Summertime

A couple weeks ago, I went in search of the secret skate spot that my neighbour's kid had told me about.



Not too far from my house is what looks to be an abandoned school. The concrete playground/parking lot behind the school is covered in cracks and weeds, and from the fence I could see that some makeshift obstacles had been constructed on a raised portion of the yard.



But the prominent "NO TRESSPASSING" sign kept me from jumping the fence; now that I'm respectably employed, I'm even more wary than I used to be about certain things.









So I headed off to the other side of the property to see if I could get a better view of what are called in skateboard park lingo, the "elements". It appears as though people had made a slider rail out of an old ladder, but I couldn't see the ramp that my neighbour had mentioned. There was, however, some pretty neat street art decoration the building.

Before I could complete my mission, however, a skateboarding friend of mine accosted me from his car, from the far side of the street. I've known M. for a while. He's a wicked painter and artist, and an excellent skateboarder. M.T. was in the car with him (there's no real reason to conceal people's names, but I try to anyways for the sake of privacy). These guys were on their way to a new skate spot and asked if I wanted to come. I was actually kind of depressed due to relationship-related issues which I can't even remember very well now, so I was happy to embark on a trip to a new skate spot with a couple of friends whom I hadn't seen for quite a while.


We drove to Dundas, to a beautiful municiapl park. The park has a bandshell with a decent sized ledge that drops off onto a sea of the smoothest grade of concrete. Beside the bandshell is another, lower ledge that is good for grinding, and has a slight curve to it. This was an ideal spot, and I had had no idea that it even existed. Another skater, S., was already there. It was early evening, and still light but cool as well; the perfect hour for skateboarding. I'm a little out of shape--actually, I'm just old--so the smooth, flat expanse was great for the flatground, freestyle tricks I like to do. You could manual forever at that place! The other three guys had more juice in them, and were doing awesome tricks on the ledges. M.T did some ollie to nose manuals on the bandshell platform, and S. did some wicked boardslide/hurricane grind combos on the curved ledge.
M. landed some perfect frontside halfcab flips. S. had brought a large, impressive-looking camera, and M. was filming some of S.'s lines. S. has been skating for a while, and has a lot of tricks at his disposal--he always has some impressive and quirky variation to throw into the mix.
I tried grinding the lower ledge a few times, but wasn't feeling too confident. I partially blame this on my deck, which was old and comfortable, but was quite ground down on the tail.

After skating for a good while, we decided to head back to town. S. took off in his '84 Porsche Carrera, while the rest of us packed into M,'s more utilitarian vehicle. He had a painting of a pair of Adidas sneakers in his back seat. It was well executed, and M.T. was buying it from him. We all went to the Vietnamese restaurant and hung out for a bit, and then M. dropped me off at home. I was going to meet back up with these guys at a local skater bar later that night, but I got tired and just did some reading before going to bed.

Street Art

One thing I love about Hamilton is the proliferation of amazing street art. It seems that everywhere one goes, there is interesting art cropping up in the most unexpected of places. I try to photography these finds, but for every photo I take, there are likely two more that go unrecorded for one reason or other.





A couple Thursdays ago, the night of the greatly anticipated English/CSCT grad student prom, I was downtown on my way to get a haircut. Except, I never made it so far as the barber as I ran into a street artist in one of the unused storefronts.

I consider skateboarding to be a mobile form of streetart performance, and so I have a keen interest and sense of camaraderie with other street-oriented creative types who appropriate public space for unconventional uses. Take, for instance, the Streets are For People movement out of Toronto, or the interventions into the urban everyday undertaken by Improv Everywhere.



This fellow was an artist who I had seen on the street at various Art Crawls.
He often, in fact, sets up shop in the alcove directly beneath what was my former living space, and I bought one his collages last winter.

But that afternoon, he had a spread of artworks and unusual books that he had collected, including several stacks of old comic books. One piece of art he showed me involved a binder with plastic sleeves filled with discarded stuff he had found beneath a bridge in the downtown core. He had assembled these items, which included a used syringe, and wrote a kind of narrative that went along with them. He also had several books that he had embellished with collages. These individual pages, he explained, would be cut out later, framed and made available individually for sale. But one book of such collages also had a section in the back hollowed out, like one of those makeshift "book safes". This hollow was just big enough for a cassette tape, which was missing, but which the artist explained actually had him explaining the various collages assembled in the book.

I talked to this fellow for a while, and he seemed happy to have some company on the street. After a while, a couple other guys came by. We were all flipping through the books and things. Caught up in the excitement I felt over this fellow's entire enterprise, I ended up spending my haircut money (in fact, most of my prom-night drinking money too), on comic books, buttons and a piece of street art that I gave to my date for the evening.

My idea was, instead of buying a corsage, we could wear vintage buttons.

I also rearranged a few of the elements to produce an embellishment of my own to the whole display.








I went to collect my date, and she seemed happy enough withe buttons, and the strange street art artefact I had procured (a pill bottle with graphic insert and a ceramic carrot inside). Why do these random assemblages make me happy? Well, we had a nice dinner of sushi, then got dressed up for the prom. At the prom itself, however, my date my date got a little mad at me for not paying enough attention to her. I guess I got distracted talking to people, and didn't realize that she wasn't having a good time. But what is a prom without a bit of drama? I walked my date to the bus, then returned to the prom and danced for a while with my classmates. This person and I are old friends, way beyond the point of dating or having romantic interest in each other, and yet something about prom night created strange expectations and reactions. However, she forgave me for ignoring her and we are still good friends.

Getting Old

Now that I'm a property owner, my perspective has shifted. A young guy who lives across the street likes to skateboard in front of my house on the sidewalk and road, and this can prove distracting when I'm trying to work, but would rather be doing something perhaps more fun, like skateboarding in front of the house.

I've been in a bit of a mood lately, contemplating mid-life, my new situation as a home owner, grad student, and the sunburn I got on the top of my head from an unnoticed (until now) bald spot. When I came home the other day, Drew (let us call him), my skateboarding neighbour, was applying candle wax to the curb on the corner of the lot upon which my house sits. Because we're on a slight hill, this curb is the best one for skating at our particular intersection, but the problem is, the wax build-up on the curb makes it quite slippery, and I have become worried that, were someone to fall on account of loosing their footing, I would be liable.

So I approached Drew and asked him not to put wax on the curb. He and I have skated together before, and, earlier this spring, I helped him soundproof a wooden box that he has built for skateboarding. He likes to place the box on the same curb in front of my house, which is the most opportune place for such an obstacle. It has a metal bar attached to one side for grinding, but it was a hollow box and made a lot of noise until I helped him fill it with insulation. Drew is a respectful fellow and listened to my concerns about pedestrians slipping, but I still felt like the old man shutting down his fun. Perhaps I was being overly cautious with my concerns, or maybe I was giving vent to a repressed desire to skate the curb myself.

But I asked what had happened to his grinder-box, and he said it had gotten rusty from all the rain we've been having lately. Nevertheless, he hauled it up the hill from his backyard and installed it on the curb. It had indeed gotten rusty, but the application of a thick layer of candle wax brought it back to life, and soon he was grinding away. I decided that I had read enough Judith Butler for one night. I put on my skate shoes, brushed my teeth (I always brush my teeth before skateboarding, as a kind of good luck charm), and did some skateboarding with Drew.

The newly-waxed box was very slippery, and I took a bit of a fall the first time I tried it. Drew said, "That was such a slow-motion fall!". Because of my time-slowing powers, I didn't hurt myself at all. It actually felt really good to skate again after so long of a hiatus. The muggy air was causing a lot of sweat, even though it was cloudy and not so hot. After busting a few of my signature moves (360 shove-its, no-comply to shifty, airwalks and "slap maxwell" grinds that nobody seems to do any more) I started to feel less like an old grouchy man and more like my normal self.

Before he went in for the night, Drew told me about a new secret skate spot, through a hole in a fence, behind a factory not so far from where I live. I'm going to have to check that one out sometime in the near future.

Toronto

I went skateboarding around Toronto on Saturday. My cell phone broke, so I couldn't take any photos. I also couldn't access the number of my friend whom I was supposed to meet for dinner. Instead of relaxing at a cafe, as I had planned, I spent the afternoon anxiously trying to remember where his house was. I had only been there once before, on New Years, and could remember the general neighbourhood and the look of the front yard, but despite skating up and down several streets, I couldn't find the house. It was difficult skateboarding and scrutinizing houses at the same time, as the roads were rough and full of holes and cracks. I stopped at a garage sale, and some women offered me free clothing. I then skated to another friend's house who gave me the number of the friend I was meeting. This whole process took a lot of effort, and I was wearing my thin-soled shoes that, though designed as skate shoes, are mostly useless for actual skateboarding. By the end of the day, my feet were killing me, and I think I bruised the ball of the foot that I push with.

But I did make it to my friend's house, late, and after running into a girl from my old philosophy class who didn't seem surprised that I couldn't find a copy of Marx's Capital anywhere in Hamilton. It's that kind of attitude that makes people hate Toronto, but maybe I'm just too sensitive. My friend made a very good dinner of braised lamb shank, rice and salad. His girlfriend is vegetarian and had soybeans on rice with salad. I think I enjoyed the soybeans more than the lamb, but I have a hard time not eating meat when it is there in front of me. As it turns out, my friend had the exact same cell phone as the one I have that had just broke. I plugged my old phone into his charger, but the phone still wouldn't come back to life. He has a blackberry for work and only used the cell phone as an alarm clock (which drove his girlfriend crazy). So he actually gave me the phone, which I brought home but haven't yet set up. However, it seems that the alarms on cell phones work even when there is no "chip" in them, because this morning at 8 am, and then again at 8:10, 8:20 and 8:30, the alarm on my friend's phone went off.

Recent Skate Activity

The new Gonz deck is still holding up. One thing about riding on a larger, heavier deck for a while (the kind of deck that, amazingly, everyone rode back in the 80's) is that, when you switch back to a slimmer, lighter, modern deck, it feels much more responsive and easy to manipulate. It's like running or playing B-ball with those strap-on weights; when you take them off, you feel extra light and "fit".

So, Matt Z and I went to Beasley Park and then to Turner Park on the mountain last week for a tour. It was nice having someone to skate with, especially at Turner, where the proliferation of younger kids, and local hot-shots out to prove something, can make an older skater feel even more like a dinosaur than usual. Matt and I skated around for a while, and then a window opened up where we had the empty swimming pool all to ourselves for a good fifteen minutes (usually, there is a whole "snake session" going on, with kids competing with each other to get a run in). I really like carving the bowl, even though I'm not all that good at it. It uses a whole different set of muscles than street skating and is, actually, the type of non-ramp skating that preceded the flatground streetstyle that I learned as a kid.

I also went out last Friday night to meet my friend Oldschool at the Beaze. He's pushing forty, and can skate Beasley park like nobody else, doing big layback grinds to revert on the quarter pipe, and all kinds of old bonelesses and fast-plants, as well as his signature nose-wheelie that he can almost sustain to the very edge of the path through the soccer field. There were just three or four of us at the park that night, and I had a good session: didn't fall that much, got a few good lines in, and had a good talk with Oldschool about computers and video games.

The next night, I decided to tempt fate and go out a second time. I reasoned that the only way to get back into shape was to apply myself a little. This time, there was the regular Beaze Crew cutting up the park. Given that it was a long weekend, I was unhappy to find that the city has not yet come through with the Jersey Barrier and curb that we ordered about a month ago, when Oldschool and I met with the parks & rec. people. They had sent a crew to fill in the dangerous gaps and cracks that had developed in the concrete over the winter--this is in their own best interests as the city would be liable if some kid broke a bone due to the perilous chasms that had been littered throughout the park. But, given that the city manages to deliver Jersey barriers and curbs on a regular basis (and in far greater quantities) to roadwork cites, why is it so difficult to get them to drop off a couple of these utilitarian fixtures at the Beaze? Just one or two curbs would provide so much enjoyment to dozens of skaters, but the city doesn't prioritize fulfilling this promise.

At any rate, at least the concrete was "smoothish" again. It was such a hot day that everyone was staying in the shade. The guys were doing tricks over the "nipple", because it was out of the sun. I tried to land a few tricks, but bailed alot instead. A combination of the heat and the sugar-filled slushy I had consumed made it difficult to focus. Mike, an older skater whom I hadn't seen for a while, was there. He spent about an hour trying to land complicated tricks out of the bowl. He never seemed to land anything, but one time I saw him almost land a trick--the board making a delicate flip in the air and just about catching back up with his feet--and I could see the poetry in his head that he was struggling to actualize.

So, this second time out wasn't the best session, but it was good to see everyone, and to sit in the shade sipping my slushy while the guys exchanged crude jokes. Paco found a way to wear a Food Basics shopping bag as if it were a "wife beater" t-shirt, and I made a joke about being inspired for a whole new summer wardrobe. He then ripped the thin plastic off his chest in an Incredible Hulk impersonation that was quite funny. It's sad that, since the new park on the mountain opened, Beasley Park does not enjoy the raging sessions that it once did. But it's also kind of nice that the same core group of downtown skaters still utilize the area and, have, if anything, less crowds to contend with.

Reading Week

It's reading week, but eyestrain is making me take it easy. Drops of water are crawling down the window of the coffee shop, cutting little lines through the gray skin of condensation that obscures the parked cars and roadway outside. I think there is something else I'm supposed to be doing right now, but I can't quite remember what it is. I just drank an Americano and ate a tasty chocolate chip cookie. Ok, this wasn't the healthiest snack for a Healthy Snack Monster, but it was tasty!

I had some thoughts last night, but forget what they were. Let me recount, instead a skateboard excursion I made about two weeks ago now, when the air was cold but the pavement of downtown Hamilton was dry and clear. I had just put together my new Mark Gonzalez oldschool deck and went to Beasley to test it out. It's a pretty nice ride: wide but not unwieldy. At the park, I was carving around, enjoying the feel of being rolling again after being landlocked for so long. There was nobody else there at first, it being the dead of winter and all. Then a young guy showed up. I forgot his name, but he was riding the most dilapidated skateboard you ever saw. I mean, the deck itself was suffering from massive delamination, and the layers of plywood that had split apart at the nose clacked against each other as he skated. It looked as though the entire nose of his board was about to break off at any moment.

And yet, this kid was thrashing the "Widow Maker" quarter pipe with reckless abandon, landing tricks on his rickety old deck that would have sent your average skater plummeting calamitously to the ground. I could only watch in awe, and try to avoid wrecking myself in the process. Something about watching another skater land treacherous tricks inspires one to try things that one perhaps shouldn't rightly attempt. Part of it is the desire to show off, but part of it is just the inspiration of seeing someone else do something truly radical.

So I was having fun just riding around and doing little shove-its and such. I was still getting the hang of the new plank. After skating for a while, I started to get warm, so I took off my outer jacket. I was wearing my wrist guards to avoid re-spraining my wrists, and I was nonchalantly cruising into a carve around the bowl when my wheel caught on a tiny piece of glass. Perhaps it is something about the cold temperatures making one's wheels harder and thus more sensitive, but I was expecting to be thrown off my board at just that point: the pavement was relatively smooth-looking and the obstruction that proved my undoing was actually tiny. Because I wasn't really expecting to be dislodged, instead of falling on my wrist guards, I did the unusual thing of falling shoulder-first. It was my right elbow that actually made first contact with the ground, and my shoulder second, but the impact hurt quite a bit. I got "road rash" on my elbow which has only just healed and bruised my elbow bone, too boot.

But not to whine: a good fall from the skateboard is often just the thing to make one feel alive again. It at least gives you a renewed respect for the whole gravity-ground nexus. The kid I was skating with was still ripping up the park fearlessly on his crappy old deck. When the sun started to go down, casting Beasley park in the dull grey shadows of a deep winter, inner city evening, we decided to call it quits. I offered to give the fellow my old deck, which I had just removed to set up my new Gonz. He was enthusiastic about this offer--my old deck was actually in much better shape then his, with only a bit of wear on the tail and no major chips or splits. So we skated back to my place and retrieved the deck. JP, the contractor was there with his power tools, so I offered to set up the new/used skateboard then and there for the fellow, but he said he would do it when he got home. It actually takes some time to get used to a new deck, so his decision to wait was probably a wise one.

Benneto Centre Curb

The North End of Hamilton has a reputation to uphold for being rough, but it has one of the best public swimming pools and rec. centres in the city. Tonight, on my way in to swim, there was a group of kids sitting around in the lobby. I had my skateboard with me, and one of the kids said, "You skate? You look like you're eighty!". I said, "I'm not that old yet, but I hope I am still skating when I'm eighty!".

On my way out, after doing a few laps of the pool, the same kids were waiting around outside the front doors. In front of the rec. centre, there is a well-waxed, nicely rounded curb at the edge of the parking lot nearest the front doors. I took off my coat and shoulder bag, and started doing a few grinds. As soon as I did one little trip, the kids on the stairs started screaming "Oooooooooh!" in a kind of mock adulation. But I kept skating and they came over and started talking to me.

A couple of the kids borrowed my board...one guy had baggy jeans, the hip-hop ball cap and a white kerchief tied to one of the belt loops of his pants. He tried some kickflips and heelflips, and asked if I could do certain tricks. I demonstrated some of my oldschool board maniupuations; I may not be able to do the tre-flips and the heel flips, but I can string together a line of moves from 1989 that would do Ray Barbee proud.

So I skated with the kids and lent out my board. I wiped out one time, landing on my back to avoid further spraining my wrist, and the kid with the kerchief asked "'sall good?". Some older guys came over--a guy named Mike who is the youth pastor at the Baptist church on Hughson. It turns out the kids were all there for a basketball game that Mike hosts on Mondays. I don't know if I really impressed them all that much with my feeble old moves, but Mike thanked me for lending out my board (and not getting pissed off about the eighty year old man comment).

When the kids left, I had the curb all to myself and threw down some long, fast frontside grinds before heading home. The air was chill and I was breathing heavily due to the cold, but the almost full moon was beaming down from behind a thin screen of billowy clouds as I walked through the empty north end streets, back to my appartment where a stack of essays on the dangers of Disney were waiting for me.