This video premiered yesterday (why does it seem like there has been a video premiere every three days for the past three months?) and is online today to keep your mind off the weather.
After putting out two videos in one year, the Film Me and Goin’ Ham crew took a few years to come back with Off the Braxx. Its vibe is similar to the past two projects, except all these kids are way better at skating now, and the short kid who was really good is now taller and even more good. Some of the rails they skate, specifically in Nate Rojas and Dylan Witkins’ part, are probably NBDs on a skateboard. The one that leads to the underground mall at the start of Water Street is nuts. Parts from Dylan Witkin, Nate Rojas, Stephan Martinez, Andre Beverly, Jamel Marshall and others.
Off the Braxx likely has the highest volume of DJ Drama drops in a skate video to date, and even though we spent the latter portion of 2011 assuming that someone would skate to a song from Drive, is Nate Rojas actually the first one to do it?
Some real nineties-looking footage. The video says it’s from 1993-1994, or “around the time when people started skating switch.” You can see the barren asphalt wasteland that Battery Park City was prior to the completion of construction some years later, The Humps (or at least the spot I think was The Humps), and the nineties version of Midtown.
The final update from the Autumn Bowl. It’s been a wrap for a minute now, but just in case you wanted visual proof of its final state. Here’s a clip from the final two days as well. But according to Forrest Edwards, “It’s not like you get paid a million dollars to skate transition.”
This Keith Hufnagel-channeling clip of Zach Moore is about a year old, but a solid watch largely due to to the speed with which he skates through things.
As a follow up to our new street plazas post from November…there’s a new street gap on Maiden Lane down the hill from C.I.A. (foot and a half high ledge over seven or eight feet of sidewalk into the street), and the new Grace Ledge is black marble, over four stairs, and lower (although still closed off for construction.)
Quote of the Week: “Yo Dre, what are you doing?” — Inquisitive Gentleman
“I have been sitting here watching the ‘Ride’ video for hours and don’t feel like I have wasted a second of my day.” — Andre Page
If you’re in the handful of individuals reading this right now with a headache, just out of a sleep marred by alcohol, at least you have a solid, new skateboard video to distract you for seventeen minutes.
Goin’ Ham is a project by the same crew that brought you the Film Me video, released this past summer. There are full parts from Nate Rojas, Ray Macken, and Stephan Martinez. It’s tightly edited, fast-paced, and an all around thorough watch. Right now, it is being downloaded from Vimeo and converted to a .m4v format so it can play off a phone. That hasn’t happened with a new video in a fairly long time. (Well, not since August 22nd.)
A real stand-out part of the video is the immense array of local terrain that it covers. While any bum on wheels flying into New York from Burbank, Europe, or Australia for a few weeks in the summer could have kickflipped the Fifth Avenue Apple Store ledge to street gap, or front crooked the CBS eight-stair rail at this point, given how far skateboarding has come in the past ten years, these kids actually made it happen. It’s easy to drive out of state to find better versions of basically every New York spot, but making do with the whole city and its myriad of pretty, but endlessly flawed skate spots is a whole different story. It’s like 1999 or 2000 all over again (except with much better skateboarding), where tricks go down all over the place, not just within the same routine boundaries that have become guidelines for where to film these past couple years. Lines at CBS in 2010 are something to genuinely be psyched on, and it gives everyone a reason to break out the wax and re-energize some spot that we have been neglecting for years.
As with the also great Film Me video, certain critical corners of the Tompkins bench might write it off for “little kid style,” or other similar deterrents that exist for the aging skateboarder population of New York. The truth is, between this and the last video, there has been less than a year’s span, and every single person’s part is a notch above the last one (and some of them have been visibly affected by growth spurts.) The video goes hard, and the third one will undoubtedly be on a different level. Parts with residual little kid style, but sprinkled with evident motivation, are always more fun to watch than half-assed pursuits at video parts that are filmed in between brunch and happy hour.
Mildly related: If anyone had seen even half of the things that have gone down in the Ziegfeld fountain that we have seen, it would inevitably lead to a second thought before neglecting the potential health risks that reside on the opposite end of any comic endeavor involving contact with its contents.
