beastly lurkage

This past summer, the Girl and Anti Hero skateboard teams came together for the second "Beauty and the Beast Tour." Just like last year all the guys came through Portland on their demo tour. This year the venue was Glenhaven skatepark. The pros had to compete with hungry locals that wouldn't let the teams skate, and those who came to see the wizardry of Eric Koston, Rick McCrank, Tony Trujillo, Julien Stranger, Mike Carroll, and many more were left with a sense of being robbed. It's not to say that nobody skated, amongst the guys who dodged his way through local kids doing early grabs was Chris Pfanner. This dude has got some of the craziest pop that I have ever seen live. He popped an 8ft high (or higher) frontside 360 off of the hip, and my friends and I were lucky enough to be in the frame.

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(screen shot from the fall Anti Hero catalog, check it out at http://www.dlxsf.com)

So after the Glenhaven demo I couldn't help to feel a little cheated, because I didn't get to see both teams skate to their full potential. On a happy note I ended up getting John Cardiel to sign a board of mine for the second time. I randomly met him at Tompkins Square Park in the East Village of NYC this past July and had gotten him to sign my Cardiel Eagle board and gave him a HB shirt. It was a damp drizzly day, so the autographed faded away long before my flight back to Portland. Crestfallen that my signature had faded, I was determined to get him to sign it again and lugged two separate set ups to the demo. John arrived a little later than the rest of the team, he decided to ride his fixed gear from Windells Camp at the base of Mt. Hood to the demo. Needless to say that is a pretty gnarly bike ride especially on a fixie. John remembered me from my travels and had no problem  "double juicing" my board as he put it. Thanks John. Back to my story, so the day after the demo I was driving in to my studio and spotted a couple of white 16 passenger vans at Burnside skatepark. I rushed to the shop, phoned up my buddy Garret and armed myself with some beers and skated down under the bridge for the "real" demo. Needless to say all the guys were killing it, some of my personal favorites were; Robbie Russo, Tom Remillard, Vincent Alvarez, Rick McCrank, Peabody, and of course TNT, Tony Trujillo #1 Park Shark. We were lucky to witness some incredible skateboarding that day, as documented by Gabe Morford in the newest Anti Hero ad. As you can see I am once again lurking from a prime lurk zone. There is a video of the tour coming out soon, so keep your eyes out for my friends and I lurking in peculiar places in the background.

check out the whole ad at http://www.dlxsf.com