Just finished watching this documentary “Beautiful Losers” about the group of artists that rose out of the Alleged Gallery on the lower east side in the early nineties.  Some of them I knew by name, Shepard Fairey, Harmony Korine etc., but I recognized the work of all of them.  It’s really good stuff and a reasonably interesting and inspiring documentary.  It chronicles how they grew out of the skate and graffiti scene to became influential artists and culture makers branching out into advertising, graphic design and film making.  Any way, check it out, it made me get excited about painting again. Incidentally, Beautiful Losers is also a beatnik novel written by a young Leonard Cohen, you can pick it up for $10 on Amazon, it’s been eighteen years since I read it but I remember liking it.

Oh and Beautiful Losers also led me to this pretty rad Mark Gonzales skate video, dig it:

Don’t lose hope dear internetting ones, we still have every intention of launching the full Outsider’s Almanac website in the near future, it just won’t be quite as soon as we had hoped. We’re pretty insanely busy these days, between writing projects, client needs, body/mind/spirit rehabbing and the pursuit of winter in it’s many splendered and distracting forms, but you should expect to see the site live by around April 1st, 2010.

We’ve got our sites on making Outsider’s Almanac the most exhaustive and user friendly site for all Outsider activities by combining tutorials with expert articles, videos, web based and mobile communication apps, up-to-the-minute live and critical information on sites and conditions, gear reviews, site reviews, events, and so much more.

Like you, we love the Outside, it’s beautiful out here, and boy is it easy to get distracted. We wouldn’t want it any other way.

you’re fearless instructor?

NLP hucksters have finally dragged their knuckles into the world of skateboarding creating one of the more enjoyable new paramounts of on-line douchebaggery I have come across in a while:

From: The Underground Skater
Friday, November 20, 2009

Dear Friend,

Are you absolutely frustrated by how difficult it is to learn new skateboard tricks?

I bet you are!

Whenever I’m at my local skate park, I always see skaters kicking and slamming their skateboard around when they have a hard time landing a new trick. You probably watched some “trick tip” videos, but they didn’t help. Your friends probably tried to teach you but you still couldn’t land them. Or maybe you did, but only once or twice.

If you did learn a couple of tricks, but how long did it take you? A month? Two months? A year? If it took your more than a week, then you are not learning as fast as you could!

The Cold Truth Behind Learning From Friends And Tutorial Videos

You see, most friends and tutorial videos are not very helpful in teaching tricks. Friends can only teach you how they do the trick. Every skater is different, so what works for others might not work for you.

Trick tip videos don’t help much either. If you search for “skateboard trick tips” in YouTube, you’ll be bombarded with instructional videos that give useless advice such as, “pop up the board, kick it out, catch it, and land.” Great advice.

Even professionally produced videos, such as Transworld’s “Show me the Way” or “Tony Hawk’s Trick Tips” miss many important points.

It angers me that people are wasting their time and money on these instructional videos in slight hope that they will improve. The cold truth is that… They Won’t.

But…

There is some good news…

If you can’t bare to be without the SECRET from this underground skater then you can follow this link here.

Shepard Fairey worked his mojo on a photo by Glen E. Friedman of elder skater Jim Muir who was hurt earlier this year in a surfing accident. There are a limited press of 450 of these signed by both Shepard and Jim Muir. The proceeds are going to help Muir pay ongoing medical bills.

Get yours here.

I pulled this off the Boardpusher.com RSS feed. This park looks pretty sweet.

Pulled this from the Uprise site, this skate park in Northbrook looks pretty dope. Might need to go do an early morning Dawn Patrol there some time before it gets too cold.

It’s 5:41am on this cheeeely autumnal morning and my fat, broken bones are up and out of bed. That could only mean one thing: DAWN PATROL!

Thas’ right, meestah, me and Trevor are heading down to the Wilson skate park this morning, for the first time in probably a month, to do some slight tearing (as opposed to shredding I guess) of said pool and park.

In honor of this momentous occasion why don’t you lazy sleeping-in sons-of-lichens enjoy this video of the adequately awesome Chris Haslam.

These guys at Crailtap.com are nucking futs, but I like their style of dipshit.

This is not a comprehensive list of Illinois Skate Parks as they don’t include Krush, Wilson or the park on the south side. I’m sure there are others, too. If you know of any more skate parks in Illinois please post them in the comments.

NOTE: BAH! BUMP THIS SHITE LIST BELOW AND CHECK OUT THE LISTING OF 105 ILLINOIS SKATE PARKS ALONG WITH VISUAL MAPS OF EACH AT CONCRETE DISCIPLES… WAY BETTER.

I scrubbed these off of skateboardparks.com

Here’s a great collection of links to blueprints for building skateboard ramps of different shapes and purposes. I scrubbed this off the Extreme Freestyle blog. Enjoy!

FUNBOX RAMP BLUEPRINT

Section A blueprint
Section B blueprint
Section C blueprint
Section D blueprint
Section E blueprint
Section F blueprint

And some more usefull stuff:

Speedbump Funbox Ramp blueprints
Bank Ramp blueprints
Launch Ramp blueprints
Pyramid Funbox Ramp blueprints
Quarterpipe Ramp blueprints
Coping Installation Instructions

blueprints by buildaramp.com