I made a “Master Cluster” notebook. Check it out.

Remember when music was good — when bands stood for something and the music they created was from the heart? Remember when music was real?

My friend Mark Lewman sent me this video clip a few years ago. It’s sort of a video zine called “UNCONSUB” that he made with a digital camera. At the time, one couldn’t share such things as freely as we do now (he sent it to me on a CDR via the regular mail), but now that we have the bandwidth, I thought I’d share it.

“The essence of culture is found in all its artifacts.” — Pete Robinson in Donald Antrim’s Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World
During one of our mid-session chats at the skatepark recently, my friend Greg mentioned that a lot of the older guys he skated with at various parks, guys who’d skated back in the late 70s and early 80s, started skateboarding again after seeing the Dogtown and Z-Boys documentary. I don’t know why, but this struck me as an odd phenomenon. I guess because it was a halo …

Quick clip of me skateboarding in the Nemo Design studio.

With all of the semi-recent focus on usability, I’ve noticed a growing countermovement that doesn’t get near as much attention: unusability. I’m talking here about deliberately designing something so that it’s not usable, not the much-maligned negligence of design that renders things unusable.

Lori Damiano has been skateboarding and making stuff for so long that I can’t even remember when or where I was first introduced to her work. Somewhere among her involvement in the zine Villa Villa Cola, her animation (she did the menus for the Spike Jones DVD, for one example), and skateboarding like a madwoman, she recently earned a master’s degree in experimental animation from The California Institute of the Arts and helped VVC get the Getting Nowhere Faster DVD out.

Tod Swank started Foundation Skateboard Company (the name comes from the Isaac Asimov sci-fi series of the same name) fifteen years ago. That’s no small feat in the cutthroat skateboard industry. Skateboard brands come and go as often as the tides of the Pacific lap the shores of San Diego. He’s since built a small empire, launching such brands as Pig, Toy Machine, Zero, Dekline, and Deathbox, among many others.

Even in the midst of today’s mega-media all-at-onceness (to quote Marshall McLuhan), Skateboarding culture remains as dynamic and engaging as it ever has been. For anyone who’s ever stepped on a skateboard — and stayed on it for that first run — the culture surrounding that act leaves a dent in you. It’s often a butterfly effect the results of which aren’t recognized until years later.