Softcore by Galen DeKemper
I began Skate Part Reviews as my 2023 New Year’s Resolution. Last January I was applying for jobs as a copywriter so this project seemed a good way to sharpen my language skills. Furthermore, I was aware that the way I watch skate videos had changed since my millennial introduction to the genre, when VHS tapes were the dominant distribution media that my brother and I would rewind and rewatch through my high school years. Over the next half of my life, digital video discs laid way for this laptop deluge in the streaming age when my habits became single watches of each new video gleaned from posts across a handful of platforms. I have passed cumulative months of my 37-year-old life watching skate videos, so I wanted to explore what thoughts are going through my head while I absorb these parts with intensive repeated viewing treatments that resemble my introduction to this genre that has informed how I map the worthwhile world.
Through months then seasons, while the square scene consistently rejected my cover letters, I wrote 57 Skate Part Reviews. Quasi Skateboards deserves honorable mention for my only copywriting job in 2023, a transcription of their Simulation video. They agreed to my price immediately and paid promptly upon project completion. When Claire and I visited Home Skateshop in Louisville and saw a stack of Simulations in the glass counter I felt so good we forgot to take a picture. Seneca suggests a better title could have been Simulacra and I think to see what he means.
I read Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. With the rigor attendant to Quasi’s standards now ingrained, my reviews evolve from daily, Pitchfork-styled summations to comprehensive, shot-by-shot descriptions with concurrent cultural and audio context; I seek to make each trick/line a Gertrude Stein word painting. I wonder about the role and definition of a “review,” when many products seem to short-serve the literal meaning of the word “review” as an expansivist blueprint rather than reductive document.
The 54 skater/subjects have been gallant sports when surprised with my deep dives and I receive a number of heartening replies from their video creators too, who remark on how trippy reading these texts as screen window into their editing brains feels. Since I make videos too, and wonder how my eyes have attuned to shots and sequences in ways that were less apparent to me at this time last year, I turn my review process on myself for Softcore, my new video, a nine-minute feature premiering here and now on my January 30th 38th birthday:
“Obama was here” graffiti marks the Guardsman Pass route down to the Heber City skatepark, where snowcapped Mount Timpanagos sits to the south among Wasatch Peaks forming the western rim around this verdant valley bowl in mid-November. A lovely place obviously, where one homophobic scrawl bothers us so we bring along a can of neutral paint and brush over the slur. Claire films me pump down a bank away from her camera toward the mountains and ascend the next slope where I pop to stab a crooked grind on the parallel flat ledge, but jump off without success. One young boy among four helmeted scooter riders on the plateau asks me, “Was that a grind?” “Yeah, man, crooked,” I tell him as Claire giggles from her corner and I return to my takeoff point wearing zipped-up turquoise L.L. Bean fleece, black pants and Shawn Kemp Reeboks.
In annual tradition, soon after dark on an evening between Christmas and New Year’s, Deer Valley hosts a torchlight ski parade. My overhead camera stretches to the limits of its zooming focus pointing up Bald Eagle mountain while Claire and I stand with her parents a few rows back in the crowd before Snow Park Lodge. A father piggybacking a child on his shoulders asks the foreign fellows to our left if they could stop smoking. One of the men holds up his vape as proof it’s not a cigarette. “No Fumo!” the parent insists, as skiers holding red flaming torches descend Big Stick’s lower slope then arrange themselves along Wide West to form a two-sided chute of twirling crimson though which paired trains of dancing skiers wrapped in rainbow LED lights create a kissing snake formation as they serpentine in helixing ropes approaching our crowd. The once and future vapours converse in French as the luminescent skiers pass to our cheers. “Allez!!”
Claire Christmas gifts me a snowskate that we take out to Deer Valley’s snowy peripheries after the lifts close. As I appear atop an overhead snowbank, drumskins and cymbals beat the first notes of Native Leaves’ “Park City,” a track I found while searching “Park City” on Apple Music when we first arrived in town that has become a theme song of ours throughout these first months. Claire yells, “Alpine baby” as I drop-in down this frozen quarter-pipe and level out straight shooting across the Sterling snowpack.
We consider two old train stations in Heber ideal locations for a skateshop bookstore cafe. The realtor isn’t available for a site visit, but is happy to share the code for a lockbox holding keys to the buildings. Inside one entrance, a diapered baby hitting a bong is drawn in white paint pen on a propped shard of glass. Further in, the far back window bears a graffitied eye that stares into screengaze for a few seconds.
“You might find yourself cruising up Parley’s,” a favored mountain access road from Salt Lake City, as Joel Miller films me pop into the Leonardo Museum’s big white full-pipe wearing an upside down mushroom t-shirt from Opening Ceremony’s Unholy Matrimony collaboration with Brett Westfall in Autumn/Winter 2007-08, black Homme Plisse pants and a 2016 Supreme wave stripe beanie, backside tube carving with my wrists drawn like I’m “sipping on that hot cup of coffee,” through one pump to fakie, adjusting placement of my black leather, white-soled Opening Ceremony Howard sneakers for a kickflip to fakie on my 8” black Palace cowboy deck. “Early in morning looking for them zoning vibes,” I stay pumping then attempt another kickflip that I stick but slide down while my board shoots up and out from the pipe over the barrier wall to land in the grass by a tree. “We live on that island time, and it’s alright.
“All the homies down for the ride, yeah,” including the Utah Skate Spot Hound cruising goofy-stance along a South Salt Lake new-build courtyard sidewalk. In red Adidas shoes and a thrifted black t-shirt covered in bright tropical birds fluttering above fitted olive trousers, he pops onto the low concrete platform grounding an electric box then quickly ollies again over a flatgap into backside 50-50 grind on a second paired platform’s edge off the end onto the sidewalk again. The type of dude who’s “down to ride from day till the night ends,” the Hound backside 180s off the curb to street with his brewery ballcap facing forward to “throw that thing in low for the climbing,” ever onward sniffing out the next spot.
I had followed UtahSkateSpotHound’s instagram account before we moved out here, then we first made plans to meet on the Sunday afternoon after Claire and I return our empty UHaul down in The Slick. The Hound sends me the address of Granite Connection Middle School, a couple miles away, where we pull up and see him in the act of removing a skatestopper. We don’t know his name at this point, so I bark like a dog to draw his attention. He suggests we park in a different lot, nearer to a small concrete amphitheater on the shady side of the building, where Claire films me frontside ollie onto the first level with sufficient speed to carry me along toward the step-channel before a cutout gap where I pop onto a second-row front 50-50 grind over the void and pop back down once the first level resumes then roll off the base block to ground. My momentum swings me around frontside to display my black Bianca Chandôn floral embroidered sweatshirt and purple Columbia x Opening Ceremony pants, barehead bearing my last New York City haircut as I face cheering Claire living in Utah now feeling more official with each clip stacked out here.
Claire’s blonde hair blows back as she goofy-stance snow-skates across Sterling base in her burgundy FreePeople snowsuit. “Goddamn you’re so pretty.” As her speed wanes, tucking hair behind her left ear, she turns to smile at my camera. “Oh, yeah,” she says, redirecting then pushing herself to glide down further incline. “Love me some Park City, yeah oh yeah.”
Everyone agrees that Cal Ross is one of Utah’s preeminent rippers. I DM Cal, who suggests we meet at the University of Utah TF one afternoon, where his friend Matt joins us for the session too. Once we warm up, our first street spot is down the hill toward the right. I follow their leads to this concrete ride-on ledge bowing down beside and past a 6-stair that feels a bit too gnarly for me at the moment, so I open my phone camera and watch them go. “It’s something like a surf board,” as Matt fakie cruises from electric box takeoff alongside the brick administrative building before corner-carving and flatground half-cab flipping in black and white Vans to show his Shake Junt grip while flowy landing situates him regular-stance down toward the six-stair set facing me for slappy back smith dip down curvaceous buttress, “riding on the frozen waaaayaayayyayayaaave,” popping out and ollieing the ensuing three-stair to ride off the curb to street while frontside carving as a motorcycle speeds past on the downstream course, then in its wake Matt hones in on a red-curb and slappy bluntslides to regular-stance longhair pushing into the sunny afternoon.
“We love all the bunnies on the ski lifts and we love all the mommies with the face lifts,” in addition to Park City’s network of paved paths that occasionally cross underneath city streets. With Claire and Mars on my first Rail Trail cruise I notice a set of snowcapped wooden ledges separated by vertical mining beams into flat windowsill sections down the slope. “This ain’t no beginner’s, we don’t take shit,” proves true while growing shadows are chilling Claire in her filming location and Mars is showing patience as my tries add up. “Alright, this is it, bud,” comes Claire’s call from behind the lens as I guide my snowscraping noseslide dismount to regular and accelerate into the underpass, where “I might take you down and put her on my spaceship.” I set up for a kickflip, then video clip cuts before the moment when I fail to flip my deck and land with only my front right foot unexpectedly back on board so I do the splits in a really abrupt way. As my groins hold strong through the stretch I feel grateful for the strength training I have done over the past 18 months rehabilitating my left knee. I bounce back up without any ill effects besides a stinging pain. Still, I will humbly remember that these Western spots can be unforgiving and to tread with care while we’re here.
A sharp array of swords and spears stand in for my unshown slam; following Isiah’s biblical guidance, these instruments of arms have been repurposed into agricultural aids at Gilgal Garden’s “Monument to Peace.” Here near Salt Lake City’s Trolley Square, Thomas Child began, upon his retirement in the 1950s, dedicating the remainder of his life to creating this backyard sculpture garden where my continuing videoscan over the rocky mount reveals two stalactite hands reaching from the ceiling within Malachi’s Cave toward a red heart and white heart, respectively symbolizing the living and dead.
Toward the end of one Sunday street skating loop near his barrel warehouse, the Skate Spot Hound shows me this yellow receiving dockside ride-on ledge to bank. The height of the loading dock drop makes me anxious during my initial approaches as I struggle placing my front truck onto the angle iron that the Hound grinds across with ease. When I finally aim true, the metal edge offers minimal resistance on my 50-50 across the gap, longer than I usually hold grinds, until I reach the ramp mound that provides my dock-to-ground exit route, “then we gone’ hit the slopes, show you the episodes,” rolling across the cracked lot where I swipe my shove-it in Jacquemus x Triple 5 Soul turquoise longsleeve and wavy Supreme beanie. “Ha-ha,” the Hound cheers as I turn to face.
Briggy on the track’s government name is Brigham Young Tautoil, “bringing you the reggae,” as Cal Ross approaches the Fort Douglas concrete wave with a flatground backside flip before carving into switch front 50-50 slappy grind down the hump bump. “Ain’t no stick figure but my fingers pretty sticky,” compliments Cal catching switch front shove down the three-stair, landing with his front toe hanging off, no drag, as he maintains carriage over quick curb-drop to street then situates himself for a tall, tweaked switch flip attempt with clip cut at its apex.
After Claire and I pass through a painted Rail Trail tunnel, I notice this grey concrete bank tucked past its mouth, beside and beneath a broad brown set of stairs. Claire and Mars film from outside the tunnel, so that I emerge frontside passing turquoise tunnel graffiti and ascend beneath the corner mirror onto the banked nook where I kickflip at the cusp to fakie then switch ride back into the tunnel from whence I came.
“If you need to find us when we’re walking through your town,” one carved foot appears placed in grass beside another unattached foot, then scope expands to include two disembodied legs, a torso and head sculptures. These carved implants symbolize the biblical story of the shattered giant from Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, where “just take a look around you’ll find us walking in the clouds” of Gilgal Garden.
“I wasn’t filming. Wait, now I am,” Claire clarifies as I push away from her camera between rows of stacked barrels down the available path toward the Skate Spot Hound’s homemade ledge, which I nollie backside tailslide to regular. “Okay!” Claire says as I bring my wrists down marionette clean then we head to Doom Lounge at the Twilite to watch f0am perform.
I “feel the motivation from the elevation” to prop my phone against my water bottle atop a bin for selfie angle on the Prospector Lodge’s quarter-pipe column made of stacked sandstone bricks. I pop above the rusty red metal base curb to land on a particular longer brick that spans most of the quarter-pipe then lift frontside 180 dismount off into the parking lot. I’m wearing Opening Ceremony Howard sneakers in turquoise, white Supreme floral print swishy pants, Bianca Chandon’s Health is Wealth longsleeve and a navy South2West8 brimmed trapper beanie with its thin leather chinstrap strings dangling.
The first big snowstorm of the season arrived in Utah just before we did in November. On one of our first walks with Mars I film the snow covering bent wheat stalks on a bluff walking leftward.
“He’ll probably land this one,” Claire says as I skate through the Hound’s stacked barrel warehouse toward her camera and hop front lipslide on the DIY ledge. “What’d I tell you?” she says as I rollaway to regular.
I use a skatespot app to locate The Headbanger Bank in Murray that we visit when taking Mars to a dog hotel before we visit the Midwest for Thanksgiving. We see the Headbanger Bank got its name because the overhanging roof of this Mormon church grows close as one ascends the tan brick slope surrounding the tabernacle. The bank’s bottom is a few inches above flush with the sidewalk so one must pop onto it. I’m wearing a beanie to afford my head protective awareness, then feel too cramped once I have ollied upon the bank to pop the backside kickflip I had in mind. Improvising instead, I mount front 180 from the end of the fresh sidewalk onto the sloped brick for a switch ride before frontside half-cabbing back down onto the darker, older section of the sidewalk for regular rollaway until my trucks catch the edge and I jump off into the lawn. “Woo,” Claire says, then “Amen.” A police car sits in the parking lot with no one inside. When I tell the Skate Spot Hound we went to this spot, he says there is some skatebable stuff around the building across the street, too.
What combinations of events lead to love? Perhaps a snowed-over hoofprint or an interior twig provides support. Sometimes Mars wants to inspect Lower Marsy Field, where I film this heart-shaped indentation on the snow one morning while Claire drops Mars’s leash to let him roam free and hopefully poop or pee.
Following the splits on my post-noseslide kickflip attempt, I was done popping tricks for the day, but happy to continue cruising downhill on the Rail Trail. After a week sitting between our two seats in the moving truck, Mars is eager for a chance to run alongside while Claire enjoys an uninterrupted, gently downhill ride longer than Brooklyn’s Prospect Park had provided her along the trail heading out of Park City. “Oh, my. I love the sunshine; pretty girls walking ‘round with blonde hair and blue eyes…” When Mars and I glide past sunglassed Claire she presses peace signs to her cheeks and I giggle while a beautiful mountain view fills the background beneath wispy wide skies as I ride facing backwards to film her. “She put me on a smooth course. Alright, alright, yeah.” With the uphill return on our minds, as the setting sun brings colder temperatures, we stop soon after to observe ducks in the center of an ice-rimmed pond, then turn around to retrace our way up the mountain.
My day with Cal and Matt continues downhill through the University of Utah campus. This Fort Douglas area, named for Lincoln’s Secretary of War, was originally an army station built on the benchland overlooking Salt Lake City from the East. We cross Legacy Bridge over to lower Campus, carving down wavy concrete paths twining sidewalks unfamiliar to me so I move more cautiously than their confident cruises as Matt ollies this fat flat gap on a course that carries them out of my sight. Cal drops their pin where I meet them at these ledges outside the library with sculptures of books stacked upon certain sections. They point out where Lizard King did a trick and we start warming up to ours. The premiere attraction here is this 20-foot long, slightly-downhill, knee-high, black-waxed ledge, a bit rounded from years of love, a good chance for me to practice standing on top of my noseslides for longer distances. I land a few before I film Matt then Cal takes the lens for my turns. I close in on half-cab noseslide over thirty tries and land a couple sketchy. Since “fakie’s steezier but regs is easier,” I acknowledge I’ll probably be rolling away to regular from a good one momentarily and go for a line afterward. Cal films an overhead rolling angle of me half-Cab nosesliding to regular in my turquoise Opening Ceremony Howard sneakers with Triple Five longsleeve tee blowing up at my waist to show black Supreme boxer briefs above purple pants as my nollie front half-Cab situates me for what I want to be a switch flip body varial with some downhill speed that wasn’t meant to be, so you don’t see that last part.
The second time Claire, Mars and I cruise the Rail Trail, we drive down further to park in a lot at the end of Prospector, where I see these blue metal fish sculptures near the mouth of the access path as bicycle racks with noseslide potential. While Claire attends an appointment next week, I skate down the neighborhood to this same little lot and set up my selfie angle centering the cresting blue fish’s fin-pole with the PC Hill backgrounding beyond. My approach course from black paved trail to the sidewalk-paneled bay on which the sculpture is implanted provides a challenging carve while I’m crouching. Two women finish their rollerblade and unboot at the trunks of their vehicles then drive off as I continue honing in on my goal. When I feel hot under the bright sun, I fold away my flower sweatshirt to wear my small black cut-off Bianca Chandôn pocket tee. I aim my noseslide to reach the top of the fish’s spine, then let its curved fin balance me out as I twist back to regular. I tic-tac a few coming closer before I land this best one gymnast clean and push twice out of the water bottle-propped stationary frame.
Some snowy days Mars enjoys exercising in the garage beneath our quarters. Active presence near the inside entrance often triggers the garage door opening automatically, but Claire pushes off from the firewood-stacked nook without tripping the radar and cruises alongside her prancing jindo through the subterrain. “Goddam you’re so pretty.” After the first wall, Mars briefly noses toward the elevator door, but Claire’s suggestive momentum in her turquoise helmet, red puffer coat, black FreePeople fleece pants and tan New Balance slipper boots convinces him to trot along for another loop toward the back recesses where he likes to sniff the corner in spot 8. “Love me some Park City.”
Back at the U of U Library Ledges, Matt surfs onscreen from the left corner lightly backside powersliding to control his ample speed with chestnut shoulder-length hair blowing in the wind onto and down a full-length front tailslide to fakie in the sun. He lands this multiple times as his true goal was front bigspin out from these tailslides, to which he comes plenty close with no cigar, then another spliff’s on deck after he calls time. While Cal films me, Matt recognizes a passerby as a former coworker and they catch up briefly. This young man has just finished his final college exam today so we congratulate him before he parts. Our next spot is the tennis court ledges, where I lose first in a game of SKATE and Matt notches an upset win over Cal. This whole session we’ve been skating down the foothill, which is back toward their turf in Sugar House and the Avenues so I don’t blame them, but my uphill retreat to my Chevrolet remains in my mind at each further spot so here’s where I bid their leave and retrace the skate back uphill, alternating between wheels and walking. My phone says I will reach the vehicle in a half-hour. Passing the library ledge I cross paths with Matt’s graduate friend again, whose big blonde hair reminds me a bit of my brother’s. “Hey, I know you,” I say with a nod when he waves as I push past him uphill.
A rough craggy boulder sits as the head atop a 38-ton, 5-sided 20-foot tall amber face of silica quartzite where Child’s oxyacetylene torching carved the outline of the captain who appeared to Isiah with his sword drawn between his legs, perhaps Yahweh incarnate providing guidance. Garden vegetation beneath the feet is largely dormant at this point in the winter so the bush before the rock resembles a crown of thorns more than it might in lusher months. The second song stirs as a grey 6-level parking garage looms behind the sculpture, with its rough head still in the clouds at this viewer’s angle. Child, when asked about the uncarved capstone, says the liberties afforded by modern art mean that he didn’t need to finish this piece in that way. “The nature of this monument does not require accuracy… It is sometimes more potent to suggest and cause wonderment than to explain in detail.”
Strums hum while light red veins cutting through deeper red run down the interior eaves of this brick-backed refuge featuring Childs’s wife’s carved bust. The thin space where the rooftop would meet is open to a bright stripe of white sky, beneath which a slight weathering line down the front of her sculpted face shows traces of time. Gilgal Park was known as Stoner Park before its recent rehabilitation. Child outsourced this bust carving of his wife to another artist, and those who knew the subject agree that she possessed a more genial beauty than the artist conveyed as pulsing rhythm grows in an ascendent Rainer Maria guitar sample.
Lucy Church Amiably is the shadowed book in my hands when I look aside and see what outline the lamp is casting.
Over a keyboard drums kick in on The City’s “Winter’s Cold (in the city)” soundtrack while I sit on the asphalt in this Cherry Street parking lot and tell Tyler Andrew he’s going to love my angle panning down mirrored Millenium Tower to the bent yellow pole in tandem with his backwards hat truck jamming up-and-over onboard trajectory. I’d met at Jason and Genesis at this spot the other day before I took Tyler and and James here.
Five tall, tight, white C-Shaped planter ledges line one side of a sloped block above the 7th Avenue F train exit, downhill frontside for me. James Lee knows the ones I mean and says he’s down to meet in Park Slope and film during a free hour before he goes to pick up his child from school. This block is typically crowded with pedestrians, so I tell James I’d rather session the Lafayette Statue on Prospect Park West. Claire and I have walked Mars past the ledge surrounding this pink granite monument hundreds of times; now this will be my first and last skate session here before I leave New York. Patterned bricks ground the decorated bas-relief street-side half, but the parkside interior ground beneath the ledge features smooth black hexagon tiles. Boardslide pop out is my first goal, which I swing out to regular while maintaining my balance through a wobble when my back wheels lift momentarily from the ground before I recenter myself and reset them down softly. I look with a grin to James as a woman who has been reading on a nearby bench acknowledges my success with an accommodating smile. My black glasses strap hangs over the left shoulder of my grey Bianca Chandôn Paris, Texas graphic t-shirt and mustard Nike Dri-fit socks tuck in the cuffs of my J.W. Anderson x Uniqlo chambray painter pants above oatmeal Quasi x Vans Crocketts as I loop around toward James talking about what I’ll do next.
I meet Jason and Nate down at the Banks, where Nate is trying to backside flip this bump to flat gap over a low hedging fence. Danny messages me asking where we are and I say the Banks. He asks me for the pin which I drop then he arrives a few minutes later in midnight blue Arcteryx shell, black CK denim and black Half-Cabs. He hasn’t been here before. “Winter’s cold in the city.” As Nate takes a break, I film Danny’s backside ollie over the curb beside the 9-stair into the wall-side brick wave, carving around the planter ledge as Jason’s back passes across the screen and The City’s song hums while Danny focuses toward his hurdle: frontside ollie over the lattice. He scoops and swoops a flatground backside 180 to confirm his line then a tree trunk momentarily blocks view of his rollaway until he reemerges. “I left for work when it was still dark and now I’m leaving and it’s dark again. I decide to take a new block home and it’s filled with locals tucked away in restaurants like some sort of quaint display.”
I had imagined nollie back tail on the Marquis’s monument ledge, but once I am here and begin building up to that, I realize that my preparatory tricks are proving sufficiently challenging on their own. I tuck my Paris, Texas tee away to go shirtless. This front tail takes me plenty of tries and is my smoothest rollaway of multiples. I had wanted to dismount more parallel to the ledge but my perpindicular rollaway with James’s zoom onto my glistening chest looks fine now. “It feels like I’m watching an advertisement for life when this feeling of isolation sets in.”
I’ve loved skating the Chinatown Quarterpipes since my second through fourth-year New York residence was nearby, from a black and white back disaster on a Zip Zinger photo Danny Weiss shot, to nollie back disaster revert in Eli Reed pants, to rock stall frontside body varial to regular. Digging deep into my bag, front boardslide 270 is my goal today with James behind the lens. When we arrive a drinking man on a bench is yelling baseball insults at a Boston-based moving truck waiting at the red light. I’ve already filmed James’s ender earlier in the day so he’s happy to accommodate me until he has to pick up his daughter. “I turn the corner. The city feels so busy.” I wish I didn’t do that little tic-tac on my rollaway but it matches with a riff of sonic fuzz.
The first time I show James this James Street spot a car is parked on the sidewalk. The second time someone has pooped near the ledge, now on my third visit the route down sidewalk toward this backside angle-iron ledge is clear enough. I approach in Ralph Lauren navy/green/yellow windowpane shirt, earthy Quasi corduroys and green Adidas Puigs. This was from right before the Chinatown quarter-pipe session in real life, as I stick a quick k-pop on the rusted metal ledge atop a 3-stair landing and squeeze down the sidewalk past a black car parked halfway off the street. I make eye contact with a pedestrian also heading downhill who cedes me passage to ollie over a slime puddle then I pass before a crosswalking man who too accommodates my roll.
The redheaded filmer is going to recharge his camera while Jason, Genesis and I skate flat in the Cherry Street handball court. “Wind stings the tips of my ears while an uncomfortably warm sweat builds on the back of my neck and in that moment I think of you.” Earlier in the day I’d been telling Clark Hassler about my goal to switch flip body varial the Flushing grate before I leave New York. He suggested I practice doing the trick over something, so this half-deflated basketball is an attainable goal that still takes me plenty of back and forth tries. “Messages mixed; am I yours or just a fix?” I ask Byoun to film my uphill switch flip body varial over this orange half-orb wearing a slate blue, sweat-marked Schiesser v-neck tee above black Roucha pants with roof tar spots on the knees and green Adidas. I have to backside pivot my rollaway, but it’s clean enough to give me confidence for my Flushing ender goal.
Daiki Hoshino rides for Fucking Awesome Japan and is at the Banks with Pat Hoblin and Horace Wendell when I meet Nate and Jason. He tucks long black hair behind his front left ear before he pops regular-stance kickflip to my backside angle down the 9-stair with quick catch and plenty of clearance. The back of his bluejeans is frayed above the pockets from previous battles as he sets up his feet then a tree blocks my view for a split-second that is long enough for what Horace’s angle shows to be a speedy heelflip that Daiki catches and lands over the dirt gap back into view with tan fallen leaves clinging to the back of his olive sweater.
Under the Brooklyn Bridge’s Pearl Street overpass, James Lee throws down on the hallowed Banks bricks and crouches in his fatigues and black tee to spring from the curb-cut into front 50-50 grind up the Brooklyn Banks bar he custom sliced to make his dream happen as the loop bellows in a way reminiscent of “Bittersweet Symphony” and “Pulaski at Night.”
“I step into a store because I’m out of tobacco, but end up leaving with a Doctor Pepper.” Since James is regular and Tyler is goofy, I switch back and forth between sides of the yellow Cherry Street pole jam to film from each’s frontside. James lands his jam onto the crusty bleached pavement until he reaches contact with a chainlink fence and steps off, turning with a smile. “The guy behind the counter calls me boss, which feels far from true, but I say thanks. Anyway, it’s getting so cold…” as Taylor’s harmony carries in with Dean’s spoken vocals.
Pat Binkley rode a bus from Philadelphia to attend my Starboard premiere, then he stayed the night in my Orchard Street room while I went to sleep in Park Slope. By the time we meet on Orchard the following afternoon to session, Pat has already purchased a sling bag from Supreme Bowery and communicated with chef Andy Sisomboune, who has arranged for our early dinner at Rule of Thirds before Pat has to catch his bus back to Philly. We session L.E.S. then skate over the Williamsburg Bridge to shred the Williamsburg monument. I sit on my board past the end of the ledge to show Pat approach with his shoulder-length hair under a black P ballcap and two-scoop a slappy noseslide to crooked grind in Purcell Converses.
“There’s an existential weight to living in the city.” A car horn honks at the moment my noseslide glances this railing alongside the Brooklyn Bridge exit ramp. My blue collared longsleeve hangs amply, half-unbuttoned, as I roll off the curb two wheels at a time. I look rightside skyward with a mixture of exasperated bemusement and fatigued frustration, then step off to pop the board into my hand while I say, “Fuck!” I want to land this noseslide longer and cleaner, but soon start overheating then gagging and decide to be content.
Clocarus Industries has been producing “I’m crying because I love skateboarding so much” stickers, one of which is affixed in the sight-line of an inquisitive bear’s face drawn in deep blue on the honeyellow subway wall. “Everything that matters is supposed to be here, but when you see it all in front of you laid out like that, you realize that maybe none of it ever did.”
Shirtless again at Prospect Park monument, my frontside boardslide pops out to fakie while James zooms in on my oatmeal high-tops as I switch kickturn to cut. “It’s all made of plastic. None of it’s real.”
I sit on this bench at Seward Park waiting for Shawn and film the boy borrowing my board as he attempts a stationary shove-it. He will run off with my board a few minutes later, then Shawn will immediately bless me with the Palace complete I’ve been riding throughout much of this video, so that all works out with no hard feelings in the end and I hope the boy is still riding this Less than Local complete.
“In the nick of time, my phone rings.” James Quakenbush’s new unisex fragrance offers notes of colored pencil on lined paper beneath bright statements of bulldog with a pierced nose, the star tails of trapezoids and a television screen spouting googly antennae.
“Hey, where are you?” a woman’s voice asks. Dean’s wife Emily records her own guest vocals. “You should come meet up,” she suggests. The Museum of Natural History’s gemstone room contains this 4.5 ton Arizona-sourced showpiece singing swirling deposits of blue azurite and green malachite down its face that was first displayed at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. “It’s not too late. I get my priorities straight and start to calm down. Guiness pint with a friend in a warm bar on Smith Street.”
Tyler Dingman films me do this switch kickflip body varial over the biggest pre-fab hip at New Rochelle’s skatepark. Happily landed, rather than risking a backside carve, I jump off my board to step over a ledge I was fast approaching. Dean stands in the background watching the clip with his vocals on the track, “laughing about what matters to other people while we make plans to do it as soon as one of us has a day off.”
A second colorful slice of James Quakenbush’s art portrays a banana smoking a cigarette beside a lightbulb showing a rearview mirror western vista, across from a smoke screen beneath an injection site with a skunk tail and a roach emitting a dog eating an airplane as a candy cane floats by. “Guinness pint with a friend in a warm bar on Smith Street,” chime the two men in The City.
Half-cab noseslide to regular is one of my more dependable tricks so I make sure to show one on the Prospect Park monument, my fourth clip here, rolling away over the stone ring down the trail as my glasses strap flaps beneath my backwards white cap celebrating Nelson Mandela’s freedom at 70. “Guinness pint with a friend in a warm bar on Smith Street.” I have been Cali-sober so far this year and throughout much of the months filming this video. When Dean, Taylor, Tyler and I go to Slainte on Bond Street after our upstate skatepark tour, they compare the pours on their Guinness pints while I enjoy ice water.
Andrew Carter films my progress in the empty fountain through a hundred attempts during 90 minutes before I land this sunset switch flip body varial over the grate at Flushing. As we skate away toward Main Street I ask him if he feels like the night got warmer the longer we were here. He says, “definitely not,” and suggests I feel this heat because of my exertion. As he was sitting stationary on the metal grate for that time, he could obviously feel the air growing colder throughout our evening in the meadow. I concede his truth and anyway, am happy. This switch kickflip body varial was the one trick I wanted to do before leaving New York, a Flushing NBD to my knowledge, as the last of the sunset disappears, stomped straighter than both of the switch flip body varials I have landed so far in Softcore.
The first time I film James Lee ollieing this spiked standalone fence section on Allen and Hester, he cuts his head bloody on a Citibike dock latch. That ends that session. He then tells me kickflip over the fence is his next goal, so I film him try kickflips for over an hour one sunny day. He catches a few on the far side but doesn’t stomp any down. I suggest he could probably front 180 the fence with more ease, then we pass two hours on a third day filming him trying front 180 and coming very close to success as Dick Rizzo, then Sully Cormier, next Brian Anderson then Gino himself all pass this location on separate missions until James has to leave to pick up his daughter. For our fourth visit, James arrives riding a fresh Palace rocket, snappier than his last battered GX1000 barge. I say that he will probably need for me to successfully jump over the fence on my feet for him to land his front 180. I have been too scared of the spikes on previous visits. I jump over the fence first try, a good omen that loosens our moods. Tyler Andrew meets up fifteen minutes into James’s session and is sitting beside me while a mailman waits for the light to turn as James approaches my low camera down the blue sky promenade then hoists his white-haired front 180 in black pants and fatigue green tee. He rolls away looking across Allen Street with his back to the camera as a tree blocks him briefly from view, then he turns to face us with his arms raised above his smiling face and Tyler applauds.
Pat Binkley films me at the Williamsburg Monument as I half-Cab into backside boardslide and shove-it for my dismount to regular. I’m wearing Quasi shoes and green Quasi trousers above grey Beyoncé Renaissance tour t-shirt with the white horse front graphic and “No Skips” emblazoned on my back.
Descending Park Slope’s slope I follow filming in Claire’s wake over yellow fallen leaves as she carves down 7th street toward Gowanus. Her blonde ponytail hangs beneath turquoise helmet over her red Book Mouse sweatshirt with burgundy backpack above black pants, white socks and Blondey Adidas in navy/black.
When Claire and I take out my snow-skate for its first ride, a couple ski patrollers see me carrying the deck and make sure to tell us that we aren’t allowed to ride on the slopes. We walk around some buildings until we reach the snowy side route beneath the Sticky Wicket, where we grow comfortable grooving on the mild downhill as I set about landing a trick in my brown zip-up A.P.C. sweater, purple pants and Timberlands. “This one,” Claire says as I approach through the evening’s blue alpenlight and scoop my first snow-skate shove-it that lands with a powdery crunch then I swing my shoulders and tic-tack to realign my course for carving down the snowy road around the bend while Claire says “bye-bye” out of sight.
Releasing one season after Starboard’s October premiere, Softcore begins by exuberant first track introduction to my life in Utah with Claire, Mars and new friends, then switches to a reflective retrospective on my last month living in New York. Though Shawn Powers absence is noted and Jason Byoun only gets BGPs, contributing New York rippers include many of the people who made my 19 years in New York so special. 18 months after my left knee sprain, I include plenty of proof that I am returning to productive skating shape and ready to bring my tricks to more new Utahn spots this spring. As Snowflake, Sidekick, and Starboard have represented my video output as Claire’s boyfriend, Softcore continues this tradition of compound word titles beginning with the letter “S.” Softcore shows Claire’s continuing development as a skater and filmer, with her commentary further coloring her benevolent eye. Thanks to Native Leaves and The City for their soundtracking, along with all skaters and filmers. This, my first 2024 video entry will also occasion my last Skate Part Review for the time being. Over my 38th year I plan to novelize Robert Altman’s movie 3 Women. I hope Skate Part Reviews have prepared me well for this undertaking. Thank you very much for reading these rides with me and please stay tuned for further updates.