going to asia

Since Sho's passing, I have been planning on making a trip out to Beijing, China to visit his parents. Those plans are finally coming to light, as I am flying out from NYC to Beijing on Thursday with my friends Jeremy and Gia. After about 5 days there, we are flying down to Jakarta, Indonesia to meet up with Budi then off to Bali the next day. As the date approaches, I am actually starting to get excited about the trip...finally. I am borrowing a pretty nice camera from a co-worker, so I am going to try to have some banging blog photos.



Well, back to NYC life.



About 3 weeks ago or so, Harley (owner of Substance Skateboards) told me to swing by and grab a deck. As I was looking through the decks, I saw this:





Mr. Ralph Murphy was turned pro! I was psyched and have been skating his board since. Also, Jahmal (Williams) had a shout-out for his new company, Hopps, in the latest Transworld. Check the site out!





Speaking of local companies, I have been riding Prize Fighter wheels for a while now and am pretty psyched on them. Billy Rohan, Rob Campbell, and Leo Gutman are riding for them now, so that is pretty hyphy. Check them out too.


Okay, okay, enough promotion. So I have been trying to skate as much as I can when not working and sometimes that means skating for 30 minutes or so during my lunch break. But it has been so humid out that I end up running back in for a meeting most of the time dripping in sweat...it is amazing. There also seems to be a trend that my friends are getting hurt, or they are out of town, or they are just over skating and it is super hard to find people to skate with sometimes...they don't have the "it's too cold out" excuse anymore. At least Matt (Rzeszutko) is coming back (the day after I leave for China) and that means a lot of rippage when I get back. He also quit ATM for 1031 and has been schralping with Kristian Svitak. He told me that the Rockstar video is almost done. Other than that, I don't really have anything new. Haven't heard from Leonard in a minute...I wonder what is up on the other coast? Leonard...City University of London?


I am going to leave you with the clip of the day, Levi Brown's part from the new Element video:

Update coming soon

I have been really busy (I know, same old excuse)...but I will be updating the blog soon. I have things to update with, I just need time.



In the meanwhile, watch Jerry Hsu show you how easy skateboarding is.

Batgirl, Ninja, and Subway Condoms

So about a week and a half ago, the group I work in at my job had another team outing. We went to the West Village and did some sort of scavenger hunt called The Go Game. Basically, we had to run around The Village doing some random tasks and answering some trivia and whatnot. We were guided by a phone and had a digital camera to use. Here are some of the photos from it:


One of the first tasks for my team was to find a "ninja weapon" and fight a ninja. She looked more like a dominatrix to me...


Then we had to find Batgirl and make her do something controversial, so we had her smoking a joint.


Since we found her near the ninja, we decided to bring the ninja over and get in on the "puff, puff, pass."


We found a bunch of the NYC Subway condoms. (That is one of the ad sellers from Chicago)


This is a genuine face he made right after seeing the bill for the shots of patron we ordered for a skit we did.


He licked a parking meter for the task to do something that you have never done before.


Kimi got her nose pierced for the first time.


This is our re-creation of a foreign land (Amsterdam in our case).

The rest of these photos are from other teams:


See what I meant about the ninja?


Cliff was enjoying the Batgirl controversy task a bit too much.


This was a pretty dope re-creation of Belgium.


Apparently they have never had an orgy before this task...what prudes?!

Overall, the outing was surprisingly fun. I got to see how down my co-workers are for doing pretty much anything. Word!

Cut It Out (hand signs included)!

So about going back to that bump...I did, but it was gone/flattened. If you look at the photos below, you will see white paint marks on the ground. That is exactly where they decided to cut out the "messed up" ground and fill it in with new asphalt. Oh well, still had fun for the day.

Speaking of skateboarding: clip of the moment: Cards!



Is it me, or do other people think that it is ridiculous that the news covers the Paris Hilton going to jail story daily? Aren't there more important things to cover? Nevermind, they are following Journalism Rule #3.


AHAHAHAHA!

13 hours of work and I somehow end up spending the rest of my night at home on the computer

So I went skateboarding with Bilk the other day and came across this super fun bump over a metal road barrier spot. I tried to snap a few photos with my phone and they came out decent for the format.


Melon Grab


Shifty Ollie


We are totally going back there tomorrow (er, it is late, so I guess technically today)...

I finally got around to making a clip with a bunch of throwaway footy. It is just footage of Alan and myself, so that means I have enough to do another one eventually. Some of this footage is a couple years old and the rest was from all in between up until a couple weeks ago.


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I'm out!

Happiness is the deferred fulfillment of a prehistoric wish.

Things I have done lately:

* Visited London. Saw Caireen and interviewed at the Institute of Education.

* Attended an Alvar Alto study day and exhibit at the Barbican.

* Saw two different Surrealism exhibits.

* Saw Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others).

* Skated the South Bank.

* Saw Whites Grounds.

* Finished The Golden Bowl.

* Came home.

* Recieved the rejection letter.

Acid Washed Art

So I decided to head over to the Volcomics show at Fuse on Saturday with Camille.



There were some pretty sick illustrations by a couple of my favorite artists: Todd Bratrud and Michael Sieben.

Bratrud:




Sieben:








I almost bought this one by Mike Aho, but somebody beat me to it:


A couple of random others that I liked:




Rodney was there getting his sauce on with the open bar...and Camille is always ready for the impromptu photos:


So I mass texted like 18 people to go skate yesterday and only two people ended up coming through: Scottie Schwartz and Billy Rohan. Less people than I envisioned, but it was a dope sessions nonetheless, even with getting rained on. I will not divulge anything more about yesterday than saying that Billy is a monster and can pretty much skate ANYTHING! On a random note, we came across a few of these squirrel-fox things...



Speaking about wildlife, Camille and I were walking through Central Park a few days ago and hear this dude outside of one of the plant nursery things (where they keep all the plants they are going to put into Central Park) yelling, "Hey you! Get out of there!" We thought he was just being really crazy, but it turns out that he was just being sort of crazy. There was a raccoon munching on the plants right there in the middle of the afternoon...no shame.


(*Sorry about the horrible photo, but the zoom on my phone camera is not the best)



^^^Aren't those pants swass??? Acid washed jeans are making a comeback, I think. And this guy is leading the revolution:

Brotherly Love

So I made a trip out to Philly this past weekend with my friend Budi via the Chinatown Bus.

We stayed with Arif in his condo near downtown Philly. He was kind enough to let us crash AND drive us around from spot to spot AND take photos.


Arif

The first stop Saturday morning was FDR skatepark.



It was my fist time skating FDR, and it was definitely an easier skate than Burnside, but gnarly nonetheless. Too bad there were mad BMXers up in the spot...

Next stop was the Ghetto Banks in North Philly. The place is sick, but we almost got robbed by a 10 year old hoodrat. After he was getting mad that I wouldn't give him $5 and telling some kid on a bike to go get his cousin (or something) I decided it was time for us to jet before we got ourselves into a situation not worth being in.


Budi - Kickflip Fakie before the flee

We went to some spot at Temple and got kicked out before we even put our boards down, so we decided to head to Cecil B. Moore to skate a bit before leaving Temple. We got kicked out of there after about half an hour.


Tailslide Fakie over a gap in a line I was trying when we got kicked out.


Budi - Manny

After 3 failed skate sessions we decided to head back to a spot a block up the street from Arif's place that we found while getting breakfast.



Budi - 10 foot long frontside boardslides!



I got a dork line...typical.

Then we took a trip over to the Art Museum to skate the banks there.


I only got a hand full of attempts before getting rained on.



We had to huddle under this tent thing until the rained stopped. Totally killed the rest of the day for skating.

Overall it was super fun though and makes me anticipate the next one that much more. Props to Budi for motivating and Arif for hooking it up!

How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved!

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