Looking Sideways: 10 Things
Here are ten things I thought were worth sharing this week.
1. On this week’s episode I welcomed the great Lesley McKenna back to the show for her second visit, four years after her first appearance in June 2017. If you don’t know Lesley, she’s a snowboarder and Olympian who is, to my mind, one of the most original and quietly influential thinkers in action sports.
Lesley was actually my first ever female guest, and in the intervening years a lot has changed - and not just for my humble little podcast. There’s the fact that her efforts with GB Park & Pipe (which formed a large part of that original discussion), helped yield a further British bronze medal for Billy Morgan at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games; as well as the wider changes we can expect following skating and surfing’s own Olympic bow at the 2020 Tokyo Games.
It’s the type of new territory that is, to my mind, crying out for the type of sophisticated insight that Lesley specialises in. Whenever I need to sense check my understanding of any new developments in our industry, Lesley is my first port of call. Which is why I decided to get her back on the show for an agenda-free catch up about all things sideways as our culture steps into a brave new post-Tokyo world.
I’ve been lucky enough to count Lesley as a close friend for over 25 years now, and I always relish our time together. I know the conversation will leap off in spontaneous directions, and that it’ll be thought-provoking and intellectually nourishing. I purposefully didn’t prepare for this conversation so I could enjoy that spontaneity in real time, and that’s exactly how it panned out. Click this link to listen.
2. During a recent chat with Ben Powell for a forthcoming episode of the podcast he mentioned this Slam City interview with Skateboard! editor Steve Kane by Neil McDonald. It is amazingly good; click here to read it.
3. More UK skateboarding! This time a new podcast by Joel Curtis called The Skate Creative Podcast. Click here to find out more, and here to listen to the very good recent episode with Percy Dean. And if you want more Percy, have a look at this interview with my friends at Good Measure.
4. Explore Your Mind, the latest by the prolific Dane Gudauskas and Alex Kilauano. Watch it above.
5. What happens when two of the world’s best surfers sit down to chat about their lives, careers and the state of competitive surfing? Watch On The Process with John John and Jordy above.
6. Print, as we all know, is great. Which is why I’m so proud to be the editor of Curator Magazine, why we worked so hard to get Looking Sideways Vol. 1 out in the world, and why I’m stoked to have a column in the latest print issue of Whitelines magazine, which comes out this autumn. In the meantime, congrats to my pals at MPORA for the publication of their first ever print issue. Click here to find out how to snag a copy.
7. Big news from the States as Patagonia boycott Jackson Hole Mountain Resort after the Wyoming super resort held a GOP fundraiser featuring Marjorie Taylor Greene and other contentious right wingers. Click here to find out more.
8. I’m normally immune to this type of thing, but I thought there were some interesting ideas in this blog on the fundamental dishonesty of most discourse around sustainable business (which is, of course, ultimately an oxymoron). Read it here.
9. In the last year or so, Britain’s much-loved National Trust organisation has found itself at the heart of the culture war and the debate about how we choose to remember our collective past. Yes, really. This clear-eyed New Yorker piece gets to the bottom of it.
10. I miss snowboarding. And this short Instagram clip of Blake Paul cruising and at his local resort made me miss it even more. Watch it above.