People change. It is a pretty standard fact of life. Whether it is you, and your gradual shift in music tastes, as you discover the artistic merits of Morrisey and the ignorance that accompanies records focused on being shot nine times, or your high school sweetheart coming back a lesbian after her first semester of college — our lives are peppered with moments of dissonance that call for reevaluations, both small and large, of those who we call friends.

One day, I started to notice that my friend Michael Gigliotti was starting to change. He wasn’t growing breasts or going bald, but there was something different about him.

I first met Michael in the back of Union Square. Several friends and I had played him in a game of skate, and he inevitably won in a shut out since he was in fact from Santa Monica, and thus grew up skating the Hollywood High School 16 stair, while me and my friends grew up skating the Seaport and Red Benches, so frankly, it was a really unfair game.

From that point on, we were really good friends. We would see obscure, black and white, Scandanavian films in revival houses together, get later’d at the Fish, write poetry in our blood on yellow looseleaf sheets of paper and subsequently paperclip them to unsuspecting girl’s scrunchies, and occasionally skateboard when the New York City Board of Fashionability deemed it fashionable (typically, this happened three times a year between 2005-2007 and has happened once a year since 2008).

But slowly, Mike decided to lose interest in skateboarding. He’d show up to our favorite ledge wearing maroon eyeliner. Oftentimes, he’d wear platform shoes with weird inscriptions carved into the sole that had cryptic messages about how life was obsolete and how the worthlessness of the human condition was a product of the government and George Bush’s plan for destroying the rain forest so it could be traded to Al Queda in exchange for trendy Arab scarves worn by college students and maybe oil wells. He would still skate sometimes, but usually, he would try tricks like shove-it willy grinds on handrails, and heelflip body varials down double sets in Midtown Manhattan. One day, I tried to learn nollie half cab flips and he told me that I was a “conformist that would lead a life subservient to the government while being wholly complacent with my ignorance to George Bush’s great plan for wiping out New Jersey and deporting every great indie band.” I asked him to clarify, and then he focused my board and I have not seen him since.

Yesterday, I opened up my e-mail and say a message entitled “Long time no see” from an e-mail account that I soon learned was connected to a radical environmentalist group located in desert that is responsible for fundraising so they could campaign a freegan president in the 2012 election, just about a hundred miles outside of Los Angeles in the desert (although some reports say he has been spotted at Cafe Orlin on Saturday mornings.) Attatched to the e-mail, was this clip. A large departure from Michael’s former Westside Connection, Late-90s No Limit and Cramps inspired filmmaking, but I guess he’s changed. Whether its for the best or the worst, you be the judge.

Clip embedded after the jump. Features Miles Marquez, Michael Gigliotti, Alex Olson, Watermelon Alex, some jerk.

War Babies from michael gigliotti on Vimeo.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 12:33 pm and is filed under Footage & Videos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.