agadir block party

i thought about writing a bit about how i usually miss these events and then feel bad about not going, and, and, and… no one cares… but the agadir block party by the dolores crew  (probably the most important thing that happened to the israeli skateboarding scene in the past few years) is really simple.
skateboarding, hip hop, live shows, burgers and beers. a great way to start a holiday! 

i wanna riot!

hopped over to galit last night to see the vans shop riot. a skateboarding contest where the skaters skate for 6 minute sessions and compete as a team. it was a great opportunity to see everyone, see galit park in full capacity and getting ripped to pieces by the best skateshop teams in the country, and of course, enjoy good music and beer in the park. who could ask for more?
           
team wheely in third place
boarderline came in second

and team gili’s took the grand prize and will compete in europe representing israel.

building a ramp… and a society

selling clothes is so much more than selling and clothes when you care about what you sell and the people you sell it to. JinG is a clothing boutique, but it’s more. when they organize a yard sale it feels like the clothing just happens to be there. the real activity is on the ramp, around the grill or by the big fridge filled with beers.
a bunch of us come with our babies and toddlers, some are already big enough to ride the mini ramp. local skater kids come to skate, probably looking at us thinking “what’s up with these geezers and their kids, didn’t they used to skate also? Im never gonna be that guy” while we’re looking at them as live entertainment, in amazement of how much the skate scene has grown, how good the kids are and, a little bit like the geezers we are, sitting on the side, drinking beer, and enjoying the gladiator style physical entertainment.
call it what you will, we had a good time, everyone had a good time, we’re looking forward to many more gatherings like this in the future. my wife even asked me if i could imagine our little girl grow up to be one of these teenage skater chicks that comes to hang out in events and places like this, and of course i truly think it’s the best place i’d want my girl to be, but it got me worried about so many other things =)   #beingadad


  
     

skating tel aviv

mid january i was contacted by shai of adrenalin magazine in israel to submit a photo. he was making a series of articles sending off 2012 and for this part he contacted several israeli skateboarding photographers and asked them to submit their favorite photo of 2012 and tell the story behind it.
i automatically thought about this one:

we left grey china and after a long couple of days of flights and staying a night in hong kong we arrived to sunny tel aviv. we put down our bags, i took my camera and my skateboard and we hit the streets. I went to say hi to Lalo, he owns the graffiti paint shop, he was really excited to see me and there was an event in the port he partly sponsored, so we decided to go to the beach and on to the jaffa port with beers and boards and took some fun pictures along the way.
and then i realized… this was our first visit in israel after moving to china. this wasn’t in 2012 at all. it was may 2011. so i looked for something else. thought about the night sessions we always have when i come to visit.

the night sessions happened also in 2012, but the pictures are all from 2011.
okay, so maybe my story should be that Im in israeli photographer and i live in china and i’ll submit a photo from china.

and then i realized that this photo of nolan on our last session before he left china was in october 2011. and after he left i didn’t really have anyone to skate here with and no one to shoot.
so i came to the dark realization that 2012 started and ended and i had not even a single skateboarding picture. and it was important that 2013 won’t be the same.
a couple of weeks before our most recent visit i wrote on Facebook that Im coming to visit,  and asked who wants to shoot something, pako wrote back that we should go skate.
i’ve known pako for years, but we never actually went skating and shooting together. i met up with doh doh, who i’ve been skating and shooting way before i even had a proper camera, and before doh-doh had any proper skateboarding skills, but all that is changed now. Then we met pako. we started off to a slow start, but ended up having a killer day.
i thought that since he’s really involved with what’s going on and i’ve been away for two years he’ll show me some new spots, or some places that he’s been thinking about, but hasn’t been yet, but we ended up hitting the regular spots that were crowded and not exciting for skating nor for photos, and then he suggested we just hit the streets “take the camera out, and lets go find some cool stuff” and  so we did.

k-grind with the girls on the lunch break and the guy napping in the back at a spot that only looks from a afar that there’s something to do there.

but pako also managed to get a backside lip slide out of it.
then we looked around for some more stuff to hit in the area, but found nothing, checked out some more spots until we took a snack and beer break in rabin square and continued to gan-hair, skating that little bank was pretty chill

doh doh’s on the backside tail slide
then we started riding towards the beach and made one little kid very happy and one old lady very upset


wallriding on statues… you can see the old lady’s legs behind pako ready to question him again if he’s crazy.

reached the beach just in time to catch the sunset and pako busted out this killer 5-0 , in between traffic, jumping up the curb then up this wall thing, then to the grind with sh*tty approach and landing and everything. but some guy was kind enough to give up a parking spot so pako could get a better approach, maybe that part is about as unbelievable in tel aviv at this hour as the rest of the buildup that leads up to this trick.

switch flip by the marina.
tel aviv isn’t really a big city, but we covered a lot of ground pushing on our skateboards that day, and got some really fun shots at really cool spots, with some local old school harassment. security guards were cool with us, but old ladies and concerned citizens weren’t.

cropped

i had this idea a few months ago, and thought i’d wait to have more board designs before i post it, but i thought about it now, and this kind of design will never be done, it’s a sketch and an idea that i hope to keep evolving and hopefully executing in different directions and places.

these four were taken in four different asian cities, but it’s all around me, so that’s what i thought would be good to start with… there will be more boards and more cropping in the future, Im sure.

staying indoors

i want to skate. there are a lot of really cool spots around here, but i hardly see any skaters; and of course i won’t see them on a day like this. it’s freezing outside and it’s raining, too. not that hard rain, storm type, either. it’s the gentle freezing rain that makes the cold air feel colder and the small raindrops feel like needles. i wish i had an indoor skatepark to go to, get the blood pumping, and maybe get some new pictures to post. In the meanwhile, i can run around the apartment and post some oldies:

berlin, october, 2005

boaz arrow aquino

yoni jonson kedem

red-bull warehouse, hod ha’sharon, israel, september, 2005

adi khavous

taz skatepark, montreal, february, 2010

B09- the “bonder bomber”

but most of all, i could really go for an alenby passage session right now.
august, 2010.