Backpackers of the World [Park] Unite

Dig, if you will, the denoument of a seemingly endless Thursday afternoon and night of skating. After skating up to midtown from Union Square, fucking with CBS and/or Time-Life and possibly the Huf ledge, you ascend the steps of your building to a narrow multi-roomated apartment. One’s sole lifelines to the outside world? Dial-up UseNet and the Strech and Bob show on 89.9 WKCR.

For anyone that came up in the Nineties and fucked with hip-hop to any extent, The Stretch and Bobbito show on Columbia University’s WKCR 89[tec]9 held Torah status. Furthermore, in the DJ Clue era of mixtape yelling, the shows were also cool to listen to on one’s walkman.* They usually started out with some rare groove type shit, like “Uzuri” by Catalyst or some shit. Knowing, to list but one example,  that the latter song was sampled on “Lefleur Leflah Eshkoshkah” was a particularly nerdy form of apocryphal pre-internet knowledge, similar to memorizing esoteric skate video soundtracks. This is the main reason why the soundtrack to the first few Girl/Choc. vids killed it so hard.

Girl/Chocolate video music supervision functioned as a nexus point for my hip-hop and skating nerdery.

Legendary Skate Houses of the Late Twentieth Century

I have never lived in a skate house, and I never will.

Let me clarify–living in a skate house would be sick as fuck. However, my age precludes me from doing so. This is a fact. As one ages, the possibility of doing certain things quietly disappears over the horizon. Joining the Marine Corps. Doing the whole “Barcelona” thing. Even the quintessential cross-country road trip would require logistical planning comparable to staging the D-Day invasion.

During the time I skated the most and the best, I lived in one of those weird NYC living situations with a bunch of random people whom I never saw, except for the Asian “landlord” dude who rode his bicycle around the Columbia campus. It would have been fucking sick to live in a skate house back then. I started thinking about this topic because, in the aftermath of the Kalis EL, a particulary vivid account of an evening at the San Diego Alien House surfaced on the SLAP messageboard—I assume from CBI or Police Informer. So vivid and powerfully nostalgic was this story—the likes of which one rarely reads in skournalism—that it reminded me of that one scene in The Great Gatsby when Nick goes to a party at Gatsby’s house for the first time: