It was frekkin 98 degrees today, ON THE BEACH! IN APRIL! That´s just not right.
Went surfing with the big bad shark yesterday. My sister did pretty good for her first time. The lifeguard was on the beach yelling "There has been a shark in the water, get out of there. Or surf at your own risk."
I still don´t understand why they think it´s more dangerous to go in the water now than one month ago... the shark isn´t coming back to that exact same spot, this isn´t Jaws. And it was 50 years ago uncle shark came to visit here...
Tried to skate around a little with the Oksanen´s, but I wasn´t too skillful today. It´s difficult to skate when you skate for an hour every four months and your nerves in your feet aren´t working.
Going to LA for a few days and then some filming in Lake Tahoe. Editing those rally clips too, needed them done yesteryear.
Did some consuming today too. Like I really needed three more hooded sweaters.
Apparently Subaru decided to make a new commercial on the new 08 STI.
I have like 10 shots in there... I had no idea they were being used. Kind of a horrible edit if you ask me. Well not horrible maybe, but for the amount of money it costs to make this commercial the editing / style / finesse could have been a little better imo. I would have liked to shoot those last 2 shots of the new car in the LA River.
I heard they have a 30 sec commercial on tv, that was the 60 sec version.
Do now they closed off the beach... no surfing tomorrow. Well they closed off a stretch, like 10km I think. Why close of 10km? The shark can´t be further away than that? Hmmm...
Heard that they came by the nearby surf spots with a helicopter and told the surfers to get out of the water, cause there was a shark in the water.
Here´s a map of the area. It happened literally right where I live / have lived the past two years. The bottom marker "Del Mar" is where I lived in 2006. The top yellow marker "Cardiff" is where I lived in 2007. The "Pepa´s" marker is where I´m staying now.
Well it´s a sad day here, everybody is talking about it. Imagine, his six friends were right next to him when the shark bit his legs off...
Thought about going to Coachella tomorrow. But it seemed like a mission... need to figure some logistics out. Although pool parties and listening to Prince´s "Little Red Corvette" in 38 degree heat sounds tempting. I´ll settle for tacos on the beach and 25 degrees.
Tired now, been sleeping four hours in the last 2 days.. but really happy to see friends, my Caddy and Taco Bell (yes, I already ate there). But I don´t know if I can fall asleep... I´ve been awake for so long, it´s 3.30am and I have a brand new episode of LOST to watch...
Oh and for whatever you do, NEVER sit in 26E or F on the Lufthansa flight between Frankfurt and Denver. No reclining seats (I´m talkin only vertical backrest) for 10 hours and 10 min... and they are middle seats too. Guess where I got seated?
So the the hill in Vännäs let Gotte (cat driver) build some sweet shit for the local swedish media. I´m all for having snowboard shoots north of Stockholm. So I´m stoked this one happened. Sick sunset in Umeå yesterday.
Anders "Nyqvist" Neuman and other swedish photdawgs were there to document. Keep your eyes peeled in Transition and Onboard.
I haven´t had that many productive shoots up here, but the one in Björkliden last May turned out pretty good. Sure it´s not easy to get stuff done there. But I enjoy being here in the springtime, hopefully there will be more shoots up here in the future. Riksgränsen are having an event early May and Björkliden are having a shovel made slopestyle contest next weekend. Craig in Riksgränsen in 1991? I stole the pic from Transition.se and Martin Willners.
The last 2.5 min of this clip is from the Björkliden/Abisko trip last year.
So there´s this show called "Moment of Truth" and it has made it to Sweden as well.
The very vain Pontus Gårdinger is hosting the swedish version and the same creep who hosted the repulsive show Temptation Island is hosting the Us version.
I know I don´t have to watch it and trust me I won´t. I did watch this 9 min clip on youtube and it took me a while to digest. But I don´t see why people would want to see this..
And how do they get people to be on the show? I know it´s the money they want obviously.., but come on...
Call me old fashioned or whatever, but this to me is a all time low for tv. Although Sverker Olofsson (annoying swedish reporter who ALWAYS sides with the consumer on his show) came pretty close today when he critiqued the low fare airline Ryan Air for operating to far from the northern coastal town of Umeå.. you had to see it I guess. Sverker, you suck and so does anyone who works on your staff. Seriously, how could that story even air?! One thing is clear, I´ve seen a lot of dumb shit come out of Umeå lately. Elitist skiers and moron journalist, both paid with tax money. Thanks to the internet I can share half the clip with you (obviously in swedish, sorry). Why they didn´t upload the entire story I have no idea... assuming it has something to do with incompetence. http://svt.se/svt/play/video.jsp?a=1119283 Historien slutar med att reguljär resan kostade typ 2100kr och Ryan Air resan typ 2600 pga att man får femhundraelva utlägg för att ta sig till Skavsta och kommer till Paris sex tim senare. Liksom, vad är problemet? Och vad har Ryan Air gjort för fel? Kan man inte räkna ut att du måste sova över en natt på hotell, eller liknande, innan du ens åkt från Sverige och sedan addera utgifterna i förväg förtjänar man fan att förlora 500kr och 12 tim på resmålet. Inte fan ska en redaktion finansierad av skattepengar sitta och koka ihop ett rep som ett problem som förmodligen aldrig skulle uppstå.
Jag undrar hur Peter Nilsson, livscoach på radioprogrammet Mammas Nya Kille, skulle debattera med Sverker om det här "problemet"? Kan tänka mig att hans första ord skulle vara ngt i stil med "Vad är problemet?"
Jag är säkert övertygad om att det är en hel del rackel med Ryan Air, men det var ju inte det reportaget handlade om. Visst är detta ett i-lands problem, men va fan. Bättre skriva om tröga lövare än att jobba med rally redigering:)
Här är ett par bra klipp på Sverre:
Sorry for the bilingual stuff there.. had to vent a little.
So yeah, I won´t be watching those two tv shows anytime soon.
And today was also Earth Day. What did you do to preserve our planet? I didn´t drive a car and ate leftovers... is that environmental?
This clip will make you think twice about recycling plastic.
Well I doubt anyone in Sweden thinks America as liberal and open minded, especially after learning that the Us doesn't allow hiv positive people into their country.
Swedish artist Andreas Lundstedt just got denied on his visa application because he is hiv positive.
He was going to NYC to play with his band Alcazar and apparently you have to apply for a visa when you want to enter the Us if you have hiv. This "law" is against the United Nation´s guidelines, but since when does the Us care about the UN?
What about americans with hiv, should they be placed under house arrest? For Magic Johnson that shouldn't be a problem. He can just buy Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch and chill out.
So I guess Andreas and others with hiv won't be visiting the land of the free and home of the brave anytime soon. And apparently Russia and China doesn´t allow hiv positive visitors either. But then again China are well known for their liberal acts... And America for it´s classy leaders.
I on the other hand plan on heading over there (Us, not China) this week... I've never been known to plan too far ahead. Pretty safe to say I haven't bought a transatlantic trip with more than 5 days notice ever. Or any trip for that matter. My adolescent mind just won't allow me to grow up and plan ahead. So this weekend you can bet your bottom dollar on me eating mexican food for breakfast, lunch and dinner in southern California.
Oh and the resort I was hating on in Vännäs/ Umeå that had closed for the season only to let some elitist skiing parents+offsprings ride the lift are having sessions for the snowboarders as we speak. Well it's not the resort so much who are putting it on. Snowboarders built the jumps with their equipment, invited the riders and the photographers. And the sun is shining so be on the look out for some sweet pics from Vännäs.
This past weekend was spent in Piteå. Had a 30 year anniversary bash, it was fun. I wore a shirt! Some had tuxedos, but to me a shirt is like wearing a tux.
In other news... Mikael Renberg (one of Sweden´s best players) is retiring from hockey. At 36 he´s calling it quits. Troubling groins and other injuries being the main reason for retirement. For some reason this wasn´t the biggest headline on the local news site in Skellefteå, where he played his last season. He will be missed. Maybe not the bitter people in Luleå will miss seeing him score against their team, but I will.
This clip is golden in so many ways. Pretty safe to say these guys aren´t Åre locals.
Obviously the actual skiing is funny. But the dude behind the camera says some funny things. I don´t know why I´m writing about this in english cause the clip is in swedish...
Kul att han kallar killen "Meatloaf" när han ligger i vattnet och sen pratar med oss tittare innan han stänger av kameran som om han vore Hans Fahlen.
So the Actionhorse Films crew didn´t score the best weather but that´s how it goes sometimes. They went back to Utah today to get some more filming done. I´m a little jealous that they can eat at Chipotle tomorrow...
There was a concert on Thursday that none of my friends wanted to go to, but I had just missed them (Caesars /Caesars Palace) in Umeå two weeks before and I used "Jerk It Out" in the first Robot Food video for Wille Yli-Luoma´s part so I really wanted to go and check it out. As it turns out I did get a friend to come with me, but a very unexpected one. I hadn´t seen him for 7 years and then he was 11 years young, and maybe 5 feet tall, now he´s 18 years old, 6"4 feet and a darker voice. Here´s a clip of Mikkel from 5 years ago:
I´m glad Mikkel joined me and I think it was cool for him to see them live as well. While we drank Bacardi Breezers and became nostalgic to the tunes of Caesar´s "Jerk It Out" the other boarders were 200 meters away at a reggae club (boring).
Apple used "Jerk It Out" as well for an ipod commercial (after Afterbang, obviously:)
I later ate at Max with the little norwegian kids and boy do they love the chicken nuggets. They eat it like they´ve never seen food before. Who in their right mind buys nuggets and dip sauce for 30$?
Burton also organized a pipe contest and a lot of friends that I travelled with in the late 90´s / early 2000´s where there. It was cool to see all of them.
Hampus took 2nd place and highest air and made some money. Look here for more pics from the event: http://actionhorse.se/smorgasbord www.transition.se/news.aspx?id=2702
Hampus Mosesson in an alley oop extreme rotation.
Mikkel Bang handplanting.
Went to the top with Neuman to help him get some shots of locals Jakob and Henke, it was a very nice sunset.
We played our top 5 most played songs on itunes at the apt and all of us had pretty acceptable songs, except Knut... he had some weird shit on his top 5... mostly r´n´b crap, like really bad slow dance songs. I was in disbelief that anyone I knew listened to that crap. He calls that shit "baby making music"... Hmmm, I guess if you want to make babies with 19 year olds in highscool those songs might work, or at least get you to first base when the slow songs comes on at the school dance.
Neuman at work.
Peaceful view from Åreskutan.
I got a ride to Ume (my car is still in Östersund with a broken engine...). It was snowing sideways for most of the drive.., where did the sunny spring weather go?
Walked around a sunny Ume all day today listening to documentaries and Patrik Larsson (swedish comedy show, Mammas Nya Kille). This band MGMT have been getting a lot of playtime lately too. They don´t have a proper music video to this song yet, but here´s a youtube clip of the song. It´s one of the greatest songs I´ve heard in a long time. I can guarantee that at least three snowboard movies will use them this year. Please go buy their album, it soooo good. Don´t steal it!
I also joined Orvar and his friend Petter for some shredding at the local mtn. But they had closed the hill for the season, well they have closed it for snowboarders... The local ski club (probably funded with tax money) have exclusive access to the t-bar. So while they run the t-bar for the 15 or so skiers and their parents (who won´t hesitate to yell at you for trying to get on "their" lift) us snowboarders are stuck hiking... And how these future speed suit racers will become better racers and people by ruining the jumps that the snowboarders have built while being told by their parents that they are better than snowboarders is beyond me. The t-bar has a capacity of at least 200 people, but since skiers run these little resorts they have no problem giving the local ski kids and their parents exclusive access to use it while the boarders look on... and the lift is running empty. The story from the 50´s of the black seamstress Rosa Parks who denied her seat to a white person on a bus comes to mind after my encounter with the fascist skiing parents today. Well, it wasn´t quite that harsh, but to me still very strange behavior for being in Sweden in 2008. Especially after reading the guidelines and mottos of the Vännäs Ski Club:
I was too tired to hike the jumps so I took these pics instead.
Little groms in training to become elitist racers in Kex Choklad speedsuits. Not that these skiers are elistist, but they to have Kex Choklad speedsuits and that´s what most skiing parents dream of putting on their kids. I dream of mine doing 360 kickflips like Jason Lee, but that´s another story.
Speaking of kids... grattis David och Stina!
Hope all you americans got your taxes done yesterday. Need to pay for W´s war. Especially when he said the american troops had already prevailed and won the war in May of 2003...
My friend and mega tweaker Ingemar Backman suffered a severe fall to his back a few days ago, while riding at a demo in Japan, which was almost fatal. He was hitting a jump that he had cleared a few times prior and got caught by the wind which made him come up short, hit a mattress and then get bucked to the flat and landing on his back. This was shot one sec before impact.
I can´t express in words how happy I am that he´s on his way to recovery.
I just got off the phone with him and he said he´s up and walking and should be healthy enough to possibly get on a plane in a week or so. The doctors said that he would have been dead if he had arrived at hospital an hour or so later since his lungs were severely damaged.
And for this to happen in Japan... I can only imagine. With an almost complete language barrier and quite different infrastructures and hospital guidelines it´s not the easiest place to get treated. Thankfully Ingemar went to the hotel after resting for a while to grab his passport and headed to the local hospital, with an interpreter I might add.
The doctors inserted these tubes into his lungs using only local anesthesia. Photo by Tobbe Allanson.
Here´s an english link: www.tackyworld.com/snowboard/article/?id=100152
Swedish link: www.tacky.se/snowboard/artikler/display_article.asp?artikkelID=30670
Here´s Ingo with Allian teammates Forrest Shearer and Peter Ström, myself and Mob Dist/Stale owner Jonas Berglund.
For those of you who don´t know who Ingemar is (like f.ex Stevie Bell), or are born in the 90´s / never looked at snowboarding before 2001, here´s some background data. Click on the pic to view the text bigger. This was taken from Snowboarder Mag´s "20 most influential snowboarders of all time" article from 2007.
I also uploaded the clip from the legendary session that happened in Riksgränsen in May of 1996. It´s THE ONE shot that introduced me to the snowboard filming world and the trick that gave Ingemar worldwide recognition.
Krya på dig Ingo. Du kan nog göra frontside rockabilly´s (svårighetsgrad 9 tror jag) innan du vet ordet av. Kanske tom en switch?
Before leaving Luleå I went to see some jazz band play at the "Culture House", the venue is pretty sweet. The jazz was ok.
On Saturday morning I woke up to 3o cm of powder.., I thought it was spring, not January.
A lot of my swedish snowboarding friends were/are heading towards Åre (one of Sweden´s biggest resorts, maybe biggest?). I´ve never boarded here before. I hiked to the top about two years ago in the fall and I filmed here at the infamous Tab X-Tra halfpipe contest in 1996, or was in 1997?
Soon to be another Malm bed at Ikea.
The road to Åre was pretty sketchy at times. I for one have no idea why the speed signs aren´t switched out in the wintertime on the inland roads. Aren´t there unemployed people who can swap out the signs when the snow comes in December? I mean there are hundreds of thousands of people without work and our government wants to reach zero deaths in traffic (www.vv.se/templates/page3____630.aspx) and they allow people to drive 110 on these roads... but when I go 100 on a 90 road by the coast that´s twice as wide and there´s no snow I get a 300$ ticket cause I´m a traffic hazard.., makes sense.
This looks like a good road to drive 65mph on right?
About 70 kilometers outside Östersund (and two hours from Åre) my car decided to sound like a lawn mower... not awesome at all. So I called a tow truck and hitchhiked to Östersund to make the train to Åre. Got a ride with a military guy. He was super nice and we chatted it up about war, snowboarding, peace, drafts, Bush, Nato and stuff.
Train views.
I made the train to Åre and my friend Anders who runs the swedish mag Transition picked me up and gave me shelter for the night. Room views.
Hotel carpet.
The evening was then spend at the Jon Olsson Super Session awards. Jon is a really talented skier (understatement) from Sweden who have been doing events here in Åre for a while and this year he had an interesting event that I wanted to see the outcome of. He invited some skiers to come and shred some cool features he had built. They spend something like 7-10 days doing d-spins and switch japan grabs (and no, you can´t ski switch on skis, or tweak out a japan air). But that wasn´t why I had come to witness. I wanted to see the video clips and photos that the skier had produced during these days. I was totally disappointed in the old school department of tricks though.., would it hurt to do daffy´s and cossacks? Remember Hot Dog - The Movie, Better of Dead and Aspen X-Treme?
See each skier invited one photographer and one filmer to document his skills and then put together a clip and slide show that were to be judged. This is a really cool formula I think. I would love to see something similar in snowboarding. I´d love to spend a week with a snowboarder (or skater) and a photographer and put together a two minute clip of that week. There used to be a photography contest like this in snowboarding called the Crystal Awards and it was really cool too, but for some reason they couldn´t keep doing it for more than two years. But photography has changed a bit since the Crystal Awards. Instead of slides projected to whatever music the photographer can now make a slide show on their computer within hours (maybe even minutes) from actually shooting. This in my opinion makes for a more entertaining visual presentation, especially for a huge crowd like the one that were here for Jon´s event. And since you can make video clips really fast these days too and the skiers/riders livelyhood is basically based around filming and taking pictures anyway this contest format is really appealing to me.
Here are some clips from the event: www.jon-olsson.com/videoblog/?p=200 www.jon-olsson.com/videoblog/?p=203
I hope snowboarding can learn from skiing (god, did I just say that?!) and make a similar event. I know I´d be stoked to enter. Parker, are you with me?
Here are some sweet pics of Travis Parker and his part from Afterbang. This video part was a serious treat to put together.
Anywho.. the event was great and I want Jon and everyone else out there to know that he did an great job of putting this together. He even had Cadillac CTS´s and Escalades´s driving the skiers around. And everyone knows I´m a sucker for Cadiallacs.
The night was spend drinking and of course there was booze a la plenty. Jon even had two 15 liter (around 4 gallon) bottles of bubbly at the table for everyone to share (most of it ended up in the air or on people). I wouldn´t expect any less in Åre on a Saturday.
Lots of people from Stockholm with "backslicked" hair and Canadian Goose down jackets frequent Åre.
Swedish sized coffee to go.
Sunday I went boarding with Jakob who´s a local here (not in the bars though:) and it was sunny and slushy. Since I was limping most of last week and in great pain due to the sciatic nerve acting up on me I took it easy, cause I´m usually a really aggressive boarder otherwise, not.
People drinking bubbly at the town plaza. Town plaza the day after. Full on winter again.
Today, Monday, it stared to snow a lot. Looks like it will snow for a while. Tomorrow is supposed to be decent at best.
I´m mooching off the www.actionhorsefilms.com crew who have condo here. I´m looking forward to see them get rad here this week. They just released their teaser!
Other news: Here´s the second beer commercial that my friends David and Ted did. It was also shot in Skellefteå and features some of Skellefteå´s hidden hockey talents.
