Uli Westphal

Combatting air pollution with…glowing artificial trees?

MIT publishes back issues of its Technology Review dating back to 1969.

Much was made of how social media affected Egypt’s uprisings, but not about the role Google Earth played. 
Akashic Books’ Johnny Temple on what you need to do before getting a book published.

Amanda Hocking is a 26-year-old millionaire who has made her money writing young adult novels and selling them for .99 on the Kindle.

Could there be an art market for animated gifs?

Drunken NES, a breathalyzer game for the 8-bit Nintendo.

A tale of the loneliest whale in the world.

Always on the lookout for new marketing angles, and inspired by the custom designs that kids were creating on their roller skate cases, a few like-minded owners created skate stickers with their rink logos on them and distributed them freely to patrons. The promotional move worked like a charm, as people were happy to slap the stickers on their gear and represent their home rink. When other rink owners caught sight of the stickers, they created their own and the trend quickly spread across the country.

The stickers ranged from one-color, roller skate and wing logos, to full-color, die-cut pieces of design mastery. The designers of the stickers, most of whose names have been lost over the years, branched out from simply creating a logo, and started exploring different themes for their stickers. Some of the more popular ones included aeronautics, the old-west and cowboy culture, patriotism, animals, love, humor and the roller rink equivalent of the pin-up girl. The design variations were as numerous as the different rinks and the acquisition of a sticker was as easy as rolling in to get one.

The existence of thousands of different roller skate stickers, all given away for free, and the fact that each sticker represented a different rink, brought on a severe case of collector-itis. Skate enthusiasts began sharing, trading and collecting stickers from as many varying rinks as they could. With rare and hard-to-find stickers being the most desirable, the highest trading value was placed on those stickers that came from out of the way places or whose designs were more intricate, with multiple colors, detailed images and custom shapes.

Roller skating sticker enthusiasts traded with friends and picked up stickers where they could. In those pre-Internet days, they were somewhat limited in how they found fellow traders. However, in 1948, a group of sticker collectors decided to turn their hobby into an organization, and they created the Universal Roller Skating Sticker Exchange (URSSE). With annual conventions at different locations around the U.S., sticker enthusiasts would travel the country, with their binders full of stickers, to attend the meetings. They would make friends, show and tell their collections, trade wares and celebrate roller skating and skating stickers with other collectors.

Over the next 30 years, URSSE membership grew to 4,000 members, and even when the Golden Age of roller skating was replaced by the glitz of the disco era, rink owners, who were well-aware of the trading community, were still printing stickers. The last official meeting of the Sticker Exchangeoccurred in 1989 in Cornwell Heights, Pennsylvania, where the few remaining members, aware that the golden age had moved on to the inline age, voted to disband.

The way the roller skating sticker phenomenon happened, with its remarkably un-Capitalist spirit, and the DIY wrangling of cultural artifacts from around the country, created a unique movement that existed outside the realm of commercialism. Skate enthusiasts took their love of skating and skate stickers and created a community of friends that transcended geography. We’re left with an amazing and inspiring snapshot of the people and the designs of the Golden Age of Roller Skating.

Special thanks to Lou Brooks for the inspiration, information and access to his roller skating sticker images. If you are interested in learning more about The Golden Age of Roller Skating and the designs it produced, check out his delightful book, Skate Crazy: Amazing Graphics from the Golden Age of Roller Skating.

I first got a tattoo at age 18, and continued to get tattooed fairly often throughout my late teens and early 20s. I want to investigate how this happened to me, and in my work I often get into telling the story of my first tattoo and the reasons for it: sharing with my client and subconsciously reaching out to bond. As the story has been repeated it has been elaborated upon and refined. Being tattooed was always a pretty personal experience for me, and the first one set the tone.

I brought no friends along; I told no one; I asked no one’s opinion of what I should get: essentially it was exemplary of what I experience now as a tattoo artist. Often people bring friends with them, and often MANY friends. I have been surrounded by crowds of 5, of 8, of 10 even, and though most tattoo artists would not tolerate this kind of atmosphere, I do, since my power of concentration is strong.

In all my personal tattooing though, I would go to the shop solo. I felt extremely out of place and perhaps I did not want to share my discomfort with a friend. I would almost sneak in, be ignored by the guys working behind the counter, and peruse the portfolios with an unforgiving eye. However uncomfortable I was, I still knew what I was looking for.

I looked for a steady line, an artistic talent that extended beyond tattoo flash–basically someone with a rock-solid hand who would not alter my ideas in any way. I always had my own design, sandwiched in my sketchbook. In retrospect, I misused amazing artists. Both Doug Love and Holly Ellis were forced by me to do another artist’s work, to trace exactly the sculpted lines of another. However beautiful their portfolios were, I disregarded their own natural talent. I could not help it though. My artistic heroes had died fifty to one hundred years before, and I wanted to be emblazoned with the work of these dead men who had made me into an artist at the youngest age that I could remember.

With each tattoo I have felt more myself. For some, tattooing is a work of metamorphosis, of forgetting your old self and forging a new life, of commemoration of the self as a parent, of rebirth in some way. I have always felt that I was an illustrated person on the inside, and the more intricate and colorful I became the more I felt comfortable in my skin. Almost none my tattoos are governed by fads, and in this way I am outside a large part of the tattooed culture in America. I don’t say this as a way to feel superior–it’s just a fact.