I haven’t been feeling well over the past couple of days so I’ve been spending some time surfing the web and going down internet rabbit holes. Here’s an interesting one.
It started off with watching Adidas skate videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EuNycDVhGk
Tangent: Here’s a video about the origins of the Adidas logo
Which led to this 20|50 video that just got uploaded:
Which led me down a rabbit hole of watching Mark Gonzales videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8uYilixzPs
Which brought me back to the Adidas X Mark Gonzales videos:
And then deeper into the Mark Gonzales “lifestyle” rabbit hole:
So, before we continue
A few words on Mark Gonzales
If you don’t know, “Mark Gonzales” is a huge name in skateboarding. Many people say that he “embodies” the spirit of skateboarding. I didn’t quite get it when I was skating as a #youth. To me he just seemed obnoxious and all over the place and crazy. But now I appreciate that sort of thing. Now, I like that he seems to have no “filter” between the things he thinks and the things he does. It all just makes sense because he’s The Gonz.
He wants to film shit on an iPad and a MacBook and make hundreds of videos to his own YouTube channel? He goes for it.
He wants to ride skateboards that are insane and big and shaped weird? He goes for it.
Anything he wants to do—he goes for it. And that’s amazing. AND THE DUDE IS 50+ YEARS OLD! Inspiring.
Anyway, at some point I got to this video:
In this video they took everything that Mark managed to hoard in a storage unit over a year and make an art exhibition out of it. And The Gonz had a lot of shit in there. Notably—he had a few boards that were made for him by Tom Sachs.
Where you may have encountered Tom Sachs:
1) If you’ve seen Frank Ocean’s Endless—that shit was inspired by and done in collaboration with Tom Sachs.
2) If you’ve watched any of the older (and even recent) Casey Neistat videos, you might notice that he has a peculiar style of making intros to segments with hand-made signs, and his studio is all set up for DIY craftsmanship, and everything is knolled, etc. etc. etc. All this is because Casey was an intern at Tom’s studio between 2001 and 2004.
So, I knew of Tom Sachs, and I’ve seen some of his work and videos, but that didn’t stop me from going into that rabbit hole anyway.
Here’s what I got out of it.
This video which describes the rules of behaving in his studio as an employee:
If I ever run my own business or studio or production company or anything, you can bet I’ll have something like this. A special section of that video will be dedicated to hygiene when using the toilet. Not washing your hands after will be a fireable offense. [footnote]The LENGTH of the LIST I keep in my head of “people I don’t shake hands with at the office” is INSANE [/footnote]
Then there’s this video that (obviously) caught my attention:
How can I skip something with the title of “10 Rules Of Filmmaking”?!
First of all, it’s a great interview. The questions are great, the answers are great, and even though we never get the full list of 10 rules, Rule #1 is still very important for me to internalize because my follow-through on creative projects is AWFUL.
I wanted to see the full documentary “A SPACE PROGRAM” but I’m not a fan of buying shit on iTunes[footnote]I’m not against paying for shit (very much for it), I just don’t like that buying things on iTunes means I can’t watch them on my PS4. I usually buy things on Vimeo, YouTube, or Digital Download so that I can watch it on any device I want.[/footnote], so I went to look on Vimeo, where I found this trailer (which isn’t all that special):
And this 4-minute excerpt from the movie (which looks awesome, so I did spend $12.99 to buy the movie on iTunes):
And so yeah, if that looks interesting, here’s the iTunes link for the full movie:
And that’s todays Rabbit Hole. Thanks for tuning in!