Even though this video starts with a random night at Stefans house, slap boxing with Omar and Kyle, my log book says “start new vid.” Side note: I was wrestling with Kyle the night before and I accidently broke his foot. SO SORRY KYLE. Subtleties is behind me now and it’s on to a new video without a name yet. It’s wild to see the making of the “eastern ledges” or “LA ledges,” I’ve even heard them called “The Hernandez ledges,” which is very kind but I never called them that because it wasn’t just me who made them.
Daniel Shimizu, Thomas Bonilla, Shiloh Greathouse, Brian and Peter Arizmendes helped build this spot. This was a big deal to me, I put in time, a lot of work, and money. Originally this spot was inspired by Shiloh so he could get certain combo-style tricks and try some tricks he had never done.
After a few days, I heard people talking about this new spot in LA. I made keys for the people who helped build it. I locked up the ledges every time I left. The last thing I wanted was to see this spot in 411 before our video came out first. But that’s impossible in L.A. The chains were cut a few days later and I started seeing all kinds of crews show up.
It was weird I would hear certain skaters talk shit on them, “That’s not a real spot,” “It’s a fake spot, they have metal edges, you can’t film there.” Sometimes I’d catch those people there filming too 🙂 This was the era where everybody talked shit, and all of us would have been canceled if someone had a cellphone. Needless to say the spot stuck around I would even see moms drop their kids off there. It grew on me. It felt good that younger kids had a place to go skate and not get kicked out. Get ready, we’ll be seeing a lot of this spot in episodes to come. First Love was filmed from July 2004 to April 2005.
I start each video the same way, I pick two to five DV tapes (in order) from my TransWorld DV drawer. I read my log book and find out what’s in store for the next video. I line the deck up with the time code that coincides with what I have written down, and the memories start flowing. I’ll fiddle with the order depending on just how gnarly the tricks are, BUT these videos are chronological in the sense that I do not skip around to different tapes just to find “gnarlier” tricks to make the edits better. These edits play very closely to how the footage got recorded on each tape and what time frame I filmed each trick.
Featuring Stefan Janoski, Kyle Leeper, Tim O’Connor, Omar Salazar, Seu Trinh, Thomas Bonilla, Daniel Shimizu, Cooper Wilt, Chris Haslam, and Shiloh Greathouse.
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