It was almost a year ago to the day (right down to the Knicks-Celtics weekend match-up …which luckily turned out better this year), that upon Chicago’s Uprise Skateshop releasing a two-punch of parts from Will Morton and Vince Guzaldo, we remarked how nice a new Uprise full-length would be.
Well, it turns out they’ve been working on one. For the past three years. Just before the weekend (late pass, sorry), Harry Reynolds dropped Where You Been, a 26-minute Chicago scene video from the Uprise family.
Though Vince only has a couple clips in the middle, Will has a strong opening part (you can practically feel the texture of the ledge through the screen on that gap crook), and the rest of video features an ensemble of characters familiar to any local project: the guy who simply needs to roll off a roof in all his clips, the third-eye-open wallie-r, or the transition guy making due in a city where ledges reign supreme.
Though the pandemic-era glitches of jarringly low busts in Chicago’s financial center have reverted to the mean, the crew still manages to eek out clips at spots that have been Uprise video fixtures for decades. (Feel like throwing down your board and charging the Picasso sculpture at least once should be on every skater’s bucket list. It’s what Pablo would’ve wanted.) And if Kush Bulmer’s closing part proves anything, it’s that you don’t need good luck with lackluster security on N Dearborn to have a good time in Chicago. There’s plenty of logs around ;)