Danny Ampersand

Final Day in Toronto

Danny Ampersand — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 16:42:59 +0000

On my last day in Toronto, my amazing friends Tom and Alex surprised me with one last cultural experience. Their friend Courteney is getting her wedding photography business (bsidestories.com) off the ground and needed a few models to volunteer. I was hungover, greasy, and tired but managed to pull through to the best of my…um…abilities?

It helped that I got paired with Lola. This girl is naturally gorgeous!

This is how good-looking love can be!

It was an absolute pleaseure to meet all the new people and I hope to see them again in the future!

Blake Sifton: wedded

Danny Ampersand — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 16:17:02 +0000

It is always an honour to stand beside this man

Two of the greatest/most beautiful friends anyone can ask for. (Big, big-ups)

Back-Alley Magic

Carribbean Queen

United at long last

The dance floor first flooded with love…

But quickly got buck and and started poppin’ off!

We will never be this young again.

BONUS: Mean-Muggin’

More Toronto

Danny Ampersand — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 20:24:35 +0000

Tom looks angelic here

And here

Beautiful girl watching us skateboard

Glad to have Tom beside me at Nathan Philips Square where the Jack Layton memorial had all of us in tears.

R.I.P. Jack

We left our own thank you on behalf of skateboarders everywhere.

Garage sale day

Sales were lacking so we packed up and headed to Queen Street

Waiting for customers

The sales team.

Toronto Trip so far

Danny Ampersand — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 19:40:24 +0000

First stop was Blue Tile Lounge skateshop on College St. Color did a profile of them a few issues back and I’ve been stoked to check it out ever since. They gripped me up and I bought a shop tee to represent on the West Coast

Then we hit this gnarly-ass spot where I took a great slam. (Don’t worry, I got the trick a few tries later. Stay tuned)

Tom got a solid line at this rail spot:

Been so long since I’ve seen this beautiful store. Tom looks as excited as I was to get some cold ones.

Found a nice stoop to throw back some Mill St. Organic and talk shit. No bottle openers so we busted caps off the railing.

I haven’t seen a crazy-ass storm ala Southwestern Ontario in so long. We watched the CN Tower get struck by lightning like 14 times!

Know?Show Vancouver

Danny Ampersand — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 21:33:25 +0000

Skateboard industry tradeshow. People are trying to sell me things, little do they know I’m just the editor at Color mag.

Latest Clip

Danny Ampersand — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 06:55:01 +0000

Tailslide – English Bay from Dan Post on Vimeo.

A Spy on the Expo Line

Danny Ampersand — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 07:10:27 +0000

Nothing about this girl screamed ‘spy’, but then again, I guess that’s the point isn’t it? She did get my attention though, when I first saw her on the platform that morning, but that’s only because she was a fairly attractive young girl and I generally gravitate towards attractive girls to sit near on the train and not smelly/loud/obnoxious men. But besides her beauty and somewhat eccentric jewelry, there was nothing extraordinary about her. Completely normal.

I ended up sitting in the seat behind her on the train. (I swear, I’m not a total creep, I only looked her over a couple of times, made note of her odd choker-style necklace draped around her slender neck and then I set to reading a newspaper that I found on the seat next to mine.) She was reading too, although I could not see what.

We were about five stops away from the station we both departed from, when something unexpected happened in the otherwise quiet train car. Out of nowhere, this girl freaked out.

“HEY!” she bellowed. “HEY!”

I looked up from my paper and saw that the colour of her face had turned red. I followed her angry eyes to the far end of the train car where a Japanese man was sitting with his family. He was holding a camcorder and panning it around the train. His kids were on their knees in the seats beside and behind him, watching the viewfinder of the camera as he filmed.

“HEY!” she yelled louder.

Then she stood up and marched down to the man. Her thin-heeled shoes nailed the ground with each heavy step and her black, poofy mini-skirt swayed from side to side as she stormed down the aisle toward him.

“You can’t just film people without their permission,” she yelled halfway down the aisle.

By now, the whole train was watching her and most of us looked very confused. She approached the man and leaned down into his face. She held the steel rail beside his seat for balance. From where I was, I could not hear what she was saying but I could see she was reprimanding him. The children stopped laughing and the man looked genuinely scared and confused. She pointed at his camera and mimicked the act of filming around the train. Then, she made him delete the footage. I could tell because she was leaning over his shoulder for a while, looking at the viewfinder while he pushed some buttons. After awhile, she seemed satisfied and stormed back towards my end of the train. When she was close, I heard her mutter to herself “I don’t like people taking my picture.”

She slumped back into her seat and I watched her intently. I wanted to tell her that actually, no, he didn’t really need to ask her for permission and that she had blown the whole thing way out of proportion and likely ruined his vacation. But I decided that she was too unstable and I should probably keep my mouth shut.

If that whole episode wasn’t strange enough, the next thing she did certainly was. She unzipped the little handbag she had with her and pulled out a palm-sized notepad and a purple pencil crayon. She flipped through the notepad frantically until she came to an empty page, the she started to scrawl a message onto the paper. She wrote the words fast and on an angle from the top left corner to the bottom right. She pushed hard at first but by the end of the second word it was a frantic and barely visible scribble. I was close enough to her however to read the note: “LOST MISSION”

The train pulled up to the next stop and the girl got up from her seat and exited through the sliding doors. I watched her as she moved briskly through the throngs of people waiting to board the train and then she disappeared down the stairs. I glanced back down at the Japanese man. He had put his camera away and was slinking in his chair with his hands hanging in front of him between his legs. He looked embarassed.

Snakerun Sunday: Seylynn Bowl – North Vancouver

Danny Ampersand — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 17:34:43 +0000

Prepping and shredding Canada’s oldest skateboard park (circa 1977)

Seylynn snakerun from Dan Post on Vimeo.

POST NO BILLS: A ‘Macho Man’ memory

Danny Ampersand — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 20:20:13 +0000

When I was in grade 7, I skipped class with my friend Tyler who had a green mohawk and wore a leather jacket adorned with patches and safety pins. He was punk and I wasn’t, but we still got along. On our way back to the townhouse complex where he lived, we found a plastic package of muffins in the middle of the road. There was only one missing and they looked pretty fresh, so we took them back to his place and ate them all. We listened to The Dead Kennedy’s “Holiday in Cambodia” and Tyler showed me his collection of rubber wrestling figures from when the WWF was still the WWF. He had Hulk Hogan (of course), the Ultimate Warrior and Macho Man Randy Savage. I had a brand new, red Swiss Army knife that I had gotten as a gift. Tyler said he didn’t mind if I carved into the Macho Man figure. The knife was very sharp and slid through Macho Man’s peach-coloured rubber stomach like it was a real peach. I wasn’t being careful and as I sliced the stomach, the knife came through and continued into the meat of my index finger. The cut was clean and deep and didn’t bleed at first. I yelled a bit and then stared at the wide-open gash until it eventually began to bleed dark purple. I eventually went back to class with a wet band-aid protecting my finger.

Channeling New York

Danny Ampersand — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 22:50:04 +0000

Back in the day, skate videos were gritty, fish-eye and sound-tracked by hip-hop artists like Hieroglyphics, GangStarr and Souls of Mischief.

Most of the skating was done in raw locations: over bricks, under bridges and various other degrees of ghetto.

Those were my favourite videos and is still the visual aesthetic I try to emulate when skating. Please enjoy this video that my homie Neil “Mad-Ill” put together from a session on a Sunday morning in VanCity.

Van-York from Neil Mad-ILL on Vimeo.