We did an interview with Jason Salfi from Comet Skateboards quite a few years ago, back when they were based in Oakland, CA.  It’s still relevant and goes to show how far ahead of the game they were building skateboards with sustainable business practices.

Good luck guys with the new shop!

Comet Skateboards
126-B Ithaca Commons
Ithaca, NY

www.cometskateboards.com

Perhaps I should define what I mean by nature. We are nature – us humans. Our home if you will, is the same ecosystem that the so-called environmentalists and tree huggers are trying to save. Our home includes the same natural resources which our consumptive lifestyles depend on – even in the face of depletion. Nature is our present and future. Nature is our flesh and bones as much as it is whales and rain forests.

After a few years of interviewing some amazing characters, I began to feel pessimistic about sustainability in the surf industry. I could see that green marketing was on the horizon and that consumer education would always take a back seat to consumer desires. So I essentially stopped creating content and my contributions to Phoresia ended. Luckily, the more pragmatic David Lawless has continued to add valuable content and kept the thing going.

Today I had the opportunity to watch a short animated lecture by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek. Zizek explains how we have mixed charity into our modern capitalism as a way of softening the moral blow of egotistical consumption. This implication has summed up so many of my misgivings. To buy a “greener” surfboard using recycled materials, does not only provide the buyer with an untrue sense of doing right for the environment, it also masks the bigger problem which is our depletive Western lifestyle – one that is being propagated worldwide by globalization.

I realize this is pessimistic and nihilistic. So why do I bother telling you so? As surfers we are given a second sense. We have the opportunity to commune so closely with nature that this communion for many of us becomes like a religion. In other words, we are drawn spiritually or intellectually, or however you want to think of it, to this primal experience of subconsciously realizing our part in the cycle of life. I conclude that this gift is something I shall continue to nurture and purse ‘till the end of my days. For the time I spend riding waves is non-depletive – even if all my cultural trappings that got me there are most definitely so.

It is some­thing that you can spend your time doing and it feels like a life well spent—a non-productive, non-depletive act that is purely aesthetic.

Steve Pezman

 

First the cooking situation. Some context… we sold our house a while ago and were in the process of moving out of state. We realized it was easier/cheaper to sell everything and keep only the essentials and replace big, bulky items once we relocated. This would also give us a chance to go down to the bare essentials and dial in the things we really needed. I had amassed a healthy set of cookware through my grandparents. High quality, long lasting cookware, the stuff you’d expect your grandmother to have and keep forever. The problem was I had all these obscure specialized things, like double-broilers, that I never used. I realized most of what I cooked was done in a skillet or pot. I had a few nice teflon skillets that were in various states of leeching evil into my food. I realized quickly those weren’t worth keeping and that I had 2 sizes of pots that I used regularly so those were keepers. They nested nicely into a larger post which is good for soups and pasta, so easy justification to keep that one. The skillets were the problem though, I never had the patience to learn to cook properly in a non-coated pan, but I really liked the concept of a cast-iron skillet. Simple, effective, timeless and reliable. I knew if I could figure it out, I’d have a piece of cookware I could keep forever. Just like my grandmother would’ve done. I ditched the teflon pans and bought a large cast-iron skillet. Problem solved, through simplicity and reverting back to the time-tested basics. It’s worked out great and a year later my skillet is nicely seasoned.

Now for my surfboard, the antithesis to the cast-iron skillet. First, context. I had always gotten poly boards glassed with 6/6/6 glassjobs because I was conscious of durability. I started wanting lighter boards but wasn’t willing to give up durability, so I settled on stringerless epoxy boards. Good solution, it worked out well for my needs – lightweight, durable and performed really well. With surfboards, there’s always some tradeoff. When you talk about increased durability, you are usually sacrificing lightness. With poly boards, the trick was to go to lighter blanks and lighter glassing. We all know how this ends. Disposable boards, that ride well for a really short time before they start falling apart.

You start getting into EPS blanks and you can go lighter on the blank and make up for it with more glass. So you end up with a board that weighs the same, maybe a little less than a poly equivalent but is noticeably stronger and quite a bit more durable/long-lasting. Following logically down that path, you start removing bits, namely the heavy wooden stringer. Again, more glass to compensate, now you have an even lighter board that is just as strong. At some point you start getting diminishing returns with super-light EPS. At EPS blanks around 1# EPS you start getting into problems that more glass alone won’t solve. The foam is just too spongy to support the forces encountered while surfing without adding so much glass to make it uncomfortably stiff. So what’s next? Even lighter foam, but putting a skin on top of it to support the surfing loads then strategically adding glass where it’s going to provide the most benefit. Turning to technology to solve problems that arise such as carbon on the rails to provide the structural rigidity and flex since you’ve ditched the wooden stringer and gone with a super-light core. Putting the whole lot into a vacuum bag to optimizes the cloth/resin ratio, which has the added benefit of decreasing weight and increasing the strength over a hand-layup. That’s the point I’m at with now.  I’m really happy with a 5 pound board that’s been abused for 2 years and hardly shows any signs of wear. It’s been a years-long process of evolving through boards, but I’ve ridden all the different construction methods and learned firsthand their strengths and weaknesses and know that where I’m at now is a really good place to be.

Cast iron vs. carbon fiber, two totally different approaches to similar problems. One solved by going backwards technologically, the other solved by pushing up on the boundaries of what’s possible with the given materials. This isn’t to say this is the right solution for everyone, but illustrates the point that the solutions to a problem are a matter of perspective. I could have easily flipped the solutions and gone with a super high-tech skillet and gone back to a chambered balsa board to solve my durability issues. That’s not where I wanted to go with either solution though, my context was different from what yours may be. Someone else’s solution may not be your solution. Figure out your context and solve your problem accordingly.

People like to say that skateboarding is fun and if you’re not having fun, why bother. I even try to believe this myself but if I’m completely honest, I’ve never been convinced that skateboarding can be reduced to mere ‘fun.’ Of course, there is always a danger of over-analyzing and over-intellectualizing skateboarding, by suggesting a political interpretation where often, there is none.

In recent years, I’ve certainly been guilty of championing by-gone eras of skateboarding as purer, more ‘punk,’ more anarchic than the last decade of Xgames, Dew Tours and Life of Ryan but I now accept that skateboarding has always had participants who were involved in it for a variety of reasons and with them, people lurking on the sidelines trying to figure out how to cash in on it all, just like any other youth subculture.

When Ricardo asked if I wanted to write a little something about how ‘skateboarding shaped my values as a youth,’ I finally understood that’s all I can do. Skateboarding is the medium I used to travel through the world and the platform from which I chose to view it. Here’s what I have seen.

My introduction to skateboarding was pure enough. I lived on a main thoroughfare from Langland Bay, the surf capital of Wales, to the village of Mumbles. As a child playing in my front garden in 46 Overland Road, I’d see various older surfy types coming back from the beach. By the time, I was six, my life ambitions were to surf, ride a bike with no hands and tic-tac a skateboard. At eight years old I got a newspaper-round. Sometimes, I used to peek at the magazines I was supposed to deliver and one time found an ad with a page full skateboards. And there it was a skull with a snake crawling out of its vacant eye-socket on a blood red background. ‘Brand X’- it said. Mum, I want a Brand X skateboard for Christmas. Well, the brand X board was a too-expensive at sixty quid, so mum got me a relic from the 70s for twenty quid from Dave Friar’s surf shop.

Soon after I was removed from my Mumbles, a place I regarded as Paradise and ended up, an expatriate Welsh kid living on a tiny Islamic Emirate of Bahrain but I took my skateboard. The early years were just pure joy, an indulgence in sensation. Pushing hard, bombing hills, turning and carving driveways, launching off little drops, no tricks, just feel. No worries about the larger world of skateboarding and what other people were doing. All day everyday. No internet, no cable/ satellite television, no skate magazines or videos. We were just a steadily growing crew of expatriate skate kids and even a few Arab kids. Slowly snippets from the wider world found their way to us. People would visit home and ollie back and eventually came the inevitable Thrasher Mag subscription. Skateboarding soon became something to ‘practice’ and focus on. There were things to learn, standards to meet but this was mostly positive. It certainly attracted those of us who could not focus on much else. While I enjoyed organized sports I was always just waiting to be done with rugby, running or hockey to get back on my skateboard. In the classroom, my mind wafted out the window to the freedom of the streets. Ultimately, I think skateboarding helped with my ADHD and helped me find focus even when I didn’t want to.

By the time my crew and I were teens, we began to understand the abstract anarchic implications of dedication to the four-wheeled plank of joy. We thrived on the lack of rules, breaking the law, defying parents, teachers, any and all authority figures. We began searching further and further from home for good places to skate. When the distance was too far to skate, we’d pack our switchblades in our back pockets and hitch hike into the city.

Pete - Frontside Rock | photo: Jeff Fryer

I can still vividly recall, skating on hot Arabian nights, drenched in sweat at 2am, attacking marble ledges in the deserted streets. Or pushing through rush hour traffic, the Islamic call to prayer echoing through the souq, crazed and dirty white boys determined to go nowhere as fast as we could. It was situations such as these that helped me understand that life on a board was not a typical approach to living. We were seeing and experiencing the urban realm in quite a different light to our peers. Fighting security guards who tried to confiscate our boards, spending hours in police cells, running for lives after offending devout Muslims after trying to skate their mosque, breaking bones, getting knocked out- essentially putting ourselves in insanely ridiculous situations that I would never want my child to put herself through but of course it had to be done to make us who we are. Hopefully, she’ll find something like it and not tell me until she’s twenty-five.

As most of my friends left skateboarding behind, I began to wonder if I should also. It certainly wasn’t helping me with girls or school or so I thought. There were times, I’d run into a teacher or girl from school while I was out and about and cringe that I had to walk past them, covered in dirt and carrying a useless wooden toy. But I couldn’t give up.

Ultimately, skateboarding taught me not to give a fuck about how people viewed me. Skateboarding taught me perseverance, pain management, concentration, and creativity. It didn’t teach me to fight but it I could handle a beating because of it. It kept me fit and alert. It took me to hidden corners of the city, introduced me to street life and those that live it. It also introduced me to the DIY ethic. My first publication was a one-page skate zine called ‘Notes From The Underground,’ while bearing little resemblance to Dostoyevsky, it was my first literary pursuit and was incredibly empowering.

To this day, I continue to reap the benefits of twenty-five years of skateboarding. From my taste in art and music, to my politics, to my reading of the city and architecture, skateboarding provides the lens from which to view the world. And no amount of commercial skatexploitation can take that away from me.