Ed’s Letter

EDITOR'S LETTER.

About ten years ago, I moved to Canada to be a snowboard bum. Money was tight and my hair looked like a dirty bird’s nest. I slept on the couch of a sharehouse until one of the other dudes who lived there broke his collarbone and left town, at which point I graduated to a bunk bed. By day I’d go snowboarding and by night I washed dishes at a restaurant for $8.50 an hour and a free dinner. Then, if I could afford it, it was onto a dive bar called Rakel’s, where conversations were slurred and then forgotten. On the last night of the season, I started a snowball fight, which quickly turned serious, and ended with some guy repeatedly punching me in the face. He had me pinned by the back of the neck over the bonnet of a parked car and the punches kept coming.

The next day I packed up my stuff and hitchhiked back to Vancouver with a black eye. I got picked up by a truck driver who spent the next six hours snorting prescription amphetamines. He told me stories about fights he’d won over the years and about how much he loved his wife and kids. All the while, he drove full speed ahead through a gnarly snowstorm, traversing a colossal mountain range in a big white cloud. At some point, I fell asleep in the passenger seat and woke up at a petrol station on the outskirts of Vancouver. I was glad to be out of there. It was time to do something else for a while.

For this issue of Grass Fires, I interviewed Sam Wilson, a filmmaker who told me he’d also moved to Canada in his 20s, “with a backpack and shit-all money”. Sam lived through a similar kind of youthful, self-destructive carnage, but instead of a bad haircut and a blackeye, he ended up making a really beautiful black and white film, loosely based around his experiences living in Vancouver. He’s the director, writer and lead actor in Miles Away, an experimental, low-budget anti-love story which takes some cues from Larry Clarke’s cult classic Kids. Centred around skateboarding and jazz, it’s an arty film that feels at once surreal and hyper-real. Scope that feature on page 30.

Lots of other yarns in this mag too. We tracked down Jaleesa Vincent, a tap-dancing, free-surfing artist from The Sunshine Coast who’s been quietly raging through the pandemic, painting, making jewellery and getting waves. She’s the one on the cover. We also spoke to Celeste Mountjoy, better known by her alias, Filthy Ratbag, whose drawings are both personal and comical, addressing mental illness, insecurity and sexuality.

On the music front, meet Gareth Liddiard, the Australian musician and lyricist who you might know from The Drones and now Tropical Fuck Storm. Gaz is a great raconteur, ranting about the pandemic, the news cycle and the evils of the internet with a good mix of misanthropy and humour. Then there’s The Moses Gunn Collective, who were prompted by three waves of Melbourne lockdowns to finish an album they’d been putting off for five years. It’s a record about a potentially sinister love doctor. And The Beastie Girls, a trio of drag queens in Melbourne who are fabulously fun, outspoken and once depicted a dramatised act of bestiality on stage.

You might be thinking at this point, I thought this was supposed to be a skateboarding magazine? We’ll, we’re not exclusively a skate mag but the old wooden toy does have a way of seeping into much of what we do here at GF. For example, author, academic and skateboarder Kyle Beachy gave us the privilege of publishing an excerpt from his new book, The Most Fun Thing, which is full of philosophical insights about the subculture-turnedcommodity that we all know and love. And finally, we’ve published a handful of Curtis Hay’s photos of the late Trent Riley, celebrating the life of one of Australia’s most beloved skateboarders. Trent was out fishing in Moreton Bay back in April when he went missing, without a trace. It rocked everyone around him and the skate community at large, but we’re stoked to be able to share some of Trent’s previously unseen gold here.

I hope you enjoy Issue 7 of Grass Fires. As you’ve no doubt figured out already, this magazine is 100% FREE. That means it’s accessible to anyone and everyone, including you, so thanks for reading.

— Nat Kassel

Done something stupid and reckless in your time? I'd love to hear about it. Email your words, photos and illustrations to nat@grass-fires.com