🧠 Words, Photo & Video by Zach Baker
I was driving a 15-passenger van containing roughly 11 skaters in the middle of the night when I started to laugh and couldn’t stop. Elijah was next to me and I realized that I probably needed to explain myself. I’d been working on this project with Coles and Stafhon called “Coles; Stafhon” and as I stared at what I could of the highway, some dumb imagery superimposed itself across the windshield. I was laughing, I told him, because I’d just imagined Coles walking into a dimly-lit dining room, sitting down and eating pasta very, very seriously.
We want “Coles; Stafhon” to speak for itself. We tried to create for you what we had hoped you’d receive as something singular. Something you maybe hadn’t seen. We worked pretty hard on it and had a lot of fun and drove around a lot. Those are basically the only requisites to making a skate video.
We want to thank Vans for the support… and Rowan Zorilla and his new shoe and Bob LaSalle and Zach Sheats, whose idea this initially was. We want to thank Pad for making a deck to give to Vans. Thanks as well go to Nick and David at Moms Skateshop in Buffalo and Jon and Michael at Pastime Skateshop in Rochester. Special thanks go to Emily and Japhey for taking such good care of us, and Evan Dow for letting us sleep in his house and do laundry and stuff, even though he never met us and never saw us. That’s insane. Thank you Zoogie for filming some of the better Stafhon clips. Grateful to Zoogie. Thanks to E.T. for doing this with me last time and thanks to Stafhon and Coles for being such epic guys.
fkn loved it