New TCU shirts and hats are now available on our webstore! All orders ship with with free OSS and TCU stickers, along with a free copy of the OSS Denver Ngus DVD. Check after the jump for some photos of Sean Morr, Chris Zep, and Adam22 wearing the new gear.

Explain the whole “Capone” thing that happened a while back, like how did you get to know him and i remember the the Capone meets Adam 22 video but had no clue what the hell it was really all about.

I’m so glad you asked! Capone was just some kid who posted on The Come Up Board a lot (it’s still around, you should post there right now). He was really young when he started posting on there, maybe 15 or 16. He was also mentally handicapped. I’m not sure to what extent, but he definitely has something seriously wrong with him. I heard that he has fetal alcohol syndrome but he vehemently denied it.

Capone was and still is a product of the Niagra Falls scene. He looked up to Charlie Crumlish, Greg Henry, Brad Hill etc.

His antics on the board were the stuff of legend. Some of his finest moments:

1) It’s been removed from the internet but he once made a video called “how to make an appel bolw” (it’s since been removed) in which he sat around his house and filmed himself explaining how to smoke weed out of an apple. Have you ever smoked weed out of an apple? It’s pretty simple. The fact that he took a half hour to explain it was pretty amazing, especially when you consider that he wasn’t wearing a shirt the entire time.

2) He got in contact with FBM and somehow convinced them to make them to re-make the classic FBM Capone frame (where his name came from) for him. They were taking too long so he blew up at them online. They were doing him a huge favor and he acted like a total dick about it.

3) He made a sex tape. I never watched it. But Biz did and he still talks about it every time I see him.

4) He made a DVD called “HIGH AS FUCK” (best video name ever) and got members of the board to send in clips of themselves. I don’t think I ever got around to watching it but the name alone is amazing.

5) For being such a dumbass, Capone was still surprisingly smart on some topics. He was always really good with computers and he’d have these long, drawn out Q&A threads on the board where he’d teach people how to do complex things with their computers, all with his signature horrible spelling.

There were many more but my memory is bad. Anyway those all fall under the category of “things Capone did before I met him”. The day I met him is also the stuff of legend.

We were on an OSS trip to Toronto with Garrett Reeves, Craig Passero, Charlie, Mike Taylor, Chris Zeppieri and Devin Feil. We had a really great trip, Toronto is unbelievable for street riding. It was kind of rainy on one of the final days of the trip so we ended up filming a skatepark session at the Niagra Falls skatepark, Capone’s local stomping grounds. We were all hoping he’d show up.

Keep in mind that over the years, Capone had gone through multiple phases where sometimes he’d love me and write me long emails about how much he wanted to swish my balls around in his mouth, and other times he’s be making public declarations on Myspace that he was going to kick my ass. So I was pretty excited to see what would happen.

We were all chilling at the park when we see Capone riding up on his bright orange bike (it was either a Sunday or he had painted it to look like a Sunday) and he rides a little. Then he looks over and realizes that Mike Taylor and I are at his skatepark. So what’s he do?

He drops in and pedals SO FUCKING FAST at this hip and just SOARS like 6 feet out of it (previously we had only seen him maybe air 1 foot over the hip) and just falls so fucking hard. His handlebar stabbed him in the thigh leaving a massive 1 inch wide hole in his leg. You could seriously see the fat and muscle inside his leg just oozing out like you were watching a liposuction on a reality TV show or something.

He talked to us for a little while and begged Charlie to let him smoke weed with him. Charlie would always make him do absurd tasks and then in exchange Charlie would give him his roaches. It was so funny watching his giant hands (I guess I haven’t mentioned this yet but he is huge) clutching these tiny little roaches. We told him he should really go to the hospital to get his leg checked out and he refused because “it’s not every day that Adam22 comes to your skatepark”. I was flattered.

We rode the rest of the day until it started raining and we even convinced him to jump the 7 stair at the park (he was terrified).

Soon after he got mad at me for not responding to his Facebook messages or something and once again started telling everyone he was going to beat my ass. He let me know that he now lifts weights and drinks protein shakes. The joke has kind of stopped being funny, but it will always be a great memory which we capped off with that web video up there.

Gutstains, our resident photo blogger, just wrote an interesting article about yesterday’s drama. He’s got a unique perspective on these things and has been in situations similar to Ryan’s recently ie; yesterday. This is pretty spot on:

“It’s not hard to see that there is a lot of tension between these two & that undoubtedly plays a role in how this situation got to where it is. If it were any other company, I honestly can’t see Fudger getting so bent out of shape. And if it were any other photographer, I could see Adam settling on a reasonable price & being done with it. But Fudger wants everyone to see what a terrible person/businessman Adam is & Adam wants everyone to see how much this whole thing bothers Fudger. Its honestly laughable both ways: Adam is so wrong & Fudger hates Adam so much.”

There is so much bullshit behind the scenes in this situation that almost nobody knows about. I can’t deny it, if this situation unfolded with somebody other than Ryan, I probably would have been more inclined to negotiate. I am also sure that if it was pretty much anyone besides me using the photo, an apology would have been enough. I’ve had multiple people who are friends with both of us tell me that Fudger and I are really similar, in that we’re both super opinionated, argumentative and confrontational. I guess this situation is basically a manifestation of that.

So, here’s a situation for you guys to mull over:

Earlier this month we sent out our new media kit to 20 or 30 brands who either advertise, have advertised or want to advertise on this site. I wrote most of the text and our graphic designer, Scotty Wemmer put it together. One page in the media kit features quotes from Ron Bonner, Will Stroud and Chase Dehart where they basically talk about how much they like The Come Up. Scotty grabbed photos off Google image search, which we didn’t really give much thought to since again, we sent this out to a very small number of brands and we never intended to put it online. The photos were all about 2 inches tall and 2 inches wide. It turns out that the photo of Chase was shot by Ryan Fudger.

Now just to give this some context, Ryan doesn’t like me. It goes way back. I wrote a post in the early days of The Come Up where I basically criticized some of the Nora Cup winners from that year, saying that I didn’t agree with the decisions. Which to me, doesn’t seem like a big deal. Ryan emailed me, then called me and was very upset. Which was pretty wild for me at the time since it was probably my first phone call from anyone in the industry, ever.

There have been some other things over the years that we’ve done, that he didn’t like. We have been critical of magazines and talked freely about the declining print industry. We Photoshopped him into a photo of Chris Duncan. There were other things as well, that I won’t mention here. But basically he just doesn’t like me.

Fast forward to last week. Ryan Fudger emailed me. I hate to make private emails public but he already did, so I suppose it’s fair game:

Ryan Fudger:
“I’d invoice any company that would use my photo without my consent, so don’t take it personal. $400 fair? I’ll send an actual invoice in the next couple days.”

I immediately forwarded this email to Scotty and had him swap out the photo of Chase.

I responded:
“designer pulled it from Google image search and we didn’t realize it was from Ride… misunderstanding, sorry about that it’s already been fixed.”

Ryan Fudger:
“The media kit was sent out weeks ago. Using the image is using the image. Sorry, but you can’t just change it now like it’s never happened. ”

Me:
“either way, i’m CCing Alfredo and you can hit him up if you want for anything legal related, not really my specialty.”

Ryan Fudger:
“Legal related? So, in short, you’re not willing to pay for using one of my photos? ”

Me:
“i’m sure you can understand that i’ll be handling this exactly the same way you are; i need to make the best decision for my business. i’m not familiar with the laws in regard to this kind of thing. any time we’ve ever accidentally used someone’s photo on the site and received a take-down request we’ve removed the photo and that’s been the end of it. if we have a legal responsibility to pay you then i’m sure we’ll be doing so.

and just like you said, this is how i’d respond to anyone who sent me this sort of email so it’s nothing personal.”

Ryan Fudger:
“Haha, alright. It’s obviously not the same as the website since you can’t take it back from all the brands it was sent to. I won’t be suing you over $400, but sometimes you make mistakes (even if it was your art director’s mistake) and you should chalk it up to a learning experience. It’s mostly a matter of respect…as most things tend to be. 

Alfredo, lemme know if I should an invoice over and who to address it to.

Thanks. ”

Then Alfredo responds:
“sorry for my late response! 

To be honest, I feel that $400 is an astronomical rate for a 200×200 image which we did not mean to even run. Realistically, I understand you and Adam have your own issues, and I respect you both so I rather not become a part of that animosity. 

Ultimately, I can’t see us paying for that photo at your rate, and furthermore, Adam is the one that would approve the payment so I really can’t do much on my end. 
In the future, if an instance like this occurs again and the rates are more realistic we can work something out.
Hopefully there’s no hard feelings towards me now, but my hands are tied by my higher up, if you catch my drift.
Cheers man,
Alfredo”

The next email from Ryan was sent to both of us:
“No animosity in any direction. ”Adam differed to you to see if you guys were legally responsible to pay me for the photo and now you’re differing back to Adam saying your hands are tied. What’s the verdict on your end? The photo was used and distributed for the company’s profit, so it’s perfectly acceptable (and legal) to want to be compensated for it. Price for a photo is not dictated by size—there is no standard. Even if it does seem high to you guys, I have my rates and as I implied in the first e-mail, they are negotiable (hence the “fair?” comment in the original e-mail). As of now the real question is if you’re willing to pay for using the photo, because it doesn’t seem like you guys are. ”

My response:
“yeah, we aren’t. there are basically two arguments, the legal one and the moral one. of course morally we don’t think we did anything wrong, and legally I could see it going either way, so the ball’s in your court.”

His final response (for now):
“Morally, you took what I do for a living, used it for free, and are un-willing to compensate me for it. Legally, you stole copy-righted material and used it for your company’s profit. Rack em up, Adam.”

My argument:

• the image was on Google image search. It’s on Facebook. It’s a lot of places.
• we didn’t know he took it
• as soon as we realized he took it, we removed it
• 20 or 30 brands that we sent the PDF to are the only people who ever even saw the media kit.
• we apologized

We did something wrong, sure. I’m not denying that. It’s the kind of mistake that we go out of our way to prevent. But it’s the kind of mistake that people make every day and we handled it as professionally as possible. We removed the image and apologized. Ryan still feels he’s owed money. I’m not being self righteous here and would have preferred to not cover this isue. I’m only writing this to tell my side of the story since his Instagram post makes this sound way, way different than it actually is.

I respect photography, photographers and agree that photographers deserve to get paid for their work. I have paid tons of different photographers over the years for all kinds of different stuff. DVD covers, shooting photos on roadtrips, print ads, web stuff. We always attempt to use authorized photos on TCU and whenever anyone starts blogging for TCU I always talk to them about what photos we can and can’t use. I’m not opposed to the idea of photographers getting paid, I’m opposed to the idea of paying $400 for a 2 inch wide photo, which we used in a situation which was CLEARLY an accident. I feel like we handled the incident professionally.

What do you think?

Growing up, I didn’t film. I mean I did once in a while when we had a camera around but it was just for fun so we could watch the clips ourselves back at home. If I felt like doing something hard or scary, I’d just do it to see if I could. But we never did anything with our footage. I grew up before the web video era and it’s not like anyone was going to ask me to film stuff for their video (it’s not like I even knew anyone who made DVD’s outside of Matt Busby) so it was just never really a concern. Sure I could have made my own video, but at the time that seemed like an impossibly complex undertaking.

Fast forward 6 or 7 years and we were immersed in the filming of the first OSS video, “Football”. I had managed to get 20 or so clips that I was pretty happy with and Mike Mastroni offered to come down to film a few more things so that we could put out my first ever web video. I was pretty happy with some of the stuff I had gotten and after years and years of profiting off of the web video economy, I was excited to put out one of my own even if I assumed it would have a mixed response.

So Mastroni met up with me in Brooklyn one morning (he was living in CT an hour or two away) and first we went to this downside ice I really wanted to do. It was a flat ledge next to a cellar door and I knew that I could do a downside ice on the ledge into the door. At the time I had never seen anyone do a bunnyhop downside ice like this. So I was kind of freaked out by it. It’s honestly such a weird motion. You have to bunnyhop fairly high and then immediately jerk your bike into an awkward tabletop and pray that your peg hits the ledge.

It took me like 50 tries to pull it and I was so happy. Then Mike made me do it again so he could get a second angle (in retrospect, both of the angles were kind of goofy) which took another 30 or so tries. What’s funny is that I went back a few weeks later to shoot a photo of it with Keith Romanowski. Previously I had only done it twice and I was a little nervous about the photo because it was so hard to get it done the first time. But I did it and Keith didn’t get the photo. He asked if I could do it again so I went back and did it again. Photo still didn’t work. I wasn’t even sure if I was going to be able to do it for him at all but I ended up doing it like 30 times in a row before he finally got the photo. He said it was the hardest photo he had ever shot, in the sense that the peg was hitting the ledge so quickly that it was almost impossible to get the peg actually hitting the ledge. That trick went from something I could barely do, to something I could do dozens of times in a row all because Keith was having a hard time getting the photo. The photo ran in some foreign magazine:

At that point I had already drank a coffee. I usually drink either one coffee or one energy drink per day. But I was buzzing off of pulling the first clip of the day that I decided I would just slam a Monster and go fire out another clip I really wanted to do. There’s a rail spot in Brooklyn that has been sessioned to death, you can see it in the background of this photo (this was taken the same day I’m describing here):

It’s a really great rail to go down and going up it isn’t impossible (I actually never did it but I saw a ton of people do it over the years, Nigel tire rided up it, etc) but I wanted to grind up the rail that was against the wall (the same one Scerbo ices down at the end of his Skavenger part). I had tried it before and it didn’t work because I had to lean out a lot so that my bars wouldn’t get caught up in the fence on the wall. But when I leaned out, my tire would be all sideways and hit the uprights on the way up. Still, I thought I could do it if I went faster and held on.

The thing was, after drinking that coffee, the Monster I drank got me FUCKED UP. My hands were shaking. I had Mastroni set up and I kept riding at it full speed and just jamming my foot in the tire at the last second. I sat down after 20 or so bitch runs and decided to try and wait until the caffeine wore off a little.

At that point the following crew of people rolled up: Edwin Delarosa, Bob Scerbo, Vinnie Sammon, Eddie Cleveland and Jackson Ratima. So as if I wasn’t freaking out already from all this caffeine surging through my body, now a bunch of my favorite riders of all time just coincidentally showed up. Mastroni’s cameras were out and they obviously asked what I was going to film and Mike told them and they were pretty excited to see me do it, but I had to explain that I was pussying out. God I felt so dumb.

Mike still really wanted me to get another clip to fill some space on the timeline though so I went to another park and did the flat rail to smith grind at 2:12. That clip was a big pain in the ass too, it looks easy as fuck when I watch it now but I had to wax the fuck out of the wooden bench and I kept taking my foot off because the angle was kinda awkward.

Anyway the edit came out a few months later and it got the most comments of any TCU post ever. A lot of those comments were negative, but I got texts from Edwin, Chase Dehart and Hoder all telling me that they were stoked on it so I was pretty happy with the results. Still, I bitched out on an uprail in front of Edwin and Scerbo which is a way better story than if I had actually done it.

Random trivia about some other clips in the section:

-The 180 smith to full cab at 0:29 was filmed by Scott Marceau before he quit doing drugs. The fact that he was still ingesting handfuls of pills, weed, beer and other illegal drugs every day probably explain why he decided to film a 1 foot tall ledge clip OPPOSITE ROLLING, ZOOMING LONG which is an angle usually reserved for… well it just usually isn’t done.

-The uprail at 0:50, I had to do twice before Garrett Reeves (wearing a ridiculous tie dye shirt) walked right in front of the camera the first time. I was stoked to get a clip on that set up because it’s the same rail Vinnie did pegs feeble 1 on in his old Props commercial.

-I learned downside ices on the ground in some parking lot in CT with Mastroni one day and I was pretty happy to do one in a line. That was by far the most talked about clip in the edit even though at least a few dudes (Wiz, John Heaton) used to be able to ice the ground back in the day.

-The switch feeble switch hard 180 at 1:44 was done in the presence of Jim C in Buffalo. A few minutes later I did that uprail 180 just a couple blocks down the street. The yellow bar clip is one of my favorite things I’ve ever done because it was really hard, didn’t take me that long and even though I hate the rollback, it came out pretty good.

-The manual drop feeble hard 180 at 1:52 is one of my favorite clips ever. I really like the rollback. I went there one day by myself and tried it for like 2 hours and came close but couldn’t get it without KP-hopping in the rollback. Then I went back a few days later with Scott Marceau and got it second try.

-I was pretty stoked on the smith to 180 switch smith at 2:03 too just because I had never seen anyone do that grind, even though it was on a banked ledge. Since then I’ve seen at least one person do it on a flat ledge which is way cooler. My original idea was to do fakie wallride to fakie smith but I fell back and came about an inch away from smashing my brain on the ground so I nixed that idea. Also, the only clip filmed in Vermont.

-I did the ender at least 5 times. First I filmed it fish with Joof but it looked kinda weird so I went back and had Craig film me doing it long. I had to do it over and over so that Keith Romanowski could get the photo (it ran in the same magazine that ran the downside ice photo). I thought it was going to be easy but it was unbelievably weird feeling, so by the time I finally got it done I was pretty happy with myself.

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This is an edit that Miles Rogoish put together a couple weeks ago from a skatepark session we randomly ended up having here in Long Beach. This totally represents how awesome the scene is out here right now. Dylan Stark, Devon Smilie, Sean Morr, Shawn Mcintosh, Jourdan Barba and Alfredo Mancuso all put shit down. This is also notable to me because it features Alfredo’s first clips in 6 months due to knee surgery. Did you guys know that Alfredo is an official TCU employee now? More on that later.

My goal with the other new section, The Oven, was to create a space for edits that were good, but not quite ready for the main page. My goal with this next section that we’re introducing today, is to provide a space for more in depth looks at videos that I feel deserve more analysis. Presenting: Chicken & Rice. Check the video above for more details and keep an eye on the sidebar to stay up to date on new posts.

Oh yeah my apologies in advance we’re heading out riding right now so I didn’t have time to post a couple more things I already have written.

This is one minute or so of shit I got randomly ever since I moved West, thanks to Chris Z for being retarded enough to put this in his DVD.

New OSS commercial from Charlie Crumlish where he documented an important OSS business meeting in Texas during the filming of Charlie’s OSS video part, Alex Raban’s OSS part, Craig Passero’s Lotek section and Scott Ditchburn (friend of OSS)’s Lotek section.

Bobby Kanode came and stayed at our house for a month this Summer and acted as my intern. This basically entailed him riding and filming every day while I coached him on how to meet girls on the internet. The resulting edit came out awesome! Make sure you watch the whole way through to see Catfish give Tony the cat a magnificent paintjob.

Riders include Zach Krejmas, Eric Bahlman, Gabe Brooks, me, Joey Motta and Kanode himself. Look for the edit we filmed of Kanode to drop soon.