Looking Sideways: 10 Things
Looking Sideways: 10 Things
Here are this week's ten things I though were worth sharing
1. My recent episode of my Patagonia Type 2 podcast with the great Marie-France Roy (above), recorded in Jackson Hole at the end of our Natural Selection trip. Marie is that rare thing: somebody who is using their platform to try and instigate change on both the micro and macro level. As a snowboarder, she has used projects such as her movie The Little Things to try and connect all of her interests in on cohesive whole.
As an activist, her work covers many areas, whether it is her increasing involvement with Protect Our Winters, her frontline involvement with the Fairy Creek blockade, or personal projects such as her ambition to develop a working kelp farm as a way of providing tangible societal and economic solutions to the problems we face.
This one is lovely, nuanced and open chat with one of the warmest and most-respected personalities in snowboarding. We were also joined halfway through the chat but Marie’s close friend Spencer O’Brien, who contributed some questions of her own. Click here to listen to the episode.
2. Olympic judging controversy! This was such a high profile story (I just got to Normandy to stay with my in-laws, and even my mother-in-law had an opinion on it) it’s been covered all over the place, so I thought I’d pull together some links here. For me, Tristan Kennedy’s Whitelines piece was the most even-handed take on the whole situation; no wonder it was quoted in the Guardian and New York Times as well. Slate had a decent round-up piece, while elsewhere my pal and Natural Selection judge Sandy MacDonald (click here to hear my episode with him where we tackled the NS judging process) was also interviewed by Chris Grenier in this slightly combative Bomb Hole IG Live chat. I also got on the IG Live tip and chatted through the whole thing with BBC commentators and friends-of-the-pod Tim Warwood and Ed Leigh. Click the image above or here to watch that chat. Phew.
3. Another Olympic story that is depressing on many, many levels: allegations of sexual misconduct and inappropriate behaviour among riders and coaches on the US snowboard team. The claims, made by 2010 Olympian Callan Chythlook-Sifsof, are currently under investigation. Click here to see ESPN’s take on things, and here to see Callan’s original Instagram posts.
4. New podcast alert! Yep, my pal and friend of the podcast Jamie Brisick has been busy recording eight episodes for the inaugural season of Soundings, his new podcast for The Surfer’s Journal. Jamie is the classiest of acts, and I have no doubt this new pod will raise the bar for everybody in the surf/skate/snow podcasting game. I mean just check out the guest list: Alva, Laird, Mike D, Dane, Steph G. The show launches on February 27th, although TSJ subscribers can access the full series already. Click here for more, and here for my most recent conversation with Jamie.
5. More podcasts! My conversation with Ben Powell has 2021’s most popular episode, (and is one of the top 5 ever). If you enjoyed that chat, you’ll also enjoy Ben’s appearance on the excellent Skate Creative podcast. Listen above.
6. Even more podcasts! Thanks to listener Jonathan Davies for alerting me to The Reason Why, a brilliant podcast series about gentrification in Cornwall. Click here to listen. And I enjoyed this episode of the FNRad Podcast in which host Erik chats to Sam Bertolino, the Burton employee whose internal email ‘may have sparked Terje being dropped from the Burton team’, as the episode description has it. Click here to listen.
7. Elsewhere - I enjoyed this piece by Sander Hölsgens and Paul O’Connor about ‘skateboarding as a discipline of failure’, as explored through the medium of skate films through the years. Click here to read it.
8. My friends at Goodrays just released some new products - mixed CBD dummies, and CBD oils and drops. The latter were my secret weapon while I was over in Jackson commentating on Natural Selection (above); click here to find out more.
9. Congrats to my friend and recent blog contributor Chas Smith (click here to read Chas’s 5 things the WSL can learn from Natural Selection) on the release of his brilliant new book. Click here to pre-order your copy.
10. (whispers conspiratorially) It isn’t very fashionable to admit you like Jim Morrison or The Doors these days - which is why I loved this brilliant piece about the enduring appeal of The Lizard King by Ben Myers (who is also one of my favourite British writers). Click here to read it (and here to listen to my own playlist of lesser-known Doors tracks).