Photo by Bobby Murphy for Mess Skate Mag
We have partnered with Mess Skate Mag to release a few videos tied back to their inaugural issue, which you can now find for free in many shops throughout the U.S.
Over the years, Cooper has had a wide-ranging slate of appearances in front of the camera: from the prescient \m/ video in 2013, to Daniel Dent’s World Peath, to Pete Spooner’s Skating Is Easy, to the Ether video that Stephen Ostrowski ran off of Cooper’s YouTube.
There are spots that everyone always skates by and throws hypotheticals on: “one day, someone will ollie this gap,” “one day, someone will 5050 this rail.”
For years, people would throw out eventualities about the kinked rail beside the 53rd Street side of the Seagram Building, which is, of course, a Ludwig Mies van der Rohe-designed landmark, a onetime home of The Famous Expensive Restaurant™, and the site of the green step-up ledges that the building’s security guards have grown an increasing affinity for throwing water on.
As ride-on grinds expanded in popularity, that fantasy got adapted for the modern age: “imagine if someone grinded that.”
“That” being the ledge that ran beside the eight-flat-nine double set.
Last year had an interesting start: we were forced to contend with the fact that a pressure flip was the best trick of the week, much to the chagrin of the crowd that gets upset at those sort of things.
It was such a shock to the system that we began a [controversial?] debate with the idea that perhaps the pressure flip had began clawing its way to a newfound respectability. That clip was over the water gap at the famous MLK spot in Miami, and came via Jake Sanso’s part in the Duplex 2 video, the first in what would ultimately become a trilogy of 2021 Florida edits that stand out as some of last year’s best.
The crew switched to HD following Duplex 2 with “Sk8 Wing” and “Five-Six-One,” and was kind enough to share a remix of Jake’s footage from the two. He’s good at a lot of other things beyond being one of the few people who can make pressure flips look good ;)
There’s been one full Josh part each year for over half a decade now — and not to be outdone by the stop-and-go-and-stop-again nature of 2021 — he uploaded this one to his IG just a few hours before the clock hit 12 on New Year’s Eve. The streak lives on ❤️
In RAT RATZ 5, there was a feeling that they were on the precipice of a great leap. Their fifth installment of Milano Centrale reportage felt like the beginning of the next chapter, though still captured through through the charm of their scuffed-up fisheye. A few months later, they would co-star along the Supreme dudes in their Milan trip video, STALLION.
Since then, a bit has changed: they made the inevitable HD upgrade (heartbroken to see the O.G. Rat Ratz fisheye go, but change is the only constant in this crazy world 😉), and they made that Leap™.
