Upon entering Walking, Square, Cylinder, Plane I am filled with an overwhelming anxiety. The exhibition title repeats in my mind cyclically,...
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Color 8.6 Editor's Letter Buy This Issue Now
art
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Eli Bronowsky
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JESSICA EATON
Jessica Eaton’s photographs will stop you in your tracks. Optically complex, and starkly, stunningly beautiful; they’re also inscrutable.......
life
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Schlepping It
Winter in Montreal is anything but ideal for skateboarding—so is Canada in general when you think about it. Even the most convenient......
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Bergenz, Austria
Bregenz is a small, cosy city by the lake of Constance, which borders Switzerland and Germany. It’s surrounded by a lot of beautiful......
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Award Category: Best New…
Otherwise known as: The Character Award. Just a taste of what the Olio awards will bring this coming September, 2011 in Vancouver thanks......
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JOSH EVIN
Kootenay legend Josh Evin died in a motorcycle accident in the early morning hours of June 13th. On a Nelson, B.C. back road, he lost......
skate
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BA.KU.
In an EA Skate commercial, Mark Gonzales described art and skateboarding as “A way of conquering boredom”, which sounds to us like......
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SKATE OR D.I.Y
The war between skateboarders and skate-proofing architects has been raging for many years, with no end it sight. But we all have to......
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The Contender Award
Unique for this issue only, this one had to go to Matt Berger who took home the loot at just about every contest he could possibly......
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Paul Trep is...
Since the beginning of time, kings have quested to expand their respective kingdoms. Unruly conquerors from far off lands often posed......
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Gone Trippin' III
For this year’s Gone Trippin’ tour (this now being the 3rd annual) a 15-man vessel built for speed and destruction was outfitted......
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JAMIE TANCOWNY
Baby Jamie puts another nail in the coffin. Coining him "Best New Pro" of 2010 wasn't hard for us to do....
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Award Category: Best Team
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BEST TRICK?
music
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CULTS
It was a different experience to have to physically find an artist in order to learn anything about them. With Cults recent signing......
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Big Freedia
Bounce, a niche form of urban music that has remained mostly underground for the past twelve years, grew out of New Orleans [Louisiana]’......
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Glasser
Over several weeks in 2009, Glasser (aka Cameron Mesirow) came to broad attention with her daily Auerglass performances in the now-defunct......
fashion
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Paper Dolls
photography HANA PESUT fashion editor MILA FRANOVIC fashion assistant MELISSA NOAK photography assistant NATASHA LANDS shot at SUGAR......
film
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Award Category: Best Performance…
And you know we mean skateboard video. Leo Romero sets the stage with already having Stay Gold and Brainwash under his (sometimes cowboy...)......
Editor's Letter
THIS IS NOT THE AWARDS ISSUE:
Everybody knows that awards are arbitrary, horribly subjective, ultimately meaningless, and, in the end, say more about who is giving them than who is getting them. They also propagate the false assumption that the winner is now stamped and certified as the best (they won, didn’t they?), which is a frightening idea, especially when you consider that there are people who actually think that the winner of American Idol is the best singer (or even, best musician!?) in the land. Awards can also foster a culture where artists and athletes live only for these occasional pats on the head, like dogs all sitting up and begging for treats, so much that they are no longer creating or doing for their own reasons, but only to impress others and polish their resumes.
We know there is nothing worse in the world than the beamer: the dude who looks right at you after he lands a difficult trick, just to see if you saw, greedily checking if you were impressed or not. Or the more sneaky version of the beamer, who says offhandedly in the car after a session, in a shameless ploy for a hit of cheap recognition, “Yeah, that cab-flip down that 13-stair was pretty sketchy,” when everybody knows that they’d done the trick perfectly.
Yet even though awards can be so corrupting and ridiculous, they continue to fascinate us. Why? Because they do draw attention, they do offer recognition, they do swing the spotlight in the direction of something new, and can draw a whole new audience to a deserving
person or work of art that never would have found it otherwise. And perhaps because awards are always hotly contested, they are not supposed to end arguments about who is the best, but, more importantly, begin them. Just fire up a best skater or best video of all time discussion with your homies over a few brews if you want to see the gloves come off and blood on the floor in no time flat.
So how to give awards without blowing it, as so many others do? Well, we can start by refusing to claim that our winners are the absolute best, and simply assert that these are people and works of art that get us stoked, period. These are artists and athletes who are, on their own terms, killing it. By this we mean they seem to be doing what they need to do, doing what they love. Another way to avoid blowing it is to aim to pick people who aren’t even trying to win awards in the first place, people who couldn’t give a shit if they’d won the award or not, because they’re so busy doing what they’re doing they’d probably never find out they’d won anyway. Actually, we love this idea.
So to announce our upcoming awards, in this issue we’re giving you the heads up on some of the categories that we’re going to be doling out awards in. These awards will sing for the unsung heroes, for the people who would’ve done it anyway, and for who will do it again and again, because they want to, because they have to, because they couldn’t even imagine doing otherwise.
—mike christie, senior editor
