Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Brian Lotti #3.



I kept flipping by this and figured it needed to be online.

This is an email conversation between Slap editor Mark Whiteley and Niall Neeson. There are some interesting points made here. It's also interesting how much things have changed in the decade since this dialogue. The notions of guest (Gest) boards were relatively unheard of back then, but now it seems hard to imagine skateboarding without them. Skateboarding nostalgia is such a difficult beast to deal with. It's a lot of fun to look back on things through the years, although I'd kind of prefer to think about going skateboarding today after work. The fact that the modern era of skateboarding isn't terribly old compared to something like football or baseball and lacks the well documented history of those activities complicates the matter. Skateboarding is such an of the moment activity that it doesn't always help itself at preserving highlights from the past. The internet obviously changes a lot about Niall and Mark's talk, since now any youngster can watch nearly every video ever made as long as they can remember what us old farts told them to check out.

Congrats to the Chrome Ball Incident for hitting number 700.

Chris Ortiz took the photos.

Slap - December 2000 Volume 9 Number 12

5 comments:

smorales said...

Excellent article. Krooked, Telegraph, Stereo, Rudy Johnson joining the beauty and the beast tour last summer, the cease and desist board company. It's all there.

Keith said...

That's a cool conversation. The sequence is even cooler. It's nice that both Brian Lotti and Jason Lee are bigspinning and 360 flipping again, respectively.

I'd love to get a Telegraph board.

NZA said...

Hi, it's Niall here. Thanks for posting this and I agree with your assertions! It is interesting that the two dudes I mentioned both came back and contributed their second verses regardless- who says there are no second acts in American lives? I travelled across Spain with Brian Lotti in 2007- he is awesome. Whenever he skated in Madrid, all the ams and pros on the tour just sat down for a masterclass. Whatever 'the thing' is, Brian has it in rare purity and it is but one manifestation of his exceptional otherness.

Matt said...

Very prophetic. The past few years have seen many 40+ guys come out of retirement and put out decent footage to the point where it seems normal now. Gotta think Whitely was right about the gap/rail guys though.

Paul said...

"I would love to revisit that time again (...)but it would be more depressing than fruitful,and I think I would rather leave that warm memory in my head"

Brings it totally on point.It's the same thing, when you rewatch a movie, that you have loved in your childhood.It's the same movie but something is missing.Guess you can call it Zeitgeist.