Like many skateboarders of the 70s, I, the teenage "Ted" was fascinated by the Dog Town articles published in Skateboarder Magazine by C.R. Stecyk III (aka John Smyth).

"Yesterday's heros, the mangled messages left molding by the all-fronts media blitz and tomorrows tragedies are all meaningless to the contemporary skater. All that matters is the act of skating. The pure and simple act...Forget about the mainline and the fast lane: the edge of the glide is all that is of value. The true skater surveys all that is offered, takes all that is given, goes after the rest and leaves nothing to chance...The skating urban anarchist employs the handiwork of the governmental/corporate structure in a thousand ways that the original architects could never even dream of: sidewalks for walking, curbs for parking, streets for driving, pipes for liquids, sewers for refuse, etc., have all been re-worked into a new social order."

– John Smythe aka C.R. Stecyk III, The History of the World and Other Short Subjects or From Jan and Dean to Joe Jackson Unabridged. Skateboarder Magazine, 1980.

The teenage "Ted" discovered finding your own fun was more fun than the fun handed to you by your high school sports program. The ride was such a bitching deal...getting vertical, that frontside hang-time, that perfect moment of weightlessness. How could you compair it to chasing a ball around a hot field all day with coaches yelling at you? Skateboarding meant riding and thinking independently, it was my freedom, it was the most important part of my teenage life. Frontside grinds were always on my mind. At the time, I, the teenage Ted was a frontside grind.

All that mattered was skating, but what really changed me over the years was Craig Stecyk's writing and ideas. His radical mixture of pop culture trash and important history; his effortless connection of events separated by great distances of time and space; all the logic made sense to me like a heavy-duty 220 volt connection, plugged diretly into my adolesent mind, ZAP! It was like he was doing radical skate manuvers off of ideas instead of concrete. Years later, when developing concepts for Drop Bass Network rave parties, I realized Craig's intellect acted as an important catalyst for me, providing a transition from skater to artist, getting rad physically first, then going completely vertical in my mind, WHOA!

>> work in progress <<

Outline

Go over all Dogtown articles, get better cover art? Rename title?

Conceptual art image for Dog Town article.