keys open doors

I was on TWSNOW today and found this great article in memory of Craig Kelly.


"Keys To Reality
by Ken Achenbach
It’s kind of funny how you can go from walking around with nothing but lint in you pocket and being totally stoked, to walking around with a pocket full of keys and being totally bummed.
It starts out simply and seductively. I’ll just get this car so I can snowboard more. Wrong. Anything that let’s you snowboard more is a scam. It won’t let you snowboard more because you ride every day and a car can’t add days to the week.

“I’ll just get this little night job so I can buy gas,” you hear yourself saying. There’s another key. Then your job starts making you miss sleep, so you can’t snowboard as hard or as long as you used to. And you need stuff to wear to work. You need a place to change and store your stuff. Now you have an address, that’s another key. Soon you have to get a day job because you’re not making enough money at night. The keys start adding up.
Now that you have a job, girls know you’re not a total loss and you end up with a girlfriend. She wants you to hang with her once in a while instead of going boarding all the time. First, she gives you the key to her heart, and then the key to her apartment. That’s two more. You can’t give her the key to your heart because snowboarding put a combination lock on it and only your snowboard knows the number.
Now you have a bunch of keys in your pocket. They’re high-maintenance items. You have to take care of them. They’re weighing you down. Snowboarding is slowly slipping away, and you don’t even notice.
One day, cruising to your full-time office job that you had to get a few years back to make payments on all your keys, you drive past a guy on the corner with his thumb out and a snowboard under his arm. While speeding by you start thinking about the guy you just passed. He looked like you used to—snowboard and nothing else. As you pull into the parking lot at work, you can’t get the hitchhiker out of your head. Your mind keeps wandering back. Pulling all the keys out of you pocket and jingling them, you think about what you really want from life.
Running back to your car, you reverse out of the parking lot and squeal a Rockford in the middle of the four-lane highway. You’ve got to get away from your keys. You begin throwing them out the window as you blow down the highway. First to go is the key to the door at work. Then you backhand your girlfriend’s apartment key out the passenger window. Flick, there goes the key to the storage unit, then the key to her car. Flick, flick, flick. You feel better each time a key flies out the window and goes bouncing down the pavement at 100 mph. You don’t even slow down for the tollbooth, paying instead with the tossed key to your office and the executive washroom.
You only have two keys left. You unlock your house, run in, grab your snowboard, and dash out of the house. You leave the key to your house sitting in the lock to the front door. Whoever finds the house open can take it, and all your stuff. You don’t need it anymore. You jump back into the car and start burning rubber through all four gears back to the highway where you saw the hitcher.
He’s still there. You slam on the brakes. When he opens the car door, you look into his eyes. It’s you. It’s the life you left behind when you sold out."

awesome. original .pdf link can be found here.

The Remix Project

so rad.

The Lynch Chronicles

The Lynch Chronicles (episode II) from leewarddude on Vimeo.

The snow season is creeping closer and closer.... Pretty bitchin drop in.

Cross Country Snowboarding

"This is an outsider sport, and.. it's an outside sport of an outside sport, snowboarding. Plus, we're doing it ouside. That's a triple entendre there bro!"


awesome!

80th post and Nidecker Contest

So the Nidecker/Core77 contest just finished up. After multiple push backs for the winner notification date the results are finally out. My designs weren't chosen, but oh well it was still fun, you can see my sketches for my final here.

The winning design will be produced by Nidecker, and the designer will receive $2,500. Personally, I think the winning design is pretty terrible, and not at all original. But I guess that's just how things go sometimes.

there are some cool designs in the semi-final and notable entry sections. So head over and check it out.

"Cheetah Ultra Sports"

So over on Core77 I saw a post for a "Radical new snowboard design"  Core 77 says that

"The thing we most like about this product--or news of it, anyway, since we haven't ridden one--is that it was clearly designed by an enthusiast combining direct experience with a clever understanding of materials. The Whip is made from a combination of wood, plastic, steel, and carbon composite."

First off, about every single snowboard is made from wood, plastic, steel, and carbon composite.  The snowboard industry is a beautiful thing with a lot of innovative minds behind it.  There is a reason why people enjoy flat based boards and things like Palmer Plates never stuck around.  Is this concept "CLEARLY" designed by an enthusiast, or some lame old man with too much time and money, and not enough real snowboard sense, so he tries to develop a completely new snowboard concept titled "The Whip"

That name, "The Whip" first of all is referencing fast zippy cars that get all kinds of corny modifications just to make a lame person feel better about themselves.  Does that belong in the fun, no bullshit, progressive sport of snowboarding? No sir.  I know the cost of snowboarding generally attracts a lot of yuppies, who may HAVE corny desires for things such as 

"Our artistic inspirations-
F-117 Stealth fighter, Leonardo de Vinci, Batman, and the Lamborghini Reventon."

I can appreciate the de Vinci refrence, and the Batman refrence.  But what relation does the military and the Lamborghini Reventon have with snowboarding?  I'm a huge fan of a new design concept bringing on it's own life and creating it's own lifestyle apart from anything else which the snowboard industry is finally doing.  Of course it had to rip off the skaters for a while, but the skateboarders had to rip off the surfers.  Now each sport has it's own lifestyle and different images that are unique to each discipline.  A skateboard T-shirt, a snowboard t-shirt, and a surf t-shirt, while of course have very similar roots, the inspiration and love of their sports all will graphically represent the differences between the sports and their communities as they evolve.  

They attack the snowboard industry with 

"No urban graffiti. No Andy Warhol. No Playboy Magazine"

I'm the first to call out how dumb those things are as well, but snowboarding has a vast youth sort of "rebellious" and "artistic" following and that is what appeals to them.  And all three of those concepts can be found almost exclusively in Burtons lines.  Here here and here.  K2 is even doing collaborations with Claw (nyc graff artist) and Mishka (Brooklyn based, graffiti influenced streetwear company.)  Those things are probably just as irrelevant to the snowboard world as a F-117 stealth fighter, but at least they mean something to the youth market that grows up actually pushing and innovating the sport!  Snowboard is young, maybe about 30 years old now, and it's been going through very obvious and sometimes awkward changes throughout those decades. 

It all started with a single snowboarder's desire for a better snowboard. Eventually, that desire, plus the appalling lack of innovation in snowboard manufactureing business, led to the invention of The Whip and finally to the establishment of Cheetah Ultra Sports in early 2008.
Our Philosophy-
Functional, innovative, technologically advanced design over pretty graphics

Our design direction-
Form always follows function. The resulting form, however, must stand alone as a work of art, rather than a platform to showcase other people's works of art.

If this man had any knowledge he would realize all the changes happening in snowboarding.  From Gnu engineering trees, urethane sidewalls, reverse camber, and Magne Traction.  The graphics on the snowboard are 2-D representation of the culture that pioneered the snowboard in the first place.  The interior composition of the board is what the rider notices as they pull in and out of turns, ollie, or press the board.  The sidecut as well is a very important factor which decides how easy the board will go on edge, stay on edge, and make an easy transition into the next carve.  I feel this company is very naively trying to shift snowboarding in a very terrible direction... 

As scary as this new concept may be, i'm pretty confident it will flop.