Making Weird Funny Things With Kevin ‘Spanky’ Long
Images Courtesy of Kevin Long
Disappointingly, and much to my surprise, we haven’t yet spoken to Kevin Long. For this, I apologize. We will do better.
Ever since his front blunt that hovered in the air before a surprising kickflip front crook in a line at Macba in This Is Skateboarding, Spanky has been one of our favorite skaters. His rise from child star skateboarder to star skateboarder with a child has been a glorious one to behold, and with every video part and Instagram slappy clip, he has gotten better at skating and weirder at art. Spanky’s uncanny, slightly-disturbing drawings and photo manipulations make us giggle uncomfortably and in the best ways, because if there’s one thing we love, it’s weird funny things. Seeing as we’ve somehow, regrettably, never had a formal interview with the guy, we phoned him for a quick chat to see what he’s up to and to talk about the MTV shows that made us weird.
What are you doing right now?
I am driving back towards my house from Baker. Me and some of the Baker dudes skated at P-Rod’s skatepark, and then I had to stop at Baker to look at swatches for flannels.
Sick, how was that?
It was good. I mean, it looked like 100 swatches of flannels.
You are one of the more stylish people in skating, I think. How hands-on are you with all the clothing design and whatnot?
I don’t know about that, but thank you. I try to be pretty hands-on with all things Baker these days. It’s slowly turned into a full-time job over these last few years.
What do you do there?
It started off with a soft title of Art Director. I was just helping lay out boards with other people’s art and contributing some of my own art, and then slowly, we’ve just narrowed it down to myself and Mike Gigliotti doing all the board graphics, clothes, hats, all that stuff. Me and Mike and Andrew kind of make all the creative decisions at Baker together.
Damn, man, that’s kind of intense.
Yeah, I mean, it’s a lot, but it’s cool, and I love it. We do a lot, so I’m working on that every day. It started very part-time, but the longer you do it, the more you care about how each season comes out, and it’s become something that we are all really invested in now.
Baker is interesting because it’s never really gone out of style, it’s always been cool.
Yeah, and we are lucky. We’ve been around for 20+ years, and that’s a long time for a skate company. I was just tripping on that with Andrew. I’d say the last four years or something has been us slowly tightening up the creative process. Over those 22-ish years, there have been a lot of different directions, sometimes no direction - I think Andrew has always done a good job of being involved but also being an active participant in the skate industry, which is not always an easy thing for someone running a brand. Even myself, I get stuck at the desk sometimes, but - and not to sound corny - but being out in the street is always a priority.
Yeah, man, you are skating a lot, putting out a lot of clips. How do you balance that with work and your new family?
I don’t know, honestly; it’s just a careful balance. I try to be really mindful of my time with each thing and to be more efficient when switching into each gear, and that’s been a welcomed change because I am not a naturally efficient person, I’m kind of a time waster by nature. Now, I can’t really go out and skate on a session where we are just sitting around eating chips and bullshitting. If I’m going skating, I have to be out there sweating my ass off because I know that I also want to be hanging out with my kid and doing other things. In some ways, it’s making time fly by, but I need to be really deliberate about chilling. It’s made me really think about how I use my time. As far as clips, I guess I’m filming a lot so that I feel productive and like it’s worth being out on the skate sesh, if that makes sense.
You put out gnarly parts, but I really enjoy the weekly 30 seconds of slappy footage you’ve been putting out just on Instagram and how that—for anyone in skating—you can make and maintain a whole career off of just those kinds of clips.
Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s nice for those of us who feel like we want to be “productive” during the week. Sometimes it’s important to feel like that. I don’t know if it’s important in the overall artistic output or whatever, but it’s nice to have something concrete that you can be like, ‘I went out skating; this is a thing I made.”
I’m a big fan of your creative output through Baker, but especially your Etch A Sketch art. How the fuck? Are you just taking hours and hours?
The Etch A Sketch stuff is actually not that time-consuming because they’re pretty small, but I guess learning how to do it came from having too much time on my hands - being on tour and having one with me and fucking around with it in the van. I am drawn to things that are tedious and maybe require some abnormal attention span. You could probably call it adult ADD or something where I really have to do tricks on myself to pay attention to normal life, but if I lock into something, I can lock in for a really long time and go deep into it, but I’m easily distracted when just walking down the street.
I’m really fascinated by your photoshopping and face swapping and how weird and funny and uncanny and fucking creepy all that stuff is. How’d that become your thing?
I think that started when I first got an iPhone and someone told me about an app where you could do really rudimentary photoshop style things, and I started making flyers for my friends’ DJ night or just funny things for the group text or to send something funny to Jerry. I think I started to feel like social media could be an easy opportunity to… sort of put my creative stuff-
A platform?
Yeah, but not a place to show off anything. Social media is something that we became expected to sort of do as pro skateboarders, but I wanted to do something that was a little less boring, not just as how I come off, but the process of doing it. For me, instead of just doing a thing that I’m expected to do, I wanted to turn it into something that was fun or had some expression in it. I started really manipulating photos with those apps out of being bored in the van or being at a spot back when I had a lot more time. I’d be like, ‘here’s a boring photo of a guy; I’m gonna swap his head with the statue that he’s sitting next to.’ At the same time, that’s just my sensibility as far as art and humor. I like things that are slightly off and uncanny, disturbing but funny to me.
That is also my sensibility, and I wonder why it got so weird. What are your comedy influences? What’d you grow up with?
Ah, man, I always space out when it comes to citing influences, and then I kick myself later. There were so many things growing up. Being a little sponge in the early ’90s, watching all the weird stuff that was on TV. There was all that weird animation on MTV, like Liquid Television. Do you remember that?
Oh, dude, I love Liquid Television.
Yeah, stuff like that. I don’t know. Ren and Stimpy—even the music videos at the time. All that sort of budget, ugly psychedelia; the Black Hole Sun video that is just so dumb with people’s faces melting; all of that stuff sunk into my head, and I’ve always liked it. There are examples of that in every type of pop art or real art movements, but I’m pretty uneducated about any of that stuff.
Did you go to art school?
Nah I did some drawing when I was in school but I dropped out of high school to skate in 10th grade. My plan was to go to art school, but skating got in the way. I was working really hard at getting good grades to get into an art school. I didn’t know how I’d even apply that, like most students, but then I got the opportunity to skate and travel, and I started prioritizing that, and so did my teachers, so I dropped out.
It turned out pretty well for you. You are art directing.
Yeah, I’ve been very fortunate to be able to do that, especially here. When I was a kid in school, I was Baker’s biggest fan, and now I get to work at Baker and make art and be creative. I can’t overstate it—it’s a dream come true, and it’s not lost on me. There’s no way that at that time I could have known that this was something I wanted to do or even could do, but now looking back, I’m like, ‘Fuck, man, this is it.’ It’s almost too good. It makes me feel like I’m living in a simulation, for sure.