THE MELLOW

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Becker | Mesa or Tempe, AZ

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Hilla | Tempe, AZ

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Another Dead Cactus. Please see my post from sometime in 2011 where I took a picture of a different one...

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I support being "lost" in your phone. Not everyone is a writer and stands to benefit by observing every detail of a Chipotle while you wait in line otherwise bored as fuck. Instead you can connect with people who marginally like you or read New York Times articles. We are incredibly productive people now and barely more self-obsessed.

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Ryan Reyes - Backside Smith Grind with a Mill Kid watching close by. Phoenix AZ, 2016

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Wig Head, Tempe, AZ 2016

I don’t have a consistent dating system for when I make these pictures. Tumblr only keeps track of when I post so I try to get them up if I need to remember them. But truth is. I don’t care too much about making pictures right now. My obsessions have all subsided. What our country has decided to do in terms of following a monster into his narcissistic hellscape is beyond me. My brother voted for republicans. But I didn’t think he would vote for this President. He said there is no way to get true information from the media so you just have to “go with your gut”.....FUCK.... Your gut chose someone who brags about sexual assault. You have stomach cancer. End of story.

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Scalped Tennis Ball, Tempe AZ, 2016

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Why would you say the media is lying?

What is the value in disseminating information to encourage distrust in fact-checking media? This place, this grid of sand colored buildings and fine people who build stuff or say stuff for money is not set up for revolution. The buildings are low to the ground and spread out. They don't break through the ice. Low center of gravity and camouflage painted. This place is made to crouch down and bear the dust and wind. Insurgencies don't live or thrive here. This is a place perfectly suited for service industry workers, landscapers, people pretending they are tech-wizards to their would-be Luddite friends. This place is perfect for settling, for things being fine and for debt. There's no room for revolution here. No thank you.

[frontsidegrinds]

Dylan. from Gravis Footwear on Vimeo.

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Untouchable. He doesn't touch the ground where we walk.

[fuckingawesomeradio]

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The best.

[themostfunthing]

Dylan, Immortal

Whatever he had – we called it style because this word played to our raging envy, arguing for some distinction between him and substance, even while inside we knew that such a distinction was absurd – it was a force inseparable from the long, narrow body where this force was expressed. There was always something auspicious in his skating, something in that slight shadow that was premised on rumor. You knew him immediately: a handful of frames, a fraction of a second and we’d know. Even before he entered the frame. And, as it went, along the way he was subsumed, or rather devoured, chewed by rows of grinding, youthful teeth that were sharpened on whatever clips they could find online. They slid the bar leftward to watch and rewatch, studying his style, marveling, digesting it, and from this sustenance growing bit-by-bit into something that was derived from Dylan, a self that was not the original’s equal by any measure, a shadow’s shadow, only an approximation, but, as we’ve seen, this inheritance did indeed help them, eventually, turn into themselves. This is what a soul is. This is immortality.

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Thank you.

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Tempe, AZ 2016

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Michael Kryger, Tempe, AZ 2016

[themostfunthing]

Roberto Bolaño called surrealism “something convulsive and vague, that familiar amorphous thing.” If indeed there is ever to be a poetics of skateboarding, familiarity will have to play a role. Suvin argued that science fiction’s value lay in its ability to effect cognitive estrangement. Campbell’s film documents and creates ostranenie by the re-presentation of a familiar world as captured by, and portrayed through, the glance of the radical dreamer. In fact, what Cuatros does better than any film I’ve seen is remind us that skateboarding’s heuristic usefulness is ontological. Its topos is not that there is a world inside the world, but rather: there is a world the exact shape and texture of the world that you know laid seamlessly over top of it, and you, for some reason, fail to see how beautiful it can be.

Convulsive, vague, and conveyed by slidy looks. Campbell’s subject is our ineffable, binding thing, that lurking, trembling essence that he can only render by images and motions of the surreal. The artist whose art was born from skateboarding has made an object about skateboarding that conveys this birth and mode of being. Skateboarding infects the filmmaker infects the musicians infects the viewer. Viewer goes out skating. Skateboarding is self-perpetuating in this way. It is always itself and something else, it is infectious, it is comprehensive and sublatable to the core. This is how the infinite comes to be—once born, skateboarding can never now die.

But the dreamscape of Cuatros Sueños Pequeños is not an expression of this infinity. Rather, it is mimetic. What world is this?, asks the skateboarder. A familiar one we have seen so many times that it’s rendered unseeable. More importantly, what is to be done in it? The answer, like Campbell’s film, is incoherent, and thank goodness. The answer is anything at all.

(Thomas Campbell’s incredible, timeless Cuatros Sueños Pequeños costs $2.99 for HD in iTunes? Full essay at The American Reader)

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Tempe, AZ | 2016

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Poser of the Month, Tempe, AZ.