Summer Reading Round-Up: Love, That’s A Crazy One & A Skateboarding Annual 3

As much as we may miss those beautiful issues of Norway’s [presumably] defunct Dank mag, over the past three years, Carhartt WIP has been producing the best skateboard magazine for grown ups.

A Skateboarding Annual has come out each of the past three summers to compile a year’s worth of special projects by the brand. The issues look and feel like fancy fashion magazines you’d pick up for $25 at a Soho newstand, and sometimes you’ll go several pages without seeing a single image of a skateboard. The current issue showcases heady skate-theory guy, Raphaël Zarka’s, work with found forms, Donald Judd-inspired minimalist sculpture and crystallography. It illustrates (as in, there are no photographs…) a trip to a tea factory in the mountains of Munnar, India. It follows Mauro Caruso’s quest to film a part in the Sicilian ghost city of Gibellina, while annotating the article with footnotes about the Italian sculptors and architects whose work decorates the background. Much of the coverage leans heavily on WIP’s European core, but what it does feature of Americans revolves around site favorites like Max Palmer, Andrew Wilson and Chris Milic.

If the greatest trick to writing about skateboarding is that you don’t write about skateboarding, Carhartt WIP figured out a solid niche in producing something special for aging skate nerds with peripheral interests in art, design and travel.

Quartersnacks, August, 2017 [article link here]