My sweet new Banquet business cards say "Skate Correspondent," so I've been dutifully watching Life of Ryan and catching up on Rob & Big to keep up with the pop culture sk8geist. Today I put my finger on exactly what is missing on both of those shows: Skateboarding. Also, Harleys. So go watch this instead: Skateboarding + Harleys + Emerica team = Wild Ride Tour. VBS.TV is rocking the reality this month, with the first two episodes up already and more to come.

If those two episodes leave you jonesin' for more while you wait for the rest, go back through the Epicly Later'd archives to catch up on old profiles of Emerica riders Braydon Szafranski, Andrew Reynolds, Neckface, Kevin Long, and Jerry Hsu.

While I was clicking around on VBS.TV, I ended up revisiting a bunch of the old Epicly Later'd episodes. This doesn't have anything at all to do with Emerica but... damn, Ray Barbee is so rad. Go watch that one too. Come skate with me some time to to see the lingering evidence of how much I studied those old Powell video parts in the day. Thanks to Ray Barbee, Matt Hensley, and Ron Allen, I've still got no-comply variations to spare, 20 years after the fact.

This doesn't have anything to do with Emerica either, but while you're soaking up the goodness over at VBS.TV, go check out the hilarious interview between Ian Svenonius and Ian Mackaye. What does that have to do with skateboarding? Admittedly, not much. But skate photography pioneer Glen E. Friedman has a great new Fugazi book out this month, just looking at it is making me miss DC like crazy, and SkateAndAnnoy recently posted this old footage of Mackaye to prove his 80s skate cred was legit:



More six degrees of skateration: Spike Jonze, another dude with DC punk roots, is the creative director of VBS.TV. You might know him from his work on some of the best skate videos of all time – or, you know, some zany Hollywood stuff – including the legendary Yeah Right! flick for Girl Skateboards, the company he co-owns. This is an extremely roundabout way of letting you know that the Girl Skateboards website is all freshly tricked out this week. Also, a good excuse to put more video in this post (from Yeah Right!) – people go nuts for the videos, apparently – and to make a little tribute to down-but-not-out skate fanatic Owen Wilson:



I'll mail some Banquet stickers and random ASR shwag i collected to whoever comes up with the lowest Bacon number connecting Owen Wilson to Kevin Bacon in the comments to this post. Get to it!