48Blocks - Josh Kalis - Love park

48Blocks is dope, its a site supposedly dedicated to skating in SF, its mostly got interviews with slightly older skaters and if you haven't been skating long you might not know what they are on about, there is an interview with Josh Kalis on there at the moment - i'd hope you all know who Josh Kalis is from his recent Mindfield part, he is a real skaters skater and always comes out with a few really progressive tricks in his video parts, the interview also touches on the Philly days when him and Stevie Williams were absolutely killing Love Park. We were watching Welcome to Hell yesterday and talking about how it was strange that Josh Kalis was once on Toy Machine, I think its rad that Jamie Thomas had some faith in him and hooked him up, then in turn Josh had some faith in a non skating Stevie Williams and changed the legacy of Love Park forever, Josh basically started the Love revival!
I think I have definately posted this On Video documentary before but I don't care, here it is again:

The quality of this bits really bad, but the skating is dope.



What happened at Love was inevitable but truly horrible as well, the mainstream media cashed in on what kids had created, making literally millions of dollars!
It obviously couldn't last forever but the sight of groups of 20+ cops coming in just to arrest skaters is ridiculous, at one point the cops even tried to dress as skaters and go undercover, obviously they just looked like complete noobs and skaters could spot them a mile away, so they dressed as bums instead.
Just think how much it costs to pay twenty cops for the day, surely any damage caused to Love, which would be minimal, pales into insignificance in comparison to how much you have to pay loads of cops to be there every day! And when you have the designer of the park saying that skating should be allowed, and literally hundreds of businesses that loved the skaters being there you would think that the city council might have noticed, i'm stoked to have been skating when the second coming of Love happened, Stevie Williams reason part, half of the Photosynthesis video, even the simple pop out, were all so rad at the time, everyone was trying nosegrind pop outs and I still can't believe how good some of the tricks were - Stevie Williams switch frontside noseslide on a waist high ledge is ridiculous, I remember seeing a photo of it and just thinking it couldn't be real.
The saddest thing about Love is that there has been nothing like it since, it changed skateboarding, I guess the closest thing to it for a new generation is the Berrics, the one thing that almost all skaters look at and look up too, but as rad as the Berrics is it isn't real, its not on the streets and I hope that it doesn't mean kids will now just want to skate indoor parks all the time, street skating is where true creativity lies. Its all good skating parks and getting tricks down ready for street spots but its good to be on the streets, the attitude should definately not be "F**k the streets!"

This part was right at the start of the second coming of Love.

The start of this seemed to be ommited from the above.


This video shows DC offering $1,000,000 to keep skateboarding at Love, the council turned down the money! turn the sound off at 2:23 unless you want an attack of scarring euro pop, definately the worst case of music ruining an otherwise sick video part.



Here is a little Stevie Williams vid.

A few people don't seem to believe me when I say Stevie williams is one of my favourite skaters, but thats the rad thing about skating, is that I can like John Cardiel and Jason Adams, and Stevie Williams at the same time.