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Skateboarding Product Reviews

Krooked Zig Zagger

The Krooked ‘cruiser’ boards have been around a few years now with three sizes. The Zip Zinger Nano 7.125″, The Zip Zinger 7.5″ and the Zig Zagger 8.6″. They come in many colour ways and alternative themed graphics ranging from classic bold colours to ice-creams, to galactic space backgrounds, oh and the board comes with stickers and a novelty Krooked card crown!

It’s the 8.6″ Zig Zagger that has got me excited though. Mostly at the thought of looking down at my feet riding this board in the street or at Stockwell skidding about pretending in my head that i’m Mark Gonzales! “But its just cruiser board!” I hear you cry. Don’t be mistaken. It has the same concave, wheel base and equal nose and tail as most standard popsicle boards. You will still be able to pop out all your nollie tricks regardless of the boards pointy nose but now with added style!

My personal point to make with this review is that skateboarding is fun. If your enthusiasm for skateboarding is running low I can’t recommend the Zig Zagger enough, take a chance and make it part of your next set up. If you’re still not convinced watch the man himself having fun on one.

Matthew Bromley

Categories
Features Skateboarding

Craig Questions A Day In The Life video interview

Filmed and edited by Matthew Bromley.

Craig_Questions_photo_by_Dom_PerkinsHe collects, he draws, he shreds, he scores…Craig ‘Questions’ Scott is a true one off. If you’ve never heard of him before then you’re definitely in for a treat with this Day In The Life. Craig is generally like marmite. You are either digging his eccentricity or done with it. He’s a skater who has asked so many questions over the years that Dom Perkins (who took this amazing photo) called him exactly that, and it stuck.

Maybe it was the luminous gunge of Jim Phillips’ famous 80’s artwork that has pushed Questions into the path of the unknown, or maybe it was the smell of Neil Blender’s pads. Underneath all the toys, smoke bombs and boneless-ones is a guy living his dream, the way he wants his life to roll out. That passion should never be sneered at- but instead, observed from within his own domain, and this week we have done exactly that.

Click to watch part 1 of 2 below and feast your eye’s on the fascinating world of a man who grew up smelling the fresh seaside air of Whitstable beaches and has just recently just inked his first board graphic for the new Zombie Series for Heroin Skateboards.

Stay tuned for part 2 of this video feature next week where you’ll see Craig, Fos and Jake Snelling shredding Brixton’s most famous beach down in Stockwell and more about how the Heroin series took shape. When you are done, click here for part 2.

Craig’s sponsors include Lovenskate, Death Urethane & Altar Skate Shop.

Categories
Skateboarding News

Gonz to release Instead of Eros Avenged book

Artist, writer and legendary skateboarder Mark Gonzales has a new book coming out titled ‘Instead of Eros Avenged‘ via an independent publishing house called Nieves this July.

The book will feature select drawings, paintings and mobile phone photographs. The photographs depict a life of joyful and chaotic spontaneity, showing Gonzales posing with fans, hanging out with family and friends and of course, performing wallrides with text by Christopher Churchill.

Get this on your shopping list as you know this will be one to have in your living room at all times. For the latest on Gonz’ travels to the UK, click here and watch the video of The Obstacle jam in London below.

Categories
Skateboarding News

20th Anniversary Blind Video Days reunion

blind-skateboards-video-daysUnsure how this managed to pass us unnoticed but enjoy this gathering of classic Blind Skateboards legends for a 20 year anniversary shoot for Skateboarder Magazine.

Watch Guy Mariano, Mark Gonzales, Rudy Johnson, Jason Lee and Jordan Richter all reminisce one of skateboarding history’s most influential videos in 3 parts and enjoy all the sections on Skately if you have never seen this.

Categories
Skateboarding News

New Frankie Hill documentary parts roll out online

3 more parts of the Frankie Hill documentary have been released to the web this weekend featuring Pat Duffy, Lance Conklin and more discussing how influential Hill was to street skating alongside stories from Hill himself.

The documentary is being put together by Nate Sherwood and completely free to watch in its entirety once a new site has been built to host this and more films on the history of skateboarding.

Categories
Skateboarding News

Watch: Behind the Video Days Reunion

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of undoubtedly one of the most culturally significant skate videos ever produced, Skateboarder Mag have recently reunited the Video Days crew for a photo shoot in the February/March 2011 issue.

The first behind-the-scenes style video is up for your viewing pleasure now. It comes complete with the awkward conversation inherent in school reunions and a strange sense of real-world surrealism when you consider that organising this shoot could easily have cost a lot more than Spike Jonze’s entire budget for Video Days. Weird, but very wonderful all the same.

Have a look below for Mark Gonzales, Guy Mariano, Jason Lee, Rudy Johnson and Jason Richter all under one familiar looking roof.

Behind the scenes: Video Days Reunion Shoot Part 1 of 3 from Skateboarder Magazine on Vimeo.

Categories
Features Skateboarding

Benjamin Deberdt Pause Mag Interview

Benjamin Deberdt has done a great deal within the realms of skateboarding both in Europe and America in the last 15 years: founder of Sugar magazine, founder of Kingpin magazine, and now founder of Pause, the new French word on the street complete with English online editions. Here is the skinny from the man himself.

Portrait Right: Benjamin outside his favourite café in Paris, shot by Éric Antoine.

So tell us about Pause then…

Ehhrrr, it’s a magazine? About what makes skateboarding something worth sacrificing a lot for?

The idea is to speak about the characters, the builders, the behind-the-scene guys, the unsung heroes alongside the rich and famous. If you have a story that is worth telling, we’ll try to find you!

Can France support another magazine?

This seems to be the main question I get these days! And I have no answer to it, to be frank. But, maybe that is not the point of Pause…

Pause also produce top shelf postcards!

Your naturalistic style of photography wins plaudits and criticism in equal measure- can you tell us a bit about why you shoot in the style you do and what you think its merits and shortcomings are?

For people to either hate or give mad props, they should know I even exist! I doubt there are that many people that are aware of me… but I can appreciate the “naturalistic” comment. When we started Sugar with my cousin Seb Caldas, back in the days, I was still learning what the hell I was doing, and also experimenting quite a bit to get different kinds of results and not have the magazine filled with only one type of photography. Which I sometimes regret… but, yep, I’d say I have always been interested in showing what I would see, in the most natural way. This is probably coming from Tobin Yelland’s work, back then. He was shooting the whole San Francisco scene during the EMB days, but in a super gritty way. Everything was super crafted and perfectly printed, but what you saw as a reader was the real deal. Glimpses of those people’s everyday life… the glamour was there, but it wasn’t posed. It was real. And this is what I really go for, more and more: just showing the people for who they are and what they do. Which probably clashes sometimes with the manufactured image skateboarding is aiming for, these days. I understand the need for commercial images, and I certainly don’t judge it, but this is not what I find interesting doing, so I’m going my own way. And there are a whole lot of people out there still documenting skateboarding for what it is. Man, we are part of this world that doesn’t need fantasy; it is already fascinating for what it is. Look at all the characters out there, who needs sunsets in the background!?

Another major influence for me has been, obviously, Thomas Campbell, to this day. His photographic style could be described as more thought through, to make the most visually striking image possible, but in a very organic way. As in to use whatever is lying around to enhance reality and make it a bit more magical, which clashed a lot with my French way of looking at life, then. Thomas taught me everything, really: “Benjamin, you’re going to go to New-York, buy a FM2 and a fish-eye, and then, you’ll be professional…” Haha!

So, yeah, apart from countless other influences, I could say that these two had a great impact on me, then, and still do to this day. Oh, and Ari Marcopoulos, for the genuine feeling of his photos, whatever times and scenes he documented. Another great inspiration, there.

What is your single all-time favourite photo that you’ve shot?

A skate photo might be the Lucas Puig water gap kickflip… Or Javier Mendizabal nosegrinding up a ledge in Casablanca, for all the stories that are told in that one image. I don’t know, really. I don’t think much about my own photos…

As for a “non-skate” photo, I have even less of an answer! I have been pretending that I’m consolidating my archives (I believe this is how you’re supposed to explain you’re opening plastic bags to discover they are full of sequences printed in 1998!), lately, and I have found some images which, then, did not mean much to me, as in: “Oh, I can’t use that in next issue of the mag…” but have grown very fond to me, as they now tell a lot about a time long gone. This tells me how much a photo ages a bit like wine. Some turn to vinegar really quick, and should be consumed right away. Others bloom with time.

When I was digging through for Résumé, the Cliché book, I found some gems, that’s for sure! Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, thinking “Did I throw away those pictures of Ricky Oyola rolling a blunt at his house in Philly in 1996!!!???? Because they were a bit blurry!!!!!!????”, haha! Actually, I want to start to work on some book projects, I think. The time has come.

Lucas Puig’s Watergap flip shot by Benjamin Deberdt in Cliché Résumé

The Lucas Puig water gap photo from Greece put you onto a lot of people’s radars outside of France, can you tell us a bit about the context of that shot?

I’ll be frank, it’s all Fred Mortagne’s fault! I would have probably shot a boring picture, but he was already knee-deep in the water, all up in what I thought would be my frame. It was the end of a long day, and the spot looked great, so I was probably cursing him under my breath, when I looked up and realized there were two more stories to that unfinished abandoned mall. I ran up, made sure there was an angle, ran back to put up flashes, screaming for everybody to wait for me, ran back up and shot probably a couple frames of Lucas’s flip and a couple more of Cale Nuske’s backside flip. This being before digital, so it’s only a week later, back in London, that I realized that the reflection showed everything you couldn’t get directly, like the board, Lucas’s face, etc. I also realized that my fish-eye was damaged and that all the pics shot with that lens on the trip were out of focus! But, yep, Lucas’s photo was a total accident. Thanks Fred, let’s get on the road again, sometime soon!

The Kenny Reed Kingpin cover was described by Steve Caballero as one of the best he’d seen in 25 years of skating; what were the circumstances surrounding it?

Really? That’s very kind of Steve! Where do I start with that one? Let’s say this was the end of another long day spent on the border of the Black Sea, for what must have been the first skateboard trip to Bulgaria, from what I believe, unless Rodney Mullen did a Swatch demo there in the 80’s! So, yep, we had a great crew from all over the world, including Kenny. You and him came back from behind some bushes to tell me about some possible spot back there. We went and Kenny told me about the trick he wanted to try. I looked around and told him that by the time I’d be set up it’d be getting dark, he said “let’s do it!”, so I started rushing around… sure enough, he did land it in almost total darkness after being fully blinded by my flashes. Jedi mind trick on that one, and another great surprise at the lab a week later!

You remain the only person to have shot a legit Belfast article for a magazine- what are your memories or impressions of the city and the skaters?

It was a very interesting trip, for sure. We were in town for a few days only, and it was quite filled with action, to say the least. Us getting attacked by about fifty children on glue was a highlight, in a way. I was so convinced that this type of behaviour is not rationally possible, that it just did not register for me. I was just standing there as people were running all over the place… Then, I saw you open the door of a van and scream for me to jump in and I did. Full A-Team style!

In many ways, these four days were very surreal for me. As a French man, religion is not part of my way of thinking, and being confronted with a place where it was all other the place was strange. Just like we were in Jerusalem… But to get back to Belfast, what really stood for me was the kindness of all the people I met, skaters or not. It did have a small town feeling, in many ways, where everybody knows each other, which did not compute with my memories of growing up and seeing Belfast on fire during the news on TV. This was very interesting for me: how can you even have a war going on in such a small town? I understand the roots of it all were centuries old and very deep, of course.

Now, what I want to see is some young Belfast photographer to step up and shoot a sick report on his scene. Let’s see it! Oh, and I want Conhuir to make a comeback! Come on, son!

Pause will have an online dimension in English, what is the deal there?

We just posted issue 01 almost entirely translated on our site. The idea is to give people outside of France the option to also read about the people we think are interesting in skateboarding right now. That, and since nobody really reads English in my slightly autistic country, it can’t really hurt our sales, ha!

What advice would you give to an aspiring photographer?

There was a great portfolio of Ari Marcopoulos in Transworld, in 1998, I believe, mixing pictures of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julien Stranger or Ryan Hickey with some advice he was giving to young photographers. I’ve had that one taped on a wall everywhere I’ve lived. Try to find it! Because, what the hell do I know, really?

Click above image for the full-size image of Ari Marcopoulos’ article…