Hey thank you man. Big ups.
I was skating House of Vans yesterday. Shut did an event there, and I’m just real sore from that so right now I’m just at one of the casinos, know what I’m saying trying give up soon, and then I’m probably gonna just kick it with the fam and have some dinner, take it easy, go from there.
I was born in Margate, NJ. Which is on Beacon island, like a mile or two from Atlantic City. Went to Atlantic City high school and was just raised on the island out here. I always tell people Atlantic City cause nobody knows where Margate is and it used to be Atlantic City fifty years ago. It’s just a little island.
Yeah, I used to go there more than I do now. When I started Clearly Faded I was going there a lot, doing nightlife photography for places as a little job for a minute. I just drank a lot more back then so I would go out to the clubs a lot and all that stuff. But I haven’t been going as much recently, unless I’m skating them or walking around or something, cause I don’t really drink like that anymore. Just trying to blaze and skate and uhh, drinking was getting in the way of me skating.
Nah, I never got into gambling. I was raised with my family always working at the casinos and they’re whole thing was we take money from the casinos, we don’t give money to the casinos.
Yeah basically I was trying to do a nightlife photography blog out here in Atlantic City, and then trying to do a photo/video company with my homie too. We were really just trying to get out there and have fun and party and get into all the spots. And do the photography of it, trying to get ourselves out there as photographers or videographers cause you know that was our little hustle out here. So we were both doing that for a while and then Clearly Faded kind of became something more than just a nightlife thing. I really wanted to bring the whole skateboarding and cannabis culture into the brand more than I wanted to do the whole nightlife stuff. Cause that was never really my scene you know. I was always just a street skater from this island just skating Atlantic City, just going to Philly and NY. And then I was just living down here, at that age with all this camera gear and I just fell into it more or less. One of the skater homies from Brazil, Marcello, gave me the opportunity to shoot inthe nightclubs. So from that point on it was like we need a name to put these photos on so we can go party, and meet chicks, and wile out, and get everything for free.
Yeah so we’re starting to offer bolts with rolling papers as a combo. And you know we did establish a little team that we’re doing. We got Quim Cardona, Antwuan Dixon, Kyle Nicholson, Kevin Taylor, and you know we got a bunch of different ams on the team. Joel Morganwest, myself, Jordan Gesko your guys boy, always rips from Jersey. We hook a lot of people up, we’re more or less just getting organized and all that, and just get shit official. Cause it’s really just a startup brand, I don’t really have a lot of money, I don’t work a regular job really. I’m a full-time caretaker for my grandmother who is 93 and can’t really operate by herself, and she just lost my grandfather. So I just live in with her, and whatever little bits I can I just get stuff made and hook people up. I’m trying to just really stock up on inventory and just get it out to the people, cause we have a demand for it that we haven’t necessarily been able to meet yet. But we’re ready for it, we got an ill manufacturing team now at Denial in Philly, and I’m confident we’re gonna be doing big things this year.
I mean obviously being a Jersey skater I’ve known him since I started skating but personally I got tight with him about 2010 or so. We were both riding for Domestics at the time, so I was living in California with Bdub out there and we had actually been talking about doing a video for domestics for a while over the phone but we never met each other. So then he flew out and you know we skated for a week, skated with Ron Chapman and all them in Long Beach. And we just got real tight, and you know I go up there and crash with him and skate NY a bunch, and he comes to AC a lot, and then we make Philly trips. Quims a good homie man, real good person, like family dude.
I was on the island with my homie Ol’Dirty Laundry, I grew up skating with this dude Chris Landry and a couple other dudes were rolling one up and they were like you won’t blaze man and I was like shit, lets go. So we went and smoked at the beach and then went and skated and I did some tricks I never did before, and then I just remember being at the Ice Cream Parlor just cracking up nonstop. Everything was mad funny, even corny shit. So it just worked out the first time and I haven’t stopped since then. When I was 13 years old.
Yeah all that lazy stereotypes people try to put on it I could never relate to that shit cause it just always makes me want to go out and skate.
Nah I’m not one particular thing. I do eat fish, I don’t eat meat, I don’t eat cheeses. I’m just super into healing herbs and nutrition and I feel a lot of people generally aredepleted nutritionally. So there’s a lot of problems that arise in their life just cause they’re consuming the wrong stuff. You know, driving the car around on empty. And I did that for so long until I broke my ankle and started studying nutrition. Now I go to a school in NY for healing nutrition, studying eastern medicine outside of the pills and the chemicals. We study the shit that grows out of the ground, that’s natural, like cannabis. And I’ll tell you what, it’s been one year I’ve been on this program and I really have never felt better on my board in my life.
Yeah, you are what you eat.
Yeah we were out there for the cannabis cup. It was epic man, they loved us out there. The dispensaries and stuff all sell Huf socks and shit, so the shop owners were coming up to the booth saying how they want to carry us, and we sold out of everything at the event. Also Cypress Hill came over for a little, B-Real was stoked on our stuff so we hooked him up. Man it was tight, we just smoked so much trees. I wish more people could experience stuff like that. And it was just super peaceful too. You throw that same 40,000 person party with alcohol as the theme, there’s gonna be all these fights and people are gonna get all type of sloppy. It was just cool to see a cannabis festival, with no fights, nobody falling on their face acting like idiots, people were just aware and happy to be around each other.
Probably just health conscious, is passionate about something artistic that she does for herself, has a lot of dreams and just looks real good.
Man I’ve been on Shut for a long time! I think I’ve been riding for Shut for like six years. I got on from this dude Nick Lang and Alex from Ocean City, Lex they called him, he used to work for Nocturnal. And they put the other homie Jake on and they were all just kind of like, yo we gotta get you sponsored and they were just old school Philly skater dudes that I was kicking it with and they just put my footage together. And man once that happened, I went up there and kicked it with everybody from Shut and it’s been like family ever since. So cool over there, great vibes and they just hook me up with motivation and skateboards man, I’m super blessed to be a part of it.
When I’m sore from skating you know I’ll hit up a hot tub or ice my shit up. But now I just flood myself with super tonic herbs and superfoods, just really powerful, healing foods, lots of fluids with all types of good stuff for your body. Because everything in nature everything all around us, everything that is a part of creation is concerned with regeneration. So the more you give your body to do its job of regenerating the cells the less sore you’re gonna be. So I go out of my way now to give myself good stuff. I used to like drink a lot of alcohol to try to kill the pain, but actually that depletes your body even more and makes it that much harder for your body to regenerate, so I just had to cut that out of the equation to skate at the level that I want to.
Yeah, I made two ledges in Atlantic City. There’s been that spot on the bay, Sovereign Avenue that everybody’s been skating for years. There’s a definite skate community in AC now, all races and ages and neighborhoods are really into it. It’s pretty awesome to see the community forming over the years. We’ve been doing beach clean ups, and things like that around the community for years, spot clean ups and stuff. Basically after seeing all these skateboarders skate shitty ramps they built out of garbage and stuff over so much time I just said fuck it and went to home depot and bought cinderblocks and glue and coping and just made two different boxes. It’s so dope since I put em there to watch all this footage coming from there in this short amount of time already.
Yeah one time I was leaving Love with my boy Jay Strickland, my homie from AC, and the homegirl Heather who used to skate Love with us a bunch. We were just walking down the street and we see these two cars a block away from Love right on Market St. and its like 2-3 in the morning and it looked like they were racing for a second, but then one just bashed into the other one and some fools just stuck their heads out the window and just started bucking shots right into the car they just hit. And that’s just on the outskirts of the park, obviously seen a lot of crazy stuff inside the park too. All that old Sabotage stuff, and I remember one time there was that old lady, and she stabbed another lady in the heart and there was like a big news story, and that same lady who stabbed to other one was all in my face a day earlier, screaming at all the skateboarders. City Hall was crazy too, I could go on for days with all those stories.
Since I was twelve years old, when I first started skating. This one homies uncle from AC took all of us out there to skate Love and there wasn’t even the grass, or the benches, or all that bullshit. When it was just that prime era with Habitat and Stevie and Kalis and that whole scene was still going on a little bit. I’ve seen a lot of generations and eras go through Love Park and that whole scene.
Oh man, that’s really hard. I never wanna leave Jersey cause that’s where my family is, but then I never wanna leave Philly cause I’ve been living there for ten years. Then when I go to NY it’s all the Shut dudes, and them dudes run the city, and make me super comfortable whenever I’m there. I would probably say AC is my favorite and my least favorite of all three.
Besides obvious ones of food, water, and shelter I would say I cant live without art, people, and just love man. I can’t live without love, people who are doing shit without passion or without respect and love for each other, I don’t fuck with people or places that get down like that.
I really believe that if you do everything in life with unconditional love, whether dealing with enemies, or with your career, or whatever you want to do, you need to do it with unconditional love. It’s a real path to a world of abundance, if you show enough love in everything you’re doing, than you’ll resonate higher with the universe. If you ain’t doing what you love, than you’re just wasting your time.
