StrangeLove
bakesale
Sean Cliver
Nick doesn't like my taste in music. I know this because he flat out told me so while sitting (and mostly sleeping in) shotgun as I drove us back down to Southern California from Santa Cruz following the 50th anniversary extravaganza hosted by NHS, circa 2023. Granted, it was a super long ass drive. He was also dealing with the mental and physical repercussions of a bizarre if not ridiculous shower mishap, and I'm sure I had on some random Spotify playlist that was algorithmically grabbing anything and everything that may have vaguely applied to the UK sounds of the Courteeners and the Vaccines. So, at some point, Nick grumpily told me he was over it and hijacked the bluetooth connection to play music he liked.
who fucking cares
Sean Cliver
Does this sound familiar at all? If so, you were likely a devotee of Big Brother skateboard magazine, circa 1995-ish, when Mark Lewman approached us with the idea for a sporadic column entitled “Who Fucking Cares.” The idea, in a nutshell, was to talk about something grossly irrelevant that had no business being in a skateboard magazine. At all. Could be anything from tropical bird care and feeding to Scandinavian spa maintenance. Then again, this concept could have applied to most any articles printed in the magazine, contest and tour articles included. But, you'll notice, there is no question mark at the end of said title, because a query was never intended.
the 2024 year of wood in review
Sean Cliver
And so it has come to this: The annual wrap up of all that we managed to accomplish deck-wise in the year of someone's lord, aka 2024. And I guess what I really meant by "this" was a glaring example of redundancy in action, given the fact the first sentence is just a wordier and less succinct version of the post title. Feel me? Please don't. I'm really not a hugger—all random tree themes aside—but more on that later.
romancing the archives
Sean Cliver
Look, "Raiders of the Lost Archives" had already been formally claimed by Jaime Owens back when he was toiling away over at the shambling zombie husk still somehow known as TransWORLD Skateboarding, so I had to make do with the next best Hollywood bite that came riding in on Indiana's blockbuster coattails. But, in case you had not noticed, we've added a new tab to our remedial Shopify site: ARCHIVE. What is it, you ask? Well, quite honestly, you could have just clicked on it and seen for yourself—it's fairly self-explanatory—but since you're here you might as well just read on. I mean, it's not like life is hurtling toward you with the ominous force of an oncoming car crash or anything, so you may as well just hang out and take a stroll down yet another wordy path with me.
something old and something new
Sean Cliver
I've always admired an artist who can say a lot with just a few lines (much like I can admire a writer who can say more in 25 words than I can in 2000 with a superfluous use of commas and an extreme predilection for parenthetical asides) so today's fireside chat takes place with Winston Tseng, a graphic designer synonymous with such former skate brands as Popwar and Enjoi. However, this interview is not recent; it dates back to 2016 when I was frantically trying to feed the internet beast over at Gorilla Flicks to justify my only reliable monthly paycheck. That said, it can still be found via a semi-quick search in the great Google gyre of digital garbage, but for the sake of cheap and easy promotional fodder to feed our own worldwide beast and support this latest release with Winston, I'm simply regurgitating it here—with bonus content! Just like the miscellaneous contents of a parental bird's stomach.