Saturday, April 11, 2009

Mission Statement

As skateboarding's popularity continues to grow, I feel there is a need, well not a need, but I personally think someone else besides myself might care about ONE more source of commentary on skateboard culture,business and media production. Thanks to Patrick O' Dell's Epicly Later'd show on vbs.tv, much of Vice's readership has been exposed to a very nuanced, and I would say brilliantly nerdy history of skateboarding and some of its most important icons. That being said this blog is going to attempt to take the Epicly Later'd project one step further and focus a little bit more on how geography, specifically urban, and in some cases rural geography effects the skateboard community.

For this inaugral post im including some videos that should give some indication as to how I see skateboarding through place. My home state is Vermont, and while growing up as a skateboarder in such a rural place constantly pushed me to travel and eventually move to a city, Vermont, specifically Burlington, has its own homebrewed skateboard culture and some of the best skaters out there right now come from the Green Mountain State.....

About a year or two this crew of kids from Burlington put out this video called "Family Tree" which was sort of a follow up to their first video "Peace of Time". Both are incredible, some really progressive shit in both. This guy Travis Card does most of the filming and has since started a clothing company out in San Francisco called Symptoms. Both videos are filmed all over VT and the northeast.

You may have seen Collin somewhere before on the internet, kid is so sick, hasn't seemed to be able to lock down any solid sponsors, but then again everyone and their mom knows that the skate industry isn't a meritocracy...



Marshall is another VT-er, he skates for sk8mafia now....peep the switch heel tailslide 270 out...By the way he pulled this trick a couple years ago down a massive hubba at the Am Getting Paid contest in Montreal and still lost the best trick contest....