Interviews | Quartersnacks

An Interview With Akira Mowatt

Features & Interviews September 12th, 2014 · 1:02 pm · 8

Photo by Corn

Growing up, there was never a ton of footage from younger New York dudes. Most of the guys from the old Zoo videos, EE3, etc. had begun waning out of skateboarding by that point. Akira was tangibly closer to all of us in age; there weren’t a whole lot of New Yorkers you’d see in videos then who weren’t a good ten years older than you. His Vehicle ad of the ollie over the bar at Ziegfeld is still one of the sickest tricks done in this city (nobody has stepped to that spot since.) Seeing footage of Akira was cool because New York footage was still sparse at the time, and hey, “He’s not much older than me.” Except after a while, he sorta disappeared.

Fast forward and he’s been on it these past five or so years. He posts Instagram videos of himself at the skatepark at 8 A.M., puts out video parts, learns new tricks at the rate of someone half his age, and is an embodiment of the fact that nobody has any excuses. You’re never too old, too rusty or too busy. Below is a quick conversation about where he went, and where he is today.

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It’s still a trip to hear you speak fluent Japanese. What is your background originally?

I’m from Okinawa. Japanese was my first language. I went to American school out there, but once I got to New York when I was 12, I was speaking a broken up Japanese version of English. Eventually I started hanging with kids out here and it cleared up.

Where did you start skateboarding?

My friends in Japan would skate a little bit, but it was more of a curiosity than a real interest. I left Japan and moved to Houston and Suffolk with my dad around 1995 or ’96 because my parents got divorced and a bunch of shit happened. My dad was psycho, so I bounced.

When I moved out here, I remember hearing skateboard wheels all around the streets. One day, I was walking my dog and heard a board snap, I turned around, and saw a skate shop called Swish, which was on St. Mark’s, near where the pizza store on Avenue A is now. I saw Harold Hunter putting his board together and was blown away that there were skaters in my neighborhood.

Harold was like “Cool dog.” I was never out here before, so I thought skateboarding was a whole different thing. I thought, “Whoa, a black dude skating? This is crazy” because I was still thinking of it in terms of who I saw skating in Japan. He asked me if I skated and I said “kinda” because I still had this board my mom bought me when I left Japan. I ran home, and next thing you know, he was showing me around Astor, Union and Washington Square.

Filmed by Bradley Cushing and Goshi Goto

Did you meet all the locals from that time through Harold? When everyone my age was growing up, you were like the one “young” dude at Supreme and everyone else was way older than us.

There was always this bonding factor with a lot of New York kids back then. A lot of them have problems at home or they’re runaways, so we’d stay up all night just hanging at Astor or Union and never go home.

I think Harold gave the word to Jeff Pang that I was progressing a bit and Zoo started flowing me boards. Eventually I started to meet A-Ron [Bondaroff] and all these people who didn’t necessarily skate, but still ran in that same circle. A-Ron took me under his wing since I spoke Japanese. He’d always have me helping out at Supreme until eventually I got a job there.

An Interview With Lurker Lou About Card Boards

Features & Interviews July 16th, 2014 · 7:30 am · 4

Photo by Trevor Macculley

If you are ready to forgive Lurker Lou for ruining skateboarding, he’s been working on a pretty cool project entitled Card Boards. Rather than allowing childhood baseball cards to collect dust and tossing old boards by the curb, Lou combined the two into a collection for the entire Major League. He has a show this Saturday featuring all the boards, so we spoke to him about how Card Boards came to fruition.

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Everyone has a story about how they first got into collecting things as a kid. How did you get into baseball cards?

My dad was into baseball throughout his life. He was born in 1947 and collected during the forties and fifties. When he went to college, his mom threw out his collection.

Baseball card collecting got hot again in the eighties. I had a brother who was five years older than me, and when he was eight or nine, my dad started buying him all these cards. By the time I started at six or seven, he was already over them. I got all my brother’s cards and went from there. The eighties were sort of the peak of collecting cards.

Why was it the peak?

All the baby boomers, like my dad, were in their forties. They didn’t want you to just throw them away like they did. That’s why they became rare, because no one thought to hold onto them when they first got big in the forties and fifties.

My dad had a liquor store and he would carry baseball cards there. He’d buy boxes for me at wholesale, like as a treat when I got As on my report card. We’d take the good ones, put them aside and make team sets. At 11 years old, I started skating, and completely left anything having to do with baseball or cards behind. Card collecting was on its way out anyway. The market got over saturated.

How’d you decide to start making boards with cards twenty years down the line?

I was bored, going through old stuff in maybe winter 2012. An old roommate had left a bunch of cards behind. He had Shawn Kemp rookie cards, Gretzkys and other shit. I wanted to get rid of the cards to make back some of the money this dude owed me. I went onto Beckett.com, which was the website of this monthly magazine that would tell you card prices back in the day. The cards are worth nothing. A mint condition 1987 Gretzky is maybe $8-16. I wasn’t going to go through the trouble of selling some cards for $10.

An Interview With Eli Reed

Features & Interviews May 2nd, 2014 · 6:01 am · 8

Photo by Sam Muller

A conversation with one of the most talented and versatile skaters from out east — or anywhere really — about his new board sponsor, New York and the Gram, obviously.

P.S. Static IV is really good and full of surprises ;)

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You went without a board sponsor for a pretty long time, especially for someone who still got a lot of coverage. Were you ever worried that you might not be able to skate for a living anymore?

I wasn’t too frustrated, I still kept skating. Skateboarding is in a weird place right now, where things are changing and evolving quicker than ever. It’s easier for a lot of companies to put on AMs because they don’t have to pay them up front and it’s sort of like a trial period. There aren’t many board companies out there making tons of money and able to pay pros a whole lot. I understood everything was about timing. Being on the east coast is another thing, since you’re not in people’s eyes every single day like you would be in California.

I’ve been blessed with so much other stuff in my life. Whether being a pro comes or goes, I knew that I still loved skateboarding, and that I still have a lot more skating I want to do in my life.

How did the Organika situation come about?

I talked to a few companies prior to that and nothing felt right at the time.

Karl Watson hit me up out of the blue and asked if I was down and I said “Let’s do this.” Expedition was a possibility a while back, but I think they were more hyped on having me on Organika since it’s a smaller knit crew. They have some young dudes killing it, and legends like Quim and Karl, so they needed someone to bridge that gap. I feel like I’m getting a second wind right now and I still got a lot left to give.

An Interview with Bill Strobeck

Features & Interviews February 28th, 2014 · 7:58 am · 23

Photo by Jonathan Mehring

There is always the one skate video project that dominates rumors and anticipation above all others. For the past year-and-a-half, that project has been the Supreme video, which we now know will be called “cherry.” We sat down with its creator, Bill Strobeck, to preview what we’re in store for without giving too much away.

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Supreme has been around for twenty years and never had a full-on skate video. How did the idea to finally do one come about and how did you get involved?

My Cinematographer Project part had just come out [in spring 2012]. Kyle [Demers] saw my section and seemed hyped on it. He had recently started working for Supreme, and was wondering what everyone else has always thought: “Why has Supreme never done a video?” Them wanting to do one would always go back and forth a bit, but ended up not working out every time. Kyle asked me if I could do a little something for the shop. First it was supposed to be just a commercial. Dill was in town at the time and they wanted me to skate with him and Tyshawn [Jones]. We ended up making the “buddy” commercial and then Kyle asked if I would be down to make a full-length. The rest is history.

How did you pick the skaters who ended up being in it?

It was mostly who was already hanging out at the shop, like the guys who set up boards there, and some others who I had been working with at the time. Some of them were working on other videos, and some people got hurt. There were a lot of things that came into play later in terms of who was able to be in it. Also, it’s a shop video where there wasn’t a real team, but a team sort of got created along the way of making it, and I’m hyped on that.

Why has it taken you so long to make a full-length of your own?

Well, I need security. I live by myself in Manhattan and everything costs a ton of money here. I have to work for other companies to support myself, so there was no time to do a full video on my own.

Another brand once asked me to make one for them. I tried doing that for a minute, but it ended because they canned their whole skate program. I’m glad my first full-length is for Supreme.

‘Do you want to go on tour with Lil’ Wayne and skate on stage?’ — An Interview with Connor Champion

Features & Interviews · Video & Remixes November 8th, 2013 · 2:57 am · 17

A bit of a preface: After a long, detailed chronicle of Lil’ Wayne’s skateboarding pursuits throughout 2012, we vowed to ease off coverage at the start of this year. We never took the protective, “OMG this is what’s wrong with skateboarding!”-outlook like many other sources for skateboard commentary. We merely observed just how insane it was that a thirty-year-old guy who happens to be one of the biggest pop stars on earth, decided to take up skateboarding and got better at skating transition than a good 40% of the Quartersnacks Office. If the guy wants to skate, let him skate — it’s not like he’s pushing past the security window at some midtown spot with fifteen kids and getting everyone else kicked out. He wasn’t bothering us. We eventually lost interest, as is the case with most 30-year-old rappers doing odd things long enough for their novelty to wear off.

Anyone who has spent time reading QS knows it’s really a rap site. New rap, old rap, underground rap, radio rap, country rap tunes, shiny suit rap, strip club rap — we love it all. Not an editorial decision goes on here without rap somehow being figured into the equation. “What would Jeezy do?”

After a summer of seeing Connor Champion’s Instagram posts, which landed him in a different city every two days, we learned that he, Kyle Berard and a few others, were on tour with Lil’ Wayne, skating on stage amidst the most seizure-inducing lighting technology imaginable. We finally had an inside source that could discuss what being on a rap tour with one of the most recognizable rappers alive was like, and he just so happened to skateboard on it.

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How did you get hit up to go on a Lil’ Wayne tour?

I’ve known Ryan Clements since I was a kid. He used to work for Skatepark of Tampa, and Lil’ Wayne’s people hired him to staff the skating part of his tour. Ryan knew I was a big Wayne fan, so he called and asked, “Do you want to go on tour with Lil’ Wayne for two months and skate on stage?” Before he said anything else, I just went “Yeah.” They didn’t tell Ryan any specific details, so I didn’t know what to expect.

Who else was on the tour?

It was me, Kyle Berard, Jeremy Knibbs, this kid Yo-Yo who rides for TrukFit, and Wayne’s little cousin, Dante. I’ve known Kyle since I was young, and all the other dudes were sick. I couldn’t ask for a better mix.

What was the first day like?

I flew from Atlanta to Birmingham, Alabama the day after they called me. We just showed up to soundcheck on the first day and saw two small quarter pipes, one large quarter pipe, and two small handrails. They were just like, “See what you can do.” At first, there was a routine where we would all go after each other. But when Wayne got on stage, he stopped the music once he saw what was going on and said, “Fuck that routine shit, just skate.” It turned more into a jam session for each show.