Watching the Real video it’s hard not to be impressed by the primal forces of Peter Ramondetta’s skate tricks. Tattooed, bearded and occasionally bloodied, he applies a heavy-handed power to the switch ollie over that big gray hubba or the hurting he puts on those big cement steps (b/s 5-0, b/s nosegrind, switch b/s kickflip). Peter Ramondetta impresses himself on semi tractor trailors and doorways, jamming the nose of his board between pillars on that one frontside blunt. His one-man legacy of brutality is maybe highlighted most by several punishing tricks executed upon an unsuspecting pink ledge.
If you were to draw up a spectrum of such squishy concepts it would maybe be possible to put dexterous light-foots such as Richard Mulder, Ronnie Creager and Austyn Gillette on one end and bruiser types such as Salman Agah, Mic-E Reyes and James Kelch on the other. You could appoint someone like Peter Ramondetta to carry on this line, a red-blooded archetype rooted in the themes and lifestyle embodied by the animal-hunting writer Ernest Hemingway. He swilled liquor, loved women and upheld the ancient tradition of bull-slaying, a truly ancient tradition.
Peter Ramondetta has yet to make public his position on bulls and their potential slaying. This is not in the Real video, unless it’s in the bonus features not featured in my iTunes edition that doesn’t possess chapter divisions either. By all accounts his lifestyle has tamed since the days of squalor at Six Newell where he, Elissa Steamer, Frank Gerwer and certain others presided over a household of decay. Ramondetta is not famed as a trophy fisherman or dangerous game hunter, unless you count that downhill handrail toward the end and that last hill with the treacherous speed bumper and all those cars with their wheels turned curb-ward. But you get the feeling that, if the situation called for it, this dude has it in him to walk up to a group of reporters covering his supposed death, run down the situation and spend the next few days catching up on his own premature obituaries.
boil the ocean 