{"id":7603,"date":"2011-02-01T01:11:04","date_gmt":"2011-02-01T01:11:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/?p=7603"},"modified":"2022-06-07T21:22:26","modified_gmt":"2022-06-08T04:22:26","slug":"arto-saari","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/arto-saari\/","title":{"rendered":"ARTO SAARI"},"content":{"rendered":"

INTERVIEW BY CHRISTIAN HOSOI<\/strong>
\nINTRODUCTION BY GEOFF ROWLEY<\/strong>
\nPHOTO BY RYAN ALLEN<\/strong><\/p>\n

Arto Saari is huge! A beast of a man! A total and utter gnarler, on and off the skateboard. When I first saw Arto skate, I was amazed that such a tall human could have such graceful style and board control coupled with a sweet ass style…. all at the age of 15! He didn’t know what the hell I was saying to him when we first met, but the glint in his eye suggested that he was going to stick around in skateboarding and, as we used to say, “Get Gnarly!” He has proved this time and again. If you have ever met the man in person, you will know that once Arto deems you his buddy, he will without question give you the shoes off his feet and treat you like family. He is a damn good person and one hell of an amazing photographer, skateboarder and whatever else he gets his bear paws into. Raw talent, beastly vibes and general good times make up the primal ape you shall read about here..<\/p>\n

\n

“I\u2019ve been skating the pool and then going and skating street, and they compliment each other in a lot of ways.”<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Arto? How are you?<\/strong>
\nI\u2019m good. It\u2019s been a busy morning.<\/p>\n

When was the last time you did an interview?<\/strong>
\nI can\u2019t even remember. It\u2019s been a while.<\/p>\n

Killer. This will be fresh then.\u2028<\/strong>
\nThis whole thing will be fresh. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve done an interview for a couple years now. I\u2019ve been laying low for a little bit, after the Mind Field thing came out. I\u2019ve done a few tidbits here and there, but I haven\u2019t done any major interviews in an actual magazine, which is nice. I\u2019ve got the wheels rollin\u2019.<\/p>\n

Juice Magazine is totally psyched on skateboarding, so this will be great for all the readers. You have a family. I met your wife and daughter.<\/strong>
\nYeah. I\u2019ve started to form a little family. It\u2019s my wife, Mimi, and our baby girl, Ella.<\/p>\n

How did you meet Mimi?<\/strong>
\nWe met through mutual friends. It was through Dylan [Rieder]. Dylan knew a bunch of girls up here and we all started hanging out. I was living in Huntington, at the time, but Dylan was already up here. Mimi and I just started hanging out, and two years later, we have a family. [Laughs] It kind of flew by really quickly. I thought I was coming to Hollywood to have a party, but that turned into a family. It\u2019s still a party though.<\/p>\n

[Laughs] Nice. Let\u2019s talk about your homeland. What was it like growing up in Finland, prior to moving to the United States?<\/strong>
\nI lived in Finland for seventeen years. There were harsh winters, so we\u2019d snowboard in the winter and skateboard during the three months of summer. That\u2019s about as long as the summer lasts. I was just trying to get through the harsh winters and get to those three months of skating during the summer. When I was growing up, there weren\u2019t many skateparks. Now there are. The cities and government started to help out and build skateparks, so kids actually have warm places to skate now. We used to skate cold parking garages or whatever. We\u2019d get kicked out and move on to the next one. We\u2019d skate anywhere there wasn\u2019t ice or snow. If there were a piece of flat ground somewhere, we\u2019d be there. That was basically growing up in Finland.<\/p>\n

FOR THE REST OF THE STORY ORDER ISSUE #68 BY CLICKING HERE…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

INTERVIEW BY CHRISTIAN HOSOI INTRODUCTION BY GEOFF ROWLEY PHOTO BY RYAN ALLEN Arto Saari is huge! A beast of a man! A total and utter gnarler, on and off the skateboard. When I first saw Arto skate, I was amazed that such a tall human could have such graceful style and board control coupled with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7604,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4028,4041],"tags":[14430,14414,4047,14450,3813,4046,4048],"class_list":["post-7603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews","category-skate-2","tag-arto-saari","tag-christian-hosoi","tag-dylan-rieder","tag-geoff-rowley","tag-issue-68","tag-juice-magazine-68","tag-ryan-allen"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/32-33-ARTO.jpg","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7603"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7603\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89579,"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7603\/revisions\/89579"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}