“The reason why I used that song is because that was another thing going on in my life. These dudes in Philly were holding themselves back, and they weren’t just having fun skating, and they were bitter and all that. I was like ‘Fuck you, man.’ This song was my ‘Fuck you’ to them.”
“I remember this line, I definitely could’ve re-filmed the last trick, but I was like ‘Fuck it.’”
Late on this, but watch it if you already haven’t. It unfortunately does not address the Black Rob switch up, which was epic, and the sort of thing Alien would never ever ever ever do again. Alien when it was still sort of hood in a weird way > Alien 2011.
Heard “Whoa” in da club in Miami last month, and it was amazing, especially considering we were all like 11-years-old when it actually came out.
It’d be sick if they did one for Stevie in The Reason or Chocolate Tour.
Rob Pluhowski never occupied the “He changed my life and/or wardrobe” status that Anthony Pappalardo and Brian Wenning enjoy after years of elusiveness (which is of course, camouflaged by devout fans spending unhealthy amounts of time promising a comeback on various message boards.) However, he was still a crucial, style-centric chunk to the whole period that has come to be defined as “the Photosynhesis era.” Several days ago, he uploaded the closest thing we have to a Revisited volume for the city of Philadelphia and the many individuals who gyrated around it as it rose to become a huge skate city in the mid-to-late nineties. The clip includes a handful of Sixth Sense makes and outtakes, and footage from several crucial years that preceded all things related to Alien Workshop and Habitat becoming massive parts your life if you happened to start skating in Philly, Jersey or New York between 1998 and 2002. Pluhowski doesn’t spend much time skating these days, as he is a family man (some of this is touched upon in Pappalardo’s “Epicly Later’d” series), but a big thank you goes to him for going out of his way to bring something like this to the surface.
(Or how hamburgers remain to be one of the greatest instruments of eating.)
One of the major footnotes to Habitat’s ten-year anniversary video is that it marks a decade since the release of Photosynthesis, the finest skateboard production of the 2000s. It was the video that taught New Jersey what to do with its shoulders when it does a backside nosegrind, gave one final hurrah to Long Island’s seemingly endless allegiance to the swooshy tan cargo pants, and provided a small dent to the ozone layer due to the surge of Philadelphia field trips that it inspired.
And if that is not enough to back up a longstanding cultural impact, the homie from Boil the Ocean summarized the video’s main contributions to the act of skateboarding fairly well: “Van Engelen’s grease-fire ledge attack, Pappalardo’s clockwork precision, Fred Gall with one pants leg up, Danny Garcia demonstrating how to pop out of a backside tailslide, Wenning’s backside nosegrinds and switch heelflips, Josh Kalis doing ‘the’ 360 flip and the walk down into Jason Dill’s bent world, back when he was doing all those 180s the hard way into ledge tricks and settling into New York.”
But skateboarding alone does not make classic skateboard videos, as ironic as that may sound. Before high-speed internet, it took a few years for tricks to get outdated, not to mention the turnaround on editing, production, and shipment of physical VHS tapes that preceded the release of the said tricks. So simply running down a list of maneuvers in a post-millenial video is not enough to surmise it being worthy of the “classic” label, e.g. when was the last time you watched Menik Mati? Once a video reaches ten years of age, the atmosphere and feel of an era gone by is what makes or breaks the likelihood of you repeatedly unearthing the tape from its cardboard dust jacket. Skateboarding videos aren’t just about tricks, and if you find yourself justifying any portion of an older video as “good for the time,” then simply put, it’s not a classic. The whole thing requires a timeless quality.
Over on Vimeo, there’s an eighteen minute long Bro Cam” video put together by KLS-1 and Ryan Gee.
Its dominantly Habitat/AWS TF outtakes, but there are a whole bunch of extras sprinkled in between, including DC video-era Macba footage, a bit of Love & Post-Love Philly footage, a few stopovers in New York that date back to the Broadway end of the Wall Street Gap still being skateable, and a some other antics that would later surface once the DC video was released. The whole thing is dominantly set to early-2000s era New York rap, back when the Neptunes were still actually making good music. Features parts of Kalis, Getz and Wenning. Worth a watch, especially considering that death-inducing wind that could be heard outside of our windows at this current moment in time.
