Brian Panebianco | Quartersnacks

gilbert trashy

Truth be told, nobody did the line with a towel-in-hand as good as S.A.D. twenty years ago. Connor Champion already elevated the bottle-in-hand line by having said bottle switch hands depending on which stance he was skating. The canon of tricks in the rain is too deep to bother breaking into. (Actually no, Matt Schlager is the only entry there — sorry Duffy.) Andre Page looked cooler than you ever will skating in the snow. Even with 95% of modern skateboarders suppressing regrets that they never applied to fashion school — how fresh or #weird of an outfit could you possibly have to leave an imprint in the jaded viewer’s mind c. 2015?

As we descend deeper towards PornHub levels of skateboard content, the spice rack of how to liven an everyday trick is getting slimmer. There aren’t many shortcuts to our memory bank because we’ve seen everything.

According to the EPA, the average American produces 4.4 pounds of garbage a day, which tallies to 1,600 pounds of garbage a year. That trash ends up in a landfill and is sadly not used for #creative purposes. We have skated over garbage for as long as the ollie has been around, and even on garbage for as long as conceptual web videos have existed. But what about with garbage? We’re constantly being called “garbage” by the women in our lives, so why not begin to embrace it?

In 2015, the easiest way to pierce into the short-term-memory-loss-laden brain of your average guy who watches skating on the internet is to skate with some trash stuck under your board. There are plenty of lloonngg back lips to go around, but it has been years since we’ve remembered one that didn’t have a piece of newspaper wedged under the wheels. And what other explanation is there for the fact that after 68 minutes of Love Park lines in Sabotage 4, two of the most memorable ones incorporated litter?

Looking in from the outside (or from 100 miles north on the interstate), Love Park seems to have always existed in eras. There was the Ricky / Eastern Exposure era, the Kalis / Wenning / Pappalardo et al. / Photosynthesis era, and now, after some downtime last decade, there is the current “pink planter” era. And there’s no crew or series that has been pushing footage of Love Park and Philly in 2015 like the Sabotage videos. Below is a conversation with Brian Panebianco, one of the principal filmers and creative forces behind Sabotage (video #4 is due out 9/11/15), about skateboarding’s most iconic skate spot as it stands in 2015, and all that surrounds it.

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Are you originally from Philly?

I’m from the suburbs, like 35 minutes out.

When was the first time you went to Love Park?

Probably when they had the first X-Games street contest at City Hall [in 2001.] I remember everyone was skating the Municipal Building, but you couldn’t skate Love because the cops were waiting there. By the next year, all the pink planters were in.

Where would you skate in those years after downtown Philly got shut down?

I grew up skating this D.I.Y. spot in Lansdale, Pennsylvania that’s actually still there. Or we’d just skate around the neighborhood.

Did you ever go into the city?

Once I got my license, I did, but by that time, Love was completely shut down. I grew up without it being skateable. We’d try to skate City Hall and sometimes get lucky, but usually not. We’d go to the three block, Temple and those shitty spots.

There was also that D.I.Y. spot with the parking blocks under I-95 that Wenning and Kerry Getz used to always skate.

How’d you get into making videos?

I’d film with this shitty camera until 2005, when I got a VX1000, and that’s when I got hyped on it. I was never a Skate Perception dude or anything, but I had a few friends who were. Some of the first people I started going out skating with were Ant and Dom Travis. Ant had a VX and he was into cameras. We started making little montages from that D.I.Y. spot, but nothing much beyond that. We still didn’t skate downtown much.

Tag: Brian Panebianco

#TRENDWATCH2015: Trash

Love Park in 2015: An Interview With Brian Panebianco