Pirkka Pollari - Slept On
July 01, 2009 @ 6:03 PM
<-------alt text here-------->
Pirkka Pollari - Slept On
Txt: Valtteri Väkevä
Photos: Antton Miettinen
Portrait: Juho Huttunen
Most of you probably remember Pirkka Pollari as that guy with funny wooden hat who had a part in Element’s Rise Up video. Well, that’s him, but there’s more you should probably know about him.
You can’t talk about Pirkka without mentioning “Perus” the Finnish skate crew in which he is one of the original members. The word “perus” translates to “basic”.
“Me and Risto Lehtinen invented the name. Everything was so basic back then. There were basic spots, basic curbs and we were all just basic skaters. Nothing too special”, Pirkka explains.
Nowadays the Perus crew has become much more than basic. Skateboarding in their last couple of videos has been ridiculously good, and those are just low budget DIY-videos, distributed hand-to-hand on home burned DVDs. Pirkka has actually edited six out of the seven Perus videos to date. You could stick them in the “party-meets-sick-skateboarding-genre”.
It is a bit weird that skateboarders like Pirkka and Eero Anttila are ready to put so much effort on such small scale videos that only 100 or so people are going to see. Searching the words “perus pirkka” on YouTube will give you some idea.
Because of the videos Perus has become some a household name within the Finnish skate scene. It is a proof of quality. If Pirkka had any business sense he would start making decks and wheels on that name. But he is not interested in business.
<-------alt text here-------->
Instead of making money Pirkka is committed to skateboarding. He reminds me of those Buddhist monks that meditate 12 hours a day. Just like monks he has quit living the so-called-normal-life to be able to concentrate full time on his religious activities - a.k.a. skateboarding.
Pirkka wakes up between 10:00 and 12:00 every day, drinks a cup of coffee and rides down the small hill to the skatepark near his home. During the next hours his friends gather there and they go skateboarding around the Helsinki area, maybe film something.
For lunch Pirkka eats a certain very cheap, very unhealthy and very poor piece of Finnish microwave pepperoni pizza. I can’t recommend it to anyone. With his pizza he drinks a can of shitty pear juice. In the evening Pirkka comes home, heats up some more pizza and goes to bed. That’s his life. He keeps it real. Skateboarding, pizza and pear juice. Quite perus, don’t you think?
“I haven’t had to do any work for a while. I get a little money from my sponsors and that’s enough for me. I rather live on a little money than spend my days at work”, says Pirkka of his situation.
Don’t get him wrong, though. Pirkka is not a lazy worker. He is a dream employee. Pirkka tells us about the period when he worked for Ikea assembling their furniture for display in- store.
“They were amazed at how fast I was. Finally they didn’t have room for all the furniture I’d put together. All the Ikea’s furniture has the same logic and I understood it right away, although their instructions don’t share the same logic”.
<-------alt text here-------->
Pirkka’s free situation and small needs allow him to escape the Finnish winter every year to Spain’s Costa del Sol and Barcelona. His sponsors pay the flights there and the accommodation isn’t that expensive—especially when there are sometimes nine chumps sharing the 50 metre- squared one bedroom flat.
Pirkka says he’s on the road approximately 5 months out of the year. Somehow he’s managed to keep a relationship going at the same time.
“Well, I don’t ask her whether I can go or not. She knows that if I have to—and I will—then I’ll just go. Of course I’ll miss her, but one gets used to it” he says.
What’s nice about Pirkka is his communal awareness, his willingness to do voluntary work for the good of the skate community. He and his friends have recently started building concrete skatepark obstacles. One of the guys works for a construction company and he delivers the leftover concrete for their skatepark experiments. Last year they built a few curbs in the skatepark near Pirkka’s home and now they have started to build all sorts of banks there.
They could have picked some secret spot in the middle of nowhere but instead they are building the obstacles in a public park where everyone can enjoy them. That’s very kind of them.
<-------alt text here-------->
Besides skateboarding the Perus crew likes to get fucked up.
“We’re often at Bar Swengi (some people have called it Helsinki’s version of Barcelona’s skate bar Manolo) but in the summertime we like to spend time outside at the parks of Helsinki. Last summer the vert ramp in the centre was a quite popular place to be. The other guys slept under it some nights”, Pirkka says.
It’s a pretty safe bet they didn’t skate the ramp at all the whole summer, just drank beer next to it.
Pirkka is a very easy going person and it is always fun to talk with him. His social skills even cross national borders, which isn’t always the case. When a typical Finnish skateboarder travels abroad he usually spends his time there with other Finnish skaters. Pirkka instead has made friends with people around the world. Proof of this is that he is a Finnish skateboarder sponsored by Plus Skateshop from Florida.
“I met those guys in Barcelona. We were good friends immediately. They hadn’t been to Barcelona before so I showed them around and of course chose spots where I could film a trick or two. Then the team manager came to town, gave me some t-shirts and said that I’m on the team”, Pirkka says.
Pirkka’s background might be the explanation for his social skills. Due to his father’s work the family had to travel all over the world when Pirkka was young. “I was put in an international school. I learned English there. Back then it felt like I was taken away from my friends but nowadays I see it as a huge opportunity that I had”.
So that is the Pirkka experience: scene builder, dietary renaissance man, small- time video producer, international socialite and radness to burn. Get some if you can.
<-------alt text here-------->
