Blogging skate
nostalgia

Skateboard nerds bring the culture
of the early 1990s back to life

MAMMARIES OF THE ’90s: Ad from April 1993
Thrasher mag, as seen on The Chrome Ball Incident

by LUCAS WISENTHAL

Full disclosure: I am a nerd with a penchant for early ’90s skateboard nostalgia. So are many of my friends. One of them, Andy Pearce, is a co-owner of the store Temple Skate Supply on St-Dominique. In 2007, when he launched a Web site, propelling the shop straight into 1998, we decided the accompanying blog should focus on our favourite era in skating—the early- through mid-’90s. So we started scanning pages from old skate magazines and writing about pros and trends most skaters under 30 would be unlikely to recall.

Slowly, the comments rolled in—some from old friends, one from former pro Julio de la Cruz, who thanked us for thinking he “used to rule,” and a couple from dudes linking to their own sites of ’90s skateboard reminiscences.

In fact, a few similarly nostalgic blogs sprung up. Other people were fond of that era, which previous and subsequent generations of skaters denounced for its championing of tricks over style and hip-hop-influenced fashion sense. But we liked the graphic style that characterized the period. Far removed from the skull and gore-dominated aesthetic of the ’80s, it incorporated street art, subversive cartoons, pornography, corporate parody and edgy humour.

Skating was small, though, and changed so quickly that this era was pretty much forgotten a few years later, when the mainstream co-opted it again.

Sharing shots

Among those who launched blogs cataloguing ’90s imagery was Dylan Cousineau, an Ottawa skater who maintains Police Informer (policeinformer.blogspot.com). At 25, Cousineau is precocious by skate nerd standards.

Like us, he just wanted to share old skate shots with friends, but soon his posts were attracting 15,000–20,000 hits a month. Even Steven Cales, a pro from our era who was more renowned for his stints in jail than for his skateboarding, commented on a post about himself. He used the forum to announce he was again free and intended to remain so. We were stoked to have him back.

Inspired by Police Informer and bobshirt.com, an archive of ’90s skate videos and decks that occasionally runs interviews, Jason, who didn’t want his full name disclosed, started Frozen in Carbonite (thecarbonite.blogspot.com) in 2007, after a hiatus from skating. “I decided to post some old ads, in addition to some writing about skating from the perspective of a washed-up 30-year-old dude,” he says.

When he ran out of mag material, he focused on writing, penning New Yorker-length essays on skating. His posts include pieces like “Living on the Edge of Time: The Lighthouse Keeper,” in which he uses literary theory to analyze the career of skater Gino Iannucci, a recurring blog favourite.

Frozen in Carbonite fills a void by providing thoughtful commentary on skating, treating early ’90s nostalgia with an academic eye. “A lot of skaters are very, very intelligent,” Jason says, “but the mainstream skate media is literally 80 per cent advertising, and what little written content there is I would guess is at a fourth-grade reading level.”

Cool design, hotly debated

Eric Swisher says his work as a graphic designer harkened to his roots as a skateboarder and, more specifically, to his stacks of old skate magazines. He started the Chrome Ball Incident (chromeballincident.blogspot.com) last April. Before the ’90s skate blogs came about, he’d search the Web for old ads, like a mid-’90s spot showing Iannucci lighting a cigarette with a $20 bill, and come up with nothing. “This stuff needs to be seen,” says the 31-year-old Pittsburgh, PA resident. “Regardless if it’s skateboarding or not, it’s just a cool ad.”

Every night, Swisher posts a series of shots with commentary on a skater or team for a daily audience of about 2,000. He’s picky about his subjects. And though many of the skaters featured on these blogs vanished from the scene years ago, readers’ reminiscences sometimes spark fiery debate—and, of course, serious sentimentalizing of the old days—in the comments sections. “It’s just old geezers getting their skate nerd on,” Swisher says.

But Swisher’s nostalgia has limits. He figures he’ll bow out of blogging when he’s mined his magazines for pages he cares to revisit. “My girlfriend called me the skateboarding librarian the other day and I almost started to cry.”