I know, it’s Vert season in Sweden right now, but we’re a little behind here at Confusion headquarters – we’ve been hitting up skate events and hardcore shows in different countries and putting out magazines. Rest assured, you’ll be seeing some insane Vert Attack 5 coverage on the site one of these days, but for now we’re going to flash back to the final day of the Ultra Bowl II in Malmö, Sweden.
Once upon a time, in a land not so far away, August 20th, in Malmö, Sweden to be exact, they held the MALMÖ ULTRA-BOWL II, where they invited skaters from all over Europe and the USA. The event was two days long in the backyard style pool at the Stapelbäddsparken skatepark.
Burnside is the oldest D.I.Y skate park in the United States and possibly the world. This Halloween I was lucky enough to partake and enjoy the 20 year celebration of the park. This skate park began its form during one Halloween night 20 years ago. Almost every following Halloween there has been some kind of gathering and skating at the park to celebrate its creation and existence. And this year was no exception…
Near the end of the summer, there was a 40th birthday skate bbq at the Siegburg bowl, about 20 minutes south of Köln, Germany.
We had been invited up to Sweden for the DIY Sibbarp Skate weekend over a month before but as the weekend drew near, the first Issue of Confusion was still not off to the printers and I almost canceled the trip. But my old saying is “It’s better to go and regret going, than not going and regret not going.” And I never regret it. So we closed down the Confusion offices on Friday morning, caught the train to the Köln airport and 2 hours later we arrived in Copenhagen airport.
Brusk Collective from Brussels, Belgium recently hosted the “Fiesta Des Ursulines” in the Square Des Uruslines where 4 years ago they completed their social-urbanistic project with the completion of their first concrete bowl and street skating area. They invited part of the Consolidated team (Roberto Alemañ, Sean Gutierrez, and Danger), to celebrate the release of their collab Brusk/Consolidated board. Roberto would come up from Spain, and Sean & Danger would make this event the beginning of 6 months in Europe, where they are building a new park with Grindline in Copenhagen.
This last summer I drove in our VW bus from Germany out to Asturias, in the North of Spain, with my girlfriend to check out the land, the people, the ocean, the skate scene and the general lifestyle of the region to see if we want to move there in the future. On our way back through Basque Country, I couldn’t resist to stop in at one of my favorite skate spots, La Kantera.
While I was down staying in a hotel in an industrial shit hole of a town, Spreitenbach, which is near the grand city of Zürich, Switzerland I was contacted by Lars Greiwe and Bertrand Trichet to let me know they’d be taking care of business in Basel, about 45 minutes from where I was staying. I decided to get out of the hotel and join them for an evening in Basel and a small adventure across the border to Germany.
Any given Sunday in Cologne, our crew attempts to motivate to go skateboarding. Either to the Factory/OMSA Bowl in Düsseldorf, or to the outside concrete bowl in Siegburg, Germany. We all talk about how we aren’t going to drink much the night before so we can be fit to skate the next day. That never works out. “Just a couple beers” turns into “too many beers”, and before we know it, we’re stumbling home at 4 in the morning, with plans for meeting at 1pm the next “morning” to go skate.
Josh Mattson testing out the Roosevelt Park in San Jose.
The Roosevelt Park in San Jose is similar to the Santa Cruz skatepark. Not surprisingly, both are designed by everyone’s favorite skatepark designer, Zack Wormhoudt, who arguably has increasingly improved his skills by his 100th design attempt.
The Cachagua Land project is a DIY “skate park” that Zarosh has been working on for the last few years. People come out to the land, deep in the Carmel Valley in central California to bring concrete, help dig, build and skate the ever changing concrete contraption. The project is a work-in-progress as cinder blocks, rebar, parking blocks, man holes, and hundreds of bags of concrete are collected piece by piece and bag by bag.
So it was time to migrate south for the winter, or at least for a … Keep reading