Abe Dubin aka. Orange Man interview

13 / 09 / 2023 / Interview

Aymer­ic Nocus and Abra­ham ‘Orange Man’ Dubin catch up for conversation.

Hi Abra­ham! Most of your audi­ence prob­ably knows you as ‘Orange Man’, or as the ‘Fancy Lad’ with the ‘weird boards’, and the realest ones prob­ably are sub­scribed to your You­Tube page — which you’ve had up since around the begin­ning of the plat­form, and has to be the most access­ible hint at how you really chan­nel your cre­ativ­ity through a seem­ingly unres­tric­ted pan­el of medi­um types, includ­ing audi­ovisu­al, and the skate­board is just one of your tools or instru­ments. Bey­ond the works, record­ings, shapes and col­ors though, who’s Abra­ham as a per­son and a skate­boarder? Where are you from, and how were you first intro­duced to skate­board­ing? Was it the epi­phany it typ­ic­ally can be to the aver­age kid with repressed express­ive inclin­a­tions and lim­ited envir­on­ment­al inter­ac­tion pos­sib­il­it­ies, or were you warmed up to the import­ance of per­son­al out­lets by any oth­er activ­ity of yours already?

I grew up in a small town in the sub­urbs of Boston, Mas­sachu­setts and I was always attrac­ted to ‘the arts’. My earli­est memor­ies are draw­ing and paint­ing… and stick­ing skel­et­on stick­ers to a hand drawn maze I had scribbled with magic mark­ers (while I was sup­posed to be nap­ping). I did a lot of youth theatre and I still have dreams of being an actor!

I nev­er enjoyed the youth team sports that I was enrolled in by my par­ents, nor was I any good at them. Per­haps I nev­er excelled in ath­let­ics because I was inter­ested in the ‘motive’ of sports. Some­thing about the ball-in-hole equa­tion nev­er really appealed to me because the nar­rat­ive wasn’t par­tic­u­larly strong.

When I found skate­board­ing, I unlocked my inner jock! I had a reas­on to sweat and pant, fall down and exer­cise all day! There were so many stor­ies to write and infin­ite impro­visa­tion­al situ­ations! Being a skate­boarder was the role (or roll) I was born to play, and I’ve been express­ing myself through the medi­um of skate­board­ing for more than twenty years.

How about every oth­er activ­ity you par­take in; what’s your his­tory with video mak­ing, for instance? Some of your old­est You­Tube uploads date back to twelve years ago and inter­est­ingly enough, the exper­i­ment­al edit­ing style in some of those edits isn’t without being remin­is­cent of some pat­terns that per­meate as far as your most recent pieces already. A lot of urb­an doc­u­ment­a­tion which helps con­tex­tu­al­ize skate­board­ing as but an act­ive part of a much lar­ger pic­ture than what most com­monly hopes to sell shoes, and paint a more hon­est pic­ture of the real­it­ies of the prac­tice all the while show­cas­ing the uni­city of the loc­ales. Do you feel like you always had a par­tic­u­lar vis­ion or ideal you’re insist­ing to express, if yes, would you be able to describe it in words, and would you say you’re more or less con­sciously high­light­ing aspects of skate­board­ing that oth­er­wise are underrepresented?

I haven’t been mak­ing skate videos since I was twelve, but I have been mak­ing movies since child­hood. Me and all the neigh­bor­hood kids would use a bor­rowed VHS cam­era and attempt to recre­ate our favor­ite action movies, most not­ably Indi­ana Jones and Bat­man. 

I have been mak­ing skate videos on You­Tube for quite some time, you’re right. Just about ten years, maybe more.

I think in my skate videos I’m try­ing to cap­ture the real­ity of the act of skate­board­ing — as well as the act of liv­ing itself. Or maybe, what it means to take part in the mys­tery of life and to be bewondered in the incred­ibly chaot­ic, beau­ti­ful and tra­gic world that we live in. To explore our big back­yard, to play on every little twist and turn and mar­vel at the sheer unpre­dict­able nature of all things.

There so much at work that is bey­ond our grasp or com­pre­hen­sion, but flowers pop­ping out of side­walk cracks and mira­cu­lous wall­ride spots give mean­ing to the mystery.

What is your rela­tion­ship with the skate­board as an object? Some time ago, you had an inter­view out on Skateism in which you men­tion spon­tan­eously inter­pret­ing it as a toy instead of a spe­cif­ic con­struc­tion, cit­ing Bart Simpson and the Teen­age Mutant Ninja Turtles as inspir­a­tions before real­iz­ing how dif­fer­ently oth­ers inter­preted the skate­board as, and into a codi­fied cul­ture. Do you feel like your envir­on­ment at the time helped you nur­ture the ‘naive’ vis­ion of the object for longer than the aver­age kid may get to nowadays, due to its insti­tu­tion­al­ized imagery sat­ur­at­ing the main­stream or would you say there is some­thing time­less to the design that is bound to catch a creative’s atten­tion, regard­less of the qual­ity of the clues and hints?

To me, nowadays, I see the skate­board as an object closer to a car than any­thing else. It is some­where between a shiny trophy auto­mobile that you parade down the strip in town and a toy mod­el car.

What it rep­res­ents is free­dom and mobil­ity; to effort­lessly glide to your heart’s con­tent; to sail to any des­tin­a­tion, or to simply enjoy the wind in your hair.

The skate­board is among the most simple machines ever ima­gined, and yet its poten­tial to trans­port our bod­ies and ima­gin­a­tions is ingenious.

What about your rela­tion­ship with the cam­era? The choice of solo angles and pro­duc­tions in itself feels like a rel­at­ive decon­struc­tion of what tra­di­tion­ally is under­stood as ‘film­ing skate­board­ing’. Stat­ic frame meets edit­ing tricks also means you gain author­it­at­ive con­trol of the entirety of the image, instead of trust­ing someone else’s manip­u­la­tion and hop­ing for a spe­cif­ic res­ult. You appear to have been on that pro­gram for quite a long time, too; that could hint at how your skate­board­ing is per­son­al, but you’re still cap­tur­ing it to broad­cast it and so, per­haps it is your ses­sions that are? At this point, would you feel com­fort­able skat­ing and film­ing with a lar­ger group of skate­boarders, or would you rather retain the med­it­at­ive solo focus? Is part of the jus­ti­fic­a­tion behind your ways that no one else around you wants to skate, or even sees the spots you appreciate?

I love skat­ing with people! Laugh­ing out loud, jok­ing around, try­ing to show each oth­er up! Laugh­ing some more! It’s the best.

That being said, I love my alone time. To silently flow in a stream of con­scious­ness down the street, stop­ping wherever on a whim to check out any­thing that vaguely interests me. And to film it too. I seek to cap­ture that ini­tial intrigue of new sur­round­ings and to val­id­ate them as legit­im­ate skate obstacles. Because you say so. Spots are only spots in the eye of the board hold­er. And shar­ing dif­fer­ing per­spect­ives can only expand what spots are and are cap­able of. The entire world is a spot, if you can inter­pret and inter­act with it. And all spots deserve attention.

I feel very strongly about ask­ing someone to film my skat­ing, or being asked to film someone else’s skat­ing. It’s a vul­ner­able pos­i­tion to be in, and relies com­pletely on the skill level and enthu­si­asm of someone who would likely rather do any­thing else. Some­times as skaters, we must insist the assist­ance of the filmer! If a trick is truly import­ant you will beg for the prop pan and angle and hours of ded­ic­ated cam­era operating.

Some­times, the easi­est meth­od (for every­one) is to simply skip the risk of rejec­tion, or ruin­ing someone else’s ses­sion, and simply set your cam­era on a stone, and try whatever simple trick you desire, for as long as you want.

How would you describe the import­ance of ter­rain to a non-skater? Would you say there are bene­fits to the prac­tice of skate­board­ing, espe­cially from a young age, not just in terms of tenacity which is a com­mon cliché but also when it comes to social integ­ra­tion, cog­nit­ive devel­op­ment and spa­tial awareness?

Wow! As someone who con­siders him­self some­what nat­ur­ally inept as an ath­lete, I would say skate­board­ing has trained my abil­ity to pre­dict and enact some fairly com­plic­ated phys­ics. Will this really work if I come from here, to there, to there?

More than improv­ing my foot to eye coordin­a­tion, skate­board­ing has honed my sense of under­stand­ing the poten­tial kin­et­ic energy in all of the objects around me and how to pretty pre­cisely pre­dict how my body and skate­board will inter­act with them!

Skate­board­ing makes your ima­gin­a­tion ripe and your abil­ity to risk access and real­ize new phys­ic­al realities!

This year, you’re com­ing to Croa­tia in order to show your new film, « REMNANT SALE » at Vladi­mir Film Fest­iv­al; a minute-long trail­er already can be watched on your You­Tube chan­nel but maybe now is the time to more pre­cisely pre­pare our read­ers to what they can expect, if so you wish? Unless you want to keep as much of it as pos­sible a sur­prise. We are talk­ing a new full-length pro­duc­tion, right? Cer­tain pat­terns can be observed in the trail­er already; does it have a spe­cif­ic theme, is it akin to, or an exten­sion of sorts of « KEEP SEEKING », your pre­vi­ous con­cep­tu­al video?

I think of my videos as ‘epic poems’ like The Illi­ad and The Odys­sey.

I am half jok­ing, but I’m also very serious.

I am the every­man, and this is my self-cur­ated myth­os. I’m not par­tic­u­larly gif­ted as a skate­boarder, but I love and cher­ish the oppor­tun­ity I have to skate and reima­gine my world with the people I love and friendly strangers on the street! My mean­der­ings through our strange, back­ward and breath­tak­ing world are as mundane as (I hope) they are enter­tain­ing and reaf­firm­ing to an audi­ence who is also won­der­ing “what’s it all mean”.

I don’+t think of my videos as ‘epis­odes’ or ‘sequels’ of each oth­er, but poems in the book of my life. Any maybe your life too.

My new film REMNANT SALE, is longer and more mus­ing than oth­er videos I’ve made.

I spent the past year trav­el­ing and liv­ing in the lush Hud­son River Val­ley in Upstate New York, America’s Homet­own in Ply­mouth MA, to America’s Heart­land The Mid­w­est, The mossy Pacific North­w­est and The City of Angels where I now reside.

I even vis­ited Israel of the first time, which felt like a real pil­grim­age. 

Through my travels, I am skat­ing and film­ing the strange and intriguing spots that tickle my mind as well as majesty of nature, the deteri­or­at­ing met­ro­pol­ises, and the many ways humans seek to con­trol, con­vince, cleanse and immor­tal­ize themselves.

And I am no different.

I use the cam­era as a note­book, and as a can­vas, to paint a self-por­trait in video that might out­live me and prove that I lived, that I thought and that I love life. I love life for all that it is. 

All things come to an end; what are you up to these days that you may get back to upon return­ing from Croa­tia, after this trip? Any oth­er pro­jects in the works you would like to announce, and any shout outs you would like to give? Thank you, Orange Man!

Right now I’m liv­ing in Los Angeles and enjoy­ing the ‘Cali Dream’. Skat­ing in the sun­shine, mak­ing lots of new friends and dis­cov­er­ing incred­ible spots and skate­parks every­where I turn my head! I plan to con­tin­ue enjoy­ing skat­ing, writ­ing poetry, mak­ing draw­ings, mak­ing boards, doc­u­ment­ing my jour­ney and keep­ing an eye out for miracles!

And thank you! I’d like to thank every­one who ever enjoys what I do and believed in me. I’m like Tinker­bell, I sus­tain myself on oth­ers believ­ing in me. And thank you if I achieved my hope and made you believe in something.