yo-yo #'s 54 & 55: higby painted sunsets

so people are trickling back from worlds. the boards are becoming repopulated. people are talking about all that they saw and experienced.

part of that is (as always) all about how "terribly flawed" the judging was. and devoid of a total powerhouse reinventing the 1a scene, it's worse this year.

the most controversial results probably hit the floor after the 2nd round of 1a. it was chock full of talent, but the names that were culled from it were definitely not what people expected, even after seeing the corresponding 1 minute freestyles. yuuki spencer, sid, augie fash, tyler severance, sebastian brock. all beloved favorites, and all eliminated.

what confuses me is... why are people so surprised? why so upset?

i know we want to make yo-yoing a sport. and god, we try so hard to pretend it is; to mold it into the shape of one. but i'm sorry it's just not right now. it's not because no one can accurately predict the winners before being TOLD what they are by a panel of judges. even if you knew what to look for, and clicked through every freestyle in slow-mo 10 times, the final results would be inherently unpredictable. said judges try their best to be fair and objective, but what system could they possibly use in real-time to determine that "blindingly-fast-freestyle a" is more valuable than "totally-innovative-freestyle b"? ... cause that's what they're up against.

i hear a lot of people talking about "string hits", and it's important for them to understand that no contests are really judged in that way. but their ignorance betrays the dirty secret that essentially NO ONE (up to and including competitors and a good many judges) really understands HOW the winners are chosen, and WHY they win. on the yoyofactory world's countdown, ben posted that the team had been training with a clear focus; to throw down innovative, difficult tricks, quickly and cleanly. it won the contest for them 2 years running. however, ben claimed that the contest was not judged in a way that benefitted his players' training model. how, in what's supposed to be a "sport", can that possibly happen?

no one watches a baseball game and is confused about who won. no one goes to track meet, but can't predict the victor after observing the 100m dash. you might train in this way or that way, but you know WHAT you're training for. you know how your performance will be measured and what you have to do to win the game. we yo-yoers have crafted this elaborate stage, upon which we display truly amazing creative feats... but we forgot that there's no real way to "judge" something called a "freestyle". oops?

the closest legitimate approximation of the model that yo-yoing appears to strive for would be figure skating, or maybe gymnastics. in both of those examples, the participants are able to design their own routines (or at least their coaches are). HOWEVER (big however), in said examples, the participants are ALSO required to demonstrate the same essential elements, and are judged on how well they complete them. the judges are able to easily compare how well skaters a and b complete their respective "triple sow-cows" (or whatever). and there are strict rules that determine the precise deductions for missteps. how boring would it be if all of the "freestyles" were not "free" at all, but composed of tricks and movements the judges knew to look for? to watch as all the competitors in a yo-yo contest strive for that "perfect rancid milk" (that everyone knows is coming) in the middle of their freestyles? but that's the only way yo-yoing can be quantified, and thereby made a sport: by being predictable, uniform, standardized. remember compulsories? everyone thought they SUCKED... but they were probably more fair and more clear than what we have now. and no, i'm not saying we should go back... i'm just saying we shouldn't invest too much in who wins and who doesn't.

i can't imagine anything more redundant than complaining about the results of the world yo-yo contest. OF COURSE the judging system sucks. NO system could do anything BUT suck. the very notion of a "system" PRECLUDES its ability to effectively judge and compare something called a "FREE-STYLE". that which is inherently expressive will never be measured with any validity. it's absurd. it's like watching two may-flies live out their lives over a day, and then numerically grading each on which had the best "quality of life". an enjoyable way to spend an afternoon perhaps (if you're an entomologist, anyway)... but at the end of said afternoon, don't try to pretend that you did something more substantial than watching some bugs fly around.

and mind, this doesn't discredit the judges who spend hour-after-hour toiling through the freestyles. yo-yo contests are FUN. they're full of hilarious hijinks and trick-trading and incredibe videos and cool new toys and NONE of it would happen if the judges didn't run it for us. if you haven't organized or judged a contest, i'd have to argue that though you may have a right to express it, your perspective on "who you think should have won" is woefully incomplete. this tirade isn't meant to diminish the efforts of the competitors up there on the stage either. we're human, and so we're pretty lazy. unless there's something "in it for us", a lot of us don't want to get out of bed, much less learn really frustrating, difficult yo-yo tricks. the idea of being "world champion" is pretty attractive. it sounds like something worth practicing for. and those of us NOT driven to be champions should thank those that strive for it... their play inspires us to improve our own.

... i purchased these sunsets from yo-yo superstar/painter, john higby a few years ago. he bought a whole mess of clear ones from yoyojam, and painted them in his distinct style using all kinds of different themes. i always loved his "space" freehand zeros, but never had one. i had to go with that. a little while later, nate weddle from throw down sent me a pair of silicone o-rings for them, and they work PERFECTLY. it's almost a pity they're so beautiful, because they're easily the best [bearing] loopers i own, and i play them all the time.

anyway, last year, higby won the "artistic performance" division at worlds. ("artistic performance". i mean if you get up in arms about who should win THAT, then i can't imagine a reason to stand around arguing with you.) higby's routine was exquisite. he built a subway staircase prop, and pretended to descend it, reascending with any number of new yo-yo styles and gags cleverly culled from his stage shows. he brought friends on stage, the event was colorful and electric, and involved 3-d glasses. it was brilliant, and pretty much everyone thought he had won (which of course, he did). i emphasize "pretty much" because i'll bet one or two of the other competitors may have disagreed. some of their friends and family may have, too. and that line between art and science is razor-thin. if one dude in the back thinks taka or hiro really deserved it... isn't that enough to question the system? how about 3 guys? 30? 300? subjective is subjective, and just like truth, it WILL out.

case in point, this year higby goes up on stage, does a dazzling three-part "past, present, and future of yo-yoing" extravaganza (actually bringing his infant son on stage in a space suit at one point, and making use of incredibly innovative props throughout). a lot of people i talked to thought he had it in the bag again, yet he wasn't even in the top three. of course, higby wasn't as pissed about it as some folks i talked to: "I really did not enter AP to win but to get my idea on stage and to get some friends up there too! I think AP is getting better and I hope more people enter with the endless creativity of the amazing toy called YO-YO." pure class.

i love how in ap, the results only list the top 3 "competitors" ("artists"?), and then after that it's alphabetical order. i mean... if we're saying there was a "winner", there must have been a "loser", right? so who "lost" the art contest? it's ridiculous to ask, right? more ridiculous than declaring someone the "winner" though?

i think the only freestyle i watched this year which seduced me into the belief that it was the incontrovertible winner was kentaro's 3a. i've never seen anything so difficult done with such grace, within yo-yoing or without. i don't know anyone who could have picked someone over him. but my argument is still inherently subjective, and the fact remains that if someone came on-stage and matched his skill (hard to believe, but not impossible)... who in the world would be qualified to call one the champion and the other "s.o.l."? kentaro should be congratulated (to the end of his effing days) on having smashed every ceiling ignorant schmucks like me had placed on 3a. he should be congratulated on designing and working out a routine that people will look back on and call "totally ahead of its time"; which will define the standard for the division in years to come. i have to believe that THOSE sentiments are more meaningful, both to the observers and to mr. kimura, himself than "congrats on being world champion". i'm sure he doesn't remember, but i just told him "thank you", and would like to do so again.

so what do we do? everybody's asking each other. do we yell to each other about how the judges must have "had it in" for this guy or that guy? do we switch things all wacky, and go to a vague "performance"-based system or peer-judging/crowd-response (which at the worlds level, become nothing more than a popularity contest). do we designate really specific criteria that everyone knows and navigates? do we demand total transparancy and live-televised click-graphs, in which case, which judges will want to step up and risk being yelled at?

i've never heard a truly satisfactory solution though; one that makes the winner clear and does so fairly. i don't believe there are solutions, because i believe the "problem" is only a problem if you choose to view it as such; if you focus more on the results of the contest than the content, itself. the real "problem" is that people need to win things to consider themselves and their passions valuable. unamerican as it may make me seem, i repectfully disagree with that premise.

i do think people should try to find ways to run a better contest. i've had the privilege of sitting in on judges' meetings, and i love the great ideas that organizers are trying out, and i look forward to helping to implement changes where i can. i ran nc states for two years (and i hope to again). it's hard, but rewarding, and the attendees are genuinely appreciative. but they're appreciative because the contest gives us an excuse for getting together. the results, themselves will never be meaningful, and if you believe they are, i think you're delusional (no offense)... the experiences on the other hand... those will always be meaningful. worlds certainly was this year, and many thanks to all of you that made it so.

yo-yo #53: sb-2

i would like seth peterson to become a brazillionaire someday (meaning i would like him to own the nation of brazil, and all of its contents/resources). he's a motivated, young entrepreneurial-type. with a little luck, and a few more shirts sold at savedeth.com (which you should support), he could totally do it.

besides being one of the planet's most creative yo-yo players, seth's also just about the most generous person i know. actually, now that i think on it, those traits seem to correspond quite a lot. i'm not sure if a life spent playing yo-yo somehow imbues one with altruistic tendencies, or if i just tend to gravitate toward friendships with the really generous players because i happen to like them. it occurs to me that i came home from worlds this week with a bunch of new yo-yo's, none of which i actually purchased.

seth has been telling me about this one for awhile. i played a tom kuhn silver bullet 2 ONCE, in about 1998. the mall-cart where i used to hang out and salivate had one that was just for prospective buyers to play. i vividly remember thinking that it was superior to proyo's cold fusion in every respect but aesthetics. i wasn't one of the kids who always asked to play it, mostly because i knew i couldn't afford it back then. i bought a custom mag for about $40, and that, in itself, felt totally outlandish. the $100+ tag on the sb-2 made it seem like it belonged in neiman marcus, and although it can be found for cheaper now, i've always associated it with extravagance.

i collect tom kuhn yo-yo's, and when seth said he had one of these for me, i was pretty excited. i've always kind of put the sb-2 on a pedestal, and although i've wanted them, i've never really gone after them. the one he gave me on wednesday though, is a yo-yo i'm truly going to treasure. the sb-2 was the first production ball bearing yo-yo, and this one plays incredibly well; as smooth as plenty of today's most technologically advanced creations. the gap tool on it is truly brilliant, and it can be made to loop splendidly or dead unresponsive with just a few rotations of the spacers. it's pretty natural to go from the flying v to the sb-2, which for some odd reason, makes me feel kind of proud (though the sb-2 was never discussed as a source of inspiration for it).

the best part about it, though, is the patina (which, incidentally, is among my favorite words). i love yo-yo's that LOOK like they've been used; that LOOK like they've been loved. while a shiny new sb-2 would be "cool", this one is "beloved"... and like something out of "the velveteen rabbit" that love has made it "real". it's taken some beatings, but the aluminum, itself, is mostly intact. while areas on the hubs still sport a dull polish, the yo-yo has oxidized on the surfaces that the hand is most prone to touching, creating a kind of natural "enso". the rims, which are the most frequently handled, have darkened considerably, and now look like aluminum does when it is pulled from the ground.

though the yo-yo has lost its polish, it has gained proof-of-play. it bears the evidence of seth's considerable committment to yo-yoing, and that's much more valuable to me than a high lustre or ornate splash-ano. seth gave me a yo-yo, but he also gave me something of himself. like i said, seth's very giving, so i don't know if that was a big deal to him. but it certainly was to me.

so yeah, i'd like him to be a brazillionaire, but then... i also know that if all of brazil WAS his someday, he'd probably just smile and hand it back to red.

yo-yo #52: spyy skyy chaser

i've just been a mess all week. i don't know how my wife even puts up with me. been all gloomy and moody and surly. slothful and listless. a real pleasure. i like to think that my "base" disposition is pretty even, and this attitude is pretty unnatural for me. so i kind of try to delve into these darker emotions when they arise.

worlds is obviously next week, and i'm elated to be going, but whenever elation is abundant, i find that it's frequently accompanied by elation's miserable doppelganger. worlds is hectic, and it just simmers with nervous energy. it's also a contest, and i'm not altogether clear on how i feel about that notion itself. also, i'm going alone; leaving my kids with their grandparents and my wife to fend for herself. not the worst i could do to them, but there's still a modicum of guilt.

i'm doing 1a, and the battle with myself over whether and how i should be motivated for that is something for which i was not prepared. i've competed some, and i did ok at nc states, but i feel like since this is worlds, it "matters", or at least... it's "supposed to". it should be preemptively stated that i'm not looking to win; (at the risk of sounding defeatist) i truly don't even want to. i haven't put in the time, practice, or consideration to even be in the running, and the title holds no glory for me whatsoever, especially given its inherently subjective nature. i revere the winners for their skill, and the amount of work they have to put in, but being champion has never been for me.

so why even get on stage? hundreds of people will compete this year and virtually none of them comes in with a legitimate chance (or even sincere intent) of walking out with the "big yo-yo guy" trophy. some of them will get on stage just to say they did it (to others, or just to themselves). some of them hold making it to finals (or even just round 2) as their deepest ambition, and after that "whatever". for me, i feel like it's kind of a pilgrimage. it's the biggest stage in yo-yoing, and whatever my grievances or misconceptions about how the winners are chosen, i feel like i should put myself up there at least once, even if only for a minute. if i have any hope for it, i hope i throw yo-yo like myself. i hope i don't get carried away with the moment and let my yo-yoing go all to hell. i hope that i don't walk off the stage with any regret (though in my experience, that's more a choice one makes than anything else). i'm an "old man" (by yo-yoer standards). i've seen things and done things that i hold much more meaningful than this (honestly, throwing wood in my backyard is no less important to me). i guess i hope i can keep my perspective that balanced.

i won't be using either of these yo-yo's for my 1a 1-minute. i'll be using the flying v, which actually constitutes another reason for getting on stage in the first place. steve buffel is considerate, almost to a fault, and would never pull the "sponsor card", issuing an edict that i compete (he even suggested i use a no jive). but i'm really proud of the yo-yo we made, and i feel like it deserves a moment on stage, too. and if said yo-yo gets pissed at me for wielding it poorly, well... tough shit, flying v!

the final and most ridiculous reason why i'm doing 1a does involve these yo-yo's. i wanna do ladder. seriously, i really like ladder. i won the "old guy" ladder at worlds in 07 (not to toot my own horn, but i win a lot of "old guy" ladders). i've talked about this before, but i think ladder is rad for two reasons. 1.) it is totally quantifiable. you've got to hit THIS trick THIS way, and if you don't you're done. no one can possibly dispute the winner afterwards (like anyone would even CARE to: "i had cuartero in first for ladder, what about you?" "psh. cuartero?! that guy has some ugly-ass pop-'n-fresh! adam brewster's gerbil took it for me."). and 2.) i like "canon". i like "kata". i like the idea that some yo-yo tricks should be preserved, and that virtually everyone should know them , so as to share some common points of understanding. i don't feel that EVERY trick on the ladder is super important, but most of them, and i think the idea is well-conceived. if you can't do kamikaze or black hops, i think you should learn those tricks. i think they're valuable. i think developing the ability to hit those tricks on command is valuable, in part for the tricks' own sakes, but also because of the fundamentals that learning them teaches you.

i'll grant you i'm not someone who "practices ladder", because well... i can't imagine anything more boring than practicing a whole list of tricks i already know i can hit. but the question of whether i WILL hit these tricks i've learned is actually pretty exciting for me.

ladder is largely viewed as "the kiddy pool" of yo-yo contests, and for pretty good reason. at most state-level contests, if you freestyle, you're precluded from ladder. otherwise, the top players would beat up on the newer players in every division and snag all the prizes. takeshi told me he HATES when experienced players do ladder, because it just depresses the newer guys and turns them off of yo-yoing. i agree with that, but i also just... really like ladder, and i don't want to apologize for being good at it. that's why i really dig contests like worlds, which have ladder, but break it into divisions. you've got the ladder for people who JUST want to do ladder, and then ladder for people who want to freestyle in one of the "championship" divisions. same tricks, but two separate pools. my only gripe is that not enough of the freestylers actually DO the ladder, and i think that's generally either because it's too easy, or because they're too cool for it. if i were mickey, and i already won ladder with no misses, then i can totally understand. lots of great freestyle players don't even know all the ladder tricks though, and i kind of think that's too bad. yo-yoing's an art, but it also has structure and pedagogy. i don't think anyone's too cool to learn 25 yo-yo tricks. hell, maybe it should be 40 tricks, or maybe have the 1a and 2a lists consolidated. anyway, having won it in my age group once, it wouldn't sit right to try and do it again, so by entering 1a, i get a whole new field and don't have to feel like a schmuck (i mean a bigger one than i already am).

i like packing early, and i'm trying to decide on the yo-yo's i'm bringing to orlando. it's amusing to me that there was a time whence i would have just said "all of em", and then spent the next few days lugging around a huge case. nothing could be less appealing, and though, as my friend jonrob says "can't hate on a case full of yo-yo's", neither do i feel like showing one off or standing guard over one next week. i got an AMAZING shipment of yo-yo's from steve this week, with a little of all of the yo-yo's spyy's put out lately. i was immediately blown away by these little beauties (i'm the type of guy to refer to yo-yo's as "little beauties"). the skyy chaser is being produced in both big c-bearing/silicone and medium-big d-bearing/pad form. it's small, about the dimensions of a skyline, but it feels disproportionately substantial. i'm not going to try it, but i feel like i could probably kill a rhino with one of these, at least a baby one. the red-orange (or orange-red - screw you, crayola) NON-blasted ano finish is flawless, and is most at home out in the sunlight. the laser art, lifted straight from the hood of a firebird, hints at the yo-yo's hidden muscle. everything about it screams performance, and so i'm pretty set on using one of them for ladder. i want to use a yo-yo that i won't have to worry about. (while "no jive ladder" is seriously fun, i've been there/done that).

winning would be fine, but like deciding to freestyle at worlds in general, it's more of an internal struggle (or "turmoil" - hi, dazzling dave!), and if you're tying any particle of self-worth to "how you do" relative to others, i'd argue your energy is misplaced. much like how i feel freestyling should be, i don't really care if i win, or anyone beats me. it's just about doing as well as i can, and so i'd really like to go perfect (at least the 1a list; on 2a my punches have always been awful and i'll be lucky to get past them at all). so, yeah. i'm not sure if i'm the first person who's kind of just doing 1a so that he can do ladder and not feel like a turd, but... well there it is. see you at worlds (who am i kidding, i'll probably crank out #53 before i leave).

writing this is a pleasant reminder that, no matter what drama and baggage you take with you, be it desire for "champion of the world glory, "what am i doing this for" confusion, or "i hope my wife eats ok while i'm gone" anxiety, worlds is first and foremost a celebration of, as boyd seth said recently "the string that ties us together". and it's gonna be an effin' party.

yo-yo #51: anti-yo eetzilla

51 is not actually prime (3x17). don't front, i know you were thinking it was.


i finally arrive at an anti-yo, which has made several of my favorite yo-yo's. when i started getting into "forum-culture", the anti-yo fluchs was just hitting. i'm always amazed when yo-yo's that have a serious design issue really resonate with the community anyhow. despite a prone-to-wobble axle/bearing design, the fluchs was the kindling that later enabled a twin-inferno in the form of the eetsit and bapezilla.

the eetsit came out on valentine's day of 06 and, hotly anticipated as it was, sold out abruptly. almost as soon as it hit peoples hands, however, the reports of a flaw started rolling in. although the eetsit was roundly held to play brilliantly and look delicious (it WAS named after a tasty snack, after all), its bearing seat was just a little too high for its inner wall. as such, much of the disappointed populace was experiencing a newly-named phenomenon that would resound like a death knell to virtually any other company: "slippage". almost overnight, all the boards were alive with theories as to what the culprit was, and whether a solution was possible. it's funny to look back and remember how confused everyone was about it. oke rosgana had a complicated theory that the eetsits shipped with a batch of konkave bearings that had a microscopically tapered edge, which caused the issue. myriad others blamed the stock baz pads, and plans to make thicker ones were made. however, when some illuminated individual (as far as i can recall/research it was mOoN in georgia) sanded down his eetsit's bearing seat, everyone seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief. true, it was "yo-yo surgery", and true, such things shouldn't be necessary after plunking down $85... but to make a beautiful beast of a yo-yo manifest its full potential? so worth it.

the eetsit was such a curious release. almost everyone who bought it seemed to LOVE it (despite that whole "unplayable due to slippage" thing). i really do think that any other yo-yo company would have been dead in the water. but kiya and sonny always represented their product so well, and for a few years, it really seemed as though they were the only force out there conning us into the belief that yo-yoing could actually be "something cool people do". i didn't actually play one for about a year, when at an nc "easily amused" meet, i tried samm scott's and fell in love. fortunately for me, samm goes on these kicks where he only plays one kind of yo-yo, and he gets a ton of em. when i first met him, he was all up on hyperwarp heavy wings, but he also went through a dark magic period, a freehand period, and an anti-yo period. at this time though, samm was deep in a 401k period, and he was more than willing to trade joey fleshman's old, all-brown eetsit for my beat, gray 401 (good call, samm!). joey had fixed the bearing seat, so i was all in. i had acquired the first half of this eetzilla.

the second half had been forged in the fires of mount doom (or machined in some shop) later in 06. the bapezilla was the inevitable "fixed" version of the genreally-adored eetsit. kiya/sonny basically just gave it a new, outlandish colorway, a flat bearing, and a new name. it played like a million bucks, and when it was covered in gold as its third incarnation, "the gouda", it could have sold for about as much. the gap was a little on the thin side for some people, but by and large, it was recognized that anti-yo had released something truly wonderful, and the bapes sold like wildfire. i bought one from the nation, and the day i received it, drove :30 to my pal dave wilmot's (he was good, but i don't think he yo-yo's anymore), and we traded halves. i got all blue; he took all green. about a week later, he let me know that he had dinged it on his floor, and unable to deal with the ding... had satin-finished the whole effing outside. i was shocked and appalled. the bapezilla had one of, if not the most beautiful finishes ever, and i was momentarily dismayed at having exchanged with him if he was going to use it so sinfully. later that week, i banked my own blue bape off of my ray bans (which were in my shirt pocket, not on my head). the 2 mm white mark the collision left upon the yo-yo felt like a blemish on my soul, but after that first one, the floodgates were opened, and i recognized that a scarred yo-yo that had experienced the world is no less beautiful than a pristine one. since then, i've had no compunction with dinging the hell out of my yo-yo's. i don't do it needlessly or artificially, mind you, like some skatepark grom rubbing his shiny new board on a rail to make it look skated. but, every gouge tells its own story, and all of them collectively construct a kind of autobiography (after all, what are WE, apart from our own loss and pain - the flat plane of our love and joy are brought to life by our own "dings"). the satin one that david had later became a total "yo-yo skank", and made its way into and out of dozens of collections. eventually, it came back to me, until i traded it to dave poyzer... for a black phi and a gold 201 (i shit you not - this momentary lapse in judgment can only have been karma for having taken advantage of samm)! in true dave fashion, he polished that sucker to perfection and later sold it for a mint.

speaking of cost, a few months after the bapezilla landed, someone sold one on ebay for $230. at least i think they did - there was some disagreement as to whether the transaction was actually finalized. the details were irrelevant though, as in the eyes of the "yo-yo market", the bapezilla was suddenly a commodity on the level of the oxy 4. $200+ prices became commonplace (even though the bape had retailed at $80), and with this new inflated clout to its price came a new (and largely undue) backlash. by the end of 06, several new high-tech yo-yo's were emerging (among them the saturn radian mk-ii, the first wave of clyw peaks and yyf g5), which totally reset the "smoothness standard". this freshly-weened generation of yo-yo's didn't necessarily render the bape obsolete, but it did get people talking (and complaining) about its design. since the bape's axle system doesn't actually "seat" the bearing, and uses a super-thick axle, on which the bearing rests, it's more prone to vibration than newer setups. as seems to happen with so many companies, anti-yo developed a tribe of haters that seemed no less zealous than their fanboys.

i've played anti-yo's though (like this one) that play as smooth as glass. i do think people should have high standards, and should look out for ways by which yo-yo design can move forward... but it's not necessarily good to be obsessive. as in all things, it's important to strike a balance. "water which is too pure has no fish." yeah, you want a smooth yo-yo, so that your spin times won't be negatively affected, but most of the yo-yo's we've seen these past 5 years though, anti-yo included, are capable of way more than YOU are (no offense). our technology has far outpaced our collective ability to utilize it, so deriding a product simply because it doesn't have a feature we perceive to be the best isn't always productive.

i brought my eetsit to worlds 07, and i hung out with sonny, who is without question one of the kindest, most interesting people i know. he was rocking an eetzilla the whole time; green and brown (i call the blue and white ones "bapesits", and almost never see blue/brown "sitzillas" or green/white "eetbapes" - ok i'm an idiot). i determined to get one, partly because i thought the "earthy" look was rad, but more because i thought sonny was. lucky for me, one of my other pals, tyler koske, had a bapezilla, and he was cool with trading halves. i don't know how his ended up, but mine was immediately transformed. it just played flawlessly, and it has ever since. perhaps it's this perfection that's rendered me especially sympathetic to the hate anti-yo seems to sustain.

unfortunately, it felt as though anti-yo went from "en vogue" to "so last year" really quickly, and when they released another yo-yo with the same axle setup in "the business", they got as much grief as they did praise. i find it pretty depressing that kiya and sonny really weren't left with any great motivation to participate in the community thereafter. these guys were really driving "yo-yo style" forward, if nothing else, and when the tide turned on anti-yo, it turned pretty harshly. it's been said before, but when one posts something on a messageboard, one's perspective rarely recognizes the people involved as "people". it's always more convenient (in light of the grandiose points we wish to make concerning yo-yo inferiority) to operate under a shield of anonymity, and with the perspective that we're dealing with some "corporate" entity than it is to recognize that we're taking a dump on two dudes, and their efforts to make yo-yo's that they love, without raking in a ton for it.

anti-yo's latest yo-yo is (of course) called the ywet, which stands (of course) for "yo-yos will eat themselves", a reference to the band "pop will eat itself". i've played two of them; they exist and are phenomenal. i have no idea if they will ever be dropped or were even meant to be. for a good long while, the forum-masses were pretty obsessed with their imminent release. i think the idea of a super-hyped yo-yo that is NEVER released is a nice way to highlight our rampant, materialistic nature (which most always values the acquisition more highly than the people behind it), and would certainly be aptly named.

sometimes i wonder why anyone posts on the fundamentally dehumanizing messageboards anyway. the bigger ones seem to serve as little more than gossip columns; perez hilton for yo-yo nerds (i only know what that is because of my wife - no really!). maybe they've always been that way, and i just wasn't paying attention. regardless, it remains the most convenient mode of communication available to us, and the participants would do well to find ways to appeal to each other's better nature, and to embrace those who continue to make yo-yoing feel like "something cool people do".

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.