Helter Shelter Back to Magazine

I approached the gate at Arto’s Hollywood hideaway, wearing a wide smile and last night’s outfit. Arto greeted me at the front door and invited me into his incredibly sunny home, taking me through the dining room and into the kitchen where the sink was being used for his baby Ella’s morning bath. Out in the backyard we passed by his well-known amenity (no, not the sauna), the acclaimed 43-foot-long concrete pool: a welcome home to skaters of all ages and the scene of some raging sessions—just call before you show up!

Picture this: it’s summer, you’re driving down a long winding road in maritime Nova Scotia. There are green spruce trees on your right and a sparkling blue river on your left. The fishermen are bringing in their nets from the day’s catch. It’s one of those picture-perfect backdrops you may have seen in some overpriced calendar at the airport.

There’s no single skate house that is timeless. Each perfect example has its rise to infamy and its inevitable decline (think: Warner Ave, 6 Newell, Pender Beach). These places are the stuff of local legend. Each could be heaven or hell depending where your head’s at. Each could be a laugh-a-second or a chamber of torture. Every one is slightly different but amongst them are some common threads (besides skate videos, Top Ramen and pre-made pizza), that weave their way through the sordid tapestry that is, quintessentially, The Skate House.

Step into this greasy garage and see how artist/photographer/motorcyle builder, Scott Pommier pays the bills. Just try not to look directly into the giant eyes of Napolean Bonaparte.

“At first glance you might just see a mans tools and hobby motorcycles, but what you don’t realize is that beside those oily bikes, Scott is wedged into the business end of what keeps the lights on in that garage. Just arms reach away from the bikes is Scott’s office and photography workspace…”

One of the most well-known skateboard households in Long Beach, California, is that of Dan Lutheran, his brother Drew, and Collin Provost. They’ve all lived together for years. Their two-bedroom apartment is only minutes away from the famous Cherry Park, as well as lots of good bars, cafes, and local medical marijuana facilities. Their place reminds one of a normal skate-house with the persistent smell of weed, the dark curtain drawn to block the light, and the routine houseguest who’s always over. Although, amongst the customary skate-house amenities, their humble abode is sprinkled with personal mementos of family and friends, reminders of home, and their own weed plant.

Especially in Vancouver, with its stratospheric rents and real-estate prices, winter skate spots are few and far between. And for carpenters and furniture designers like Beau Kerner, Danny Hagge, Quinn Starr and Craig Johnson, this means that workshop space also doesn’t come cheap. This need for a place to ply their woodworking trades was how Manland was born. “There was a bunch of us who’d finished carpentry school, and after that nobody really had access to a shop or anything,” recalls Beau. “You can rent work space in the city but it’s pretty expensive, you pay by the hour, and you don’t have all your own tools.” So after almost a year of searching, Beau and Craig found the perfect building: a huge old warehouse, right downtown and dirt-cheap.

This artist’s live/work studio is inhabited by many a knick-knack from his worldly travels.

SAMPLE:
On a recent tour of the Southwestern United States, artist/illustrator Jeremy Fish saw parts of the U.S. that few have; from a perspective that even fewer of his age have seen: inside of a vintage 1970s van. His fascination with the bygone era of custom gas guzzling shaggin’ wagons is either an early onset of a mid-life crisis or a genuine appreciation for a brief era in automotive history. Whatever the reason, his interest has grown to include an offshoot of his famed Silly Pink Bunnies; the Vanimals are a crew of like-minded friends that share the love of the van. His love of motor vehicles is not limited only to vans, the favorite of creepy dudes everywhere; he also has a passion for Vespas and their larger, more utilitarian cousins that populate Italy. He’s a well-traveled man who has seen most of Europe and picked up some interesting items during those travels. The few curiosities that he has brought back reside with him in his live/work studio in San Francisco’s North Beach. There in his mini-maze of small rooms and doors, he keeps his life regimented. No surprise that the largest room in the place is his studio. His life consists of 10-16 hour days (depending on deadlines), spent hunched over his table, working on the next project, where he tries to get ideas involving a motorized vehicles, mules, and ill-tempered gnomes out of his head and made into his reality. The mad man of Union Street is at it again.

Mark Scott, or ‘Red’, has been pouring cement ever since skateboarders were first getting around to it (I mean, he built Burnside for Christ’s sake!). Not to mention he gets calls from Brewce to expand the Skatopia terrain, and the list could go on. His company, Dreamland Skateparks, has been carrying on their legacy across the Northwest Coast and into the mainland of America for some time now. But what do you get when the premiere skatepark builder in America feels the urge to have his own park? Well, he builds one of the deepest and most insane cement bowls that lives under a barn in his backyard, complete with a bat cave and all. Upcoming plans also call for the world’s first underground bowl, which has been started just around the corner.

Micah Lexier’s studio apartment offers a peek into the impulses behind his unique combination of exactitude and offhandedness. The Winnipeg-born, Toronto-based artist, curator and collector is fascinated with indexes – mark-making, measurement, proximity… this is the stuff of his own artwork and his interest in art and design in general. His studio is startlingly clean, comprised of uniform rows of shelves and files. His living space is orderly, emphasizing the harmony of his basic needs with the aesthetic contributions of the artworks and design objects he lives with. But it isn’t all predetermined, as the ever-rotating collection of objects on his long countertop reveals. The series of small pieces, some of which are catalogued here, testify to Lexier’s inquisitive mind and restless spirit. Ever shifting, based on formal and thematic associations as much as the artist’s whim, these small works and multiples signal his abiding interest in the gesture. Things picked up, moved around – one thing after the next.

I had a favorite book as a child, The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. It’s the story of a boy and the tree that loved him. He would climb in her branches, and eat her apples and nap in her shade. But the boy grows and spends less and less time with the tree and that makes her sad. The boy returns as a man, and the tree offers him apples so that he can have money, branches so that he can build a house, and eventually her trunk so that he can build a boat and sail away. In the end the boy returns as an old man, and the only thing the tree can offer is a stump for the man to sit on, which is all he needs and makes the tree happy.

This issue we’re giving you two for the price of one. Take a look inside Ben Stoddard’s Don’t Sleep Productions studio and filmmaker Kirk Dianda’s black and white home.

This issue we’re giving you two for the price of one. Take a look inside Ben Stoddard’s Don’t Sleep Productions studio and filmmaker Kirk Dianda’s black and white home.

[ o ] BRUNETTI

ERIK BRUNETTI

wordsby jay revelle

While the name ‘Erik Brunetti’ may not ring a bell, the clothing brand ‘Fuct’ surely might. Brought to life by Brunetti in the early 1990s, initially under the domain of World Industries, Fuct grew quickly in popularity. At the time, the streetwear industry was still in its infancy, and the brand rapidly gave skateboarding the new and subversive edge it was ready for. Fuct’s classic circle logo and a plethora of ingenious t-shirt designs became an immediate symbol of skateboarding’s DIY mentality and “fuck the man” ideology. The brand’s groundbreaking language of symbolic representation and sharp, seditious design were the direct result of Brunetti’s passion for voicing beliefs through art and creativity.

THE BALLAD OF MOOK AND FUDGE:

Travis Millard and Mel Kadel’s L.A. Retreat

words and photos by randy laybourne

PENDER BEACH

wordsby katina danabassis photosby gordon nicholas

This issue we paid a visit to the former habitat of Sheldon Meleshinski. He would be the one face in the Pender house [Vancouver] who you might recognize. The others are probably for the better that you don’t. The hippy, the thief, the tremor, the man upstairs, the brothers and the ‘other guy’ are all in good company with Katina Danabassis taking notes on the havoc that remains…

KALAMATA HOUSE: HELTER SHELTER

words and photosby jeff thorburn

Skateboarding is a funny thing. While most of the general recognition goes to those doing the hot tricks at the hot spots, there are always those outside of the limelight doing interesting things that usually go unnoticed. While the local hotshot is going through his list of tricks down the eight stair, rest assured that someone, whose name you might not know, is doing a trick at a spot that you’ve maybe walked by hundreds of times and never thought of how to skate it. What that guy is doing is far closer to pure street skating than just trying to learn new flippers down the standard stairs. Whenever the low-key variety aren’t working, or even while they are, these guys are watching the streets, looking for untouched or unnoticed spots. Every city has these types, but you rarely hear much about them…

HOUSE OF HART

wordsby devin morrison photosby ian snow

Welcome to the Hart House. This 5600 square foot home, which sits on 2.17 acres of land, was built in 1905.

In 1920 it was converted into The Soldiers ’Children’s home for orphans and sometime after (in 1951) it was sold to Stu Hart for $25,000…