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Drawing inspiration from the likes of “master” painters such as Diego Velázquez and John Singer Sargent, the portraits of Stephen Appleby-Barr are no Sunday paintings. The Toronto artist has combined carefully researched practices of the past with a penchant for the archaic. Appropriating the conventions of Victorian cartes-de-visite and daguerreotypes, the artist inserts his colleagues, friends, and contemporaries into mythic tableaus, complete with the mannered expressions of identity that pervade these historic sources. What results in this body of portraits is a legacy of an imagined brotherhood that highlights the residual ritualism of contemporary societies and fraternities. Appleby-Barr’s interest in collective identities parallels his own membership in the five-man collective Team Macho, which includes Lauchie Reid, Chris Buchan, Nicholas Aoki, and Jacob Whibley.

PHOTOGRAPHY MICHELLE FORD
Stylist MILA FRANOVIC
assistant ARIANA PREECE

Toronto gets kind of a bad rap. For Americans, it’s Canada’s cute attempt at having its own New York city. For most Canadians, it’s the sprawling, smoggy financial centre that thinks it’s so important. Vancouver’s got the ocean and the mountains, the laid-back West Coast vibe and the famous marijuana. Montreal’s got the almost-European bohemian cool, the unbelievably cheap rent and lax liquor laws. Toronto? Well, it’s got the CN Tower. That’s the common wisdom, anyway. Torontonians themselves, of course, know different. Hogtown isn’t the biggest city in Canada for nothing – it’s a massively diverse metropolis, and its patchwork of distinct neighbourhoods are miles deep with history and character. That also means that it has some of the best arts infrastructure in North America: you can barely trip over a streetcar track without landing in a bar, art gallery, or concert venue.

So the door kicks in and there it is, the scene of a lifetime. A balding middle-aged man sucking the filthy rotten toes of a Hastings street lady of the night. Who kicked the door in? I have no clue, but that is not relevant. I turn to Sascha and mouth the words ‘what the fuck’.

The first time I heard about JS Lapierre, I was sitting in my friend’s car and I even remember where we were because my friend just talks and talks and talks, so I was paying more attention to the scenery. At one point in his constant rambling I heard him say threeflip noseblunt, and it caught my interest. I was like, “What? Threeflip noseblunt, who?” And he replied, “JS Lapierre.” I think my exact reaction was “Who the fuck is JS Lapierre?”

As I write these words, Vancouver is in the midst of a corporate overhaul in the form of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games. Everything here is positioned to accommodate the influx of tourists, athletes and media – advertisements with those five linked rings have been burned into my eyeballs and steps have been taken to herd ‘undesirables’ into temporary shelters or delegated protest zones. But, there’s at least one up-side to the exorbitant spending of tax dollars by Olympic cities… new skate spots! The construction of new sports venues, plazas, metro lines and public sculptures are all part of the Olympic tradition. Yet this architecture built to support the Games – a celebration of exclusive athleticism – unintentionally creates new spaces for street skating.

The skateboard graphic is an underestimated art medium that is often overlooked on its destructive journey from the skate shop wall to the streets. But while skaters have been out marking up the masterpieces of legendary graphic designers VC Johnson, Pushead, Jim Phillips, Marc McKee and wave-maker Todd Bratrud, other artists have been drawing inspiration from these iconic styles. In an effort to pay homage to his biggest influences, California-based artist Aye Jay, known to the skateboard community for his designs on Consolidated, Creature, and Foundation decks, has created illustrations replicating each artists’ infamous style to accompany our look at said artists’ iconic images, their influence on skateboarding, and the future of the skateboard graphic.

In the heat of summer, adidas spread their giant trident across the country, getting the Canadian team together along with team manager Benjamin Motz and Color’s compadre with a camera, Jeff Comber. With a strong eastern connection, the team started their trek in Montreal hitting the suburbs, visiting shops, hosting games of S.K.A.T.E. with the locals, and barbecuing up the best beef our great plains have to offer. Plane tickets stowed, they hit the road for Ottawa and then the railway for Toronto, onward to Winnipeg. Separating ‘tours’ from ‘trips’, adidas made it successfully to Vancouver and after 20 days of skateboarding every day, the barbeque burned better than ever and the after party sizzled too. U.S. import, Zach Lyon attests, “I had an amazing time in Canada!” Reminding us again that skateboarding hasn’t forgotten about us. “[I] Got to see Tony Ferguson skate, Galiea Momolu got me a shot at the bar, chilled with Wade [Desarmo]...” Lyon adds. Lost train tickets, endless days of driving, injuries, and the necessary shop visits to boot, the team introduced to you on the following pages offered not the standard trick-by-trick recollection of their journey, but simply brief stories about some people you may or may not know who skated for 20 days straight and go the photos to prove it.

Om is a duo featuring the sonorous bass tones and chant-like vocals of Al Cisneros, formerly of Sleep and currently also in supergroup Shrinebuilder, along with member of Neurosis and the Melvins. The group formed in 2003 with drummer Chris Hakius, also of Sleep, and released five albums together before Emil Amos of Grails and Holy Sons took over on drums in 2008. Om’s sound has always contained the hallmarks of Sleep’s revered stoner rock but, relying almost strictly on rhythm instruments, their songs are focused and meditative musical dialogues that often run well over 10 minutes in their search for transcendent bass tone. Live, Al’s Rickenbacker bass is powered by 480 watts and 18 speakers rivaling the bellows of a giant pipe organ, while Amos exudes enough fury behind the drums to fend off an army of rabid pit-bulls. Even at molasses-slow tempos, Om’s songs work like incantations, drawing a magic diagram that holds their two extremes – drawn-out euphoria and explosive crescendo – in perfect tension. They’ve just wrapped up North American and European tours in support of their new album God is Good – their first to incorporate more diverse instruments and flavours – and with new material already in the works, Om’s future is something to look forward to.

Saturday night at the end of the winter. It’s been two weeks since I’ve quit my comfortable job in order to change my life. The 30s crisis hit me hard and a complicated relationship with a co-worker had made things worse. So here I am, drinking with some friends, wondering what I’ll be doing during the six months before returning to school. Considering my state of depression, a friend suggests that I just pack my goods and head to Barcelona. I tell him that it doesn’t just work like that. I can’t just show up in Barca and start shooting photos of random skaters, so I simply sink into my bottles of red wine and fall asleep on my couch. I arrive home the next day to find that Josh Clark has added me on Facebook and I initiate a conversation. Josh tells me that he’s in Barca with a group of young guys for the next two months. I check my bank account, arrange for someone to water my plants and pick up my mail, and buy a plane ticket for two months in Europe. My head still hurts from all the wine but to quote The Dead Poets Society, I’ve got the feeling I have seized the day.

So let’s say you’re a homeless drifter in L.A. with a bad-attitude and huge muscles and one day you happen upon an abandoned church full of boxes and boxes of Ray-Bans. There’s a crazy, blind priest insider broadcasting subversive messages on pirate T.V. airwaves. You put the sunglasses on and – holy shit! – now you can see hidden, corporate, mass media messages of “Obey” and “Consume” that secret alien overlords are using to subliminally control our minds and take over the world. So with your badass decoder shades on, you get some guns and then say something like, “Life’s a bitch…and she’s back in heat,” while you kill some aliens.

ILLUSTRATIONS Ben Tour
PHOTOGRAPHY Gordon Nicholas
STYLIST Mila Franovic

Hats. As we go through life we all wear different hats to suit the needs of the moment, job, trick or relationship. For Mr. Jenkins, the front of his head has become partially worn due to the number of times he’s had to change hats over his career and life. His first hat tricks were in the magazine business doing a wide variety of work for BMX magazine Freestylin’, Homeboy, DIRT, Transworld Skate and Snow, Big Brother and his own company Bend Press (although it no longer produces on a regular basis). The number of hats in those jobs alone range all over the spectrum that can never be captured in a resume. During those years he honed the skills he learned at art school, in the workplace, gaining experience and learning the pacingof monthly and weekly deadlines. In 1989 his attention turned to doing bard graphics. He did the graphics for new Blind pro Jason Lee and continued to work freelance doing graphics for 101, World Industries, Fishlips, Blockhead, Blue and others until he was hired on as Girl’s main art man in 1992.

Cliche’s new book, Resume, chronicles the first 10 years and changes of the French-made skateboard company and how it grew to be an internationally known and admired entity amongst skateboarders. Mackenzie Eisenhour breaks it down from owner (former Flip Skateboards team rider) Jeremie Daclin’s career as a skater in the early 90s onward to the early beginnings of Cliche Skateboards in the late 90s and how it came to be known as one of the best companies and teams of all time.

In our opinion, the best part in Plan B’s earth-shattering video Virtual Reality doesn’t have any Plan B skaters in it. It’s the Beatles sound-tracked friends section: Guy Mariano, Brian Lotti, Henry Sanchez and others, dropping multiple NBD neutron bombs, all in somebody else’s video! It was a time when videos weren’t all-important and people weren’t forced to horde their best shit for years. And it seems astonishing to us that nobody has tried to recreate this kind of distilled, rapid-fire intensity, until now.

The Beginning is a fragile, fragile time. 3 of us have brutally slammed while attempting to ride our touring bikes, first across the vast city of Auckland and subsequently over the 309 pass on New Zealands Coromandel peninsula.
Each day a goal is set. Today we must reach hot water beach by sundown or face a perilous night time ride deep in Bogan country.

In pondering the essence of the modern skateboarding tour, this famous sentence [above], as written in A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, can’t help but come to mind. Although completely unrelated to skateboarding, such prose seems to completely bespeak the trials and tribulations of the modern skateboard tour as we have come to know it. Tours in which disaster anxiously awaits around every bend in the road, tours in which trouble can sometimes turn to triumph, and tours in which legends are born, friendships are solidified, and battles are won.

Japanese bands rarely get exposure on the shores of North America, and Breakfast is no exception. Amidst the throes of hardcore bands that are currently active in Japan, Breakfast has one defining characteristic separating them from most: their love for skateboarding. They seem to love skateboarding just as much as rocking a stage, and their musical style stays oh-so-true to a late-80s hardcore skatepunk paradigm. The artwork of many of their CD releases and other merchandise often displays the work of Raymond Pettibon, famous for his connection to bands such as Black Flag and the Minutemen, among others.

FROM HIGH BEAMS TO BIG THINGS

Jarvis Nigelsky captured Chad Dickson, Spencer Hamilton, Josh Clark, Micky Papa, Dustin Montie, Ryan Bonnell, Lee Saunders, and many others for his new video.

FASHION/IRRATION

A late summer day in New York and a crew of friends cruising around was all the inspiration Jody Rogac needed to shoot the fashion story for this issue.