Offices Ransacked!

Apparently the Kingsport crew caught wind of this site and notified some members of our sworn enemy, the BFRO (Bigfoot Field Research Organization) as to the whereabouts of the Daily Coiler's offices. Needless to say, they wasted no time in getting here, apparently breaking in while I was at work today to fuck up our operations. Check out the damage.

 

I guess to prove a point, the bastards left a bunch of bigfoot turds laying around the ransacked office that I had to clean up as well.

The tape measure certainly demonstrates the authenticity of the mysterious ape man's shit. And here I thought I was so funny all those times I used to send those guys jars of my poop and say I'd found East Tennessee Bigfoot crap in my backyard. I guess years and years of that would take its toll even on the most professional of crypto-zoologist. The irony in all this is that I used to complain that there wasn't shit going on around here, and now I've literally got my hands full. Yuk.

Anyway, my apologies to our legions of followers if I don't have anything to post for a few days, but I've got to get our operations back in order. I understand Caleb's deal has been postponed to this weekend, so get down there and skate and maybe donate if you get the chance. I'll be too busy sifting through the rubble here to get down there myself. I hope to have D. C. relief donation information up soon. Thanks for your continued support during these difficult times, and fuck the BFRO!

The Worm

If I had to compare how skateboarding was when I grew up to a political philosophy, it would obviously be anarchism. Highly individualized, exploratory, unregulated, lacking regimentation, hidden in the margins of everyday life, skating took place almost completely out of view of the mainstream. Skating was peopled by a hodgepodge of unique characters, none of whom thought much alike but all of whom agreed to let skating be what it was. Skating didn't appeal to people who could live within normal boundaries. Free spirited, contemptuous of authority, skaters blurred the distinctions between art and diversion and didn't really ask why. They already knew. There was no formality, no routine, nothing preordained, rehearsed, or staged, not in the everyday lives of everyday skaters where I grew up. Things progressed quickly in those days; boundaries were surpassed apparently because no one noticed them to begin with.

Clearly, somewhere--and I don't care where--things changed to the extent that much of skateboarding today has more in common with fascism than with anarchism. The isolated silhouette that once lurked in the most remote social periphery, locked into a lap-over grind under a serpentine freeway overpass in wasted desertopia all but forgotten. In its place, the heirs of an entirely new landscape: the centralized, safe, governable skate park, home to confused but calculating skateboard in-breds huddled under the billboard placed there to remind us who's responsible for all this, though no one bothers to notice.

If it's true that you know you've bought into the system when you think things aren't the way they're supposed to be, then we're all fucked. More often than not, it seems, I experience skating through the corporate aperture of multimedia rather than through an evening session in a drainage ditch with a half dozen friends or so. Sure, a lot of that is due to the logistics of age, work, family. But the fact is, no one skates there anymore. At some point, parks were built, billboards erected, and helmet rules enforced. But we're the ones who stopped skating the Worm, or whatever your local spot was called. We can hit it up this weekend, if you want to.

Alien UFO Bigfoot

As if there was any doubt that Bigfoot existed, Joshua Blu Buhs inadvertently proves so in his new book Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend. He compares Mort Künstler's 1960 illustration in True Magazine pictured below (on top) with the famous 1968 Patterson "film" of Bigfoot taken in California (on bottom). Go ahead, compare for yourself.

I agree. No similarity whatsoever. I mean, the most obvious difference is that the bigfoot on the bottom is clearly a real one while the one on top is merely a painting of the same one walking the opposite direction eight years earlier. Like, duh. Sure, Künstler's drawing may have inspired the later bigfoot film, but only because it gave the filmmakers a bunch of clues of what to look for: woods, logs, bigfeet. etc., that enabled them to successfully film the bigfoot at long last. Besides, Buhs clearly ignores the most important factor in his supposed debunking: Bigfoot's an alien, a UFO dude. He doesn't play by our rules. He probably posed as Künstler and painted that picture himself just to show people where to find him. Dumb humans. They probably interpret posts like this as lame attempts to get people to send in things about skateboarding, since there's officially nothing going on in this neck of the woods. Whatevs. Pretty soon people will be debunking this blog.

Kick Your Own Ass for a Change

The dude in the pictures below is named Greg. Like most dudes his age, he's acquired a number of nicknames, among them "Silverback" and, most notably, "Onefoot."

"Onefoot" is  a semi-literal description. He likes to do one-footed frontside carve grinds on coping all over Texas or, as pictured above, in Arkansas. He's skated since the '70s, but chilled a while to ride dirt bikes, I think the story goes. He later decided to take up skating again after breaking his neck or back or something like that. Greg's been skating so long that he's one of those guys who's never even heard of punk rock, but make no mistake about it, he's way punker than most. I haven't seen Greg for a few years now, but pictures like these remind me of that fact, and I'm sure he's still hitting coping somewhere. Why wouldn't he be?

 

By all accounts, Greg's gnarly. Not in the sense that he'll kick your ass or anything like that, though. In fact, far from it. He's as mellow as they come. For example, every time I used to see him at the old Frosty bowl he'd ask me politely to "please not yell at the kids today." He's gnarly for better reasons than most; he's gnarly because he's considerably older than almost anyone he skates with, yet does things no one else can do, thus the name "Onefoot."

One time while watching Greg skate, a total stranger in Arkansas raved: "That guy rules, man. He reminds me what this shit's all about." When pressed to explain further, he reflected, "Well, my boss is a dick. My wife won't let me drink no more, and my own kid wants me to buy him fucking roller blades. This dude kinda reminds me that I can kick my own ass for a change." Enough said. 

At the risk of waxing philosophical yet again (I know it's not punk, jockface), I think I understand what dude meant. Somewhere at the essence of skating, none of the rules of banality seem to apply anymore. The usual limitations of age itself are tossed out the proverbial window and replaced by the much freer possibilities of imagination and determination. Every time Onefoot carries out his namesake grind, he demonstrates the fact that we place a lot of restrictions on ourselves in those very categories. Put simply, Greg stokes people out by showing them there are no rules, that you can in fact kick your own ass for a change. Maybe some of us--chest puffed out, punk rule book in hand--need to remember that.

Authenticity

One of the appeals of skateboarding over the years for me and, I suspect, for most "lifer" types, is its undeniable authenticity. Unlike so much of American mass culture, where style usually outranks substance by a long shot, it's just hard to fake skating. Sure, you can try to look the part, you can run yer yap, you can drop names. But in the end, you have to get on board and, whenever that happens, you're bound to fall eventually. Viola. Humility. The dignity's in trying in the first place. Getting up and trying again. There's a real metaphor for life in there somewhere.

As skateboarding has increasingly become swept up by the seemingly irresistible wave of soulless, plastic American consumer culture, and is thereby represented more by people who don't skate than those who do, longtime participants have obviously bemoaned the consequent, suspected loss of its authenticity. But never fear. Skating will always be "realer" than most things.  So long as people actually skate, and so long as it doesn't become too jocked out, regimented, and predictable, the beauty of skating will always reside in the fact that you actually have to do it. And so long as there are still people who don't think there's really a wrong way to do it, that in itself will ensure that people will find new ways to do so in new places. As is the case with every worthwhile thing, it's the effort that counts, after all. Cheers to everyone who's still trying.

Duh!

In response to the post entitled "Name that Spot," I came across this picture today which gave me a definitive answer: Oregon. Duh! The reason we didn't skate the previously unnamed spot was because we were skating this one on the same property. Damn. 2003 was a good year.

I later learned that a guy I knew from New Mexico who grew up in Oregon was really mean and used to throw the guy who built this spot, as well as the previously unnamed spot, in the trashcan every day before school. Every day? Geez. That seems a little excessive.

Nevertheless, the guy who built this bowl ran into us at Donald and invited us over to his crib to hang out and skate this thing right around the time the construction on it was being finished up. Really fun and, at the time, incredible that people were doing this sort of thing. Notice something? That's right. It's a barn constructed over the bowl. I.e., this is something similar to what they're trying to accomplish down in Shelby right now if you'd get off your ass and go donate $100, or whatever you can part with, to preserve that bowl. Few better causes have existed in the history of mankind, so make sure you come out on the right side of events and can actually tell your kids you accomplished something during your otherwise failed existence.

In Humbler Days...

Sorry but I can't resist lame puns. Anyway, today everybody's down in Shelby skating the bowl and probably hitting up Bridge's BBQ while I'm working (as you have already obviously noted). As many of you know, Caleb's first bowl, the "Humbler," was legendary until it *GASP* eventually rotted. Here's a pic of the Humbler in its later days... that's me in there I think, and you know I can't resist my fat face in lights.

So what's the point of all of this shameless self-promotion, you ask? Well, get your ass down to Shelby and donate $100 bucks so that the same fate doesn't befall this newer, bluer Humbler. Camp. Skate. Eat. Smoke. Skate. Have good time. Give $100. Preserve bowl.

In other words, for all the shit I talk about the Humbler, I probably skated it a grand total of five times. Lewie, who took this picture I believe, and who has sworn to bail out this site by sending video of people actually skating so that you don't have to read my relentless sales pitches (buy American, by the way, it's way better than communist and costs more, too), could have skated this all the time but sat around drinking beer instead. He never gave $100 to preserve the Humbler and now it's gone. So there you have it, moral and all. Get to Shelby, buy American, and save skateboarding from communists like Lewie.