“I did 56 tricks on the European tour and they was all crazy.” Photo by Pad Dowd
It all began with a cursory revisitation of “Ragers Inc.” — the four-year-and-running title holder for greatest iPhone video of all-time. The good times from Ragers Inc. were contagious. Then it hit us: why not attempt to recreate it for 2015? And so, we enlisted the only Quartersnacks shareholder who attended the original tour (T. Goodall) as a consultant, and booked travel to the three primary filming locations: Copenhagen, Malmö and Berlin.
There’s a reason why they say you can’t beat the classics. Returning from our time abroad and realizing we paled in comparison to the original masterwork, we stripped the original idea of a remake. It’s just impossible. Luckily, we were able to attain sponsorship from the Ragers Inc. board of trustees for “56 Tricks,” our homage to the most infectious collection of ballads about European travel.
Features Aravin, Francesco, Hjalte, Emilio, Torey, Frey, Thando, Pad.
“Four skate spots and one skatepark all on the same street — I can’t tell which is the skatepark.”
By the third or fourth day, Copenhagen begins to feel like a colossal joke. Coming from the classic American “if you get hurt, you’re gonna sue us”-disposition, almost every spot is met with a “What the hell were they thinking when they made this?” You don’t get kicked out much*, and the general public seems way too concerned with enjoying their chill lives to tell you you’re ruining some slab of stone. On top of everything, there’s a canal full of swimmable, clean water dividing the city — sorta like if the Hudson was unpolluted and safe enough for a swim after you got done with a summer session on the Westside Highway. There are a thousand beautiful girls riding by on bikes, and even the pizza is mysteriously better than you ever thought Danish pizza had the ability to be. It’s an expensive playground for adults, but not in a hookers/drugs/”tonight we’re getting fucked up“-kind of way.
[*In the two weeks I spent there last summer, we got kicked out once by a knife-wielding hash dealer who said we were scaring off his customers. He promised to kill us if we stayed at the spot. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Better safe than sorry?]
Jarmers is the Tompkins of Copenhagen. It contains two highish ledges, good-yet-razortail-inducing flatground, and a nice ledge for sitting, drinking beers and watching hours go by, not unlike some green benches we have quite an affinity for. If you watch the Skate Europe episode above, you’ll see a snapshot of the attitude that has allowed Copenhagen to become one of the most skate-friendly cities in Europe: “They cleaned the ledges every week…every week we’d have to re-wax them. We actually met the architect [who built the plaza.] In the beginning, he was almost crying, ‘You’re ruining my plaza.’ We [told him], ‘Nobody is using the plaza besides us, you should be happy.’ [He says] ‘Maybe you’re right,’ and I think after that, they stopped cleaning [the ledges.]” Now, there are even cheesy lil’ ads on the screens at Jarmers depicting some of the locals who skate there. It is worth noting that all of this takes place adjacent to a financial building at a major crossroad of the city, and not in some tucked away outskirt.
Who wins the battle of most insane thing accomplished on a skateboard for the past week — Jake Johnson (above) or Dane Burman for 5050ing the Philadelphia Municipal Services rail? (As a result of those two, one of the crazier bluntslides in recent history may have unfortunately been overshadowed.)
Though it doesn’t have the particular Montreal trick in question, the new GX1000 montage has a good bit of Jake Johnson footage from Montreal.
The good news: Someone up there likes skateboarding, because the Chase two up, five down has been remodeled into exactly what it once was. The bad news: The building has been sold to a Chinese company, with “plans to expand and enhance the retail space at the base of the building,” so it may soon become a bust.
