All Photography by Nils Svensson
Been a slow news week around here. The web store ate up most of the time (thanks for all the support, your stuff should finish shipping today!) In consolation, here’s a quick convo with Polar Skateboards man-in-charge, Pontus Alv, and Aaron Herrington, Polar’s resident New Yorker, about their Manhattan-based sequel to last year’s “Trocadero Days” video. Have a good weekend.
What is the concept behind the “Manhattan Days” video?
Pontus: For both this and “Trocadero Days,” we approached it like we were tourists discovering a new city with our skateboards.
Aaron: We watched the New York section from Powell-Peralta’s Future Primitive a few times before we filmed it. You see them skating the streets together around Times Square, World Trade, and Rector Street as a big crew.
Pontus: We wanted to use diamond plates for it. The sounds they make are very distinctive to east coast skateboarding. I really wanted that noise in it. The shopping cart was another aspect. Coming from Europe, the homeless people pushing around the shopping cart with all their belongings really stands out for us. It’s not something we really see. We wanted to customize that idea for skateboarding — us pushing around New York with junk. We added a pole jam as a Ricky Oyola tribute, to Philly and that whole Eastern Exposure era.
Aaron: In “Trocadero Days,” they used pieces of wood, but we wanted to make it so that the diamond plate material was accessible everywhere. You always associate it with New York skating, just seeing those old Tribeca spots and bump to bars made out of it.
Was the Future Primitive section a big guide for the vibe you guys were trying to achieve?
Pontus: My biggest inspiration for both videos was the Trent Gaines, Rueben Dominguez and Paul de Jesus section in Propaganda. That part has always been a huge inspiration behind what I do. I want to showcase skaters skating together: doubles, triples and more of a gang vibe than about the individual. When skateboarders go skate, they go in a crew. We have fun together and we laugh together, but in the final product, the video always turns out to be about the one guy who’s doing the trick, even if the whole crew is there with him. Skate videos have a way of portraying it as more about the solo artist. I really miss seeing people doing stuff together.