Skateboarding

A month after banning skateboarding near the Newport Pier, the City Council is now considering amending the municipal code to prohibit the use of skateboards and roller skates in other areas of Newport Beach. Currently, the municipal code gives the council discretion to regulate the use of roller skates and skateboards only on public streets and sidewalks.

Angelenos taking to car-free streets along CicLAvia's 15-mile route say they came out to have fun, enjoy family and give back to the community. One volunteer, who rode in the past, said she wanted to help Sunday because it was important to let people know that biking can be fun, and family-friendly, particularly when you don't have to worry about potential danger from cars. But some came to the streets with other means of transportation, For Spencer Knight a skateboard was the way to go. What made him want to skateboard the entire route?

Despite protests from skateboarders, the City Council on Monday banned the sport entirely from the city's boardwalk to avoid more collisions--and more lawsuits. "We are trying to make it possible to accommodate an impossible situation on that sidewalk," Councilwoman Ruthelyn Plummer said. "I'm sorry, but the skateboards are just one more burden on the sidewalk."

Merry Christmas, everyone! Here's a little skateboarding present courtesy of Thrasher magazine. Among the treats on the 2012 compilation video: --Trevor Colden with a lengthy front wheelie. --Dakota Servold grinding down a rail on a couple of flights of concrete stairs. --Paul Rodriguez sporting some stylish black-and-gold Nike shoes. --Silas Baxter Neal going old school with some blue suede Adidas Campus shoes (OK, I dig shoes). --More kick flips than you can possibly count.

When hotshot skateboarder Erik Ellington agreed to promote the oddly named upstart apparel brand KR3W four years ago, his duties weren't much of a stretch. "I just did the tricks out in the street ... dark slides and Casper slides and stuff like that," the Hollywood resident said. "And keeping it real in the streets." He and other skateboarders sponsored by the Santa Ana company -- who wear its clothes while they skate -- kept it real enough to suit young shoppers.

Revolutions are still televised, but they get Tumblr'd, tweeted and YouTubed first. This one started last summer when music micro-bloggers began deifying a pack of nine skateboarding, freewheeling teenaged rap vandals from Los Angeles. Full name: Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All -- or OFWGKTA if you're into brevity. Like most Internet contagions, the first germs of information spread via viral video. Directed by the crew's founder, Tyler the Creator, the clip for a song called "French" felt like Larry Clark's "Kids" updated for the "Jackass" and American Apparel generation: full of skateboarding, vomiting, automatic handguns and suggestive maneuvers with a plastic Ronald McDonald statuette.

Jake Brown was groggy from all the medication, but he knew where he hurt. "My wrist is pretty sore and my back and neck feel like I've been through a car accident," he said Saturday morning during a phone interview. "I guess I've got a fracture in one of my vertebras, but it's pretty minor supposedly, so I came out all right." Brown, 32, is fortunate to be alive after crash landing from more than 45 feet during Thursday night's skateboarding big air competition.

Bob Biniak, whose daring and innovative skateboarding style as one of the original Dogtown Z-Boys helped revitalize the pursuit in the 1970s, has died. He was 51. Biniak died at Baptist Beaches Medical Center in Jacksonville Beach, Fla., on Feb. 25, four days after having a heart attack, said his wife, Charlene. To his fellow Z-Boys -- a ragtag group from Dogtown, a rough beachfront area wedged between Venice and Santa Monica -- Biniak was simply "the Bullet," a nickname that saluted his affinity for speed.

At the Summer X Games in 2006, the fiery-haired action sports superstar Shaun White tried 21 times to land the most elusive trick in skateboarding, a holy grail of a maneuver that no human had yet to achieve: "The 1080. " That's three complete midair revolutions on the board, which requires both considerable air time and skill. White failed all 21 times, just as he had failed in all 29 of his tries at the Summer X Games in 2005. A 6-year-old sandy-haired boy from Malibu watched those 21 failures from the stands.

Re "He's Chairman of the Skateboard, So to Speak," July 6. Being a young business major, I found this article to be very interesting and somewhat inspirational. Andre Senizergues has become such a success at such a young age, and you might even say at exactly the right time. The skateboarding, snowboarding and surfing business is on the rise right now. Senizergues not only picked the right business to be involved in but also reveals some of his strategies to create a higher profit for himself.

Skateboard legend Danny Way is the subject of a new documentary, "Waiting for Lightning" by Jake Rosenberg, which follows his career from childhood to a spectacular 2005 jump over the Great Wall of China. The native Californian based in Encinitas is known for imagining and executing extraordinary jumps, such as his 2008 "bomb drop" from a helicopter onto a ramp. The documentary is structured around your jump over the Great Wall of China . How long had you had that dream and what prompted it?

"Waiting for Lightning" is a portrait of the extreme-sports superstar Danny Way, centered on his 2005 effort to leap over the Great Wall of China on a skateboard using an enormous megaramp to accomplish the stunt. Unfortunately, the athlete himself simply isn't much of a presence in this documentary, even as the film aims to celebrate him. Why it took some seven years to bring this story to screen is unclear. As the film uses the buildup and preparations to the jump as its structuring spine, people speak of Way as if he's already dead, often talking for him when he could be responding for himself (he is still alive and well and interviewed in the film)

Pro skateboarder Rob Dyrdek has sold his tricked-out house in the Hollywood Hills West for $2.125 million. Built in 2005 and designed for entertaining, the home features a two-story entry, an open floor plan, 20-foot ceilings, five bedrooms and five bathrooms in 4,706 square feet of living space. There is a swimming pool, a patio and a lawn. Dyrdek, 38, is executive producer, a creator and appears in the series "Wild Grinders" (2012), "Ridiculousness" (2010-12) and "Fantasy Factory" (2009-12)

Stacy Peralta was fighting off bronchitis inside Santa Barbara's fabled Skate One complex - a kind of Willy Wonka world for skateboard manufacturing that he and former business partner George Powell established in 1978 to distribute their groundbreaking Powell-Peralta line. While the factory hummed with the day-to-day business of cranking out hundreds of candy-colored urethane wheels and pressing plywood into signature decks for Kilian Martin, Tony Hawk and more top riders, Peralta ripped into a box containing DVDs of his latest documentary, "Bones Brigade: An Autobiography.

Skateboarding legend Stacy Peralta's latest documentary, "Bones Brigade: An Autobiography," is like a high school reunion, filled with affectionate memories of an earlier, more innocent, time. The director returns to his pro-skateboard roots, and it's clear from Peralta's comments, sprinkled through the film, that the sport and the players remain his first love. But while his breakthrough documentary, "Dogtown and Z-Boys," cracked open the window on a largely unknown world in vibrant and visceral ways, "Bones" feels like an epilogue.

Traffic was heavy in and around downtown Los Angeles on Sunday, but not for the reasons one might expect in a city known for freeways, angry drivers and bumper-to-bumper frustration. Organizers estimate about 100,000 bicyclists, pedestrians and skateboarders flooded much of Spring, Figueroa, West 7th and East 4th streets and beyond as part of the city's fifth CicLAvia festival, which bills itself as the city's biggest block party. More than nine miles of city streets stretching from Boyle Heights to MacArthur Park and from Chinatown to Exposition Park were closed to motor vehicles for five hours.

"Plan for Skateboard Park Moves Ahead," Oct. 9. I just finished reading the article on the proposed Calabasas skateboard park in which skateboarders are characterized as "kids that enjoy risk" who would otherwise be "sitting in front of a TV eating Chee-tos" if it were not for skateboarding. I am fed up with image of skateboarding as a children's sport that is quickly forgotten about at the same time the kid gets his drivers license. I am a 26-year-old college graduate with a good job, a car and my own house.

The beachfront city of Malibu voted Monday to outlaw a form of youthful daredevilry known as speedboarding -- an extreme hobby that has grown increasingly popular here. Speedboarders don protective helmets, knee and elbow pads, and sometimes even sleek bodysuits before hopping onto long skateboards and rocketing down steep public streets and canyon roads at speeds greater than 40 mph. Enthusiasts swear by speedboarding's addictive adrenaline rush.

For 20 years, Diavolo has been Los Angeles' wild child, a company of daredevil dancers leaping and cavorting on pitching wheels, Goliath walls and other playground equipment from a super-sized Wonderland. An unsettling issue kept nagging: Was it circus or was it dance? Artistic director Jacques Heim intended the latter, but he couldn't always convincingly make the case. The choreography's superhuman feats often overwhelmed the metaphorical themes within. But a corner has been turned.

Tom Sims, an innovative skateboarding and snowboarding pioneer and former world champion who helped bring snowboarding to the masses by pushing ski resorts to embrace the fledgling sport in the 1980s, has died. He was 61. The founder of Sims Skateboards and Sims Snowboards died Wednesday at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital after suffering cardiac arrest, said his sister, Margie Sims Klinger. "He was the godfather of all board sports," Michael Brooke, publisher of Concrete Wave Magazine, said Friday.