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Thrasher Magazine, June, 2003

WEED IT

The first day you touched wood and stopped being just a pedestrian was the day you got your new set of eyes. Not content to just breathe air and wait for a slow death, you saw outside the rigid confines of the footpath and made it come alive. Your flowing, speeding presence defied the architects' grand designs--no more were you to let cold concrete and steel merely house you. Now every street became an unwritten page to leave your signature upon. It's just you and your fellow artisans out there in the hours, bleeding out the frustrations of modem life and leaving a trail of blood to let them know that it was possible and not just a day dream.

Whatever scraps of triumph you prized from the streets was earned through never losing faith in your abilities, and when the fear made a nest inside your skull and gravity dragged you to the ground, you called it even. Skin, bone, perspiration and spilled blood are the toil for taking away all the paint, and all the concrete and marble that was put in place only to alienate you from the natural world. And by our count, we are winning the war for control of our own minds and freedom. Every scowling suit, every taunting jock squad, every insecure rent-a-cop, every ticket from the swine-herd just fan the flames of our quest to set these lifeless streets alight with passion.

It is us, the urban woodsman, plying our tireless art to the grey cityscape with a song in our hearts as we lay down the soundtrack to the destruction of what was once thought to only echo the march of defeated footsteps. It is up to you to never let the forces that oppose us win. Live for yourself and your dreams, so that when you go out to take on the world of stairs, rails, curbs, cracks and bumps you sow the seeds of the future in the young minds of the children who see you skate by as they cling to their mother's hand in wonder. For it is they who will see us through to the next dawn of change and progression. Four wheels forward forever until the black runs out...

Jordan Bloomer

Kaikoura, New Zealand

Are you in prison or what? T-Ed

YOUNG HERM

I just read that one Bryan Herman interview and it sounded really cool 'cause he was nice and sounded really anti-poser. I've subscribed for only a few months now and would just like to say thank you for getting me into skating, because when I was about six or seven I picked up Thrasher at a store and it had Jamie Thomas skating on the coven. I looked at that magazine over and over. It was a sick one. Flip rules.

Brad Carter

Newport, Tennessee

No, Thrasher rules. T-Ed

TEACH ME

I was completely inspired by Wez Lundry's "To Classify is to Control." This article was masterfully written; however, I can foresee a whole lot of panty-wearing ball-washing bastards going into a hissy fit over the first half of the article. Now, Wez did touch on a couple of controversial notions, but his point was perfectly made. I can only hope that all the skaters of the world take to heart the full article and not get pissed off only after getting through half of it. As an old-school skateboarder, I am so "on board" with what Wez conveyed in the April '03 issue. We all should not conform to the ways of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of our minds, bodies, and spirits so that we may skate all that is good, all that is grindable, and leave no tranny without a carve. Do not ever let street skating die. Ninety-percent of my skating techniques were learned right in a convenience store parking lot. I then applied what I learned to anything that lay in front of my wheels. Let skating bleed into on e little package. Use what we have inherited and just let the freedom of skateboarding ring.

Dan Hickman Boring, Oregon

DV-DON'T

With the recent trend of these new so-called "extreme sports" all over television, it can be easily seen how much of an influence skateboarding has had on them all. This influence on these other activities is well-known and is a very good thing. But the biggest problem seems to be a definite lack of innovation and creativity within these activities. A particularly bothersome issue is the way in which they misrepresent our tricks. Anyone that knows the slightest bit about skateboarding knows that skating switch is riding goofy when you're regular and riding regular when you're goofy. This is common knowledge. Now, how can these sports call their tricks switch when there is only one possible stance? In rollerbooting, riding is called switch.

This is just wrong. They could at least call it fakie. If a rollerbooter could actually do tricks switch it would be quite interesting to say the very least. This would mean that they would have to jump in the air, then take off their boots, put them on the opposite feet and then land the trick. This would be quite hard to do, unlike all their other tricks.

Skiing is another sport that uses the term switch interchangeably. Skiing has been around much longer than skateboarding, so when and why they started using the term switch is unknown. Again, this is the same situation as rollerbooting--you can't ride switch on skis. It's just not possible. Bikers also use the term switch and they use it totally wrong. Tricks they call switch are those in which they spin in the "unnatural" direction. This is an example of totally slaughtering the term. In order for bikers to ride switch, they would have to ride with their feet on the wrong pedals. This is very impractical. Many other sports also use this term the wrong way entirely, but these are the most bothersome. Stealing tricks from the greatest sport of all time will always happen, but it should at least be done correctly.