The Worst Kind of Reality

I recently read a Vanity Fair article decrying the spread of reality TV and comparing it to vacuum cleaner that sucks culture and any hint of substance from the life of popular media. After the scandal with those idiots known only for leaving untpaid tabs all over DC and running failed vineyards sneaking their way into the White House State Dinner last week I was pretty convinced that even adults were absolving themselves of any potential as role models for America's youth.

And after this most recent spectacle,

I am inclined to agree with the author of the aforementioned. Anyone who willingly promotes themselves with the opening tagline "MTV is taking you inside a shore house you've never seen, full of the hottest, tannest, craziest guidos," and then flaunts pit stains in the opener, needs to be shot. I'm calling my gun-toting, NRA card-carrying, global-warming-is-a-hoax cousin right now. He's been looking to cull some livestock for a long time.

dump o' thangs

all photos by Ryan Dunfee (except Enjoi ad).

Flo-rida

My parents recently copped a place in south Florida, which I would normally avoid if I didn't like surfing so much. Especially when the temp outside is 83 and the water is 75. You can surf until your shoulders fall off from paddling, which is not the case back in NH right now, where rigor mortus sets on as soon as the Vaseline you rubbed on your face to protect you from the 48 degree water and 35 degree air wears off. It has been an awesome week and I've gotten a bit better at surfing. I shouldn't really call it surfing, as I have to kneeboard as my spinal cord injury relegated me to kneeboarding cuz I can't balance standing up. Rehtard. Still fun as, though.

Any photos of kneeboarding from the front make me look like an amputee. This looks somewhat more graceful.

oh yeeeee.

Even Dad slays!

Back to NH Monday, which I'm not really looking forward to, but will be able to hook it up with some homies, possibly ski a day or two, and hopefully get a temp job to increase my dwindling funds before I get killed by the Euro in France. Maybe also surfing, but I am sure that as soon as I step outside I will change my mind.

encore une tasse

two fun bits from the world of unreasable bindings:

VIDEOGRASS TEASER from VIDEOGRASS on Vimeo.

sleezin

K2 has a really good team of shreds, Pep Fujas, Sean Petit, and Andy Mahre have always been favorites of mine. Well maybe not Sean. He's 16, and only really been around a lil bit. At any rate, Rob Huele is another head I'm super into. Even though he lands some shit backseat, he's got that stringy, go-for-it jib style you in skaters like Ragdoll. Plus he KILLS the COC hip in this edit. Even though it's an American holiday, I'm celebrating Thanksgiving with a Canadian video. enjoi (pun intended). The song is a bit slow, but maybe throw on some Ramones and it might make a little more sense.

Rob Heule 09-vid from rob heule on Vimeo.

my header photo is all flipped out right now, but im sick of tyring to fix it. i will be attacking that problem soon.

And even mo' foks!

My friend Kit is possibly, scratch that, the craziest person I have met in my 24 years of living. You may know him already from the Video Daze series, especially Part III. And if you remember any of his time on-camera, you at least have a taste of the hundreds of absolutely rediculous moments I've shared with this kid.

After being let loose from his front desk position at the Hotel Jerome this summer for god knows what reasons, Kit took up art full time. And by full time, I mean that he woke up at six every morning and starting making fully-colored drawings on Microsoft Paint. He managed to churn out two or three drawings a day, and if one judges by his art blog, Infinite Eight, he has kept up that dizzying pace ever since, the whole time managing to insulate his 2nd-grade spelling abilities ("whale" spelt "wale") from even spellcheck. It will forever remain a mystery to me how he managed to gain acceptance to, and graduate from, the country's most selective liberal arts college.

At any rate, Kit has even tried his hand at commodifying his art for material gain, in the form of a Zazzle store with a full array of products. With Black Friday only days away, it's time to start thinking about presents for your kin, and what cheap credit-American doesn't love another t-shirt?

So why not get Auntie Margo or Cousin Jim a t-shirt with a screen-printed scene of a bat filming a pig drilling a polar bear in the ass?

Which one is your favorite relative?

Or how about a visual interpretation of your most horrific night at Aspen's Regal Watering Hole in which you become the victim of domestic abuse by your girlfriend because you were dancing with a cougar while she was at home (at least for a little), all nice and imprinted on a pair of Keds for your niece?

No one wears SB's anymore. Regal Horror Keds are the new it!

To be honest, despite 98% of his art being incomprehensibe (and thus greater art?), Kit has come up with some true gems.

What's your expression?

And by far his best piece (although we still can't seem to convince him of it), the infamous Land Shark tee.

There's a lesson here, kids: Don't think you can get away being a cool, sunglass-sporting deer, or else you will be eaten by a shark, who will either approach from underground a la Tremors or on his back from across the lawn. I still can't figure out from where.

More folks to listen to

I'm pretty suspicious of any big-mountain ripper that comes out of SLC or Jackson. Getting treated like a beater at Snowbird on two different occasions after I'd been jumping respectable cliffs all day lead me to believe that these guys are WAY too intense about their scene, like Flea's locals-or-die surf crew from Point Break that swerved across lanes on the highway while standing in the back of a topless Jeep and tried to beat up Keanu Reeves before Swayze dropped heads.

Despite the fact that Cody Townsend has allies in both Little Cottonwood and out of every gate at Jackson, and despite the fact that he skies for Salomon (of which I'm highly suspicious in general... even though i own Czars and love them), I am starting to enjoy his blog a lot. I think also that pro skiers seem to be much cooler and chiller than the gnarathon locals who bitch at you for slowing them down on the traverse (I'm sorry, there are no traverses at any of the mountains in Aspen, so FUCK OFF). At any rate, I caught two gems of video off his blog today.

The first is a Cody's helmet-cammed run from that rediculously tight and long couloir Jeremy Jones rips in the trailer for Deeper. Turns out Cody is so cool he gets to ride with Jeremy. Instant seal of approval... double seal of approval for keeping his speed down that whole thing.

Flashing Hallways from Cody Townsend on Vimeo.

The second is Cody's post of the Verbier Extreme video from last year. I have always known that when it comes to skiing, the Euros let you go and do whatever you goddamn please, which is why I'm going there for the winter. What I didn't know is that they occasionally force you to go down whatever they goddamn please, to the tune of the Extreme venue being the Bec de Rosses, which is a 2800 vertical feet face (Squaw is 2100 in total) of no-fall cliff bands with no apparent way down, even if you've looked at the face four or five times, or spent two weeks looking at it and watching video of it three hours a day, as many of the pros did in preperation. You only need to watch the first few minutes of the fly-over shots to understand why JT Holmes, who needs to introduction, is shitting his pants. The empty start gate at the top is the icing on the cake... And since Freecaster doesn't understand how to embed things, you'll have to suffer through an extra mouse click to get to the link.

Empire State of Mind

"Sittin' courtside, Knicks and Nets give me high-fives."

hell ye.

As I start packing up my things here in Aspen and getting to make the move to France for the winter (after stopping in Florida and back home in Now!Hampshire), I've gotten to go through all shit for the first time in awhile. When I got all my ski gear together, I noticed a striking progression (i.e. accumulation) of gear. The past few seasons I have seen a huge change in my skiing, both in the improvement in my skills (& steez, rehtards!) and location, having spent four years in college skiing Jiminy Peak and the park mecca of Mount Snow, then moving out to Aspen for a year, and now onto the Alps. The gear tells the story...

2007-2008 Season. Mt. Snow, VT. Center-mounted park skis and East Coast-wide "pow" skis, that felt like skiing on Harts when I went to Alta.

2008-2009. Move to Aspen. Eventually earn enough tips to add a pair of rockered real pow skis to the quiver. I learn how to ski pow, do the Highlands Bowl in 3 turns, and jump a cliff with speed going into a 35-degree chute. They prove worth their while; I even ripped Alta this time. Good, very good.

2009-2010 season. French Alps. Line Blends come into the picture with a touring setup (Marker Dukes, CSD skins), along with a ski bag, powder baskets, a slope meter, an avi shovel, probe, and beacon. Now this shit is serious!

I super stoked to realize I will actually need all of this/use all of this, and can't wait to get my avi cert and start skiing some shit. Already had some great days skinning, and I feel like I picked up right from the end of last season. OH YEAH!!!

Heyah Me Nah

I've come to find that there is very little bad reggae. I have really yet to hear reggae I really can't stand (although Tanner Hall's choices for ski soundtracks occasionally creep close to this), but for the most part it's all good. Maybe it's because it seems really hard to fuck up, it seems pretty easy to do if you got some soul.

At any rate, if you can only press "play" on your computer once from now until the end of time, you would be best served by going to Pandora and playing a station based on The Ethiopians. This is some of the best reggae I've ever found. It will not dissapoint.

This Must be Just Like Living in Paradise

Snwomass got 16-20" out of this last blast, and with my bases repaired on the cheap (thanks Charlie at Durrance for hooking it up!), I got a late afternoon start skiing up towards the Sheer Bliss chair. The hike got rough at times as I was burning through a massive hangover with no iPod to tune myself out with. After two and a half hours, I dropped in about 2/3 of the way up Sheer Bliss.

The pow was mid-winter light and knee deep, I could barely get moving when I dropped.

All in all, a fucking rad day to be out, especially with some warm weather in the forecast this week before it dumps again next weekend. Winter is definitely here in Aspen. Hell yeah.

Wadin'

Poking around the Surface blab I found this ill video of Ian Wade, aka Blake Nyman Vol. II. Naw just playing. I hadn't seen any video of Ian before but this kid rips, even in '08! Super smooth park skiing, most on rockered Live Life II's, and a wild tight pants/ no poles look. Get this!

Ian Wade 2008 Ski Journey from Jeremiah Langston on Vimeo.

Souter on my Mind

Ran across this entertaining article from the NY Times about former Justice David Souter, whose personal and juidicial philosophy represent the purest form of NH individualism possible... namely, not excepting any gifts as a Justice, and escaping Washington as quickly as possible to retreat to a farm house in the woods with no e-mail, TV, or answering machine and hike mountains. Damn. Souter remains one of my favorite public figures of recent memory, as he is one of the few who has been able to keep the responsibilities of his position pure and intact during his career.

This might come across as being written by a self-indulgent liberal, but what writer isn't:

http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/souters-summits/

Catchin' Up

Been a calendar week since my last post, so I thought I'd catch everyone up by spewing lots of pertinent information:

-Aspen Halloween involved lots of crazy outfits, hair bands, Green Dragon, short-term memory loss, and a town that hadn't been as packed since Labor Day weekend. Definitely lived up to its reputation.

-Looking at the forecast (10+ days of 50 degree weather) I decided to skin up Snowmass last weekend before all the snow was gone. Two hours later I was about half way up the Big Burn lift and dropped into what turned out to be a very low-tide snowpack, with the sun having done nothing to solidify the snowpack and cover the rocks. Im pretty sure I made three or four turns before I started grating rocks. Two core shots, one in each of my new Line Blends. damn. had to straightline most of the rest of the way through hay and shrubs on about four inches of snow covering bare ground, it was super ghetto but pretty fun pointing it down what looked like bare ground, and not doing any more damage to the skis.

-With ski DVD's creeping up on $30, I was very excited to find out that Matchstick put up their new movie, In Deep, on iTunes for 8 bucks. Worth the money for Sean Petit's opening segment alone. Sean absolutely CHARGES in his seggie, straighlining his 6th-grade size frame down AK pillows with way more vert than you see coming, huge 360s that will surely become one of Sean's signatures, and a rodeo off the cliff that Benchetler broke himself on in Hunting Yeti that he takes DEEP into the landing. Like 150 feet deep. Gets blown out of the landing, but goddamn, at 16 this kid goes for it in a way I haven't seen since Eric Hjorliefsen stopped skiing park with spikes in his A-frames and started dropping lines. We will definitely be watching him for awhile, if he doesn't get bored of skiing by the time he's 18.

On a seperate note, Level 1 put up Refresh on Autumn Garage, something like ten dollars for three views, which is pretty stupid in my opinion. That movie was off the bandwagon as well, but as much as I want to relive Phil Casabon's segment, ten dollars for three views online is not a deal, and neither is 30 dollars for a DVD (when your DVD drive doesn't work). Guess I'll have to wait and see ifthat one turns up in my stocking.

-Following Colorado's accelerating march towards complete legalization of marijuana and solidifying the fantasyland reputation of many of its ski towns, the town of Breck legalized pot to the tune of an ounce or less for anyone over 21. It will be interesting to see how the tourist crowd takes this, but I have a feeling they'll be too busy crashing their rented Expeditions on I-70 to notice. Aspen apparently isn't the next target for Colorado's pot legalization movement; I guess four dispensaries opening in a town of 5,000 permanent residents in two months isn't encouraging enough.

-Our winter weather of late October has morphed into spring, with 50-60 degree temps during the day all this week. The temps have killed any chance of skinning back up Snowmass for turns, and with Independence Pass now closed for the season, skiing options are limited to early-season park shredding in Summit County. (or skinning lines and getting caught in wet slides in Summit County)

-Found the video for Dead Prez's "Hell Yeah," and it is fucking awesome. Here it be

-Hair band cover band "Danger Kitty," which is "an original band, playing the original songs from the original artists," made its way to Belly Up the eve of Halloween. I must say I was very impressed, as the lead singer was able to match perfectly the vocal tones of Bon Jovi, Jani Lane (Warrent), Gene Simmons, AND David Lee Roth. Quite... impressive.

That's all now for the land of la, more to come as I continue to plan my winter in France and maybe even ski park at Keystone on the day next week commemorating our veterans. che che che...