Brooklyn Banks Week: Charles Lamb Interview

July 14th, 2010 | 12:43 pm | Features & Interviews | 5 Comments

Part 3 of Brooklyn Banks week. Couldn’t find any nineties / Banks footage of Charles, but the Lurkers 2 part (alternate edit) is always worth a revisit.

Interviewed by Ted Barrow on August 27, 2006

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I first started skating in Staten Island around the neighborhood of my parent’s house. The whole way I started skating was, I lived on a hill, and I used to hear the bearings roll down the hill, and the locals around the hood were skating. I used to watch them roll down the hill and it was a bunch of white dudes, a bunch of black dudes, and two Spanish dudes. They were all going to this one kid Jose’s house like three blocks away from my mom’s house who had like, a piece of shit box with nails coming out of the side.

What year is this?

I guess I was nine or ten. I skated around before that, but on little blue banana boards with crazy wheels and not doing tricks. But I saw them doing ollies out of curb cuts going down the hill, getting this high, and I was like, “Oh I gotta do that.” So I started creeping around that dude Jose’s house and eventually got a Santa Cruz, like, Jim Theibaud board. This is 1990 I guess, in the spring. I started hanging out at that dude Jose’s house all the time, which eventually led me to these other kids at McDonnell Lane Park, where there were people from all over Staten Island skating a ledge and 4 stairs. From there I met some kids that were really good, and I learned a bunch of tricks, and then it started.

I was always going to the city to skate the Banks, but it was only when I was like, “I don’t want to take a bus or ask for a ride to go to this park in the middle of Staten Island and have to come all the way back, I could just skate down the hill to the ferry, take the twenty-five minute boat ride, and be at the Banks, five, ten minutes after that.” Skate with people from all over the world that are super good, get really psyched. That’s what I started doing, all the time. Saturday, Sunday, when I wasn’t in school, it was just like full-on Banks.

How early would you get there on a Saturday?

Oh, I was getting there at like 9:30 in the morning at first, and then it just became like, I would always get the twelve o’clock ferry boat, skate until seven, go back home, eat dinner, maybe go back out, somewhere on the Island, you know, skating around. So I guess that’s how I got introduced to the Banks and skating was just like, 360 flips, impossibles, a few switch things were coming out, but uh, pressure flips…

So this is like, ’91, ’92…

Yeah, by now, by the time the Banks had become a regular thing in my weekly schedule, it was a time of like, I saw the first pressure flip and was like “Wow.” It was at a Blue demo at the banks. There were mad Banks contests. One summer there was a Banks contest like every other weekend.

I see you on that fire escape, girl.

June 23rd, 2010 | 2:52 pm | Daily News | 20 Comments

Joe Cups has been posting an ensemble of wonderful videos over on Vimeo. The latest installment features Ted Barrow, Matt Avedon, Charles Lamb, Taji Ameen, Ian Reid & Matt Mooney. There are a handful of others, including Ty, Pryce & Charles in Barcelona, in addition to some golden TF nostalgia reaching a half-decade back in time, when it was at the height of its oft-discussed (at least here) high-point of cultural relevancy and featured many eminent, eighties-inspired crackhead performing artists. All is embedded after the jump.

The nineties

October 17th, 2009 | 7:39 pm | Daily News | 8 Comments

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The mastermind behind one of the finer New York videos of the decade Lurkers 2, and the revisionist cult-classic Gnar Gnar, dug deep into the cesspool of nineties New York degeneracy and released a video he had made in his wild teenage years. I am not exactly sure as to the precise year, but the Menace jeans allow any discerning eye to ballpark it. Features Charles Lamb in his pre-flip-in trick and feeble grind combo days, Sasha Lamb, and Newport legend and early-2000s New York-branded clothing entrepreneur, Sancho Cammayo. It’s a Staten Island affair the whole way. But way before P.S. 4 (or P.S. 6, whatever, you know the one I’m talking about).

Vimeo link here. Thirteen minutes and forty-five seconds long. *Link was taken down.

P.S. Rodrigo is like Mariano, but better. He just needs less indigenous generic underground hip-hop beats in his life.

P.P.S. Rowley had the part of the year, aside from maybe Busenitz.

Got me working day and night

June 26th, 2009 | 3:06 am | Footage | 8 Comments

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Another king gone.

You already know the drill. Dirty lenses, excessive cross dissolves, curbs, the worst filmed Jake Johnson footage you’ll ever see, Lenox Ledges, etc.

Features Miles Marquez, Ty Lyons, Matthew Mooney, Tyler Mate, Jack Greer, Tyler Tufty, DJ Roctakon, Ian Reid, Galen Dekemper, Jake Johnson, Billy Rohan, Charles Lamb, Brendan Granstrand, Snack, Justin White, Negative, Taji Ameen, Benjamin Nazario and Michael Gigliotti.

Contains cameos from Switch Michael Strobert, Thando Beschta, whores from Washington Heights and Danny Weiss.

Thanks to Justin White, Jeremy Cohan, Alex Rialdi, and Brengar for contributing footage.

There is an alternate edit of this that was unfortunately suppressed by the Quartersnacks Board of Trustees as it was declared too racist and ignorant for public disclosure. While I still feel that is not the case, it is better to keep it buried in a folder of random edits to ensure that nobody gets offended.

Skateboarding’s #1 Regressive Force Since 2005

March 31st, 2009 | 4:26 am | Footage | 42 Comments

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Photos above by Keegan Gibbs

In an effort to insult the constant expansion and revision of standards in this wholesome, all-american activity we call skateboarding, our first official clip of the year (it has been a long winter) has made particular strides to provide an overabundance of below-league-regulation level ledge obstacles (also known as curbs), glitches, jacked audio and outdated spots that turn us back into the dark ages of New York — not when you’d step out your door and hear the crunch of crack vials underneath your Nikes, but when only one of your friends was fortunate enough to be blessed with the gift of doing a backside tailslide. I would call it “Bringing Sketchy Back Volume 2,” but I don’t think we’re quite on that level, so I might want to wait some time before a sequel drops because it would inevitably have to include footage of Gigliotti in a stylish hat (in the LES sense). Be sure to THINK before you decide to flip-in to a trick next time. Here you go…

Features Ted Barrow, Miles Marquez, Galen Dekemper, Thando Beschta, Barry Livan, Pryce Holmes, Ty Lyons, Charles Lamb, Michael Gigliotti, Luke Malaney, Benjamin Nazario, the much-anticipated return of Watermelon Alex and the legend himself, Taji Ameen. Contributing filmers: Steven Garcia, Evan Walsh and Justin White.