Werk it Sister

I think these dudes had a pretty good idea of how to make a music video for fifty deutschmarks. All you need is an imagination and that theatre school mentality.

City of Analgesics

I'm sure a heavy back catalogue of spots in the Los Angeles area looms large in the mind of just about any skateboarder. Who's done what. Who killed. Who lagged like a cripple. It's no secret that a small vicinity of land mass has pumped out and played host to a sizable portion of raw skating over the last 20 years (perhaps on a per capita basis that even rivals New Jersey). Gonz to Girl. Menace to Marko Jazbinsek.

It's hard not to feel that LA dropped off the map a little in recent years. Post-Barcelona explosion, shit got way more spread out and international. No longer is LA the top dawg city of four wheels. Outside of Daewon Song, it's common place nowadays for dudes to have half the globe covered in a video part. It's hard to fathom the pull that California and LA specifically had on the skate world 10 years ago.

You could see the cohesive zeal of the region start to slip after the LA County video came out. I'm not trying to write off a whole generation of dudes that came after, but once Chris Franzen's time zone dipped, some of that LA spark faded. I guess kids get tired of seeing the same spots in every issue of a magazine, so the spots go unskated until they're new again. People go elsewhere, and the limelight on the city dims a bit.

Good skaters can come from anywhere, but some real LA street shit has been hard to come by the last decade. That's not to say it's not there. Take a look at Vincent Alvarez. Straight kills. More to the point, take a look at this dude I'd never heard of before, Justin Guillen:

(Disregard the embarrassingly bad intro on this one)






If that doesn't give you some faith for progressive nu-Menace bone thug rawdoggin, you may as well never touch a ledge for the rest of your life. Gone but not forgotten, the city of angels will rise again.

Fat Man Comin Down Yo Pipe

Gather round one and all,

Christmas time is here again
A time to spend, with drinks to blend
A holy day to get new socks
Visa bill ungodly shock

Brandon O Brandon

Look, you can trade Scott Rolen for garbage, you can get a package for Halladay that won't satisfy my immediate and unreasonable desires, but when you get rid of Brandon League, that's just too much.

Brandon League, I mourn for your loss. You can point to all the times that he came into a game and blew up, but when that young man was on, he could've miffed Satan himself. All the tangible qualities of excellence were there, just not at the same time. Never did the stew congeal into a palatable solid to rest upon your bread. Still, I feel he wasn't given the full reign he might've thrived on. Had they thrown him in there instead of Downs or Frasor in the post-BJ ambiguity of the closing curtains this year, who knows what might've flourished. Granted, too many what ifs, too many parallel universes (universi?). So, farewell delicious unpredictability. So long complete dominance offset by wild shit. Goodbye, the perfect closer that never was.

Disco Queen

1977 World Series
Game 666
Dodgy Fuckers vs. Yankee Dude-les

I'm dying for a baseball fix in the off season. As exciting as the Blue Jays filling their bench with subpar infielders this past week has been (I've already pre-ordered my Alex Gonzalez jersey ... not), sometimes the visceral sensation of a game is required to recharge your baseball senses.

Much like a junkie returning to his old ways after a month away from the hard stuff, I stooped so low as to take a DVD out of the public library of an old-time sizzler Fall Classic. Finding full game downloads on the internet is not so common (if anybody has a link to the full game 6 of the '93 series, I would be ever so indebted to you), so sometimes you just gotta make do with watching the fuckin Yankees win.

Perhaps we'll draw some comparisons between the '77 Yankees and the 2009 Skankees as this rambling turd unfolds, but fear not, any analysis will be completely superficial and ill-informed, as is my want.



So, picture it, New York City in the year of our lord, nineteen hundred and seventy-seven. Richard Hell is at the peak of his creative powers, Abraham D. Beame is in the mayor's office, and the city is crumbling. It probably looked something like this (jump to 4:00):



Billy Martin's Bronx Bombers plow their way to within one win of the Series, anchored by the heavy burger bat of Reggie Jackson, showboat extraordinaire. Billy and Reggie's squabbles had come to a head earlier in the season when Martin had to be restrained from dealing some short man vengeance Reggie's way after he pulled him from a game for lack of hustle.

Tommy Lasorda helms the boys in blue and eggs them on towards a brighter tomorrow. The moustaches of Ron Cey and Davey Lopes are invariably laced with cocaine as they hunker down at VIP tables on the sunset strip.

The pantaloons are so tight, mobility becomes limited. Here, Ron Cey hoofs it home with the stanky leg as he begins to resemble a mannequin in motion.



Game 6 is of course famous for Reggie's power performance. "Hi mom!" mugging aside, what he did here is substantially gnarly. Perhaps it does take an ego the size of Manhattan to go into a pressure cooker situation like this with so much confidence at the plate. You know, him referring to himself in the third person, calling himself "the straw that stirs the drink" in the Yankee organization, and the ineptitude with which he self-promoted himself smacks real similar to what A-Rod could've been without the coaching of one million press relations lessons. But for all the "New Mr. October" accolades that A-Rod got with his "post-season renaissance" this year, I'm sure he would trade em all in a heartbeat for three dingers in the last game of a Series.



Shit gets buck when they close it out. Reggie had just called time to go switch his hat for a helmet as some scummy New Yorkers were throwing firecrackers near him in the outfield. With the last out, he's off like a shot taking fools down like The Fridge on a Sunday. Harsh barge the large Marge and you're off to poison the clubhouse.



Maybe Reggie is just the King of the Nerds. I picture him as a feeble basement dwelling poindexter concocting some kind of suave medicine to get that go-to gumption. Much like the episode of Family Matters where Urkel transforms into Stefan Urkelle, Reggie becomes a muscled freak trotting the bases, knowing that darkness will bring his reversion to his former, lesser self, which might explain why he was in such a hurry to get back to the clubhouse. His puny medecine-free body must never be viewed by the public eye.