‘My Role Is To Show That It’s Magical’ – An Interview With Lucas Puig

Intro & Interviews by Farran Golding
Collages by Requiem For A Screen
Original Photography by Sem Rubio

Beyond Lucas Puig’s reputation as the quintessential European who “made it,” his sponsor history alone weaves his name into the skateboard culture of not only France and America – but also England, China and however many other countries in which he’s filmed video parts.

Born and raised in Toulouse, France, and traveling from a young age, Lucas had no desire to live elsewhere for some time. “I felt like I needed to be home,” he says of the gaps between skate trips. “That’s why I never moved to Paris or another big city.”

Five years ago, however, he relocated to the small Basque town of Biarritz. “We came here to be close to the beach,” Lucas says over the phone one morning. “For me, it was for surfing and for my girlfriend, it was for a different lifestyle. More chilled and less subways, less people. Just taking our time.”

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‘All Part Of The Show’ — The Politics of Pants in Skateboarding

Intro + Interviews by Frozen in Carbonite
Top Collage by Requiem For A Screen
Illustrations by Charles Rivard

Pants, as an article of clothing and a philosophical entity, dominate the skate zeitgeist. They consume the daily banter on #skatetwitter, inspired an Instagram account dedicated to IDing them, and have the potential to become the most controversial item of one’s kit. Pants factions line up like the gangs at the beginning of The Warriors — Dickies disciples, nineties enthusiasts, Polar people, and so on.

So began our quest to investigate — not so much the what of pants — but the why. To accomplish this goal, we interviewed four skaters over a generational spectrum and asked the same set of questions.

As we stitched together the interviews, one common thread stood out: Like everything else in 2020, one’s choice of pants is a political act.

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Deeper Understanding — An Interview With Charlie Birch

Interview by Farran Golding
Collages by Requiem For A Screen
Original Photos by Marimo Ohyama & Alex Pires

It seems like just the other day that Palace was a small U.K. brand buzzing with montages filmed on VHS tapes, and P.W.B.C. news segments aimed at a skate industry still coming to grips with how to use the internet. In the ensuing decade of successes, it has remained unshakably English in its vision — even the fact that Jamal Smith is the only American to turn pro for the brand rings of a certain “foreigners appreciating your homeland in a better way than you do”-type thing.

To the American eye, Palace rose to prominence in that void left by Blueprint at the onset of the 2010s. In the time since, the world of U.K. skateboarding feels like it became closer intertwined to our own. This of course is thanks to Palace, yes, but also because of things like Isle’s unanimously adored “Atlantic Drift” series, the Yardsale videos, Free becoming one of the best alternate channels for skate media, and the inspiring success of the Long Live Southbank campaign.

With little context for how the U.K. scene actually operates, we asked Farran Golding — the man behind many of the deep-dive features on the Slam City Skates blog — to interview Charlie Birch, Palace’s newest teamrider, who we don’t know all that much about on this side of the Atlantic ;)

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Unforgettable — The Oral History of the Twin Towers in Skate Photos

Intro + Interviews by Adam Abada
Header Collage by Requiem For A Screen

The World Trade Center — with its centerpiece, the Twin Towers — opened just a few months before the Knicks won their second championship in 1973, and symbolized a new, modernized era of New York City. As literal twins, the Towers are excellent symbols for the push and pull of capital versus culture which, by the 70s, was really coming to a head in American society. They were the biggest buildings in the world and just one wasn’t even enough.

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‘You’re Ruining The Aesthetic’ — Five Videographers On Skate Video Music Supervision In 2019

Graphic by Requiem For A Screen

Skate videos have long been a portal for musical discovery. Except in recent years, it has began to almost feel like …filler. If one editor finds success with an untapped genre or artist, there is always an avalanche of imitators. If you find that “how has nobody skated to this?!”-song, the answer to your question is often “someone has, it was just in some video you missed.” And a popular song? Forget it, it has been in twenty kids’ IG edits since the day it got uploaded to YouTube.

(Don’t even start with the dude editing his “Trip to N.Y.C!” video to Big L right now.)

Choosing a song that makes an impact, and gets people tracking it down is hard when our attention spans are their fickle 2019 selves. We reached out to five people who routinely put out edits (i.e. not the guys dropping one full-length every few years) to get their thoughts on how the process of selecting music in skate videos has evolved.

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