The 24-minute movie of the year
Bobby De Keyzer the young swagged-out skating legend on his mini-masterpiece, plus intel on banging new jackets, jeans, vests, caps & more
Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane
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In today’s sletter:
A banging new batch of clothes from one of our favorite small designers drops at earth’s greatest shop IRL today and online tomorrow
Sick home-goods from a midcentury GOAT respected by the heads but lesser-known on the whole so you can still find deals on slappers — for now
A fresh take on my favorite baseball cap out
But first —
Three things we care about deeply at Blackbird Spyplane are swag… excellence… and cinema.
The other day, the cool and gifted skater Bobby De Keyzer put out a captivating new 24-minute video called BOBCBC, co-directed with Tomas Morrison, and it is a major achievement in all three categories.
De Keyzer is a young Toronto legend whose contributions to the Skating and Swag Arts we’ve saluted before. In our landmark investigation into why skaters have more sauce per capita than any other demographic, Spyplane Skate Correspondent (and owner of the wonderful Oakland clothing shop Understory) Wes Allen saluted Bobby as “the easy choice for ‘best-dressed skateboarder,” noting that bruv routinely gets clips while rocking clothes from a gang of BBSP-beloved independent labels.
So when BOBCBC dropped last week, I (Jonah) watched it eagerly, loved it, then watched it again two more times and loved it even more. It’s a skate video, it’s an art film, and it’s a purposely repetitive, weirdly riveting drama.
Bobby and Tomas shot it entirely in a single, cramped location — the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation benches in Toronto — over two and a half months last fall. In sequence after sequence, we see Bobby take the same lines to attempt the same tricks in the same spots, over and over, and not just nailing them, but f**king up a ton of them, too.
I am of course a Mach 3+ Art Perceiver, but to help me understand BOBCBC better from an Insider Skate P.O.V., I tapped in with Wes again, alongside New York Times Magazine editor and skate connoisseur Willy Staley (who wrote a definitive profile of Supreme superstar Tyshawn Jones a few years ago).
Wes told me that “Bobby’s skating is so exacting that, when it comes packaged in a standard video part, it’s kind of hard to imagine him not landing stuff. The way he destroys spots can make him come across as some kind of Skate Terminator. But this section helped humanize him and provide some context for how impressive his skating is.”
He shouted out Jon Miner for starting “the trend of doing ‘B Sides’ or ‘Raw Files’-type edits to show the process” behind a skate video, but he credits De Keyzer and Morrison with pushing the approach into unprecedented territory. “This part integrates that idea into a whole concept, in a way that feels like a step in a new direction,” he said. “And Bobby’s one of a small number of skaters who could actually pull it off, because you can watch him do the back tail bigspin or a flatground fakie flip 50 times and not get bored.”
Willy celebrated the video against the backdrop of an endless churn of ephemeral online footage. “Abundance has left us numb and spoiled,” he said. “I can’t help but watch this part in that context: It bends the abundance curve back on itself, using the endless vacuum of YouTube to document the unending series of frustrations that go into filming a part.”
In that light, he singled out one “strange shot that appears a few times, far removed from the action, maybe up on a pole, like a security camera, that puts Bobby and the whole project in perspective, literally. After he finally lands the switch tre flip over the block, we see it all again from this angle. The agony and drama are gone. You can hardly see the trick. He blends in with the schlubs and tourists trudging by, who seem to pay him no mind. That’s the reality of the job: No matter what you put into it, or how you document it, or where you put it afterward, it’s over in an instant. And you’d be lucky if anyone bothers to notice.”
There’s a lovely score by Barrett Avner, heavy on slow-stirred-and-tasty guitar with some “cosmic pastoral” Windham Hill energy. There are also vibey interstitials of seagulls, Bobby high-fiving a baby, and a dude in a reflective vest smoking something in the jagged crevices of a public sculpture.
Added all up, it’s a unique meditation on the thin line between obsession and dedication, tedium and joy, frustration and transcendence. You don’t need to be a skating enthusiast to appreciate it. Anyone who’s ever worked hard to make something beautiful — and who’s banged their head against a wall a bunch of times in the process — can relate.
Also? Bobby rocks a sick pair of Nigel Cabourn Lybro duck-canvas double knees, a killer dark-green v-neck sweater he thrifted in L.A., and some boxy button-ups from his own line, Faces of Another. As Wes put it, “Dude truly is a next-level clothes-wearer. His button-up game almost makes it look like he came down from one of the buildings on his lunch break and started tearing the place apart.”
Bobby rarely gives interviews these days, but he f**ks with the Spyplane, so I was stoked to call him up yesterday and find out how this mini-masterpiece came together.
Blackbird Spyplane: The whole video takes place in a single location — this kind of ugly but also kind of deceptively cool-looking corporate plaza in Toronto. Tell me about the CBC ledges and what’s special about them.
Bobby De Keyzer: “It’s a classic Toronto spot. Lots of people skate there because you don’t get kicked out, which is cool, but they’re kind of junk ledges. I never really skated them that much before this. I kind of detested this spot, actually. The ground is rough, they’re all just blocks with really deep notches, and they’ve been pushed together by skaters so you can grind or slide certain tricks longer, but that means it’s this extremely tight square in the center of the plaza. A lot of the time, you’re looping back to the same ledge where you started, or using the same ledge multiple times. And it’s on a down slope, so it’s tiring to push uphill, and you can skate too fast if you’re on the downhill. But ultimately I think it’s a cool place, because it allows you to really think, and really get to know it.”
Blackbird Spyplane: The premise is you just drilling the same spot, day in, day out, for two and a half months, with some incredible tricks and a lot of mistakes and exasperation along the way. What did you and Tomas have in mind making this one?
Bobby De Keyzer: “I hadn’t been skating much, and I was starting to feel some guilt about that. Then Tom and I went skating one day at CBC, and I tried a line and was, like, Maybe we could just film a whole video here. If I give myself this really short window, and we narrow it down to this one spot, it might give me something to get excited about. Like, ‘We’re just gonna come here and work as hard as we can.’ That’s what created the atmosphere, the anger, the frustration: I felt this huge pressure piling up, and it sent me over the edge a lot of days, because everything ended up feeling so crucial. ‘I need to land this, or the whole thing won’t work.’”
Blackbird Spyplane: There’s also a cool tension in the way Tomas shoots it, where he switches between these fluid close-ups where he’s an inch away from you, and then these stationary, CCTV-style shots of the whole plaza, where you’re almost a meaningless speck in the frame.
Bobby De Keyzer: That’s a mounted GoPro. It’s an idea I’ve had for a while: I always wanted to have this voyeuristic-feeling video part. The way I skate is very precision-driven, and Tom films in a similar way, so we can get into this rhythm together where it feels really familiar, but it can become boring, too — like mechanical, or automated. We can get stuck in a tunnel-vision mindset. So I wanted to have this kind of perverse, exterior view that’s the opposite of that.
“I also think a lot of people are burnt out on this kind of formula everyone’s been locked into as far as what skate videos should look like, and I don’t wanna do that anymore. So instead of just getting totally jaded, you gotta be creative. Exploring ideas like voyeurism, having these views that are unfamiliar in a skate video, that’s what makes it exciting for me — even when I’m trying to kick flip over the ledge exactly the way I want 160 times in a row.”
Blackbird Spyplane: It winds up feeling like a droning piece of music, with this tight group of themes repeating, but varying a little each time. I’m a sucker for drones, and I’m a sucker for documents of the creative process, and this video brings those two things together. And the fact that you include so much “outtake” material, instead of just going for a tight, two-minute edit of you nailing these crazy tricks, helps open up the drama beyond what we’re used to seeing in skate videos.
Bobby De Keyzer: “Yeah, I think that when you show everything, it allows more people in. There are people I know who don’t skate who have watched this and for them it’s like a hero’s journey or something: You’re watching someone go through something, and you can maybe sympathize with me, or maybe think I’m insane, but you get that I’m trying really hard to do something. You don’t need to understand the context for the tricks to get that. The technicality doesn’t matter.
“I’ve done the other version so many times, where it’s just me landing the tricks. But of course in real life I don’t always land them. And when I’m out there, I’ll get really obsessive with the way one attempt feels, and I start comparing that feeling with how the other attempts feel, and then the one where I actually land the trick might not feel like that. It’s almost like you’re in a war against yourself. I think even people who don’t skate can appreciate that.”
Bobby De Keyzer is on IG here.
Meanwhile —
Speaking of skating and dressing very cool, there’s a highly limited drop hitting earth’s best clothing shop tomorrow — banging new jackets, jeans, pants, a button-up and a slapping vest from a small label that mixes skate influences into its vintage-workwear DNA at an elite level.
Here’s every piece in the drop, as rocked by one of the best-looking dudes in all of menswear: