new front page

Brandon sent me that bit of Ridgeway that's on the front page, it's awesome, to see more of this stuff go here http://www.flickr.com/photos/alpacawhat .

There's a contest in Fairbanks on Saturday, which means I actually get to ride... all you Anchorage kids should head up there, it'll be a good time.

I'm finally getting a new camera here in a minute, as soon as the taxes come back, no more awesome one chip footage around here.

Tyzee is coming up in August to do a bit of filming and travelling around, that's really the only news.

Check back after the weekend for a bit from the comp; in the meantime go check out the new etnies trailer www.etniesbmx.com

-Aaron

with only two hours
possibility of flight
lets not get hopes up


Okay so pretty much i missed my flight this morning and have been sitting in the portland airport since about 10:15 and it is now 7:09. below is a picture of what i have been wondering the check in and baggage claim areas of the airport with..... so people pretty much love me, especially in the elevators



p.s. camera phones rule

This is what an alaskan skatepark looks like right now.

Just for reference, that quarter on the right is an eight foot quarterpipe. It's dumping snow right now.... I love spring.

-Aaron

HELLO EVERYBODY!

since i am now officially part of the no bikes family i guess ill tell a little about myself.

i am twenty one
alaska is my home
is it summer yet

but yeah here are a couple self portraits i did last year

this is probably the only week i'll ever update this much

I asked Andrew a few questions about his trip to New Zealand:

where did you go when you were over there? what was your favourite place and why?

i flew into auckland on the norh island and just stayed on the north island the whole time. it was awesome i really liked it alot. i never really went any farther north then auckland but i went all the way down to wellington for x air which was a pretty cool drive. got to see some cool scenery and ride some really fun parks. my favourite park i rode when i was there was probably raglan. its super awesome kinda clover shaped bowl right on the beach. i had so much fun riding there and the town itself was really nice too, its just a small little surfing town.

how did x-air compare to a contest over here?

x-air didnt really feel that much different than a metro jam. qualifying was a bit different though, you got 2 one minute runs. it was just kinda weird for me cause that was the first non jam format contest i rode in. but the finals are run in a 3 person jam. so that felt no different especially since they even had grotbags announcing too.

did you meet mike spinner? if so is he as awesome as he is on the internet?

hahahah i never really actually talked to him or read much of the stuff he has said on the internet, so i dont really want to say too much about this.... but if the stuff that i over heard coming out of his mouth is any indication, then the answer would have to be yes.


I've begun collecting contest prizes for the year. This is a new screen that I drew with a sharpie; it's a haiku. I've chosen the two greatest clothing articles to put the graphic on and though I think these may end up being one offs (because tie dyes and tank tops are a little too rad for the average person), e-mail me if you want something with that graphic.

Here's a couple other things that may be headed to Campbell River for a gap to flat comp:

Lastly, a bike check with my bike that traces the origin of all of its prehistoric parts:

I only keep two old Ride magazines and they're the first two I ever bought. Today I was going back through one of them and I thought there were a few things that were interesting enough to scan and put up on the site. Back in '95 the X-Games were in their first year and they were still called the Extreme Games (I'm pretty sure this was the year that some guy bungee jumped in a canoe). Jay Miron wrote an East coast roadtrip article that spanned most of the issue, Robbie Morales was a slim looking AA pro racer and Taj wore a full face helmet. Here are a few more highlights:

Ian Morris and one of the craziest rails of all time. Just click the photo and keep in mind what would happen if he missed that or hung up on an upright.

This was from the Extreme Games article, it's Jay's pretty hilarious explanation of the other events that happenned that year.

This Fuzzy Hall Mongoose ad is probably the best thing they ever did. Leathers... shades.... open faced race helmet... nice.


This isn't really that funny or cool, but I'm pretty sure it's the first mention of Little Devil in bmx popular culture (notice that Derek Adams is still selling shirts out of his house at this point). I'm not really a huge Little Devil fan but you can't deny that they've had a pretty big influence on the industry. Also notice Dave Osato riding for basic on the left there back when the Small Town Hick was the frame to have around BC

I'll post more later in the week when I go through my other issue.

-Aaron

I've recovered from my bout with negativity for a bit of an upswing. Last post I complained about that Brandon Hoerres interview in Ride UK (the point still stands, bmx media need to be less lazy...), but it's a pretty interesting interview that reinforces some things that I'm sure some people have been thinking for a long time. In the interview he talks about how he hates it when people want to be friends with him, or tell them about all the sweet new tricks they learned just because he's a good rider; there's some more stuff about how he's sick of people telling him how good he is, and then he talks about philosophy. It really made me think about the interview itself and how the only reason I was reading Brandon Hoerres' opinions in a magazine was because he's a ridiculously talented bike rider. I'm not trying to call him out as a hypocrite or anything because having an interview in arguably the best bmx magazine out there is really cool, and he should want that, but why should I want to read his opinions any more than anyone elses? Being a good bike rider doesn't make you any more insightful than the average person, some of them are dumb as rocks. We have this tendency to put people on pedistals and think that they must be really cool just because they can flip a bike around. I've met a couple bmx legends in my lifetime and they were pretty normal, except for Dom Mach, he could definitely levitate and shoot fire out of his eyes.

Again, there is a comp in Fairbanks on March 31st, and it will be awesome.

And to get back to the actual subject of this website, I'll be re-doing the team page this week to something much more scaled down and putting together a new t-shirt design. I think that Sexsmith may have something in the works too, but I'm not sure because he doesn't have a computer. Zac Heinen is a friend of mine from Anchorage who will be helping out with some random stuff, I'm really hoping photos and things because he's a pretty good photographer, but you may notice his name as a contributor on the left, so if he ever posts on here, that's who Zac is. While I'm on that, Zac is down in Portland right now hanging out and riding a bit with Shawn Hoffarth, who is an old friend of ours from back in the day... now I'm just rambling.

-Aaron

Blog marathon

Spring break started today so amidst having nothing to do and some things to say I stumbled online... Don't expect this to have any common themes though. There is a contest happening at the end of the month at Joel's place in Fairbanks, this will be a good time and i'll be there, but not because I love driving to Fairbanks.

After much anticipation from me, Borat finally came out on dvd and honestly I was pretty disappointed. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of intentionallly tarninshing the reputation of an entire nation, but the humour in this movie was just dumb. Any idiot can think of extremely inappropriate things and say them to strangers; It says a lot about our culture when saying things like "I have sexy time with my mother in law" will land your movie at the top of the box office. I'm not necessarily going off on this movie because it was inapproriate because that's not really the big issue to me, what I am saying is that it's unoriginal and unintelligent. Before this Steve-O ran around in a thong and Tom Green painted lesbians on his father's car, don't you think it's time popular culture learned a new trick instead of just churning out the same old stuff? If you want to see something that's funny and required the use of somebody's brain watch a Wes Anderson movie, or Little Miss Sunshine, even some things by Kevin Smith...

Three other things that I hate this week:

1. When bmx magazines print interviews in which every photo has already been in a video section (brandon hoerres ride uk, seth kimbrough dig etc.).

2. Online bmx videos featuring kids from all over the country doing the exact same thing (yes, you can tailwhip and hang 5, we get it).

3. It's March, and there's still three feet of snow.

Three things that I like this week:

1. The prizes I've begun collecting for the Juston Gair Jam (I'm not sure if you know what you got yourself into here Zane)

2. Scotty Cranmer. Somehow he went from being a guy who makes weird faces while doing park rat tricks to a guy who still makes weird faces, but now while doing some pretty interesting stuff.

3. Tabletops.

I'll probably feel bad about all the negativity in this post and delete it later.

-Aaron

Desson

I asked Matt a few questions about the contest in Toronto...

how did you do in the contest?

I rode like crap. I fell on every trick I tryed pretty much. I got 53rd out of like 60 riders. I was freaking stoked!

everyone seemed to be into your dad, why is he so awesome?

Because he is Doug Desson. He would came out and got drunk with us, he told people awesome things. And was stoked on charlie making fun of the leafs at the local bar.

who's the best person you met out there and why?

Jeff Evans . For reals, those dudes rock. I think jeff is so aweosme people he is pretty much my twin, When matt reid lived in kelowna he would always say how we looked alike and I didnt really think much of it untill I saw jeff. It was awesome. Jeff and I ended up on the top floor or our hotel room at like 4 in the morning with a bunch of other dudes trying to make a fort out of plywood. I met a lot of sweet guys there awell, but jeff was seriously the best.

how was the contest compared to a metro jam?

I like metro jam more I think because Its closer to home. It also seems to be ran better and the ramps are way more fun. And seriously, who could put on a better contest then the beast himself?

Sav vy Interview

This has been sitting in my inbox for a couple weeks now, but I finally had some time so I put it together. Desson went to fake metro and apparently his Dad is pretty sweet, he crashed a lot and he had to wear one of those seshin air freshner shirts (I mean, I like Seshin and all, but those things had better be an inside joke... and if they are that's awesome because inside jokes that nobody else gets are the best kind of t-shirt). Oh yeah and the other day I had to do a presentation in this class which consisted of me trying to convince people that I'd seen the ogopogo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onWaXNIaEyw&mode=related&search= and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkeyYgO3TnI for some rad videos).

"Did you guys ever get harassed when you were like swimming and stuff?"

"No, we always brought a small animal to sacrifice..."

-Aaron

Thursday

Thursday is basically the best day for me because I have absolutely nothing on Friday, so I'm going to take the opportunity to update the blog. There is an amazing video up over on defgrip right now featuring everyone's favourite comedian... I don't usually like to cite other blogs cause most people read defgrip anyways but this is worth it, so head on over. While on the topic of other people's stuff, Lavar's JBA project has been stirring up some controversy, but I think they're awesome (even though I would never spend $65 on a t-shirt). I did some dying on a few shirts last summer (yeah, that's right, we're waaayyy ahead of the trends) and it was really fun; they never made it up here because I didn't expect people to want marble dyed shirts, but props to those guys for putting some artistry into t-shirts and not just throwing a screen on the front. There are some photos of zane over at www.seshinbikes.com and he is still busy working on a little web video for us; also the owrd on the street is that seshin is making some kind of video this year, possibly a free web release which is cool for us because Zane and Desson are both on that team along with Brent Webb, the greatest tabletopper of all time.

Anchorage is supposed to get a new skatepark this summer, that's the good news, the bad news is that they're spending $275,000 on a 20,000 square foot metal skatepark which is completely mind blowing because it's such a dumb idea, maybe they figure if it all goes sour they can melt it and sell it for scrap to the Chinese. I mean, i respect the fact that some people probably put a lot of work into getting the thing and at least it's better than what we have now (a 3 foot spine/boxjump and a flatbank in a hockey rink), but if you've ever been to a metal skatepark you know this has bad idea written all over it.

I will have the savvy interview up this weekend.

-Aaron