Holler At a Baller
A few weeks ago we posted an old Jamiel Nowparvar part from a local Minneapolis video that never saw the light of day called Holla At A Balla, (HAAB). Our good friend Jason Katz was able to track down a rough cut of the rest of the video and get some words from Dan Bukstein, the video's creator. Here is what Dan had to say about the long lost project:
In 2001 we started going on these wild all night skate missions.
Our crew included Dennis Burdick (current Familia GM), Jamiel Nowparvar, Mike Guy, Eddie Kochendorfer, Jason Katz, Paulmer Johnson, Shawn M, and a few others. Like every other group of kids in the world that ride skateboards, we used to film every session no matter what. We tried to act like we were big time, staying out all night with the generator and lights, trying to film stuff. Eventually footage started to accumulate, so D-Bong (Dennis Burdick) and I started thinking we were going to put a video together, we just didn’t have a title.
While eating at Perkins after a late night session at 3rd Lair Skatepark (like we ALWAYS did), Jamiel came up with the title Holla At A Balla. it was stupid and it was funny, and we all agreed that was going to be the video's name. For the next couple of years, we were going out skating almost every freakin’ day, staying up all night skating. I remember trying tricks at the Basilica double set so late into the night that we'd actually kill the lights and the generator because the sun would come up. This type of stuff happened routinely and was really, really fun.
In 2004 our crew got a house at 3315 University Ave (6 bedrooms, 1 bathroom) in Minneapolis. Around this point I made this half-assed little edit of what we thought was about the halfway point of filming for our video. I really thought that house would be the jumping off point for me skating, us making the video, and skate life in general...boy was that incorrect.
On one of those ultra fun nights, I got busted off pretty bad skating a rail, which took me out of the game for a couple months. Over the months it took my foot to heal, the normal tensions of living with people exploded. As much fun as it was having keggers every couple days and doing back-tails in the living room at 3:30 am on a Tuesday, it was equally annoying listening to others do it when I had to be to work at 6 the next day.
After living in the house we all went our separate ways. Ten years later, I have barely talked to anyone from that house since the last day there. What I left 3315 with was a terrible mark in my renters credit and a hard drive that had this half completed skate video on it that our group of friends didn’t stay together quite long enough to finish.
I harbor no ill will towards any of these people, in fact it makes me pretty sad to have lost connection with so many people that were once great friends, which is why Jason hassling me to find this miniDV tape with the less than rough cut of HAAB has brought me so much joy. It's pretty neat to look back in time ten years and see all these dudes I once hung out with every day of my life. Here's what we were working on but would never complete…not much by todays standards but we had lots of fun doing it: