As a proud SASS employee, Ryan knows a thing or two about summer. Unfortunately, he also knows a thing or two about getting stuck behind in North America while all your homies slay pow in Argentina. Out of heartbreak comes, well, semi-aggressive ideas for a summer spent in the northern hemisphere. Enjoy!
Today’s video comes to us from the same people who gave the world Lord of the Rings and Flight of the Conchords: New Zealanders! Your task is to watch the video before reading any of the poll options and then vote for the option that best describes what you just saw. If you’re pressed for time just skip to about 3:15 and watch from there (it’s just NZ’ers speaking their bizarre language before that anyway).
Skier vs. snowboarder hate is something best left to Disney movies, and the dudes over at Knife Show Inc prove that there’s some good stuff coming out of the sideways camp. They’ve added a forum to their site that is largely dedicated to providing advice on After Effects and other video related software and technology. I really like the idea of a film group making a forum intended to help people learn and improve on their art form.
In addition to dishing out advice, they’re holding video contests in the forums. They seem pretty informal, but it’s a hell of an opportunity to get your edit exposed to a different audience than it might if you simply put it on NS. Their last contest was based solely on editing and they specifically said that quality of riding doesn’t matter. I like that because the next great ski or snowboard filmer probably isn’t the sickest rider on the hill and he/she doesn’t need to be either.
We’re planning on bringing some edits to BroBomb once winter starts rolling, so I’m sure we’ll be taking advantage of some Knife Show advice.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with their work, this is my personal favorite:
My ski brethren, the one footed slides are looking good. I’m not talking about the much maligned rollerblade style slide that Charles Gagnier made famous with his 2005 gold medal run in the X Games. I’m talking entire ski on the rail, forward slide.
It’s been a long time coming. The first time I remember seeing it was when CR Johnson threw it down on a handrail that abutted a wall in Happy Dayz. Since then it has been ignored, ridiculed, or straight up hated on. But I tell you my friends, its day seems to have finally arrived. People are doing them with style and I’m an especially big fan of when it’s done on the top half of a flat-down, and then swapped to a regular slide. Shit’s smooth, stylish, and adds desperately needed variety to the rail tricks possible on skis.
That said, it leads naturally into the eternal question…what’s next? Click to continue »
I pledged (kinda) to hate on the shitty movies that come out every year, rather than provide the standard ski mag review of “great riders, great locations, great movie.” So it’s a little dangerous to start with such a sappy bullshit review, but I love the Traveling Circus series. It is probably the only film project in skiing that I have no qualms about. The damn thing just succeeds on so many levels:
You’ll have to forgive me in advance on this one, but I’m about to do some soapboxin’. You see, I have an irrational love of mini shred. You might even call me a mini shred evangelist. For those who don’t know exactly what mini shred is, well its really anything at all. I guess it tends to fit into the broad spectrum of what we call “urban,” but there’s plenty of mini shred to be had at your local resort too. I guess I’ll sum it up as a creative re-imagining of the way small things can be ridden. How’s that for specific?
That lame attempt at a definition notwithstanding, mini shred is the SHIT! It doesn’t require you to live in a park mecca with perfectly groomed features and the stuff you need is usually accessible at little to no cost. The only real limit is your own creativity. It has a long and venerable history in just about any “street” oriented sport you can think of, and its time has come in skiing. Enough riding laps with your friends as if it’s the finals of a slopestyle event. Go find something small and try to do something you’ve never thought to do on skis.
The incomparable Liam Downey once wrote that skiing copies snowboarding like an older brother, and skateboarding is the posterboy that snowboarding pins to its metaphorical wall. He said it, and it is true. Let’s move on.
So where does this long chain of self conscious replication end? Well that’s a hard question, but it most certainly extends beyond skateboarding. You see, skateboarding’s style comes from spending some time in the trendy parts of any major city and then emulating the most ridiculous butthole of a hipster you can find there. This makes sense, because by nature skateboarders spend more time in major cities than any of the aforementioned sports. Therefore, they are there to behold the hipster ridiculousness pouring out of a Man Man (or any other band nobody has ever heard of) concert .
So for all you ski fashionistas, if you want to leapfrog the biting all the way to the front of the line then grab the keys to mom’s Audi, leave the McMansion, and head on down to your local major city to get inspired/bite that shit hard. If you’re near Philly I recommend anywhere in N. Liberties or Fishtown. If NYC isn’t too far, I bet just about anywhere in Brooklyn would do the trick…otherwise you’re on your own, but it can’t really be that hard.
If big cities scare you then just jump on www.latfh.com and do a little mix and match. It’d be hard to go wrong with anything this guy is working with:
SPK Kaos boot.
After perusing the latest edition of what Freeskier calls an Annual Gear Guide, I could write a week’s worth of posts on the complete lack of real product reviews in the ski world. I’ll try not to wear the hater hat for too long, but let’s face it, there are shit products out there. But of course you would never know this if you relied on the sole surviving print mag our fledgling corner of skiing has left. Each ski gets a stoke factor (which means literally nothing), and the only products that get a more thorough look are pro setups. The LAST thing that matters in a gear guide are pro setups. They’re paid to ride this shit, hell I’d ride any damn thing if you paid me to do it. I’d rather hear what Joey the pizza guy in Truckee is riding, cuz his ass paid real hard earned cash for his setup. That means something.
ANYWAY…on to our review:
Click to continue »
