Bricklaying

All photos by Jeff 'Gazelle' Petersen who was cool enough to blow some film at the new Tigard skatepark. The brick banks in these photos are replicas of the famous King City banks, that were skated for years but never meant to be. Steep, tight and fun.

I have feared I am too old to be tooling around on a skateboard since I was fifteen. At fifteen it is easy to give into peer pressure. If all your friends are giving up skateboarding for girls, music drink, drugs and so on, it is all too easy to follow suit and be done with it. But I needed my skateboard pretty desperately at age fifteen. While I would still slash my mattress with my switchblade and cutting my school tie in half, I believe my skateboard saved me doing a lot more harm to myself, my surroundings and others. At the same time, I was almost ashamed of my obsession.

I had one teacher I gave a fuck about at that age and I remember I was skateboarding through the city center one day and caught a glimpse of her about to cross my path. Her name was Mrs. Sirl and she was my history teacher. I didn’t want the image of a sweaty, bloody and dirty skateboarder ruining the image of her star history student (it was the only class I ever really excelled at) and so I darted down a side alleyway out of her sight. I picked up my board and looked at it. I looked at my holey shoes and baggy jeans and thought to myself no wonder I’m shit in school, no wonder I’m a social retard and no wonder I’m still a virgin while all my mates are claiming otherwise. It ruined my day.


Not long after that a girl in my class asked me if I was still skateboarding. I said, ‘No I barely skate, in fact I’m thinking of giving up.’ The truth was I was skateboarding more than ever. I was going through boards and shoes at such a rapid rate; I had to sell my other belongings to pay for them. Luckily, I had a mother who never ever questioned my one focus in life and also, I soon scored a job at the local skate shop. I was skateboarding all weekend and every evening, often by myself, occasionally with some younger kids who were still interested and once in awhile with friends I could convince to skate for an hour before they were sidetracked with booze and cigs.
The girl replied, ‘Well I thought you were pretty good at it and it would be stupid of you to quit.’ I shrugged my shoulders and walked off.


Of course I wasn’t living in Southern California. In the places and time I grew up in, it simply wasn’t cool to emulate the Californian lifestyle. So hiding your skateboard identity was sometimes the only way to get through the day unridiculed and unharmed. By the time I was eighteen, I moved to a small university town in rural Wales. I brought a skateboard but never thought I’d use it again. I bought some hiking boots and left my skate clothes in the wardrobe. One evening I was walking around, I heard the tell tale sign of clacking, grinding, smacking and popping at the plaza on the uni campus. I went to check it out and there were a group of lads about my age sessioning a set of steps. They were locals and not students and they didn’t care who was watching them. I walked up to them and asked, ‘What’s it like to skate around here?’

They looked me up and down. I looked like another boring middle-class student ‘You skate?’

Yes.

‘Well go get your fucking board and we’ll show you around.’

I ran back to my dorm, changed into some proper attire, pulled out my skate shoes, grabbed my board and locked my room. As I was doing so, my roommates caught a glimpse of me ‘You skate?’


‘Ah yeah, sometimes… see you later.’ and I bolted out the door.


I hooked up with the locs and I was soon forgiven for abandoning my priorities. Unfortunately, over the following few years, these locals also fell by the wayside, to drink, families, jobs, drugs and so on. After three years, I moved away without saying goodbye to a core group of rippers who had kept their own little isolated unique scene alive for years.


After uni, I again, figured it was time to hang up my skate for career, more education, and learning to surf properly (as it was more respectable than skateboarding). The next town I moved to had a long history of skateboarding and I soon fell in with a large and diverse group of people who were down to ride all the time. I stopped caring about being in my twenties and getting glimpses of old ladies tutting at me as I bombed my hill into the town. I ignored the abuse hurled at me from speeding cars by lads out on the piss, and sometimes I fed off it. I started to contextualize what I was doing and place skateboarding in the grand scheme of things. I saw its relevance in youth culture and urban theory.

Each stage of my life and each geographical move, I have assumed I will be hanging up my skateboard for good. I thought so when I moved to Oregon to get married. But it has been impossible to quit. Who cares? Why write about it? I’m not sure… Its just sometimes I just want to burst thinking about it. I can’t skate right now as my three year old is napping so instead I’m getting this off my chest. But I know tomorrow, I’ll grab my board step out of the house and push as hard as I can. Beer gut and beard, blowing in the wind, pissing off motorists, going nowhere as fast as I can because its all I know. Nothing has ever compared and I am finally OK accepting that nothing ever will.

1995

Photo by The Stoat.

I just stumbled upon this photo, sneaking around on Facebook. This is me and my friend Iain getting Irie in Cardigan Bay. Iain had a kilo of dreadlocks under that hat. I was the only one of four blokes without dreads in the flat we lived in.... such a stinking place it was... ha ha... No, they were good times for sure... We surfed, sabotaged fox hunts, fought fascism, drank, saved the world and wasted lots and lots of time talking shit...

I Remember Nothing

Still from the new Ian Curtis biopic, Control

We all have selective memory when it comes to our childhoods and it becomes even more selective when we relay the stories. When I was child, I was continuously reinventing and selecting my history as I went along, as I am sure most children do. After watching 21 Jump Street, at about age twelve, I envisioned myself a part of a multi-racial gang of cool kids. We would all lead separate lives with separate interests but on a Friday night we would all to get together and exchange stories about our week. We would walk around town, invincible. Turning heads wherever we went because we were Black, White, Asian, female, male, straight and gay (now there’s some selective memory for you, I was actually a homophobic bastard when I was a teenager). We were skateboarders, martial arts experts, punks, nerds, Goths and musicians.

The reality was quite far from my ideal in the expatriate culture I grew up in Bahrain. My friends were indeed multi-racial, Brits, Americans, Arabs, Pakistanis and Indian males but we all liked the same activities, same music and dressed the same. Kids who did otherwise were not our friends and in general everyone tended to be deeply embedded in their various cliques.

The biggest rival clique to mine was a group of older British kids and British wannabes, male and female. They dressed in black, wore winkle-pickers, listened to The Cure, The Mission, New Model Army and Joy Division. They hated us because we were younger, Californian aspiring skate nerds.

I remember skateboarding by myself one afternoon, waiting for my mum to pick me up and one of them drove by. He was being driven by his mother and sitting in the back with his girlfriend. As they drove by, he snarled at me. In response, I flipped him the ‘V’. He then pointed right at me, nodded and slid his index finger across his throat. I was dead. I had flipped him off, in front of his mother and girlfriend and I knew I was going to pay. For weeks, I worried about where I was going hang out to avoid him but ultimately everyone tended towards the same hang-outs, I knew it was coming. And then I broke my leg. Skateboarding, of course.

One day I was the bus. My leg was in a cast and I had crutches. I’d give myself a really ridiculous haircut. It was long and shaggy on top and I had shaved the sides down to the skin. I was sitting there, trying to lay low while the cool kids were smoking at the back and then he walked on. He walked up to me, called me a ‘mushroom head,’ slammed my head against the window and said, ‘when this bus stops, you’re dead’ and then went to sit down to have a smoke. That was one of the longest bus journey’s I have ever had.

So the bus stops and I hobble off. Immediately, he starts kicking me with his pointy winkle-picker shoes and I wonder what sort of beating I’m in for until one of his friends says to him, ‘Can’t you see he has a broken leg?’ With everyone looking at him he gave it up, spat in my direction and they all walked off. None of my fucking friends did a damn thing.

I hated them and their subculture before that incident but now I loathed it. Fuck you. fuck Robert Smith, fuck Manchester, fuck Joy Division fuck your winkle pickers and tight black jeans and fuck your wanky hairdo. I was always plotting my revenge but at the same time, friends of mine were dangerously flirting with leaving skateboarding and joining their clique.

One of my friends was a couple of years older than me. He had just moved to Bahrain from Glasgow. He was punk before I knew what punk was. He had spiked blonde, acne that actually made him look tougher, skin tight black jeans and hundreds of ripped t-shirts with band names I had never heard of sprawled across them. He smoked at age fourteen at home with his parents. He even smoked in my house and my parents never said anything. He was going to be who he wanted to be and no one could say anything about it. How fucking cool was that? I idolized him for awhile. For whatever reason he liked me. Probably because he had decided to take up skateboarding and I was somewhat competent at it. People wanted to know him and would approach him and he might say, ‘I’m Simon Graham who the fuck are you? Pete and me are going skatin’. Fuck off!’ Yeah, take that arseholes. Simon and me are going skateboarding and there is fuck’all you can say about it. Being who he was, he effortlessly brought his Glaswegian punk/ heroin chic aesthetic to skateboarding and it worked. He was certainly no Californian wannabe like the rest of us. I learnt a lot from this young man including how to sniff glue and Butane.

Of course the older British kids, found out about the glue sniffing and gave me hell about it. Yes, solvent abuse is insanely idiotic but I didn’t need to provide them with more ammunition for the assault on my character. Yet, I soon had my glory moment. One of them was given a skateboard by his grandmother for Christmas. He came up to me one day and asked if I would show him some moves. The skateboard was immaculate, brand spanking new, not a scratch on it. I said, ‘Oh sure, I will.’ I took the board and beat the hell out of it on the surrounding curbs and planters, thrashed the fucker unlike I’ve thrashed any skateboard before. Until, ‘Hey be careful my granny gave that to me.’ I threw the board at his feet and laughed. I was liberated and all in front of my friend Simon.

Not long after that, Simon announced to me, ‘Pete you won’t be seeing much of me this Easter holiday.’ I asked why and he replied, ‘Because, I’m going to focus on pussy instead of skateboarding.’ Since when did he use the word ‘pussy?’ Before long he was ‘going out’ with the same girl I had flipped off months prior, the same girl who was once on the arm of the lad who wanted to kick my broken arse. I pretended to shrug it off nonchalantly but yeah, it hurt.

By my mid to late twenties, I was finally able to listen to Joy Division. Oh my god, what had I denied myself? In my head I re-invented my past in 1980s Manchester, life on the dole, strikes, relishing in the bleakness of Thatcher’s Britain. Now, I can’t listen to some of their song without breaking into a sweat or an uncontrollable shake. Maybe, it was better I waited.

Oh and I ended up marrying a girl, a wannbe Brit, who used to hang out with the crew of cunts that I hated so much and she took me to California.

Hey can we get a babysitter, so we can go and watch Control?

Got a PDF of the first few pages of foulweather #2 last night... looking good... looking good...

Give up

Wayne Lynch not sure where or who shot this...

Andrew Kidman: Is there anything you think surfers can do to help the environment?

Wayne Lynch: Give up, Ha!


From Andrew Kidman's new book Ether. Kidman presented a refreshing and largely noncommercial documentation of surfing when it needed it most. However, as Lynchy jokes, its pretty hard to tread lightly when you are surfer. This book appears to compile some of the best moments of his films and magazine articles. Should be a keeper but so it should be at just under $190. Check out 12 pages of the book, here.

If you must insist on surfing, then check out Phroseia for some ideas on how to be a little bit less toxic about it but never be under any illusion you are helping the planet with this selfish indulgence or by making books (and zines ha ha) about it...

...to nowhere...

Yes, I have used this photo before but I only just got my hands on this full size scan. A little teaser from foulweather #2. Fonts are chosen, layout is being worked on. It is slowly coming together.

Anyway, this is one of my favourite photos for a number of different reasons. I was going to list the metaphorical possibilities but I think they are pretty obvious. Let's just say its been a few years now since the City of Swansea lifted the bridge away from this stairway and it still sits slowly getting buried under the sand, unused. I hope they turn it into an official art piece or monument.

Ha, I only just noticed the bird, flying near the top and my shadow lurking at the base...

$600 Skateboard

Santa Cruz Eric Dressen 1989. Still in the shrink wrap.

Apparently, one of these sold on Ebay for $600 the other day. If I can sell mine for anything close to that amount, I can fund the printing of Foulweather #2!

Make me an offer.



Here's the man himself boosting a massive wall-ride in Venice CA sometime in the mid to late 80s. Photo by Cesario "Block" Montano, from the amazing SuperXmedia webzine.