yo-yo #50(!): clean machine with "aberrant grain"

50!!!! WOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (ok, who cares.)

this yo-yo will make me a bit of a hypocrite. i'm always going on about how "yo-yo's are meant to be played!" or "what indeed, dear friends, is the ultimate value of a yo-yo kept in its box?" or something similarly flowery, idealistic, and patronizing.

i um... i'm keeping this yo-yo in the box.

i took it out to take a picture. i've even thrown it once, last summer. i actually had forgotten it existed before it returned to me in the mail yesterday.

in the spring of 08, the yo-yo world was atwitter (though this was before "twitter" was so big) about "the green triangle project". this was to be an epic feature film collaboration between west coast yo-yo legends spencer berry and paul escolar. so huge were the expectations surrounding it that the "atlas" of yo-yo forums, yoyonation, set up its own special board for the project. within said board, a secret mini-forum emerged, invisible but to a pretty random group of invitees. private forums are such interesting entities, in general. they're obviously exclusive, and this breeds a certain degree of egomania among some of the participants, and it rubs some of the excluded the wrong way that people are "talking yo-yo" in secret. but they're not inherently "bad" at all, and in my experience they represent the most casual and sincere internet forums, and very rarely pertain to yo-yo's at all (which is part of their appeal). anyway, before said venue fizzled due to its redundancy, a really cool plan was hatched there.

i had talked to brad countryman, and to my own shock, was able to acquire the LAST stock of clean machine no-jives on the planet (or so i was told). i received some 23 of them for what basically amounted to a pittance, given their rarity. meanwhile, drew "fro" tetz and brandon "bohacklés" jackson began working on cool laserable "gtp" side-art for the yo-yo's, which interested peeps could buy for $12. although they came up with KILLER logos, i could find no way to have them engraved on the cheap, so they sat for awhile (to the chagrin of those that bought em).

then, last august, i drove up to nyc for the "iyyo" with some pals (mike "sausalito" salcito, samm "i'm driving with you AGAIN?" scott, brandon "bojackpsychoschematixgrayscale" jackson, and adam "i expose my belly to i-95 traffic just like kierkegaard did" brewster. while up there, i visited the millenium hotel room of stu brown and his "werrd" team (very posh, though with a grim view of ground zero). whilst there, stu showed off his newest and most fantastic laser-engraved and pad-printed yo-yo's. they looked ridiculously good and i told him so. later in the week, we discussed lasering further, and stu offered to do the clean machines up for free!

after i got home, i shipped the box off to australia. a few people weren't interested in the graphics and just wanted the yo-yo's, so they got theirs right away. due to a series of unforeseen circumstances, however, stu wasn't able to do the yo-yo's... and again they sat... for nearly a year (to the continued chagrin of those that bought em).

stu sent them back to me this week. they're still unengraved (clean, as it were), but since the green triangle project has been dormant and the aforementioned private board silent for going on a year, it hardly seems to matter. i'm actually pretty happy with the way it worked out, since clean machines are beautiful, special, and rare in themselves. so at worlds this year, i'll be able to distribute the last 16 of the LAST clean machines on the planet to their rightful owners. awesome.

THIS particular yo-yo is one of three in the group with a WEIRD aberration. i've seen a lot of no jives. i HAVE a lot of no jives (3oish?). but i've never seen another one like these. traditionally, tom kuhn's wooden yo-yo's are cut with the wood's grain passing through the diameter of the yo-yo. on these 3 (and the one depicted here, which i claimed for my own as soon as i saw it last may, cause i'm a jerk), the grain goes around the circumference, so instead of lines going through the diameter, you have a really clean, eliptical pattern around the hex-nut area. (see the pic, with a comparison to my other "normal" clean machine on top.) this would seem like no big deal to the casual observer, but aside from its uniqueness, it's really cool for 2 reasons: a.) it's considerably harder [or so i'm told] to cleanly cut wood that way. and b.) since the grain goes around the outside evenly, the density of the wood is more evenly distributed around the yo-yo. the grain is ALWAYS "lined up", which makes a huge component of "tuning" these no jives totally irrelevant and unnecessary. as such, mine is ultra-smooth, which, it must be said... most clean machines are. it occurs to me that i do have an eric wolff yo-yo that's cut in this way, but i've never seen it in a "production" wood yo-yo.

as i said before, i'm keeping it in its original clear box for now. i'm not entirely positive as to why. i mean, clearly no jive yo-yo's are super-special to me, and i already have more than i can throw regularly. and i do think that having one with a characteristic i've never really seen is pretty nifty. however, i think i'm also doing so with the knowledge that i won't be able to keep it safe from the world forever. one day, this yo-yo will be tarnished, broken, dismantled, and sitting unloved in a trash heap someplace... just like essentially every yo-yo (and on some level, every person). i DO feel that the primary value in a yo-yo is what can be DONE with it, and for this yo-yo to sit aside is, to me, a violation of one aspect of its nature. it's a bit like withholding a part of my SELF from the world, which on the one hand feels dishonest, but is also unavoidable, even to the most sincere. maybe one day, i'll break it out, and it will reveal a state of play that's only ever been obscure to me. maybe i'll pass it on to my daughter or son, or to one of their kids (knock on wood - PUN!). regardless, i'm not quite ready to play it. and for all my hypocirsy, it makes me feel good that this tiny anomaly, this strange little particle of the world sits like a gift, ready and waiting to be opened.

someday, maybe.`

yo-yo #49: red imperial

it only took me 49 yo-yo's to get to the imperial. so what? not like it took me 50 or anything!

beloved yo-yo icon steve brown just posted a link to his facebook today: wired magazine's 100 things your kids may never know about. reading through the list was pretty remarkable. i rarely pause to consider just how much has changed since i was a kid. from the way i access and learn information to the way i express myself to the food that i get and how i prepare it... so many facets of my childhood would seem totally primitive and foreign to my 6-year-old daughter. obviously, every generation can say as much. (i used to love being regaled with my great-grandfather's stories about life in massachusettes at the turn of the century. he provided for his family as the proprietor of a vegetable cart, and would push it along the winding streets for miles, greeting his customers by name. eventually he saved up enough to open a market, and was able to put his kids though college. can the american dream still be lived in such a way?)

anyway, this list made me think:
remember when yo-yo's came back up?
remember when you couldn't take them apart?
remember when a 10-second spinner felt like a serious achievement?
remember when you bought them on a whim at a toy shop or drugstore for $2?
remember when, if you played sloppy or carelessly, they'd whack you in the knuckles?
remember when no one gave a crap that you were really good with a yo-yo? ... oh wait.

what's the saying? "the more things change, the more they stay the same."

i bought this imperial at a local k-mart just a few years back. there was a thread on yoyonation that essentially dared people to make a video of themselves playing with imperials, and i thought that idea was just the coolest. i've never watched a ton of yo-yo videos (even now i mostly watch friends or offerings i'm pretty sure i'll like), but i get so tired of vids that don't do anything to really set themselves apart in some way. this was at least an opportunity to make a video (a craft i had only just begun to learn) that was different at its premise.

making this video catalyzed my desire to play more fixed axle, which led me to no jives, which set me in the direction i'm on now. still, every time i look at this video, i'm embarassed by it. i feel it's one of just a few i've done that are truly terrible, and that i should go back and do over. the tricks aren't the issue so much as how i perform them. nothing looks smooth or clearly-intentioned at all. it LOOKS like someone who's not at home playing an imperial - which i guess i wasn't. oh well, i guess it's important to document ones' amateur rattle (though probably NOT one's pseudo-mullet or hideous goatee).

i talked to steve about imperials a few years back. having been mr. duncan-guy, i kind of expected him to say "they're awesome. classic." he basically told me they're total crap - butterflies, too. the gummy, low-quality plastic, a design that can survive only a few light bumps, and mediocre-at-best looping ability really seemed to infuriate him, especially compared with russells (which are probably the only yo-yo that are more numerous than imperials worldwide). he said he'd asked duncan/flambeau repeatedly to revisit and improve them, but if it "ain't broke" (here having the meaning of "still sells") the company saw no real need to fix it. it occurs to me that i've pretty much never talked to an old-timey yo-yoer (at least one who was worth a damn) that really prefered the imperial. larry sayco also told me he despised it, and vastly preferred both the "super" and "professional" models.

regardless, i like this particular yo-yo. if the atomic-zombpocalypse hit tomorrow, and i survived in a sewer eating rats for 6 months before emerging... and if the only yo-yo left to be found was this red imperial, i'd be ok. i'd be just fine. i love the translucent red against the gold stamp. it doesn't play well by the standard i hold (which is not high in itself), but at least it's held together. i started on midnight specials growing up, so every time i throw this it feels a bit like coming home. i tried to hit spirit bomb on it earlier today, but no dice whatsoever. my no jive practice has not refined my technique to that extent, evidently.

it also makes me think of "good yo-yoing". like i said before, every generation looks back at the previous ones with a bit of wonder and maybe superiority. "how did you even SURVIVE without ipods?" my old students would ask me. and admittedly, if i could time travel and talk to my 12 year-old self as i suffered through long hours of making "mix tapes", saying "in 20 years, every song you have ever owned (and some movies) will fit in a 3x2 inch casing and will be able to be accessed instantly"... well... i probably wouldn't have finished said mixtape.

we yo-yoers do it too. we mostly operate under the assumption that the stuff we're doing now is somehow grander than all of the stuff that came before. to the kids in the community now, pre-webforum yo-yoing is like the dark ages, when in fact... blissfully ignorant or not, our tricks cannot be effectively detached from those of the people who spent long years refining and teaching the basics. they're the reason yo-yoing is burned into collective american consciousness; why yo-yo's are identifiable at all. and though they are in large part obscure to us now (just as we will be to later generations), we're foolish and forgetful when we neglect to honor yo-yoing's history. our yo-yo's aren't that great and our tricks aren't that incredible. i mean... they ARE... but not to the extent that they grant us license to deride the past. "good yo-yoing" is just yo-yoing that is relevant and meaningful in its moment.

this yo-yo (by which i mean imperials in general) has survived, like alligators, sharks and cockroaches. although the plastic sucks and you can't do "soiled panties" on it (whatever that is), the imperial has never broken in the long term. for all its flaws, i like that i can go buy one at a store and feel connected to [a part of] what yo-yoing was 50 years ago. would i mind if yoyofactory (or someone else) were to reset the standard someday, and another yo-yo occupies the imperial's hallowed space? not a bit. i DO think there should be a better "standard" out there that the uninitiated first associate with our art.

but before you scoff at the imperial, consider: how many yo-yo's will still be relevant 5 years from now (let alone 50)? and how many thousands have seen their first (or only) glimpse of yo-yoing through the imperial's plastic prism?

where the yo-yo's and yo-yoers of today seem to immediately alienate passers-by ("oh, i could never do that in a million years"), the imperial invited us all to try to "make it come back up to our hand" that first time... where now we try to burn through categories like "advanced", "expert", and "master", shedding them as if they carry a disease, the imperial told us it was ok to just enjoy "gravity pull" or "forward pass" in the beginning... that HAVING a "beginning" is, in fact, worthwhile... and where the yo-yo's of today are engineering feats in themselves, masking our ineptitude with their remarkable technology, the imperial taught us that when we fight through frustration and learn to use it, the skill we develop is truly, undeniably, and forever our own.

yo-yo #48: orange/blue siliconed zero

"So many want the juice that skating gives, the popularity and coolness, but are not ready for the pain that comes eternally. People who think skating owes them are wrong; they get wheelbite in the rain. People who owe skating will live for ever. You want to know how to be a skater? Taste the concrete!"

- Jake Phelps
i've been playing yo-yo since july 1985. that was [to the best that i can recollect/research] when my dad brought my a guilt-gift from one of his many doctor-trips in the form of an early yomega brain. he was at a conference in boston, and was staying at his home in fall river. at the apparent recommendation of his mother, he bought the yo-yo from a local toy store. the patent on the brain is, i think, from 1984, so mine must have been one of the earliest production models.

anyway, that means i've been yo-yoing (albeit touch n' go here and there) for 24 years.
and if you can believe it, i've been skateboarding for 25!

i'm old. really old. like easter island-deity old. at least i feel that way sometimes. in may of 1984, my family moved from 2101 kentucky ave. in "charm city" (baltimore, md - alternatively "the city that reads", as bus stop benches advertise) to that den of heat and sin and biting reptiles - new orleans, louisiana. my parents had bought their first house (which had to be 3 times as big as the one we'd left), a low, sprawling ranch nestled in a labyrinth of white-concrete suburban streets, alleys, and intertwining drainage canals. this would be the playground which, over the next 6 years, would provide me with endless delinquent adventure, and which would perpetually dare me to discover and redefine the true nature of "fun".

when we made the move, the old owners had left behind exactly three items: a set of "jarts", a useless basketball backboard, and a bright yellow, metal-wheeled banana-board. i had never seen a skateboard up close, although i knew vaguely what they were. i remember trying to stand on it with my dad looking on, unsure of whether he should intervene. upon the glass-smooth surface of the garage, the wheels slipped immediately. the board shot out from beneath me, and had settled under the workbench before my ass had fully connected with the floor. i remember it hurt; enough to put me off wanting to skate for a couple months.

in the intervening time, however, i met jason heinze and matthew patterson. matt i met at the local pool. i was playing with my brand new "gizmo" toy (the cute one from "gremlins", remember?), and we ended up tossing the thing across the length of the pool. by the end of an hour, we had built a lasting friendship and had penciled in a summers worth of playdates. (it is amazing and surreal to watch now, as my own daughter strikes instant swimming-pool-friendships in the same way.) later that week, i met jason while exploring the streets of the neighborhood on my bike. he laughed at my training wheels, in a moment providing me with the imptus to finally shed them, which i did a week later. almost immediately, i learned that jason and matt had a pre-existing friendship, and i was surprised to find that, rather than being ostracized by the pair with their history, we formed a sort of trio. usually three's a crowd, but with us, three was riches and power. three was always having someone to play with, always having someone get your back when psycho-timmy threw glass at you, and when you had to punch psycho-timmy, three was never (ok, rarely) getting the ever-loving shit kicked out of you when his big brother came home.

and when we all concurrently discovered skateboarding, three became a full-on pre-pubescant skate-gang.

jason had an old nash board with which he introduced matt and me to the virtues of skate. and whatever we learned, he probably always remained the best of us. within a few weeks of seeing his board and learning to push, matt and i had our own rides; matching variflex dragon boards (by coincidence, i kid you not). my first summer in new orleans was a blur of skinned and re-skinned knees, huge carves, and the made-up tricks that every eight-year-old swears are pure gold. somehow, the next 6 years (and to some extent the next 24) were composed of incrementally amplified versions of the same.

skate-sessions with matt and jason remain my most readily-fetched and most indelible childhood memories. i can still feel the asphalt under my ojii "team rider" wheels (which i still have and occasionally ride). matt became skilled at riding ramps (i won't say "vert" because all our ramps were mini's or launches). he was the only one of us that could launch into a 180 or land a solid backside air off our pal robbie's quarter pipe. jason always had lance mountain boards, but really only rode street. he could grind before it was called "grinding", and though our roads had no curbs, he ollied up the "gentle inclines" with easy grace. i kind of blended the pair of them. i was happy riding street; happy with transition. i had the best boneless in the neighborhood, and i'd snap them uselessly over hydrants to compensate for my mediocre ollies. though my skill was nothing much, and no sponsorships were seeking me out as they were some other kids in our neighborhood... i remember being happy to be included, to be swept up in something, to be a skater.

to be a skater in the 80's was an incredible thing. i remember, really remember thinking how cool it was to be a part of what felt like an artistic movement, no less epic than the harlem renaissance... or "the" Renaissance itself, for that matter. hanging out at the nearby shop, i'd watch powell and g&s decks flying off the shelves, bombarded by ubiquitous images of the bones brigade and day-glo thrasher stickers. every day at school was spent half-assing it, doodling imaginary signature-decks and impossible ramp-plans while waiting for 3pm (c'mon, at least i WENT). our little triumvirate took full possession of the evening, from when the bus breaks squealed at our stop to when our parents would literally peal us from the street for bed. although my house was on the way to our usual ramp corner, i made a habit of bringing my board to school so as to waste no time in collecting it (or maybe just so i could bring my board to school). the neighborhood, the whole world it seemed, was ALIVE with skate-passion, even if it was really just me.

and then, like most everything... one day it was all gone.

i blinked and my friends quit; they moved on to remote control cars and collecting hunting knives and stuff. the streets were all quiet, and no one was willing to break out the ramps. in 1989, skating in new orleans just died. not with a bang, but a whimper.

i was too busy to ruminate much on it. we were preparing to move to north carolina (it might as well have been nepal). the move was as much for me as it was for my dad's professional opportunities. the city had begun to simmer me into potentially criminal form (aside from skateboarding), and my parents wisely noted the precipice upon which i was perched. the move to winston-salem was for me, a move into nothingness, but it was undeniably safe. there were no skaters in my new neighborhood. if there had ever been a "movement" here, it had died of alzheimers. one kid at my new school had a skateboard (a nice hosoi hammerhead), but when i went to his house, it turned out to just be the deck, which he had salvaged from somewhere. noting my disappointment, he gave it to me, and yeah, i still skate that too.

the move to nc did teach me one positive thing though, a revelation that irrevocably altered my whole perception of skateboarding: hills are cool.

new orleans had no hills. well, technically it had ONE hill at a park by the zoo, and hundreds of kids would be on that grassy sucker daily, climbing up, rolling down, and just generally trying to comprehend it. nc was different. my kitchen window looked out on two huge, beautiful hills, tapering nicely with slight inclines before intersecting at a common stop sign. i vividly remember the first time i braved the steeper and shorter of the two. everything was perfect, amazing... until a third of the way down i developed a "wobble". speedwobbles turn a skateboard board into a shuddering, convulsing mess, especially if the trucks are too loose. having never experienced this speed for more than a second while on a ramp, this sensation was foreign to me and i panicked. i ended up rolling down the latter 2/3 and amassed an instant contusion-collection that had my mom mystified as to why we'd moved at all. within another week, trucks tightened, i was pointing my schmidtt stix down the nastiest hill in the neighborhood, and though i rode through the wobbles, i was unable to do so with the brick wall that punctuated the t-intersection at the bottom. more ow.

i mastered speedwobbles and powerslides eventually, and much more importantly, i mastered riding alone. on occasion, i'd be run off the road by seniors in their mustang or mocked by b-ball jocks as i pushed past their pick-up game. it's amazing to me that there was a time when being a skater was a real liability when it came to "being cool". but when i look back on it, pushing alone through those years was one of the richest, most meaningful times in my life. and every time i bomb a hill now, it's the same feeling, the same desperation, the same commitment that sweeps over me. it's somehow surprising to look back now and realize that i constructed a huge chunk of my character while on a skateboard.

so what's it got to do with yo-yo's?

well... whatever. i never said it all had to tie up perfectly. i was holding this yo-yo today, an orange and blue siliconed fhz that i traded (or just stole) from my buddy samm scott, and it made me think about skating. it's an incredible zero, as some zeros just mysteriously seem to be. but as for what it's got to do with skating, i'm coming up empty... maybe it's the colorway. i had a rad driveway session yesterday, and i've got it on the brain. it's all just manipulating energy anyway.

but much has been made of how similar the two media are. for awhile in the late 90's, they were marketed in very similar (very eXtreme!!!) ways. both are all about tricks; the aesthetic of "the dance", and though both skating and yo-yoing pretend to be competitive sports sometimes, the best exponents of each recognize that they are ARTS first. they're different, too. some yo-yoers love to talk about yo-yoing as though it's some kind of iconoclastic sub-culture, but really it's playing with toys. it can be done in the safety of one's room, closeted if necessary, free from ridicule, and sans pain. all that notwithstanding... much of what i've learned from riding a skateboard has applied itself pretty naturally to playing yo-yo. truth is universal, and these could be "yo-yo truths" with only minor editing. let me hear it if you disagree.

• if you intend to hit a trick, commit... or you will probably eat it.
• learn the basics; no one wants to see you do a stationary tré flip if you can't rock a giant ollie at speed.
• your board's going to get trashed if you're using it right. don't sweat it.
• skateboarding does not happen on the internet.
• whether in a park, in the rain, or in 110 degrees, know how your gear is going to respond.
• knowing where skating comes from is just as meaningful as knowing where it's going.
• if you want to bomb massive hills, you're going to spend a lot of time walking back up.
• you're going to fall down, sometimes worse than others. get the hell up.
• getting sponsored will get you some gear and might make you cool among skaters, but if it satisfies your compulsion to skate, you should never have stepped on the board to begin with.
• although it's great to session with friends, skating is primarily a loner deal; you have to be comfortable with yourself.
• if you go fast, you get wobbles. put your weight forward and ride through them.
• sometimes skating won't be cool. people are going to make fun of you. get over it. if you're skating to be cool in the eyes of others, quit. now. please.
• the tricks are rad, but the ride will always matter more in the end.
• being able to do a handplant is pretty worthless. being a skater is pretty worthless. being a person who understands what a skater understands... is invaluable.

yo-yo #47: SPYY Flying V

i'd like to preface this by stating that i realize i don't deserve a signature yo-yo. maybe only a very few people do. that said, this is gonna be mine.

two years ago, i was an elementary school teacher in durham, nc. for the third time in four years, i had been graced with a student teacher. although it actually added up to more work for me than i initially expected, it came with two undeniably cool perks: the university paid me (usually right before xmas) AND i basically got 2 weeks off of teaching when the trainee took over full time. sometimes i'd wander the grounds playing haunting (annoying) melodies on my shakuhachi (no really, i'd do that). i'd watch surf movies in the lounge, enduring the inevitable witty comments of my overwraught peers. i'd play yo-yo. a lot... i even designed one.

in november of 06, i started drawing out "my dream yo-yo" on graph paper. this was right around the release of the peak, and the yo-yo i drew had a similar bearing seat, big c bearing, silicone response. i borrowed a single schmoove ring from "the end". when it came to the profile, i wanted something wicked. throw down was getting ready to release the luchador, and i was testing it. i wanted something comparably sharp and dangerous, and drew out a yo-yo that was wide, spikey, and brutal; something i'd be wary of catching, let alone throwing in a crowd. heavily rim weighted and pyro wide with a perfect square profile, i wanted it to spin forever and handle a bazillion string mutations.

i sat on that idea for months, and then on a lark, shot it off to nate weddle, who pretty much WAS throw down, asking about whether i could "borrow" his machinist to do a one-off. his response was "i like it. why not just make it your signature throw down yo-yo?" although it embarrasses me to admit it, i got really excited about that; attached to it. i thought it was really. really. cool... and i will not deny dreaming up bizarre colorways and cool little tweaks. whilst i kept dreaming, however, on and off over a year, i fell in love HARD with another yo-yo.

i had liked the tom kuhn no jive 3-in-1 for awhile... but when i approached it again 18 months ago, something was different. whereas before, i saw playing a wood yo-yo as a cool retro novelty (or something), now it just felt like yo-yoing, period. everything else was the novelty; unnecessary window-dressing. as has been documented in a metric ton of my videos, i became obsessed with throwing no jives; especially with hitting tricks on them that i had previously assumed to be impossible (ex. 1, 2, 3, 4). over the course of a year, playing ball-bearing yo-yo's only sparingly... my style evolved toward a completely different ideal. like chemosynthetic plants living deep in the ocean, i no longer required the "light" of bearings or low-response to do what i wanted to do. yo-yoing became more spiritual, more meaningful, and much less dependent upon equipment. i'm not trying to say that i became a "better yo-yoer" than anyone else; just that it "felt better" to me.

i still looked at the ronin and thought of how nice it would be to have my own special yo-yo, but since it no longer suited the direction my style had taken, it was really just empty ego thinking that.

then this winter, steve buffel of saturn precision yo-yo's released a pet project he called the "pistolero". when i saw the finished project, i was completely astounded. steve actually captured the engravings of an 1873 colt peacemaker pistol, and had used them to adorn the outer circumference of the yo-yo's rims. he had also surgically drilled 6 holes into the hub, giving the feel of a revolver's cylinder. unfortunately, a problem with the anodizing left him unhappy with the final result. although the yo-yo looked phenomenal by all accounts, he felt it vibrated too much to be released at full price, and put it up for sale direct from his site for what was basically a $75 pittance.

regardless, i never saw a yo-yo i liked the look of so much, and i contacted steve about maybe working out a trade. i offered him one of my ronin prototypes for one of his pistoleros. to my shock and glee, he not only accepted, but offered me a red one, the existence of which i was unaware. despite shipping from calgary, it showed up at my door like 4 days later, and i was even more blown away. i quickly traded a benchmade butterfly knife for a 2nd one, and it became my main player for a few weeks (along with my no jives, of course), reinvigorating my interest in playing with a bearing.

although i assumed that steve had received the ronin, felt "meh" about it, and had just kept mum to be polite... in actuality it took him about 3 WEEKS to receive it. when he finally did, he e-mailed me straight away, intimating that he liked it a lot, and if nate was truly "awol" for good, that he'd be interested in producing it for me himself. needless to say, i was flabbergasted. this was a yo-yo dream that was basically dead in the water, and suddenly it's being raised like a relic from the lusitania? moreover, jonrob, one of the yo-yoers i most respect, had just become spyy's first sponsored player, and his yo-yo, the "pure" was due out in a few weeks. though i had always associated it with extremely (maybe even obsessively) high quality, it occured to me that spyy was suddenly one of the most multi-faceted and interesting companies out there. i talked to nate about it, expressing my interest, and he said in his predictably low-key way "hell yeah, do it! i love spyy! i'll make the ronin my way eventually to make it up to people who never got their lucha libres replaced." (whether he will shall remain to be seen.)

steve and i talked, and he sent me 3-d CAD-drawings of what the ronin would look like with a few "spyyish" tweaks. it looked good, and i was dizzy at the idea of being included in something so cool... but i was also pretty conflicted. this was just not a yo-yo that matched me very well anymore. coke-can wide, and with a gap you could drive a truck through, it would probably sell great... but what's the point of having "your own yo-yo" if it's not truly, FULLY, what you want to play? despite my reservations, i didn't mention any of this stuff to steve at first.

and as it happens, i didn't need to. during our 3rd or 4th phone conversation, he basically asked whether this was really the yo-yo i wanted, and i had to say "well...". though i still can't believe it, he said "let's start from scratch", and we set about making a yo-yo that really fit with the yo-yoing i do. that was easier than it might sound. i play with no jives. i basically asked steve to make me a metal one.

obviously, it was more complicated than that, especially for him. at first we even bandied about the idea of making a wood yo-yo. but i've already got about 30 wood yo-yo's that do exactly what i want a wood yo-yo to do. i've never had (and never SEEN) a metal yo-yo that plays with the classic feel and subtlety of a wood yo-yo. that's what i wanted. steve had just finished setting up the cad profile of the "addiction", complete with a big c-size bearing and recessed silicone. he wondered whether we could use the same guts on this yo-yo, but expressed concern at the idea of such a wide gap on a slimline. it was a leap of faith, but he made it. the morning after he made the initial proof, he called me before coffee, seriously worried about whether it would work. it "just feels so different" he said. in the end though, thankfully, he evidently recognized that that's what he was going for (and maybe that's what having me on the team implied), and he went ahead.

this yo-yo is mostly all i've played for the last month or so. i've still thrown my no jives some (especially with my weak 2-handed). i love it. LOVE it. it's slim enough to put in a tight jeans pocket and plays like the emmeff dickens; just as smooth as any spyy you've ever played. it's got a hint of classic old school flavor, but handles anything the new school could possibly throw at it. it regenerates smooth and easy and eats string layers for brunch. it's going to ship not ONLY with a big c bearing, but also with a "half-spec" bearing that greatly reduces the gap and instantly makes the v tug-responsive, enabling the trapeze stalls i love to do on 3-in-1's. i wanted a slim metal yo-yo that could be set up to handle spirit bomb and shoot the moon on successive throws, or huge, beautiful fly-away dismounts... and now i've got one.

steve had the idea for the name, "the flying v". i don't exactly remember his reasons, but i liked it. the flying v is, of course, a classic gibson guitar, and fit well with our idea of a kind of "retro" profile. it also occurs to me that when i play yo-yo, i generally only "see" one half of the profile at a time. pretty much every yo-yo i throw therefore makes a kind of "flying v" as it moves over and through string segments (a little cheesy maybe, but i think it works for this yo-yo). it's also way rad that it's my favorite color, by which i don't just mean "green". anyone who's spent time in a forest will recognize that there are a bazillion "greens". this is my favorite green. it's the green you get sometimes in the early-morning shade of pisgah national forest in the blue ridge mountains (ok, really cheesy, BUT IT WORKS FOR THIS YO-YO). tressley cahill did the art for it, and i'm really pleased with how it turned out.

i'm still a little conflicted and werided out, in a "this is all surreal" way. not about spyy, mind you. i can't imagine a company that'd be easier to "rep". good people, amazingly consistent yo-yo's; what's not to like? no, although i strike a lot of people as a pretty "take-it-easy" kind of guy, i'm not at all. i over-analyze things and take apparently trivial matters pretty seriously. i still worry about being able to do something positive for the brand. i'm an old guy who's mostly good at throwing old wood yo-yo's. and here i am holding this next-generation metal masterpiece that's clearly capable of "more" than i could ever throw at it, so it's easy to feel a little guilty. add to that the fact that i'm not going to be champion of the world (i probably only barely deserve my "champion of the state" status), and there are tons of kids who can shock me with moves i don't understand after they've yo-yoed for 1/10 as long as i have. so it's also easy to feel a little apprehensive. and yet it's been made clear to me that i'm not really on the team for those reasons. so i'm just gonna keep doing what i do.

i remember when yoyojam came out with the 'matador' for jennifer baybrook, and everyone was like "um... why does she need a 1a yo-yo when she pretty much just loops (and had a concurrently issued signature looper)?" well, sometimes i worry that people will say "um... he plays old, irrelevant yo-yo's, right? why does he need a high-end metal signature?" again, i don't need one (and i don't actually concern myself with things "people will say").

so maybe it is a little weird for me to be on spyy given my proclivities... but at the same time... yo-yoing's yo-yoing. it's playing with physics, with the air, and a bit of string. sometimes there's wood attached to the end, sometimes there's plastic, or metal. i'm coming to learn that it doesn't matter as much as i thought it did - either way. it's the yo-yoing that's going on INSIDE that matters. and i really approach that the same no matter what i'm throwing.

this yo-yo is everything i could want in a metal. and at the risk of sounding [predictably] esoteric to many, the hardest, coolest, most serendipitous thing steve's done was to inject some real "soul" into it; some character. it doesn't feel like just another super-smooth metal yo-yo. yes, i recognize that it's probably just the hand i had in its creation, but this yo-yo and i connect where so many others just feel distant and alien. i really, really hope other people are able to say the same. i hope they can pick it up and feel inspired to play really honestly. cause that's really all i could ever ask of a yo-yo... or a yo-yoer.

it should be out really, really soon!

yo-yo #46: throw down ronin prototype

throw down... sigh... i didn't really recognize the extent to which i had 'attached' to it until it foundered.

i'm so disappointed about it. nate weddle has only ever been a really nice guy to me. and i was amped to meet james buffington finally at indy this year (another nice guy). i really wanted throw down to keep it together. i wanted this yo-yo to work out. but my desperate wanting is silly, and just another facet of the bad feelings i now associate with the whole situation.

this yo-yo was going to be "the ronin". ronin in japanese means "unemployed person", although i've heard the more poetic "wandering wave" also. basically, a samurai who was severed from his lord, either by some misdeed or the latter's death, became a ronin. westerners often associate the word with heroic figures like miyamoto musashi, wandering the countryside, dueling and practicing incessantly, honing both skill and character. we tend to like the idea of the loner-john-wane-cowboy riding off into the sunset. generally though, the term was an insult; a derrogation. if you operated outside of a fife or the service of a lord, you were essentially without use in feudal japan, and were probably "better off" committing seppuku. anyway, it's an ironic name for a yo-yo, considering that it represents the end of my loose affiliation with throw down. it's a cool, bulky toy ; comparable in size and weight to a pyro. it's very smooth, but in play, feels decidedly "clunky".

we had released two yo-yo's: the luchador (yo-yo #12/13) and the tiny shuriken. i was really pleased by how both played, by their branding, and by how they were received by the community. i felt that throw down was headed in a really cool direction. in fall 07, nate sent me a prototype of the "lucha libre", an all-delrin version of the luchador. his first attempt was in essence, exactly that. it was a plastic luchador, without a bearing seat and with a huge axle screwed right into the plastic. as a product tester, i felt like this was a recipe for disaster; that the axle would strip the plastic halves, ruining the yo-yo or that the bearing seat would fail under the pressure of the steel bearing being tightened into it. i said as much to nate, and he considered it.

after awhile, he decided to redesign the lucha libre with a weird steel hex-nut axle insert that would fit into the delrin body. it used protective shims and was a very ambitious and complicated design that ended up taking him forever to finalize. i'm not sure if he got impatient or what, but i certainly never got to play with the updated version before he brought it to market. because i'm intentionally hard on yo-yo's i test, i like to think that i'd have caught the flaw, but who really knows? the libre had a paper thin wall around the bearing seat. even the slightest overtightening or banging could (and would) break it, rendering the yo-yo pretty much useless. nate told me he was aware of the flaw just in time for its release from stores. he added a quick disclaimer to it, and hoped that people would be gentle.

whether they were or weren't, peoples' toys broke quickly and in large number. i know of relatively few libres that are still in working condition (and have been played reasonably hard). around this time, nate pretty much stopped responding to my emails (and apparently to those of an increasingly irate yo-yo community, many of whom had been told that he'd replace their broken halves). i'd still harass him on the phone sometimes, and he'd repeatedly say stuff like "yeah i gotta get on that." i really think he wanted to, but that he simply didn't have the means. my good friend takeshi reminded me that nate's got some aspect of the "samurai" mindset himself, and that he wouldn't want to ask for help or even offer up the fact that everything was not alright. and to be honest, though i think he should have said SOMETHING directly to the community, i can appreciate that perspective to a degree. i think that nate was just overwhelmed by the financial meltdown the libre had become. he had been putting the little money he made from one yo-yo into funding the next, and all it took was one design flaw to toss throw down into a whirling vortex. evidently (and most unfortunately), he hit the "eject button", and has been incommunicado with the yo-yo world since last year.

this irritated me for 2 reasons. although i just tested out his yo-yo's, and had nothing to do with the company or business plan (or apparent lack thereof), i was perceived as an official "throw down guy" who could accurately comment on what-the-hell-happened. also, this yo-yo, MY yo-yo, the ronin... obviously stalled indefinitely. over the course of a year, i was told "2 more weeks, 2 more weeks" and pretty much believed it. needless to say, the original run of 10ish protos are the only ones that have ever been made. at one point i had 4 of them (3 of which i bought from nate at cost), but i've only kept this one. i'm not sure if i kept it to remind myself of how excited i was about designing a yo-yo "just for me" (i sure don't love the way it plays now), or if i've kept it to remind myself to "see the forest for the trees", and NOT to get too excited about phenomena over which i have essentially no control.

forgive me, but i'm going to talk more about this yo-yo in just a minute (in a much more gleeful context!)

yo-yo #45: steve brown/jason tracy tung-oiled clean machine

that was a mouthful.

do you have a yo-yo that just always seems to play amazingly? whatever you do to it? no?
though you might need night goggles, a pickaxe, and a compass to find one, i recommend you give it a shot.

this yo-yo has a seriously amazing pedigree (at least it did before it got to me). the yo-yo world appears to have forgotten '97 world champ and tom kuhn/bc wood thrower, jason tracy, who originally got this yo-yo from its maker, brad countryman. he gave it to steve brown, whose legend is obviously undiminished. i have another jason tracy clean machine that's quite a lot like it. i received this one from steve some time in 2007 (he basically said 'pay me what you think it's worth whenever you can' - i think i sent him $50 at one point, but i'm still in the hole for the other $999,950.)

unlike my other jason tracy clean machine, this one isn't actually 'clean' (i guess neither is the other technically). like my other example, it's got a printed 'special' logo on one side and the 'custom yo-yo's' logo on the reverse. UNlike its counterpart, however, jason applied a generous tung-oil finish to this one. i don't know much about the virtues of tung-oil finish (i remember i used to want a carvin bass with it though), but it sure is beautiful. and since the finish isn't really raised off the wood at all (as on a regular laquer-finished no jive), you still get all the benefits of a clean machine. maple is a very underrated response mechanism.

since i got it, i've pretty much only played this yo-yo in imperial. it's really lovely, and i never thought i'd want to risk hurt to it by playing it hard. now i have like 30 no jives though, and among those are a great deal that i find it easy to keep pristine. the other day i was playing the aforementioned jason tracy no jive 'a', and i realized "damn... this thing plays perfect every time, and needs way less fussing than my laiminates or my #1. if only i had another one like it." and after 2 years or something, it occurred to me that... i do. i'd still rather not fling it against the asphalt, but i think steve and jason would both appreciate the value of a yo-yo played more than that of one shelved.

i gave it the same rough setup as its brother (shimmed out the gap a tad, added one dead duncan sticker and type 8 string), and behold, it plays just as wonderfully. i hit my benchmark 3-in-1 trick, 'spirit bomb' with it on each of my first 3 tries (a feat i've never done on another wood axle yo-yo).

on an epic tangent, i want to quickly document the 'no jive spirit bomb club'. it's getting kinda big, and i feel like i should record the names of the members someplace so i can remember later. (basically, the "njsbc" is just a silly little club for people who've hit spirit bomb on a no jive. to be in the club, you have to do it in front of one of the existing members. it's a totally informal thing that was started at iyyo last year (i think red came up with the idea for a 'club'?)) anyway, the members (in order of induction) are: brandon jackson, adam brewster, joey fleshman, red (1st try), yuuki spencer (1st try), tyler severance (1st try), me (200th try), samm scott, andre boulay, sebastian brock. if i missed you, remind me.

anyhow, i don't know what it is/was about jason, but both of the yo-yo's i have that were formerly his just seem to play awesome of their own accord. like i CAN'T set them up poorly. some other no jives you have to be ginger with and really struggle to get in tune, but this one and its bro just seem to say, "you want to yo-yo? right on! let's yo-yo amazing, just 'cause!" it ALWAYS seems to spin true, which is impressive when you consider that the vast majority of it is stuff that used to be alive... and maybe it still is in some way.

this yo-yo is just always in harmony, which is kind of where i want to be, as a person and as a yo-yoer. i want my yo-yoing (and my surfing, and my aikido, and my skating, and my music, and my stay-at-home-dadding) to be truly Appropriate. i want my actions to really suit the circumstances. i want to stop forcing my self and the weight of my will upon the world. i just want to spin true.