Catholic High School Girls In Trouble

Somewhere, someone has already commented on how stupid good kids are today, exemplified in the best trick footage from the recent Girl/Choco/Royal/Ruby/Skate Mental/Fourstar/Podium/Crailtap open house. So, I will not whine. What I will do is note Utility Board Shop’s Daniel Espinosa, who took Carroll’s last trick from “Yeah Right” and flipped it frontside. (Also: how good is it, that he didn’t go to fakie.)

TWS Is Down For The Goofs

Does that make me Clarabelle Cow

Transworld Skateboarding presents the first video I will buy that includes a Corey Duffel part. How long do you think he was sitting on that Biebel jersey, hotly anticipating the highest-profile occasion on which to break it out for film documentation? Yes, it’s a new America.

More to the point: I think it would be a moderately good look (or at least a semi-refreshing change of pace) if TWS traded in their dads’ Northern Lights-scented 8 track tape collection for some type of minimal techno soundtrack for this video. And the rainbow quick-cut collage clips make me think of the Tomorrowland motif or whatever I imagined Plan B’s “Superfuture” promo was getting at, until the Beatles kicked in. Do it TWS, keep us guessing.

At this point I would like to turn the blog over to the controlled chaos of the TWS comments section, in deference to their unbending wisdom and powerful variance.

OMG this is going to be the sickest skatevideo ever !!!!!!!!!!!!:P

i know ima get hated on, but its kinda weird they make an all goofy vid

dope skating+time lapse traffic footage+skaters silhouettes on the beach=transworld vid

I heard Bobby did the Canadian Embassy 21 stair and he is saving the footy for this!

HELL YEA RAY RAY DEFINITLY DIFFERENT WIT THE EDITING BUT HEY ITS COOL 2009 STAY ON DA GRIND

Sole Tech: One Foot In Heaven, One Foot In Hell

The First Power

Balance is a concept that is critical to skateboarding. And I’m not just talking about the kind of balance that keeps Joey Brezinski in five-panel hats. I’m talking about the cosmic kind of balance. The mystic force that binds us together, and ensuring that for every Saddam Hussein there is a Crocodile Hunter, for every Mark Rogowski a Tim Brauch, for every chaotic evil arms dealer a lawful good veterinarian with a fuel efficient car.

The skateboarding world has explored these concepts of course via the turn of the century battles between Flame Boy and Wet Willy that spilled out across the bottoms of countless World Industries boards, as well as videos such as Mystery’s “Black and White” or, to a more British extent, Blueprint’s “Lost and Found.” And who could forget Digital naturist Bill Weiss’s dearly departed Balance skateboards.*

In the early 90s, Todd Swank even attempted to smash good and evil particle beams against one another via Foundation’s Super Collider-Super Conductor, despite the whole project being hated upon by shook scientists who feared the experiment would create microscopic black holes that would send the world back in time to the days of coordinated freestyle routines.

Thankfully that never happened and here in 2009 we find Sole Tech shoes exploring the concept of cosmic balance through the ultimate late ’00s medium, collaborative footwear endeavors. About a month ago Emerica announced its collabo with Barrier Kultist Deer Man of Dark Woods, the scary-voiced proponent of devil worship through ski masks and the abrupt transition discipline of skateboarding, who is also Canadian and regarded in certain circles as a boss figure.

Representing the side of light is that sworn enemy of Satan, car thieves and other evildoers, Mickey Mouse, who has a shoe coming out with Etnies as part of the only collabo more bizarre than a shoe designed by a masked barrier-skating devil worshiper. I know! This is all part of Etnies’ recently revealed collaboration with Walt Disney that also includes some high top Tinkerbell shoes.

Meanwhile, Sole Tech’s resident black sheep Es is pursuing a relationship with Clipse.

*Except many of us.

Video Games Killed The Video Star… Or Something…

Every now and again, I’m visited with the pleasant and usually unexpected revelation that there are people in this world that A. have free time on their hands, B. have less pressing matters on which to spend said time than managing web logs. So it is with the cottage industry of recreating skate video parts via EA Skate, known to some as the best skateboard video game since Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2. And, it’s not even classic video parts, of course there’s Guy Mariano’s “Mouse” section and a whopper of a three-part version of Marc Johnson’s “Fully Flared” closer, but beyond these you’ll find such head-scratching esoterica as Furby’s Berrics clip, Jake Brown’s X-games mega-slam (sans helmet), and a remake of YouTube manual sensation Aaron Kyros’s part.

(On a side note, I would be inclined to say that Aaron Kyros could have been the Soulja Boy Tell’Em of YouTube skate videos, if he would have thought up a name for his manual twirling dance, and made it into a ringtone.)

So as Electronic Arts releases the meticulously titled “Skate 2,” let’s look over a few parts recreated with the original “Skate.”

Antwuan Dixon – “Baker 3”

This entry, if not 100% faithful in size and scope trick-wise, is sort of innovative in that it cribs the soundtrack from the video itself in recreating young Antwuan’s Baker debut. The medium drives home the notion that we are looking back on a more innocent time for all of us, with nice use of the Suburbs picnic tables and a suitable stand-in for the Carlsbad gap.
Rating: Three-up

Nick Trapasso – “Suffer the Joy”

This one gets points for dredging the Suburbs for a passable schoolyard setting for Trapasso’s well-loved bigspin blunt line, but couldn’t fit in the wallie – bummer, brah. The minds who put this clip together give into the all-too-strong desire to boost the stair count on some of the hairier rail/gap stuff, but EA Skate’s “loose style” does a decent Trapasso impersonation and they replicated the wonky landing on the kickflip backside 360 pretty good.
Rating: Three-up

Alex Chalmers – “Sorry”

Probably one of the most impressive EA Skate knock-off parts considering how hard it is to do transition shit in this game. With the Faction pop-punk and general contempt shown for gravity, the Canadian fly-out wizard’s little-loved Flip video makes for a convincing update to those old Tony Hawk clips they used to toss you when you completed the game with such-and-such pro. The only thing holding this back from a perfect five rating are the hilariously awkward telephone voice interlude and the fact that the wits behind this couldn’t figure out a way to recreate Renee Renee’s late back foot flip thing. For shame.
Rating: Four-up

Guy Mariano – “Mouse”

It kind of looks like him, if you squint your eyes, and hit yourself over the head with a whiskey bottle for a few hours. Back to the Suburb playgrounds for the bump-to-picnic-table, which is okay minus the lengthy hangtime, and while I can’t think of any particular spot offhand I have to imagine he could have found a better bank-to-ledge to stand in for the Lockwood bench. Plus the awkward rotations on some of the techy ledge stuff. (There are several recreations of Guy Mariano’s “Fully Flared” opus, but if I’m going to bear seven minutes of Band of Horses music and not actually watch Guy Mariano skate, well, I need to get something out of it besides a lengthy blog posting.)
Rating: Two-up

Ronnie Creager – “What If”

Under the video details it says “I needs me a life.” He got the slow-mo kickflip backside tailslide 360 out, when the song stops, so that’s something. User “BriDenSkates” has several other such parts to his name, as well as a couple super cute kitten videos, which as we all know are the lifeblood of YouTube. For this reason I bestow upon this clip a full five-up rating, and encourage BriDenSkates to get to work on “Trilogy” and “20 Shot Sequence.”

Flame On

This Darren Navarette photo is all kinds of awesome for all kinds of awesome reasons, but I sort of realized today that if you pulled it out of a big pile of pictures, it could theoretically be from 1999, 1989, or (maybe) 1979… you get the idea, right? Yeah, timeless. (Brendan Klein photo from the Trapasso issue of TSM.)

I Sort Of Want To Believe

Caught you lookin for the same thing

I’m not sure what to make of Hype!, which is by all appearances a Popwar retread complete with mass-culture motif, sub-Street Corner graphics (excluding the hover board, and that’s probably already been done by somebody at some point) and an even more muddled mission statement:

AN ESSENTIAL PART OF THE “BEING” SURVIVES DEATH TO BE REBORN IN A NEW BODY,
HYPE! IS THE SAME AS IT NEVER WAS…
ACCORDING TO CERTAIN BELIEF SYSTEMS, A NEW “PERSONALITY” IS DEVELOPED
DURING EACH LIFE IN THE PHYSICAL WORLD,
BUT SOME PART OF THE SELF REMAINS CONSTANT THROUGHOUT THE SUCCESSIVE LIVES.

Word. But rather than dwell on their migraine Magic Eye website, Hype has my full support when it comes to their slowly filling handful of team riders. One is Element amateur scorned Mike Barker, a tousle-headed Popwar refugee himself who turned in one of the better parts in the not-nearly-so-bad-as-its-name “This Is My Element” video a couple years ago and apparently was shown the door for his trouble.

Back to throw the dice with another startup after his corporate sponsorship adventure, Barker joins the consistently underrated wandering Texan Jeremy Holmes, the whole point of this posting being his little clip of footage put up on the Hype site a week or so back. The nollie b/s 180 switch b/s 5-0 shove-it trips me out in this clip because of how fast the shove-it is, just about Satva Leung switch frontside flip in “Welcome to Hell” fast:

vimeo vimeo.com/2787630?pg=embed&sec=2787630

Mall Justice No Match For Mike Vallely

“Somewhat integral”

Mike v is a man of contrasts, a beardly figure brimming with nuance and harsh truths about the human condition. Also, bonelesses. Truly he is a man of our times, but as it ever was, the measure of a man is made not in X-Games or even the wrestling ring, but rather in that ultimate court of American accomplishment, the box office.

Last weekend, Mike V met and introduced himself to the U.S. public, or at least those who haven’t seen his Fuel TV series or his numerous biographical documentaries or his poems. As one of the chief villains in the new retail-themed thriller “Mall Cop,” Vallely is garnering passing mentions, if not rave reviews, in the national press. To wit:

Finally there’s champion skateboarder and musician (in the band Revolution Mother) Mike Vallely, who plays the criminal ringleader, Rudolph.

“They had to find the most bad-ass skateboarders on the planet,” says Vallely, a voracious reader and father of two who wears his blond hair long and scraggly. “I was at the top of that list.”

Vallely has the biggest action sequence of the bunch, battling James throughout the mall. In what he describes as an undoubtedly riveting climax, Rudolph will leap from floor to floor as he chases Paul Blart. Then, in a never-before-done skating move, he’ll jump on – and break into – a moving elevator.

“It’s a whole new challenge,” Vallely says. “I’m not just skateboarding. I play a character that is somewhat integral. This is the first time I feel, as athletes, we’ve really been taken in.”

Somebody’s been taken in for sure, as the Blart-star vehicle hoisted an estimated $40 million over the three-day weekend, putting it in the number one box-office spot.

But tidings of Vallely’s Hollywood success are of course no news to those of us in the skateboarding sphere, who gladly cheer the multifaceted Mike V as he flexes his pecs in the squared circle, gets his nose cracked open on the hockey rink, recites verses at the poetry slam, snarls through his beard at the Warp Tour, or pushes over and over and over in that Black Label video.

“I just had water, anger and a destination. It’s just how I am,” Vallely says.

Equally transfixing are Vallely’s intellectual travels, transitioning through vegetarianism, straight-edgeism, and non-violence over the years. He hews closely to the punk purism of local scenes and staying true to skating’s roots, whatever those may be, while fervently embracing mega-corporate sponsors. He remains fiercely loyal to his sponsors of the moment and wastes no time in spewing poison upon those who dare to cross him.

To this end there’s actually a really good interview in the new Transworld (2-09) where Mackenzie Eisenhour kind of gets Mike V to admit he wants to have his beating-people-up cake and eat it too.

TWS: You repudiated violence after the “Greatest Hits” DVD. (re: fighting “Creature Lee” at Van’s Downtown Showdown last year)
MV: In a broader sense, I have spoken out of both sides of my mouth…. “Greatest Hits” was definitely the capitalist pig in me [laughs]. After the craze of “CKY” and “Jackass”, I saw an opportunity in the marketplace to package that stuff and that’s something I can understand someone disagreeing with.

There’s a lot more, it’s a pretty good interview in terms of putting the harder questions to Vallely as far as his perceived jock nature, whether he ever considers learning new tricks, how he’d be a great cop and that hoary old cliche “skateboarding saved my life.” Also there are two photos of bonelesses.

Street Levitation

Enjoy harsh surfaces

The other weekend I was chopping it up with a bro of mine who out of nowhere brazenly declared John Rattray’s “Waiting For the World” video part to be in the top ten video parts of all time. Which I sort of disagreed with, not because it isn’t an amazing part or anything but more like, well, ten parts of all time? From there the conversation meandered toward what parts could be agreed upon (Pat Duffy in “Questionable,” Guy Mariano “Mouse,” Mike Carroll in something or other, not much else) and eventually the debate dissolved back into the session. But shortly thereafter I web-browsered my way onto the Blueprint site where they’d put up a set of photos from the WFTW era.

The John Rattray part in question:

Having not watched it for a couple years, what hits me is not how well the overwrought Brit-pop and Hawaiian shirts have aged (fine wine, cheese), but that this to me will always be the greatest Rattray part, due to any number of intangible factors. Mostly how fast he skates, the b/s tail shove-it, the little carve out of the frontside-floating nollie heelflip in the last line. And that thing he does where he sort of brings his hands up when he lands tricks (see kickflip b/s 50-50 on the rail). He looks kind of, relaxed.

I remember, I first heard about this part from Cairo Foster. It was in an old 411, a “Wheels of Fortune” or something, they asked him the best video parts he saw recently – it was Rattray in “WFTW” and Brian Wenning in “Photosynthesis.” Noble picks, they were.

LSMF

Internet-focused Web site BoingBoing today brings us this lazy susan-style concept table from Studio Mauerer Hendrichs, which incorporates basic skateboard technology to more easily facilitate remote control grabbing, or drink spilling for the more enthusiastic table-spinners amongst us. Available to you in German oak or wal-nut; I assume you’d also have the option of swapping out the plane-jane truck/wheel combo for a jazzier setup. Like maybe those powder blue Krux with Louie Barletta screaming, and some Hubba wheels. Swiss bearings to up the revolving suspense during those spin-the-table games on sultry summer nights.

Insta-poll:
First… would this table even work? Looking at it, I would think that the trucks would have to be tilted slightly toward the center of the table to make it so the glass disc spins like it’s supposed to. And the bottom of the table might have to be sort of convex.

Second, is the $1795 price tag way too low for this level of staggering innovation?

Greg Lutzka Wins The Dew Tour That Is This Earthly Life

One Toyota to rule them all

Like many others, my imagination was captivated this week with the revelation that frontside-favoring Milwaukeean Greg Lutzka completed an agreement with Toyota to produce a line of white cars with a drawing on the side. While it may have made more sense for Toyota to go with, say, valley boy Mikey Taylor for this honor given his fondness for street racing and, one can only assume, Tokyo drifting as well, you have to commend Lutzka for his business savvy and sheer ballsiness, managing to convince a global car company to adorn the side of a hatch-back with a funny-looking moustache dude pulling his pud.

(Notice to Madison Avenue: This is exactly the type of low-brow, bottom-of-the-barrel approach that I keep trying to tell you resonates with kids today. And this is why those kids are tomorrow’s today’s Toyota buyers.)

Wikipedia (where someone, possibly on the Lutzka payroll, keeps rather close tabs on his trophy-packed contest schedule), tells us that the Matrix is Toyota’s Heathcliff to the Garfield that is the Pontiac Vibe. It has received mixed reviews for safety, much like Greg Lutzka’s trick selection. Yet it also received solid marks for reliability, much like Greg Lutzka’s trick selection. Again, I refer you to the exhaustive Lutzkapedia contest compendium.

Now a lot of people poke fun at Greg Lutzka, or as he’s increasingly known, the Greg Lutzka. There was that embarrassing month-long stint on Krooked, a partnership rumored to have come apart following the revelation that the GL adorned his bedroom walls with his own likeness in the form of Illennium ads or what have you. And one of my great regrets of last year was that I never devoted one of these none-too-precious postings to the kind of amazing Globe section, themed as it was with French techno music and some really sweet “Krazy Kings”-esque special effects.

But the Greg Lutzka’s earnest Midwestern cluelessness is deeply endearing, and puts his finger-snappin’, hat-wearin’, frontside flippin’ spinnin’ in the sort of perspective that you can’t get when he strolls the club in a leather jacket. Why, just a few years ago the kid needed a sit-down* to learn the proper way to wipe and discard the wasteful, shameful, hateful “tissue glove” method.

Now look at him. His name sparkles proudly on the side of a Toyota hatch-back. He knows Lil Jon and Ryan Sheckler. He sells his own hat made from the skin of synthetic frogs, developed in a secret laboratory owned by Oakley glasses. Australian footwear concern Globe recently approached him to design a shoe, which does closely resemble the Muska’s vaunted Sky-Top, but this is hardly a mark against the Greg Lutzka. As we all know it is nigh impossible to fade the Muska, and one can only hope to follow his lead. Which the GL wisely has done in this instance. So don’t try and tell me the kid hasn’t made it.

*from a Big Brother writer, no less