Surfing the city: Juan Rayos longboarding Madrid, Spain.

Produced by sk8cinema

“Any day now, a new fence will slice the Brooklyn Banks roughly in half, giving construction crews a staging area for trucks and equipment until 2014,” reports John Branch of The New York Times.

Steve Rodriguez, a well known rider and founder of 5Boro, is hoping to maintain access to the Banks for generations to come: “He wonders what all the heavy equipment will do to the smooth brickwork. He wonders if construction will stay on schedule, allowing the entire Banks to reopen in 2014. He wonders if the intervening years will tempt the city to consider another sort of makeover in the plaza.”

photo credit: Melle_Oh

Cirque Belgique: Belgian Snow, Skate, Surf Extravaganza. O’Neill team riders Delphine and Mathias Vanoverbeke, Axel Vermeulen, Keith Marcantuoni, and Pascal Van Der Mast surf Puerto Viejo, Peru, From Romania With Love freestyle snowboard documentary teaser, Luxemburg skatetrip, and Dopamine II surf footage.

Produced by Cirque Belgique

Fuerteventura longboarding: The steep, sinuous hills of Spain’s Fuerteventura Island (one of the Canary Islands) creates ideal conditions for longboard aficionados.

Production by Andro Kajzer

“It’s very hard to still find that naïve excitement. I still find the skate-rat kid who skates for himself all day inside me. But, I wish I could still get that naïve everything-is-awesome-feeling as quickly as I used to.”

“There are decks with laminated collages of famous punk rockers, decks adorned with mosaics of colored glass and found objects, decks in silkscreen and bamboo, and a deck where a steel stencil was used and an image burned into the wood,” writes Julian Guthrie of The San Francisco Chronicle.

“‘We want to show that art is not limited to people who consider themselves artists, and it’s not limited to a canvas or a certain shape,’ said Anna-Lisa Stardust Van der Valk, the curator and producer of ‘Skate This Art.’ ‘We have decks from professional artists, from children, from the elderly, from the disabled.’”

“‘I was sceptical at first,’ admits Denise Howard, director of sport at Brookfield school in Derbyshire. ‘But it’s something completely different, and being in the middle of landlocked Derbyshire, the chance for students to have a go at any kind of surfing was too intriguing to turn down,’” reports Kate Hilpern of the guardian.co.uk.

“Indeed, six million children worldwide have now been taught how to street surf, with 250,000 taught in the UK alone. ‘When you’re the last kid picked for sports teams, it’s horrid. I know because I was one of those kids. With street surfing, everyone’s rubbish at first, but you suddenly get it and it’s addictive,’ reports Fice-Thomson, who adds that the sport is increasingly used in training top snowboarders and surfers.”

“We’ll go to a skate park in East LA, in heavily controlled gang territory, or we’ll go to Skid Row and know we’re putting ourselves on the line. They’ll say, ‘Let’s say a little prayer, especially if they’re some people who aren’t saved.’ I never know if they’re referring to me. I don’t go to church or anything.”

Produced by SteelRoots

Cirque Belgique: Belgian Snow, Skate, Surf Extravaganza. Szymon Stachon at the 2009 Quiksilver skateboard Super Bowl, “A Day In The Life” with snowboarder David Doom, surfer Jamie O’Brien, and Hadlow kiteboarding.

Produced by Cirque Belgique