M E R O

N E S T O R

T H E

S A U D E R

“ S P A N K Y ”

J U D K I N S

B A L A N C E

O F

O P P O S I T E S

R V C A . C O M T I M E B O M B T R A D I N G . C O M F A C E B O O K . C O M / T I M E B O M B T R A D I N G

vol. 9 no. 4

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The Impossible

“A skateboarder, Sheckler or otherwise, is not LIKE an ape, a skateboarder, Sheckler or otherwise, IS an ape.”

wordsby john rattray

his book chronicles the birth and sinusoidal growth of the business and culture of skateboarding. To do this, Louison focuses on those figures that have been both the most influential on skating’s technical development and it’s most successful from a mainstream (i.e. financial) point of view. Reasonably, he chooses Rodney Mullen and Ryan Sheckler as his chief protagonists in this odd, almost mythological tale. The story builds in concise brilliantly paced sections that lead us ever on toward the 2010 Dew Tour finals. Whether this is a place you want to go doesn’t matter too much, since Louison’s skill as a writer quickly enthralls and, since he seems a decent fellow, we are excited to accompany him on his journey.

He begins by bringing us fascinating historical details of the dark machinations and dastardly dealings at the very germination of the skate industry. He quickly and effectively places Rodney in a rich historical context and paints for us a conflicted hero, mystically attuned to the skateboard trick potential ever-present in the invisible fabric of the universe (this is my own interpretation). For us Rodney channels that particular music of the spheres. He is our trusted shaman. Refreshing breaths of cynicism punctuate the journeys of our heroes. Observing skateboarding’s diamond ear-ringed firebird rise—from the ashes of the junkyard bonfire lit by skating’s libertine heroes in the early 90s— to the televised, quantified, big money skate contests of the early 21st century, Louison notes the appearance of the “skate moms and dads,” who are, “not there to support their kids but rather to support the investment they’d made in what their kids were doing.” Not guarding but watching, not cheering but yelling. One of the book’s main themes is the intersection of skate culture with mainstream (popular) culture, and throughout, Louison investigates the interplay between art and commerce. That uneasy symbiosis. That love hate thing. The writing is the excited, lucid prose of a man enthusiastic about skateboarding, but with an occupation and responsibilities that often divert his attention. This

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frown and pout, but the more Louison continued to write it, the more that frown turned into a smile. “Switch nollie laser” Louison writes at one point. It’s a trick I would always refer to as a fakie laser unless I was taking the piss. I decided to read on as if this was a joke Louison was consciously playing. A Monty Python-esque lampooning of overly technical jargon. Something Ronnie Barker would have done so skillfully in the 70s and 80s. Throughout the author comes across as somewhat of a Sheckler-phile (with a mild Lizard King fixation). Which is fine, Sheckler is the Luke Skywalker of Louison’s skateboarding Star Wars after all, but it doesn’t always make for unquestionable statements. He cites a kickflip indy over a bmx jump in 2003 as something “No one had seen an adult pro do,” which immediately brings Colt Cannon, Chris Senn, and Ryan Johnson to this reviewers mind. And his “There is no one who works harder on a skateboard than Sheckler” also doesn’t quite ring true. I should add is no bad thing, and it’s perhaps what accounts for the small number of factual errors that crop up throughout the book. We might call these errors hairs. We do this in order to set up this bit-based on the expression there’s no need to split hairs. The specific tricks Reynolds did at Bust or Bail are not make or break details in the grand scheme of skateboarding’s story, and if I was to talk of “Jeff Phelps of Thrasher” it would be a hair I’d apologise for splitting, because Jeff Phelps sounds like Jake Phelps with his shirt tucked in, working a job in a bank somewhere. But the hair I can’t apologize for splitting is the use of simile in a description of Sheckler kickflip front boarding at the start of his winning 2010 X-Games finals run early in the book. It is a great piece of writing, Louisons fast, smooth prose leads us charging through the trick in matrix like slow motion, all grace and precision, when all of a sudden we are hit with the phrase “…like a soaring ape.” Out of respect for Desmond Morris I am here stopped in my tracks. This is one of two occasions while reading this book I am forced to talk out loud. “A skateboarder, Sheckler or otherwise, is not LIKE an ape, a skateboarder, Sheckler or otherwise, IS an ape (unless of course they are a dog or some other species of generally earth-bound creature). One more thing I found very odd was the abundant use of the phrase “switch nollie.” At first it sort of made me

The sanctifying, however, is by this point already comedy since earlier he describes Sheckles thus, “He has big shining eyes inside long-lashed, almond-shaped sockets, and full lips and tan skin and pink nails.” He describes a cherubic doll of a boy beating everyone’s ass in a pink bracelet. Pure truth-stranger-than-fiction gold. Louison’s punch lines are numerous, but one relevant to his description of Sheckler might be when he notes the resemblance of Ryan’s Rolling Stone profile portrait to “the opening image of a teen-themed pornography sequence.” And describing Ryan’s approach to skateboarding as “steroidic” verges on insulting depending how it’s read. It’s this type of brilliance that keeps us going all the way to Rodney’s quiet, reflective house on the last page. But! It’s his description of Shaun White, sitting in an interview room at the 2010 Dew tour finals, in the glorious, heinous desert city of Las Vegas, that had me shouting for my wife, so I could read it aloud and we could both fall around on the floor in hysterical laughter. For that treat you will have to part with the purchase price. Cole Louison’s works as a researcher for GQ magazine. He has contributed to such notable publications as The New Yorker and McSweeneys. The Impossible, published by Lyons Press, is his first book.

The

Featuring

Lighter. Stronger. Better.

Genius.

Jerry.

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vol. 9 no. 4

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LUIS TOLENTINO frontside 180 fakie 5-0 frontside half cab heelflip [ o ] reda.

JOSH CLARK fakie hurricane [ o ] clifford.

ANGEL RAMIREZ frontside 360 [ o ] broach.

DESMOND HOOSTIE 360 flip manual ollie impossible [ o ] odam.

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e LAc m QUE Yste UnI ng S KI loC

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vol. 9 no. 4

—

Sara Cwynar

wordsby dorothy rivers

rained as a graphic designer and photographer, Sara Cwynar channels her desire to create a tangible record of experience by compulsively collecting and ordering visual material. Her now-expansive image bank is comprised of photographs she takes herself, pictures culled from the internet, shorn from books, picked up at flea markets, and photocopied in libraries. This personal archive provides the source material for her projects, in which she bridges photography, graphic design, book-making, sculptural installation, collage and video to test the relationship of image and memory. Certain references recur throughout her work, as she uses, for example, theoretical explorations of kitsch and nostalgia (via Kundera, Barthes and Baudrillard) to visually negotiate deeper questions of paranoia, obsession, memory and alienation. The result is a body of work equally driven by concept and aesthetics, and teeming with haunting qualities, whether through surreal photography, hoarder-style accumulations or collaged compositions evoking stylish sci-fi fantasies. Cwynar’s installations thrive on this layering of materials, mediums, and stories: photographs (her own) are affixed en masse to the wall, thickly layered with found imagery, objects of sentimental value, and detritus, creating through the deluge, portraits of imagined collectors exhibiting behaviour not unlike her own compulsive gathering.

In her latest work, a series of photographs created for the exhibition This Time in Place at Show & Tell Gallery in Toronto (September 16 – October 9, 2011), Cwynar turns her attention to photographic tropes and types recreating, among others, the vanitas still life, the advert and the vacation snapshot, to suggest the degree to which our perception of photography is shaped by existing visual codes.

images courtesy of the artist.

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Paranoia Archive: Prologue, 2010 20" x 24" c-print (handprinted), edition of 10

no. 4

“7 Minutes in Heaven” Contest Winner For our last issue’s contest, we paired up with Comune to bring you “7 Minutes in Heaven,” asking you to hit us up with a photo of your closet to win $500 worth of swag from Comune. We definitely received some interesting entries (microwave closet warmer anyone?). After we narrowed them down to three, we posted these on our Facebook fan page for your votes. Winning by a landslide was Matt Young, who managed to garner 221 likes. Matt, $500 is a shit-ton of amazing product—you better get rid of some of those shoeboxes to make room for these goods! Big thanks to Comune for the swag and letting us get a glimpse into the seedy vs. high rollin’ closets of our readers. VIEW CONTEST HERE COMUNE.COM

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FTCSF.COM

Oh, and we also ran the wrong album cover for Chad VanGaalen’s recently released Diaper Island album in last issue’s Soundcheque. This is the cover that should have made it in—oh, and while we’re talking VanGaalen, take a minute to check out the video ’zine Lifetime Collective made recently as Chad and Sean MacAlister chat, skate and get creative. LIFETIMECOLLECTIVE.COM

Color & Push have got you covered The biggest thing to hit Vancouver this year has gotta be OLIO Festival and our newest skate contest, Jamcouver! We’ve teamed up with push.ca to give you full online coverage of both happenings including interviews, videos, photos, and more, all for your viewing pleasure. We’ll be adding content for weeks to come, so keep checking back to ride this fun train ’til the end. COLORMAGAZINE.CA PUSH.CA

@colormag #hellyeahtwitterrules We gotta admit, Twitter was a phenomenon that no one in our li’l skate office really wanted to take on. That is until recently, when a certain skater joined our ranks, sat us down and gave us the low-down into why Twitter is so fucking awesome. So, hopefully you’ve all noticed our Twitter account has been more action-packed as of late, Tweet us @colormag and let us know you saw this. It’ll make us feel good and you’ll get to find out stuff you never would otherwise!

.C INE

Sorry, we mis-captioned the photo of FTC founder and creative genius Kent Uyehara in the Faces ‘N Spaces article in our last issue. Ken Goto is a prolific photographer with a much easier-to-spell last name.

•

Our very own Gordon Nicholas traveled to N.Y.C. recently and spent some time with the long-time Color contributor, skater, filmer, photographer, and all-around good guy Jeremy Elkin. Check out their adventures in an exclusive online feature coming soon to colormagazine.ca

ARSENALPULP.COM

Oops—hey, we’re only human, too

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Slam that beer and let Joe “Shithead” Keithly drag your ass through the grimy back alleys and dive bars of Canada’s punk rock heritage. This unprecedented illustrated history of Vancouver ‘hardcore’ legends D.O.A, chokes you out with a barrage of vintage posters, handwritten riders, rare photos, and unfathomable stories from over 30 years of tours, riots, and unbridled punk-rock debauchery. But don’t miss the message behind the flurry of smoke and fists, because if there’s one thing D.O.A has proven over more than three decades of preaching Talk – Action = 0, is that if you want to get something done, sometimes you just have to do it yourself. So stop patching up that leather jacket for a minute and go get this book. But be warned, it may just give you a black eye, put a cigarette out on your forearm, and hock a loogie in your face. —dan post

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Two Photogs and a Microphone

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Talk – Action = 0

CA E.

[ o ] MCKAY-RANDOZZI

FTC Founder, Kent Uyehara.

A • colORMAGAZINE.CA • colORMAGAZINE.CA • colORMAGAZINE.CA • colORMAGAZINE.CA • colORMAGAZINE.CA • colORMAGAZINE.CA • colORMAGAZINE.CA • colORMAGAZINE.CA • colORMAGAZ IN

Turn to 50 to enter our new contest this issue and join the party line with Color & Sitka!

no. 4

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Anthrax

Accidents Happen’N Almost Skateboards just released their new “Circle Collage” deck series, for team riders Haslam, Marnell, and Cooper. We always dig hearing about how board graphics are born, and this story from Almost’s Art Director Eric Wollam is a good one: “The Collage series came about basically from one photo that Chris sent me a while ago. It’s the one that’s on his board of the yoga posse. I had the print out on my desk one day with all sorts of other papers and line sheets… and was doing some hand writing for each of the guys’ names. Then I looked down and everything was all layered over each other and I kinda liked how it all looked.... after some tweaking I made the one for Haslam. I showed him and he liked it a lot... then I just followed that for the other two. Happy accident I guess.” A happy accident we’re happy to ride. ALMOSTAWEBSITE.COM

Quiksilver X JBL Don’t have a meow, man Sleaze Pleaze Montreal’s Urban Ambush Skateboards recently came out with these sick Sleaze Balls 55mm wheels. Aztecstyle zombie eaters? Damn, we’re stoked to throw these on our set-up! UA’s underground vibes, hesh clubhouse, and OG crew including Barry Walsh and Marc Tison have kept us a fan for years. Wear down the lines on these wheels and you’ll be channeling El Muerto in no time.

Toronto’s Reilly Hodgson is a man after our hearts, as he recently started his own D.I.Y. publishing house, No Fun Press. Working with artists, weirdoes, skate rats, and creative-minded individuals, No Fun focuses on producing high quality ’zines and limited edition goods, including our new favorite Tupac tee, and buttons from Dimitri Karakostas’ cool-as-shit cult classic: “Portrait of the Young Artist as Bart Simpson.” Keep an eye on these guys.

Quiksilver has collaborated with JBL to create a line of super-tech audio products, including headphones, earbuds, pocket speakers, and a portable dock that weighs in at less than a pound. We passed these headphones around the office and gave everyone a chance to weigh in. Best comment: “Whoa, now I don’t have to pretend not to listen to you guys… I can’t even hear you!”. That, along with super-soft ear pads and flat-folding design, is pretty much all you can ask for. QUIKSILVER.COM

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Remind Insoles

Natural Experimenting

Volcom Hood-lums

We’ve heard every tale of woe imaginable in terms of skate injuries, and so have the guys over at Remind Insoles. These insoles aren’t going to help you if you bust your head or break a limb, but are designed to lower the impact skating has on your joints and help keep your alignment in check. This may sound like mom-talk, but living in a world of pain is pretty second nature to skaters, and the guys at Remind just want to help you out a bit. No bullshit, just some rad orthotics. Wow. Never thought I’d use those two words in the same sentence.

Two armed robbers recently pulled a takeover-style hold-up at a bank in Tacoma, WA. The surveillance tapes showed these guys wore zipped-up Volcom Highwear hoodies to mask their faces. Jail just ain’t worth it, but these hoodies definitely make for a good disguise. I want one to scare the shit out of my buddy Aaron the next time we’re out skating late and taking back alleys home—dude seriously pisses his pants at the sight of anything scarier then a spider. We’re stoked that Volcom hasn’t pulled these hoodies, just ’cause of a few bad dudes! Makes a good Halloween costume in a pinch, too.

REMINDINSOLES.COM

VOLCOM.COM

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Portland, OR-based Shwood met up with Keith Hufnagel and the HUF crew to cruise around L.A. earlier this year, and ended up coming home with a broken board and an idea. They were able to turn the deck into a custom pair of wooden sunglasses, which ended up becoming the basis for a new online project, Experiment with Nature. Curated by the creative minds at Shwood, Experiment… cultivates and shares inspiring endeavors in our daily lives in the form of mini-documentaries, interviews, playlists, and, of course, experiments. This is the kind of hands-on, D.I.Y. mentality we here at Color love. SHWOOD.COM EXPERIMENTWITHNATURE.COM HUFSF.COM

SPACECRAFT // AUTUMN // 2011 WWW.SPACECRAFTCOLLECTIVE.COM distributed by Ultimate

vol. 9 no. 4

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Jai Tanju

wordsby isaac mckay-randozzi

photosby jai tanju

ome artists choose to specialize, while others opt for a broader depth in their discipline. Jai Tanju’s take on photography is a melting of the two. Start with his self-published book, With a Camera from Marc—a collection of photos taken with a camera gifted to him by Marc Johnson. Here, the world of skateboarding is melded with everyday moments and rendered in B&W But now, King Hamburger Eyes, an arm of the established and well-respected Burger World Media Group, has just released a ‘zine called Its History Now that shows a different side to Mr. Tanju’s work. Its History Now contains photos shot in 2010 that, unlike the Marc Johnson camera material, have a warm golden feel, like taking a walking tour of the underside of California. You might pass discarded people of the state’s social welfare system and mental institutions on one page and then a flea market full of the junk of life on another. The idea is to show us moments both familiar and alien. Skate scenes and other daily activities are given importance by their mere existence, captured with a simple honesty that only film can truly portray.

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“Tanju not only captures the action, but also the substance in-between tricks.”

As a published skate photographer, Tanju’s photos have been used by companies and publications like Vans, Enjoi, Black Label, Transworld and Big Brother to name a few. But he doesn’t follow the traditional skate photographer course. Tanju not only captures the action, but also the substance in-between tricks—moments that illustrate the drama of the scene. Jai Tanju is truly a dynamic documentarian and his images and choice of shots reflect this. Today, Tanju also runs and curates The Print Exchange Program: a postcard print exchange between photographers from all across the globe. Through the program, both professionals (Joe Brook and Ed Templeton for example)

Selections from It's History Now (published by King Hamburger Eyes, 2011)

and weekend point-and-shooters alike, send out their postcards with simple notes to this strange man of Turkish extraction in San Jose. Their unabashed willingness to be included in another stranger’s project has helped foster an interactive element to the exchange. You might send a postcard to Jai that could result in five reciprocal cards from members who happen to see your address online. The Program has had two exhibits this past year, the first in New York’s Fuse gallery followed by a stint in England at the Wayward Gallery in London. Both were well-received by the public, and private collector’s found value in the breadth of the program’s objectives which has now opened the door for future exhibitions.

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vol. 9 no. 4

(clockwise from bottom left)

RVCA leo romero belt GIRL mariano navajo deck ADIDAS skate shoe HUF firefly chambray shirt DESTRUCTO d2 flat black truck INCASE metallic slider case QUIKSILVER luma watch VANS beer gut belt NIKE stefan janoski shoe CHOCOLATE league c wheels BAKER pile lighter cover and beer opener HUF f 11 d ring key chain POWELL swiss leather wallet COMUNE davis wallet

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Put Together Put everything that matters in this sick bag by Want Essentials. Seriously, no one will know you’re a scratchy dude if you have nice shoes and a nice bag. Pair it with this classy HUF long sleeve woven and you got yourself a date… with Facebook. With genius designing and good sourcing, even these two worlds of fashion can be happily married.

WANT ESSENTIALS bag / WINGS AND HORNS tie / OPENING CEREMONY shoes from Roden Gray 44

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distributed by Ultimate

photos: brendan klein

vol. 9 no. 4

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Fancy Feet These sculpturally classic oxfords by Mark Mcnairy stand well alongside the Lakai Rick Howard, sharing in the contrasting yellow sole design. Nestle it all atop some Jello-esque juicy Sector 9 wheels and you’re walking on sunshine, even though it’s Fall. (clockwise from wheels)

SECTOR 9 top shelf wheels LAKAI rick howard shoe ZIP ZINGER nano galaktik deck DC studio shoe FOURSTAR carmel top FRESHJIVE marina chino pants ROYAL raw silver truck HUF classic h new era hat

MARK MCNAIRY shoes from Roden Gray colORMAGAZINE.CA

introducing the nike paul rodriguez 5 featuring lunarlon dynamic cushioning

available august 2011 nikeskateboarding.com

vol. 9 no. 4

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Petite Steps High Street meets skate street with bold colour and mixed prints making seismic waves through to Fall. For the ladies, keep your stems warm in these VOLCOM tights, and give your feet African heat in these ISABEL MARANT zebra print pumps. Dudes, try this BAKER battle cheetah deck, set up with some orange trucks from THUNDER and SPITFIRE wheels.

(clockwise from tights)

VOLCOM womens tight wad tights ROXY perfect match texting gloves BAKER battle cheetah deck RVCA peggy bag ROXY cozy up scarf NATIVE miller shoe STACKS turbo sunglasses SPITFIRE high roller mosh wheels THUNDER cole venom trucks CONVERSE star player mid shoe SPACECRAFT trash belt MATIX womens talk to me sweater

ISABEL MARANT shoes from Roden Gray colORMAGAZINE.CA

Get your friends together and film a continuous sequence doing what your crew does best* for a chance to win $500 in Sitka swag! parâ&#x20AC;˘ty line [pahr-tee lahyn]

noun 1. A clip flimed for fun, as opposed to fame, involving all your friends in one continuous take. ex: Strathcona skate park provides an optimum setting for a party line. *You donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have to be skateboarding to make a party line. Entries will be judged on creativity, content and cinematography. Contest ends October 15, 2011 scan for video sample

post your party line video on our wall at FACEBOOK.COM/COLORMAGAZINE

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vol. 9 no. no. 44

wordsby mike christie

photosby babas levrai

longside all the amazing stuff (the food, music, culture, friendly people, and incredible nightlife), Montreal is also a city, known for it’s sketchy, corrupt contractors. During the construction of the Big O Stadium for the 1976 Summer Olympics, there were rumours of contractors driving loaded trucks in one entrance, out another, then back through the first entrance to get paid for a second (and third and fourth) time. Then, in 1986, a large chunk of a concrete tower fell onto the Expos playing field, and in 1991 a large concrete slab fell on a walkway (hurting no one, luckily).

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It’s easy then, to understand why a group of skateboarders who were anxiously awaiting the outdoor skatepark planned for the lot beside the Taz indoor park had grown frustrated with a contractor not living up to his obligations. So what did they do? “A bunch of old motivated guys decided to roll up their sleeves and get out their shovels to build the Project 45,” said Yan Tremblay, the contagiously enthusiastic but reluctant leader. And build it they did. In that very spot now: an amazing, shred-ready concrete park, built entirely with donated labour and money. Their inspiration? The great DIYs of the world: Burnside, Channel St., Washington St., Marginal Way, FDR, Wasteland, and countless other DIY spots. If you’re still complaining about your lack of spots, thinking,“Yeah, those guys probably didn’t have anything else to do,” you are dead wrong. Yan, a 21-year skate veteran, is a firefighter with a family, and he worked on the project in his off-time. “Yes, there are days I’m tired,” says Tremblay, “my job is very physical. Plus I have to take care of my family, so I don’t have much free time. However, when I go to the project and I see other volunteers working hard, and new people getting involved, I forget all my physical pain. It motivates me to work even harder. It’s my paycheque!” But Yan had plenty of help, both with labour and fundraising. Yan emphasized the fact that “this truly was a collective effort,” numerous times throughout our interview. Yannick Nolet, a skater, artist, and graphic designer for the

newspaper La Presse, helped organize events for the cause and created the blog. When I asked Yannick if money was a problem, he was quick to reply, “I would say yes, but isn’t money always a problem? To fundraise, we organized parties and BBQs and collected donations in a P45 box. We made boards and t-shirts that we sell, and all the money went towards concrete. We’ve also received money from skate brands and shops, which helped a lot. The best thing about the project is that we have a tight budget and all hard-working volunteers.” They found their first sponsors in Bobby Gascon at Vans. Then came beer from Pabst, money from Foundation skateplaza, RVCA, Series Skateboard, Axis, Underworld, and Max at Supra Distribution. Other supporters along the way included Rob at Lowcard, Jim Thiebauld at Deluxe, and Jenny at Thrasher. One hitch when they started was that nobody really knew how to pour concrete. “We learned a lot about how to pour from Éric Meunier, and we are still learning from him. The internet gives you some good ideas, that’s why we put lots of pictures on the blog to show people that it’s possible to make your own stuff.” The learning curve was steep, and everybody was excited to get their shovels dirty, even when the usual pour days started at 6 am! “People complain about the skateparks in Montreal,” said Yan, “but when it’s time to wake up and make it happen, the mouth soldiers were too tired! But the last pouring day we were 20, so that kept us motivated. You can always have a good reason to do nothing, but if you put love in what you do, you will find the time.”

(opposite) Jesse Ramones, backside judo air. Montreal.

“When I go to the project and I see other volunteers working hard, and new people getting involved, I forget all my physical pain. It motivates me to work even harder. It’s my paycheque!” —yan tremblay Annie Guglia, frontside hurricane. Montreal.

used for fill, Yan Nolet replied, “A marmot! Bearing (Dan Mathieu’s dog), killed one the other day so we buried it in the volcano.”

Often, DIY parks can be infamous for their locals-only regulations, as well as an unwelcoming vibe for female skaters. Luckily, this is not the case at Project 45. “At least five girls contributed to the project so far,” said Annie Guglia, a ripping skater and member of the aptly named skate crew, the Skirtboarders. “There’s really no discrimination. As long as people aren’t causing trouble, they’re welcome to skate, or work!” When Annie mentioned she’d done very little construction work in the past, I asked how exactly she learned the ropes. “Imitation mostly. I remember the first time I came to help, I felt so useless and lost. But once you understand the basic steps of construction with concrete, then you know when and how to make yourself useful and available.” When I asked what was the strangest thing they

But as with all collectives, there can be a kind of paralysis that results when decisions need to be made. In this case, it was where to put 1000 pounds of dirt and concrete. But Yan remains committed to a democratic process. “The key is to listen to what people want and make compromises,” he said. “Sometimes people can be spoiled babies, they forget that it is a collective. They just want their home obstacle; they just want to work on their own thing. My primary goal in this project is to bring people to work together. We are a society of individualistists. As a fireman you have to work together to fight the fire, if not, you can die. And when I see someone working for only himself, it can make me angry. Just never forget that a DIY project is the contribution of several individuals and not a single person.”

As it stands, the future looks bright for Project 45: the zoning has been worked out, and the insurance issues have essentially been cleared up. After hundreds of sand bags, countless bags of ’crete, and thousands of pounds of fill, the project is well on its way. “I hope we’ll keep building. The park is getting so sick, and we have many construction projects in development, so if money isn’t a problem in the future, we’ll have a hell of a park!” said Annie. “I just want to build more!” said Yan when I asked him about the future of Project 45. “The more you build,” he went on, “the more you’re proud of what you do, and the feeling of accomplishment is embedded in the park. You get respect from other skaters too, just by working on it. After every day of pouring concrete, you just want to build more, and more, and it’s so easy to pour you’re heart into it.” So if by now you are thinking of starting a project like this of your very own (please say you are!), remember that you don’t necessarily have to ‘Do It Yourself’. If you’ve got a good idea, you can always get more than a little help from your friends. Any excuses left? Didn’t think so.

And then there is the problem of keeping an unpaid crew motivated. But Yan seems to have an innate knack for bringing people together. “Make people responsible, people need to know that they are part of the project. It is very important to value everyone! Make them proud of what they do! Most of the skaters are full of creativity, so use your talents.” I asked the collective for advice to anybody interested in starting a project like this of their own. “Invest in a good BBQ,” half-joked Annie, “you’ll use it a lot!” “Your [concrete] forms should be perfect if you want something nice,” said Yannick. “And if you want to freestyle obstacles, go ahead! And the most important thing: don’t forget to enjoy it!” “Find a good crew,” said Yan, “find a good spot, some cash, buy some tools, buy bag of concrete, bring some water, and look everywhere to find stuff to build with. Do it for the love of skateboarding, don’t think you will make money or get something from it.”

Sonia Kenfech, Frederique Luyet and Annie Guglia add that woman’s touch colORMAGAZINE.CA

KENNY ANDERSON KENNY ANDERSON

KA-ONE

Andrew wanted to slide this rail on his socks, but I convinced him that this heelflip over it would be more impressive.

vol. 9 no. 4

words and photosby joel dufresne

o land a full interview in a skateboard magazine before many people have even seen you skate, let alone know your name, is rare. But for Andrew Summersides, ‘fame before fame’ is an ongoing theme. While working on this interview there were a couple of occasions where people mistook Andrew for someone famous. First, outside of a Penticton school, a trio of eleventeen-year-old girls walked up after the skate session giggling and asking for his autograph. Andrew, having never autographed something before, simply smiled, took their pen, and asked the young’uns what to write.The second brush with celebrity occured while we were shooting portraits, this time involving a couple of foreign gentlemen who approached Andrew on the bridge we were on, and requested a chance to have their photo taken with Mr. Summersides. Again, he just smiled and obliged them. This attention from strangers has been confusing indeed, but it was clear why we we wanted to meet Andrew. His casual free-flowing style is a thrill to watch, and his ‘let’s go’ attitude is always refreshing. It’s the reason he’s causing such a stir. .interview

Not many people have skated this spot, and for good reason. An awkward angled run up combined with an unforgiving landing makes this seemingly simple backside 180 quite the opposite.

interview.

Only those who are motivated enough to read captions will know that Andrew shoved out of this front blunt.

Color: You’re pretty much off the radar as far as video and photo coverage goes. Tell me a little bit about yourself and how this Shazam came to be. Andrew: I was born and raised in Nelson, B.C., pretty much grew up skating there, skating the indoor park. I didn’t really have anyone there who shot photos or filmed. When I turned 18, after high school, I moved out to Vancouver and started working at Showcase to try and get into magazines and start filming out here. I started skating Bonsor a lot, I’d go there everyday, like every fucking day. I love that park so much. One day I was there and Jon from Push Wheels asked if I wanted to go on a trip, so I went on the trip, and you came on that...

How was growing up in Nelson? It was dope. The summers are so sick there, it’s like forty degrees all the time, and you like go swimming [and] cliff jumping all summer, that’s all we’d do. Go to Paradise, cliff jump and smoke weed, chill, and skate the indoor at night, cause that’s when it’s cool. It’s way too hot to skate during the day. Growing up there was awesome. We had our crew of skaters and we’d just skate every day—morning to night, just skate. It’s a close community so you know everyone, so you don’t gotta worry about a thing.

So that’s pretty much where it started. I had some footage but it was all fucking shit, like bro-cam. And also, the dude who filmed it all, got arrested for pedophilia. What!? Isn’t that crazy? He’s in jail. All the footage that I had, from back in the day.[is gone]… He’s done, like I can’t get any of it because he had photos of this 13-year-old girl or something, so... So dude was filming little girls and skateboarding with the same camera? Yeah, so fucked. [laughs]

Autograph sesh.

.andrewsummersides

Were the spots good out there? Hell no. [laughs] You’d find the odd gem here and there, like, ‘Oh my God they built this for skateboarding!’ and then they cap it. I’m from a small town myself, so growing up I found that you’d have to be more creative with keeping yourself occupied. Did you find it that way in Nelson? Totally. Me and my friends were such little shits dude. We were always into trouble, like breaking windows, or going spray-painting. We had these phases where all of a sudden we’d be like, “Spray-painting is so sick!” So we all came up with tag names and started tagging Nelson. [laughs] Slack was my tag name. Where’d that come from? It’s because I was lazy as fuck and smoked too much weed. [laughs] But we had to get really creative skating especially. You find a spot and spend like threeand-a-half hours there, just skating this little weird dip in the pavement. You’d have to come up with just retarded stuff to keep yourself occupied. We’d make kickers onto washing machines, or go down to the old barges and set up pole-jams in the old wood. I saw a photo on Facebook of you riding a Llama, is that pretty commonplace in Nelson? [laughs] Dude that’s so legit, that night was fucked. I’ll tell you one story about that night. I talked to my friend and he was super ripped, like gone, and he said all he remembers was at 8:30 in the morning he was walking out of the party and all he saw when he looked up into the mist, was me in my underwear, riding the llama down through the mist

Fans appeased. One of the quicker photos I’ve shot in recent months. Andrew hucks a backside heel down this narrow Castlegar double in seven tries.

andrewsummersides.

with the pack following me, and like, yelling and screaming. I was so twisted, riding this llama and leading the pack around in my underwear, like fucked! He said it made his whole night. That’s so random. [laughs] Have you lived anywhere else other than Nelson? No, I pretty much just lived in Nelson, moved out when I was 16 into a party house, that was fucking gnarly. It was like six bedrooms, me and all my closest homies just throwing down every night. So crazy. We got evicted like a month later. The landlord showed up and there was paint all over the carpet and like, a porno-lanche coming down the stairs, like just ripped up pages of porno magazines. [laughs] That was Silica house. That shit was good! Who are you staying with in Vancouver? I’m actually staying with Dan Redmond, who’s an amazing skateboarder. Skating with that dude is crazy. And I’m also staying with Caleb [Davies], who’s one of the coolest dudes, like so chill and so down to earth. You’re currently staying with Dan Redmond and Caleb Davies. So you are just crashing on the couch or? No, I’m on the floor. Two months of the floor, it’s been good! [laughs] I live out of my car-partment too. Pillows, and fuckin’ cups of coffee, and garbage and terrible cigarette packages. Weed everywhere. It’s good though, I like it.

No cliffjumping here, but damn close. Drew hucks a sizable ollie in loafers at this Penticton motel.

Where was that demo you went to skate in recently? Oh yeah, the Pros and Bros tour. There were so many dudes, Cody MacEntire, Josiah Gatlyn, Skylar [Kehr], Caleb [Davies], Kristian Svitak and a bunch of sick dudes. It was in Castlegar, drove back there to meet up with them and skate in the demo with Ultimate and stuff. It was a lot of fun. Oh yeah, also back to that last trip in Castlegar, didn’t you say you had a party at your Mom’s when she was in Cali? Oh yeah, that was such a bummer man, I feel so bad. But like, ok, I knew she wasn’t there, and I was back in Nelson so I was like, fuck it man, I have to have a banger. My mom has this house that’s like, just a fucking mansion, it’s up in the very highest part of Nelson, like so sick, I invited so many people. Me and my homie dipped out half way through the party and went to the bar, we just left the party going. I went back to the party later and it was so much bigger than it was before, so I kicked everyone out and just chilled with this girl friend of mine. I woke up in the morning like, way too hung to do anything, I put a couple of pieces of recycling in the bin, not to mention we drank ALL my mom’s booze, like every last drop. I left the house a mess, got in the car and drove back to Vancouver. My mom called me when she got back and was so livid, cause she wanted a drink. I swear that’s all she was choked about. [laughs] Damn, that’s pretty chill. Is she pretty supportive of your skating? Yeah, my mom’s a physiotherapist, so any time I get hurt or anything it’s good. She’s not super keen to work with me, cause I’m kind of a dick when it comes down to it. I don’t want her pulling on my feet and making me hurt you know? [laughs] But yeah, she’s super supportive. She gives me money to live, which is more than I could ever ask for. She’s awesome.

.shazam

Is it true that you used to do gymnastics? I remember somebody mentioning it on one of the trips we went on. Yeah, I did seven years of gymnastics. That shit is tight dude, I love gymnastics. I still go to the Canada Games pool all the time and throw myself off those platforms, like double gainers and shit, double corks both ways, it’s so much fun. I think it helps a lot with skating, just being aware of how you’re falling and stuff, like always rolling and not trying to jam stuff. Do you think that attributes to why you are more prone to jump down big shit? I think it’s mostly because if I know I can do a trick on flatground, then why the fuck can’t I do it over something like that, you know? When it comes to skating rails, all I imagine is myself getting bucked off the fucking thing. But when I’m jumping down a stair set, nothing is on my mind because nothing fucks with me, there’s no rail there that I have to get on. It’s just, thinking-thinking-thinking-thinking-thinking-thinking, land. I know I can skate rails and shit, and I’m not saying I suck at rails or anything, but it’s a bit of a mentality thing. Like the other day when I got bucked off that rail...

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Who gets you hyped skating wise? Let’s go international, then Canadians. Romero is my all-time favourite; he’s just so good. Ever since his First Love part, and his Foundation That’s Life part, so good! Reynolds is so good. I know how cliché that is, but Reynolds is just awesome. Also, I really like Jamie Tancowny, he’s so good. He has the kind of skating that everybody dreams of, well, that I dream of at least. Just so fast and so aggressive, so sick. My homie Sam Bartinger has one of the best styles I’ve ever seen on a skateboard. It’s weird, he’s so hesh, but so clean at the same time. My homie Tristan Sharp. Dan [Redmond] gets me so hyped, same as Travis Mikulin, just his style, his style is so sick. I really like watching Skylar Kehr’s Love Bolts part. I can honestly sit down and watch Reynolds’ Stay Gold part, and then watch Skylar’s part, and get just as hyped, that kid is so good. Sheldon Meleshinski, oh my god, he’s one of my favourites for sure. That’s like the main reason I go to Budgies Burritos, to see if Sheldon’s working. [laughs] Such a little fan boy. Do you watch a lot of vids? Yeah, well I subscribe to this guy Vianouzzzz’s YouTube channel. He uploads all the random skateboarders who are just random, and I’ve seen some

of the best skateboarding on that channel. Watching Ryan Peirce and Evan Wilkinsonoh, my fuck. The Boyish Promo is beyond. Anyone who’s reading this needs to check out Boyish, that shit will blow your mind. What’s your all time favourite vid? Probably Hot Chocolate [2004], just because that’s from the era where I started watching vids. Also DVS Skate More [2005], and Emerica’s This Is Skateboarding [2003]. Any of the original Baker videos. What are your plans for the next couple of months? I want to go back to Nelson, and just chill and do some cliff jumping. [laughs] My friend just got a legit camera, too, so I want to go back and film every fucking day and go cliff jumping every day. Put out two promos, one cliff jumping and one skating, and see which one picks up. Exactly. I just want to get clips back home that I’ve always wanted to get. And re-film shit with filmers who aren’t pedophiles. [laughs] Exactly!

timebombtrading.com facebook.com/timebombtrading

vol. 9 no. 4

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Nuit Blanche 2011 wordsby kari cwynar

uit Blanche (sorry, Scotiabank Nuit Blanche) can be frustrating: with hundreds of art projects spread across a city for one night only, it is physically impossible to see everything. Beer consumption takes precedence for many, and crowd navigation becomes a survival tactic, precluding real consideration of the work itself (the event’s purported raison d’être). But for all the commotion, every year Nuit Blanche commissions a number of excellent projects that can really give one pause in the midst of the chaos. One way to sift through the deluge is to go small-scale. In this spirit, I’m zeroing in on one curator, one zone and four projects you should probably check out.

Nicholas Brown, one of Nuit Blanche’s three curators, has titled his zone “You had to go looking for it,” bringing to mind the thrill of the hunt, the possibility of stumbling upon something in a familiar, or forgotten, corner of the city. Brown is curating in Toronto’s financial district, an area in which chance encounters with contemporary art are not to be expected on the other 364 days of the year. This infiltration of a sector reserved for high-pressure economics and corporate systems provides productive tension between the works and the site. With questions of labour at the fore of current discussions in contemporary art, this zone bears particular resonance. Here is the tip of the iceberg.

BONE-JARRING A Vancouver native currently living in Guelph, Ontario, Maura Doyle has a little bit of history with public art in both Toronto and Vancouver. In 2005, she staged There’s a New Boulder in Town in both cities, repossessing glacial-era boulders by giving them histories via informational plaques. Foreign objects within the city, uprooted and relocated by outside “natural” forces, albeit tens of thousands of years ago, the boulders raised questions about urban surroundings taken for granted: what came first, the rock or the town? With Bone Dump, her project for Nuit Blanche 2011, Doyle will go from big (boulders) to little (bones), plopping a mountain of sculpted porcelain amidst the district’s numerous banking headquarters. Doyle’s practice is generally highly conceptual (her boulders) or service-based (The Money Collection, a cheeky venture in which she solicits donations of money for her “collection”), but Bone Dump will see Doyle return to a studio-based practice. Hand-sculpting more than 7000 bones, Doyle imagines the pile will be versatile, taking on new meaning every time it is heaped anew. A delicate pile of bones in the financial district feels very human, in contrast to the fast-paced, often inhospitable market and the closed doors of big business. Doyle’s bones in particular represent a return to small-scale production and craftsmanship lost in an age of cheap foreign labour.

SIGN LANGUAGE

Raymond Boisjoly was born and raised in Chilliwack. His latest project, a series of hand-cut construction paper text pieces, studies the removal of Aboriginal terms from their original contexts in order to name colonial towns. Boisjoly blends the Aboriginal names of British Columbian cities with the aesthetics of heavy metal, making parallels between black metal’s violent disavowal of Christian influence in Northern Europe, and histories of appropriation and assimilation in North America. His work interrogates the political implications of language, and positions it as integral to the production of knowledge and identities. Boisjoly’s proposed project for Nuit Blanche, the sense of reckoning, builds on this intertwining of language, place and Aboriginality, bound up in the relationship between message and medium. He will be working with the portable electronic signs one finds on roadsides and in construction zones, markers of civic infrastructure in-themaking. the sense of reckoning uses words like “disruptive,” to probe the disruption of urban movement, asking: What kind of authority do we ascribe to these signs and the commands they put forth? If it tells us the road is closed, we will act accordingly—text once again prescribing experience. The project also resonates with the site on another, deeper level; growing from his research into Aboriginal histories, Boisjoly’s signs will call attention to the etymology of Toronto’s name and the history of the land upon which Nuit Blanche takes place. (top) the sense of reckoning, 2011 Raymond Boisjoly (Chilliwack, Canada) Bone Dump, 2011 Maura Doyle (Guelph, Canada)

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“One could perform a marathon sprint through all three zones if you’re a glutton for punishment.”

characters, but they have already grown and dyed their locks to embody their roles. As Neuspiel says, “Almost every time Geoffrey and I are together now, even off the court, someone inevitably comments on our resemblance to the two.” Neuspiel and Pugen will repeat the grueling tennis match hourly, breaking it up with screenings of a contextual video and commentary from an announcer. With their rigorous schedule and attention to detail,they aspire, according to Neuspiel, to surmount the “so what?” reaction that accompanies a night with many competing attractions by creating a narrative “accessible enough to jump into at any moment.” It is bound to provide remarkably different experiences at 7pm and at 5am, when

CROWD CONTROL Similar to Boisjoly’s confronting modes of civic control and the manipulation of public gatherings, friends and frequent collaborators Jeremy Jansen and Niall McClelland team up again for Barricades, a project bound to sting in post-G20 Toronto. The impetus for their threepiece sculptural installation arises from the compulsion to create work that makes sense in its context. In email conversation, the artists reiterated: “The location of the Barricades project is a fairly major intersection [Queen and Yonge] and required a project that could fill up that space in one way or another. The materials we’re using to create these sculptures share a sort of golden thread with the materials we use in the rest of our work.” Often using every day materials in their respective practices, for Barricades, Jansen and McClelland will again source materials from their surroundings, stacking slabs of plywood with painted ends into minimalist structures and renting police barricades from the city only to manipulate them by privileging form over function. Jansen and McClelland’s blockades are likely to be ineffectual, more aesthetic than authoritarian and lacking the leverage of a swarm of riot police. In the context of the event, the barricades will draw passersby into the street rather than diverting their paths, testing the visual language of crowd control and designating Nuit Blanche revelers with a degree of trust. (l-r) Barricades, 2011 Jeremy Jansen & Niall McClelland (Toronto, Canada) Tie-break, 2011 Tibi Tibi Neuspiel (Ottawa, Canada) and Geoffrey Pugen (Toronto, Canada)

STRAIGHT SETS

Another Toronto duo, Tibi Tibi Neuspiel and Geoffrey Pugen, will be teaming up for the first time for a 12-hour performance, The Tie Break (2011), in which they will repeatedly recreate the infamous tie-breaking tennis match between Bjorn Börg and John McEnroe at Wimbledon in 1980. Neuspiel generally works in sculpture, cheekily exploring the mainstays of North American culture (Wonder Bread, television, and comfortable fashions) via meticulously crafted beeswax toasts or pairs of XXXL sweatpants bearing an interview between Charlie Rose and Martin Amis. This is his first performance piece since a longterm eating performance in which he sought to weigh 200 pounds in the year 2000 at the age of 20, giving himself gluten and lactose intolerances in the process. It proves, however, that Neuspiel has the determination necessary for an all-night tennis match. Pugen, his tennis rival, has already mastered the art of theatrics and the conflict between real and imagined. Spinning fantastical tales of renegade teenagers, hybrid animal-humans and switchblade sisters, Pugen delivers these mythologies in dramatic, digitally manipulated videos and photographs. Clearly, he possesses the imagination to animate his next character, John McEnroe.

exhaustion sets in. The charm of The Tie-Break is in its sincerity, acknowledging the inevitability of imperfection yet jumping in headlong, and in its simple underlying principle: hard work. Enacting this epic feat of athleticism in Commerce Court will dramatize the event, conjuring the competitive nature of the capitalist economy, the marketability of sport and the American Dream.

Neuspiel and Pugen admit the impossibility of a fully accurate re-staging, but are committed to the details, including memorizing the choreography of the match, each hit and miss. This performance is far from being a one-off event: Neuspiel, who harboured tennis dreams as a child, and Pugen, once a scholarship-winning tennis player, have been training for three hours daily since submitting their project proposal last December. Both already possess remarkably accurate hairstyles for their respective

This year’s edition occurs on October 1 from 6:59pm to sunrise. There are endless ways to make the most of your time on this all-too-brief night. One could perform a marathon sprint through all three zones if you’re a glutton for punishment. You might enact a durational performance yourself in watching the trajectory of The Tie-Break from dusk to dawn, or spend an hour contemplating a pile of bones in the shadows of the skyscrapers. Either way, the beauty of Nuit Blanche is in the backstreets.

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lucas puig Switch Pop Shove-It in Athens, Greece. adidas.com/skateboarding

ÂŠ 2011 adidas America, Inc. adidas, the trefoil logo and the 3-Stripes mark are registered trademarks of the adidas Group.

vol. 9 no. 4

wordsby saelan twerdy

photoby malcolm elijah

ure X (formerly Pure Ecstasy) are a rock trio from Austin, TX, made up of Nate Grace, Jesse Jenkins, and Austin Youngblood. Elements of their music will probably sound familiar to you: they record at a basementlevel fidelity that swathes all of their songs in that bleary, cavernous haze so characteristic of underground rock music circa now, and their combination of placidly reverbed guitar tones and grungy feedback hits all the dreamy, magic-hour signifiers common to indie music’s current obsession with beach-bound escapism. What’s special about Pure X, though, is that their immersion in texture, mood, and atmospherics is only the still surface of a much deeper body of water. Rather than an emblem of casual slackerdom or simple economy of means, their choice to record live with no overdubs reflects a commitment to capturing the intensity of life lived in the moment. Songs like “Twisted Mirror” burn hot because they burn so slowly, with Jesse Jenkins’ syrupy bass hits setting the pace. Each stretched-out note swells until it aches before eventually arching around to the guitar blowout. Not that these guys care about shredding: there’s a few solos here, but the focus is on feeling out every movement in unison, not about individual chops.

Unlike a lot of bands doing the “chill” thing, their drugginess isn’t just about feeling good or getting away from it all. Like the S&M-inspired photo of a rose and chains on their album cover suggests, they’re interested in pain as much as pleasure, and their music goes in search of real and heavy experience with enough patience to follow the flow all the way down. They’re not just zoning out, they’re zoning in. That sense of exploration and togetherness is part of what makes their debut LP, Pleasure (out now on the always-excellent Acephale label,) stand out, and you can chalk part of it up to the band’s shared habitation. Nate and Jesse live together in a converted halfway house with other musical friends including Stefanie Franciotti of Sleep ∞ Over. Their bandmate Austin Youngblood lives just up the street. We caught up with them via email to discuss their living situation, their name, and how their philosophy of skating informs their philosophy of music. Color: For a band called Pure X, your music isn’t super danceable or energetic. It’s more flat-on-your-back, peacedout, but it’s sad as much as it’s happy. So why Pure X? Nate Grace: Well, to me the drug connotation is only part of it. It is there and if that’s what you want to focus on, then that’s cool, I got no problems with that. But to me the name has other meanings too. And first and foremost it is nothing more than a name - a signifier. And it looks good on a record which is probably the most important aspect of any band name. On a similar note, you guys are really into skating, but most music by and for skaters tends to be designed to get you stoked. If it’s not straight-up aggro, it’s usually at least pretty upbeat. Your music is more spaced-out, though. Do you think of it as post-session chillout music, or do you just have a more chill philosophy of skating? NG: There was a period in my life when I was more into “aggro” skate jams. I was into Bad Brains, Dag Nasty, Youth of Today, Black Flag, Antidote—shit like that. At that time I really only knew about street skating and I was into hitting stairs, ledges, rails. Then when I was 20, I tore my ACL ollieing down a six-stair. I was about to land all wonked, so I kicked the board away at the last second and landed with my leg completely straight. POP! ACL ripped straight in half. I got the surgery, like, six months later and was out of skating for almost two years. I had some complications and the whole thing was just fucking ugly. I tried to get back on my board when I could finally bend my knee again but shit was never the same. I got bummed on the whole thing

and just gave up on it for, like, five years. Then I went through a shitty period of my life where I needed some new kind of outlet. The band started then, and Austin and Jesse and I started skating again. We were lucky enough to discover ditch skating and were introduced to that whole style, which I guess some people would call "old man style." Like, a style that doesn't give a fuck about big flashy bullshit tricks, it

aren’t listening hard enough. And that’s cool. There is a layer of atmosphere in the music that can be interpreted as chill, and I’m ok with people taking our music for this “surface value.” That is pretty much the standard for human interaction anyway, especially in this weird age of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Netflix. When it comes to music, most people listen to a song, look at the accompanying imagery, probably

“You can get so caught up in trying to land one stupid fuckin’ trick that you forget to just skate. Enjoy the ride.” cares about flow and about the feeling of it. Getting into that was really beautiful and allowed me to remember what skateboarding really is about. FUN. Just having fun. Zenning out. Forgetting about all the fucked bullshit that this insane world keeps throwing at you and just thrashing for its own sake. You can get so caught up in trying to land one stupid fuckin’ trick that you forget to just skate. Enjoy the ride. That's the type of session I think our jams would work with. A flowed-out, styled-out session. I'd be stoked if Richie Jackson skated to our music. Jesse Jenkins: Yeah, we all discovered ditch skating around the same time we started the band. I'd say the place we were at, musically and in life at the time, made surf-style skating instantly appealing. I can see now that we were all looking for some other positive thing to fully zone out on other than music. I get a lot of my ideas, musical and otherwise, when I'm skating. Skating has always been the easiest way for me to clear my mind completely. Nate once said that one of his heroes is Tehching “Sam” Hsieh, the performance artist known for endurance pieces like One Year Performance (1980), in which he punched a time clock every hour on the hour for a whole year. As far as I can tell, Hsieh’s art is about time and struggle and work and suffering, whereas your music seems to be almost the opposite: it’s got a dreamy, outsideof-time feel and it’s about chilling and relaxation. You’ve got songs called “Pleasure” and “Easy.” Am I right about this? Does Nate just respect a guy like Hsieh for taking the opposite path, or is there something in common between his art and your music? NG: First off, if you really believe our music is all about “chilling and relaxation,” then you are not looking deep enough. You

read something that a “music writer” has written about it (if they even go this far) and then they quickly throw it in a category that makes it easy for them to understand. The internet makes it seem like there is SOOO much information out there and that we must get through all of it as quickly as possible. What I’m arguing is that real understanding does not work like that. You have to dwell on something for a while (sometimes years, sometimes a whole lifetime) before you get anywhere close to a cohesive meaning. This is something that I feel is being eroded by this modern age of “information overload” and I’m skeptical as to whether that erosion isn’t as haphazard a development as it seems. Tehching Hsieh’s work is like that too. I agree with you that his art encompasses the ideas of work, human suffering, and human struggle, but I also think it goes beyond all that—as I feel that any good piece of art both encapsulates certain ideas and goes beyond those borders at the same time. I found out about him at the public library one day last year. I like to go there and wander around picking up any book that looks interesting. I saw his book of collected works from a distance and was instantly drawn to it by the cover image—a photograph from the time clock piece you mentioned. Inside were pictures from his other works—a piece where he stayed out of doors for a year, one where he stayed in a jail cell for a year, one where he tied a rope from himself to a female artist friend for another year. They supposedly didn't touch either! Yeah, right. He also did one where he made no art at all for thirteen years. The main idea that I take from his work is that life and art are one. There is no separation. In music it means to me that the best songs are the ones ripped right out of life. The ones that reek of actual feeling. The ones that crush the fictional line between life and art. The ones that act as a mirror so

that the listener can see her or himself more clearly. This is the type of song that I want. I hear that you guys live in what used to be a halfway house with a bunch of likeminded folks. Does that communal feeling creep into your music? Do you guys have big group jam sessions at home? JJ: Yeah we have a pretty solid group of people here right now. There’s an unspoken respect and understanding that feels extremely rare—especially for this many people. We have a disturbing amount of music and audio gear between us that we all pile up and share, which is great. The house is a really long, ranch-style house with a room up front that could be considered a ‘den’ that we use as a jam lab. There have been some deep tapes made in there by all of us (and others) in various combinations. It sounds like Austin is a pretty happening place right now. Can you clue our readers into what going on there and some bands they might not have heard of? JJ: Honestly I know very little about what’s going on in Austin outside our crew of friends: SURVIVE, Silent Diane, Troller, Silent Land Time Machine, Smokey Emery, Thousand Foot Whaleclaw, Amasa Gana. I did just find out about this dude Xander Harris who apparently lives in Austin. His records are good. People have this conception of Austin as some kind of thriving music hub, but a huge part of it is the same highly visible garbage that exists everywhere in the world and doesn’t register on my radar at all. NG: People should check out Answering Machine records, Light Lodge records, and our drummer Austin is starting a label called Holodeck records. You can also check out the BRAIN CLUB series which is an outlet for side projects and one-offs for our friends in Texas. Do you guys have any plans to tour soon? I noticed that you don’t have any dates posted at the moment. JJ: Yeah we’re working on that as we speak. We’ll be in the UK and EU in November, and we’re gonna try and do a few US shows between now and then. NG: We just got a booking agent, so we’re in this kinda in between place where we are moving from booking the shows ourselves to having someone else do it. So things should get moving here pretty soon. Pleasure is out now on Acephale Records. Visit http://pure-x.info for tour dates and info.

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vol. 9 no. 4

wordsby justin gradin

portraitsby maggie west

he first time I called Don Bolles he was busy mixing a record. One that he is producing and recording at his all-analogue, Los Angeles-based Unisex Studios that he runs with fellow band mate, X-orb-X. I called Don several more times after that, and this was the case each time. Until one day, I finally caught him in a down moment, relaxing at home with his girlfriend. Don is a very busy, very involved and very prolific man, who seems now as interested in making and producing music as he ever was. Heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s played in not one, but multiple influential bands, including the seminal Los Angeles punk rock band The Germs, but also Vox Pop, Nervous Gender, 45 Grave, and Celebrity Skin. Don later joined and recorded with the Seedlings, a band made up of the last lineup of the Seeds, with Don on bass and vocals in place of the original singer and bassist Skye Saxon who had died. Don also emcees and organizes the infamous Cub Ding-a-Ling night of live music and performance art at Silverlakeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Hyperion Tavern in L.A.

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this year, played shows all over L.A., and landed a spot in an upcoming live version of the children’s show Yo Gabba Gabba. “One of the guys from that show, DJ Lance Rock, and one of the producers came to our show and they bought all of our stuff. One guy was from the [Luis] Buñuel Institute, and he called us the ‘epitome of Surrealism’.” Hopefully the entities don’t complain too much about the band’s plans to release a full-length LP and go on a bigger tour. “We go through a lot of space suits,” said Don about an upcoming tour with Smashing Pumpkins. “We’d need a big trailer, those things don’t really wear well on earth.”

“We were sorta contacted by these alien entities.” I first met Don Bolles in 2002 at the Pasadena City College flea market in California. Initially I thought he was just promoting and selling the book, Lexicon Devil (an oral history describing the life and early death of notorious Germs singer Darby Crash, which Don co-wrote,) but when I got closer I saw he was selling what looked like Nazi memorabilia, some original Germs Live at the Whisky LPs, a Charles Manson record, and of course, his book. Don was easy to talk to and seemed interested in speaking to everyone and anyone. He showed me a t-shirt he said he bought for Thurston Moore, which read: “Tune it or Die,” and talked about his new band (at the time) called Deathbread. When local L.A. artist Mike Kelley approached and Don stopped talking to me mid-sentence, I took this opportunity to continue my search of the flea market. I found a copy of the Vox Pop record The Band, The Myth, The Volume (on the cover of which Don appears naked) at another booth. At that moment, I looked up to see Don coming around the corner, this time with two Manson-esque hippie/punk girls. We resumed our conversation and Don described his cable access television show The Three Geniuses. He said it would “make your brain shit,” as though it was the greatest possible compliment. Since then, the TV show has ended, and Don is once again playing in The Germs. With singer

Shane West replacing the late Darby Crash, along with original members Pat Smear and Lorna Doom, Don plans on releasing a ten-LP Germs live boxed set, and a new Germs LP featuring West’s vocal take on old Germs songs. When asked about the motivation for project he says, “There’s a lot of Darby and Pat material that hasn’t really seen the light of day, some really good songs.” But for now Don has turned his attention from the drums to the guitar in his newest project of psychedelic-space-religious-glamour Fancy Space People, founded with Hyperion Tavern bartender No-Ra Keyes. “We were sorta contacted by these alien entities,” said Don on the origins of the band. “We just noticed we were being vaguely instructed or lead to do these different things.” He also said, “[they] basically told us we were carrying out the wishes of their leaders and we were sort of disseminating these messages and this information through the music… they said ‘Fine, go ahead you can have the publishing, we don’t care. We don’t have names or bodies or bank accounts.” With members No-Ra, M-ele, X-orb-X, Danny, Shonn, and Bri-on, along with D’on, they have signed to a subsidiary of Billy Corgan’s Constantinople label, released their first EP

When I asked Don about Vox Pop, he reminisced with a bitter fondness on their hastily recorded offerings. “More Drugs Than Elvis was a terrible mix. It was just god-awful,” he said. “It actually sounded like a bunch of guitars, and crazy guitar feedback and a bunch of rock n’ roll, and that thing sounds like a bunch of stupid stuff. The 12” sucked too, that was just terrible. The best thing about that was the picture of me on the cover all naked.” When asked about his band Nervous Gender, he said, “I’m the guy on the album where the stuff sounds like songs. That’s me playing drums on way too many amphetamines. You can hear it on this thing Nervous Gender At The Hong Kong Café that they put out recently. It’s pretty interesting, I’m playing tape loops with my left hand and playing drums with my feet and my right hand. My right half I had to be this complete Neanderthal monster, beating the hell outta stuff with a stick, and then with my left hand I had to maintain this delicate balance. And then I was replaced by an eight year-old.” Along with Don’s many successes, there have also been some bad times: battles with addiction, the death of Darby Crash, and trips to jail. “Going to jail was not fun. There was one time I was just standing around at stupid Oki Dog, back in the early 80s, and these cops just came. I was there in the middle of the night, it was like 1am or something, and I just really wanted a Coke and some french fries. I’m in gym shorts and a t-shirt and some tennis shoes and they just round up all these people that were at Oki Dog and throw us in these cop cars and handcuff us, and then take us to the Beverly Hills jail. And then keep us all night and charge us with things like trespassing. I guess it turned out some bouncer at the Starwood had gotten stabbed, so they just suspected that everyone at Oki Dog was some punk rock murderer.” With a career spanning over three decades, Don Bolles is a multi-instrumentalist, producer, writer, and cable access television star, not to mention a Los Angeles staple, a living punk rock legend, and a punk rock lifer.

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vol. 9 no. 4

—

Mark Appleyard

words and photosby landon stirling

could only begin to imagine the amount of times Mark Appleyard has climbed onto a big jet airliner to spread the word of skate to the world. It seems travel has always been in his blood, right from his early runaways to the fantasy spots that kids only heard about in skateboard folklore. Mark has always required the basics: a skateboard, the clothes on this back, and a mind to convince himself that sugar packets were as good as food. Having met Mark for the first time back in the Cayman Islands, at a time when he was crowned Thrasher’s Skater Of The Year, I was interested to meet up with him now and learn what keeps him going on the road. Happily, Mark is still keeping it simple in the often-overwhelming life of professional skateboarding. Less is more, and Mark demonstrates that both with his passion for skateboarding and with his giving persona. The Element tour dropped anchor in Vancouver long enough for me to drill him with questions and have a laugh at where our lives have taken us to this point.

“I got a lot going on in my wacky world man.” What’s your citizenship? Canadian, working on a green card, and British. What’s the purpose of your trip? To have a good time! And tour with the Element team across Canada from Halifax all the way to Vancouver. How long have you been in the country? Almost two weeks, about 11 days

Not one to lug around a ton of accessories, Appleyard keeps it simple: Skateboards, passport, clothes, camera, phone, Ipod.

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Did you travel anywhere prior to entering Canada? When I rolled in, I had been traveling with my team manager for Element, and he had been arrested before and my bags were on his roller thing. They rolled us over and searched our shit. They were going through his computer searching for shit. But yeah, what was the question?

Oh yeah, this summer has been busy as fuck. I went to South Africa, Spain, all over Europe, all over the States, and now this Canada trip. Where are you staying here? Downtown [Vancouver]. I share a room with Levi Brown. He brought his guitar, so we jam. How much cash are you carrying? Right now… on me? I dunno, I could check. I got a hundy bill, and a couple of twenty bills. How many Visas do you have? Yeah, I got different accounts man! I got a lot going on in my wacky world man. My world is overwhelming at times. Gotta keep it organized!

Who do you know here in Vancouver? I know Alex Rothbauer, My brother cruised out to meet me here, Corey Sheppard, a lot of people. I know a good amount of dudes in Vancouver. Is there anything you plan to leave in the country? I’ll probably leave some money with my brother or something. Share a special piece of information you’ve learned about Canada. The population of California is bigger than the population of all of Canada. Is there anything you can’t travel without? My wallet. I need a couple bucks to work with. I’ve got to travel with my bank cards and some cash. And a pack of smokes.

vol. 9 no. 4

words and photosby benjamin deberdt

man who knows no grey areas, Scott Bourne walked away from the States about ten years ago to set up camp in Paris. While still maintaining his professional skateboard career, his move to Europe did brush many feathers, somehow proving that in this world you are mostly free, (to do as everybody else that is.) Over the last couple years, Scott has not only realized, but he has also accepted, that there are new dreams and goals to pursue. He has just embraced it. Recently, “The book” that he had been working on for years got completed, as well as a second one. And adult life has replaced the pro skater adventures. Or so says Scott. The following conversation might explain why and how skateboarders can actually manage to walk away from it all. Or at least give you an insight on what Scott Bourne has been up to, since there are no doubt many more radical turns to come. Welcome to another chapter of a life lived in black and white…

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Thanks to the internet, people outside of France have recently become aware of your modeling jobs, which came with mixed reactions. Was this something you were “hiding” purposely, until now? I guess that’s what you get for using the “ENTER-NETS”: dreams smashed in a single Google search. I am actually hiding my entire life from skateboarding, it’s stuck in a prepubescent shell. Is that something you actually “work” on; keeping away from skateboarding? It’s just that after you have had some success in skateboarding, there are not many places left to go where you can maintain your integrity. You are either some washed up old guy living off of something you did when you where young, convinced you are a “legend”, or you’re a traitor and a sell-out because you just went on with your life. I chose to just go on with my life, and it saddens me to see a lot of kids struggling in their old men bodies with their past triumphs in life. I’d like to think that my present triumphs fit my mind and body. The idea of “skateboard legend” is almost disturbing, isn’t it? It’s just strange to me, and I feel partially like skateboarding hasn’t even been around long enough to have legends. And if you are still alive, you’re certainly not a legend! So you never get the urge to grab the board and fly away from it all? Honestly, no. But I do remember and romanticize the days of my youth, the long trips and train rides just to find that one spot, and the next, and the next. Yeah, that I miss sometimes. But now I just conquer those grounds with other interests. Let’s say you’d have to sum up that time of your life, in some years, to your future kids for example. What would you say about Scott Bourne, the skateboarder? I don’t think I will mention it to them. I am not living in it any more, and I don’t have it all over my home or up on the walls. If they discover it in a box in the basement or become interested in skateboarding on their own, yeah, I will certainly tell them about their father and all the wonderful moments I got out of it, but I am not living in the past and have no intentions of dragging my kids into my past and tattooing their dreams with mine. I always have the impression you take being a grown-up very seriously, something you have to apply to, which I find interesting… It’s more that I take being a kid seriously. Imagine that. You are basically born pure, innocent, and at the same time it’s the

“I am a grown man and a professional at whatever I do. If you can’t treat me with respect, then I walk, end of story!”

most experimental time in your life. Those experiments are what turn you into an adult. But there is nothing more hideous than the perversion of that innocence by those who want to stay forever in their youth. It’s like old people who try to be “hip” by wearing what their kids do, it just looks so out of context and becomes disgusting to observe. Tell us a bit more of the reality of modeling, as this must be one of the most fantasized-about jobs out there? In all honesty, it’s been amazing thus far. It’s put me in some pretty phe nomenal places that I would have never had entrance to any other way, outside of being very wealthy. From a mansion on the Champs de Mars, to the roof top suite of Hotel Meurice, or a week-end at La Mamounia… and almost always, it’s with a beautiful woman. But is it what it’s cracked up to be? I am too old, too mature, almost immune to other people’s shit. I mean, I am a grown man and a professional at whatever I do. If you can’t treat me with respect, then I walk, end of story! At 38, after an adolescent brush with fame and world travels, there is little about the fashion world that can suck me in or impress me. I have had the beautiful women, seen the drugs and the money. I’ve graced the covers of magazines, done films, TV commercials, and designed a shoe for a major corporate brand. I have wealthy friends and some pretty famous ones, too. Modeling is all a straight sail for me. There’s no handrails, no steps, no Great Wall of China to jump! Then, what would you honestly say is the greatest perk of it? Desk time. Writing a novel takes up a lot of time. Modeling jobs take up almost no time and pay well, so it allows me a lot of time for my writing, and when I do model, I make a good amount of money, especially for the time put into it, and, as I said, it’s taken me to some beautiful places. As modeling is just a job, where have you been devoting your time in the last couple years? Writing. I will have a first novel published in

(above) A Toast To The End Of Time (work in progress GmbH, 2011) by Carhartt.

.scottbourne

“You also have to be able to spend long periods of time alone. You cannot have every day distractions.”

early 2012 with 19/80 Éditions. It’s already being translated into French and I have had a German offer for it as well. I have also just been offered a four-book deal from another house: two books of poetry and two books of my journal writings with my photographs. I am currently editing a second novel, and have an agent who will shop it at the end of the year. And I have already begun a third one. Not to mention the East of The Adriatic book, or the three poetry books we put out through Carhartt. People talk about writing a book. What does it take to actually do it? Discipline, that’s the bottom line. Discipline! And, of course, you have to have a story, something you want to say combined with experience and injected into a plot. You sit down and you begin to compose. You also have to be able to spend long periods of time alone. You cannot have every day distractions. And then you pour it out and put it together. Then, how does one get published? What kind of hoops a writer has to jump these days? Today, it’s nearly impossible to get what I have written published. People are no longer buying literature, and if your novel is more than two hundred fifty pages long, it’s unlikely that, as a first time novelist, you will get a deal at all in America. Statistically, this stuff just doesn’t sell, so you will not be able to sell it to an agent because the agent will not be able to sell it to a publisher. Then the major houses are going to want you to blog about your book. Like, who has time for that crap? I’m writing another book, I’m not blogging about anything. So, basically, you find an independent that you like, and likes you, and you go from there. “Being a Writer” is another activity that is very romanticized, I’d say. It seems to me the same could be said about the idea of living in Paris… A lot of skateboarders ran away to San Francisco or New York City and that did not make them great, and I am sure a lot of people who wanted to be writers have run away to Paris. But there is no city in

scottbourne.

(above) A Toast To The End Of Time (work in progress GmbH, 2011) by Carhartt.

Scott Hobbs Bourne, at work, at home, in Paris.

the world that will make your dreams come true. Romanticizing things is just another trap. To get something done, you have to put in hard work, and it helps to have a beautiful city outside you windows, but when you lay down the pen, its just you and the paper… a blank white paradise. Good luck romanticizing your landscapes! Could you actually pinpoint a time in your life where you thought “I am going to write, this is what I want to do!”? I have been keeping daily journals since I was about 15, and I had begun writing a book when I was about 19 or 20 and first ran away to California. Then pro skateboarding happened and I just got distracted, but on the other hand, I also got tons of travel and experience that I think

has been indispensable to the writing. I have always been writing and working my ideas around in a novel form. It’s just that, now, I have the discipline to actually sit alone for long hours and explore my ideas in characters and plot.

On top of all that, skateboarders don’t read, and with all the media gadgets that have come into the world, skateboarders read less than ever. So, a lot of what I was writing, I felt, was being wasted in these sorts of publications.

You used to have a voice in some skateboard media, from Slap back in the days to Soma in France, until recently. Is that something you have given up, writing for skateboard publications? Yeah, At the beginning of this year, I stopped any and all writing projects, as well as photography, for any skate exclusive publications. Most don’t pay, edit your work badly, and you can’t even put this stuff in a portfolio, because no one outside of skateboarding has heard of these publications.

You realize some people might think of some of those statements toward skateboarding as bitter? My life at this particular point is better than ever, and skateboarding just isn’t a part of it, for me that’s not bitter at all, it’s just the honest truth. I had a great life in skateboarding, it’s responsible for much of my development and how I approach the world. When I was an infant, I played in my crib. When I was a child, I played in the sandbox. When I was in my teens and twenties I

played in the street and I made a living out of it. Now playtime is over and I have put myself to work on other things I desire. That’s not bitter at all, it’s a natural evolution of things, and I think that it’s incredible that other people actually get angry at me for desiring more than skateboarding could give me. And it gave me a lot for a long time. I am smart enough to know when it’s over and many aren’t. Those guys are the bitter ones. What do you think is the next chapter for you? Kids! Will it certainly be written in Paris? Where else?

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vol. 9 no. 4

wordsby jenn jackson

dentity is shaped through an accumulation of momentary experiences. It builds up slowly and constantly transforms through the continuous passage of time. There are infinite approaches to how such experiences are collected. Some people arrive at their destination by floating with the current, while others choose a less complacent approach. The latter requires a particular investment in contemplative consideration. The living picture that eventually composes ones life is made up of a cast of choices, a summation of that which we wish to include.

Patrick Cruz grew up in Manila, Philippines. This fact is emphasized by his “Made in the Philippines” neck tattoo, apparent upon first introduction. As kids, he and his brother were both enrolled in clown school, and to this day they continue to perform together. Not only does he create art, he embodies it, dissolving the division between himself and the works he produces. His entire being, including his everyday costume of apparel, is something of another world.

In their contributions for this feature, artists Patrick Cruz, Lucien Durey, and Andrea Lukic share their own subjective reflections on personal interests and the distillation of experience. Each of these artists has an investment in the construction of their own past, present and future. They consciously organize a dialogue between their daily life and their artistic practices. This ability arrives through a confidence in individual choice and style. Their works combine both fictional and documentary propositions that are intuitively produced and inspire imagined moments. The disparate elements of each practice all share their beginnings in everyday personal encounters. A montage of experience, each work encourages associative interpretation.

Over the past two years, Cruz has been creating digital compositions and organizing them on Facebook. Currently they exist as 317 albums containing over 3000 images. As one of his Facebook friends, I have had the pleasure of watching this collection grow. It began on a whim with Patrick creating portraits of his friends in MS Paint. When he first started this proliferation, he wasn’t necessarily considering the works critically; they existed as an impulse, a carefree ritual that served to represent Cruz’s daily encounters, evolving to become something more meaningful through sheer quantity and persistence. From surfing the net to riding the Skytrain out to Surrey, Cruz would create representations of nothing and everything.

Enacted with a performative quality that finds itself in the blurring of life and art, Cruz, Durey, and Lukic are all familiar with the erasure of such borders. All maintain practices that mythologize persona and blend their personal lives with their creative endeavors.

(opposite) Post Identity, 2011 by Patrick Cruz MS Paint, dimensions variable

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images courtesy of the artists.

Patrick Cruz

For Cruz, the medium is secondary to the information it contains. On a basic level the work is just a daily exercise, a performance of making stuff. Beyond that he admits it is very difficult to imagine what other people see. Perspective conditions of the Internet are a tricky thing to control. Cruz utilizes Facebook as a structure to upload images, pumping out a constant stream of content for those who subscribe to his newsfeed. For his contribution to Color Cruz provided us with the entire Facebook collection. He gave no input as to how the images be presented, rather he requested a completely external editorial approach. Proposing this alternative to order, beyond his usual subscription to personal selection, emphasizes the persistence of chance within not only the production but the distribution of his work, allowing myth and narrative to take centre stage.

.artfeature

Lucien Durey

Taking a reality and making it something legendary is part of the preservation of history. Bits and pieces of information contort and reconfigure and become a spectacle. Inevitably, the magic and mischief of mythmaking finds its way into our own personal constructions of identity. Hailing from Regina, Saskatchewan, Lucien Durey has spent his life surveying the imagined territories of his family’s supposed history. His narrativizations are part fact, part fiction, and bleed into his own perceptions of whom he is, or what has shaped who he is today. He interprets his personal history by re-enacting moments of his past through performance, assemblage, and storytelling. This includes numerous performative endeavors in which Durey embodies idealized characters influenced by popular culture and his own geneology. Long before he was born, Durey’s parents moved to Canada from the U.S. to be teachers in northern Saskatchewan. It was a dream of his father’s to detach from the American identity and immerse himself in the Canadian landscape. He was obsessed with embodying a true Canadian self, in particular that of the Great White North. The collage Durey created for Color utilizes imagery from two 1989 in-flight magazines, Northwest Explorer and Above and Beyond, that Durey collected from a storage locker belonging to his father. The locker is a practical time capsule, having been largely abandoned for two decades, housing a variety of objects and documents of little to no value; the fragments of a complex narrative. The magazine publication dates mark the beginning of a 20-year estrangement from his son. Durey’s father remained in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut until his death in 2008. The highly personal narrative that accompanies this work makes no explicit gesture or appearance, rather it is glossed over in an aesthetic abstraction of surface. In a sense, shape and colour as a language take precedence over the inclusion of personal content. By co-opting the symbolic forms of his father’s mythology, Durey reorients the document within a new fiction. This doubling back on history intervenes with the seamless surface and circumscribes a new mental space. Durey often re-purposes such works within immersive installations; these compositions will become visual elements in his next fictionalized performance. The work re-ritualizes the capacity for material content to alter perception: a magazine in a magazine, eventually becoming a poster on the wall in a photograph of a performative happening.

everydayhistories.

“Each artist understands the way in which information circulates continually, evolving into a web of connections, confrontations, wear-outs, and paradoxes.” Andrea Lukic

Repurposing material of the past within a personal framework is a familiar theme for Serbian artist Andrea Lukic. These conversions materialize in many forms immersive installations, musical composures, newsletters, photographs, performances, plays, postcards, staged sets, videos and zines. Lukic has been collecting material for a number of years as research, but also as an investment into how she knows the world. Her artistic practice proposes an amalgamation of personal lifestyle with material outcomes, art, music, and writing. One such project is Lukic’s personal newsletters. Sent intermittently via email, they arrive in my inbox as a .pdf from a sender named thegarbagepeople. I print them from a Xerox copier, often on pastel-coloured paper, and staple them long-edged. My impulse to do this is derived from an imagined perception of how Lukic would materialize the .pdf herself.

Much of the material Lukic draws from first appears in print form, and many of her sources could be considered picture books. The subjects found within her work range greatly yet connections of relatability come together through the familiarity of subject matter. An ironic undercutting of fantasy occurs within her assemblages. Lukic consciously indulges in imitation and togetherness as an act of rebellion. She constructs rituals and belief systems in a natural, almost invisible way. Particular homage is paid to underground youth movements and their satirical behaviaral codes and laws. The theme of escape is visited in a weaving of fictional and documentary scenarios. Her contribution to Color will also be used within a forthcoming personal newsletter. Lukic made no explicit request for order, stating that they would correspond regardless of this detail. Lukic is interested in collecting this kind of research as a “backyard” anthropological strategy to communicate her ideas. Through her research she identifies distinctive patterns built upon the virtueless and invisible, yet, profound histories, recording and reinterpreting the underbelly of the underbelly. Admittedly, Lukic finds it difficult to separate herself from a perspective on the margins of popular culture, especially in terms of objects and narratives. Her cataloging takes on a variety of forms all of which provide an incomplete picture of information. They are neutral and admit to a struggle, in translating the reality of the world into an image of the world.

Cruz, Durey, and Lukic consider the pages of printed matter within the magazine as individual art objects. The magazine is a vessel for a particular experience; the pages are sculptures within an installation. Each artist has manifested an investigation into the incentives of printed material as an object of specific discourse. Books, newspapers, ‘zines and innumerable other vessels of information have been precluded by new forms and digital circuits of information. Each artist understands the way in which information circulates continually, evolving in a web of connections, confrontations, wear-outs, and paradoxes. Their editorial selections illustrate an intention to stage or re-stage the already staged. The various subject matters offer dimension and supports the development of new media structures as well as the repurposing of those structures already in place. In the promotion of creative autonomy, Cruz, Durey and Lukic have considered production as capable of existing prior to consumption and postulated the capacity for reinvention through a sincere language of intuition. It is obvious they respect their instincts in maintaining unorthodox perspectives, a stimulatingly confident gesture, or cult.

(opposite) Collage #3 (Summer 1989), 2011 by Lucien Durey inkjet, 36" x 24" Poem Fusion and Gardening 2011 Research, by Andrea Lukic, dimensions variable

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vol. 9 no. 4

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Alibi Boutique

The storefront at 506 Rachel East

Jean-Mat Vincent & Olivier Douville

photosby babas levrai

he Alibi Boutique opened its doors on May 1st, 2010, in the heart of Montreal’s Plateau, on the corner of Rachel St. and Berri St. Returning to Montreal after years travelling around the world, co-owners Olivier Douville and Jean-Mat Vincent (both 12-year veterans of the MTL skate scene) felt that the city was missing a small menswear boutique that carried products with originality and style. “We brainstormed about selling helicopters or even maybe space shuttles,” jokes Douville. “Realistically, we had little money and only knew about skateboarding and clothes. The decision was obvious.” Thus, from a passion for life, clothes, art, and skateboards, the Alibi Boutique was born.

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They choose brands that stand out through their quality, authenticity, and commitment to individual style. Douville and Vincent select only genuine brands with a strong profile and philosophy that stand behind their products for the boutique. They believe in garments to be worn and lived in; iconic and timeless pieces for your wardrobe that will stay with you for a long time. The mix of international and European labels reflect their passion for travel and high-quality manufacturing brands like: Garbstore, Dunderdon, Naked and Famous, Marshall Artists, and Filson, each brought to you with knowledge and a down-to-earth attitude. What makes Alibi especially unique from other menswear boutiques is the in-store sneaker consignment shop. Gotsole Consignment takes in dead stock sneakers, flips them, and stocks hard-to-find and limited edition sneakers. Hence, Gotsole’s slogan: Bring In, Set Price, GET PAID! When asked about the popularity of the consignment option, Douville replied, “I guess some people like it, some people don’t. We do it for the love.” With a store-branded clothing line in the works, and plans for an attached coffee joint, the future is bright.

Brett Stobbart

{ sitka }

Available online and at Available fine retailers onlineacross and at thefine universe retailers across the universe

photo BrettGordon StobbartNicholas photo Gord

vol. 9 no. 4

[ o ] PETERS

Mark Oblow, smith grind.

wordsby dan post

photosby mark oblow

ust because Mark Oblow has been living the skateboard lifestyle for over three decades, (during which time he has gone from sponsored skater and photographer of legends like Christian Hosoi, to team manager and mentor to modern-day ripper Dylan Rieder,) does not make him a father figure. No, Oblow is more like a trusted friend, responsible for shaping some of today’s most influential skate teams, and even now, with a renewed focus on his passion for photography, he’s just getting started.

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Mark Oblow was born and raised in Hawaii where surfing is a way of life. At age 12, he rode as a sponsored surfer but then, as the skateboarding wave swept America in the late 70s, Mark ditched the sponsored surf career and switched one board for another because, , as he says, “that’s where the chicks were.” By 1985 Mark had earned his first sponsorships with Vision, Jimmy Z and OJ wheels, but it would be his earlier years spent photographing high-profile friends like Christian Hosoi, Tony Hawk, Steve Cabellero, and The Gonz that would set his career into motion. “I was shooting all those guys ‘cause I was just like “holy fuck”— tripping that I was around them,” Mark remembers, “and then it just turned into shit.” Oblow became the skate program manager for Quiksilver at the same time he was trying to run his own company, Vita, which was having troubles. “We were struggling just to make it,” says Oblow. He recognized that Quiksilver didn’t really have a team at the time and so he made a move. He told Quiksilver, “I could bring you a team, you guys could just deal with your shit and help us out, travel us around.” Then, Mark says, “It just went from there.”

But Oblow eventually left Quiksilver, making the switch over to Analog. “Quiksilver had been going through some shit, me coming from skateboarding and all these guys coming from skateboarding, they just weren’t treating us correct, not so much me, but the riders weren’t getting treated the way they should be, and so it kinda was like we needed to make a stand, not just for ourselves but for skateboarding.” Mark’s motivations were truly unselfish. He left Quiksilver partly so they too could better their team situation. “It was able to help Reese Forbes, for him to come up and get a role and now he’s running things,” says Oblow. And for the riders, he was the type of mentor needed to quell hostilities. Oblow points out, “Right before I left we had got Alex [Olson] on, and it was like, ok, this will give Alex an opportunity with Quik ‘cause now he’s not hitting the heads of Dylan and Arto and Stefan and Omar who were all there before him.” It’s this selfless dedication to the skateboarding world that has garnered Oblow so much respect from successful young skaters.. One person who came-up right in front of Oblow and has always stuck by him as loyal friend, is Dylan Rieder.

“We can just fuck around and shoot photos, play music, record music, get nuts, watch Arto build shit.”

(clockwise from top left) Dylan Rieder Steve Forstner Sammy Winter Arto Saari Gravis team, Australia

Mark was shooting a fashion editorial for Quiksilver when he first met the 10-year-old model, Rieder. “He showed up to a photo shoot and I was kinda just dissin’ him ‘cause I didn’t really care,” says Oblow. “Then he just came around to another one, and then we let him enter a contest, the Damn Am, and he won and that was kinda it.” Soon after, Oblow became a sort of mentor to the young Rieder. “He was quiet, he didn’t ever really used to talk, he would only really talk to me. It was funny, like we’d get in the hotel room and he’d just fuckin’ go nuts.” But Rieder’s parents trusted Mark and let him take a bit of control in guiding Dylan. “We just became really good friends and that’s the biggest thing,” says Oblow, “he’s like a son, he’s like a best friend, he influences me, so it’s just a really good relationship.” These days, when Mark isn’t on the road shooting a skate tour, or at Gravis/Analog headquarters, he’s likely in Costa Mesa at his studio ‘35’ with fellow skater/photographer Ryan Allen. Oblow credits Canadian-born Allen as a major influence in his current photography and so he decided to, “pop up a studio and a space for us to work in and we can

really try to push ourselves and take it to the next level.” But it’s not all serious in the ‘35’ studio: “We have a music room in there and all our camera gear and I have motorcycles and bikes and skateboards and it’s just rad ‘cause guys come in and we can just fuck around and shoot photos, play music, record music, get nuts, watch Arto build shit.” Mark is one of the few people on this earth who has a VIP pass to Arto Saari’s backyard pool. “I have the pass,” says Oblow, “but you can’t skate by yourself, that’s the hard thing, and the session isn’t quite the same if Arto’s not there.” He adds, “If he’s not home then I’m not skating really. It’s just what happens with getting old and working.” Work keeps Mark Oblow very busy. These days, Mark finds success even outside the world of skateboarding, shooting for fashion and lifestyle clients like Low and Adidas: “but not their skate, only their nieko squad. Shit like David Beckham and Katy Perry.”

And Mark’s got big plans with his studio too. “Ideally I want to open up a studio in Hawaii next, and then there were talks on this trip of possibly even doing a ‘35’ in Sydney.” And then there’s the Analog/Gravis tours still going off. “We’ve just got a really good crew and that’s what’s always rad is that we get to travel with our friends. It’s cool ‘cause we’ll be in L.A. and that’s Dylan’s hood and he’s dominating and then we go to Finland and that’s Arto’s hood so he’s dominating, then we get to go to Sammy and Luke’s spot, and then go to Toronto which is Ryan’s spot, and then we go to Hawaii which is my spot… We always seem to be able to get the best shit out of everything.” Surely with that kind of energy stoking his passions, the best of Mark Oblow is still to come. Thanks to Andrew Peters for conducting the full, extended interview with Mark Oblow which can be read at colormagazine.ca. Check out some of Mark’s work at markoblow.com

colORMAGAZINE.CA

vol. 9 no. 4

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‘Unbeleafable’ wordsby mike christie

Ty Evans

photosby scott pommier

n 2004, Scott Pommier took one of skateboarding’s iconic photographs. You must’ve seen it: the cover of the Transworld Photo Annual, a back tail on a step-up ledge, rimmed by an eerie fall light, the background aswirl with leaves. It’s the kind of image that makes you think, “How the hell did he do that?” and “Is that real?” Well, for both Scott and the skater, (virtually unknown Canadian, Devin Morrison,) it was a dream come true. The thing is, normally skateboarding has somewhat of a short memory, and it’s not often you’d get a call from Girl Cinema guru Ty Evans about a photo you took seven years ago. But for Scott Pommier, that’s exactly what happened. “He told me about this project he was working on with MOCA [Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles]” said Scott, “and he’d been offered the chance to do probably the first 3D skateboard video, actually one of the first 3D film art installation pieces anywhere.” Ty went on to say that he’d always remembered Scott’s photo of Devin, and the image had been the catalyst for an idea for this 3D project. Ty then asked Scott if he was cool with Ty using it as inspiration for the film. “Of course I was,” said Scott. They then discussed how that shot had come about, and Scott offered a quick rundown on how he shot it in Calgary, and gave details about how he lit it. Pleased, Ty offered Scott a chance to drop by the set once the production got going. What Scott found was a surprise. “I went out there thinking it was just going to be like a warehouse,” reminisced Scott, “and some lights and some cameras, but the

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“What he did was make his own world out of it.”

scale of production turned out to be gigantic. They were shooting with these Red cameras, Phantom cameras— equipment that is used for feature films and high-end commercial productions. I don’t know how many crew were there, maybe 40 people or something, and there were lifts and these giant, I don’t know like 10k lights, like daylight power lights. And I walked into this sort of forest scene in the middle of this giant airplane hanger-sized warehouse.” When asked if he sees his own image in the final film, Scott had this to say: “It was really surreal because I could actually sort of recognize that, on some level, it was my picture, recreated in real time. The photo I shot was a concrete ledge, with a wall of leaves in the background, but what the art department and what Ty had done, was make the whole thing more foresty. The set was 25 meters wide and maybe 50 meters deep, all built up with trees and logs, and they had bags and bags of leaves, and these giant fans to recreate the look of this picture.”

In the end, Scott wasn’t sorry in the least to give the go-ahead, and was more than pleased with the result. “Really what he did was make his own world out of it. I mean on some level I recognize my picture in there, but it also has some affinities with the Spike Jonze forest skating scene that he did [Mouse (1996)]. Ty really went an incredible distance in making his own world.” In the current creative climate of cultural appropriation [see Hype Willams’ shamelessly unacknowledged pillaging for a Kanye West video of Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void and its epic title sequence for one gross example,] we think that this move by Ty was about as classy as they come. “I don’t know that I would have thought: ‘I know where he got that from,’ if he’d never asked,” said Scott. “He could have gotten away with it, because there is so much there that is Ty, and so little that is me, but it was cool that he acknowledged where that little bit had come from, and all it took was a phone call. I was stoked to be involved. I was touched.”

vol. 9 no. 4

words and photosby andrew peters

ometimes I wonder how many borders are crossed in the name of skateboarding each year. Not in terms of progression, but in an actual travel sense: how much ground is covered just to go skateboarding these days? Skateboarding has always revolved around exploring, whether it be a block from your house or on the other side of the world and no matter if you’re a big time pro or grommit with their first board, you’re going to want to scope for something skateable. Search and destroy, right?

Today, travel for skateboarding is more extensive then ever. Where haven’t we been? As skateboarding has affected so many places, skaters like Dylan Rieder have to stay on the road constantly to keep up with the world. In attempts to keep it local, Dylan filmed a part based mostly in a ‘one-mile radius’ of his house in L.A., so as to spend as much time there as possible. But over the last year or so, things seemed to have changed. I met Dylan through skateboarding friends about two years ago and since then I’ve tried to stay in contact with him and even meet up where and when I could, but it’s near impossible. It seems there’s a new flight every week and a passport more full then your Mom’s fridge. Recently, one of those stamps was Australian, and luckily there was a little time in between the hustle to just hang out and go skateboarding in more of a relaxed atmosphere. colORMAGAZINE.CA

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Nose Manual – Five Dock, Sydney All of my favourite, or most interesting spots, are the spots around the corner from the ‘spot’. As a true explorer, when you’re taken to a spot, it’s vital to go for a cruise around the corner while everyone else is still looking at the thing you came for, stretching their legs and scratching their heads. Chances are, there’s something better within a block. This little rooftop was yet to be skated and just down the road from one of Sydney’s most famous skateparks, Five Dock. .dylanrieder

dylanrieder.

Kickflip â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Kings Cross, Sydney Kings Cross is where the underworld of Sydney operates behind a few dark and dangerous doors. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s also a major tourist area, with lots of nightlife and constant shenanigans. The area is a little rough and so heavily policed we got the boot and had to come back. Of course it was well worth it for the glory roll from this kickflip.

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distributed by Ultimate

vol. 9 no. 4

Brayden is wearing an ANTI HERO hat, EMERICA pants and VANS shoes. Skateboard by SKATE MENTAL.

ALEXIS GROSS & brayden olson

Alexis is wearing her EMERICA customized LEVIâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S vest, JUDY ROSEN shorts.

Brayden is wearing a CALVIN KLEIN top. Alexis is wearing a SITKA shirt WRANGLER shorts and OPENING CEREMONY BOOTS.

Alexis is wearing an ANTI HERO top, and vintage leather lace-up shorts.

Alexis is wearing a tank by ALTAMONT. Brayden is wearing a vintage t-shirt, RAY BAN sunglasses, EMERICA pants and VANS shoes.

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vol. 9 no. 4

wordsby mike christie

“

photosby lex kembery

he artist is always beginning,” the poet Ezra Pound once wrote. “Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.”

Crooked Grind, Camden Town. I like this photo because I think it sums up a lot of things about London, Nick and skateboarding. I love the scene that surrounds Nick doing something that he is really good at: skating something that most would walk past or think is too hard. We stopped off here on the way home after going skating all day. I think we went because someone said the ledges were fun to skate being nice, new shiny granite. Then as Nick skated, the scene started to unfold: new and old buildings, pizza delivery bikes, cars, bicycles and, of course, people – something Camden is never short on. It couldn’t have worked out better that three girls about to head out on their night out, passed by as Nick made his crooked grind. Afterwards, we went across the road to a really good and famous ice cream parlour, Marines. If ever your skating London, go check it out and have a coffee & honey ice cream.

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104 lookingfor.

Frontside noseslide, Westminster. It seems to be a running trend with Nick and I that when we go out to shoot photographs we discover something else on the way there or home, I really like this about going out with Nick. This was another scenario similar to the crook. We actually went skating just up the road from here at the Home Office and we found this on the way back. It was just before New Year’s, really cold. It actually started snowing shortly afterwards. The railing is so high that even with the minor bump before, I still remain puzzled how Nick got up there and did a front nose. The red socks are a good touch with the old Mariano’s he found in his brother’s car. or something.

What the hell do you do with yourself after you’ve been skateboarding every single day of your entire life so far? This beguiling question will eventually face most of us as our bodies give way, our work demands more of our time, and our interests expand (hopefully) to areas outside the skate universe. Some will be slumped in a basement somewhere with a warm beer in their hand talking about how rad they once were, while others will undoubtedly go on to more interesting things. Nick Jensen is without a doubt one of those people you just know is going to be okay in a post-skateboard reality. Many know Nick from his shared part in the now officially classic, Fully Flared, but he has been ruling it forever: his parts in the Blueprint videos First Broadcast and Lost and Found are underground classics, earning him the honoured distinction of “skateboarder’s skateboarder.” But what’s more, this British style-monger has always seemed like one of those dudes whose whole life isn’t skateboarding. You can just tell. There is a freshness to the way he skates, the opposite of the robotic park kid’s 24-hour stomp-a-thon. It’s as though he is discovering and inventing as he rolls. If you can look that stylish on the roughly cobbled alleyways of London, then you’ve got something special. Seems we were right because, as we discovered, Jensen is also a painter, or, as he puts it in his own healthy view, he “makes paintings.” He recently graduated with an MA in art theory, for which he wrote a thesis on a topic he describes as, “our media-saturated environment and how this effects the meaning of past and present painting.” Surprisingly, the art world isn’t always as welcoming to painters as one might expect. But Nick understands what he needs to do. “I just invested more time in considering how my ideas could be expressed most successfully through paint.”

Don’t watch that, 2009 Oil on linen, 36 x 29cm

.anewengland 105

Nosegrind nollie flip, Central London. It’s funny now in London, how new buildings and street furniture will have skate stoppers designed into them to try and stop the issue of damage caused by skateboarding before it even starts. Sometimes this is the case, however the architect who designed these benches, failed in their brief massively. They made them from perfect marble and made what would be a perfect marble block a more interesting/challenging skate spot. The grind is short and sweet, if you can get up there, so a nollie flip out is precise!

Jensen’s paintings contain a high degree of realism that is offset by a kind of fantastical or surreal presence that can’t be explained. (The one I saw had what looked like a floating reflective blob in a normal street scene.) They have a disquieting, mysterious quality that resists easy explanation. “I like the way in which Franc Aurbach makes a painting float between abstraction and figuration,” says Jensen. “I was attracted to similar ideas, something that exists as a real object but resists definition. I am interested in stuff with peculiar qualities. In this way it’s related to skateboarding, very simply because skateboarding is a rather peculiar activity.” In a recent interview, Nick said that unlike skating, “art doesn’t hurt more as you get older.” When asked if artmaking is mostly a pleasurable process for him, he was quick to revise his statement. “That was a pretty stupid comment,” he said. “I probably meant physically that it doesn’t hurt. But I don’t think art should be all about pleasure, you have to take on a lot of considerations

106 lookingfor.

when making something. It’s not just having a beer, chucking some paint onto a canvas.” There is also a high degree of technical proficiency in his work, which includes some very meticulously rendered objects, as if his clean and precise approach to skateboarding has translated into his art. “I used to be super anal and cut my paint brushes down to make sure I could get every little bit of detail in. My back used to stiffen up, [laughs] so now painting hurts.” Nick’s images also feature an abundance of architectural imagery, implying a relation to his identity as a skateboarder and the way in which we pay attention to cities in such a focused way. “There are certain styles of architecture I think are cool,” said Nick, “like Art Deco, I love the Chrysler building in N.Y.C. for example, and Modernist architecture, such as Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye. This also includes social housing such as Robin Hood Gardens, and famously, in London, The Trellick Tower. I suppose this relates to skateboarding because I grew up skateboard-

Neomarble, 2011 oil on linen, 17.1cm x 28.8cm

ing at South Bank, which is a classic example of this Modernist design. There is a lot of reinforced concrete— it’s kind of disgusting and amazing at the same time.” Nick takes inspiration from fellow Brit, and master painter, Lucien Freud, who also works with a psychologically unsettling twist on realism. “I think he is an amazing man and artist. I like his stubbornness,” Jensen says of Freud “He was born pretty recently after the development of Cubism in a time when painting was changing dramatically. He stuck to his idea of painting and continued to obsessively study the human figure. He was more of a traditionalist in a way, he didn't want to be at the forefront of an art movement, he just wanted to do his own thing.” When asked if there were any other painters he was into, Nick said, “I like a lot of painters, some really recently I have seen like James Viscardi, Steven Allan, Ryan Mosley. Slightly more established painters such as William Daniels, Daniel Sinsel, Ansel Krut, Glenn Brown, Johnathan Monk. He makes all kinds of stuff, but he is

.anewengland 107

an interesting painter. And then old school dudes: Picasso, Cessanne, Aurbach, Bacon, Frued. And then ancient dudes: Van Dyke, Frans Hals, Vameer, Valesquez, and so on...” But don’t worry, Nick isn’t done skating yet. He’s traveling to Berlin for a little skateboarding adventure in the near future, and is currently filming for various upcoming projects. So for now anyway, full-time painting can wait. But one thing is sure, whatever Nick is doing, we’re interested.

5-0, Clerkenwell. I met Nick at his house and we skated through the streets to Clerkenwell. We didn’t find any spots on the way to this one, but Nick was telling me that Hold Tight Henry had found a spot on Google Maps and that I was going to shit my pants when I saw it! I didn’t (thankfully,) but I wasn’t far off when Jensen made this 5-0. The ledge run-up isn’t that wide on either side of the metal girder holding the gate, so Nick had to ollie over that and then into 5-0 four feet up on a round rail, and then pop off as it goes into the wall. Next level stuff. Kickflip, Southbank. Southbank has been given a big revamp recently. They have resurfaced everything with the best granite you have ever seen or skated. Not really. Instead, they put a railing up so the hordes of passerby’s don’t get boards shooting out towards them. So now when you skate there you get to know how it feels to be an animal in a zoo more than ever. The good thing about this railing is it opens doors: theres is a bit more room along the side and it’s added a new dimension to skating there as it has a really high bar to do tricks over like kickflips. Maybe it was thought up by the same architect that made those benches!

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distributed by Ultimate

vol. 9 no. 4

Ben Paterson

Dennis Busenitz

Chris Pfanner

Geoff Rowley

wordsby matt meadows

David Gravette

photosby andrew mapstone

hen people think of Ontario and Quebec they immediately associate the two provinces with a few key things: hot summers, cold winters, and Canada’s colonial past. As the English and the French fought over Upper and Lower Canada, it’s unlikely that they ever imagined that the two distinct provinces would eventually hold some of the nation’s most populated and culturally diverse cities.

Aaron Suski

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Taking full advantage of the historic area’s distinct nature and copious skate spots, Volcom decided to enlist their grade A pros and send them on a 10-day tour across Ontario and Quebec. The roster of colonial trail assailants included Geoff Rowley, Aaron Suski, David Gravette, Dennis Busenitz, Chris Pfanner, and Canadian ams Adam Green and Ben Paterson. Our retracing of Canada’s colonial past began in Toronto. As members of our convoy arrived throughout Friday night from far-off locations, some played it safe with an early tuck-in, while others opted for a night on the town. We arrived at a small skate bar in the heart of downtown, where Suski, Floris Gierman and myself were excited to find an impromptu game of s.k.a.t.e. taking place in the basement. After several bad falls due to spilt beer, we realized it might not have been such a hot idea to join in after all. Sunrise approached faster than we expected, and ended our sampling of the mega city’s hospitality. That morning, our group of ama(top) Geoff Rowley, Switch nose bluntslide.

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teur cultural enthusiasts met at a greasy spoon for a gas-up in preparation for the day’s events. After a spot of tea and a cup of joe, we piled into our respective vehicles and headed toward Ashbridges. When we reached the park we were taken aback by the welcome from several hundred soon-to-be sunburnt fans. With the afternoon hours reaching peak heat, the crew took to the park, and within a blink, the demo had began. The level of skating was something likely never seen before at this park. But like all good things in life, the show came with a price. Flying in all the way in from Germany, Chris Pfanner blew out his ankle on a massive ollie as the demo winded down. Armed with a sharpie and several imported German pilsners, Pfanner fueled the stoke of the crowd through an impromptu ankle-icing and autograph session. Once the sun had begun to set on the solid four-hour demo, it was back to the vans for

(bottom) Dennis Busenitz, Bluntslide kickflip out.

(opposite) Ben Paterson, goes front feeble in proper form.

an evening of heavy bowling at Volcom’s Bowl Shop Battle. Volcom had invited numerous retailers from the Toronto area, and the shop battle helped level the field between the Pros and shop employees. What was clear though, was that individual style remains the same on or off the board. For example, Aaron Suski threw the ball with a casual, smooth style, while Dennis Busenitz literally ran from the canteen stand before throwing his ball at the unsuspecting pins. After our full day of cross-training, some of the team again opted for an early night, while Floris, Gravette, Suski and myself again decided to head into the city, this time under the watchful eye of local rep Tarek Elmas. What began with a few harmless shots turned into a chug-off between

Gravette and Suski with a bottle of Jameson. Needless to say, it was the Jameson who eventually lost. The next morning our heads pounded and visions of 5am. lawn bowling still haunted us, but we were off to battle the streets of Toronto. Local, Jay Scullard, took our entourage to many spots throughout the day, and some serious hammers were laid down, despite upset stomachs from the night before. Once the afternoon’s session had culminated, it was off to bed to prepare for our drive to Ottawa the next day. We arrived in the nation’s capital with the gang eager to check out the streets. Rowley wanted to save himself for the next day, so in true English pioneer fashion, he decided

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Aaron Suski, no comply tailslide in Montreal.

to take a solo wander around the city to find some spots. The rest of us had not yet gotten a hold of local tour guide Mitch Barrette, so we proceeded to the more well-known Ottawa spots. We narrowly avoided being rained out, and the group ended up at the famous Dow’s lake rail where Dennis found an alternate route up the 7 stairs. Since we’d already given our bodies a day to recover from drink, we thought it was time to fall back off the wagon. So we decided to join local Andrew Rashotte for his Make-A-Wish photo show: “Our Streets On Canvas” that was taking place at a favorite

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haunt of his. After a barrage of drinks of every colour, shape, and size, David Gravette began to utter mumblings of wanting a new tattoo. Sparked by an idea from who knows where, David proclaimed he wanted to get the words “METH BRETH” inked on the inside of his lips. We thought nothing of it and the group adjourned before another day of street skating. The next morning it turned out that what we all thought was a funny joke made under the influence, was in fact dead serious. David had full intentions of getting a tattoo later that day. So as the crew parted ways, some

David Gravette, nosegrind fakie.

No need for wax in the rain, Dennis Busenitz boardslide. (opposite) Dennis Busenitz lip slides throughout the stratosphere.

to get gnarly, and others to get even gnarlier, we were made to promise to arrive at the demo later that day. At the demo we were stoked to find out that Ottawa legend and Volcom flow team rider Richard Sarazin would be skating with us. Never has the skatepark seen such tranny destruction, as the Stone riders each found their niche obstacle, and Pfanner once again manned the marker with great pride. We split our colony again into a multicar convoy and trailblazed our way to Montreal. Rowley pumped several obscure Motörhead tracks, and I imagined how much faster the battles between the French and the English would have been fought if they’d had his iPod playlist. The following day, waking up, the

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clouds unleashed a torrential downpour upon the city. So with an escape to dry surfaces in mind, Adam Green took some of our team members to the NDG bowl. Saturday’s demo in Montreal turned out fans both young and old. Packing Le Taz to capacity, our already stacked team was joined by Montreal Volcom riders Pat Tremblay, Gab Lalande, and Toronto’s Jayden Bono. And although most of the people who showed up were merely expecting to witness carnage on a professional level, the ams more than held their own when standing shoulder to shoulder with the pros. The most notable am showings came from Ben Paterson’s front blunt down the big rail, young Jayden’s frontside flip on an awkward quarter pipe, Gab

Lalande’s boardslide up the 7-stair rail, Pat Tremblay’s general domination of the course, and Adam Green’s massive nollie bigspin over the hip. We completed the session and hit the road with our sights set on the final stop: Quebec City. When we arrived at the home of the bloody Plains of Abraham, like so many travellers before us, it became priority number one to find our watering hole for the night. The city seemed fairly dead, but we were able to find a friendly place to grab a cold pint. Sunday brought weary bones for some, but high spirits for all, and as the demo commenced it was obvious the crew was down to make the last big push. Sweating it out in a hockey arena-turned skatepark, everyone quickly found their

favorite obstacle. Once again for Gravette, it was a mega-steep quarterpipe, while Suski and Busenitz seemed to enjoy the pyramid. It was unclear initially what Geoff favoured on the course as he pumped around to scope things out, but shortly thereafter, he put on a one-man demo on the steep slant ramp. Looking back on the 10-day adventure, I can honestly say I feel privileged to have travelled in such amazing company. The calibre of skateboarding, and the individual personalities, will undoubtedly be hard to recreate. And even now, as I wonder if there will ever be another trip like this again, I can’t help but think of our colonial forefathers, and how much they proved that you never can tell what lies on the road ahead.

[ o ] STIRLING

David Gravette / Color 9.1

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QUIKSILVER

SKATEBOARDING

COLLECTION

vol. 9 no. 4

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DUSTY YAUILLA switch frontside flip [ o ] jones. 125

126 DAVID REYES feeble grind [ o ] broach.

DEVIN MORRISON backside 180 nosegrind [ o ] thorburn.

CHRIS ST-CYR crail [ o ] mathieu.

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SPENCER HAMILTON backside heelflip [ o ] clifford. 129

ROLL WITH US.

anywhere / anytime

DIGITAL EDITIONS INSTANT ACCESS TO: ANIMATED SEQUENCES, SECOND ANGLES AUDIO INTERVIEWS SAVE 44% OFF COVER PRICE + TREES FOR MORE SKATEBOARDS! colORMAGAZINE.CA Scan and Subscribe.

The Hollow Tree

Cows & Cousins

dir. buster o’shea & hunter o’shea

daniel j. pierce (ramchackle pictures)

Hailing from the wasteland of transient retirees that is Arizona, Buster and Hunter O’Shea give the skate world A Happy Medium 2, sequel to A Happy Medium [2008]. The original became an instant classic among skateboarders and was (still is) exactly what a local video should be. A Happy Medium 2 is consistent with its predecessor in that it is an honest portrait of what skateboarding is: struggle, excitement, pain, mishaps, and most importantly, good times. There have been some switch-ups in the cast, with most of your favourites, but also some new guys like Riley Hawk and John Motta, who closed the curtains in the original, and opens them this second time around with his quirky and location-inspired skateboarding. On the opposing end, Aaron “Jaws” Homoki, who had first part in the original, closes this one out, and shows us that he does in fact deserve that brand new pro model from Birdhouse. You’ll watch this video for the names mentioned above, but you’ll keep watching it for others, like Josh Hawkins, Jeff Stevens, John Rob Moore, and Tyler Franz. —ben hlavacek

Imagine you went in front of your hometown’s city council and you asked them to build a skatepark and they said “No, but if you find the money, you can do it yourself.” So the first thing you do is recruit a bunch of skilled locals to donate their services, then you start fundraising and making construction plans. But you just can’t seem to get there, and the city is breathing down your neck to come up with the money, and naysayers who just don’t understand the importance of your project keep telling you that you’re wasting money and time, until eventually you just pour the damn concrete yourself and make it happen overnight, before the city can scrap your plan and crushes your dream. If you were a skateboarder, you’d probably go to jail, but if you’re a friend of The Hollow Tree, and are now responsible for saving one of Vancouver’s most beloved cultural landmarks, despite the adversity, you become a folk hero. Check out this quirky documentary and prepare to get inspired by a small, but passionate group of citizens determined to save a huge piece of dead wood. —dan post

Everyone loves a good homie video, and Cows & Cousins is no exception. They’re a reminder to us all that skateboarding is about fun, and bros, and getting darts impaled into your back. The video features a roster of notable Vancouver locals such as Chris Connolly, Nate Lacoste, Gio Namini, Jamie Maley, and several more. Vancouver sets the stage for 90% of the video, with a little sprinkle of Arizona after a road trip made by some of the fellas. Bud Patterson and Adam Cassidy have a split part that surprised the hell out of me. I hadn’t seen shredding from those guys since Homegrown’s Burning Whale Project. I was also happy to see some appearances by dudes who are normally behind the lens. Ben Stoddard and Dave Ehrenreich, the masterminds behind Don’t Sleep Productions both have a banger or two, and both creators of the video have full parts. This video will make you want to grab your camera, your bros, and go film your homies bust massive 180s over a gap into the street while security tries to kick you out. Just watch out for cars.

A Happy Medium 2

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jeff falconer & lee saunders (don’t sleep productions)

—joel martell

vol. 9 no. 4

RUSS MILLIGAN intro and photoby gordon nicholas

orth Vancouver legend/resident by Summer, San Francisco local come winter, Russ Milligan has been making the trek between these two great cities for some time now. Admirer of good wine, strong coffee, and cold beer, Russ has become accustomed to the good things in life through his many travels over the years. I was able to catch up with him for a minute and ask him some more about who and what else Russ looks up to, as well as what he wants us to look out for.

SKATE SPOT

SPORTS TEAM

— Streets of S.F. / The White Plaza in Portugal

— Canucks / Philadelphia Eagles

VANCOUVER SUBURB

CANADIAN SLANG

SKATE VIDEO

PRO

— North Van / North Van

— Green Apple / Mouse

TRAVEL COMPANIONS — Think team / Kevin Lowry

SKATEPARK

— True / Anything from the rez

— Jake Johnson / Adrian Williams

— Paul Liliani / Josh Matthews

STANCE

— Dunbat / Ambleside

— Regular / Goofy

CITY

FLIP TRICK

— S.F. / Vancouver

— Kickflip / Switch flip

VISIT HOME

NORTH VAN SPOT

— Christmas / Multi-wedding trip last July

— Lonsdale Quay / The courts R.I.P.

MANUAL

GUILTY PLEASURE

— Nose manual / Kenny Anderson

WEAPON OF CHOICE

— Day beers / NFL Sundays

SESSION AT AMBLESIDE

— Golf club / Eggs

— Hopefully soon. / Any given day between 1997 and 2005

MUNCHY

WAY TO SPEND A RAINY AFTERNOON

— Maple bacon donut / Ms Vickies salt and vinegar chips

— Drink coffee / Get creative

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vol. 9 no. 4

DIET COKEHEADS

MISTER HEAVENLY

ocular (vinyl rites)

Thank God for bands like the Diet Cokeheads. Seriously. Thank God that people are still able to master their craft so meticulously that they can actually create something totally new that does not totally suck. How do I explain this? Florida’s Diet Cokeheads don’t sound like they are from Florida. In fact, they don’t even sound like they are of this earth at all. Ocular is unforgiving punk that cannot be boxed into a genre. “Gay Goters” introduces evil like you’ve never heard it before. Like a guilty rapist, the song starts off gentle, smudged and eerie, allowing you to settle in safely before it grabs your throat and throws you down. The guitars are wild and puzzlepieced throughout the powerhouse drums and bass. Flip the record to find “Dumptruck,” a song shrill with child-like screams and terrifying male roars. It’s up and down. It’s complicated. It scares the shit out of you, but you are hooked on the confusion. It’s merciless and it is fucking great. —mish way

WOODEN SHJIPS west (thrill jockey)

If you can depend on Wooden Shjips for anything, it’s their tenacity to stick within their own invented version of hard psych. Little has changed in the two years since their last lost long player, the somewhat subdued Dos, was released. Sure, Ripley Johnson, the band’s singer and lead guitarist, has been, for lack of a better word, moonlighting with his wife in Moon Duo, but the songs here remain the same. If anything, the Shjips sound on West has become more polished and the playing is a little looser than the previous lockstep grinds we’ve come to know them for. Where those early singles and the debut album were shrouded in a thick coat of slashed-speaker fuzz, West has notched up the production and put forth the band’s most clear and crisp sound thus far. From the Crazy Horse buzz of “Home” to the head spinning bop of “Looking Out,” West is as loose as this band gets. If you can’t get enough of the hypno-psych rock these guys have been dishing for years, head out West. —mark richardson

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out of love (sub pop)

A three-piece composed of Nick Thorburn (Islands/The Unicorns), Ryan “Honus Honus” Kattner (Man Man), and Joe Plummer (Modest Mouse), Mister Heavenly is a bit of an indie rock super-group. They have even been signed to Sub Pop without anyone even knowing who the band was. Adding to the super-group status, they are doing a West Coast tour with television and film star Michael Cera on bass and occasional piano. Mister Heavenly is a band that is hard to pin down musically. With elements of art-punk, grunge and indie rock, and nods toward 50s vocal-based R&B, they end up with a very eclectic pop, indie-rock sound that is heavy on vocal arrangements, with Thorburn and Kattner trading off on frontman duties. Mister Heavenly has even created it’s own subgenre called Doom Wop, which is described to be thought of as more of a state of mind or attitude than an actual genre. —mackie square-brix

PURE X

pleasure (acephale)

Have you never been mellow? Have you never tried? Well Austin, Texas’s Pure X has tried, and succeeded, on this their first album Pleasure. This isn’t sipping on drinks at the beach with your best pals kind of music, this is comatose in a bathtub full of ice. There are some songs like “Dream Over” and “Voices” that are reminiscent of The Jesus & Mary Chain, especially vocally, and a lot of them sound sort of like that really long middle part of Sonic Youth’s “The Diamond Sea.” Pleasure was recorded completely live off the floor without any overdubbing, stressing the importance and looseness of the raw song and recording mistakes as they come, when they come, and welcoming them as part of the song. Handsome and talented, very sparse, and very patient, these 10 songs are heart-felt and sonically original: unafraid to move in different directions and never feeling too claustrophobic. If you wanna mellow the fuck out, and I mean Mellow. The. Fuck. Out, then listening to Pleasure will be a real... ahem... pleasure. —bobby lawn

BABE RAINBOW endless path ep (warp)

Babe, pig in the city, is that you? No, it’s just Babe Rainbow, otherwise known to civilians as Vancouverite and Music Waste organizer, Cameron Reed. His latest output on Warp, Endless Path starts out with blasts of drums and flute over dark bodies of moody, eerie ambiance, that almost make you think of a horror version of a jazz-fusion ensemble, but that tune quickly changes. With haunted, atmospheric, minimal jams, Reed explores the deep dark depths of his demented ginger mind. This is mostly instrumental heavy creep music, with vocals only appearing on one track, “Greed,” provided by Yung Clova of the Huntsville, Alabama hip-hop duo G-Side. “Set Loose” utilizes a beat that was originally intended for Youtube superstar Lil’ B. Cam Reed is truly a spooked man and a deeply tortured artist. I once saw him crying at a sunset, and when I asked him what was wrong he replied, “I held a baby dolphin today. It was beautiful.” —justin gradin

THE GROUP SOUND secret girlfriend (total disconnected)

Normally I hate it when bands try to do the whole period piece thing. You know, paying homage to a musical era by ripping off that style of music directly and even going so far as to dress in the appropriate “vintage” or develop unnecessary accents. However, The Group Sound, a 1960s revival outfit from Edmonton, Alberta, do not piss me off. In fact, their single “Secret Girlfriend” has been stuck in my brain like a bubble gum jingle for days. Named after a genre of Japanese garage rock that spawned in the post-Beatles 1960s, The Group Sound do not shy away from their references. Frontman Matt Israelson’s buttery voice croons over jangling guitar riffs—layered with just the right amount of reverb—and thick, chugging bass lines as Jessica Kyca’s back-ups, tambourine and keyboards keep everything neatly packaged together. Secret Girlfriend is 30 minutes of sing-a-long songs about dating, love, “my darling,” and all that gushy stuff. It’s clever, catchy and cute, so please don’t tell the punks I like it. Wink. —mish way

SOFT METALS

s/t (captured tracks)

Patricia Hall and Ian Hicks met at an audition that Ian was holding to find a vocalist to front his moody synth landscapes. There they fell in love and now they are boyfriend and girlfriend—isn’t that just the cutest thing? The musical result is the Portland, Oregon, duo Soft Metals. With a 12-inch EP The Cold World Melts and split 7-inch with Jewels Of The Nile under their belts, Soft Metals here offers up their first self-titled album on label Captured Tracks. A collection of nostalgic sounding synth-pop, new wave, and firstwave industrial-influenced songs, this album has a hint of post-punk but it also sounds very fresh and new and of it’s own. Patricia has an extremely dreamy voice that is easy to get lost in, and even when mixed together with cuckoo sounding drum machines, Ian’s synths, and whatever other electronics they’ve used, the music still maintains a very warm vibe that makes you want to shake a tail feather at the local discotheque y’all. —mackie square-brix

LUKE ROBERTS big bells & dime songs (thrill jockey)

Ever notice how skateboarders these days are so into the woods and acoustic guitars? But, if they were really into the woods and acoustic guitars then they wouldn’t skateboard or play acoustic guitars. Anyway, this Luke Roberts album Big Bells & Dime Songs is all acoustic guitar driven, and all-American. For example the song “All American.” There are other instruments on this too. Drums for sure. A piano also appears. A very ‘mid-West country air blowing through your precious locks kind of an album. There are songs on here about all sorts of topics, and Luke sure isn’t afraid to bust into any subject. He even talks about being tired of having black people come and visit him, “Heaven’s to betsy, nigger knocking at my door/ Heaven’s to betsy, I get bored”, he sings on “Just Do It Blues” (which I think is a song about working in a Nike factory.) Every song makes you think of running away from your mom who wants to put you in hair dressing school, and hopping on a train with your best girlfriends. Sisters are doing it for themselves! —mildred smith

FANCY SPACE PEOPLE

NO UFOs

mind controls the flood (public information)

s/t (starry records)

From the opening notes on Fancy Space People’s self-titled first track, you get a real psych/glitter/girl-group/cult impression, and even when the beat picks up, and the guitars get loud, that impression remains. But of course, who could expect anything else from the supreme freak mind of Don (D’on) Bolles, famously known as the drummer of The Germs, etc., with assistance of singer No-Ra Keyes, and a cast of musicians including Billy Corgan on guitar. Speaking of Billy Corgan, he has started a label that has released nothing, and this EP came out on a subsidiary of this label that has released nothing. The world truly is a vampire. Along with some catchy 60s psych vibes, this 12-inch 45 rpm EP is chock-full of weirdo alien cult worship, with songs like “Pleiadian Youth” and their opening theme song, all set to a soundtrack that brings to mind early Bowie, T.Rex, and even Queen with some of the arrangements. All songs are broadcasted to you by the band via a race of invisible space creatures from “fancy space,” who have been delivering them messages to be presented to the people of Earth through the music. All hail the Xxenogenesis!! —justin gradin

Last year, Vancouver’s own No UFOs issued a self-released cassette limited to a mere 100 copies that eventually bent the ear of everyone who heard it. Blogs caught on, WFMU started playing it, and rave reviews began to pile up for the out-of-nowhere debut. A follow-up cassette came soon after and was gobbled up just as quick. Now No UFOs (the name is ripped from a classic Juan Atkins techno track) has hit it big with a new vinyl-only 12-inch, released on a new UK-based label, Public Information. Mind Controls the Flood is hard to categorize, much like their debut album. Seamlessly blending the disparate elements of kraut rock and Detroit techno, coupled with undercurrents of chilling ambience, Mind Controls... is an inspired work from an artist that truly knows his musical history. The record plays much like a single piece, slowly and effortlessly morphing from crumbling electronics to Faust-inspired guitar work, over an all-toobrief 20-minute run time. No doubt a strange and puzzling trip, but one that will have you ceaselessly flipping the record to uncover its mysterious content. —mark richardson

ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER

STEPHEN MALKMUS AND THE JICKS

replica (software/mexican summer)

Over his five preceding albums, Brooklyn’s Oneohtrix Point Never (aka Daniel Lopatin) has proven himself a master of that strain of ambient electronic music that reinterprets once-maligned New Age sounds by filtering them back through the kosmiche German psychedelia that most of them came from in the first place. On Replica, Lopatin doesn’t stray too far from his previous work, but this is still a first-rate album of drone-heavy space out music steeped in his trademark atmosphere of melancholic sci-fi paranoia. As the title suggests, Replica invokes shades of Vangelis’ elegiac Blade Runner soundtrack. Short, overlapping loops of decayed piano-and-strings samples suggest a future suffused with nostalgia for the past. The music’s dispersed layers are also haunted by scraps of voices, often pitch-shifted into genderless alien or cyborg tones. The overall sensation, sticking with the sci-fi metaphor, is of being plugged into a psionic interface in which the self becomes dispersed in a sea of other minds, all floating in a crystalline miasma where the bass tone is the sound of the universe itself, breathing in and out. Deep listening only. —saelan twerdy

mirror traffic (matador)

The first words on Stephen Malkmus’ new album are, “I saw you streaking in your Birkenstocks / a scary thought / In the 2-Ks.” It’s a typical scrap of his oblique wit, but the fact that he can so confidently pontificate about what’s cool and what’s not goes to show that the former Pavement frontman’s own rep remains pretty secure. Stephen enlisted Beck to produce this latest effort, making this a super-team perfectly positioned to take advantage of burgeoning 90s nostalgia. Don’t expect any “Loser”-era slackerism or throwbacks to classic Pavement shambling, though: both guys are far too settled in their maturity to attempt to recapture past (anti-heroic) glories. Beck’s touch on the mixing boards is subtle, mostly restricted to warming up the tone and inserting the odd horn arrangement or lap steel accent, but his influence reins in Malkmus’ guitar-dad self-indulgence and beefs up his pop chops. Album opener “Tigers” is the catchiest tune Malkmus has penned in two or three albums, and nearly all of these songs are compact, memorable, and replete with wry musings on aging in an absurd country. Good stuff. —saelan twerdy

FUCKED UP

ONEIDA

david comes to life (matador)

When Fucked Up leader Damian Abraham opens his mouth, he doesn’t sing: he growls, screams, and generally does whatever he can to tear his vocal chords to shreds. But despite the frontman’s unhinged style, there’s no shortage of subtlety and beauty on David Comes to Life, an ambitious rock opera romance about a factory worker set against the backdrop of a fictional town in Thatcherite, Britain. Following an atmospheric instrumental overture, “Queen of Hearts” gets the album off to a sweetly tuneful start, as Cults singer Madeline Follin stops by to sing a drop-dead gorgeous chorus. Things only get catchier from there: “The Other Shoe” brims with chiming guitar licks and hypnotic, manta-like refrains, while “A Little Death” pairs Abraham’s hollering with a sublime background vocal hook. With 18 songs and a run-time of well over an hour, David Comes to Life is an exhausting listen. Luckily, the quality is consistent enough to make it worth your while. With its bountiful melodic treats, this just might be the album to convince your pop-loving friends to listen to hardcore punk. —alex hudson

absolute ii (jagjaguwar)

New York’s long-running trio Oneida finally finish their Thank Your Parents trilogy with the release of Absolute II. The trilogy began with the spaced-out Preteen Weaponry, and was followed by the centerpiece of the triptych, Rated O: a triple album that ranged from blistering club bangers to side-long psych sprawls, and was overloaded with ideas and songs that had probably sat on the trio’s backburner for years. After such a varied and hectic middle section, Oneida ends the trilogy on an intriguing, though somewhat anticlimactic note. However, taken as a whole, Absolute II is actually the perfect comedown from the sprawling intensity that was Rated O. Veering confidently between moments of Eno-esque dark ambience and bleak soundscapes that are more fitting as an alternate version of the Eraserhead soundtrack, the four 10-minute tracks here contain none of the complex rhythms we’ve come to expect from an Oneida record. Instead, we’re handed the final piece of this trilogy and left confounded and wondering what they could possibly dream up next. —mark richardson

Bon Iver

BARN OWL

s/t (jagjaguwar)

After 2007’s For Emma, Forever Ago, we all knew that Bon Iver songwriter Justin Vernon had a knack for hushed, intimate folk. Few, however, could have expected him to follow his debut with such a game-changing masterpiece as this. A far cry from the stark, rustic arrangements of its predecessor, this album is an expansive studio-crafted effort that draws on the diverse instrumental talents of a large cast of contributors. Opener “Perth” swells with towering horns and clattering, militaristic drums, while the standout “Calgary” glides by on a warm bed of pillowy synths. These ornate, percussionheavy arrangements help to highlight the R&B leanings that have always been present in Vernon’s breathy falsetto and lush vocal layering. The collection closes with its most unexpected stylistic foray, “Beth/Rest:” a schmaltzy soft rock tune with keyboard textures that wouldn’t sound out of place on an Enya album. This blatantly cheeseball finale could easily come across as gimmicky, but like the rest of Bon Iver, it’s a charming triumph from a songwriter who refuses to be pigeonholed. —alex hudson

lost in the glare (thrill jockey)

Ridiculously prolific San Franciscan duo, Barn Owl, have been steadily building a fan base for their scorched-desert brand of drone and psych since 2007. Many of their releases, including very limited CDRs, cassettes and LPs, have disappeared at an astonishing rate, not to mention the releases of both members’ solo projects. This situation has been remedied thanks to longrunning indie stalwart Thrill Jockey, who has put forth the first widely available release. The duo, who have recorded much of their past material themselves, have enlisted the help of producer and real life guitar hero Phil Manley (Fucking Champs, Trans Am, Jonas Reinhardt) for Lost In the Glare, to help bring Barn Owl’s twin guitar drone mantras to a pristine clarity. They’ve also brought in the help of some outsiders, adding percussion, clarinet, piano, and a tanpura (an electronic tambura), all of which have helped flesh out their normally straightforward approach to guitar drone. Lost In The Glare is probably the record that Barn Owl have always wanted to make, thanks to some outside help and a growing interest in the group. —mark richardson colORMAGAZINE.CA

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vol. 9 no. 4

wordsby gordon nicholas

â&#x20AC;&#x201D;

Know Show (Spring Ahead)

ast to West, and North to South, the Summer is always a time when we venture out of the bat caves and into the throng of good weather parties. From the KnowShow and Agenda trade shows, to our magazine release party, film premiers, and Circa and Sitka parties, there's no better time to dust off those old drinking shoes and make your way to the pub for a pint or three.

Resse Forbes

Nugget & Sluggo

Torey Goodall

Dustin Henry

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JS Lapierre

Micky Papa & Friend

Max Osburn & Pete Hall-Patch

Alfred Lai & Nathalia Rodriguestop

Tyler Gauthier & Killer

Arron Shuttleworth, Tyler Klassen & Tom Holbrook

Maddie Hibbard, Mike Peperdine & Mel Greene

Bradley Sheppard

Stephanie Van Rooij

Conlan Killeen, Joe Buffalo & Dane Pryds

photosby nicholas, martell, & goldberg

Drea, Nate Lacoste, Jamie Maley & Friend

Mackenzie Meeker & Ben Gulliver

Kenny Anderson & Gershon Mosley

Dario Phillips, Colin Nogue & Landon Stirling

Wes Loates & Jimmy Decaire

distributed by Ultimate

dylan

congratulations on winning the transworld skateboarding readerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s choice award

dylan rieder/ gravisskateboarding.com

vol. 9 no. 4

—

Billy Rohan

N words and photoby alexis gross 1. There’s a YouTube video I came across the other day of you at a March for Marijuana… Yeah that was a funny one. We were at Tompkins Square Park heckling each other with the mega-mic like we always do and we see this rally going on so we figured why not go and fuck with them. They still didn’t get that we were just kidding and the irony of it all was that I was wearing an Angel Dust hat and an Acalpulco Gold shirt. Whatever though, the video ended up on High Times. I really like the smell of pot. 2. What’s up with the ninja front side flip over the rail at the Brooklyn Banks? We thought it would be really funny to do a skate video to the RZA song Samurai Showdown. As a skater you grow up watching all the different kung fu movies and in the back of your mind you wish that you were a ninja. With all the tricks needed for the length of the song, it ended up taking four years to produce because we had to wait for Halloween to roll around each year. It was the only time we could skate around the city in ninja costumes without getting shot at. 3. So you did a backflip off a cop car to end up in the back of one. Why? When I was 18 I moved to Europe with this girl that I met and I was doin’ a lot of partying and skating a lot back then. So, I’m goin’ from a contest in Innsbruck, Austria to one in Prague, Czech and instead of flying with the rest of the guys, I decide to get a rental car and get a drive because I wanted to see the country side. I end up getting pulled over and I’m trying to convince this cop that I’m sober and so I just ran up to his car and did a backflip off his car which landed me straight in the nut house for two weeks. I was trying to explain that I’m a professional athlete and that I was there for the contests but they just wouldn’t believe it until my distributor gathered enough info for them to understand. I’ve never been the same since. It’s definitely what made me crazy. 4. Wait, all that acid didn’t make you crazy? Uh... hm... hmm... uh. Drugs are bad for ya.

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ew York Skate Ambassador Billy Rohan has established himself as one of the most innovative and crazy motherfuckers in the industry. Now taking a more serious turn in life, the husband-to-be still finds time to push around the city, teach, take classes at NYU, run the park at 12th and A, and live like there’s no tomorrow. Normally Tattered Ten is reserved for conversations under the influence, but Billy is both hilarious and crazy enough to do it stone-cold sober. I’m happy. At the end of the day average thought doesn’t accomplish great things. You have to become a little insane and desperate in your work because within that desperation lies a true commitment to what you’re doing.

“Fight, Fuck, or Freak out.” 5. Rumor has it you’re a freemason. Are you allowed to speak of this? I am a mason at Shakespeare Lodge #750 and what really got me into them was the art that was associated with the masonic fraternity and became an art handler at the Robert R Livingston Masonic Library for about a year. If you’re ever in N.Y.C. you should go take the tour of the building on 23rd street. The reality of the Masons is that they’re like the secret service for others and essentially they do work to benefit society as a whole. 6. How has Wu Tang tied in with skateboarding? It’s training music. It has the power to get you in the zone and do what you have to do. It’s kind of like if you meet a girl in high school and you fall in love and you know it’s not gonna work out but you wait ‘til she graduates college with a PhD then you know that everything’s gonna be good… So essentially the kids in the skate world, they’ve graduated with their PhDs and now are ready to take on Wu Tang as a serious thing in skating.

7. What was it like growing up in Gainesville? Well, its home of the Florida Gators [does a gator mouth with arms flailing]. It’s like a giant college town and one of the most beautiful cities in Florida as [far as] I’m concerned. If you grew up there it’s kind of fucked. The kids that grew up there, there wasn’t a lot of shit for you to do until you were in college so when you were 13, you were sneakin’ into keg parties at the colleges like goin’ full on, as hard as you can. That’s where I grew up. The older skater dudes that I was hangin’ out with liked to party and that’s where I was because that’s who I was hangin’ out with at the time. I skated in this thing called F.A.S.L. [Florida Amateur Skateboarding League] with Andrew Reynolds, Caine Gayle, Clyde Singleton, Kris Markovich, Jamie Thomas, and all of these other dudes who are huge now and even back then Reynolds was still the fuckin’ best. Hands down. If he showed up, you knew that he was winning. 8. Are you crazy? Yeah I’m crazy. I just got with that.

9. You threw shit at Chad Fernandez. This guy was super wasted. I go to say hi to two of my friends and he busts through and is like “Rohan, what the fuck!” and the dude starts trying to fight me and I hate fighting! I’m not a fighter. I kept trying to tell him to chill out and he wouldn’t listen so I told him that I’m gonna beat him like a bad child if he doesn’t. I tried to rip him off with my belt like Pootie Tang and he was kinda flustered by it so I walked away to go grab some horse shit from the Police station because I knew this guy wasn’t gonna stop. I go back up to ask him if he’s done and offer peace, lets end this and he went for it. He tried to swing so I went for it with the shit and it was on from there. He was just trying to fight for the attention but I didn’t even fight him back which was the funny part. He kind of just fought himself. Fuck it, eat shit mother fucker. Fuck that, literally. It went on for 10 minutes. I took off my Air Max’s and threw ‘em at him. It got pretty stupid. At the end of it though it was a funny conflict. I feel bad for him because he’s not a bad dude. When I drink I know one of the 3 F’s are gonna happen. Fight, Fuck, or Freak out. 10. Do girls ever get you in trouble? Yeah! One time Gershon Mosley punched me so hard in the face I thought I broke my neck. We were in Prague and he was talking to this girl and she’s kinda whack. I go up to the bar to get a drink and she takes my hat off my head and I told her don’t play I’m not in the mood just give me my hat back and the dude thought I was hitting on her so he runs up and hits me and that was it. All hell broke loose. My nose is crooked still from it! It makes a left hand turn. Live by the board, die by the board. Every girl in your life will let you down at some point but skating will always be there for you. I do love my fiancée and everything’s gonna work out... I hope. And I will work towards that. Nothing can cure a bad day like a game of s.k.a.t.e. though.

no. 4

Noseslides and 50-50's go together like gin and tonic; Sheldon Meleshinski and Alien go for doubles. nicholasphoto.

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vol. 9

SANDRO GRISON

co-founder / creative director

LINDA OUNAPUU

operations manager

GORDON NICHOLAS photo editor

DAVID KO

graphic design

GUEST TYPOGRAPHER eric cruikshank

MIKE CHRISTIE senior editor

MILA FRANOVIC fashion editor

JUSTIN GRADIN music editor

JENN JACKSON guest arts editor

DAN POST

copy editor

BEN TOUR illustration

CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

PRE PRESS

joel dufresne

INTERNS

joel martell, ben hlavacek

ISAAC MCKAY-RANDOZZI contributing web editor

aaron smith, alex hudson, alexis gross, andrew peters, ariana preece, ben hlavacek, benjamin deberdt, bobby lawn, dorothy rivers, jenn jackson, john rattray, kari cwynar, mackie square-brix, mark richardson, matt meadows, mildred smith, mish way, saelan twerdy

CONTRIBUTING ARTIST cycle This M a

aaron smith, alexis gross, andrew mapstone, andrew peters, babas levrai, bart jones, ben hlavacek, benjamin deberdt, braydon olsen, brent goldsmith, dan mathieu, dave bloom, david broach, david goldberg, geoff clifford, giovanni reda, jai tanju, jeff thorburn, joel hibbard, lex kembery, maggie west, malcolm elijah, mark oblow, rich odam, scott pommier, terry worona

Jamie Tancowny; post surgery scooter shredding. bloomphoto.

caliden j. robinson ga

Re ot

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FIFTEEN YEARS

PROUDLY INTRODUCING ISHOD WAIR

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