Just another post to act as a reminder to everyone to do everything they can to make it to UAB this Sunday the 21st for the Orleans FUNdraiser Jam Tommy Hains is throwing. Should be lots of fun and prizes for everyone. There’s been tons of notice for this event, so all excuses are going to be pretty poor for non attendance. Click below to see the post with all the jam details.

*UPDATED – click below for more information and photos*

forgive the typos in the flyer, a casualty of carelessly working with pen and paper

Yo Sick Zine: Issue 5
8.5″ x 5.5″
24 pages
photocopy + laser printed card stock cover
photos, drawings, and more by me (Prashant Gopal) and contributions from Trent Barker
if you would like a copy and don’t live here, send me an email to prashantgopal at gmail dot com

Andrew Grant shares the cover with a stranger.

Some of Trent’s pages.

Some of my pages.

Tommy Hains sent this flier through for a FUNdraiser Jam he is throwing at UAB in Montreal for, get this, raising funds towards the Orleans box jump project. He wanted to get the word out as early as possible, so that more people can get the time off from work and organize rides to come (eyes looking at you East End kids). Everyone should try make it out to this event. It’s a little tough to read some of the print on the flier when I had to shrink it to fit, but here’s the details:

UAB in Montreal (1935 Avenue de L’Eglise)
Sunday, February 21st
1pm – 9pm
$10 entry – half goes straight towards the box jump fund
Prizes from Joe Mamma and UAB

Kicking off 2010; Jeff, Marc, Karl, and Jamie threw down with one of the most original BMX Jams that I have ever been to. As most people in Ottawa know, Jeff has a bunch of ramps stowed away in his warehouse that have been used for a bunch of things already (backyard jam, ghetto street jam)… well this time the 39C boys decided to take things to a new level by placing the ramps smack dab in the middle of their living room. I wasn’t totally surprised when they announced their plans to do this, as anyone who knows them knows that they like to leave their living room as little as possible. Beers and C-gars on the couch all day. What DID surprise me was the amount of work they put in to make it happen, very out of character for Jeff especially.

The Jam attracted people from all over, in fact there were more people at the party that were from out of town than there were Ottawa locals. Fan favourites, Pat and Lelo showed up for the jam and partied hard all night. Riding wise, the ramps were owned all night by Greg and Dewey from MTL, Corey from Vancouver Island and our own Big Ben Kaufmann. It was seriously a pro demo in there. Greg was owning the quarter to sub, Corey put a hole in the roof trying a flair on a quarter that shouldn’t even be comfortable to air, and Dewey manning up a sick icepick 270 on the same ramp were all probably the most notable tricks I saw that night.

After the riding chilled out, everyone got serious about drinking. Andrew Grant chugged a bottle of wine and then he and a couple of others started jumping and hitting their heads in the ceiling fan… which eventually led to a high kick smashing out the ceiling fan… which eventually led to wrestling matches between the ramps where Karl Oxenlostthefight got owned by Andrew, and then we watched Jeff and Jamie square off in a ruthless sumo wrestle. During this sumo duke out, they each had a smoke in their mouth, and at one point Jamie had Jeff pinned to the ground while taking a drag of his cigarette and ashing all over Jeff’s chesty nipples.

Its events like this that make me excited to be part of the BMX community. Nobody has this much fun over the age of 15 but us. We may be acting like 15 year olds; wrecking a living room, drinking in a terribly irresponsible manner, smashing our heads into a ceiling fan and play wrestling in a super gay way… but it sure beats the alternative; being a douchebag fun hater. So next time you don’t show up to one of these events (thats right, i mean you) remember that someday you’re going to have smelly kids, a shitty job and a wife that gets saggier and less fertile every day and you’ll wish you could go back in time and enjoy your life before it started to suck*.

*this scenario excludes the exception of Roland who has a kid and a wife and still has more fun than any of us.

Last week a bunch of us drove to Montreal for the Premiere of Jeremy Deme’s newest Presence video, You Know Time It Is. Everyone rode UAB during the day, stuffed our faces with poutine (or poutine soup if you were unlucky), and then headed to the Green Room for the video and party. What was expected to be a short night of partying evolved in to an all night affair, and Andrew Grant was the trooper and drove us home long after the bar closed, and everyone got to make a late night stop at Belle De Provence. I slacked on shooting any worthwhile photos of any riding, but here’s a few party photos that you can check out after the link below.

Just about everyone was out dancing and mingling.

DJ booth.

We thought the DJ looked like Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Karl had this shirt on.

Mike Fiz seemed to know every girl there. All 3 of them. BMX Boner Party.

Mike started picking up Lil’ Dill and swinging him around at one point.

Watching Greg Flag and Corey Dewey dance is a sight to see, because they really don’t need anyone else there, or each other for that matter, to have fun.

I forgot to post this earlier, but Jeremy from Presence will be premiering his new video You Know What Time It Is? at the Green Room in Montreal on December 28th. It’s over a month away, but the more notice the better, right? Check out the interview I did with him about it here, and try and make it out. I think the 28th/29th is a holiday for most people, correct?

Andrew and Boudreau in costume

Despite a forecast of terrible weather, the Halloween Jam took place as it always has and always will. The turnout wasn’t as great as previous years, partly because of the weather and partly because most of Ottawa’s scene thinks they’re too hardcore to have fun anymore. The Jam had some great costumes, including Karl Oxinnuzzen’s ‘Greased Up Deaf Guy’ outfit, Boudreau’s Bill Clinton outfit, and Rich’s homemade Predator costume. There were also on the other hand, a bunch of people who showed up without a costume… who does that? Its a halloween jam… show up with a costume, or don’t bother coming at all.

Regardless of the moderate levels of suck, there was a high level of awesome. Watching Karl do greased up tailwhips, having a couple of epic games of foot down in the bowl, and a monster truck rally where we had to ride our bikes over a pile of other bikes, each time a person was unable to make it over a pile and got stuck, their bike stayed in the pile, making it harder to get through… all of which made this year’s halloween jam a success.

vader nosewheelie

Pretty much everyone got some sort of prize. We didn’t have a 180 contest this year due to high winds, so all the prizes were given out for foot down, monster truck and costumes. Big thanks to TenPack for hooking us up on that front. They’re always pretty good to us, we had a bunch of parts, soft goods, videos, sadly though we didn’t get a copy of ten pack’s evolution DVD to hand out…

kyle tossin' the hots over the wedges

It was a nice change of pace to have the jam during the day, usually we do it at night and freeze our asses off. The sun actually made an appearance as you can see in the pictures, and we had pretty mild temperatures all afternoon. Although as nice as it was, Karl was still the coldest guy around and covered in vaseline to boot.

Just a reminder to everyone that the Halloween Jam is this Saturday at the Kanata Skatepark from 3pm to dark. I have a box of goods from our sponsors and will have free candy on hand. Come out and show your support, have some fun, wear a costume, and we’ll pass around a donation container to keep raising funds for the Orleans box jump.

The Mox, either doing a 270 one handed x... or a truckdriver... not sure.

For those who aren’t in the know… this project has been in the works since February. I met with  Councillor Bob Monette and presented our case for the need of a proper training facility with better ramp structures now that BMX is a legitimate sport (olympic gold baby… olympic gold). Either way, Bob was excited by the idea of a user group showing up, and instead of asking for money offering to donate it. At that point we had several people who were willing to drop a hundred bucks each to make it happen; as the summer progressed and the project got held up by the red tape which is always involved with government though interest dwindled until it was all but forgotten about.

Big Ben with a toothpick stall.

Around the middle of August, I received a follow up e-mail asking why we hadn’t built the ramp… meanwhile I was under the impression that parks and rec was still examining the designs… so here we are now rushing to raise money to try and make this happen first thing when spring rolls around.

Andrew Grant grabbin' that tire.

The box jump is really the first step in the DIY process that BMX is going to have to take in Ottawa if we want to see any kind of new stuff. Clearly skateparks aren’t a priority in the nation’s capital, we spend so much money trying to keep things like crackheads and gang violence swept under the rug that at the end of the day there’s not alot of coin to build trannies. If we manage to get this ramp built, and if the project is a success, there really isn’t much holding us back from building more at the park… a street spine perhaps?

About as close to a box jump as we've got. Me flipping.

I don’t have a final tally of what was raised today, but I do know that it was significant. Lots of food was sold, lots of dudes showed up, and some really really good tricks went down too. As I said before, I missed most of the awesome stuff but if what I saw going down at the end of the session was any indication of what happened before, it was pretty gnarly. Thanks to everyone who came out and donated. And whoever it was that stole all those hamburgers, I hope your lungs collapse under the weight of your own guilt.

AND remember to show up for the Halloween Jam in 2 weeks to help us raise some more money!!

Crazy fucking Steve!

Gordy with a nice flatty.