Who is neil blender

Eddie Elguera—he was like a guy to be like. Chris Strople was, too. He was a sketcher. And Duane Peters, he was hot. Mixing rap in with it. The mixture of rap and skateboarding is pretty dumb. Freestyle laughter. Street freestyle is what the modern shit is. Too much inconsistency can be really annoying. And art being done by the skaters themselves. You kind of set that whole thing up. And then the tricks you did, too, they were just a little off. The pain of putting on pads and everything smelling like shit all the time.

Actually, ammonia. That was depressing. But if things were set up right … the Del Mar Keyhole would be fun. But only at night. I rode around in that thing. At Carlsbad you run into dead ends. Have you seen that? It just seems like a bunch of video kids. Maybe a little of everything. What would you draw? My mom drew all the time, my brother actually draws, my sister draws… G: It was a family affair. N: How about that show, Family Affair!

Where Buffy St. N: Jodie! And then that stupid Mr. French guy. G: Mr. Yeah, Sebastian Cabot. N: Yes! G: …was the dad. It was depressing as fuck. G: I grew up on that shit, man. My mom would do stuff—she would sing in public and yell for us in public… N: Wha…?

G: And I just always thought she was Lucille Ball. Did she have red hair too? G: No, she had blond or black hair. N: Oh no! N: There was so much bullshit.

G: Do you draw dogs? I draw dogs, a lot of faces, a lot of fucking nothing at this point. G: Do they have precision bearings? G: Who are you skating with? G: Are there young guys too skating? G: Where do you sell them? How does somebody get them? N: …tapered in the front.

We just got Joel. G: All right. Do you still do Heated Wheel? G: Can you ride them on vert? G: Like at OB? G: Mm hmmm. G: Are they good for going to the liquor store? N: Laughs. Perfect for going to the liquor store. And coming home! Bye, say something… N: Bye people, I love you.

Chad Crescenzi December 30, The guy who turned into a moth, or whatever it was, and the one about the guy going down to the lake [to look for head]. Yeah, I remember that. I remember other fake companies.

In seventh or eighth grade, my friend Carl Weezer made this hot logo for a fake skate company called Loop. Cartoons are hot. The Aggro Zone was fun. I liked being able to know there was going to be a rad photo to look at. That photo! That was just retardation, man. I have to quit trying to do that. It was called the lien air because you have to lean in order to do them.

Then [in an Action Now caption], D. David Morin spelled it like my name backward, so it seems like I got more credit on that one. Niko Weis. He showed up at the North Vancouver skatepark in that snake run and did s going high speed, just sliding through the bowl. Duane does slides straight up and down, no-handed, just free spinning like a pirouette on the wall. There was never a sequence of that anywhere.

Lance Mountain or Eric Grisham? It seems like he would have made it up. What other moves are there? The gay twist was lame. Yeah, I tried it for days, and then it was just too hard to figure out how to make the board stick to my feet. No, I left it alone.

I tried them again maybe around seven years ago at Clairemont. I feel like maybe I could make one now, if I was lucky.

It would take all day, though. Yeah, it seemed retarded when we did it. The way it felt, too, just struggling through the trick. Cab is too hot at those. Then there are half Cabs. People do those like they were water. Darren Navarette, people like that. GSD: Do you remember the Tracker air? It was a mute air, but the Tracker name never stuck.

I thought you might know the story of how it became the mute air. No, that might have forged its way into the Japan air. I never made one. Ho-hos were too intense. Steve Schneer was an actual gymnast who was a skater. He was one of the first good guys I saw at Big O.

Him and Duane Peters were the best dudes there. Then El Gato came in right around that time. He may have seen Schneer do it, but Schneer was the first. Aerial Bertlemann. How hard are those things? They were impossible, right? But Schneer did the ho-ho. It was too hard. He ended up walking around the deck on his hands. He had a trick called the hospital, which was a egg right along the tile—a tumbling egg. He never landed one, but he tried them so long ago. It was an Elguerial [ invert] to tail, right?

Him and Eric Grisham were the only two guys I saw do fakie taps clean, no wheel touching. Did you ever see anyone else do it? GSD: Visiting hours was a frontside front truck grind, invented by an alien called the Visitor. Was it? That was the new deal. They turned it into that name, I guess. So, maybe that was the trick. He made up that whole thing. Those seem hard nowadays, like just a body jolt. People still do it. Just fakie out to your nose, grabbing stale between your legs.

Nobody has done one tuck knee. That would be hot. Or maybe they have. Henry Gutierrez has probably done them. Yeah, you know, hot moves. That rates way up there, right? Yeah, just a little cartoonish, bigger outline painting style using brushes. I still draw with pens a lot. I usually do pen stuff for Vans. They use a lot of small line work and blow it up for t-shirt graphics. Why would the site occasionally just disappear? I think it got put up wrong.

I would go to pull stuff off of it, and it would just pull the whole page off. Duane Pitre did the very first one. It was pretty wild. There was a lot of graphic stuff on it. Then my mom did it the next time, and that lasted for about a year. Then I just got over it. I make a couple of things and sell it under that name, under the moniker. Just the name. I eventually need to make it real.

I have to start making some boards and t-shirts. I did a run of t-shirts with the logo and stuff, the trampoline guy. Did you ever see that one?

I think I made, like, 50 of them. I sold a bunch of stuff on eBay, but that was like two years ago. What else we got? Micke Alba could do the best rock and roll shuffles, period. Slider shuffles.