StrangeLove
how did it get there?
Sean Cliver
Eventually this post will, I swear, provide an answer to that question, but for now I'm going to fly in the face of upstanding journalistic standards* and veer straight off to Tangent Land rather than Main Point. If you've come to expect anything from these entries, though, that bar should be set very, very low, because: a) I'm my own worst editor; b) I'm not getting paid so there's no reason to be all professional and shit; and c) I'm by no means equating myself to Kurt Vonnegut, but similar to his novel Breakfast of Champions I do think I'm in the process of purging all the garbage that has been piling up in the assorted sordid waste bins of my mind—and, if I may be entirely honest, I wish the contents were more substantive in nature to reflect a life well lived, but… well… so it goes.
just in time for… st. patrick's day?
Sean Cliver
They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The same can be said for the boulevard to holidays. You see, we had every seasonal intent to release this new "Gargoyle" board by Todd Bratrud last Halloween, but the moving parts in our production schedule proved to not be so moveable—or at least not to the limitless bounds of our wildest unrealistic fantasies—so we, in turn, had to temper our expectations in a much more malleable manner. But that was then, this is now, and at least it's green so you can ride it with pride come St. Paddy's in a week.
porous walker: have you seen him?
Sean Cliver porous walker
Contrary to what Forrest Gump famously postulated, life is not a box of fucking chocolates. What it is, though, is exactly what the esteemed philosopher Miller pointed out in Repo Man:
"A lot of people don't realize what's going on. They view life as a bunch of unconnected incidents and things. They don't realize that there's this like, lattice of coincidence that lays on top of everything. I'll give you an example. Show you what I mean. Suppose you're thinking about a plate of shrimp. Suddenly, somebody'll say like, plate, or shrimp, or plate of shrimp. Out of the blue. No explanation. No point looking for one either. It's all part of the cosmic unconsciousness."
a nightmare on del amo blvd.
Sean Cliver
The year was 1992—isn't it always?—and I'd just started working in the World Industries art department after getting the steel-toed boot from Powell-Peralta. I was fresh off the boat in Torrance, you could say, and not yet savvy to the internal affairs and politics at World, most of which stemmed from the still relatively fresh intake of the new kid on the block, Plan B.
a carnie christmas story; or, sean's slick soliloquy
Sean Cliver
Never before in the history of mankind has the magical holiday of Christmas been properly explained until now. But before getting to the obligatory promotional hand-off to Dave Carnie's latest cold cut creation, I'd first like to slide down a slick little wormhole and go back in time to the year of 1990—or was it 1991?—when Santa Cruz/NHS introduced the Everslick™ deck construction, which, in layman's terms, boiled down to a thin plastic sheet pressed onto the bottom of a board. This was right around the time when rails, the last of the plastic bastions from the '80s, were swiftly going the way of the dodo (unless you happened to be one company focused on the introduction of their years-in-the-making orange product), so it just made sliding sense, right?