Be it my lowly Wisconsin origins or an unfortunately shallow embankment of brain cells, I'm certainly not above a little journalistic Cheez Whiz. So it's without much care or concern that I make the widely clichéd Warhol-attributed reference, "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes," because anyone, really, could have a 15-minute photo show nowadays. Once upon a time, no lie, it used to be a real pain in the ass to be a photographer: dealing with all that pesky film stuff, the inherent frame limitations to a roll, not knowing what the hell you got or if you even got it until all that tedious developing and processing crap... let's just say it wasn't for everyone. Obviously, that's not anywhere near the current case, and it would probably be quite the mind-blowing statistic to know how many photos are taken the whole world over in the period of just one single second. Boom! Even in the act of pondering there went the last of my synapses for the day. One or two more vaguely constructed paragraphs like this and I'll need to shut down and recharge my neural capacitors to deal with tomorrow's daily struggle.
Left to right: Tremaine on what could have been any night in the mid-late ‘90s; Rick Kosick and Chris Pontius, full metal ninja turtles; Kosick and a gold lamé Dave Carnie, post-Russian strip club destruction on the eve of yet another ill-fated Big Brother-sanctioned event.
But there existed a window of time in the '90s, just prior to the digital age of chaos, when the consumer-grade point 'n' shoot film camera reached the apex of its soon-to-be-meteored evolution with the Yashica T4. It was a magical pocket device indeed, and both professional photographers and commoners alike snatched them up at a very affordable price. This was especially so in the world of skateboarding, where it serendipitously coincided with the height of decadence right before the industry's li'l butt pucker was ruptured by the mainstream and all the booby-traps and pitfalls that came along with the unholy coupling (once the term "athletes" was heard and used in all seriousness, it was Crystal Clear with Capital Corporate Cs that the end was nigh and the doomsday clock was two minutes to midnight for the fuck-all-show-it-like-it-is rag that was then Big Brother skateboard magazine). For a few priceless years, though, it wasn't uncommon to see everyone out in the bar with a beer in one hand and a T4 in the other.
Left to right: Mike Crum was a darling of the "Last Call" parade of party photos in Big Brother, all thanks to the omnipresent lens of Dimitry; Scott Johnston, Jeff Tremaine, Dimitry, and Sean Cliver—all cleaned up and ready for the post-Y2K world at a respectable, no-nonsense Chocolate premiere at the DGA theater on Sunset Blvd.
I only embark on such tangents, because the late great photo show of Dimitry Elyashkevich this past weekend at the Door Gallery in Hollywood not only embraced and celebrated this slaphappy snapshot period in skateboarding, but embodied it in spirit as well. If I heard correctly, the show was to open at 9pm, yet by 7:30 that night there was still nothing on the walls?! I walked in at 9pm, at which point the sweat was pouring and the first words—as well as probably the next 20 or 30 or so—to come out of Dimitry's mouth to me were, "NO PHOTOS. NO PHOTOS. SERIOUSLY, NO PHOTOS." Apparently, no one was supposed to take any photos of the photos on display, because there were indeed some that may not have even been run in the pages of Big Brother when they were taken at the time. And that's saying a fuck lot. It's not like anything was that incriminating, but 20 years have since passed and everyone within the swath of Dimitry's lens back then is now a legitimate grown-up with families and respectable jobs—none of which was the responsible case in the ridiculous span of globe-trotting and partying years showcased in his buckshot blast of 4 x 6 prints taped up on the wall with Sharpies hanging beside them for anyone and everyone to add descriptions, word bubbles, and random comments in general. On a hypothetical comfort level scale of 1–10, it's safe to say this one went to 11 (but probably could have gone to 13, knowing what he has in his vaults).
Left to right: The El Rey Theatre, circa 1997, hours before all sorts of shit hit the fan before, during, and after the premiere of the Big Brother video number two; Faces in the crowd of aforementioned premiere.
So yeah. You're not seeing any of the really hot shit photos here; just the few that Dimitry let us take to share a few innocuous looks at the way we were before everything else transpired in life. —Sean Cliver
This last one, of course, is more of an inside joke than anything, but if you happen to be a stickler for skate trash lore then you know at one point in 1993 I found myself on the wrong hand of the legendary Sean Sheffey—and not entirely by my own doing. The truth would have been exposed in the dumb Big Brother documentary on HULU, where in a previous rough cut there was a section talking about the more "physical repercussions" to occur with the magazine staff, the crown jewel of which being my face-palming incident with Sheffey over a caption that had been blamed on me (a situation akin to being sentenced to death for a crime you didn't commit). Anyway, at the end of it all, Tremaine admitted that he was in fact the one who wrote the caption and then stood silently by as I brushed with death, but the segment was cutting room-floored after a note from HULU that it seemed like an unnecessarily negative side street to go down and detracted from the zany chase of the story arc. However, please let the record show for all of Interweb eternity that I was in fact innocent in the matter—case fucking closed. Oh, this photo, incidentally, was taken years after the OG confrontation, maybe 5–6, give or take a drink or two, at one of those great gala DC/Droors holiday affairs of the late ‘90s.
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