Blue Tile Obsession » pool stuff

Hmmm…

Ozzie Ausband — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 04:25:11 +0000

Alva & Ozzy

Ozzie & Alva

I love Ozzy Osbourne…he just doesn’t skate! Sadly, he does not skate. Actually, sometimes when I hear him interviewed….it seems as though he cannot speak any longer either……Anyway, I thought it was amusing. Ozzy goes along with Halloween as well. “Hey, yeah, Bark at the moon!” Fini-Ozzie

more candy…

Ozzie Ausband — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:50:42 +0000

jolly rancher

jelly belly

adam morgan with some fs shallow rock sweetness.

My heart has been a dark well of sorrow lately. I am glad it is Halloween. I am in love with death ! I want to put on my war paint and take a stand like others have before me…The incomparable French poet- Arthur Rimbaud wrote; “What an old maid I am becoming. I am losing my love for death & all things macabre.” Enjoy the candy & skate! Thanks to MRZ & Mark Phillips-Ozzie

Candy for Halloween.

Ozzie Ausband — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 03:10:43 +0000

starburst fruit chew

sweet tart

sour patch kid

In case that didn't work...here's Lance Mountain with a sweet tail tap.

I know that very few street rats are going to be stalking the corridors of the internet, looking for backyard pool action…so these are for you; my pool pals! Sometimes, I just have to feed that sweet tooth. Thank you to Mark Phillips & MRZ for the tooth decay!-SKATE —Ozzie

Skateboarding Hall of Fame.

Ozzie Ausband — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 06:51:48 +0000

Steve Hawk, Danny Way, Tony Alva & Bruce Logan Ozzie, TA: Our crew- me, Katy, TA, Mike Early & his tribe.

TA interviewed by Neal Hendrix for Fuel TV

myself w Dave Hackett

Bruce Logan

Alvas Hall of Fame board

The wall of power!

My friend Tony Alva, couldn’t make it out to my birthday BBQ last week. I wanted him to come & meet my pool pals and skate but he was ill after a week in Europe. He phoned me a few days back & told me he wanted me as his guest the night he is inducted into the Skateboarding Hall of Fame. I would be going with TAs good friend, Mike Early as well. Gulp! “Of course I’ll be there!”

Tony Hawk, Danny Way, Bruce Logan & Tony Alva were being inducted into the Hall of Fame. Historical moment! When I was a scrawny kid in PA, I would see photographs in ‘Skateboarder’ magazine of Bruce Logan with Torger Johnson just killing it…all style & speed. There is a poster that Tony Alva has in his shop hanging on the wall. It is of himself at Wallos ditch in Hawaii, tucked low, knees tight, one arm arched high overhead, flowing at Mach 5 in a transfer down the line. If I recall, he is wearing a Logan Earth Ski team jersey & low cut Vans. The poster is epic!

Seeing the Logan family at the event was exciting & humbling for me. Like the way you catch your breath when you see a movie star? All that they did as a family, is what makes me what I am. They built skateboarding in many ways. TA was sponsored by Logan and subsequently went on to become who he is…all because of the Logans. Its amazing. Walking around, I spoke with Lance Mountain, Dave Hackett, Andy Macdonald, Dave Bergthold, Danny Way, Dave Swift, Aaron & Des Astorga, Michael Furukawa of Powell, George Powell, Jeff Ho, Todd Swank, Steve Van Doren, Larry Balma and Adrian Demain…among others.

It was a complete privilege to be allowed the opportunity of a lifetime & witness these four receive the honor they truly deserve. The Logan brood spoke of how during contests, they would let the others; ie– Brad & Robin– compete first. They would save Bruce Logan for last and then he would soundly whip everyone! Steve Hawk…Tonys brother, who accepted his award for him, told a funny story about their mom, Mrs Hawk. Steve said that whenever they travel, its usually only a few minutes before Tonys mom will corner a stranger to say, “I am Tony Hawks mother.” Bragging rights for sure!

Danny Way spoke briefly about always wanting to push himself harder & do more difficult things. He spoke about his numerous injuries and flatly stated, “I’m not done.” ” You’ll have to wheel me away when I cannot go on.” Amazing. He wanted us to remember Mike Ternasky & all he did for the sport.

Tony Alva spoke of his journey & what it has taught him…about the good and the bad. He told us to never forget Andy Kessler, Torger Johnson, Bobby Mohr, Baby Paul Cullen and the other broken heroes that went too soon. It was a special night. I apologize for the photographs and poor quality. I was using a digital point and shoot. I just wanted you all to experience our collective history. Never forget where we came from and what we are. Special thanks to Des Astorga for the group photograph…Skateboarding rules.- Ozzie

Necessity.

Ozzie Ausband — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 02:48:52 +0000

Jon Spooner: Mark Phillips

Jim Howell

Clyde -fs grind to tail

Kyle Morris

Its funny how my needs change as I grow older. When I was young, I didn’t know what I needed as far as -lets say- girls were concerned. Then, I needed any girl. Then, I needed a beautiful girl, then a girl with a beautiful ass, now I just dont need the hassle! Its sort-of the same way with skateboarding. There was a time when I needed ANY pool. A kinked out, over vert, cancer hole would’ve suited me just fine. Later, as my abilities and experience grew, I found that I needed a better -cupped shallow end, or a nice box to grind over. See? Same thing. Different needs but -ultimately-the same thing. I need to skate. Its a primal urge. That need operates out of the limbic system in my brain. Maybe there are others out there just like myself. Need. Thanks to MRZ, Brian Walnum, Peter King & Mark Phillips for the pictures. Without the photographs, this would just be useless words.-Skate-Ozzie

Guest post by Bob Pribble.

Ozzie Ausband — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:52:00 +0000

There are riders in every local scene who can consistently be counted on to do the most or least amount of work to create skate spots. Among this latter group, there are those who will always do the bare minimum amount of work to forever claim they contributed to a project and have a right to ride. You know who I’m talking about because every skate scene has them. This is the guy who shows up at the ramp project with a borrowed cordless drill to install the very last screw in the flat bottom before the very first session. Around my parts, competition can be fierce to win the not-so coveted ”golden screw award” for driving in the ceremonial spike like Leland Stanford did in Promontory Summit, Utah in 1869 to complete work on the United States’ First Transcontinental Railroad.

But, this is a backyard pool blog, so I’ll shut up about ramps. While I try to come up with a derisively appropriate name for a pool slacker award, I’m reminded of a story that a friend told me recently about the time he and some other guys were helping empty one of Chris Renner’s pools (more about him later). My friend was passing the hat for donations to rent a trash pump and was denied by a local dude who wouldn’t cough up one measley dollar, but fully planned on sticking around that permish backyard to skate when the pool was finally emptied and dried. As the story goes, it wasn’t as if the guy didn’t have on his person a single, solitary bone to kick down, it was simply that he had concluded that others would take up the slack and all would be good in his life. No one will be surpised to hear that this same slacker was at a later time time caught curbstoning for personal profit a trunk full of those two-wheeled swizzle stick boards to poor urban neighborhood kids at a local DIY spot in Washington, DC that some misguided company had donated to a local charity. Maybe there should be established a Leaky Bucket award for these types. The latest word on this Leaky Bucket slacker, though, is that he’s volunteering time at a nearby skatepark build. So, maybe there’s hope for all of us, whatever our shortcomings (real or perceived).

There are also those who reside at the polar opposite side of every local scene. These are the folks who build ramps and pools in their backyards and are forever on the hunt for pools, drainaige ditches, and dare I say, street spots. Such folks are the types who populate municipal skatepark planning meetings and fundraise for their completion.

scott green

chris renner

dirt pool

Somewhere in the mix resides our Blue Tile Obsessed Ozzie. Said another way, these are the people who put up with all the real and literal mess that comes with the local skate scene day in and year out. We should all be respectful of these people in life and when they pass from this great world. Like most of you, we’ve all probably worn holes in such friends’ welcome mats; but, hopefully, and at a minimum, we’ve all managed to pull our weight when stuff needed to get done…and that we cleaned up more empties than littered.

The guy who epitomized this selfless skate scene builder in the middle part of the East Coast was a guy named Chris Renner. He was forever fundraising to build a concrete skatepark in his hometown of Baltimore, MD, and always on the hunt for a backyard pool in this part of the country where they don’t come up often. Unfortunately, pancreatic cancer took Chris from us last April at the age of 46, and he is survied by a great wife, two kids and a skate community that will never forget him.

I may have known Chris the least well of all the local area skaters who learned to drive in the 80s, but I definately got to know the essence of him as someone who was relentlessly optimistic about life. Chris was a hard charging guy who truly cared about everybody around him. During the year or better that he was receiving cancer treatment, I would occassionally run into him at any number of local spots, but mostly at a local skatepark where he would endlessly carve and grind its eleven foot pool. For a while, Chris had a weekly medical/skate regiment that went something like: go get jacked up on chemotherapy on one day, fight to regain strength for a couple of days, go skate any number of local pools for another couple days, repeat… That dude is surely ripping some big left handed kidney in the sky right now.

If you ever find yourself at Landsdowne Skatepark, look for Chris Renner’s initials at beginning of the upper snake run and say a kind word before you push off. The pics are of him , friends and of one of the many pools that Chris found and shared with everyone in the local skate scene. RIP, brother, you’re the best!

Bob Pribble

Thank you to Jason Zdun & Chelsea Greene for the photographs & Bob Pribble for helping everyone remember a great skateboarding pool pal-Ozzie

shrelp

Ozzie Ausband — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:32:58 +0000

Take a serious look at Shrelp.

By Ozzie Ausband

What makes a great skate photograph? Why is it that corporate executives continue using inane images of skateboarders doing nothing, falling off their boards or simply having no frame of reference for the viewer? Jon Spooner & Zach Petschek saw a problem. They knew that skateboarding desperately needed a stock photography site which kept the primary interests of the riders & photographers paramount.

Shrelp was designed to do this. Shrelp was assembled to provide skateboarding with a stock photography site that could provide authentic images of legitimate skateboarders completing real skateboard manuevers with the images photographed by professional skateboard photographers within the industry.

Jon, Zach & myself, came together and are attempting to develop Shrelp so corporations & consumers outside our sport can obtain stellar, authentic images for advertising & editorial use. No longer will useless images & advertisements be acceptable to us. We need to unite the skateboard riders & photographers together, and collect images from the past, present and future of skateboarding, so that our sport can be represented legitimately in the media & press.

Please sign on to Shrelp & take a good hard look at what we are offering. It’s your hard work, time and skateboarding involvement that is at stake. Why let some advertisement corporation present the world with another awful image of a kid falling off his skateboard or appearing like God just dropped him out of the sky, surrounded by that unending moniker they never tire of—’Extreme’. Lets band together & place the future of our sport in our own hands. Let us never let another ‘Extreme’ image go by without a howl of protest.

Take a look at this image of a skater at Mt. Baldy pipe. The Baldy pipe has been a major proving ground for over-vertical sessioning since Pat ‘Muck’ Mullis found & rode it in the very early 1970’s. No corporation or advertisement company would know any of this or the history behind the images. At Shrelp…we know the deal, because we are the deal. We are skateboarders.

With Shrelp, the rider will be paid for the image & some small compensation for the years of sacrifice & pain it takes to develop our skateboarding talent. With Shrelp, the photographer will be paid for the image and a small measure of compensation for the hard work it takes to create our art. Do the right thing. We are lifelong skateboarders trying to help you. Skateboarders for skateboarders. Please take a look. We will not let you down. -Jon, Zach & Ozzie

http://shrelp.com/images/shJ2kUiBkgXGg

“…that’s sooo East coast.”

Ozzie Ausband — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 15:55:43 +0000

jim howell & myself- poolside.

jim- rock-n-roll @ bible bowl.

clayton howell- Baldy

Jim Howell is my best friend in the entire world. I feel sorry for him. It must be a bitch to put up with all that disappointment, drunken debauchery & overall mayhem our whole lives. Poor guy. We met when we were 13 years old & have traveled up & down both coasts riding pools, vert ramps, parks and ditches. He has a son-Clayton, who is 15 years old & kills it! They recently visited for a birthday week of skating pools, pipes and parks. Thanks to the talented, Brian Walnum for shooting the epic photographs. I love my friends! – Skate-Ozzie

http://brianwalnum.com/photo/

just for today.

Ozzie Ausband — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 11:07:23 +0000

scott cooper

bad billy

skreech

It is my 46th birthday. Gods! I find it hard to believe how close that is getting to my 50th. It makes me wince. Some of my best pool pals are visiting & we’ll be riding pools. Here are a few rippers that I love to ride with. Have a rad day. Thanks to MRZ & Brandon Wong for the photographs. Skate long/Skate strong-Ozzie

Birthdays.

Ozzie Ausband — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 02:40:51 +0000

My 46th birthday is Wednesday. Weirdness. My best friends, Jim Howell & Scott Ward are having birthdays in October as well. So, We are having a skate / pool party/ BBQ @ ‘Ridiculous’ on Saturday (October 17th) from 4pm until the last grind is completed. If u drink beer, bring your own. We will have burgers/dogs. Come sk8 w me & my bros. Thnx-Ozzie

Peter Kings-'Ridiculous'