Issue 3 Bowl Trolls
3
Pixelated Gold
9
Less Is More
13
Dan Watson
15
Blazin’ with Diekman
18
Cover - Race Nagel, Front Blunt I would like to thank Andrew Loaiza, Dave Biesel, Dan Watson, Owen Woytowich, Zach Diekman, Fletcher Eidum, Alex Strandell, Hamilton Lynn, Race Nagel, Logan Triplett, Taylor Schwickert, Adam Kirschhoffer, Fiona Ramey, Nash Addicks and anyone else who is stoked on the mag. Also, in the last issue I failed to give credit to Andrew Loaiza who wrote the article on Beta Kappa Kappa. Sorry Andrew.
Layout and Photography by Nick Weber
Matt Hughes - Bluntslide to fakie
2
Bowl Trolls Skateboarding in the winter months can be hard, if not damn near impossible, especially in Montana. Luckily our friends at Skate Army built the best bowl in the area. Indoor two-foot mini ramps are fun, but how about a six foot bowl with perfect transitions and pool coping? Brave the ten mile journey on iced over roads, and be rewarded with prime skate real estate.
3
Race Nagel - Backside Smith Grind
4
Alex Strandell - Fingerflip Lien to Tail
5
Race Nagel -Stalefish
6
7
Alex Strandell - Lien Air
8
Fletcher Eidum - Backside Nosegrind
9
pixel
ated_
gold
10
p
e t a l ixe
Dave Biesel - Ollie up
11
ld o g d_
12
Less is More:
An Essay on Skate Videos by David Adam Biesel
I started skating in 1994
when I was 15 in Wausau Wisconsin. I charged a little harder than the guys I hung out with but never really took skating seriously for a couple summers. However, something about skateboarding drew me in and I became interested in what the core skaters in town were like. I started going to our little, yet fun, skate park and got in with some guys. I remember watching the video Love Child at this guy Cory’s house. Looking back, even to someone who didn’t understand the difference between backside and front side 50-50’s, it still came across as a sick video. Before this, the only exposure I had to skate-media was from the random things I had seen on television. The creativity, style and speed inspired me like nothing before. I needed more. The first two videos I ever bought were Eastern Exposure 3: Under Achievers and the first Zero video, Thrill of it All. Out of all the videos in the CCS catalogue these two looked the most unique. To say the least, they were. They set the standard for every video I’ve seen since and also taught me a lot of lessons in how to make a skate video a good skate video. Thrill of it All is still a sick video. Black and white, great tunes, tough ass skating and really good filming. Aaron Harrison’s part stands out in my memory but I never got to see much else of him. This video taught me how to film-- I noticed the way tricks moved from one side of the screen to the other, always keeping the best part of the trick in the middle. The cuts are fast -- get in, get out style and the video is short enough that my buddy Gonnsen and I could watch it before we went skating. Needless to say this put it on a heavier rotation than my collection of VHS porn. Eastern Exposure 3 was a bit longer, but it had a lot of the same appeal for me. The good tunes and ripping were there, but it differed from the Zero video in that it showed off the city of New York and the style of the skaters there. Central Wisconsin requires an east coast style to block weather and spot boredom. I connected with the way they took unconventional spots and found ways to shred them. In short, Dan Wolf made a video that kept me watching Donny Barley, Tim O’Connor, Reese Forbes and Ricky Oyola for years. Ricky Oyola is the reason I learned fakie blind side 180’s, so sick. At the time I thought all videos would live up to the standard of Under Achievers and Thrill of it All, both by quality of production and undeniable style of skating. I was way wrong. Editing technology started getting stronger the skateboard industry started to lose itself in mainstream media and the larger sales it brought. This was the first step down a dark path that all skate videos were destined to follow. I began to notice little changes: 411 Video Magazine changed their opening song into some techno remix garbage. There was nothing wrong with the original opening song. Hell, thinking of that tune right now takes me back to 1998, but it showed that things were in fact changing. Ramping footage started ravaging videos all over the place. In laymen’ s terms, “ramping” is a slowing down or speeding up of footage gradually. So when you ramp footage you hear and see it slow down or speed up, it doesn’t just start going faster or slower all of the sudden. Everyone and their grandma started ramping tricks. It was a new technology that was being passed around the professional and amateur skating world like an STD in the 80’s. The Reason is still one of the worst popular videos ever made. It failed because of its editing and sound track. Gonnsen put it a little something like this, “what the fuck? I
just saw that trick, now you show it to me backwards and then forwards again? Then in slow motion?” This may look fantastic to the general public, but to Gonnsen and I it was just redundant. The Reason had such potential and with skaters like Cairo Foster, Gershon Mosley, Stevie Williams and Rick McCrank it could have been an amazing video. It was a shame to see their footage puked out like that. The Reason’s quality of skating has stood the test of time; unfortunately one must still wade through the bog of distracting editing to truly appreciate it. Again, it could have been gold if it were not for overzealous clicking of the editor. A redeeming quality of The Reason, however, is that it was probably the first time I heard a Built to Spill or a Fugazi song. Other than that, the music in The Reason was offensive to everything I held holy in the skateboarding. It was almost like the skate industry was trying to be something it never subscribed to: mainstream and kitschy. Techno music in skateboard videos set the stage for big business corporate scum like Nike to buy their way into my world and convince everyone that they belonged. The residual affect of these bad editing techniques and bad music choices was that the average Joe started making videos that followed suite. Everyone started doing their best Ty Evans impression and trying to make it look like Transworld was a good representation of the skateboard world. Things have been looking up in the last couple years, however. The last two Emerica videos are both well filmed, well edited and have fitting sound tracks. They have a style about them that affords them a chance to use, but not over use, all of the tools that technology has to offer. John Miner and Mike Manzoori are the guys behind Emerica videos and you can tell that these guys have a unique vision that shows in their filming as well as editing. In film they say if an editor does their job right no one sees their work. Keep that in mind the next time you watch Stay Gold. Krooked has been making some great stuff and Anti Hero has always found a way to honestly represent the heart of skateboarding. None of these companies’ videos are over shadowed by super fancy editing and synthesizer music. With cameras becoming as common as skateboards and editing equipment allowing people to mess with footage more and more, I urge people to edit less. Skateboarding is rad to watch at the speed of life and even more amazing to do. Don’t go out there trying to make your video move the way companies make theirs, make them move the way that you and your friends move. Skateboarding can be a beautiful thing and no video can ever truly compare to doing it yourself. As long as there is a lifeline of cash being pumped into the industry there will be over-produced skate videos. However, for those who don’t have the money to copy the big boy videos, heed these simple words. For they ring truer in few places more than in skateboarding: less is more.
It was a shame to see their footage puked out like that.
14
With
the recent popularity of skateboarding, it is no surprise that the professionals of the sport are looking to make as much money as possible with however many questionable sponsors as possible. Action Figures? Tequila? Reality TV? Underwear? While the wallets of pro skaters are growing, so are their egos. The man talking shit on these people is
Dan Watson:
Professional blogger. Interview by Nick Weber Photography by Owen Woytowich
1. Name, age, weight, and years skating. Daniel David Watson, I’m 33 years young, and I’ve been skating for around 17 of those years, plus a few other years when I was a kid before skateboarding officially consumed my entire life. Do you really want to know my weight? That seems kind of weird. I’m a thick dude, but over winter I fully jocked out and lost around 20 pounds so that Berra couldn’t take jabs at my weight anymore. I talked to a friend from a shop in another city today and he said some kid told him “I was in Saskatoon on the weekend and met that dude who does YouWillSoon. He’s not as fat as I thought.” So that’s good.
2. Have you ever had sex as a direct result of your blogging ability? Actually, yes. Which is pretty sad if you think about it. If you can imagine the quality of pussy you get for writing a skateboarding blog, I’ll just leave it at that. The worst part of the night was when she asked “Oh, is this the Shit Talk couch?!”
3. Why did you want to start blogging? Was the blog created solely as a vehicle for shit-talk on pros and trends? How did you get the name “you will soon”? I started blogging because I always wanted to do an interview with a zine from fuckin Bozeman Montana that has a name that could be confused with a gay porn mag. Actually me and the two dudes who started the blog, Ian and Pulv would always just sit around cracking up and thought “we could totally have a website”. After years of not really trying to put one together, one day I got an e-mail from Ian saying he had started a blogspot. I didn’t even know what .blogspot was. If you look at the early days of the blog, it was not directed towards anything in particular. Just a place for us to try and be funny. The name came about in the early 2000’s when Ian worked at a skatepark connected to a record store, and our friend Jason was wearing Vans Old Skools and some chick came in and said to Jason “Vans? Who wears those?!” And Ian said “You will..... soon.” It just became an inside joke of always knowing what was up before the general population of dinguses.
4. How did the blog become so popular? I’m not sure I’m the best person to answer that. But it’s strange that it did because we never had any intention of making it the big deal it is now (if it is even a big deal). We just started it for close friends to check out. But I guess since lots of our close friends live all over the place now, they would show it to people, and those people would show it to others, and those others would show it to others, etc. People seemed to respond to the nostalgic posts and airing the industry’s dirty laundry and talking shit about it.
5. Why are the Berrics so popular? Why do kids care so much about watching pros skate this park?
15
Because kids are stupid. They’ve always been stupid and they always will be. If I were a 12-14 year old kid I’d probably think The Berrics was the fucking shit! The problem for me doesn’t lie in the concept of The Berrics, it lies in it’s execution. The “humour” exhibited on that site, the editing, the music, just basically everything about the site is lame as fuck. So instead of having this generation of all these kids who grew up on sick skate videos with street skating, we’re gonna have a generation of kids who think skating an indoor park and over editing your videos of Mikey Taylor doing a “Text Yo’ Self Beef Yo’ Wreck Yo’ Self ” is “buttery.”
6. How do you feel about most skate footage going online almost immediately? Would you rather wait a few years for the DVD? I don’t know. It’s just a part of the times we live in. I come across as an old curmudgeon, but this is the way it is now and it’s silly to even argue with it. It actually doesn’t even really bother me. If I can see semi-regular footage of Joey Pepper, Austyn Gillette, or other dudes I like on a more frequent basis, then it’s good. And the dudes that I think are shit, I can just ignore them. Or talk shit on them.
7. Does Jereme Rogers ever make you feel like less of a man? Well word around town is that Magnums are also what I fit. But word around town is that often they still do not rip. So yes.
8. Why do all Canadian skaters rock the Ghetto Gown (tall white tee, New Era hat)? They don’t. This is an outright fallacy concocted and propagated by you painfully insecure Americans in an attempt to discredit our multitude of Canadian skaters who are very legit and killing it. You see, all narcissism is secretly rooted in insecurity, and in order for Americans to feel like “USA IS NUMBER FUCKING ONE!!!!” they must belittle and brush off all other nations as though they were inferior. And what better nation to bully than the meek Canadians to the north? Take a good look in the mirror, America. The mirror mounted on the walls of your glass houses. For shame.
9. What is your favorite era of skateboarding and why? Favorite pro from that era? My favourite era of skateboarding is right now. No matter how much I complain on the blog, skateboarding is fucking awesome right now, and I’m enjoying myself more than I ever have. Too many amazing pros to choose from, so let’s just say Doug Brown.
10. How do you think this current era of skateboarding will be remembered? The X-Games Dew Tour Slim Jim Monster Energy Maloof Red Bull Street League Berrics US Army Element Rockstar MTV Fantasy Factory Life Of Ryan Viva La Bam Printin Money Productions Era. ©™
11. Any last words? The act of skateboarding is everything, the industry of skateboarding is nothing. Nothing can kill skateboarding. Lipslide If you just finished reading this article, you should immediately go to www.youwillsoon.com. Otherwise, you are fucking blowing it!
16
p m Ju r o F . . . y o J Because Kream Mag is FREE to read online! Just go to kream-mag.blogspot.com!
Blazin’ with Diekman
Twelve hot wings in six minutes? Sounds easy right? Wrong! Remember that these things are HOT and should not be taken lightly. I asked Zach Diekman if he was down for the challenge, and without hesitation he said something along the lines of “fuck yeah”.
Pre-feast Interview!
Kream Mag - You are about to attempt the Blazin’ Challenge. How do you feel going into it?
Diekman - (sighs) A little nervous, overall pretty stoked. K.M. - Do you have a strategy? D. - I do: Eat them before the heat catches up to me. K.M. - How will you celebrate if victorious? D. - Probably by drinking a big beer, I dunno.
Things started to get hot...
...and kind of snotty.
I was going to try and conduct some sort of super-official-post-feast interview, but this should explain everything just fine...
My God... I think he’s got it!