http://thisispushculture.com/?page_id=281
http://thisispushculture.com/
* this is the links writing, not mine
Pusher Bio’s
This came right off the Bustin Boards blog from the OG himself Ryan D. Not so much a bio as a PushCulture recap but here it is in his own words.
So I got up early, excited to spend some time at the shop alone before the guys showed up to open the store. These are my favorite times in there because I can go into mad scientist mode, print funky shop boards, work on prototype ideas, fix things in the store that have been secretly bugging me all week and other random things. Basically, I can just fiddle around with no defined agenda. My dad calls this ‘putsin’. Growing up I remember his favorite thing to do was go ‘putsin” around in the barn. Usually he would emerge Sunday afternoon with something cool that he made for my mom or an old civil war era tool that he had restored. I took to the ‘putsin in the barn’ sport very young and a longboard company was eventually spawn in the same barn. I had my own section in the lower part of the barn where original boards are still hanging on the walls today along with the original ‘bustin’ shop sign.
Anyway, back to the story ten years later. So I’m putsin around our Brooklyn shop this morning and decided I would throw a set of the new 2010 Bear Grizzly trucks on my Maestro. I had ridden the trucks some when we got the samples but until today have been content with the old Grizzlys I have on my board. I was working some on the component wall in the store and admiring the sexy new shape of the Bears when I decided it was time to snag myself a set. We recently got in a huge shipment so I felt comfortable that I wouldn’t be screwing up the inventory too bad (aka accountant Rob won’t be bustin my balls too bad for stealing inventory). While I was at it I noticed we needed a Maestro for the Demo Rack at the store so I decided to go ahead and retire my original Maestro as the Demo and print myself up a new one. We changed the drop-thru cutout on the recent batch to fit a few more truck brands and I figured it couldn’t hurt to break out a freshy board for myself to celebrate Memorial Day. So I printed one up real simple like I like it and threw it together with the new trucks and my super perfectly broken-in 75mm Boca wheels and Swiss bearings.
It was by this time 11:30 and I had a half hour before the store opened so I jumped on the board and ripped around a brunch lively Brooklyn. Immediately I couldnt believe how butter the setup was. The carve and rebound was so much smoother than before. I felt like I could turn on a dime and the rail-to-rail motion was so smooth and predictable. I skated right up til 11:55 before barreling up to the shop door to find a friendly fellow from Madrid waiting at the door. He was a Dervish rider in Spain and was sent to our shop by his girlfriend who wanted a Spliff. We talked for a while about the Spliff, then about how sick the Loaded Dervish is, then about Spain and then forever about the World Cup (watch out for Spain next month!). Finally, he sent his girlfriend some pictures of the Spliff special editions we currently have in the shop and waited for a reply on her choice. I casually mentioned that he was welcome to take one of the Demo boards out while he waited and quickly reneged… i said “no wait you gotta take my board if your going out”. He went out for about 5 minutes and came back wide-eyed and a bit concerned. “I have to have one today, please tell me that you have one to sell me” he said.
After gripping and setting one up for him, I thanked him for coming and passed him off to Mike and Solomon to coordinate the Spliff purchase. I had a very specific game plan for this weekend and wanted to be home by 1 so I could begin work on my computer. I’m leaving next week for my wedding and honeymoon and have a long list of tasks, mostly web updates, video logging and design stuff, that I need to knock out before I leave the shop for a month. My fiance has already gone to Maryland too coordinate last minute wedding stuff (don’t ask me??) and I so I’m home alone for a long weekend to do my work. PERFECT. I was looking forward to sitting at home in the air conditioning jamming the music as I photoshoped a few ads, tweak a few web pages, logged a few hours of footage for our CW video, etc etc etc. I love that stuff, enjoying a string of uninterrupted design work days is a Top 5 for me. You can really get your wheels turning and produce some quality work. In heaven I think I’ll have the baddest Mac Pro available and be allowed to sit in a quiet room for weeks on end playing with Bustin Boards projects. This long weekend had heavenly potential.
So that WAS the plan before I jumped on my new board to go home. As soon as I hit the streets of Manhattan I began worrying that I wouldn’t make it home today. Not only was the board as fast and liquid as any longboard I’ve ever ridden, but the weather was beautiful and the city was alive. Almost zero wind, about 75 degrees and sunny. With every push I realized I was not, in fact, going home to work in the air conditioning. I skated from Brooklyn to the West Side of Manhattan (a trip that normally sort of wears me out) and when I got there I just couldn’t get off the board. I cut south down to Houston street and just rolled with the flow, weaving through tourists, pushing through yellow lights and having the recurring thought that I’d never had so much fun longboarding. I ended up passing my old apartment building on Thompson street and stopped to snap a picture of my board in front of Generation Records. When I first moved to NYC, these were my stomping grounds and it was cool to rip the old streets on the new board. I dropped out of the village and proceeded to skate aimlessly for the rest of the afternoon having the time of my life and effectively destroying my plan to be productive. And there you have it, hours and hours of critical productive design work wasted on my skate addiction.
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