andrew.j.peters

DUSTIN DOLLIN - SWEET TIMES - 2013

Bunch of Sammy Winter photos you mighta seen before, but he turned pro so thats enough reason to share again for me.

Bjorn Johnston Interview/Cover/Poster of new Slam Skateboarding Magazine in Australia.

So sad to hear that Skateboarder Magazine is officially done...

I was lucky enough to shoot a cover and some other stuff on the inside of Vol 22 # 1. Figured I'd grab the tears off their site before they vanish and my issues go moldy at my Mums. Thanks Jaime Owens, Jamie Thomas, Big John Fitzgerald and Brian Delatorre. Legends. 

Last year i was lucky enough to travel around Asia for a month with the some DC riders. Here's a bunch of photos from the trip and the article/essay kinda thing I wrote for the Skateboarder Journal.

Where do we go from here Captain?

Andrew James Peters

Where to start on a month long journey through Asia? The crew chopped and changed, involving about a hundred different people along different parts of the ride. It would be stupid to try to periodically chip away at what happened day by day. Knowing what was the most important part to talk about would be an impossible and ridiculous task to try to perform.

Like most trips to places unknown, the experience was life changing and the antics a rollercoaster of emotions good and bad. This is unavoidable, a lot can happen to an individual, let alone dozens of humans, in a month. The team left the trip in a blur of separate departures heading home to all different parts of the world at different times in the last leg of the tour.

They say it takes at least a week for the mind to truly catch up to the body when traveling, so after floating through Jakarta, Kuala Lumpar, Phuket, Hong Kong, Macau, Cheng Du and Shanghai it took a good couple of weeks to try to reflect on what had just happened the month before hitting home base.

We entered the countries with next to no background of their history. Needing to know more about what I had just stumbled upon on this skateboarding trip, I gave myself a quick historical brief on our closest neighbours down here in little old Australia.

Thirty years ago, around the same time skateboarding really started to take off and hit it’s stride, Asia in general and China in particular was at a political crossroad. China had leased their own land Hong Kong, which was governed by England; Macau by Portugal and Shanghai only given back by the French thirty years prior. In Asia in general there was little international trade. There were few tourists and fewer cars, but there were millions of bicycles on the streets. These days the streets are jam-packed with cars, and the air is polluted with fumes, grit and noise. Residents lived simple lives mostly in walled courtyards. A seven- or eight-story building was considered unusually high. These structures are now dwarfed by skyscrapers which house fancy westernized shopping malls and outlets like McDonald's, KFC and Starbucks. Fashion used to be just as simple, the unisex look was the norm with very little self expression on any physical level. Now street fashion is varied and colorful, if not always chic.

Incredibly, a lot of Asia and China in particular has pulled off the equivalent of reform, renaissance and industrial revolution in 30 years. It’s generally acknowledged that new Asia and new China started thirty years ago, but like the mind catches up with the body, the legislations catch up with the reality and the real ‘new Asia’ has just begun this decade.

Skateboarding in the western world started as an ongoing progression from a culture that had built itself for almost a century prior, surfing. It took decades of gradual redefining to find itself as we see it today. The shape of boards, the fashion, pools, competitions, street skating, shoes, hardware, art and popularity had all developed as a fairly slow movement. But the progression picked up generation upon generation along the way trying to find their place within the new culture and of course sculpting it themselves. This took at least the thirty years (more like 40) that it has taken our Asian neighbours to literally reinvent themselves demographically and culturally.

In the last twenty years of skateboarding the focus has undoubtedly been on street skating; proving itself to be the most progressive form of skateboarding, with trick and style variations becoming never-ending. It has outdone itself year after year since the very first ollie to the last ledge combination or monstrous handrail just concurred.  There has been something magical about each different generation and movement in skateboarding, but from the beginning, the gap in time between changes has become less and less. In the last 5 years skateboarding has seen the quickest and most dramatic progression due to the massive influence of the Internet.

The last generation eagerly awaited video releases that were years in the making (unless innovators themselves) to see what the next trends were in skateboarding; trick, style and power wise. Adapting to this and keeping up with the standards being pushed was a much slower process. In your first years of skateboarding, the expectation of being able to flip your board in more than one direction or coordinate an ollie higher then a gutter was not really present as there were only a few ‘cream of the crop’ dudes that were at that level, particularly in Australia, and they seemed almost super human. The standard bar of skateboarding has risen so high with the accessibility to so much information in the last few years, that picking up a skateboard as a pre-teen these days, the possibilities are endless and the basics are what were pushing the boundaries just a few years ago. Asia only sees skateboarding for what it has been elevated to at this present day. The accessibility to the world standard is what they are exposed to, with pro teams touring year round and online content coming out daily. In Asia there aren’t previous generations of skateboarders, still interested or pushing around the local park, for the newbies to look up to and take heritage from. The idea of skateboarding being passed down from parents, uncles or even older brothers is near impossible.

Watching the Asian skateboarders on our adventure was an extremely interesting exercise. In the same way that street skating in the 90’s tried to figure out what tricks work and what the possibilities were spot-wise, these guys are really just testing the waters of it all. They’re soaking up all of their surroundings, but at times oblivious to the amazing landscapes of architecture in front of them, often missing  gems of spots right before their eyes just lacking the experience, skill and background to understand the potential. The local guys that came on our trip progressed day after day in front of us. The trick selections literally multiplied by just adding combinations to them; tailslides turned into tailslide - bigspins, turned into heelflip - tailslide - bigspins.

Western culture is so important and fascinating to the South East Asians. With disposable incomes becoming more common it’s new and exciting, but also still very foreign. Westerners are still almost alien in a lot of the areas we visited, so although they have our side of skateboarding, old and new, to look up to for inspiration, the difference in levels of ability would seem unfathomable to them. They naturally need their own heroes in their scene - peers to look up to that make it seem like a more achievable goal. These figures in the Asian skateboarding world have already naturally started to form as in any human cycle, but the question is: Will the nature of their new and rapidly progressing subculture will follow the western interpretation of skateboarding?

The history of skateboarding in the Western world has created legends and innovators over time. We have looked to the likes of The Gonz, Cardiel, Reynolds and Stranger (the list is too long) for advancements in style and tricks, watching the evolution of street skateboarding unfold first hand. The massive Asian population that is beginning to interpret skateboarding isn’t building an industry like the originators, rather immersing themselves in one that already exists. Is there going to be room for ‘stars’ in Asia’s skateboarding fruition, the same way that there is in the western scenes?

The blanket of overwhelming information on such a huge community will naturally take skateboarding to levels we never could have imagined. Around three quarters of the worlds population is in Asia. A law of averages says that within the next twenty years more than half of the worlds skateboarding community will be in Asia, if not sooner if the industrial revolution continues and the economic growth is steady (their economy has grown at an average of 9.8% since 1978). Skateboarders from previous generations of street skating generally already feel flooded by the amount of attention it gets from the public. It has evolved into a huge beast that has moved from a form of expression of an attitude and movement to a more acrobatic sport - for better or worse. So where will this next influx of participators take skateboarding?

Luckily skateboarding is a very personal thing. We can try to make rules and try to define perfection within the subculture, but at the end of the day the possibilities only end where you leave them. Skateboarding has gone through so many different phases in its short life, and in some way those phases live on and inspire each one to succeed them. The people getting into skateboarding in western culture now are very different to the people that explored it before its extreme popularity. Who knows where to from here…

Warmest welcomes to Asia.. Thanks for the hospitality so far.

KETCHUP FOR THE BOYS!

- A week in Byron Bay with Natas and Dylan... This was supposed to be for a magazine, but the photos got sprayed all over Instagram before it got a chance, so naturally the magazine pulled out. The beauty of social media.

All of a sudden my email was full of a train of back and forth emails between Natas Kaupas, Dylan Rieder and some guys from the La Casa House in Byron. Everyone seemed as confused as each other. Emails kept hovering for a couple of weeks until I could finally decipher what it was, that was going on. It seemed that they were inviting Dylan and Natas to the Beach House in Belongil for 10 days to build a ramp, swim, jump off rocks, paint the ramp, skate the ramp, play stupid music all night and try to get through a never ending fridge of beers.

  The basic idea seemed easy; take a couple of dudes, chuck them in a house with everything they need and see what happens. Despite the preparation to make sure there was a ramp, paint, food and beer there was no day to day plan that mapped out what was going to happen and when. The first couple of days were spent recovering from the week before, camping around the north of New Zealand. The two got comfortable with their surroundings and the ramp that ended up in the front yard of the beach resort.

  The ramp only had to stick around for the 10 days we were in town so a decision was made somewhere along the line (not by any of us) to surface the ramp with MDF. Unfortunately, as anyone who has made a ramp out of MDF before will know, although it’s extremely maneuverable and slick it doesn’t hold up against the stress of bad weather. Byron weather was for the most part gorgeous and sunny as expected but extremely tropical. At least once a day storm clouds would roll over the residence to dump a layer of water on the ramp. Efforts were always made to tarp up, but naturally water got in and started to soak the wood. The ramp started to swell, puff up and fall apart bit-by-bit, day-by-day.

  When the rain set in we were never left with nothing to do. There was a room downstairs full of musical instruments and a fridge full of Coronas. Natas and Riley were convinced there must be little beer leprechauns living out the back topping up the fridge. This theory was not far off as there was a house assistant refueling the icebox every morning no matter how much of a dint we thought we were trying to make in supplies. It took a few nights of boozing and making a mess and then waking up to a clean and stocked house before we even noticed that someone was coming in and doing all the dirty work for us. As much as it’s the best thing ever to make as much of a mess as you like and never have to clean, our consciences started to ware on us as we spent more and more time with the house assistant ‘Pete’ and generally felt bad for all of the work he was doing on behalf of our drunken lazy selves. Even when you would wake up early with the best intentions to clean up the house and save Pete the trouble, he had gotten in before us and left the place sparkling. A general observation was made mid way through the stay that all of our mouths had turned into wrinkly, soggy messes, much like the sensation of staying in the bath too long and your fingers go all prunish, but inside your mouth.

  As the first couple of days slipped by and the ramp had already started to deteriorate in some form, a decision was made to turn it into some sort of visual diary as it decomposed at the same time. Tricks and lines were added to the ramps history, as were colour blocks and quotes. Most of the quotes came from the previous nights antics or quotes from the tour the week before. The first quote painted on the ramp and the most prolific from the stay was ‘Ketchup for the Boys’. This came about from one boozy night in the band room, when a 30 minute long song was born singing the words ‘Tits out for the boys’ over and over again. As the song came to it’s climax and the band found some kind of unison to end, Riley stuck his head through the curtains after returning in from partying in town exclaiming, “what are you guys singing? Ketchup for the Boys?” and then it began. A whole new song was composed and a band of musical retards formed to make ‘The Condiments’.

ONCE UPON A TIME ANDREW CURRIE AND I DID A ZINE CALLED FUKNOATH. WE DIDNT MAKE IT LAST LONG ENOUGH.. BUT IT WAS TOUGH WHEN WE DID. THOSE WERE THE DAYS. 

:(

IT'S ACTUALLY AFFORDABLE TO SHOOT FILM HERE!!!! PHOTOGRAPHY JUST GOT FUN AGAIN! MORE FROM THE LAST WEEK OR SO IN N.Y.C. Flatemates, NateMates, Josh Palls and Flowers etc...

THIS ARTICLE JUST CAME OUT IN 'THE SKATEBOARDERS JOURNAL' BUT I CAN'T IMAGINE THE HAD ENOUGH ROOM FOR ALL OUR RAMBLING, SO IF YOU HAVE A LITTLE WHILE, AND LIKE CHRIS NIERATKO, HAVE A READ!!!

// MEET THE NIERATKO'S // 

I’d heard rumors about the nightmare that is Chris Nieratko. I always wanted to meet him, but was very worried about how it would happen and what would happen. As you’ve read on these very pages and in all skateboarding media for the last couple of decades, the guys a straight shooter and he’s often shooting pretty close to the heart. As a journalist he’s pissed off and called out all shapes, sizes and walks of life, so when the day came I entered with caution. It was true. My next ten days were spent looking over my shoulder for a sparkler to come flying past me, our van to be broken into or instigating fights or weird love affairs between twins. It was all too much and then he’d run away into a writing frenzy. Quickly I felt like I’d met the infamous Chris Nieratko and his reputation was not preceding him. When the tour ended we all went in different directions but I thought, where does he go now. What happens in Chris’s life off tour. I knew he had a young family, a house, a dog and some skate shops. How did this maniac fit into that. At a lose end and an urge to get out of New York City, I quickly got back in touch with Chris and jumped on an hour long train from Brooklyn to suburban New Jersey. I’d met the Chris, but now it was time to meet the Nieratko’s.

Andrew - I wikipedia’d you and you pretty much just come up as a porn reviewer?

Chris - Yeah (laughs) I wonder who made that up?

A - But you kind of are a porn reviewer for Vice?

C - But I look at it as, so far down the line of occupations that I have. I’m like a Jamaican, I have, like 17 jobs. I’m a nanny to two boys, I do daddy day care around the house, I own four skate shops, I write for Vans, Skateboarder, The Skateboard Mag, The Skateboarders Journal, ESPN and then I do stuff for Vice, I don’t do much for them because they don’t pay, they don’t pay much and I don’t like Canadians all that much so uh, I don’t give them too much of my time. Oh and Kingshit, my bad, from Canada.

A - You wrote a book ‘Skinema’ isn’t that excerpts from your Vice porn reviews?

C - I actually used to do more - They weren’t in vice they were in a UK fetish magazine called Bizzare, from like 2000-2005 and it’s pretty much just a collection of all the craziness that was happening behind the scenes for me at Big Brother before I met my wife and then the last chapter is like meeting my wife and us eventually getting married, so its uh, it’s a feel good story. It’s the story of a junkie being saved. I was the damsel in distress and she saved me.

A - Is that how you’ll describe it to your kids when they look you up and you’re a porn reviewer?

C - Yeah… I will first show them the savings that I’ve put away for them, for college and explain that money doesn’t grow on trees, it grows with words and that’s how I paid for this.

A - One of your kids was born on 9-11, which just adds to the ironic nature of ‘The Neraitko’s”

C - Yeah I was hoping that the second one would be born on the 4th of July so he could be like, real patriotic, so he could be the opposite of the 9-11 terrorist baby, but that didn’t work - he was late. Then I was hoping that he would be born on the date of the bombing of Hiroshima, umm, so that they could be ahh, you know, brothers in arms, but that didn’t happen either. He was instead born on the day that my good friend Andy Kessler passed away on August 10th.

A - That was a fair blow to the industry at large, but a personal blow also? He was a good friend?

C - He was a good friend but also was just very helpful when I was comin’ up, younger then you, probably like 17-18 and just starting to write for some crappy skateboard mags on the East coast. But uh, he just told me, he’s like “don’t bullshit people, just tell them how it is. People want to hear the truth” and I’ve tried to stay true to that my entire life, you know, thanks to him, and I think when people see my name on something, they know it’s not going to be, you know, fluff or bullshit.

A - When your first child was born all of your family members were named Chris?

C - I call the new one Chris as well. His name is Nicholas. My wife got to pick the name because I got to pick the first ones name. You know, it was like an ongoing joke that the whole family would be named Chris’s, Like George Foreman has, I think 8 or 9 sons named George and a daughter named Georgia. Um, but she picked Nicholas, and when she told me the name I was like “Oh like st Nick for Christmas, cool, I’ll call him Chris for short” and then she just threw her hands up in the air and walked away.

A - In an interview about Skinema you’re asked about your lady-killer days…

(cuts in) I almost killed a lady.

A - Really, what happened?

C - She almost OD’d on cocaine and choked on her own vomit I had to pull her tongue out, scoop all the vomit out of her mouth, she was turning blue, choking on it, I put her in a bathtub, um, she lunged forward, smacked her head on a faucet, started bleeding out of her head, still turning blue, still convulsing and vomiting… It was pretty gnarly.

A - Right, that’s kind of dark.. I was about to ask you about 3somes cause you spoke about 3somes in the interview..

C - I thought you trying to ask me about killing women.

A - Nah, this interviewer seemed to think you were a bit of a ladies-man.

C - I don’t know if I was much of a ladies man, I just always had a lot of drugs and strippers love drugs, so, um, it’s easy to barter drugs for sex. But I could never find two strippers that wanted drugs at the same time or sex at the same time, so no 3somes..

A - And none since the marriage?

C - Ah, no, she’s the mother of my children sadly.

A - Where are you originally from? You say in an interview that you’re bummed because your mum cant read Skinema, because she doesn’t read English? Is that fact or fiction?

C - No, that’s a complete lie. She can’t read it, because she doesn’t know it exists. She doesnt really know about any of my dark side, she just knows that I write about skateboarding and that I’m a good husband and father, that’s as far as she knows.

A - Ok, She hasn’t ‘Googled’ you?

C - She has just recently become aware of the internet… She has trouble checking her email, luckily for me. I don’t think she’s googled me..(shrugging) My mother-in-law has and knows far too much about me and her daughters sex life.

A - Your first skateboarding writing was for Disney?

C - Yeah I interviewed Tony Hawk when I was like 17 and I really how easy it was to just talk to people and then I had a friend that was shooting photos of bands for Thrasher and he got me hooked up with Thrasher, and so I was doing music interview for them in maybe, 97-98 around there I’m not really sure… And then it just kinda took off, I was just trying to freelance for anyone that would have me and uh I eventually moved to Cincinnati to work for Strength. Big Brother was going through a lot of changes because everybody was going to start Jackass so they needed and Editor.

A - Was that when Larry Flynt bought it?

C - He had bought it a few years prior. I was freelancing for them for a couple of years before that, but that’s when I actually moved out there.

A - Was Dave Carnie already there?

C - Dave Carnie was there almost from the beginning, so yeah he was there.

A - What was that like, working at Big Brother?

C - It was the best job that I will ever have in my life. It was completely unhealthy for me because of the sex, drugs and alcohol, but um, it was just pure fun and I’ll never have another job like that, that gave me so much money just to really just fuck off.. I mean we’d get interns in, we’d get hot ones who were girls and I’d sleep with them or dumb ones who were guys and we’d torture them make them pan handle in the middle of the street, it was just fun.

A - What was an editorial meeting like at Big Brother?

C - I don’t know, I remember them happening but it was like, silly business, it was always silly business, and thing is, me and Dave were always just wasted so what we’d do, he would write half the magazine, I would write half the magazine. We would uh, sober up for like a 48 hour stretch and just write the entire thing in two days and get back to drinking, so anybody out there that cries how tough it is to put a skateboard magazine together, I don’t wanna hear it cause I can put a magazine together and 2 days and make it good.

A - Was it mainly you two that came up with all the concepts for covers etc, or were there a lot of contributors?

C - For sure, I mean, anything that was conceptual was definitely ours, uh, we crafted that. Every once in a while I think someone would come with an amazing photo, but I don’t think any of the crazy concepts were like… I mean Jarod Barry in chaps, um, he was a gay skater, someone shot it, but I think even that, Carnie gave them instructions on what to shoot and how to shoot it.

A - What are your favourite articles?

C - Oh man, theres… I used to love the Ams, it was called God Damn Ams, and it was just a spread. So one page was just a photo and the other was just torture. It was like a kids first introduction to getting interviewed and I would just say the worst things and just completely torture them.. I don’t know, we have a thing out here, like 5Boro Skateboards loves to tortures their ams. I just think that ams should be tortured and treated terribly so that they can know the ropes and never get a big head. But, nowadays ams are treated so nicely you got these cocky kids that think theyre the shit

and they haven’t paid their dues. You haven’t earned it yet, baby.

A - So what went on when Dr Laura Schlessinger piped up?

C - I don’t think I had too much involvement in what went on with that. There was like a kids issue and I think Sheckler was on the cover as like a little boy and it was just a lot of naughty talk in there and she got a copy of it and began this crusade against us. But she’s on a constant crusade against everything.

A - Did you ever have to meet her?

C - No, I couldn’t care less about her.

A - Ok, but was that to do with the demise of the magazine?

C - No, by no means, that was years before. I think it was only really publicity and any publicity’s good. The demise was, skateboarding taking a turn for the worse and turning vanilla and advertisers not wanting to have their riders cast in such a crazy alcohol fueled light, they’d rather have a press realize about their guy, something very vanilla. That’s kinda the deal now, I’ve had an editor tell me that everything is advertorial, so you’re just supposed to suck the advertisers dick. Any body that advertised in Big Brother I’m thankful for them because they were willing to put their riders in there and just, you know, warts and all, and let them just… you know let the kids see their favourite riders exposed and natural and not some kind of façade. That’s kinda whats goin’ on now, everyone’s got this persona and noone’s allowed to say anything crazy and everything has to be so P.C. and that’s why I love Leo Romero right now, I think his pull quote in the new Skateboarder was “I make more money then P-Rod and Chris Cole and those two can suck my dick.” And its like, noone says any stuff like that anymore but it was like common in Big Brother, people would just always, purposefully say the most insane things and I loved it, skateboarding needs that, its supposed to be rebel rousing, its supposed to be outcasts, its not supposed to be this jock-ish sound bit from Bill Doran.

A - Do you see any publications that revive this?

C - Not in the United States, everyone’s too scared in the United States, It’s just power to the almighty advertising dollar, um, Kingshit in Canada lets me and Carnie do whatever we want, I mean, it’s a Canadian magazine and I purposefully just make fun of Canada all the time and they just, they love it and they take it, not to many other people are fuckin’ with other people, I mean, then again my scope is limited, I don’t know what’s going on overseas, there’s probably magazines doin’ it and I’m just not seein’ it.

A - I heard you mention in an interview that Vice had stolen the idea from Big Brother or were just trying to rip it off?

C - I think maybe Carnie had said it, Umm, my stance is always that they wanted to be Big Brother.

A - Canadian also, right?

C - Yeah, Canadian. I was at a trade show and they were just a newspaper magazine and uh, they loved Big Brother. They told me flat out, and this is when they were starting, that’s what they wanted to be and there’s that voice, but along the line that got lost. I’m not really sure what they want to be now, they want to be a political version of Big Brother, traveling the world. I just think a lot of the humor has been lost by the magazine and they’ve begun to believe their own press.

A - So you don’t see them as any kind of savior at all in that sense?

C - I, I, I, ah, are, Someone looks at them as a savior? I mean I think there’s entertainment value there and I think they do a good product, and I think they have an amazing media pyramid scheme that I love you know, it’s in every country around the world and those guys are making tons of money and I’m very happy for them. There is no trickle down effect in that, theyre not sharing the wealth, um, but um, I’m not one of the guys who like bags on peoples success, I’m happy for them, but I know that many years ago they wanted to be Big Brother, they wanted that voice as theres… and so it’s worked.

A - Do you feel that the CKY videos held onto that and pushed it after Big Brother?

C - Yeah, you gotta tip your hat to Bam who has really formed what Jackass is. For Bam to not have been an executive producer on Jackass is almost absurd, he came up with the format. It’s all him.. shopping carts, all that and just getting hurt and fucking up your friends.. Fucking shit up. He was doing it with his buddies for no reason at all.

A - You were involved in that a little bit right?

C - Not so much, I came up with a bunch of ideas for skits and stuff but they were just all of my friends. They are all amazingly and immensely rich right now and I’m stoked for them but it’s like, I had the option to be involved to whatever degree I wanted to but chose not to. I don’t like Jerry Lewis, I don’t like slapshtick humor.. umm whats that other guys name that does shlapstick.. umm Ace Ventura, Jim Carrie. It’s not my type of humor. I don’t like physical humor like that, I like more tortuorous, funny, mental humor.

A - I noticed that Johnny Knoxville wrote the forward for your book Skinema, do you regard him as a friend?

C - He’s actually a pretty smart fella and his pranks that aren’t filmed are actually quite clever. I like him a lot. That was something that Vice thought would help sell the book. So I appreciate the gesture but that was from their suggestion. I think I had an intro that worked just fine from Dave Carnie and I was happy with it like that, but you know, I’m stoked Johnny did it.

A - The front cover of Skinema was shot by Terry Richardson, did you ever meet him?

C - I’ve met him a couple of times, we’ve never ‘really’ hung out. Again that was something that Vice pulled off for me. I love his stuff, I like dirty photos and he’s a dirty, dirty man so I was definitely stoked to have him shoot the cover. The chick was hot. There was this other cover that was like this busty blonde, natural tits that I was feelin’ too but Supreme had just used it so I couldn’t, but that one definitely gave me a boner.

A - Have you got any other weird celebrity relationships we wouldn’t know about? Any secret phone conversations that happen behind closed doors.

C - I recently became friends with ummmm… ‘slums of Beverly Hills’… umm dude I’m spacing. The red head chick. Actress. I guess we’re not that good’a friends cause I can’t remember. Don’t print that. I can’t remember her fuckin name. I’ll tell you after. I met her at like some skate contest and she has just got a very crass sense of humor, really, it’s pretty fucked. So her and I hit it off right away, just drinking for a couple of hours telling dead baby jokes.. really awful, awful stuff. So we’re trying to get together soon to come up with some concepts for T.V. shows. She needs a T.V. show and wants it to be very, very dark. So I’m trying to make a family sitcom where she’s a street prostitute and she lives with two other street prostitutes and they’re trying to raise a baby.

A - Are you trying to move into that kind of stuff? Away from skateboarding interviews and skateboarding news based stuff?

C - Yeah I mean, I’ve gotta try to find some kind of side work to pay for these children to go to college, cause skateboarding doesn’t pay much… It affords me a decent lifestyle when it’s just me and my wife, but with two kids… If I wrote a T.V. show I’d make in a month what I make in two years right now. So yeah… I could do that. Or write some more books.

A - Are you going to do anything like that? Books?

C - Yeah I’m trying to do a ‘terrible parenting guide’. Like the worst parenting guide ever. There is really no humor in that category. I went to the parenting area of the store, trying to find a book for myself and it was just all so very serious  - trying to find a book that was like ‘how not to kill your baby’. So there’s an angle there. I’d also like to start to write messed up childrens books. I wrote one about my kid shitting his pants. I wanna do more of those. There’s gotta be a niche, maybe its not in a proper book store but there are fun parents out there that want something a little bit different.

A - Do you study that kind of literature or any others before you endeavour to write it.

C - Generally not. In the case of kids books, I went once or twice to the store just to see what was out there but more then anything just for what you can physically do with a book like pop outs and squeaky noises. I had the shitting the pant story done and I had a friend who’s got a friend at a publishing house and he was like, let me put you in touch with this publisher. So I sent it to her and she’s like “we like it, but can you make the baby boy a vampire and can you make his dog who eats the poo a warefolf” and I was like, “no it’s my son and his dog, what are you talkin’ about” and she was like “well vampires are really hot right now and if you made him a vampire then we could sell this” and I was like “no, what happens to my book when vampires aren’t hot anymore, people stop buying it? Little boys and their dog are always hot”. So Yeah, I don’t do a whole lot of research, I try not to. It just kind of effects my voice and my writing so I try not to. I’ve got a little motto, ‘If I didn’t write it, I don’t read it’.

A - So you obviously don’t really have any favourite writers?

C - Raymond Carver is my favourite writer, hands down, he’s very simple. My favourite is What we talk about, When we talk about Love.  He only writes short stories. He died a drunk. He never got around to even doing a novel because he just couldn’t, but his short stories are just amazing. They pieced a bunch of them together to make a film called shortcuts. He was just really good. I just like simple writing; Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson… you know? I don’t… Someone told me to read The Shining and it was the only thing I’d ever read by Stephen King and it took four pages for him to tell me that it was raining and I was like, I can’t read this, this is not the type of writing I like. Three words, It Was Raining, lets just move on from there.

A - All the writers that you’ve mentioned have mentioned are known for their drinking and excessive drug abuse, do you think that you entering this kind of ‘family life’ is going to taint that kind of charm in your own writing?

C - I can’t really speak for those writers and what their reasons were. I know that this is a crazy voice in my head that wont shut up and I try to drink toward the end of the day to try to numb it so I can go to sleep otherwise I’m up all night with this voice in my head just spitting absurdities at me. My voice is my voice, I don’t try to pepper it up and I don’t think it’s about to change.

A - There’s obviously a lot of movement toward web media. Do you like the saturation of the web or prefer plain old print.

C - What I prefer doesn’t really matter to where it’s going. I grew up with print, I’m a comic book fan, that’s why I wanted to start. I just like printed matter. Photos look better printed, that’s just a reality. But the fact of the matter is, the printed page is going to go the way of the dinosaur in the next 10 years. You’re going to have to have specialty product just for it to exist. People want their information and they want it yesterday.. News immediately. They want footage, they don’t want a still photo. They’d rather take a sequence and make it into a giff with movement, that’s what they want.

A - You don’t think there’s enough people like yourself, and myself that will keep the print industry alive to a certain degree?

C - Nope, and I can tell you that for sure. Magazines are having a hard enough time surviving as it is and I can just tell you from the fact that I’ve got 4 skateshops and every single month I’m giving away 95% of the magazines to kids “here take ‘em” cause they haven’t sold. Kids come in and look at them, but financially theyre not supporting them and a magazine cannot run on good intentions.

A - You’ve worked for a bunch of magazines over the years, Hustler, Interview, I.d. what are your favourites to have worked for?

C - I’ve worked for so many over the years and they’ve all been good in their own way. The Skateboarders Journal to me is hands down the nicest feeling magazine that I currently work for. I think the paper is unbelievable. I’m not sure that the people in Australia know how good of a product they have in their hands because we don’t have anything that nice over here in the states, in the skateboarding world. Skateboarding is not printed like that here, the layouts aren’t that nice. There’s a lot of half arsed layouts here in the states.

A - From a litereary point of view were there any magazines that you were honored to have your work published in? Interview is one of my favourite magazines to read.. what was the article you wrote in that?

C - I think I interviewed Spike Jonze for that and maybe some other people. Honestly I just regard it as a trade for me. Putting the words in the right place is no different then like being a plumber or like an electrician, so it’s like you asking me that question is like asking a plumber if there were any sinks that he was really stoked on fixing. It doesn’t matter to me man. I send it off and where it goes, who knows. Interview magazine, it paid a bit of money, Spike got me the gig, I didn’t even know at the time it had anything to do with Andy Warhol, it’s just work to me. I love it and I’m lucky enough to work in something that I love but people come up to me and say “hey do you remember this story” and it’s like, I drink so much still to this day that it’s hard for me to remember anything at all.

A - I know you still drink a lot but..

C - I’ve been taking it easy on you since you’ve been here.

A - Do you attribute some of your writing capabilities to the drugs and alcohol.

C - I don’t know. It’s not like it’s fancy. It’s not like it’s very good. It’s the voice I speak just put on paper. Like when you and I were at the bar, it’s the way I’d tell you a story at a bar is the way I wan my writing to come across, it’s not very flowery. I try to make it just the way that I talk and the way that my people talk. If anything I think it’s just attributed to me being from New Jersey and it’s just the way we talk. We tell Big Fish tales.

ALMOST AS SOON AS I GOT BACK TO THE STATES I JUMPED ON A TRAIN TO SAN DIEGO TO SEE WHERE MY GOOD FRIEND WES KREMER CALLS HOME. IT WAS A BRIEF LITTLE ADVENTURE, AND AMIDST A CAMERA COMPLETELY TAKING A DUMP ON ITSELF AND NEARLY ALL OF MY FILM, THERE  ARE A COUPLE OF PICTURES FROM THE TRIP / The portrait up top is in Wes's room which supposedly hasn't really changed in the last 10 years, with all the skate posters of all his favourites and friends. You can find printed version on the contents page of the new 'The Skateboarders Journal' / 2013

RILEY BLAKEWAY AND I SHOT JACK FARDELL MUCKING AROUND WITH THE LEATHERMAN X MONSTER CHILDREN TOOL AND ELEANORA FULLPIPE. GO WATCH HIS LITTLE VIDEO FOR THEM AT www.rileyblakeway.com 

IN FACT WATCH ALL OF HIS VIDEOS, HIS WORK IS AMAZING AND HE HAS AN EXTRA SPECIAL FRONT FLIP DOWN SAND DUNES.

SAMMY WINTER BACKSIDE SMITH AND SWITCH CROOKS / AS SEEN IN THE NEW 'THE SKATEBOARDERS JOURNAL', (minus the portrait that's just off a random roll of film) / Wish I could see the rest of the magazine and his interview, but they don't make it to NYC often / 2013

MORE FILM SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS AND DIDDY'S BACK IN NYC RIGHT NOW.

WE IN NEW YORK.. 4TH OF JULY, POOLS AND SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS #FILM