howies®

This is a sneak preview trailer for a one off exhibition of 3 deckades of skateboard art that howies and Shiners Distribution are curating at howies 62 Queens Road store in Bristol running from April 17th.

Chris Allen of Shiner has kindly agreed to let us have access to their whole archive of decks. We’ve chosen over 200 favourites which will be on show for a month. With boards from every deckade that Shiners have been distributing the biggest names in skateboarding to the british public it will be a treat for any skateboard fan and graphic freak . There will be decks on show from
Dogtown, Sims, Sant Cruz, Powell Peralta, Vision, Schmitt stix, G & S, Zorlac, Alva, Santa Monica Airlines, plus a host of others.

There will also be a series of one off decks painted by guest artists that will be auctioned for unicef at the end of the exhibition. All boards are hand painted,  Jim Phillips, Geoff McFetridge, Pete Fowler, French, Kev Grey, Will Barras, Mr Jago, China Mike, Marcus Oakley, Andy J Miller, Chris Bourke, Mr Bingo, Bowlegs, Millie Marotta, Gav Strange, Danny Wainwright, Jethro Haynes and Nigel Peake’s boards will all be on show for the month.

Dont miss it.

Artist, Samantha Gilraine came in yesterday to refresh our Staircase Gallery in the Bristol shop.

Samantha is a Bristol based artist and photographer who merges traditional painting and digital photography.

“My aim when creating artwork is not to just recreate what a landscape looks like, but the real experience and feeling of being within a landscape. ”

Pop by to see Samantha’s work over the next few weeks.

We also have a selection of greetings cards on sale of  Samantha’s work if you would like to take a smaller version home with you.

Local beer is being kindly provided by our mates at Bristol Beer Factory.

There are still some tickets left. You can reserve tickets through the Bristol shop via email or giving us a ring.

The shop will be open all evening for the event so you will get a chance to try out the new spring season range which has just come in.

Some of you may know that it’s Fairtrade Fortnight until the 7th March! To celebrate this, the people at Fairtrade are running the ‘Big Swap’ and are asking us to swap our usual stuff for Fairtrade stuff. The usual bananas for Fairtrade bananas and your usual cuppa for a Fairtrade cuppa. Get involved and register your swap…http://www.fairtrade.org.uk/thebigswap/about_the_big_swap/

We’ve got some Fairtrade tea from our friends at Clipper so if you’re popping by the shop and fancy a cuppa then just come in and we’ll stick the kettle on!

Good news for you lovely Bristolians, we are coming to hold one of our legendary sample sales later this week.

Naomi is out in the back warehouse right now getting the clothes sorted out and packed up.

Once that’s done and we fix a small windscreen wiper problem, Simon will be driving the big black van down to the Bristol shop on Thursday.

There will be the usual collection of great end of line items along with a few amazing one-off samples (some in odd colours) that we never put into production, some otherwise brilliant stuff with dodgy buttons and plenty of other t-shirts and things at bargain prices.

Definitely worth a look if you’re in the area.

The sale will be held upstairs in the shop – here’s the address and opening times -

howies
62 Queens Road
Bristol
BS8 1RE
(map here)

Opening times:

Thursday  18th – 4pm til 8pm
Friday 19th – 9.30am – 6pm
Saturday 20th – 9.30am – 6pm
Sunday 21st – 11am – 5 pm

Bring a bag, ’cause as usual, we wont have any.

Hope to see you there.

Here at the Bristol shop we have strong links with a local charity called Fairbridge West which works with some of the most disadvantaged and disengaged young people in Bristol and the West. Fairbridge West offer these young people a combination of 1-2-1 support, training and skills to help them realise their true potential and change their lives. You may remember that some of us had a box car challenge with Fairbridge last year.

They are inviting 50 people to take part in the Bristol Half Marathon on September 5th 2010 to raise money for their great cause. If it’s the time of year for you to dust of your running shoes, then the 13 miles harbour side to suspension bridge run would be fun to aim for and you have plenty of time to build up those muscles and get your time down.

The places are going to be available soon, cost £36 and we will be getting some leaflets in the shop with some more info. If you are interested, contact Ella at Fairbridge West on 0117 9425362 or email her at ella.pollock@fairbridge.org.uk

The naughty banks have been in the press a lot lately, but do you know how they came to be in the first place?

Once upon a time, well, in the in the middle ages to be exact, Venetian merchants relied on gold as a standard value to prevent the limitations of  barter (I imagine carrying a lot of chickens around with you to exchange for bread and honey would have been quite annoying!)

At sea their stores of gold would be vulnerable to pirates, so some ingenious people set up strong vaults and offered to look after the merchant’s gold for them while they were at sea. So that no gold had to be moved by the merchants, they gave out ‘promissory notes’ in exchange for goods, essentially promising that the vendor could collect the merchant’s gold from the vault. The notes soon took on the same value as the gold as vendors just passed them between one another.

The newly established ‘bankers’ then realised that the gold wasn’t leaving thevaults so they would sneakily lend it out to other people and charge them interest, thereby starting the now familiar magic trick of creating money out of nothing by lending money that wasn’t even theirs.

This system was regularised by the Banking Acts in the early nineteenth century and has been accepted ever since. The End ……

Or, can we go back to the good ole fashioned barter system? A customer the other day did offer the jacket off  his own back in exchange for the Cuddy shrit that Will was wearing…it turns out the jacket wasn’t entirely his as he still owed his friend a shirt in exchange! Maybe this customer was a banker?!

We got into work this morning and in our inbox was a lovely update from Jess who had been working in the Bristol shop for a few months up until Christmas. She is now off on a new grand adventure, and if you are a regular at our shop and have met the bubbly young Jess, we thought you would enjoy hearing about her news…

Buongiorno howies!

I’ve been in Italy for a month now, working as an intern for the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. Really enjoying the work so far – there’s a fantastic team of people at the Guggenheim.

My days out here tend to start off with the sound of church bells and end with a glass of ‘spritz con Aperol’ (a very Venetian, bright orange aperitif), with a fair amount of twentieth-century art in between. For those of you that know me, you’ll know this is pretty much my ideal cup of tea! Sono molto contenta a Venezia!

Here I am ice-skating infront of the Verona opera theatre, sailing across the Grand Canal and putting Severini’s Blue Dancer (Ballerina blu), 1912, to bed. PREGO!

Till next month,

Ciao!

Jess

Ade got this email the other day – after reading it through properly, I realise I should have posted it up faster! (By the way, Myles, I do remember you. You had an On One and you were damn quick up hills.)

Stewart Brand TED talk

I don’t know about you, but all the complicated talk about climate change and it’s potentially terrifying consequences is a bit overwhelming and gets my mind in a pickle.

To remedy this I went to a lecture by Stewart Brand and Brian Eno as part of Bristol’s fabulous ‘Festival of Ideas.’ Stewart Brand has been at the forfront of Environmentalism since the 60’s in America. He says that he wants to foster an ‘un-idealistic, practical view about how to get things done’.  He was the guy who got NASA to first publish images of Earth from the Apollo Space missions which changed our view of our planet forever. And for the computer nerds, you might like to know that he was there at the inception of the internet, developing a way of linking environmentalists via a system called ‘The Wall’. He has faith in human beings to do the right thing when given the opportunities and feels that the appropriate tools are key to this. He optimistically believes that we can create a world we believe in.

Watch his video on TED to judge for yourself. I learnt much from the talk I went, and I would like to share with you the information that is still ringing loud in my ears now, how does this information sit with you?

1. How do we frame a problem in a way that it’s solvable? (apparently engineers do this alot!)

2. Instead of refraining from things, we need to do more things.

3. There is a movement for ‘open-source genetic engineering’ so farmers everywhere can use it to modify their crops as they have done through breeding for generations. This could potentially stop world food sources being controlled by controversial giants such as Monsanto (one of the biggest fears of anti-GM campaigners). There is a book called ‘Mendel in the Kitchen’ by an American couple who write about combining the best of organic growing principles and GM technology.

4. He believes that there is currently a regular mis-use of the precautionary principle. Many things have un-intended consequences both positive and negative and it is best that we keep an eye out for both.

5. The new 3rd generation of nuclear power generators have the options to be small modular reactors, that can de-centralize power supplies, even a floating barge in Russia. Uranium supplies are from stable countries such as Australia and Canada.  Third generation reactors can use the waste from first and second generation as fuel. Amusingly, 10% of America’s nuclear fuel comes from old soviet weapons, how’s that for recycling?! New methods of uranium processing are being developed to prevent any waste from the process being used in weapons. 

He didn’t have time to talk much about his positive views on mass migration into cities and population growth, which is a shame.

If you went to the talk or have heard him in his video, let me (Amy) know what you think? He made me question my opinions, has he done the same for you?