July 27th-28th 2004

The broken arm (fourteen weeks and counting) has made me slack on all things keyboard related of late. One finger typing sucks. Doing it for a laugh on a blog doesn't come in on the list of things I'm up for currently. Sort of.

Anyhow, after an operation which has seen my arm once again wrapped to the point of immobility and - just to add to the excitement - a hip which has had bone marrow removed to help said arm, I've been put in the strange position of having to take proper time off of work.

Fun, but only partially as these painkillers have a knack of leaving you staring into space for hours at a time.

Anyhow, during this time out I managed to get around to sending my damaged fisheye in for repair. No filming anyway for the above reasons - but now I have time on my hands I can finally get on with the things you only ever worry about seconds before you fall to sleep.

One of which for me is thirteen years of footage for which a good chunk only resides on DV tapes.
Under the previous regime, once the footage appeared in a video it was deleted from the hard drive if no more fun was to be had with it.

Except now, all these years later tapes are deteriorating and memories are fading.

I've begun a recapturing project which will hopefully see me regrab hundreds of random lines and ticklers from forgotten faces, child-doubles of now more well known names and those that just never went and aged at all.

First up - a little trip to Prague.
We got in on the 27th July 2004 - the night before the Mystic Cup Qualifiers. Rodney and I shared a room kinda near the park. We got straight down there for a little session and the first half of the clip below was filmed as we had arranged to meet a few Antipodean pals for a shred.

What's really amusing is that this was a Creme Skateboards trip. Rod was (is?) pro for them. I believe the rest of the team at that point was Manuel Magreitter and Dominic Dietrich. Maybe there was an Am or two. Who knows?

Notice however how only Rodney appears in the park section of the clip.
Powers that be over at Creme HQ were so clued up on skateboarding that they managed to send us out to meet up with Manu and Domi at Mystic with a plan to us useing some downtime from the contest to go and film.

Nice idea, if a little limiting.

However, Creme negated to let Manu or Domi know. They also failed in letting us know that they were at Mystic with Quiksilver who would be using downtime to look after the lads in only a way which Quik would - boat parties and other general shit that has fuck all to do with skateboarding.

So, once all three Creme bods had finished their runs, I tried to get the action underway only to find out all the above.
Rod retracted to a purely support role from there on in, pissed at the donuts who sent him there - yet excited to party and roll with old Aussie mates. He was good value on the sidelines.

I'm stoked the Aussies were there. I'd hung out with Morgan and Jake a lot. Jake would come and give us a shout when he was down in Melbourne way back when he was scared of anything even booze related. This was right around the timme Jake got on Volcom (He's wearing SMP gear here as well as Etnies) and probably not long after Blind.
We both went to grab some food one afternoon in Prague and Jake refused to let me pay as "I'd looked out for him when he was younger, so he felt he should return the favour as he's now doing okay".
That's fairly fucking rad.
That line of Jakes at the end was something he did in two part with the upmost of ease - yet come camera time, it became a nightmare.
As he says at the end (His last of probably 70 tries) - "I really don't care".
Fair play.

Morgan had asked me to film a video park with him while I was in Australia, which we'd finished a few months previous to this - so it was nice to see him post deadline in a neutral country for the good times.

Jon Lorcan was someone I'd kinda met a few times. He's a rad guy - always grinning. I think this was right around the time he became the editor for Slam magazine.
Actually, after this trip he usked me to come film a tour video for Slam. They'd be going to Lisbon with a good crew but sadly I was elsewhere over their dates.
Ciaran O' Conner ended up putting that one together for them. One of Ross' tricks from Savoir Faire ended up getting filmed on that trip by Ciaran. It's probably the oldest thing in that video!

On street only duties is Ben Gauci starring in an unfinished line. Blind in one eye. A painter and decorator who had a moment as Dark Star TM. He's fairly excited about the world.
I've not heard from him in forever.
Richard Flude, Steve Gourley and Ben were the first people to take me street skating in Australia. They just grabbed me out of the citypark, threw me in the van and took me on their mission. For that, I eternally hold them in the highest regard.

I think a bit of this ended up in Morgan's Liquid Pixel World Lap. I can see Morgan getting doubles on the final Jake line...

Prague 27-28 July 2004 from Kevin Parrott on Vimeo.