If you count everything in the Thrasher Junk Drawer, ten full-length videos, plus another handful of solo parts and edits came out in August 2023. We’ve come to expect that sort of programming when marketing teams try to get a thumb on the scale during the S.O.T.Y. race, but the end of summer has traditionally been a much less productive time of year for skateboarding.
At least until this year.
Lakai’s Bubble, Pass~Port’s “Trinket,” and Johnny’s Vid all came out in the same week. Palace’s Beta Blockers and WKND’s Rumble Pack came out on the same day, creating a nineties skater version of the meme about how eating a bag of Takis would overwhelm and kill a child from the 19th century.
What are the chances? How did it happen? And did anybody realize what was coming down the pipeline? I called a handful of skaters and filmers who worked on the projects that were released that month to find out why it was so stacked, and how it felt to navigate the spotlight.
Can’t tell what happened with this and why it is only going online now — as it was supposed to come out, like, literally four or five years ago (maybe they just waited for angst to start trending again) — but Death Video is now online in full. Features much, much younger versions of Tyshawn, Kempsey, Troy, etc.
With the potential end of Muni looming in the future, this was fun to watch (although admittedly, it is nowhere near as good the Big Three of Philadelphia skate spots) — The guys from Municipal Skateboards filmed a montage exclusively at the Philadelphia Museum of Art a.k.a. the Rocky steps.
The B.Q.E. Lot is set to be renovated by the D.O.T. at the start of next year, and it’s going to look exactly like that shitty space around the Flatiron Building with sandpaper ground and random rocks everywhere. Can’t we just get a ledge?
“Does all this mean that New York is vanishing? Sure. But the deli wasn’t there forever, either. Vanishing is what New York does.” Roctakon’s brother wrote a rad thing about revisiting the Brooklyn delis that he had photographed back in 2008.