Stop Skating With Your Eyes

We experience skateboarding with all of our senses, but we consume it with our eyes. Ironically, when you are actually skating, what you see is the least important part of the experience. The feeling of weightlessness in the air, the vibration of the grind through your feet, the sound of trucks on concrete: These are the things skaters are really chasing after when they ride. Yet the increasing emphasis on watching skateboarding, from pro vids to your own selfies, can make it real easy to lose sight of this.

With "Fetish", Welcome are no longer the Monarchs of the Mystifying

When Welcome skateboards apparated onto the scene in 2010, they immediately got attention for putting out boards that looked like no one else's. With team riders like Chris "Mango" Milic, and Eric Winkowski bending minds in their Monarchs Of Magic vid, they just as quickly gained a rep as the team that skated like no one else. A lot has changed since Monarchs. A brand that began as a quirky oddity, has grown to become much more than just the common ground between old warhorses looking for the glory days and millenial hipsters burning to be "different". Welcome is now a wildly successful a-list company. The distinctive boards that once set them apart are now representative of the status quo. With Welcome's new full length video Fetish, the same might be said to have happened to the team's skating.

Don't Blame Jamie Or Jaws, Here's The Real Reason For The Scooter Menace

Skating often captures the imagination of those who lack the will, temperament or dedication to take it up. This is why trends like rollerblades, snakeboards, rip-stiks, and razor scooters are always yapping at skaters' heels.

The latest incarnation of this phenomenon, the Razor scooter, has been especially persistent, not to mention obstructive to the modern skateboarder.  More than one skater has placed the blame for the scooter epidemic on the high-impact, highly technical trends in modern pro skateboarding. At a glance, the connection seems plausible: Elite level Skateboarding has developed a more risky dimension than it had in the good ol days, they say. An emphasis on increasingly complex and risky tricks rather than "just rolling", is making kids take up scooters instead of skateboards. The skate world, they posit, has become an all jocks club that welcomes only the most athletically driven skaters.

Take a closer look at skateboarding, and a good hard look at the Razor scooter, and it becomes clear that the kids riding those Razors wouldn't be riding skateboards no matter what sort of stuff was going down in Thrasher magazine.

Bomb (Drop) The Suburbs

Not me...but pretty close

In recollecting all the shenanigans and illuminations surrounding my first ever quarter pipe session in Jimmy Wallace's driveway, I forgot to mention that I learned my first skateboard trick that day: The Bomb Drop. By today's standards the bomb drop might not be considered a trick at all, even in '88 it was already out of date for most skaters in the know, but for me, back then, it was the first thing I learned that looked like a trick and, more importantly, that felt like a trick.

And, to me, it was the most awesome thing I had ever done, on or off a skateboard.

Keep Your Heroes. We Don't Want Them.

Slash Dog with Real Dogs. Alva at Nude Bowl on that fateful night, by Andrew Hutchison

The culture of skateboarding is largely built on hero worship. In this way, skating is not unlike conventional spectator sports. Pro endorsements are the prime mover of skate products, and the deeds of pro skaters dominate the media we consume. Still, even in an era where pros can earn seven figure incomes, the relationship skaters have with their pro "heroes" is  fundamentally different from the relationship adoring sports fans have with theirs. In fact, it makes me wonder whether the term "hero" has any place in skateboarding at all.