An Instant NJ Classic — Matty Hilzenrath’s ‘A 20 Of Regular’ Video

🔑 Words by Adam Abada
📷 Photos by Matty Hilzenrath & Yusef Dwider

It is easy to imagine the title of this video uttered from a driver’s window to a gas station attendant. Twenty bucks can get you a lot of places in the only state where the law requires someone to pump your gas for you. In A 20 of Regular, the ground covered situates it in the echelon of great New Jersey videos. Its textures and rhythm call to mind great independent videos like the Grains series and Rust Belt Trap, but features enough of its creator Matty Hilzenrath’s personal touches to herald a skate videographer coming into his own. The 40-minute video lives and breathes its crusty spots, with extended time given to run-ups, landings, and the in-betweens of filming.

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Heat Wave?

#TRENDWATCH for the week: night skating, skateboarding’s version of day poker © Charles Rivard • 📷 Photo via Greg Navarro

Village Psychic has the web premiere of Kevin Barthold’s part in A 20 Of Regular, which covers every genre of New Jersey crust imaginable.

Some spots only last a day. Neil Herrick talks through three photos and a couple of trick battles he had from 5Boro’s 5Ball video with Skate Jawn.

“In the 80s in the New York, Halloween was a license for craziness. It was beyond egging cars. It was a lot of violence…” TWS spoke with O.G. Bruno Musso (if you have the Full Bleed book, that’s Musso on the cover) about the 80s and early 90s days of the Brooklyn Banks.

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NJ Report — ‘you*re amazing don’t forget it’ by Connor Cloonan

📷 Photo by Sammy Levy

“you*re amazing don’t forget it” is a New Jersey scene video by Connor Cloonan, combining the crews from Branded Skateshop in Long Branch (right next door to Wenning’s hometown), and Travel Skateshop in Rahway (…someone or other’s hometown.)

Though Jersey (and by this same token, Long Island) is famous for producing skaters that go on to be more closely associated with the mega-scenes just across the state lines, the Jersey videos that exist in an insular Jersey-fied world always feel like their own genre. Sure, there’s a couple out-of-state clips, but like, you could substantially pad the runtime with a few more day trips up to New York or down to Philly — but wouldn’t it be better to dig behind every gloomy industrial park, around every state college campus, and under every highway for morsels of gold that Freddy, Petillo, Derm and them missed? (Or revisit a NJ classic with the world record for longest running sticker?)

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Day Trip to the Suburbs — A #spotcheck on the Alexis Sablone-designed Park in Montclair, NJ

If you haven’t been skating for too long, you’d be forgiven if you thought that cities ceding spaces containing D.I.Y. spots over to skaters was a longtime phenomenon. Sure, there are famous precedents (Burnside, et al.), but even in New Jersey, the location of today’s subject, the reality has often gone the other way. Newark’s Shorty’s D.I.Y. and Fred Gall’s Jody’s Spot were both recently torn down in favor of nothing.

Two weekends ago, Montclair, New Jersey had a ribbon-cutting ceremony at Rand Park B.K.A. Candy Courts, for the unveiling of eight skateable sculptures designed by known goat, Alexis Sablone. The former tennis courts were a suburban, Tompkins-like spot that people would bring boxes, flatbars and ramps to — there is even a lil’ graveyard off to the side of mini Element flatbars and plastic ramps you get at sporting goods stores. The courts got increasingly popular over the COVID years, and caught the eye of The Skatepark Project, the non-profit you likely know as The Tony Hawk Foundation (the old name.) They flowed the park $25k and Skate Essex, another nonprofit that advocates for skateboarding in North Jersey, provided additional fundraising dollars.

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