Vent City

Ryan Lay and Ted Barrow interview Leo Valls at the Pushing Boarders Conference in Malmö, Sweden last month to talk about his panel and the work he's doing back home in Bordeaux. To hear the rest of the interviews ryan conducted, just go to patreon.com/ventcity and you can sign up for either the Rep Flow or Pro Flow tier and you'll have those to listen to while you're doing stuff around the house or switching out bearings alone. Don't listen to podcasts in your headphones around your friends. It's a lame move.

Bonus Episode!

Four of the six hop on the pod to answer listener questions. We talk about a lot of stuff and I don't wanna type it all out so listen and enjoy!

Also, contribute here to Britt Rutan's Go Fund Me: https://www.gofundme.com/f/helpbrittrutan

He's an Arizona sweetheart who took a bad slam in Portland and we love him and we hope some kind listeners and skaters can show him some love too.

Here is a selected interview Ryan Lay did with Mimi Knoop while at the Pushing Boarders conference. This is just one of five we've put up on our Patreon feed at patreon.com/ventcity. These interviews are just brief discussions to give listeners a sample of the panels we heard and participated in at the conference.

In this interview Mimi talks with Ryan about how she helped get the X-Games to give equal pay for the women's division. It's an amazing story and we hope you like it. It's cool to like things.

The additional interviews from the full show include Thom Callan-Riley (organizer at Pushing Boarders), Betsy Gordon (helping to catalog skateboarding at the Smithsonian), Indigo WIlling (Ph.D candidate working on what she calls "the new ethics of skateboarding"), and Rick McCrank (he's Rick McCrank).

Welcome Back, Skaters, to another episode of Vent City. On this show we have Kristin Ebeling, Alex White, Ted Barrow, and Ted Schmitz having a conversation about the Sk8 Rats video by Shane Aukland which has full parts from Kristin and Shari White from the Skate Witches and more.

Shane steps in to set Ted S. straight on some of the music used throughout the video.

The panel discusses Kristin’s part at length after a lengthy discussion of bath balms and the necessity of self-care in your 30s. They also discuss Cory Kennedy’s new part and how the prison system in America is a fucking joke.

At some point they talk about the uses of a Theragun during foreplay so there’s that.

Alex also tells a show-stopping about how the ASR Tradeshow saved her life.

To prep the interview with Keegan Guizard at the College Skateboarding Educational Foundation (CSEF), the panel talks a little about each of their college experiences and what Ted B. gives an inside look at what is actually entailed by a Ph.D program—time, so much time.

After Ted Schmitz (me) sits down with Keegan the group goes on to talk about the New York Times article about the events that happened in San Francisco earlier this year between skaters and a security guard.

Then there’s the Funeral Pyre segment:

Alex White throws in the practice of Go Funding Yourself to get to contests. The platform could probably be used to more necessary things. Kristin lights ablaze the practice of having companies being run and operated mostly by men who are shutting down opportunities for women in skating and don’t know how to advance equity in skating. Boy’s club shit needs to go. Ted Barrow can see, somewhere off in the distance a glowing orange strobe that seems to get more intense the closer he gets. It’s a giant temple of flames and everyone is standing around it honoring a memory while the heat keeps them at a distance. That giant flame is fueled by EMB footy in 2019 and the kept ablaze by the thick oil of nostalgia that soaks each clip. The historian stays toward the back of crowd, taking in the last flickers of light as the crowd starts to dissipate while he mutters to himself—or maybe an imagined historically minded crowd member—“all I see is an absence, not a presence.” Ted Schmitz on a petty note takes issue with the constantly reinventing instagram move of archiving the grid so skaters only have one post up, making it impossible to find the funny heel flip board slide of yesterday.

That’s the show here are resources from the topics, links, and credits:

To send mail to Cory Kennedy, address all envelopes to:

Cory Kennedy

410614

PO Box 37

Little Rock, WA

98556

To learn more about CSEF:

Go to https://www.collegeskateboarding.com/

Transition music by Michael Kryger (@blogafonte)

Credits music by Ilana Bryne (@ilana.bryne or naivetrax.bandcamp.com)

Graphic design by Michael Worful (@worful)

For this week's Patreon Flowgram we have a reading by Ted Barrow about being disrespected by a non-skater in high school, self-respect, and the significance of a good pair of pants.

Welcome back to Vent City, a place to talk about skateboarding and it’s bullshit. This week on the show we have novelist Kyle Beachy, pro skater and commentator Alex White, art historian Ted Barrow, and Thrasher contributor Ted Schmitz.

The panel starts by discussing good things going on in skating and the world—USA Women’s Soccer team being non-White House going badasses, teaching kids to push their skating, and Jacob Elliot Harris’s recent video output.

Following the Trust Fall and Nike videos discussion the panel discusses the Welcome video, Seance, and discusses whether or not Ryan Lay’s most recent part is dummy good or not. Spoiler: nollie front salad equals dummy good.

WIth the industry skate talk out of the way, everyone engages Ted Barrow on stopping the daily skatepark clip reviews on feedback_ts and what his output on the account looks like going forward. They also discuss sincerity online and arguing with 14 year olds.

The funeral pyre burns bright this week as we say goodbye to some practices in skating that once served us but maybe we could do without. Ted Schmitz thinks being good at skating for certain people is no longer enough to make him like someone’s skating, Ted Barrow thinks roll-on grinds that aren’t in a pool are quite corny. Alex White thinks nose slide bigspins in contest runs have run their course. Kyle Beachy thinks their is an odd thing taking place where skateboarding, instead of having our scene co-opted by pop culture, is now taking influences from the broader culture when it comes to things like Spencer Hamilton’s Primitive intro video, which seems to look more like an innocuous Uber commercial than a street skating video.

Thank you to everyone for listening. As always you can support the show on patreon.com/ventcity to get access to more show and help our operation get our faster.

Music provided by Ilana Bryne (@ilana.bryne and naivetrax.bandcamp.com)

Logo Design by Michael Worful (@worful)

Enjoy this excerpted reading by Kyle Beachy from his essay in the newest Push Periodical Magazine, On Benches. Listen to the full reading and get more show at patreon.com/ventcity and if you want to support the print (and we hope you do), you can do so here— http://www.pushperiodical.com/ 

Credits song by Ilana Bryne (@ilana.bryne or naivetrax.bandcamp.com) 

Intro song by Michael Kryger (@blogafonte)

Logo design and graphics by Michael Worful (@worful)

Hey Skaters,

In the sixth episode of Vent City, the cast (Kristin Ebeling, Ryan Lay, Ted Barrow, Kyle Beachy, and Ted Schmitz) talk Alexis Sablone's Thrasher interview by Elissa Steamer and whether skating is enough to keep someone happy.

They go over some already covered ground about pads and shame, that hopefully uncovers something exciting.

Dew Tour had a remarkably young podium for the Women's division and they talk about how these young skaters are pushing the limits. Misugu Okamoto and Kokona Hiraka are both under 15 and winning/placing alongside well established skaters like Lizzie Armanto.

Music in this episode was provided by the amazing Ilana Bryne (naivetrax.bandcamp.com & @ilana.bryne on Instragram)

This is a sample of the episode on our Patreon-only feed. If you’d like to hear the rest of that discussion and get access to future additional shows on the Flowgram, just go to www.Patreon.com/ventcity and you can get on the rep flow team for $5 a month. Thank you to everyone who has joined so far, your support will give us time to produce and edit more shows!

Music by Michael Kryger (instagram: @blogafonte) and Ilana Bryne (https://naivetrax.bandcamp.com/)

Welcome back to Vent City. Our tagline is something like “a place to talk about skateboarding and all its bullshit,” which pretty much covers what goes on in this episode.

First up, we are excited to announce that we have launched a Patreon for fans of the show to support the show and access some exclusive content (www.patreon.com/ventcity). This will help us work on the show more and take a few shifts off a month to focus on the production and editing. We’ll make some stickers too and get those to you if you sign up. We have two tiers: Rep Flow ($5/month) will get you extra Patreon-only content and some bragging rights; Pro Flow ($20/month) for the die-hards out there who are maybe too down for the show. Pro flow will get you a shoutout on every episode as well as access to the sweet extra content and hell, if we see you out in the real world, we’ll buy you a drink (coffee, beer, tea, soda, water or even a Red Bull)

As for the discussion in this episode: Kristin Ebeling, Ted Barrow, Kyle Beachy, Ted Schmitz and Ryan Lay talk Nike’s Gizmo and a bunch of other cool stuff. Kristin conducted and wrote the Gizmo interviews is this month’s Thrasher, so do yourself a favor and pick that up.

The feature of this episode is an interview Ryan Lay with some of the key players at Skate Pal (Charlie Davis, Aram Sabbah and Theo Krish), an NGO doing incredible work in the West Bank in Palestine. They talk their mission to support young people in Palestine through skateboarding by building skateparks and growing the skate scene in the region.

To learn more about or to support Skate Pal with their amazing work go to http://www.skatepal.co.uk Volunteer, donate, spread the word.

Following the interview, the panel discusses Ryan’s conversation and then casts a few things out of skateboarding in the Funeral Pyre segment. Kyle thinks we could do with less of the travel-based skateboarding that feels disconnected from the skaters’ deep relationship with the place or its history—Shanghai’s marble landscape comes to mind. Ryan is over long back smiths that are just like funky 5050s. Kristin invites people to find some more inclusive vocabulary to address non-male skaters by casting off the term “female skateboarding.” Ted Barrow thinks we could do better by not confusing the world of skateboarding with the act of skateboarding—hear him out! Ted Schmitz’s insecurities about his own output in skating make him throw Jacob Elliott Harris of Atlantic Drift onto the pyre—Harris is just too good at everything and is making people look bad.

This one is a doozie, coming in around three hours. Enjoy the discussion and let us know what you think of the show or if we fucked up in some way by sending us an email at [email protected]

Music in this episode was provided by the amazing Ilana Bryne (naivetrax.bandcamp.com & @ilana.bryne on Instragram)

Logo Design by Michael Worful (@worful)