The Mandible Claw: Colin Read
Images Courtesy of Colin Read
‘Who and what is a mandible claw? The WWE guy?’
‘He’s a skate filmer who makes films and music videos and other kinds of visual art,’ I replied to the girl sitting next to me at the bar. She seemed unexcited about my interview. Perhaps because she didn’t skate, or perhaps because the next thing that came out of her mouth was spittle. Talking to people at bars can be tricky, sticky business.
If you are as ignorant to film and skateboarding as that girl at the bar who couldn’t contain her oral fluids, Mandible Claw’s real name is Colin Read, and he makes films.
Best known in skateboarding for his masterful, mind-wrecking video, Spirit Quest, as well as the best Cons concept in recent memory, Colin is a talented mind committed to cultural refreshment. If skateboarding were a sterile room, Colin would be in there decorating - color pops of underwater VX’s, throw pillows of perfectly-synced cuts, and a floor rug made out of the finest animated cotton. Banality, particularly skateboarding banality, be absolutely fucking damned.
How long have you lived here?
Let’s see- oh, are we on the record?
We are, yep.
Oh, man. Alright. Let’s see. I just turned thirty five, and I moved here when I was twenty one.
What brought you to New York?
Skating. I did undergrad in Florida which is where I grew up. I just wanted to come to New York. I came the previous summer and stayed with Billy Rohan and knew that I wanted to be here, so I used getting an MFA as a way to pay for moving.
An MFA in filmmaking?
Creative writing. I really just wanted to skate. I was an adjunct professor for a while, and when I finished with that stint, I didn’t try to do it again because I wasn’t prepared for that much responsibility, so I just fucked off back into skating, and I guess I’ve been there since.
“What’s the point of making a skate video? I would only make another one if I had a solid concept for it.”
What was the transition into filmmaking like?
I came from skate videos. Hardly the first director to start there. Growing up, we’d hand the camera around and film each other. There was no dedicated filmer. When I was nineteen, I broke my pelvis skating, and when I was up and about again but still couldn’t skate really hard, I’d be the one with the camera. By the time that I fully healed, it was too late for me. I had fallen into the role of the filmer and have been there ever since.
The transition from skate filmer to filmmaker is an interesting one. Spike Jonze famously made that transition when Sonic Youth saw the Blind video and asked him to direct their music video. Did you have a moment like that?
Yeah, same thing.
Sonic Youth?
Radiohead.
Fuck.
My first so-called filmmaking experience was making the Radiohead video for Man Of War. It was super scary because I didn’t have any real idea of what I was doing. I had been asked to pitch on things before, but I had no idea what a pitch was supposed to look like, so I would send over a word doc of the idea, and it worked. It was laid out beat by beat, time coded, and the video is essentially exactly what was written on that word document. I had no idea what real filmmaking was, everything I knew was self taught from making skate videos. I’m very envious of people who had a mentor, it sounds great. I am here solely because I happened to stumble in. I got through the video and once we started rolling, I realized that this is exactly the same as making a skate video.
What do you mean?
My skate videos are very conceptual and framed really precisely - sometimes even storyboarded, so it felt the same to make that music video. After that, I was like, ‘oh this could be a career’ so I quit my job and couldn’t get another one for a year. I found out that nobody gave a shit that I made a music video, so I just picked up freelance editing and what not to sustain myself.
Do you think that doing the Radiohead video was a good call? A feasible way to enter the industry?
Yeah, it’s how I got in. I think that music videos are the most common entry point for people who want to direct. The budgets are super low, the stakes are low, and sometimes you're given a lot of control. The downside is that you get chump change thrown at you and the label crawling all over you and sabotaging things and it’s almost fucking impossible, but if you can do it, it’s a good entry point.
Earlier you said that you are a very conceptual director, where do you think that comes from?
At this point I’m just shoehorned into it. It’s the only thing people want to see from me, and it’s the only thing I get at this point. I guess it came from skate videos, I was bored with the form. They were trite, and had become stagnant. I was especially bored of filming and being the nanny of all these skaters, chasing them around, squatting at the bottom of a stair set for hours. If you can do something different, you should, just to keep your brain healthy.
How do you feel about skate videos now?
I have no idea. I’m out of the loop. I watch videos that my friends make or are in and that’s about it. I’m at the point now where I have to say that I used to skate. I haven’t skated since October 2021 because I had long standing back problems from being a filmer, a furniture mover, mixed with my shitty inbred white person genes. My back didn’t have a chance. It’s been terrible for ten years and finally it got to a critical point where I had to get spine surgery. I’m doing quite well now, I was on a cane for a period of time and it was demoralizing. This year, my priority is focusing on my health.
Do you think you’ll make a skate video again?
I think about it. A bunch of people sent me a clip on instagram of someone using a VX with a drone and I was like, ‘it’s time to come back’. I tried to do that with a shitty drone like ten years ago, but a crappy one, and it crashed into my face and sliced open my eyebrow. But yeah, I think about it. Most of the people I hang with are skaters. I just don’t know what it’d be yet. What’s the point of making a skate video? I would only make another one if I had a solid concept for it. Maybe eventually. I’d better hurry up because all of my friends will be too old soon.
[We stopped the recorder, but then I thought of more questions, so we unpaused]
The question he just asked was, ‘do I hate skaters/skating now’ and of course, no, because I am one, and I always will be. Things have changed, though. I hate to use this phrase, but it’s always been a very toxic culture. Super misogynistic. Better now, but still not great. Super jock-ish. Super clique. I never liked that. My videos had a very eclectic cast - Danny Renaud sharing a part with Zach Lyons. All of us happened to be friends, so it fell together that way, to combat that. I think that skateboarders, like other jock cultures, have been sort of proud of their ignorance. Proud not to read books. Most of my friends are skaters, and they’re articulate, intelligent people, and I always found it a bit high school to pretend to be stupid to fit in.
“The question he just asked was, ‘do I hate skaters/skating now’ and of course, no, because I am one, and I always will be. Things have changed, though.”
Or don’t adapt. I know what you mean.
yeah , or- oh hello. Yeah, she’s very friendly. Give her a pet. Those are some nice sniffs. Bye! You can leave all of these dog interjections in the interview. Anyway, I don’t think you necessarily need ambition to lead a happy life.
It’s just so easy to drink a beer at the skatepark forever.
Sure, and you can fill a life with that and that’s fine, but there’s a lot more to life.
There’s something very zen about being satisfied with that life.
Yeah, and I was for a long time, and I sometimes wish I still was. It feels like a very judgemental viewpoint, but I wish that skateboarding just grew up a little. I don’t mean, ‘get a job you damn kids’. I mean more like ‘stop fighting security guards and people whose houses you’re fucking up’. It’s a child's toy, and I’m all for adults playing with toys, but we’re older now. Back when I was skating and filming, I did what I had to do, but now, I can’t imagine skating a house spot. If one is already really fucked up, that’s different I guess. I’d feel really bad. In one way, that conflicts with my sensibility within skating because I am so into adapting and recontextualizing space-
But public space.
Yeah, public spaces. Who cares if you steal from a Walmart, but don’t steal from the mom and pop shop. I’ll get raked over the coals for this but whatever. It’s grown up a lot over the years and become much more supportive of all kinds of skaters, but it’s got a long way to go.
I think that skating is a lot more diplomatic now. People are afraid of saying anything about anything, not only because of controversy, but because they don’t want to be perceived to care about anything.
It’s the social media era, I think. In social media land, people's worth is judged by the masses in real time. Popularity is determined moment to moment and shown empirically with your likes. You didn’t have to used to worry about that. It’s just another danger.
I think that the coolness factor is different now from when I was a kid. Being cool was uncool, whereas now, being cool is cool.
Skating wasn’t cool when we were growing up. There were two of us in school who skated. I think it made it more authentic in a way.
Now everyone skates.
And weird shit is cool that I don’t understand. This is the point where I’m not going to name names, it's subjective, but the one thing that people used to agree on is that you kind of needed to be really good at skating, but now everyone is good at skating, so you don’t need to be good to be pro.
Do you mean like how people say that Shane O’Niell’s biggest criticism is that he’s so good that it’s tedious to watch?
What I’m saying is that there are ten thousand Shane’s. Skating is cool now, so more people are skating than ever before and they are all doing fucked up impossible tricks. In that way, skating is a lot less special. It’s like the exponential skill heightening of every generation. The random unsponsored kids at the skatepark now are better than the pros of yesteryear.
A kid on the football team is now skating.
It’s interesting because it makes you feel more comfortable at every skill level, because great skill is becoming obsolete. Outsider art is more interesting because flip-in-flip-out is everywhere.
That’s why I think Polar in 2016 was way ahead of the curve.
Oh, for sure. Pontus had his finger on something way ahead of the times. But now, that’s become the blueprint for all these other independent brands. There will never be another Girl/Chocolate for that reason. They had the best, coolest skaters, and the best, coolest videos. It can’t happen again. I think that the invasion of big brands into skating is incredibly lame, but it was always inevitable in the corporate age. Once skateboarding opened the door to Nike - the second time - that was it. Kids are going to be trained up for the Olympics like any other sport.
I mean, that’s been a thing. Japan’s been doing that for years. Yuto fucking rips and is the shit, but there are like eight year old kids with enormous calve muscles just destroying vert. I remember seeing them in like 2018 and being absolutely blown away. Cyborg skills.
Yeah, totally, but that specifically kind of sucks because Japan skateboarding has always been a bastion of really interesting, unique thinking, and a style of skateboarding all its own, and it’ll be now sort of Westernized and pointed more toward Olympic, competitive skating. I don’t know. We’ll see. Tomorrow is the Static VI premier, that’ll be me checking in on skating.