skateboard the movie [1978]

 

how the hell have i not seen this flick until last night?!  i was an avid reader of skateboarder magazine in the late 1970s.  i had a banana board [a cheap plastic skateboard that was mass produced & sold everywhere].  i knew who tony alva was.  i even fondly remember seeing the extreme sports movie styled as a documentary go for it [1976] at the drive-ins which featured alva & a few other skateboarders.  but this particular movie?  nope.  

so when i clicked play i didn't know if this pic was a documentary of late '70s skaters & skating culture or a fictive film.  turns out it is the latter but with honest to betsy skating legends like alva & ellen o'neal.  the gist goes like this.  a down-on-his-luck sadsack hollywood agent, played by allen garfield, is in hock to the mob.  he needs a winner.  & at his wits end he finds a group of teen skaters.  one of them even leaped over his parked car.  amazed by these kids prowess on their boards he convenes a pro skating team to compete up & down the pacific seaboard.  hell, even my beloved hometown shows up as a rival skating team.

garfield is not without a kind of neurotic charm.  his charges include skating legends tony alva & ellen o'neal, indeed it is remarkable that the filmmakers included both girls & boys on the same skating team.  i could be quite wrong but i don't recall such teams integrated with both sexes when i was following skating back then.  still, the kids are all right.  even heartthrob leif garrett is in this pic.  but you might not know it for tho garrett gets top billing the real star is garfield, & skating a la '70s style.  

this is a throwback to an era of skating that was transitioning from the carve the bowl, headstands on a board, kind of skating to the skating of vertical walls & wild street skills a la rodney mullen.  even better was the era of the late 1970s captured by the filmmakers which gave me heaps of nostalgia.  indeed, my nostalgia of this era of skating is a kind of soft proof that this is a good work of exploitation cinema.

two kings of horror together in a fight of fright!

 

la ciudad nocturna

 

i got the middle of the week blues so let me put on a record & let us dance like no one is looking to 'i wanna be yr dog'

i was a regular viewer of david sanborn's music TV show in the late '80s, 'night music', which was broadcast very late sunday night.  i was thrilled to see sonic youth on the program & i have not seen this performance since buying my first copy of daydream nation.  sanborn collected a variety of killer artists & the close-out of the show would be all the artists performing one song.  that song here is 'i wanna be yr dog' by iggy pop.  so fucking good that everyone, including folk duo the indigo girls, are killing it.  ah!  such sweet noise!  i fucking love it!

skateboards & retirement

for jonathan hayes

i was asked at work how long i've been there doing this work

long enough to get near retirement

& when you retire will you & the missus [yep, he said missus] buy a RV & travel this fair land

i've traveled a bit already besides we live in the greatest [arguably] state in the country everything is here

then you can travel these californian roads

i have many many times 

then what will you do

i think i will get me a skateboard

then what

learn to ride it again or maybe hang it on the wall as art

for i can never skate like i did when i was a lad but i can imagine the streets rolling beneath my wheels as it once felt like being born again or maybe on second thought perhaps i'll skate like the devil-in-me go for broke at length upside & sideways full bore wu wei a livable death at last

poem in concrete

 

carlos murphy's

for whatever reason the restaurant, Carlos Murphy's, popped up in my mind tonight as i was collecting the photos i posted earlier.  those pics are the result of a long walk i took in the early evening a couple of weeks ago thru midtown/downtown listening to Halloween radio on my phone.  but why Carlos Murphy's?  i dunno exactly.  it specialized in a fusion of irish-mexican fare.  located across the street from Cal Expo, home of the CA State Fair, it was a chain restaurant that had locations, i just learned from a quick google search, in Emeryville, & other cities.  i admit that i never ate at Carlos Murphy's.  have no excuse why not.  i think it had a reputation as an older crowd's dating scene.  i could be wrong about that.  my parents never bothered to take the family there.  & by the time i was old enough to go on my own my interests often led me elsewhere.  but just the idea of a marriage between mexican & irish dishes sounds interesting.  even its name is a hybrid, like so many things that are of CA & American culture[s].  Carlos Murphy's folded in the late '80s or sometime in the '90s.  the building sat derelict for many years.  until it was torn down.  now the whole area is rebuilt with medical buildings, apartment complexes etc etc.  my memories are not as keen as they used to be.  partly due to age, i guess.  i recall reading online a bit of advice.  take pictures of everything.  because everything changes & when they do you will have your memories of places, people & things preserved.  how often have you driven past some place & asked yourself, what was there before this?  because our memories fade or self-delete we often forgot even the very things we would look at for years.  until they are gone.  replaced by something else.  so Carlos Murphy's is now a memory of a restaurant that i'd see so often i took it for granted.  an 'irish-mexican cafe' because why the hell not.  

peace & love  

new world co.

 

bard's eye view

 

it's saturday nite, you got the america blues, so you wanna hear a rock&roll protest song by brandi fucking carlile!