Clip Of The Week by Steve Cuellar (08/17/08)

Barcelona, Spain 2007 (1 of 7)

I was sifting through my old hard drive today looking for some pictures to blog and noticed that I had a “Barcelona, Spain 2007″ folder contained in there so I decided to share them with you broken down into 7 parts. Don’t know if any of you know this but back in the Summer of 2007 I was lucky enough to travel halfway around the world to Barcelona, Spain for 2.5 weeks with the World Famous Seventh Letter crew for a tradeshow called Bread & Butter. (Bread & Butter is basically one of the world’s largest tradeshows that showcases all of the clothing brands that you can think of. From The Hundreds to Marc Jacobs, they had it all in one huge ass area.) It was an honor for me to roll out to Europe with some of the best, west coast graffiti writers in the USA. That’s something that I would have never imagined. Let me remind you that this happened about a year ago (before the blog was created) so the stories behind these upcoming blog entries are going to be based on my (short-term) memory. So shall we begin? Then let’s take a trip down memory lane…

Switch Ollie Over Barrier - Barcelona, Spain 2007 (Sants Station)

Let’s see, where should I begin? Well I had a 4am flight out of LAX the night that I was leaving to BCN so I was thinking I had 2 options: 1.) Stay up till 4am and sleep on the plane? or 2.) Sleep early around 9pm and try to wake up to catch the flight and be bored out of my mind for the next 14-16 hours in the air? I ran with Option #3. To party all night long and catch the flight out of LAX at 4am and stay drunk out of my fucken mind till I passed out so that I didn’t remember anything. Hahah. So that’s what I did. My first stop that night was at a rooftop party on a loft in Downtown Los Angeles at my boy DREOS house. (Sorry no pics.) After that it was about 2am so we went back to my homegirl Nicole’s pad to grab my luggage and go pick up my flight partner RUETS. But before leaving LA, we had to drink some more, just to celebrate. (Not that I wasn’t faded already.) We ended up doing beer shots out of a ghetto makeshift beer bong from a 12oz water bottle. What better way to start off a European Summer trip right? Savageness!

Gabriel, “Come back and guzzle this brew kid!”

Asian Glow & Chicken Legs

Cruising down the street in my Six Four…

After picking up RUETS and flying for a couple of hours we had our first stop. A 3 hour layover out in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. While waiting to exchange flights we just walked around the airport and took some random photos.

RUETS - Philadephia, PA

I remember being super tired and semi-drunk still while taking this photo. This huge black dude was falling asleep and snoring right on his seat so I told RUETS to sneak up on him and sit next to him to take a pic.

After getting on our flight from Philly to Barcelona we finally arrived and saw this advertisement at the airport. Look at the hand sticking out of the wave with what looks like a can of yellow paint! Montana can I’m assuming? You know what that means right? They’re letting us know that it’s ok to paint in Barcelona! Especially Big Orange Bubbles! Hahaha, just kidding. But seriously, I thought that this advertisement was pretty cool. It was the first thing that I noticed. It’s alot larger than it seems but I didn’t have a fisheye lens to capture everything. Just my trusty old 4 Megapixel Canon Digital Elph SD400. It looks like an advertisement for one of major beer companies in Barcelona. OBVI….right?

View of the Airport Traffic

After grabbing a quick snack to eat, we find out through our itinerary that the rest of the crew won’t be arriving for another 8 hours! (FYI: Alot of us took separate flights.) So we had time to spare and ended up riding a tourbus aka The Double Decker! On our way towards the bus stop we saw some pretty abstract Barcelona graffiti. If you’re a skater and/or writer then this place is pretty much the place to be. There’s not a block or area where you can’t find a place to skate or paint. It’s nuts over here. The street culture and people are amazing.

After catching a train from the airport to the center of the city, we randomly stumbled upon the famous Sants station in Barcelona! For anyone who skateboards then I’m sure that you’ve seen this spot before on ALL of the skate videos. Anyone and everyone that visits from out of the country stops by here. You know I had to skate this shit. Soggy Legs, Hangover, 50 pound Luggage and all! You can’t see where I stashed my luggage in the photo but I have a medium sized, 50 pound, black suitcase and a backpack with skateboard that I had to lug around town for a good 8 hours until the Seventh Letter heads arrived and got us our hotel rooms.

Ollie (My legs were soggy from the flight so I wasn’t trying to bust sucka.)

After skating we hopped on the next available Double Decker bus and cruised around town. You can see me taking photos on the top deck of the bus below. An amazing sight of a beautiful city for sure. In fact, I’m thinking I need to go back and visit right now! (Note To Self: Barcelona Summer 09)

Barcelo Hotel Sants

Took this photo for ANDR SAC.

We caught some racial graffiti with a NAZI symbol in the alleys of Barcelona. Don’t remember what it said but it wasn’t nice. Haha.

After finishing the tour on the Double Decker, we went back to the airport to go meet up with The Seventh Letter heads. We waited for an additional 4 hours (on top of the previous eight) with a total of approximately 12 hours due to some complications with customs. Evidently the artwork for the Letter’s First show was causing problems at the airport and everyone had to get searched. Ouch! I mean, you can’t blame airport security. Just imagine 20-25 writers deep on a chartered plane to Europe with huge wooden crates! It’s gotta look suspicious. After all that was said and done though we all finally regrouped and caught another bus into the city to settle down into our hotel rooms compliments of Royal Elastics. Royal Elastics is a shoe company that sponsored the event and rented out the hotel rooms for all of us. Basically they’re the shit. After getting our rooms situated we went to the 12th floor and had a private rooftop pool party.

Loungin…

Some pretty famous graffiti writers pictured here but we won’t list any off.

RISK WCA

To Be Continued…

Clip Of The Week by Beto Guerrero (08/10/08)

PuzzleVideo.com

If you’ve been watching skate videos since the early 2000’s then you might remember 411VM.com and PUZZLE. Puzzle was the European version of 411 and had some of the craziest footage from upcoming European skaters. They are now producing FREE bi-monthly issues of their video magazine available for download on their website. You just need to register with a valid email address. I just downloaded all 4 of the issues and some additional movies that are available under the FREEVIDEOS section. All I can say is, “FUCK, I quit!” Kids are too good these days. Go check out the insane footage that these Europeans are busting out. Double Frontside Flip to Boardslide down rails and Caballerial Double Flips! What about Double Bigspins? Hmmmm….

X-Games

This past weekend we had the opportunity to stop by The Home Depot Center in Carson, CA to check out the X-Games. Thanks to my boy Brandon over at Artsteez.com for hooking up the tickets! This was my first time attending so I didn’t know what to expect. All I can say is that it was EXXXXTREEEEMMMMEE! Hahaha, nah just playing. But seriously if you’re into having lots of tattoos, wearing DC’s, cap backwards with sunglasses, sportin Ed Hardy gear and all then this is the spot for you! Bro City son! Don’t they have a saying for the OC aka Bro-C? Just fucken with ya’ll. I got nothing but love for everyone. Sarcasm is key. With all the shit talking aside I still had a good time watchin the BMXers and Moto-Xers rockin the course as well as Bob Burnquist doing huge Switch Frontside 180 Indy Grabs on the vert ramp. Geezus! See ya’ll there next time!

Ummmm, excuse me girlies. Can I take a picture with you for my blog? Photography: ArtSteez

I swear that I’m on the “VIP” list dog. Double check that for me.

No Available Seating…

Bra Boys and Nachos

TBK (Taco Bell Kids)

The Moto Course

After chillin in the crazy heat for over 2-3 hours we were kinda over it. So we decided to beat traffic and go home early and just chill out. (I think I’m getting a little too old for this shit to be honest.) X-Games “BRO”VERLOAD. While being held up in traffic we benched some flicks of graffiti that were on the freeways.

FISHE & VERSUZ - KOG’S

JEVEL HOF

ISRL, SCRIPT, JEVEL

SCRIPT (This kid is getting up lately.)

JETR, GIROE

Aaaaggghhhh!!!

Manolo Robles

My boy Masaki just recently sent me a YouTube video through Myspace of a skater by the name of Manolo Robles. First off, I don’t even know this cat but from the looks of his skate video he needs to get on a major team! The footy is abso”fucken”lutely ridiculous! Girl or Chocolate, sponsor this guy already or else WE WILL! (Hahaha, just kidding. We’re not backed up with major ends like that…….YET.) But from the looks of his video he could be based out of Barcelona, Spain. I’m not going to spoil any of the tricks that he’s busting but let me list off just 1 for you. Frontside Kickflip 5-0 Grind to Treflip out! WTF….

Clip Of The Week by Steve Cuellar (08/03/08)

Monster Garage

We were approached by MonsterGarage.com recently to film some action shots of us skateboarding through mechanical machinery for an online segment of their show under the “Extreme Actions” category. So we sent out one of our soldiers (Gabriel) to go handle the job. You can visit their website to view the slow-mo HD video and rate it. Just some fuck around shit but it’s exposure to the masses nevertheless. Thanks to Breck for setting this all up.

Skate All Cities x Monster Garage

Manual

Ollie

Masaki Itoi SAC (Wallpaper)

Here’s a new wallpaper image for your computer showcasing the talents of our boy Masaki doing a Backside 180 Nosegrind up the ledge in Santa Monica. Other wallpaper images of the Skate All Cities Krew are also available for download in our Downloads section. Photo courtesy of James Reynolds.

Photography by: James Reynolds
Available Sizes: 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×960, 1600×1200

Clip Of The Week by Beto Guerrero (07/27/08)