Is Brandon Westgate’s New Emerica Video The Career Equivalent Of Ollieing Over The Back Of A Rail And Grinding It Uphill? Switch??

Now that everybody can do all tricks and caballerial kickflips are a prerequisite for post-roshambo strategy I kind of have no idea whether restraint as a concept is still in play. Probably not the time or the place to have the conversation about whether or not the bro going for the kickflip frontside blunt down the park handrail can do it consistently on a curb but maybe there’s some similar elements. Pretty sure that Spiderman explored some related themes of power and responsibility in his new off-broadway production, I think it’s called “U Do U And I’ll Do Me: Turn Off The Dark While I File This Workman’s Comp Claim On U” or something.

Speaking of responsibilities young Zoo Yorker Brandon Westgate has professionally designed footwear to sell and name recognition to build ahead of a potential retirement gig as an “extremely” informed home renovation specialist on HGTVX. Your more seasoned pro might get his companies to pony up for a mini-ramp jam in a strip club and let the blurred web-only footage do the heavy lifting, but instead you’ve got handyman Westgate continuing to push the old boulder uphill with a whole new video section after an teeth-rattling entry in the Emerica vid a couple months ago.

To me this one’s way better — half the length and zeroes in on the more dramatic aspects of his skating, bombing down those San Francisco hills like he’s riding a snowboard* and the ungodly pop up onto some of those bars. The run where he 50-50s the fence off of the sidewalk bump is the kind of clip you want to watch every day, all the time, one of those little slices of what skating is perfectly captured on a digital video-making machine. The nagging reservations I harboured around his sort-of weird-looking flip tricks in the past are basically washed away here with not a lot of complex moves — Quartersnacks and Platinum Seagulls are riding for the giant kickflip but over here I’m promoting the 360 flip over the rail that seems like a totally ridiculously long distance to launch that particular trick. Later on the ender quietly asks the world at large how much better they can do with the up-rail movement in 2011, the answer could be some time coming.

*in a good way, dudes

1990s Antique Roadshow: Piece of an Actual Real-Life Menace T-Shirt

This is on some “design on a dime” shit where I had the bright idea of framing some skate T-shirts of yesteryear, or more likely remembered hearing about somebody else trying it. To those still holding out hope for an Eric Pupecki comeback, fear not, as the shirt wasn’t otherwise wearable in its pre-chopped condition and definitely wasn’t seeing much action at the bottom of a box in the garage anyway. This was among three Menace shirts owned. There also was the traditional MNC star, a heather-gray number that remained in good-if-90s-sized condition until it vaporized while moving house sometime in the early 00′s. Then there was a more nontraditional navy one that had the MNC block-type logo printed on both sides, vertically under the sleeves… if that makes sense. Now that one never fit right and I tried in vain one time to trade it to a chick at a sweaty nightclub for an MNC star logo shirt she was wearing, the one with the plaid-patterned star, but no dice.