I meant to send this photo as my ‘mugshot’ but screwed up and sent the top one instead.
I basically met Kurt Hohberger when I was sitting at a roulette table in Vegas (during Interbike week) and while we were hangin’ out in the parking lot, he asked if I’d do an interview for his website, BMX Union. This is what became of it. I was pretty stoked to have had the opportunity to ramble more than usual. Thanks again, Kurt. I appreciate it.
PS. I blacked out my eyes in all the photos. I don’t want people looking at my pupils.
EDIT: I can’t believe I forgot to include Odyssey in the ‘Thanks’ portion. I feel like a jackass. If it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t even be here. It’s a really great opportunity to work for them. Mucho gracias!
I haven’t edited a video in almost a year, so it was fun playing around with this. I’m not a pro at it but I like to pretend. This video in particular was self-filmed in Long Beach, over the span of three days and edited in one. I tend to lean more towards the self-filmed edits because it gives me 100% control over everything. Plus, it lets me take as much time as I want entertaining myself with silly little things…
The first day involved a crack in the sidewalk and a fire hydrant. The second day involved curb cuts, alleyways, slides and riding between drips of rain. The third day involved a flat-tire trying to hop up an unlucky 7-stair. I’ve pulled it once before, slightly intoxicated, but each time after that first, a tube always gets claimed. It’s the stairs in the 360 clip.
The music is 36-24-36, by the Violent Femmes. I was looking for something short and sweet and that song best fit the bill. The lyrics are kinda silly, but so is the entire video. I found the song on a CD a friend gave me from over 5 years ago. It was filled with Violent Femmes albums and pornography…
Fast-forward to the 4:20 mark. I’m the asian kid in the red shirt and Bauer’s my supervisor at Odyssey. He does huge 360s over rails and once picked me up at the Hard Rock Casino… where I was detained for being much too intoxicated to walk back to the hotel. Miles, the guy that edited it / filmed most of it, does sick ET variations. Fudger’s VW goes ridiculously fast and he put up with two car rides worth of me asking questions about turbo. The skatepark attendant is a safety gear nazi. She’ll nag at you about it in between her sessions of learning how to ollie, pad-less and helmet-less, in the skatepark entryway.
I’ll be in Vegas for the rest of the week, cranking out updates out of the Odyssey booth. There are a lot of kooky spandex going on in this annual bike convention known as Interbike. Fortunately, they all stay away from the BMX section and I only encounter it when I leach internet on the other side of the building.
Anyway, the flipbook above will show you some stuff that we have going on. There’ll be more flipbooks popping up through out the week and you can use the two arrows next in the large dice (upper left) to cycle through all of them.
Ryan Fudger and Paul Alessio let me tag along on a pool riding expedition last week. We rode a handful of pools that day, which is a very rare thing since they’re usually pretty hard to come by. Anyway, Fudger wrote up a little blog post about it on the Ride site. Read about how that day came to be.
