📝 Words + Photos by Frozen in Carbonite
Circles, bro. Life fuckin’ moves in circles.
June 1993: I purchase the VHS cassette of the Plan B skate video, Virtual Reality from Classic Boards (R.I.P.), ride my bike over to my friend Seb’s house, and promptly view the film. It is hard to describe the sensation of seeing the triple-screen intro for the first time. The only comparison I can think of is the phenomenon drug users speak of when their first hit is so mind-blowing that they spend their whole life chasing that same high. Or so I have read.
September 2024: I sit in a movie theater inside a museum in New York City – still the Greatest City in the World™ – anticipating a one-night-only screening of Virtual along with a gang of nineties pros and skate industry veterans. Eyes lock on as the triple-screen explodes.
How did I get here?
Recording the Ride is a skate video retrospective at The Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, co-curated by legendary videographer Jacob Rosenberg and Michaela Ternasky-Holland, with an assist from the collections of Tim “Bobshirt” Anderson and Brendan “Secret Tape” Spohn. I had heard rumblings of a Virtual screening in NYC for about a year, so I was juiced when Rosenberg announced the event. Money comes and goes; it’s all just numbers on a screen anyways. I searched up some last-minute flights and it was decided. I headed to the airport straight from work, parked in long-term parking, and took off into the night air, Queens-bound.
I would not leave the borough the entire weekend.
Indeed, the zone of Queens which I found myself traversing three or four times over that weekend is filled with junkyards, factories and other ominous industrial edifices. If you ask F. Scott Fitzgerald, not much has changed in 105 years or some shit. ANYWAY, after our car service (you need a car in Queens) dropped us off outside the MoMI, we entered and collected our tickets to the show.
On a long enough timeline, the number of skate lifers dwindles (pun intended) to — a very small number. Along those lines, we said what’s up to a select group of skate cognoscenti and filed into the theater.
A few notes upon viewing Virtual Reality for the 50,000th time, albeit the first on The Big Screen:
The triple screen still comes off futuristic as shit.
While not as intentionally cinematic and without as many “highs” as The Questionable Video, Virtual maintains a more consistent rhythm throughout, displaying Rosenberg’s considerable on-the-job training.
Rick had the best part? Rick had the best part.
Shoutout Jake for including the credits (“The Only Thing I Care About is Not Caring!”) and the Sal Barbier “retirement” part at the end.
Following the video, King-size Matt Hensley got looped in via Zoom for a panel consisting of him, Rosenberg, and Rick Howard, who climbed up onstage from the audience. The panel ran the gamut of all aspects of Mike Ternasky’s influence, from the skate to the metaphysical. At one point, Rosenberg capped it off by stating “Skateboarding taught me a great deal of how to be,” a sentiment I have shared many a time. If I had a dollar for every time I said to myself, “The only thing I care about is not caring,” “There’s only one way to do it – you gotta move it or lose it,” “Walk like I’m at war, talk like I’m at war,” et al.
And now, the exhibit itself.
The exhibit ascends on a slight angle in chronological order, presenting a collection of artifacts and ephemera from critical time periods and brands – from the actual camera R.B. Umali used to film Mixtape to an actual physical copy of 20 Shot Sequence (never seen one), to the official Plan B editing deck. It’s as if a bunch of skate nerd archaeologists from 2525 discovered an early 21st-century skate house – complete with the mandatory “tower of videos” next to the television – and organized and curated the shit.
As we exited into the fall New York City night air (nothin’ like it!), we overheard two veteran pros shooting the shit, as one invited the other to his mid-Atlantic beach house.
It was a dope, almost Hemingwayan moment, like two WWI soldiers meeting at a bar in Paris in 1931 or some shit.
Recording the Ride is up through January 26, 2025 at the Museum of the Moving Image. 36-01 35 Avenue, Astoria, Queens.