Protest Best Trick – Top Ten

Dec 18,2012 / By Hippie Mike / No Comment

Okay here’s the list of who made the Top Ten in The Best Trick Contest

In no particular order

Time for the Team to make a decision on the winner. It will be announced this Thursday.

Memories of Summer

Dec 18,2012 / By Hippie Mike / No Comment

As the snow starts falling today and the rain has been nonstop for over a month we are all in need of some good summer love. Since it’s a long while away it’s great to have a video like this come out and get us exited for what we got too experience this year. One of my favourite days of the year every year is Canada Day – July 1^st. Hundreds of amazing people gather every year on this day and skate Seylynn Bowl for the kickoff of the annual Bowl Series and just hang out.

Steve Denham, Jonny B., Steve Lange, Cuz, Mike Strato, Andy Anderson, Adam Hopkins, Hippo, Bushman, Eve, Dave Boyce, myself (Hippie Mike), and so many more who you are pretty much guaranteed to see every single year. It’s a great time and a great party and tons of awesome skating is sure to go down.

Here’s a Rolling Podcast Video recap of 2012 Seylynn Bowl Series. Late as always, but this year, I’d have to say Perfect Timing!!

Enjoy

If the world’s gonna end – we’re goin’ out in style

Dec 17,2012 / By Hippie Mike / No Comment

They say that December 21^st, 2012 is going to be the end of the Earth, that all hell is going to break loose and meteors are going to fall from the sky and kill us all, demolishing the planet we live on. I say bullshit…

In all the years I’ve been alive there have been many times where we are told the whole world is going down. And no one even cares about this prediction, they’re all non-believers. Sorry Mayans.

My favourite threat like this was the Millennium when all technology was supposed to fail us and we were all going to be helpless for weeks and months if we weren’t prepared. Oh we prepared alright, by going to Barbados where we could warm and relaxed and make sure we would enjoy ourselves if we couldn’t utilize technology to survive. Oh no, please don’t trap me on this beautiful island where we have plenty of natural substances and just enough people to share them with. But unfortunately the reality I believed was true and we still had a plane to catch on January 2^nd. Now the earth is going to explode? Sure.

Either way I’m going to prepare to go out in style like always.

Join me for the end of the earth on December 21^st – 4-8pm at Chuck Bailey Skate Park where I will be dressed as Santa Claus handing out gifts to everyone who shows up for a session in the park.

Rain, Shine, Snow, Meteors…. Don’t matter.

Travis Emerson is really good

Dec 14,2012 / By Protest Skateboards / No Comment

Here’s a quick video filmed by Dominic DeVries of Travis Emerson shredding up Chuck Bailey for a half an hour. Travis puts down a couple tricks in this little edit that are effortless for him but practically impossible for most other people. This kid is very unrecognized for how talented he actually is and I hope someone blows him up huge soon. Chance Skateboards is hookin’ him up at least.

Super tech, super chill, super awesome – Travis Emerson

Fandangle Blunt to Seran Wrap??

Dec 11,2012 / By Hippie Mike / No Comment

Jaden Easton-Ellett, my partner in crime…

This kid’s still only 18 years old and proven himself quite the man lately, but one of the things I will always recognize about Jaden is how he loves to invent new combo tricks. Back when Jaden was younger and skated a lot more he would dominate in lots of contests just because of his creativity and crazy mentality. He loves to go for it and do things that make you do a double take and ask – “What the hell was that?”

Here’s a new one from Jaden Easton-Ellett that I had never seen done before

Fandangle Blunt to Seran Wrap

Schpeels on Wheels

Dec 10,2012 / By Capn Old Ballz / No Comment

When I first started skating in the 80’s wheels were mostly 60mm, 95a, conical shape and some kind of neon color, usually pink. That was basically the 80’s in a nutshell and skateboarding was no exception. I loved the shapes and colors of wheels back then but things were changing, wheels were getting smaller. In the late 80’s when street skating was about to blow up a 57mm thinner harder wheel was becoming the norm. By the time the 90’s were in full swing wheels were becoming ridiculous and so were the pants. Wheels were like bearing covers, they were terrible and if you rode anything bigger than a 52mm you must have been a vert skating jock! Big wheels were not cool. By mid 90’s things evened out, 52-54mm were deemed acceptable by the skate world, no colors though and all the same shape! Probably the same shape wheel you are riding now. If you had colored wheels you were very different. This thought blows me away, how could wheels be the same shape for so long? Nobody seemed to care or notice? I certainly didn’t, until they started selling re-issue old school wheels. Powell Peralta was one of the first companies that started selling re-issues. G-bones and rat-bones were some of the best wheels ever made. These wheels were more for cruising though. The reason wheels haven’t changed much is because a huge amount of tricks incorporate some kind of slide, this is why the durometer of wheels are generally 99a-101a being the hardest. A popular durometer for cruising is 78a. Still that’s no excuse for wheels having the same bubble shape for so many years. I’m happy to see some really different wheel shape, colour and durometer coming out, it keeps skating refreshing and fun.

Don’t be afraid to make your skate set-up your own, try new things. Design your own board graphic or do some kind of grip tape design. Try a wider board or softer wheels. Be you, have fun and keep shredding.

– The Captain

Remember your Heroes

Dec 7,2012 / By Skully / 3 Comments

I was just telling this story the other day so I figured I’d share it. We were talking about snowboarding, you know now that winter seems to be fully in motion and I was complaining about how snowboarding is such a joke now. The boards are these flimsy pieces of fibreglass and everything is just too smooth and built for easy riding. When we were kids we had to struggle for our shit. I still remember building the first halfpipe at Snow Valley with shovels, a chainsaw and a hole bunch of crazy teenagers. We called it the U-Ditch because it pretty much had no flatbottom and the walls were like 8 feet high. Either way it was awesome. But this story comes from even before that…

It was the winter of 1990/1991 and we were going hardcore in the ravine by my house. We had huge jumps all over the place in there, most of them that would kick you 10 feet into the air or more and land to flat. We had our “fallen tree” log rails everywhere ad then we had these sick quarterpipes that you raged straight across the gully at. Straight B-Line down this steep grade across the quick flat bottom and up the other side to catch fat airs off these things. They were pretty cool and every now and then it would attract someone I didn’t know down there. I was only 12 at the time and didn’t even know that there were ski resorts. All I knew was that we snowboarded all winter every winter in this ravine. It was my 3^rd year snowboarding and I loved it. I would always look up to the older guys and then try what they tried. I could do 540’s and Handplants and Ho-Ho’s and even McTwists. Shit always went down in the ravine and most of the guys I learned from ended up being the best in the area for a long time. I’d always be hittin’ it up with Chris MacCallum, Mike Sutton, Mike Van Noortwyk, Brian Roberts, the Lamberts, the Jelineks, Matt & Justin Brett, Jason Rayner, Jamie Taylor, Brian Michals and lots more. So this one day my entire life changed. The older guys showed up with this dude I had never seen before and he was just killin’ it. Throwing down on the quarter pipes and hittin’ all the good jumps. His name was Ken Leamen and this was the day he became one of my Idols. Ken was a lot older than all of us and he was sick at snowboarding. I think the other guys recognized him the way I looked at them as the older more experienced guy to learn from. So anyway, after Ken was destroying all the obstacles everyone was just hanging out by the top entrance of the ravine. The way it was is the ravine goes down about 10-12 feet and then flattens out for 10 feet and then goes down again. On the one side there was a clump of birch trees with this big rock in the middle of them right on the flat portion of the downhill. I saw Ken looking at it and was wondering what he was doing. Then he walked to the top and strapped in. He dropped in straight at the rock and ollied over it as if he was skateboarding. It was amazing. The way he made the board ollie just like a skateboard blew my young 12 year old mind. I don’t think he made it over the first time but stuck it 2^nd try. I don’t know why, but that moment was life changing. I knew right then that you could do anything you wanted on a snowboard. I remember being so stoked on Ken Leamen and taking note of the board he was riding, you know, maybe it was just such an awesome board that it made him better. That’s what I was thinking anyway. Ken was riding the 1990 Santa Cruz Twin Tip Double Cut . It was the era when snowboard shapes had just changed from being Square-Tail Pointy-Nose, to actually be symmetrical. So the nose and tail looked the exact same and that’s when switch stance came out. I still had a Pointy-Nose Board. But what I remember most about that Santa Cruz board was the double cut. Each end of the board had a chiseled cut out of the same side just to be different from the rest. It was a sick board anyway, but after that day it was a board I’d never forget. It was unique, and so was the guy that was riding it.

At some point during that winter one of my friend’s Dad invited me to go with them to the ski resort – Snow Valley. Like I said before, I didn’t even know there was such a thing. So off we went and we had a blast. I was a natural because of the 3 years of bushwacking in the ravine. Ski Resort hills were easy, and it was fun. So I started going there every now and then. One time I was there and I saw Ken Leamen and he looked over at me and said, “Hey, you’re that Skully kid.” I was just like, “Yeah…” I though it was so cool that he knew my name and remembered me from that one day I met him. He was such an amazing snowboarder. So when the halfpipe came out we all hung out in there and I started to get to know him better. And as the years went on I was getting really good at snowboarding and was usually trying to hang out with Ken, who I might not have mentioned was about 8 years older than me. We ended up becoming really close friends and always rode together for years. I’d say from the time I was 15 till I was 18 we were pretty inseparable on the slopes, and we partied a lot. We were both crazy, fearless, and smart. We had great times together ruling Snow Valley and I’ll always remember him as one of the people who molded me into the man i became. We invented, we created, we were even on the opening montage of Fashion Television together. We were legends.

So the funny thing is in 1998 I moved away from Ontario and I didn’t snowboard as much. I would always talk shit about how amazing a snowboarder I was and people would give me a hard time because I never proved it. So one day I bet this dude Fareed that I could go to the mountain, strap in at the top of the halfpipe and drop in straight for a MCTwist. $20 said I would land it, and I hadn’t snowboarded once in 2 years.

So I went up to the mountain, strapped in and looked across the halfpipe, no warm up, and raged at my backside wall hard. I flipped a perfect McTwist and stomped it leaning a tiny bit forward. Well my snowboard at the time had been through a lot, and anyone who remembers that old SMA I rode would tell you that it probably wasn’t safe to have on the hill. There were spots were portions of my base were missing from too much rock riding, I had 23 pop rivets holding my edge in, and the nose was cracked right across the board in front of the binding. So when I landed this beautiful McTwist, I broke the nose and it was standing straight up in the air. I rode away about 10 feet and fell over. Fareed said it didn’t count and I called bullshit. I said that’s a rebate because of faulty equipment. And I strapped back in, nose bent 90 degrees up and rode hard into the pipe. I stuck the McTwist and finished off a full run down the pipe. We argued all night and probably for months afterwards about who won that bet, and neither of us would pay the other. But one thing that was for sure was that I needed a new Snowboard. I went down the street to Cash Converters figuring they would have some cheap piece of shit I could ride and boom there it was… The board of my dreams. It was like a movie when the shining lights are flashing around an object and everything else in the picture is obsolete. I almost cried in joy. It was the 1990 Santa Cruz Twin Tip Double Cut, the exact same one that my snowboard Idol Ken Leamen had the day I met him, and it was only $12.

I bought it right away, went home drilled T-Bolts through it, and put my bindings on permanently at the same nasty duck stance I had rocked for years.

It was legendary, and it brought back a gigantic piece of my childhood and made me respect my teenaged years again. And guess what, it’s still to this day, the only snowboard I ride.

One Fuckin’ Love!!

Dec 6,2012 / By Hippie Mike / No Comment

I apologize for the language but God Damn, did you check out this latest teaser from One Love Skateboard Shop? Ty Williamson out with some of the most talented dudes around right now all representin’ for One Love – Lanny DeBoer, Micky Papa, Jesse Holland, Jason Wilson and the man behind it all Dan Pageau. It’s a one day session at Mackin Park and the homies were definitely Mackin’!! Phat gaps and tech tricks, you know that’s what you’re seein’, and then Micky takes over on the handrail Street League style…

Just watch it

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Feel it – Fight it – Overcome it

Dec 5,2012 / By Hippie Mike / No Comment

Death is all around me, it’s painful. Constant flashbacks and memories of friends and family who I’ll never see again. Reminders of how precious we are to the people who surround us. Tears….

Every day we go through so much struggle, everybody does, Mental, Physical, Emotional, Financial… I’m always being pushed down to the ground and kicked multiple times while lying there hurt. And what do I do about it? Get back up and beg for more.

When life throws shit at you from every angle it shows how strong or weak you really are as a person. Can you continue to just wipe it off, and throw some back every now and then. And how much can one man take before he just crumbles. I consider myself a very strong individual and I have a stubborn mentality when it comes to giving up – I don’t do it. For me it’s about how much I can take before asking for help to overcome it. Giving up isn’t even a question. The question is how do I beat it?

When life knocks you down you gotta get back up.

When you’re crying tears of sadness you gotta think of all the good things you have, and good times you had.

When you are so hurt you can’t move you gotta set goals for getting better.

And when you lose one that you love you gotta look towards the others who love you for comfort.

I have to quote 3 Bob Marley songs this time and they all mean the same thing –

“They made their world so hard, every day we got to keep on fightin’” – One Drop

“So arm in arms, with arms, we’ll fight this little struggle, ’cause that’s the only way we can overcome our little trouble” – Zimbabwe

“Get up, Stand up: Stand up for your rights! Get up, Stand up: Don’t give up the fight!” – Get up, Stand up

All three of these songs are talking about completely different subjects, political; cultural; religious beliefs;, but they all have the same message. Take what you believe and let the world know you believe it. Don’t take shit from anyone, and never back down. Stand up for yourself and everyone who walks beside you. And be yourself every day for the rest of your life.

Thanks Bob

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A Memory I wish I could Forget – Lee Matasi Murdered

Dec 4,2012 / By Hippie Mike / No Comment

7 painful years ago today – December 3, 2005 – our friend Lee Matasi was shot down in the streets and killed dead for no reason, all because he voiced his opinion to an ignorant idiot who thought it was cool to carry around a deadly weapon and flash it openly.

I still remember the day it happened and how I was arguing with a young teenager at the Cloverdale Youth Centre while I was working about Gangsters and Guns and fighting and shit like that. It’s so hard to get across to these kids that what happens in movies and on records in the music is not something to think is cool. Violence is not cool, it’s ignorant. Weapons are not cool, there destructive. And murder is definitely not cool, it’s the worst thing you could do. Not only do you end someone’s life without justice but you cause everyone who loved that person to hate – hate the world, hate the system, hate you. During the time I was having this ridiculous conversation with this ignorant kid, Lee Matasi lost his life…

I didn’t know it had happened until Monday when my wife Carrie called me from work crying. Someone had brought in the newspaper and put it in front of her, and there was a picture of Lee with the story of him being shot. I had never cried so uncontrollably in my life up to that point. All I could think of was Why? And How? Why would someone shoot Lee? And how could anybody just shoot someone dead? It changed my whole life. I was already fully against weapons, but this incident made me think twice before stating my opinion about things I didn’t agree with to people I didn’t know. It took away every last bit of trust I had for anyone any more. And it broke my heart to think about how his family had to suffer.

Lee was a great guy, and I’ve written lots of articles about him and what he meant to me, and how he helped to change the face of skateboarding in Vancouver. He is a legend. And proof of that was when we all gathered into the Tunnel called Leeside and paid our respects to him only days after he was killed. Hundreds of people, skateboarders, graffiti artists, and anyone else that knew him joined together in a heartbreaking ceremony to remember the man he was. And not one person in that crowd had a dry eye.

It’s times like that where I believe in the Death Penalty. When you outright take someone’s life away without rhyme or reason and the proof is there, you deserve to die. 16 years of imprisonment without chance of parole was the sentence for one Dennis Robert White, the man that killed our friend. But to me, that’s not enough.

I thank Michelle Pezel at Antisocial Skate Shop for all the I Love Lee Matasi gear they have created over the years to help us show our appreciation, and also Momentum Wheels for the I Love Lee Wheels they made. We all miss Lee Matasi every day. The smiles he brought to the skate park, the crazy tricks he would land first try, and that mellow stoned look in his eyes. And every time I skate at Leeside Memorial Park I give him praise. That place has come so far from when Lee originally found it and we began putting skateable objects down there and it’s a damn shame that he isn’t here to enjoy it. But in spirit he is, and we are with him today and every day.

Rest in Peace Lee Matasi – a hero to so many

you will never be forgotten…