Respect Authority

Check out this totally extreme video I found linked on Adam Riff. It’s got all the ingredients for the makings of a fartsy phenomenon with just enough edge to convince the cool kids.

• A rad to the max action sport is featured - check
• Neon is involved somehow - check
• There is a blatant grab for the nostalgic - check
• Sweet techno music that would be pretty decent to listen to in some lower Manhattan vomit hole - check

Just so you know, that was the winning recipe on Food Network’s The Next Viral Video Star.

I was just about ready to sign this off as the coolest thing I’ve seen all week, but… 1) I see a whole lot of cool shit these days, 2) I apparently have some kind of fetish for lists today, and 3) THESE LOSERS ARE ON FREEBORDS.

Admittedly, I don’t even know exactly what a “freebord” is, but I do know that it’s yet another lame appropriation of skateboarding. Leaving the “a” out of “board” does not increase your street cred, sorry to say. Also, those helmets aren’t doing much for your cause either considering helmets are for babies. Aggressive Downhill Tetris is a most dangerous game, my friends. If you’re worried about that soft spot on your skull, maybe you should have stuck to playing normal Tetris with all the inside kids.

Having a particular day of the year set aside for skateboarding (June 21st) seems about as pointless as having a special day reserved for smoking copious amounts weed. If you really profess to be a skateboarder, every day should be a celebration of your slow, glorious decent into perpetual adolescence. Similarly, 4/20 is a great idea and all… except that most of us truly dedicated wastes of life smoke almost every single day of the year anyway. I guess it’s the thought that counts after all… so, thanks to whatever anonymous committee first took the whopping ten seconds to think of that idea.

However, if Santa Claus jumped down your chimney at the stroke of midnight every night like clockwork itself, wouldn’t Christmas just be business as usual? Indeed, if it was always Halloween, wouldn’t the skeleton king grow weary and bored, eventually seeking out different forms of holiday cheer, going on to inspire a claymation musical which would then make Hot Topic ludicrous sums of money for an entire decade?

Nonetheless, there are always those who try to make the special specialer, such as SLAP magazine, Adidas, and skate shop FTC who collaborated this past Go Skateboarding Day in San Francisco to put on the 7×7 Video Contest. The contest featured entrants from shops such as FTC SF, HUF SF, 35 North, and Skateworks, with each five-member team heading out into the streets of San Francisco to create a video part recreating iconic photography from the pages of SLAP’s past.

HUF just posted their finished video, which, admittedly, looks a little more fun than your average flat-ground session in the parking lot.

Now, if only they combined Go Skateboarding Day and 4/20 to form a massive black hole of slacker delights we might finally be talking about a real holiday. Hell, you might as well throw Talk Like a Pirate Day into the mix while you’re at it, just to make it that much more intolerable for the mundane majority. Ha ha, people with ambitions are dumb!

Why aren’t there more skate parks out there like this one they’re planning to build in San Francisco? Oh, right, probably because most of the time, skate parks are designed by oblivious city planners whose last experience with a skateboard was when they stepped on one twenty years ago in high school, fell in front of a crowd of laughing and jeering assholes (skateboarders), and vowed to make their hecklers pay by building parks with layouts so confounding that finding a line in them is like navigating The fucking Grape Escape.

San Francisco deserves a beautiful park full of realistic street obstacles considering the once mecca of street skating has slowly seen all its great ghosts of skateboarding past knobbed, destroyed, or otherwise exorcised. After all, most cities’ primary function is to crush hapless skaters back into the asphalt from which they came… unless of course they’re making the city a ton of cash for two weeks during the X-Games.

Skate parks are necessary considering the transient and nomadic nature of skating — this nature applies to spots as well. They come, they go, they’re infested with kooks on Razor scooters or security guards or, ugh, stupid pedestrians. Skate parks provide a haven for skaters who are but a tiny island in a sea of curbs and cracked pavement, and realistic street courses are essential for skaters looking to hone their skills in a place where they don’t have only two tries before a scary fat guy in a uniform comes lumbering over to ruin the fun. Read More ›