miromi

East L.A.

miromi — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:39:40 +0000

Man, all the Chicano kids in East L.A. really do look like the Ramones lately! It’s so cute!

And how do the death metal boys skating all day in the park manage to have perfectly clean black jeans while I’m sweating and covered with grip tape skidmarks after 5 seconds in the park? They are made of better stuff than me.

VIVA East Los Angeles!

I think they should mentally beat up the poseur populist brats that are holding them down. Learn media activism and destroy the oppression! Yeah! And East L.A. has some awesome skateboarding Mexican girls too who are so cool they can effortless scoop through bowls without sweating and caring too much about what the boys think.

Rollerskating Homie Elle Seven

At Belvedere we met some good people and rollerskating angel Elle Seven modelled the gift I gave her from Oakland’s very own 5733 streetwear label. Thanks for housing me, putting up with my crabbiness and sharing my addiction to skateparks!

Belvedere Skatepark

These beautiful parks are oasises of light and joy in a concrete jungle that can be so cruel and uncaring to their families. Plus they’d make really awesome sets for heavy metal music videos. People should be taking care of these places and doing stuff like world peace instead of bitching about skateboarding helmets. Geez.

Truth Skateboarding through Manga

miromi — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:20:48 +0000

On vacation in a wonderful ramen restaraunt in Los Angeles’ Sawtelle with the nice waiters I was shocked to discover that there is total truth in manga. The Japanese have reached this higher state where they are recording divine messages from elevated centers of our collective consciousness.

For example:

Manga Captures our Emotional State When Encountering Skateboarding

Only in real life it’s skateboarding and not a bottle of wine. You could also put really good sneakers in here.

A Skateboarder Confronts the Death of his Dreams

Inevitably bad stuff happens in life.

Sometimes it’s trivial and laughable to think about: skater discovers through a random genetic test that the real fathers of his children are his first 2 skateboard company sponsors. I mean, how ridiculous! It’s sad when people let stuff like that get to them that a few quick trips to the therapist’s office and a good Brazilian waxing session couldn’t easily solve.

Sometimes it’s the worst thing possible: a studio executive’s minion turns the filmmaker’s greatest masterpiece into a corporate piece if sh** that fails to make any money, if couse the filmmaker is instantly blamed. For those things you need to go on a round thet rip world or work in a nonprofit monastery for 10 years. It’s gnarly stuff.

At the end of the day most everyone’s awful experiences aren’t that original (unless they are ).

You realize that while it sucks it’s more important to overcome total nihilism unless it involves explosions and pagan rituals. But that’s just “fun” nihilism, not the real thing.

The worst possible thing is actually the death of your dreams and giving up on your love of skateboarding. It could also be poseur populists being taken seriously in our national dialogue and dragging us down into the mud with them or the death of Sassy magazine, but no, there really is nothing sadder in my eyes than someone destroying their love of skateboarding or snowboarding because of mean people.

mHealth scientific advances reveal What Happens when Bitterness wrecks your ability to be real

This is the empty cavity where the ex-skateboarder’s heart used to be. I’m glad this happens only rarely. This actually occurs a lot in the start-up scene, and people go around saying that there will never be anything such as entrepreneurs, VCs, or angels anymore and we’re doomed, we’re just doomed.

The most bitter of bitter people tend to spend a lot of time writing celebrity blogs and making mean-spirited YouTube videos and conduct smear campaigns against intelligent black people trying to make a difference in this world.

While this is so rare as to almost never happen in skateboarding, I’ve heard of rare occurrences of ex-skateboarding photographers who now avidly read celebrity gossip magainzes and even do a bit of under-the-table “freelance work” for them too. This is also a place where these ex-skateboarding photographers will find the “true love of their lives” after a lap dance or two. It’s sad to see.

Scariest Horror Movie Scene Possible

A terrified skater tells his girlfriend that his sponsor would only sign him on again on one condition: she was absolutely not allowed to manage his skate career .

All hell breaks loose as the worst moment of his life begins…

Femme

miromi — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 23:15:52 +0000

Breath

miromi — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 22:02:54 +0000

Thanks for a great class Acrosports!

However I turn out, I’m happy I’m choosing the right path. It’s a lot of hassle, harassment, but you have to realize that doing the default is usually the worst way to live your life.

Use the Force, Luke!

No skating... why not?

Slayer, Skateboarding and Snowboarding, what more is there in life?

miromi — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 15:19:29 +0000

Smut magazine from the early 1990s… maybe the early 2000′s? Slayer, Skateboarding and Snowboarding, what more is there in life? From the awesome Rock Paper Scissors Zine Library.

This is how it was for girls who were awesome too except we had XX chromosomes. Unfortunately therewas a total anti Susan Faludi style backlash and women still aren’t allowed to show anger. They end up all messed up, unable to skateboard or do anything meaningful in life and trained to seduce men and manipulate them into becoming their ATM machines.

The the daughters they grow up to be these frustrated housewives losing their looks who pass ridiculous laws against drug use and try to ban skateboarding.

Good parents know that teen girls skateboarding, listening to Slayer and learning how to drink beer and respect boys their own age for their personalities as well as their bodies is the best thing to do.

To all the good parents that exist, you are few and far between, but you rock!

You’re also the ones who have the bumper stickers that say “My kid is an honour student at the punk rock academy of life” to counter all those obnoxious PTA mom bumper stickers. Keep fighting the good fight…

People without a clue will say that the Misfits are sexist and little girls should listen to brainwashing music instead. However, although Glenn Danzig would admittedly be the boyfriend from hell, he has chicks that kill evil men who walk alone. Man! Even outwardly looking sexist people can be totally having subconscious thoughts to do good things like create heroic women!

Misfits – Paradoxically a Family Values-based Band?

Really good punk rock dads and moms also teach their kids that songs about killing people doesn’t mean that they will actually kill people. The real people who are into killing people are the ones into buying guns tend to kill people and so do people who are massively racist and pretending they are populists when they are just mean-spirited jerks.

Teaching Children not to Scapegoat Minorities

When Columbine happened the community did not stop to examine its ways of life and instead felt like blaming Marilyn Manson because they were easy targets. You don’t want your kids to be mentally stupid and pick easy scapegoating targets like young poor black men. The Misfits teaches children complex topics of allegory, metaphor and myth.

If the people who initiated the Iraq war had danced around the bonfire with their moms and dads and asked “Mommy, can I go out and Kill Tonight?” then maybe their parents would have realized this is a perfect way to practice the Socratic method.

Little Kid singing: “Mommy! Can I go out and kill tonight?”

“Do you want to feel really bad and be an evil person?”

“Yes!”

“But like, I’m not talking about being this fun person who wears black and burns things, but this truly awful person who screws people over, doesn’t care about human life and turns punk rock into a total high school scene well into their 30s.”

“Huh?”

“Do you want to be a total poseur who doesn’t believe in global warming, wants to run the country as if it were a major corporation (even though there are nice smart people in corporations), and is really into busywork instead of doing work that matters?”

“No way! I don’t wanna be a poseur!”

“Well if you’re into literally going out and killing tonight then you’d be a total poseur. What Danzig was doing was letting his subconscious issues work themselves out. He’s probably a lot nicer and more mild-mannered than he looks and talks. He’d be a really complicated boyfriend though, so those are those guys you want to avoid. They just always get so emotional.”

“Ew! Boys have cooties!”

“They do, they do. But so do girls.”

Trying New Things

miromi — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 15:53:03 +0000

Years upon years and now trying something new… happy with art, but glad I didn’t become an artist. It wasn’t the right thing for me. You get that feeling in your gut.

But you don’t realize until much later that everything and anything is art, and it’s something you use to tell stories and build in the most unlikely of places. I like dress shirts too, but just because you wear a dress shirt doesn’t mean you sold out. It only means you have a scary dry cleaning bill.

The pieces at the very top are by “8 Ball Saint” by Elle Seven (left) who does work with music and art on L.A.’s Urban Canvas and then Marseille French Comic book homie Clement Baloup.

Late Nights

miromi — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 14:00:12 +0000

DJ Cam & the Love of Record Shops

miromi — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 00:11:54 +0000

Ah yeah!

Here’s a moment from my record collection: a DJ cam record from that crazy fun trip to Paris a few years ago. I spent 5 hours in the shop listening to albums because I was addicted to music at the time. Oh wait, I’m still addicted!

Paris is this cosmopolitan, exciting city almost completely unlike most people’s perceptions of it, but it is true that it tends to be cold and impersonal.

Come on… it has the worst tourist infestation problem in the whole world. It’s like a tsunami of tourists 12 months out of the year. It just never stops. And there are a lot of people. You have to keep up your guard!

After five hours the employees finally let their guard down, I made off with the DJ Cam record, and I was imparted with all these nice secret spots in the Paris underground music scene. How else could I as a dumb American tourist end up in secret basements of Senegalese restaraunts in Belleville with secret DJ crews?

I didn’t even realize this until later, but the passes they had given me were worth a lot of money. And I didn’t even ask for stuff. I hate asking small shops for free crap.

So Thank you, record stores of the world! And skate shops! And bookstores!

Heartland Highways (1996?)

miromi — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 23:24:05 +0000

Heartland Highways

Sometimes you wonder if some people are still alive. Nostalgia is nice once in a while, but it also makes you forget how lame some of your choices were in men. What sounded so profound and moving back then just comes out in total douchebag dialogue now.

Thank God teenaged girls become middle-aged women.

I’m not even sure if these theoretical weird men, even if they did exist, which they probably didn’t, would have liked Jawbreaker. Who knows?

L.A. Skate Film Festival, Weetzie Bat Adventures starting 8/31/10

miromi — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 22:27:49 +0000

The L.A. Skate Film Festival - Good Mojo!

Skateboarding: We can make you do anything we want.
Me: Yes, master! Why it’s a great idea for me to go for preferred participatory stock and wacky liquidation preferences! Why don’t I listen to Milli Vanilli and wear pink spandex while I’m at it? Let’s also totally not regulate the equities market.

To all my Los Angeles friends, or rather, the 3 people that actually read my blog… I’m going to be down south for a few days at the delightful L.A. Skate Film Festival.

Let’s hang out, eat all the food that’s possibly eatable (Sawtelle gorging warpath here we come!), raid Out of the Closet for fancy designer gowns for $5, get makeovers from drag queens (Psych), listen to breakcore and death metal and skate!

Please prevent me from:

Financially ruinous activities regarding skateboarding because skateboarding controls pleasure centers in my mind
Not skateboarding