In our face-paced age of information, it is easy to forget that un-used skate footage is a commodity with an expiration date. Any number of factors — tees featuring logos of sponsors from yesteryear, spots that haven’t been with us for some time, new tats, hair — risk pulling the viewer out of the simulation that the person onscreen didn’t toil for months and years over the product at hand.
Young legend Tor Ström put together a surprise Ville Wester part and dropped it on his YouTube channel this morning. Some of it feels like it was culled from the Polar days before the switch to Palace, likely from the sessions that produced their last video, which Ville obvs had the ender in. Seeing as how “What Now?” feels every bit as — to quote a recent Thrasher caption, “fully formed” — as the part that ended up closing The Polar Video With Endless Name Variations, Ville def had an extra opus worth of footage on ice.
Like anybody with Josh Kalis’ “big ledges, little ledges”-monologue from The Sixth Sense ingrained in their brain, it’s always been a pleasure to hear skateboarders talk about the places that hold the most real estate in their hearts. Our “Favorite Spot” series is an expansion on that short bit of skate video ephemera into a retrospective of people whose careers have grown tethered to a certain spot. You may recall that Gilbert Crockett was the inaugural edition back in December.
We have long toutedthe virtuesof Copenhagen, and at a time when European travel isn’t exactly possible, it made sense to vicariously re-experience the city’s most famous (yet deceptively difficult) spot via its modern-day ambassador, Hjalte Halberg.
Footage courtesy of: Emil Hvilsom, Frederik Bengston, Henrik Edelbo, Tor Ström, Pontus Alv, Johnny Wilson, Pekka Løvås, Jimmy Viberg & Anton Juul. Special thanks to:Polar Skate Co. & Dancer CPH.
Ben “Actually, I Like Wearing Wack Gear” Blundell receives redemption after barely any clips in Courtesy. Go watch his “OJO” part over on Thrasher. Rest in Peace Dillon ♥
Gotta hand it to Europe’s Most Productive Crew™ for consistently doing something that feels so natural and different than everything else out there, year after year — especially in a country without much of a skate industry. Also ~love~ the recurring role of dogs in their videos. “Nap Mint Nap Volume 4” is the latest from the Rios Crew. We really gotta make it out to Budapest, pretty much everyone says nothing but good things…
In hindsight, it’s pretty crazy that a peak shiny suit era Bad Boy song ever slipped into an Alien Workshop video, even for 45 seconds. And guess what! Twenty years later, we get the full [re]edit: Manolo remixed two decades of Kalis footage to the complete extended version of Black Rob’s “Whoa.” FWIW, that album has some sleepergems.
“Pornography had already been done, and the skate/fetish graphic thing said all that needed to be said on the subject. Take away the black bag and the sticker about censorship, and you just have a dumb idea repeated endlessly. For nearly 3 decades.” Ted Barrow wrote a nice piece on the history of the black bag World Industries board, and everything that followed it over on Skateism.
Solange in a skate clip ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Def worth the watch from Peter Deigaard + Drew, Hugo, Ville, and all the Copenhagen boys, which will make you feel the summer even if you have no Danish travel plans :)
“DOA RMX” is a video featuring some upstate dudes (pretty sure…), and has a random ass remix of Pat Washington footage from the early 2000s at the end, which is timely given Jamal Smith reminded us about his iconic Got Gold? part last week.
Realized the other day that Tao’s “KBH MIXEN” video is the 2018 video that still gets the most revisitation in 2019. Felt Ville’s section deserved it’s own upload :)
The good news is we finally switched over to a circa 2018 design that’s mobile compatible, etc. Hopefully it’s not a Crailtap-getting-rid-of-the-iframes shock to the system, because let’s be honest: it basically looks the same, just moderne. We purged a couple spots that have been gone long enough for people to forget about, cleaned up some shit around the pages, etc. If anything seems to not be working properly, feel free to drop us a line.
The bad news is we are still amidst the same general skate internet content slump we have been experiencing all month. Nearly nothing happened last week…
On the off chance that you didn’t catch it, Jawn Gardner continues his streak of being one of the most contagiously good vibed skaters to watch in 2018, via his DC Streetsweeper raw files. That A/C contraption he made is nuts…
Gunes’ new FTC part is up there with John’s raw files as what got ran back the most at the office last week. Shout out to everyone who looks like they’re having fun while being really good at skateboarding.
Don’t know much about this one, but “Long Shots & Low Odds” is a ~moody~ seven-minute New York video from Canon Hastings featuring all your New York 2018 dietary staples (wallies, .T.F., a pit stop at the Grand Street courts) + a stubborn commitment to skating those red double cellar doors next to Motorino.
“I feel good because I can make money, because I can help my family, but I don’t give a fuck about the Olympics. I don’t care and I don’t want to be there.” Grey has an interview with Olympian and European life enthusiast, Tiago Lemos.
“The big underground music in America is like house and dance stuff, based on what I see in the shop, and that’s what skaters are buying. When I was getting into deep underground hip-hop growing up, the only other kids listening to it were skaters. Like, you guys know Hieroglyphics? Why? ‘Oh, it was on the blah blah blah VHS.'” This link actually has nothing to do with skating, but is an insightful conversation on how people consume music (particularly rap) in 2018, and a reminder that it’s ok to not have an opinion on some stuff!
Quote of the Week: “If you’re having fun, chances are, you’re breaking at least one law.” — Conor
It’s eerie how well this clip has aged. If you sent this to us sans titles as a “hey my friends went to Paris and here’s our clip!” in 2018, it’d probably get a pass…
The first time we ever went to Copenhagen’s Red Plaza, a disgruntled guy told us some shit in Danish, which we ignored considering none of us spoke the language. He sought out our Danish-speaking guide, flashed some sketchy blade, and told him that he was selling hash and if we keep skating there, he’s going to stab all of us (*queue up the Chris Rock “97 people deserved it” joke*). We went to the next spot.
“Red Code” is a [mostly] one-spot video in the recent tradition of the all Oslo City Hall video, or the London Gillette Square one from the summer. Unlike those two cities, “Red Code” hails from a place doused with some of the best spots on earth. So why skate a big empty space, with a short bank, wood scraps, and a D.I.Y. ledge? (The park is even across the street from an admittedly shitty but charming skatepark.)
Big, empty and centrally-located spaces with nice ground are malleable. It’s tempting to call the Red Plaza “Copenhagen’s T.F.,” but it’s actually more like an O.G. Astor Place closed off to vehicular traffic. It sits in the middle of city life. People bike, walk, skate and wheelchair through at all hours. You skate what winds up there until it falls apart beyond recognition. You interact, you create, you reshape.
For all its merits as a skateboard mecca, the one nitpicky criticism you can pass Copenhagen’s way is that a lot of its best spots occupy a grey zone between skate spot and skatepark (obviously because these multi-use spaces are designed with skater input.) I’ve watched Johnny Wilson and all those guys skate past some of the most amazing spots simply because they didn’t look interesting enough. And it’s like, yeah, fair — you want your video to look different.
“Red Code” is a tribute to the infinite, simple and universal joy of nice ground :)
(From what I understand, the drug dealers and skateboarders have made their peace. Shout out to the magic of unregulated public space! ♥)
Edited by Anton Juul. Filmed by Anton Juul, Søren Nordal Enevoldsen, Anders Jørgensen. Features every single blonde-haired skateboarder in the world besides Pryce Holmes.
