StrangeLove
the ace of spades, by dave carnie
Sean Cliver
I was standing in the beer aisle at the grocery store when I was approached by an old, wiry hessian in a denim jacket. He placed his hands on my shoulders and squared me off so he could better read my shirt. I didn’t resist because I had never been molested in the beer aisle before so I was interested in seeing where this was going to go. The old hessian then proceeded to read my shirt. My shirt said, “Listen To Black Sabbath.” After he finished reading, which I felt took longer than four words required, he stepped back and laughed a maniacal laugh and asked, “IS THAT A COMMAND? HAHA!” When I got home, I put 11 beers in the fridge and opened one for myself. After a long sip of cool, refreshing alcohol, I put the can on the counter, pulled off my “Listen To Black Sabbath” shirt, and threw it in the trash.
just the fuqs
Sean Cliver
Hello. Here at StrangeLove we receive a lot of questions, oftentimes as many up to two-to-three a month. As much as we'd like to personally respond to each and every one it's simply not possible. Why, you ask? Well, there you go. Another question I now have to attend to while simultaneously trying to keep the production pipeline filled with new and exciting graphic content to tickle your fancy. So, you see, I can do one, or I can do the other, but I can't do both or nothing at all will get done. Yeah, I know that doesn't make much sense—energy, matter, entropy, all that Einstein-fusion jazz—but to be fair a lot of the questions we're asked don't always make a lot of sense either. I did, however, come up with this ingenious idea to compile an assortment of the most frequently uttered questions in a one-stop shop for all your inquisitive needs, leaving me to continue on my merry working way.
a review of olympic skateboarding and a conversation with olympic skateboarding commentator, paul zitzer, by dave carnie
Sean Cliver
One of the first questions I often ask in an interview is, “What’s your title?” In Paul’s case I genuinely didn’t know: Olympic Skateboarding Commentator? Color Commentator? Announcer? What’s the proper term here? “Do you remember Paul Higgins?” Paul asked in reply. “He announced the first few XGames. I want to go by whatever he went by.”
beat it, ya val jerk!
Sean Cliver
Stop me if you've read this before, but throughout the course of this fantastic journey called life we will experience things of such great magnitude they will profoundly influence us till our dying day. For me, one such meteoric impact of the soul came in the celluloid form of Thrashin' (1986), so when shit started to go viral in March 2020 with all the pandemic pandemonium and no one had any real clue what might be coming around the next infectious bend, I thought to myself, "If this is it, like really it, the twilight of humankind on Earth, the fabled End of Days, what's the very last thing I want to accomplish before our final whistle blows and we all clock out for eternity?"
chris pontius’ dad’s lil red shorts, by dave carnie
Sean Cliver
One day, when it was too hot to skate, me, Chris Pontius, and all of our dumb lil buddies decided to visit Avila Beach near San Luis Obispo to frolic in the ocean and cool down. When we arrived at the beach the sun was shining, there was sand, an ocean, children, towels, it looked like a beach, and we ran straight into the water. We were young, hyper boys that hadn’t yet learned the art of sitting around in the sand and doing nothing. We just got out of the minivan and ran straight into the ocean waving our...