Pic by Jero
Kevin Yee Interview by Michael Garlinghouse:
San Francisco has some of the best, most interesting street spots in the US, how do you go about finding new spots and challenges in San Francisco?
Most of the spots I find are around my place, on my way to work, or around my work. My eyes are always keying in on my environment for skating possibilities, and my mind is constantly assessing whether or not what I’m seeing could be skated in an interesting and challenging way.
Since I am filming a lot these days I also think about how beautiful and captivating the image will be. Once something stands out to me I start to skate it in my mind in various ways. I keep at it until I find a trick or a line that feels complete or I decide that the obstacle really isn’t worth it. If I find something good then I am quick to type it into my phone and take a picture of it. After that I will naturally gravitate towards the spot again and again. Sometimes I will decide against my first trick impression and think of something even more interesting. And again, I might just eventually write the spot off.
The other day for example, I went back to a park by my work that I have been studying for months. I really love this park, it’s called ‘Yerba Buena’. When it’s warm out I like to stretch and eat lunch there. Anyways, I had three tricks picked out in a single area that I wanted to do individually for photos. Just last week I went there again and the AHA! feeling hit me… I realized that I could connect all three tricks into an epic line. Of course, when the urethane hits the pavement I often find that there are variables like my own mental-bodily states (fear, frustration, lack of focus, dealing with injuries, soreness, tightness etc.) and the actual physical difficulty of the trick that I have to overcome. I am getting better at alleviating these variables through diet, stretching and working out, but I have a long way to go.
It’s an amazing feeling for me to land a trick just like how I imagined it. It’s usually harder than I imagine it and I think that is because in mind skating I work with my ideal body, not taking into account a long week at work, an unhealthy meal, an unclear mind, etc… Whether I lace the trick or not, after the real skating is done I always go back to the mind skating with a clearer idea of what my body is capable of. It’s hard to talk about this practice without creating a dualism between ‘mind’ skating and ‘real’ skating… but my feeling is that in ‘reality’ the two are completely intertwined…
(I wrote an article on the topic of mindskating, check it out at http://stabyourselfintheface.com/?p=1069)
Fakie 450 back royale, pic by Labez
You have lived in SF for a while and the city has been skated and filmed in for a decade, is there much potential in the city still?
I find new things to skate almost everyday… So YES there is still really no limit on blading potential in SF. Come out here and find out for yourself! I actually just moved to Oakland and even there I have been walking through the neighborhoods with my homie Matt Murphy and finding blocks full of amazing trick possibilities. At the same time, we don’t have a lot of session spots. When you’re on someones front porch about to lace their down ledge there’s no time for goofing around. You have to handle shit fast and be out. To really enjoy street skating in SF you have to also have an eye for unique spots, if all you want to skate is a perfect down rail then this isn’t the city for you. If you want to see what I am talking about then buy a copy of ‘RIP SF’!

Vertical Wallride, shot by Dale Travers
When did you first meet Sean and how did your relationship with him grow to what it is today?
I met Sean through Pat Lennen a few years ago. When I met him I had just seen ‘The Apple that Fell over the Lake” and was eager to probe him about what I considered to be the philosophical content of the video. As I remember it, this essentially amounted to a misunderstanding between us, but he did want footage of me for his next video. I gave him some throwaway clips since I had committed to filming for Pat’s video. Pat got busy with work and I quit my job. So I ended up having lots of time to blade. Sean was down to pick me up everyday. He was hurt for a lot of the time we were filming so he would just introduce me to sick SF spots and I would do my thing as he filmed and made suggestions. I went into the filming of the video feeling pretty non-committal, almost two years later, by the end of the filming and editing of the video I was the producer. Near the end of the filming for the video Sean came out with Inri Cloth and asked me to be part of it. 2010 is going to be a big year for Inri, one of the things to look out for is a full length video!
Pic by Labez
What is your craziest Sean Sea story?
I don’t know about ‘craziest’ but this one is pretty good: Sean and I were in the middle of filming for RIP SF and my hair had gotten really long. It was starting to bug me while I was skating so I went and got it chopped off. I show up at Sean’s pad to skate and he goes, “Ohhhhhhh….dog what did you do to your hair!!!” I’m like, “I just got it cut… I think it looks pretty good.” Then he’s like, “Dog, you just set the movie back months, how are we supposed to make it look like this is all one day when your hair is suddenly short?”… Then I’m like, “Well maybe I could get a haircut in the middle of the day?” Sean gives me a look like I’m the biggest idiot in the entire world, I agree… that was a pretty bad idea. So we get in Sean’s van, and I ask him where we are going. He says we are going to wig shop, and I’m like, “Sean… there is no way I am wearing a wig, thats crazy!” no response… We pull up to the shop, (of course he knows exactly where the wig shop is!) he parks illegally, runs in and I wait like 5 minutes and he comes out without a wig, doesn’t say anything about it and then we go skating.
Negative makio shot by Travers.
Give me 3 reasons why someone should give Xsjado skates a try.
Xsjados are the most comfortable and responsive blades. That’s 2, number 3 is if you don’t like them then you at least come away from the deal with some shoes.
Negative citric acid by Dale Travers
Where/what do you draw your motivation/inspiration for skating from?
One of the sources of my motivation is the fact I know that this is my time to focus on rollerblading. There are other things in life that (I think) I could love just as much as rollerblading, writing for example. But most of those other interests don’t demand a young body, so I plan to explore those interests later in life. For better or worse, I am the kind of person who can only focus on one thing at a time. In terms of inspiration, I have always loved the way that martial artists move—stylized, quick and in unexpected ways. I take those images and try to approximate them with my skating—running on walls for example… I also had an obsession with x-men comic books when I was younger. I thought it was the coolest thing how each x-man had his or her own special and unique power. I think that had a big impact on me! And maybe that is related to how I try to focus on my unique talents and push them further and further. The street terrain I come across inspires me too. The more beautiful, unique, and challenging the spot is the more stoked I am to find a way to skate it. I get really excited to skate hard when I am traveling, the whole mind-skating à real skating dialogue gets more or less dropped and I lace tricks impulsively because I know that I won’t get to go back anytime soon. Finally, (I’ll stop now since I could go on forever on this topic) like everyone else, I get juiced when I am skating with my close friends.
540 toespin shot by Travers
While going to school at Berkeley, you stopped skating for a while. Why did you take that intermission from skating? What sparked your love for skating again?
In hindsight I see that I took that intermission from skating because I needed to develop an identity outside of being a rollerblader. Rollerblading was really all that I concerned myself with until I was about 20, the only thing I thought had any value. I was angry at the world around me and rollerblading was my only solace. So when I was about 20, at a time when all the members of my crew (SNF) were going in different directions for the first time, I looked in the mirror and realized that I didn’t know who I was. I became consumed by this question of self. I figured rollerblading was a step along the way to some grand self-realization, but that I had to move on from it to keep progressing as a person. So I switched my focus from rollerblading to studying philosophy, religion, and literature. I poured my heart into my studies in the same way that I had poured my heart into skating. I ended up at UC Berkeley studying philosophy, which is a fate that I don’t think anyone could have foreseen. I definitely never considered myself to be particularly intelligent in high school. I started skating again during my last year at Berkeley, but only at skateparks as a kind of medicine to escape depression and the pressure I was putting on myself to excel in my classes. After I graduated I met Pat Lennen through my old friend Nick Whitmore and he asked me if I wanted to start filming a section. I was honored but I hadn’t been filming/skating street hard for years so I wasn’t sure if I could pull it off. After my first street session with Pat and Rory Melehan (who happened to be in town) I was waiting for the train to come and it hit me like a bolt of lightning that I was going to pour my life back into skating and work tirelessly towards perfecting this art. I don’t know how to further explain life transforming moments like these! —All I know is this: here I am 3 years later.

Bump to Topsoul shot by Travers.
How does your full time job effect your skating?
Anyone who works a full time job and is still focused on progressing their blading knows that the balance is fucking tough. There’s no getting around that. Most of our co-workers are thinking about how they really should get to the gym soon… We are working the same 8 hours as they are and then overcoming the drained feeling to rip the fuck out of a skatepark like a 16 year old who ditched class, played video games, took a nap, smoked a spliff and went out for a sesh. On the flip side, it’s nice to have enough money to buy plane tickets every so often!

Fish up, backslide down shot by Labez
How did you and Tommy Boy decide to begin the SHOCK website?
Tommyboy called me up one day and told me that he was starting a website and he wanted me to be the ‘SF Correspondent’. Tom has been writing articles for various blading magazines for years. He felt like it was time to start putting that work into his own concept. I was interested in bringing my passion for writing and rollerblading together and seeing where it went. So I took him up on the offer as long as I had the freedom to be myself on the website (i.e. SHOCK would not only promote prostitution, illegal drugs and blacking out, but also, philosophy, abstract thought about blading, and meaningful interviews). A couple months later, before the site had dropped, Tommyboy and I went to New York City for a week long blading trip. Tommyboy and I are both rather intense personalities in our own ways. We got to know each other a lot better on the trip and we simultaneously were having long discussions about what we wanted to do with SHOCK. Out of these discussions the seeds were planted for what SHOCK was to become and I went from ‘correspondent’ to equal partner. That seems to be a pattern in my life…
What is the purpose of SHOCK?
I think Tommyboy is the best one to answer this: via phone he says, “Right now in rollerblading people are accepting of everything even if its fucking garbage. The purpose of SHOCK is to segregate the sickest elements of Blading culture from all the watered down bullshit that we see on the internet… and a big fuck you to everyone who is not down with us.”
You are working on making a SHOCK video, how is that coming along and what can be expected of it?
The SHOCK video is coming along very well, steady ripping.
