Corey O’Brien, owner of The Ritz, was a pro skater back in the day—his single-tail Santa Cruz board is displayed at Cinebar. So it makes sense that he would host this super-gnar screening party. The Ritz will show the latest episode of the Viceland show a week before its premiere. The Thrasher-sponsored King of the Road contest debuted in 2003, but the show in its current form is relatively young. King of the Road is about halfway through its second season and features multiple skate teams competing at locales around the U.S. Teams include San Jose’s own Enjoi and the Santa Cruz-based Creature.

King of the Road
Sat, 8pm, Free
The Ritz, San Jose

Skateboarding and the Bay Area—and the South Bay in particular—have long been intertwined. Many of the biggest names to come out of the sport in the 1980s hailed from Silicon Valley, and Thrasher magazine once identified San Jose as the skating capital of the world. And so it makes perfect sense that Volcom and The Berrics would pick Mayfair Skatepark as one of only 10 stops on the 2015 North American “Wild in the Parks” tour.

The touring amateur skate contest—now in its 13th year—set up shop at Mayfair on Saturday, July 11, and let the kids rip. The free contest was broken into three categories: 14 and under, 15-21 and amateur. It is likely that many of those who entered the competition did so with the hope of advancing to the final round of the series, which is scheduled to be held on Oct. 17 at The Berrics skatepark in Los Angeles. (The Berrics, which is owned by pro skaters Steve Berra and Eric Koston is a co-sponsor of the series).

However, there is another reason for young skaters to strut their stuff at Wild in the Parks. According to the Volcom website, the contest series has established itself as a “proving ground for emerging skateboarders.” In other words, the event functions as a combine for aspiring skaters.

We sent our videographer, Linh Nguyen, to Mayfair Skatepark. Watch:

Not Everyone could pull off an entire art show inspired by a single shoe design, but then most shoes don’t carry the significance that local skateboarder Steve Caballero’s Half Cabs do.

The art show, called “Birth of an Icon,”  Feb. 7 at Cukui in San Jose’s Japantown, will feature work by more than 25 artists, including Caballero, who is also curating the event. The idea behind the show is for each artist to create a single piece of artwork based off the shoe in some way.

“I kind of wanted to do something with the premise of you know when people do artwork of the classic Air Jordans, they have the Air Jordan in the piece of art. People look at that painting and go, ‘oh cool, Air Jordans.’ I wanted to do the same thing but with my shoe, and when people see the painting they go, ‘oh Half Cab,’” Caballero says.

The Half Cabs, which are made by Vans, landed in stores in 1992, right as street-skating was taking off. The shoes came to be synonymous with skateboarding and remain popular to this day.
Artists’ sole instruction in creating their pieces for “Birth of an Icon” was to take inspiration from the Half Cabs, so it probably doesn’t hurt that the shoes have such a memorable logo: a drawing of Caballero doing the Half Cab trick. Interestingly, the Half Cab skateboarding move was actually pioneered by Tony Hawk in an alteration of the Caballerial—one of Caballero’s most influential tricks, which he invented in 1981. It was the launching pad for his career and a big leap forward for skateboarding.

It’s fitting, though, that the shoe is named after a trick inspired by a different trick, as the Half Cabs were based on a previous Vans shoe design of Caballero’s, the Full Cabs. They were essentially the same, only they had high tops. Caballero learned that skaters were cutting off the high tops and duct-taping them back up in order to skate better in them. He called up Vans and suggested they make Half Cabs and take a little height off the ankles.

Caballero’s contributions to skating are well known enough that the Caballerial was the subject of a Jeopardy answer a few weeks ago. (“Time to hit the street on this piece of equipment and do a Caballerial.” The question, of course, is “What is a skateboard?”)

“It was really cool to see that. It’s pretty amazing to see how far skateboarding has come,” Caballero says.

Joe Sib became a household name in DIY punk rock after starting Sideonedummy Records in 1995 in Los Angeles, releasing albums by Flogging Molly, 7Seconds, MXPS, Gogol Bordello and many others. Sib has also gained recognition for his spoken word and comedy act, where he tells tales of punk rocking and skateboarding, most of which he did in San Jose, where he spent his formative years.

We asked Sib, how moved to Los Angeles in 1990,  to revisit some of his favorite memories and San Jose haunts. he knows, the one from the late 80s.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up on the border of Los Gatos and Campbell. This was in the 80s when I moved in with my dad. It seemed like everywhere there were condominiums with these names like Los Gatos Woods and there were a bunch of other people that were recently divorced and living solo and having their kids come stay with them on the weekends.

My dad moved into Los Gatos Estates. I lived there with him and I went to Westmont High School. I was a skateboarder. We were about two minutes away from Winchester Skate Park. That was the best thing. I was in skateboarding distance of anything I wanted to do. It was rural enough because you had orchards back then that you walked through, which isn’t the case anymore.

What was the best show you ever went to in San Jose?

The Ramones. It was 1989 July 4th, 5th and 6th at One Step Beyond. I went to the show on  the Fourth of July and totally get annihilated. If you’re a Ramones fan, you know they’re very American. To this day on Fourth of July at my house, we drink American beer and listen to American bands and blow shit up. My wife hates it, but I love it. It’s the way we roll.

So this particular Fourth of July, it’s 1989, The Ramones come through, I go to all three shows. The first night I got totally annihilated. The second night and the third night I wanted to be sober. The Ramones are in town, I really want to take it all in.

A buddy of mine, Corey O’Brien, who owns the Blank Club, we found out they were staying at the Holiday Inn and we were trying to go down there and find out where they were. Murphy’s Law was opening, from New York City. It was pretty amazing because Murphy’s Law is a legendary hardcore band. They almost blew the Ramones off the stage. All the sudden you had New York hitting San Jose.

The second night I watched the show, I actually climbed onto the lighting board and the sound board during the show and this guy reached over and grabbed my arms and was yelling at me while the Ramones were playing. But of course I couldn’t hear anything cause it’s the Ramones at full volume. He motions me to climb over the barrier. So now I’m in the lighting-sound booth and in-between one of their songs he’s like, in this crazy accent, “You can be up here, but you can’t get in my way.” It was half Spanish and half English. So now I got a full direct view of the Ramones and I’m just watching everyone lose their minds to the Ramones.

At one point the guy says to me, ‘”Hey, go get me a beer and I’ll let you watch the rest of the set up here.” I’m maybe 20 years old abd I run over and grab him a Heineken. I come back. I watch the rest of the set. At the end of the set he tells me he’s Arturo Vega—at that point I didn’t know who Arturo Vega was—but he seemed important.

He tells me, “hey would you like to meet the Ramones?” I’m like, “Nah, I don’t want to meet them cause if they’re dicks it’s going to bum me out.” I loved Ramones—everyone has their gateway band. He said to me, ‘The Ramones are not dicks.” That night he introduced me to Joey, Johnny, Richie and Dee Dee. It was like, there they are, right in front of me. It was insane. I got autographs and everything. Then they split.

I didn’t know it at the time that Dee Dee quit that night. That was the last show he ever did. Since then, I’ve become good friends with Johnny. I produced the 30 year anniversary concert of the Ramones here in LA. I became friendly with the Ramones when I was in Wax. We toured with the Ramones. I became really good friends with Joey when I was in 22 Jacks. 22 Jacks backed up Joey on his last trip to Los Angeles. He did a whole set of Ramones songs, which was pretty amazing. None of those experiences with the Ramones would have happened if it wasn’t there for that night in San Jose.

Rey Resurreccion, one of San Jose’s best, unsung rappers, recently released a video for his track “Saturday”, produced by the Bangerz. The video itself is pretty standard, mostly a lot of shots of Resurreccion and his crew biking, skateboarding, breakdancing and, of course, plenty of tattooed women. What is exceptional is the song, due in no small part to the productions skills of the Bangerz.

One of Resurreccion’s gifts is how effortlessly he raps. He’s got a cooler than cool, laid back flow and spits out solid rhythms with clever lines. In “Saturday,” Resurreccion talks about hanging out with his good friends with no plans in mind, using Saturday as an analogy.
(“Rollin’ down the block/Cruisin’ with the homies like every day’s a Saturday.”)

Where this song truly shines above Resureccion’s normally high-quality work, is in the Bangerz textured production. The beat is a laid back, new-school jam, but it’s nuanced with old school sounds. It’s clever, so hip hop fan will love how brilliantly the Bangerz reference familiar 80s samples within the context of a strictly modern track. Casual hip hop fans will just love how cool everything sounds. The low synth bass line is a nice touch.

Tony Hawk had nothing but love for San Jose at the Birdhouse Left Coast Tour 2012, tweeting: “Thanks San Jose! Your park is awesome; hope the city keeps it going. @ Lake Cunningham Regional Skate Park .” Our photographer was on site to catch the action with the Birdhouse skate team and local legend Steve Caballero.

Following the demo at Lake Cunningham, Tony and the Birdhouse crew stopped at Circle-A Skateboards in downtown San Jose for an in-store.

Photos by Alex Stover.

MORE PHOTOS: +100 photos from the Tony Hawk Birdhouse Left Coast Tour in San Jose
READ MORE: An interview with Tony Hawk

San Jose is a legendary skating spot, even in the mind of Tony Hawk. When he first started skating in the ’80s, while growing up in San Diego, he wasn’t even supposed to respect it, thanks to the bitter divide between NorCal and SoCal boarders.

“The rivalry was bizarre,” he tells me now, while prepping for the latest tour with his Birdhouse Team, who will come to San Jose’s Lake Cunningham Regional Skate Park Sunday for a demo. “We had a very small population that couldn’t get along. It was very polarized.”

But Hawk couldn’t help himself, because one of his earliest skating heroes lived in San Jose: Steve Caballero. And he’ll never forget the day he got to go to Winchester Skate Park in Campbell and skate with “Cab” for the first time.

“To this day, that’s one of the most monumental events for me,” says Hawk.

Hawk has skated the Lake Cunningham park only once, before it was completed. He calls the design, which features the world’s largest full pipe and cradle, and tallest vert wall, “incredible,” but marvels even more that this is just one of a whole system of public parks that now line California—a far cry from what was around in his younger days.

Of course, Hawk himself is one of the skaters whose fame ushered in the massive popularity of skateboarding that made these bigger and better parks possible in the first place. His new “Left Coast” tour comes not long after director Stacy Peralta, the former pro skater who made Dogtown and Z-Boys, brought his newest documentary to Sundance—a film that is likely to take the legend of Hawk and his fellow skaters to yet another level, even as it breaks it down to very personal and fascinating stories.

Bones Brigade: An Autobiography takes a look at the’80s skateboarding team of the same name that featured both Hawk and Caballero, and changed the sport forever. It allows the various members to tell their own stories, and focuses on their growing fame and rivalries, especially the infamous one between Hawk and Christian Hosoi. In the end, the movie is as much about how they pushed each other as a team as it is about their individual legacies.

For Hawk, the documentary was revealing, but not in the way you might expect. “It was fun to reminisce, but it was more interesting to me to get everyone else’s perspective on what our era represented to people, and to each other.” There was hardly time for such insights back then, he says, because “we were all fighting our own little wars.”

For this tour, Hawk will be bringing along skaters such as Kevin Staab, Willy Santos, Aaron Homoki, Shawn Hale, Clint Walker and several others. He knows his own skating is the main draw for a lot of fans, but he’s also entered in to what he thinks of as a new phase, where part of his goal is to give some visibility to rising stars.

“There’s a new generation of guys pushing the limits,” he says. “If I’m the one who turns on that spotlight for them, I’m happy.”

Tony Hawk and the Birdhouse Skate Team will demo at Lake Cunningham Park in San Jose on Sunday, July 15 at 2pm; free. An in-store will follow at Circle-A Skateboards, 4pm to 5pm.

Jai Tanju is waging a war against any faction set on destroying his favorite form of expression: film based photography. He’s dug himself in, armed with only his wits, various analog cameras and worldwide support from enthusiast ready to prove digital is not always best.

His blog filmporvida is a nexus for aspiring photographers from all over. Although convention seems to suggest otherwise, Jai has some pretty convincing arguments why film is superior.

He’s not some raving curmudgeon; far from it, Jai is skilled in all forms of photography and visual editing. He’s just a comfortable with a high-end digital camera as he is with a Holga. We recently spoke with him about his art.

When did you get your first camera?

I didn’t get a camera until i was maybe 26 or 27. I was kinda late to the game. My grandpa gave me his Nikon FE2 because his eyesight was going out and he was getting a auto-focus camera.

When and why did you start the Print Exchange?

I started the Print Exchange program six years ago out of sheer boredom. There is a lot of down time to being a skateboard photographer, so I would sit around a lot in my office waiting for checks to come in. I was constantly checking the mail box for that check that never came; so, I started to wonder why I wasn’t getting anything good in the mail anymore.

Someone turned me on to a documentary called “How to draw a bunny” about  a New York artist named Ray Johnson who did the New York correspondence school where he would exchange art with people from around the world. After seeing the film, I noticed a photo pinned to the wall of my office that a friend had sent me a year or so before. So, I took it off the wall and wondered to myself why he hadn’t sent anything to me recently. A light bulb went off in my head at that point…I hadn’t sent him anything back.

I decided to start sending him things and wrote Print Exchange Program on there so he would know to send something back, and he did! From there I got obsessed and started sending photos to everyone I knew, friends, family, artist and other photographers. It caught on quickly and before I knew it I was exchanging with 30 people from around the world. I was sending out 50 to 100 photos a week. After 6 months, I made a zine with everyone’s addresses in it and urged them to send mail between each other. You have to remember, this was a time when everyone wasn’t as connected as we are now, and blogs were just starting. Once I made the filmporvida.blogspot.com it really took off. Now I exchange with 300-500 people and get from 1 to 10 things in the mail everyday.

Photo by Jai Tanju

Do you think your experience as a skateboarder helped your artistic endeavors? How?

Without skateboarding I wouldn’t be who I am today, and I might have never picked up a camera at all. Skateboarding gives you the freedom and confidence to move about this world in an artistic way. It’s hard to explain, but at some point historians will look back and talk about skateboarding and its affect on the world like the impressionist and see that it changed the world as we know it.

How do you see the SJ art scene these days compared to ten years ago?

Well, it seems like a lot more is going on now downtown. The A.D. gallery has done a lot for the city, cultivating a great art scene, but we need more. The bottom line is rent is too high here, and the city needs to do more to make things easier for people to start small businesses.

I have wanted to start a photo gallery for a few years and can’t because the rents are crazy. There are too many unused storefronts downtown, and the people need to put it to the test like they did in L.A. They have to rent out their space or risk losing them. L.A. changed the rule from what we have to the “use it or lose it” and hundreds of galleries and shops opened that same year.

Do they make more money not renting them here? San Jose has a rich art history that always goes in phases form decade to decade. I helped a lady, Katherine Funk, set up and take down shows at the gallery connected to City Hall on 4th Street, and she told me some great stories about the art movement in the late 70s and 80s, and it sounded like chaos in the streets. When I first moved to downtown, I thought we could do anything, but those times seem even crazier.

What were your biggest shows?

The Print Exchange Program show went to New York City then to London and most recently to a great gallery in Salt Lake City. I had three shows at the No.12 Gallery in Tokyo, which I felt good about. I had a show last year in Philadelphia called “Heavy.” I made 140 lbs of metal/photo collages. that was something new for me.

I have done a few shows in San Jose that were by far my favorite. I got to do a show with my best friend Jason Adams at Black and Brown called “beauty is in the eye of the beer holder.” I really felt like we were pushing our boundaries, and that feels great. Jason and I got to do another show this last year at the Empire Seven Studios in Japantown called “Shits getting Heavy so Kill yourself Laughing,” which was my Philly show “Heavy” and his SF show “kill yourself laughing,” which we brought to San Jose for all our friends to see.

Any words of wisdom for aspiring photographers?

If you look through your viewfinder and you don’t see what you want, go find it.

Jai Tanju’s work will be part of Black and Brown‘s 7 year anniversary on March 31st.