The legendary Santa Cruz Skateboard company have teamed up with Matt Groening of The Simpsons fame to produce a one off run of SC/Simpsons set ups and stickers this month. The 5 Cruzer completes are available to buy direct from the States over at the NHS Fun Factory website so if you know someone out there then mail them to order one for you. Full set ups cost about $144 and should bring a smile to your face today!
I think it’s weird that the majority of Americans get their foreskins chopped off. There’s something very unmetal about the idea of circumcision. I’m sure the act of it is gnarly and all, but the premise… it’s just too… too hygienic. It’s like saying “Let’s cut off our eyelids to stop getting eye boogies” and probably looks just as stupid. And It always reminds me of Kraftwerk for some reason. I don’t know why.
But I bet everyone at Creature has whooping great big,dangly, elephant trunk foreskins. I bet they trip up on them and can double them up as sleeping bags which keep them snug as a bug. A bug wrapped in a luminous green foreskin. I mean look at this dude that Mr.Skinner’s drawn for their ‘High On Fire‘ Limited edition board; he’s frozen solid. Probably because he hasn’t got any foreskin. You’d be surprised at what a couple of inches of skin can do to raise your body temperature. I wonder if the guys in High on Fire have foreskins? Maybe that’s why Sir Skinner chose to draw a frozen Ice barbarian; a bit of a private joke perhaps? Maybe Skinner specialises in Circumcision, hence his pseudonym… It’s all making sense now.
I’ll admit I haven’t listened to High on Fire in a while. I think it was around about the time that I heard they were touring with Mastodon and Converge that I stopped listening to them. I thought they were quite good, but they can’t be that good if they’re sharing a stage with fags like Mastodon and Converge. I thought I best pay the band a revisit in light of this review and even resolved to buy their latest LP. Admittedly I didn’t have a clue what their latest LP was called, so I got Bertha out and surfed the intergalactic cyber spaces in search of metal knowledge. It turns out they’ve got a wikipedia page dedicated solely to their latest album and everything. They must be famous. The album is called ‘Snakes of the Divine‘. Sounds a bit too biblical for my liking, but I suppose snakes are evil and evil is pretty cool. According to the LP’s wikipedia page “The album cover art and track listing were revealed on the band’s Myspace page on January 6, 2010.” ?! I stopped reading there because they’ve obviously been hanging round with Converge and Mastodon for too long and have turned in to complete pussies.
At this point I was starting to get confused; why would Creature release a skateboard in conjunction with a band who have overly detailed wikipedia pages? I put it down to the fact that the brutes at Creature probably don’t even know what the internet is and so have no idea about how unmetal High on Fire have become. They’re probably way too busy painting everything snot green, destroying concrete coping and having sex with hot horror punk girls. And hopefully punching them in the face afterwards and poking them with broomhandles whilst telling them how stupid and worthless they are and making them cry by telling them that her Stepdad gets off smelling her used underwear. Proper metal.
The size of this deck is proper metal. It’s fookin huge. 8.8″! It’s the same shape as Stu Graham’s pro board and he’s definitely proper metal. And the graphic is metal. It even comes with a special pack of three Creature/High on Fire Dunlop guitar pleks; which is kind of metal, sort of. And is a limited edition of only 400 and each one comes individually numbered. Which isn’t metal at all. But it has all the right things you need in a skateboard; made of wood, has holes in the right places and everything. So I’d recommend going and buying it. No, maybe go buy Sam Hitz’s new Creature board because I know French drew it and he’s got foreskin and isn’t in an unmetal metal band with multiple wikipedia pages.
Zombie
Fresh from sponsoring our Xmas Jam Mini Ramp comp and shelling out hard cash for those that earned it (Greg Nowick, Jed Cullen, Craig Coombs), Flip, Mob Grip and Ricta Wheels stored some goodies aside that weren’t included in the mammoth product toss to give away in this great little package!
Simply answer the question below for a chance to win all you see above. That’s a Flip Gold Alchemy deck (7.75″), Flip Magic Mushroom griptape from Mob Grip, a magic mushroom hoody (size L) to go with it and a set of Ricta All Stars in 54mm. Hot damn!
This competition ends on January 21st.
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Behold readers, on the right of this page your eyes are currently focussed on the very first deck to come from Bristol’s The Highbrow Company, skater-owned and operated by self-proclaimed skateboarding/fartist, Mike O’Shea.
Only fifty of them have been made, probably because if the rumours are true that by simply carrying the deck a person is made instantly trendy then we could have an epidemic of trendy bastards across the UK on our hand if this wood was mass-produced.
Anyway, we think it looks great and you can pick one up for yourself here.
A very Highbrow video is currently in the making also. If you haven’t peeped the trailer that dropped earlier this year then have a gander below. It’s got Chris Jones, Owen Hopkins, Jason Lewer and plenty more awesome people involved.
My interest in sports peaks in whatever novelty crossover Nintendo have got Mario involved in and up until this point, the italian plumber has raced in little cars that gobble shrooms and shit banana skins and has even engaged in tedious golf tournaments; but never has he jumped on the basketball bandwagon, even during the height of Fresh Prince tie-in possibilities. So the word, ‘Three-Peat‘, serving as the name for one of Chaz Ortiz’s trio of inaugural pro models, meant absolutely nothing to me other than it’s a terrible, terrible pun. What’s cute is that I’ve since discovered that a retired basketball coach had trademarked the portmanteau (a posh word sometimes used in place of ‘terrible, terrible pun’) ‘Three-Peat’ for commercial use. Thankfully, in later years, more people realised that making money out of a pun is as intensely stupid as making Mario play mini-golf so Zoo York had no legal trouble using the name for young Chaz’s three-peat success of boards. Fun fact: neither did we writing it in that last sentence. Why? Because it’s just a fucking pun.
Three-peat is the correct term however, as Zoo York have taken the tried and tested plain and simple approach and made three solid models making sure no one misses the point: Chaz Ortiz, the young gun and comp-destroyer picked up by the late legend Harold Hunter himself is a professional skateboarder and you can buy boards with his name on.
I’ve only rode one Zoo York in the past but have been equally pleased with the results. Their shape (and this comes in the glorious street skater’s dream size, 7.75″) is spot-on, complete with expertly crafted dips in the concave that help provide an instant sense of excellent board control, response and subsequently gives you more confidence while skating, which I haven’t noticed in a deck in some time. Feet-on manoevres are so simple with Zoo York, so if you’re out to learn 360s for the first time then it wouldn’t be out of line to give them a go on this. It’s mad durability may take you by surprise too. As someone who favours ugly spots that tear up decks faster than the notorious blue shell I was stunned by how intact this deck has remained. Not a single chip, no pressure crackes, no ugly grom scratches on the graphic from where it looks like I’ve been boardsliding a rock (which I had).
So this one is undoubtedly exclusively for the street skaters, but as the second ZY deck I’ve loved to ride in a row I feel tempted to make a threepeat purchase (hohohohohoho) and can only recommend that you give these a try too. All puns aside, Chaz is pretty ripping, hasn’t let the pro status go to his head yet, is stoked on school and skating. So big ups.
Stanley
Cliché and Etnies rider Charles Collet recently celebrated the launch of his new collab shoe Eurostyle by travelling like a gypsy for ten days, skating in three different countries.
You can check out his One Man Band Tour video below, and watch carefully because the question that follows relates to the clip. Answer correctly to be in with a chance of getting all those sexy looking products above.
The deadline for this competition is September 13th.
Charles Collet, The One Man Band tour from etnies europe on Vimeo.
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Lots of good new stuff from the good ship Science this week!
The new line of sexy, sexy looking decks with transatlantic artwork courtesy of LA-based Steven Harrington and London’s Matthew Green and Chris Morgan is now available in all good shops along with some equally fine looking tees.
On top of that our eyes were treated to a 2010 teaser this morning. It’s awesome, keep on scrolling and have a look at it below after the new decks. Ben Cruickshank’s trick at the three block near St Pauls is very special…
Baker have never portrayed themselves as clean-cut, nor do they succumb to trends as transparently as handfuls of other companies. While edits are appearing like wildfire implying that skateboarding is still experiencing a comedown from the overdose of HDMA (ever wondered why all that shit is in slow-motion?), Baker haven’t strayed from lo-fi lurker footage at parties and an IMPACT typeface. To put this in perspective, Impact is the font used on all those lolcat macros that dominated the internet for a while. Hardly Brooklyn-based fixie-riding designers flicking imported Lucky Strike ash on their Polaroid collection and doing polejams to Belle and Sebastian is it?
What it is, is fucking rad. Drew is called The Boss for a reason, and that reason is because he runs a tight ship that regularly throws out shitty (read: awesome) footage and crude (read: awesome) decks for beat-up sketchy (read: awesome) riders. I had the pleasure of riding Braydon Szafranski’s ‘Bad Guys’ deck this week and had a baller time doing so. The deck is a garish orange and the graphic is a flick lighter beaming away at you like only a waking baking and shaking hotel room trashing skateboarder can. A Baker design through and through that fits in perfectly with a brand that shoots their team portraits in a liquor store.
The board is an 8” so my clumsy feet aren’t at risk of flopping around like they tend to. There’s deep pockets of potential pop, the concave is shapely and while I’m not nailing full-cab flips down big stairs like Braydon let me just say that bitches don’t know about my slappy noseslides. Bangers bangers bangers.
Stanley
Pigeons are my favourite animal ever. They’ve got a bad reputation and I dig that. This rep stems from the same breed of idiots that attribute notions of purity and peace to those butter-wouldn’t-melt bastard doves. Despite the dove and the pigeon being in the same family of birds, they are dismissed as a disease-riddled nuisance. Never to be put down by racial profiling, the pigeon is so bad-ass it just struts around cities where ever it pleases, eating up whatever we’re too lazy to put in a bin. The pigeon is an urban bird that quite obviously doesn’t give a fuck. And I love them.
So imagine my delight when Zoo York put out a board with a flock of up-to-no-good pigeons lurking on top of the tallest building in the sprawling menagerie that is New York. The caption reads ‘plotting doom from high upon the empire state building’ and that’s precisely what they’re up to. These birds belong in the same cage that houses the likes of Forrest Kirby, Zered Basset, Aaron Suski and other wood-pushers that are simply too gnarly to exist outside of some sort of enclosure. It’s only fair that my bros the pigeons get a pro board too.
The deck itself rides like a dream made straight from the concrete jungle. The very place that according to Alicia Keys has an assembly line specifically designed to pump out dreams as relentlessly as time passes. The only difference is that this dream is a solid piece of wood, but it did come from a similar assembly line. Zoo York regularly produce excellent planks to ride and this is no exception. It also happens to have the raddest graphic I’ve seen from them in some time. Hold tight Zoo York and hold tight pigeons.
Stanley
Skateboarders are skateboarders and pedestrians are pedestrians and never the twain shall meet. Now, for the benefit of the pedestrian’s ankles I would testify that this grossly re-contextualised Rudyard Kipling argument is probably for the best. But exclusivity outside of whose ankles your board is smashing into isn’t necessarily as cool as you’d like it to be. Element have unashamedly and routinely scoffed at social barriers in a way that would make Andy Warhol stoked. I could be sitting on the tube, this Muska Finger deck in hand and a businessman opposite me could be counting the tens and twenties he can barely fit into his wallet with the same logo on it. He knows that his wallet isn’t going to fall apart today, and I know my deck isn’t either.
Element consistently provide skateboarders with good, solid wood. The lightness and insta-pop was a big relief from the unreliable soggy fishes I’d been riding previously. The wild welsh rain and terrain was obviously too much for them. Durability is a big deal for me, and Element don’t disappoint. The guy in the suit probably doesn’t even realise that the same company that made his wallet made the plank of wood that the smelly dude sitting opposite him is clutching. He could afford a new wallet if he wanted to, but if this deck says anything about their other products, he won’t need to.
What’s cute is that this business dude is getting shown the finger by my deck, courtesy of Chad Muska: that guy that you either hate to love, or love to hate, or more likely than not, both. So as he packs his big bucks into his wallet, the same company that’s keeping all that moolah snug is flipping him off. That’s skateboarder mentality for you. I love it. Don’t let those extreme suits with hair that’s a little too dude for the office fool you, Element material is constructed from a skater mindset. If the excellent Trio didn’t sway you in their direction, then the regular high-grade shit they’re pushing will.
Stanley