Paul Frank interview

Here's designer Paul Frank talking about Julius the monkey and bikes he's desiging for Nirve. I'm diggin' those new school Stingray bikes.

Julius and Friends from Paul Frank

This is Paul Frank's monkey Julius along with snowboarder Tina Basich and the Chaka Brah Yeti.

I remember going to an art show in Costa Mesa in the late 1980's, while I worked at the Vision Skateboards video company. The art was by Paul Frank, who was either a art guy at Vision at the time, or one of that crowd. He showed us this little monkey character, and a couple of us went, "Cool, it looks like Curious George." Paul got pissed off and said "It's Julius, it's NOT Curious George." We shut up after that. It was a cool little character, and I didn't think much about it after that.

Years later I started seeing teenage girls wearing shirts with that monkey all over the place. Julius was the basis of the Paul Frank clothing line. Now Julius is in a bunch of cartoons, and Paul is designing all kind of products. It all started from a little sock puppet monkey.

Don Brown and Pierre Andre Senizergues now

Pierre Andre Senizergues is now owner and founder of Sole Technology which owns Etnies, Emerica, and E's shoes. Don Brown is vice-president of marketing and manages much of the day to day activities. Sole Technologies has gross sales of around $200 million a year now.

Don Brown freestyle skating in 1989

This is Don Brown, another Huntington Beach local freestyle skater in the late 1980's and early 1990's. This clip is from the Vision Skateboards video Barge at Will, the biggest budget skateboard video Vision made in its heyday. I worked at Unreel Productions, the Vision video arm at the time, so I got to know many of the pro skaters of they day, besides the ones I hung out with.

We all got hassled by the HB police pretty much every day we hung out at the pier. I remember thinking, "you cops have no idea that these guys are top five in the world at what they do." That's the way it is with the Creative Class in the early days. Many, if not most, of the highly creative people in the world are seen as juvenile delinquents, downright losers, or worse.

When Pierre Andre got that French company to make shoes, Don went to work with him. Again, I met these guys because I was a BMXer and occasional skateboarder. I wasn't networking. I wasn't looking to befriend highly creative people. In those days, Pierre, Don, me and the other locals would loan each other money to get a burrito or slice of pizza. We were all guys into weird sports and living cheap to be able to do what we liked doing. None of us really pictured it going very far. In most of our minds, we were just delaying going to college for a few years while skateboarding or riding bikes.

Pierre Andre at the Huntington Beach Pier

Here's Pierre Andre, as we called him then, skating at the Huntington Beach Pier in California.

I got laid off at Wizard Publications at the end of 1986. BMX freestyle was my life, and I'd accidentally broken into the industry, only to be laid off five months later. I called around and wound up working at the American Freestyle Association, the little company that put on all the BMX freestyle contests at the time. I moved to Huntington Beach in early 1987, and started hanging out at the pier on the weekends. There were several freestyle skateboarders who hung out and practiced there, Pierre Andre was one of them. He was the top freestyle skater in France. For those not into skateboarding, "freestyle" is skating on smaller boards without using ramps. The tricks freestyle skaters did weren't big, but they were really hard, or "technical" as skaters say. Street skateboarding was just evolving at that time in the late 1980's, and freestyle skaters' tricks formed the basis of much of street skating.

The freestyle skaters didn't make much money, maybe $10,000 to $12,000 a year, if that. Several of the foreign guys, including Pierre, lived in Huntington Beach much of the year because their sponsor, Vision Skateboards was located in Costa Mesa, the next city over. Because the pier was a known spot, one that happened to have lots of women in bikinis walking around, all the skaters in the area showed up there on a regular basis. Among those HB area locals then were Don Brown, Mark Gonzales, Ed Templeton, John Lucero, Jason Lee, and many others, along with a lot of freestyle BMXers.

One day Pierre walked up to me and said, "I found a shoe company in France that's going to make skateboard shoes." I said, "cool," and didn't think much of it. That shoe company was Etnies.

Ed Templeton art interview

There's a bunch of nudity in the art photos in this interview, so if that bothers you, don't watch it.

This is an interview in Europe by a really creepy guy called Red Ronnie. But Ed Templeton gives some really cool thoughts on skateboarding, religion, drugs, art and women. I really like how explains skateboarding. I think he hits a great truth about how skateboarding (and BMX and snowboarding and surfing, etc.) attracted the dispossessed people in the early days. Perhaps that's while so much creativity sprang from the skateboarding world in particular. There is more to this interview on You Yube of you search "Ed Templeton art Red Ronnie."

Beautiful Losers trailer

So I was a humungously fat taxi driver in Orange County, California a few years ago. I drove down a street near Fashion Island Mall one day and there was a van on its side in an art gallery parking lot. "What the fuck?" I thought. So I drove in the parking lot to see what was up. A bunch of people were setting up for an art show, someone told me. I came by a week or so later, after the opening, and went in to check it out. The show was Beautiful Losers, and much to my surprise, there were works in there by three or four people I knew, and many others from the skateboard world I knew of. There was even a mini ramp in the lobby. It was only then that I realized that all the weird skateboarder and BMX art had actually risen to another level. It blew me away, because I made zines and bike videos and was a part of that world the show explored. I love how they talk about art in this trailer. To me, that pretty much sums it all up. That's Ed Templeton walking backwards through Huntington beach in the beginning.