Most kids sweat the superheroes, the X-Men, the fantastical characters with special powers, opposing strengths and weaknesses, and accompanying storylines. For me, instead of comic books, I pored over Transworld, Thrasher, Big Brother, Slap. I didn’t have a Spiderman calendar, I had a fold-out poster of Dyrdek doing a frontside noseslide on a waist-high planter. In all honesty, I’m not sure how it is today with the kids and how they look up to the new generation of skateboarders, but when I was growing up, these guys were heroic. Idols. Larger than life. It was an entire universe that couldn’t be formulated, a cast of dynamic personas that couldn’t be scripted, each pro skater carrying a unique style, attitude, and responsible for reinventing the urethane wheel in their own fashion.

That’s what I spent the better half of lunch today talking about with Salman Agah, veteran pro skateboarder and 1/2 of Skate Book, a quarterly skateboarding magazine book compendium that not only documents modern skate culture, but immortalizes the skate of yesteryear by reanimating it for today. Skate Book also shares a dialogue with its accompanying web counterpart SkateBook.tv, where you can watch further video editorial.

I guess you could say Salman was like ..hmm.. Juggernaut? to me. He was always about charging head-on into a session, executing with concise, compact precision. Pummeling right through.

Be on the lookout for Skate Book’s second issue, which is due out soon at a skate shop near you. 2 words, kids.

Cardiel.

Kelch.

by bobbyhundreds