skating downtown

Lately I've been heading downtown a lot for skating, there's a lot more cool spots and the people always just seem way more chill. It's just a better scene over all.
This weekend Jordan, Jarred and I headed down there and found a few spots to skate and just burned a few hours we had nothing else to do with. Jarred kept trying to hippie gap this bench outside the courthouse, that was the first spot we went. The court house down town has the most perfect little skate plaza I have ever seen, the ledges are low and so are the benches, nothing has skate stoppers and its all just really smooth.
Anyways, Jarred kept trying to hippie gap the bench so then Jordan started trying it too and pretty soon they got obsessed with it and were determined, the weird thing is that I think Jordan has been on a skateboard maybe six times in his life and he came closer than Jarred to landing it.
Next we headed to this spot up by the Knitting Factory or what used to be the Big Eazy, I don't know why they changed the name, kind of pisses me off. Anyways it was this little plaza thing across the street from it and they got straight to doing the same things, hippie gapping these banches, so thats about all we did all day, I tried to boneless axle stall on a bench and I think I pulled something in my ankle because it hurts bad.

week 4 quotes

This weeks quotes are both from Paul Strand

“Look at the things around you, the immediate world around you,” he said. “If you are alive, it will mean something to you, and if you care enough about photography, and if you know how to use it, you will want to photograph that meaningness.”

This just means that someone who is alive and wants to be a photographer will be able to photograph anything and there will be meaning to it. It makes me think of that old saying "only boring people get bored", it's sort of the same principle but applied to photography.


“Your photography is a record of your living--for anyone who really sees,” Strand said. “You may see and be affected by other people’s ways, you may even use them to find your own, but you will have to eventually free yourself from them.”

You eventually have to find your own way, you can't always just be influenced by what you see in other people.

third week quote responses

The great end of education is, to discipline rather than to furnish the mind;
to train it to the use of its own powers, rather than fill it with the accumulations of others.

Tryon Edwards

You have to add new things to your mind, that is education, not just working with the same old mind.

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance;
The wise grows it under his feet.

James Oppenheim

If you are looking for happiness in the distance then you will never have happiness. You have to know how to just be happy with what you have or create your own happiness.

response to the second week quote

“I visualize a story as a beaded necklace – a pearl necklace- coiled up in the muck at the bottom of the sludge collected at the bottom of your subconscious. When you start yanking on the string, an old string that’s been rotting in the muck for years, the string breaks. But you’ve got one gorgeous pearl left in your hands, and you’re motivated to roll up your sleeves and stick your hand down into the muck to find the rest of the pearls you just barely glimpsed. And one by one you fetch them up. But without their string (the plot; the because-sequence is the string) they come up in a random order. In fact, some of the pearls may not even belong to this necklace.

Eventually, when you’ve got them all, you can sit down and make the “outline” of the story. You look at the pearls and your sense of ART tells you which ones go with which – by color and shape and texture and size –and you arrange a set of pearls so the big one is in the middle and the small ones on the end (or however your Art says to do it). At that point, you know which pearls don’t belong on this necklace and set them aside.

C.J. Cherryh

This is basically just saying how every time you have ideas for a story or part of a story you just have to be able to bring them all together and then make it make sense.



“The method I use now is to present ideas through impressions. Readers immersed in the gradually unfolding impressions will form their own ideas, which might or might not be in agreement with the author’s; that is fine either way. Ideas are like the string that turns the pearls into a necklace. The string is invisible, but it is not dispensable and cannot be broken.”

A dialogue with MuXin

This is like the same basic idea except for it's saying that other people can understand the story differently and it still works, just in their head they used a different sring.

garage skating

The Garage

Last night it was rainging, but I still wanted to go skating. I was gettin really angry at mother nature, but then I remembered that Jarred's house has a garage. I called Jarred and asked if he wanted to skate in the garage, maybe smoke some cigars and just chill out, he was down for that.

we started skating and there wasn't much roon, but we tried to get by with what we had to work with. We ended up starting a game of skate, I think Jarred lost, but we never really finished. Jarred kept busting out the primo flip though.

Then we decided to bust out the cigars. They were Swisher Cherrys, the best kind. Jarred had to be a show off and put one up his nose.

Eventually we kind of go bored skating. for some reason we decided to start throwing knives at logs tryin to stick them. It was fun, everyone loves sharp projectiles wizzing through a small room.

skate sesh at the stairs

Tyler, Jarred and I went and skated this little stair set thing we found towards the back of the campus. We skated it before, but had never taken pictures or anything. We never really landed anything intense, but we got some good looking shots.

It took TK a while to warm up, but once he did he had this whole little line dialed in. He would jsut drop the first 2 stairs, ollie the next 3 and then fire cracker the last 2.

Jarred looks like he was going to push mongo, but he didn't, otherwise I woudl have called him a MAB. (I don't think he ever made it past the 3 stair in the middle)

There were leaves all over the stairs, it made it sort of weird to skate, but it made for really cool shots. I liked the look of the whole thing.

We had a good little session though until security kicked us out. I never even got to skate, but it was cool because my ankle felt like it was broken anyways.