The guy in the moving truck yelling “SKATE OR DIE!” while you practiced slappy noseslides on the red curbs in the grocery store parking lot? That was me, my child, that was me. The group of nine-year-olds demanding, that you do a kickflip, can you kickflip? Me as well. It’s always been me.
Here are some photos of cool teens in Saint Petersburg, Russia, that (except for the snow) look like they could’ve been taken in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Why Closing Southbank Skate Park Would Suck for London
I don’t know if you’ve ever been to London, but if there’s one thing this city is lacking it’s coffee and sandwich shops. Many’s the time I’ve found myself approaching people in the street, saying, “Hey, you know what this city needs? More cafes.” Because there just really, genuinely aren’t enough. I mean, take supposedly gastro-friendly Spitalfields Market, for instance; there are only four Prets, three EATs and two branches of POD in a five-minute radius. And as for fusion taco stalls and Evisu stores? Don’t even get me started. Honestly, it’s like living in Brezhnev’s Russia sometimes.
It seems the good people at the Southbank Centre share my opinion, as they’d apparently like Londoners to forget about that world famous unofficial skate park next to the Royal Festival Hall and instead associate the area with places where you can spend an hour’s pay on a sandwich. The planning committee has announcedplans to “refurbish” the area and move in high-rent retail units, shunting the skaters from the brutalist, graffiti-splattered enclave of banks, ledges, and stairsets they carved out themselves, to a new council-built spot beneath nearby Hungerford Bridge.
A video shot at Southbank and other nearby spots in 1991.
It’s an expensive development, coming in at a reported $183 million. There are a lot of fierce opinions flying around, as well as a petition addressed to Lambeth Council, the Southbank Centre, London Mayor Boris Johnson, and the Arts Council. Naturally, the skate community and anyone who has a vested interest in London not becoming a massive shopping center on the outskirts of Guildford are up in arms about it. We went down to Southbank to gauge what the local heads were thinking and find out what the future holds for the site, the skaters, and London as a whole.
Lev Tanju, from our film Skate World: London.
Since I was too busy listening to Cypress Hill on my Discman outside a nearby chain music shop to get involved in the early Southbank scene, I thought I’d speak to somebody who knew what they were talking about. Lev Tanju, founder of Palace Skateboards, is someone who’s been skating Southbank for 15 years.
I asked Lev about the first time he ever skated Southbank, when he was young and “proper shit” (his words, not mine). He painted a picture of a lost time, the days before South Bank looked like a Richard Curtis set.
“It was kind of at its most legendary then, because it was before South Bank was redeveloped. There were no shops or cafes, it was like a no man’s land. The only people there on the regular were homeless people and skateboarders, and the skaters there at that time policed the place and wouldn’t take shit from anyone. There was a feeling that you had to know someone to skate there.”
Apparently Women Love This 13-Year-Old Skateboarder Named Baby Scumbag
Steven Fernandez, aka Baby Scumbag, is just a normal 13-year-old skater from a bad neighborhood in LA. A normal 13-year-old skater who’s sponsored by a bunch of companies, has 38,000 subscribers onFacebook and 140,000 followers onInstagram, and gets photographed with guns and sexy (adult) women. He’s been skating since he was nine (here’s a video of him at 11), but unlike other absurdly talented kids likeRene Serrano and Evan Doherty, he’s developed a whole persona that revolves around trying to get girls and eating junk food (again: typical 13-year-old). It’s hard to tell how much of that is him putting on an act and how much of that is real, but either way, young Stephen knows more about what people on the internet like than all the “social media gurus” two and three times his age put together. I called him to ask what he wants to be when he grows up.
VICE: Hey, Steven how’s it going? I didn’t force you to miss school, right?
Baby Scumbag: Hey, VICE lady. Just chillin’. Just got home from school. Got out a little early.
You like school, or what?
Yeah, school is cool, but it’s kind of tough out here in poverty. You see a lot bad stuff around here, like gang-related stuff, drugs. I live in Compton, California. The border of South Central.
So, you’re super popular at school, right?
Nah, I’m just a normal kid going to school. An average teenager.
How did you get start getting sponsored?
Well it all started when I had posted a video of skateboarding, and people actually enjoyed watching the video. As I started making more videos, I started getting more sponsors as well.
What’s a typical day in the life of Baby Scumbag?
Hang out at school, homework, skateboarding, maybe even go film. And a little masturbation.
43 Is What a Skate Magazine Should Look Like
As skateboarding has grown in popularity and seeped into the lives of an ever-increasing number of households, the industry—and I’m painting with a broad stroke here—has morphed into a more family-friendly, watered-down version of what it once was, like MTV or domesticated animals. Which is why 43, a New York-based magazine that debuted last year from photographer Allen Ying, is a much-needed breath of clogged city air. A large-format quarterly that’s heavy on excellent photography and light on ads, 43 combines stories of late-night New York City skate missions with photos that wouldn’t be out of place on gallery walls anywhere in the city. Which is fitting, because on Tuesday night, in celebration of its third issue, 43 hosted a photo show at Temp Gallery in Tribeca.
While its previous issues have drawn praise within the skateboarding world, it’s probably safe to assume that this issue has received the most attention of any 43 so far, thanks to one of its photos body-jarring the internet a couple of weeks ago. The image above, of a gentleman by the name of Koki, ollie-ing a subway platform was spread far and wide not only on skate sites, but regular-people blogs like NYMag’s and Gothamist, among others.
I caught up with Allen to talk about his new issue and the pretty things inside of it.
VICE: Let’s cut right to it. Who is Koki, the guy sailing over the 143 Street subway gap, and what is wrong with him?
Allen Ying: Koki is an MIA local, and he’s a beast! I only got to meet him that night. It was all pretty surreal, but he’s rad. Koki was the only one in our crew who thought he could do it.
I’ve heard some whispers around the ole water cooler that Gonz ollied that gap, or one like it, way back when. What do you know about that?
I heard that rumor recently too, but I haven’t heard someone definitively say, “Oh, he def did that.” It was just someone saying they heard he might have done it. I’d love to hear about it if he did; that’d be amazing.
The ATL Twins live a life of (shared) penthouses and playmates now, but not too long ago they were impoverished and dodging pedophiles in a hellish part of Tennessee.
Welcome to the Twin Zone - Your Mind Is About to Be Double-Penetrated
above: Thurman and Sidney Sewell, better known as the ATL Twins, cozy up around a woman’s butt in the bed of their penthouse apartment in Midtown Atlanta. Photos by Paul Birman, Chris Nieratko, and Troy Stains.
Do you think we could fuck Selena Gomez?” asked the voice on the other end of my iPhone, a little over a year ago. His deep Tennessean twang added extra emphasis to the word fuck.
“Yes, of course. Definitely,” I replied. “Who is Selena Gomez?”
“She’s that Disney bitch.”
In the year since this conversation, I’ve realized that most people find it hard to believe that I had never heard of one of the most famous young celebrities in the world until Sidney and Thurman Sewell—better known as the ATL Twins—mentioned her to me that day on the phone. But I’ve been a bit out of the loop on all things Disney since I stopped writing for their children’s digest, Disney Adventures, back in 1995. The only Disney bitch I know is Minnie Mouse. And even though I was unaware of Selena and her hit Disney teenybopper television show Wizards of Waverly Place before our call, I’m still confident that one day Thurm and Sid will double-penetrate her young orifices to oblivion. That’s what the ATL Twins do. So it was strange that they seemed so hesitant.
“But she’s dating Justin Bieber,” Thurm continued.
“Do you think Justin Bieber has a nine-inch cock?” I asked. “And even if he does, he definitely doesn’t have two of them.”
“Nah, I doubt it,” Thurm said and began laughing hysterically.
And that, my friends, is what you get when you fuck with the ATL Twins: 18 inches of raging-hard dick coming at you from either side. They are a package deal. The Twins had called to tell me that they had just been cast in Spring Breakers, Harmony Korine’s beautiful new film about four bikini-clad, seemingly goody-goody gals on spring break in St. Petersburg, Florida. The girls—Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine, and former Disney stars Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens—get in way over their heads when they are arrested at an out-of-control hotel party, and a gun-toting drug dealer named Alien, played by a scumbagified James Franco, bails them out of jail alongside the Twins, who are employed as Alien’s silent henchmen. Despite not uttering a single word in the film, the Twins’ presence is as memorable as any of the headliners, and their unsettling silence only adds to their mystique. Their roles will only intensify the public’s curiosity about the real story behind the brothers, resulting in more pussy than they will possibly be able to handle (their volume is already at critical mass).
The entire cast loved the Twins. Weeks before the film’s release Selena Gomez was on French radio saying that she and the girls passed time by laughing at their antics. And James Franco was so affected by working with them that their time together inspired a poem, published for the first time here:
Double
Something scary: There is a pair of twins
From Atlanta.
They’re identical.
They’ve got hip-hop style
And chase ambulances
For a living.
But they want to be famous.
They’re the same person
In two bodies.
They are never apart.
They sleep in the same bed,
Finish each other’s sentences,
And share their women.
They like double penetration,
It’s all they talk about.
At one point they were engaged
To a Penthouse model;
Only one would have been legal,
But they both would have kissed
Her at the wedding ceremony.
Ever since they were put on this earth, the longest period of time the ATL Twins have spent apart has been six hours when Sidney was locked up for a DUI. Otherwise they are always together, with the exception of a few minutes here and there to shit, shave, and shower. Every possession, emotion, and experience is shared: They have one car, one bed, and sleep with the same women. At 13 they simultaneously lost their virginity to a 21-year-old stripper, and they were once both engaged to a Penthouse Pet who, according to the Twins, broke their hearts after her parents pressured her to leave them. Someday they want to father children from one woman, which isn’t so surprising when you consider that they believe themselves to be a single person with two bodies. They are mirror-image twins, meaning that the egg that spawned them split in two somewhere around ten days after fertilization, which is very late in the game (any longer and the chances of birthing conjoined twins increases dramatically). They are genetically and physically identical, but their features are reversed. Sid is right-handed, while Thurm’s a lefty. If they stand face-to-face, you notice that what seem like slight differences in their appearance actually mirror one another exactly. Unlike the bearded, fictitious dildo in those Dos Equis commercials, Sid and Thurm are truly the most unique and interesting men I know.
Meet the ATL Twins, Part 1
Our resident porn reviewer, Chris Nieratko, travels to Atlanta to meet the one-of-a-kind ATL Twins and asks them why they share the same bed, wear matching outfits, and sleep with the same girls. Chris also gets them to open up about their short-lived engagement to the same Penthouse Pet and their breakout acting role: playing James Franco’s gangster sidekicks in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers.
The ATL Twins Would Like to Introduce You to the Li’l Twins
The world has always been a terrifying place, but few have the bravery to stick there head into the vilest and most dead-end aspects of the human condition and document it. As far as we can tell, this is the thesis ofVrille, a twisted-ass video series directed by Matt Swinsky. We found out about Vrille by way of our favorite stripper-banging, double-penetrating duo, the ATL Twins. They helped Matt put the inaugural “episode” together, which features their childhood friends Adam and Andrew Gates—who also happen to be twins and go by the collective “Suave” and “Cutesy,” aka the Li’l Twins.
The ATL Twins and Matt first met the Li’l Twins at a young age via the skateboarding scene of Atlanta. But over the years the Gates boys went off in a peculiar and depressing direction, devolving into boozing hermits who spend their days watching obscure films on a near-broken TV, smoking cigs, and, on the rare occasion when they’re feeling social, hanging out with the dregs of society. You can tell after the first few moments of this clip, which is shot on gritty VHS tape within the Li’l Twins’ dilapidated home, that the two boys have seen some really fucked up shit in their day.
We won’t completely spoil the story contained within this video for you, but we will say that it involves an alleged murderous KKK member who has skinned a few folks (whether they were alive or dead at the time of the skinning has been lost to the sands of time). We also want to make it clear that the gnarly-ass tale told by the Gates Twins is believed to be gospel by both the ATL Twins and the director Matt. The ATL Twins and Matt also want everyone to know that this document is not meant to be exploitative in any way, and the Li’l Twins gave them full approval to shoot it—in other words, it’s “just real shit.”
VICE: How’d you guys meet the Li’l Twins?
The ATL Twins: When we first moved to ATL, we moved to this neighborhood and we met them they were skaters and they were twins. The whole crew was little kids, we were young too, but they were younger—like 16 or some shit—but we got with them and started skating and became really good friends with them. Eventually we became roommates with them and worked with them and shit. Actually, they used to be really amazing skateboarders.
In the interview Chris Nieratko did with you a couple of years ago that sort of introduced you to the world, you guys said something like “fuck other twins.” So I’m surprised you were so close with these two.
Yeah well, we never really ever met any other twins to be honest with you. Other than the Li’l Twins, we haven’t kicked it with any twins. We can relate to them in a lot of always; they were different, they would fight, they were close, but they would also get into fights. One of them knocked the other one’s tooth out. They werebad. They were also really close. We really clicked with them—skateboarding, movies, and shit. We always saw eye-to-eye on everything, they were really cool.
