Rushing Elephants

The psychedelic Walt Disney reference so nice we used it… again

There was, and probably still is, a certain breed of skateboarder that works second-shift assembly line jobs, gets evicted from cheap apartments, and remain a crucial part of the skating DNA as far as flying the “office job never” flag. Whether or not this demographic still exists, future “buy a vowel” T-Eddy contender Ben Skrzypek totally looks the part in “God Save the Label,” whilst generally skating much faster than you’d expect, with some validity to the Rob Welsh comparison on several of these ride-aways (like the fakie flip b/s nosegrind), and it’s good to see a dude on the make who’s not caught up in the outfit wars. We are partial to the switch frontside heelflip over the rail, the backside flip over the hydrant, and the cracked ender that looks like it took some balls to ride out.

Whereas Skrzyp6qrxpek rarely shifts from a black tee motif, Adam Alfaro has something like a desert-dweller/GY!BE thing going, in some ways seeming like he’s lightened up for his part in this video: colorful socks and some loopy spots with a comparatively bouncy song and those effortless kickflips. The carve-around ditch kicker thing looks like a snowboard spot, and pretty fun. But if you’re short on spots, or buy into Chet Childress’s story about a bad recession ruining his scheme to frontside grind the Taj Mahal, you could do worse than film a one-spot video part at the ever-mutating Burnside, and the harebrained hillbilly is probably among the better-suited types to pull such a thing off. He’s adopted Portland as a hometown of sorts now, and while he could possibly claim Canada after pushing a Wu-Tang sample for his song, the Label benefits from the thematic push forward I think. The part’s full of trademark Chetisms such as the bluntslide pop-out, the 5-0 revert, an eyebrow-raising switch drop-in and some weird disaster sorta stuff.

Veni Diddy Vici

Render unto John Lucero…

Haven’t heard a great deal of buzz over the new Black Label video, which debuted a few weeks back, something that could be chalked up to people being busy tearing up obsolete Berrics brackets, downloading any of the other 40 videos that came out this summer, or still watching “Debacle” which is high in this blog’s personal running for top five vids of the year (maybe). Whatever the case the venerable Black Label spirit is very much intact through this new production, despite parting ways with half the team; scraggly speedster Vince Del Valle I had heard of, and mainly associated with that one Adidas ad where he’s doing a backside tailslide shove-it on a ledge above a set of stairs – it made a more interesting ad than usual because they’d gone with the still shot instead of the sequence, well-timed with the shove-it halfway to his feet, which probably incited a few arguments amongst the current crop of driveway kickflippers as to what trick it was supposed to be really.

When Vince Del Valle popped up as the first elephant on parade in “God Save the Label” I was hoping to see how it turned out, since that maneuver wasn’t in his “Diagonal” clip… alas, not. But there’s plenty of chicken-fried flavor to this part, which includes tricks over pieces of trash and a proper 90’s-style switch` hardflip into a ditch – on a related topic VDV also packs one of the more classical 360 flips in a world gone mad with Brian Boitano flare-foot.  Also nice: the underpass escalator backside lipslide, pictured above, the tailslide to regular on a rail, cruise control on the multicolored bank and the horns chiming in for the helicopter ender.

Jimmy Carlin Wins Battle At the Berrics On His Day Off

RIP John Hughes

Sometimes it seems SoCal wundergoon Jimmy Carlin is living out this unholy skateboard version of “Ferris Bueler’s Day Off.” As in, this sort of weird, spastic dorky dude busts various moves, gets the girl, the fancy car, triumphs over adversity and gets away with everything even though he probably shouldn’t. Or maybe he should? His personal brand tends to be rather in-your-face and proactive, but it seems to be working for him, and it wouldn’t be a huge stretch to walk outside and see him lipsyncing “Dream Police” aboard a festive parade float. He’s having a good time, like the Tiltmoders, and also like the Tiltmoders, enjoys the luxury of being stupid crazy good without looking like he’s trying much at all. Which brings us to today’s feature, the “Flippity Flop Pit Stop,” which includes a handful of flatground maneuvers that I personally have conceived of only in my most fevered nightmares. Also, he assigns them funny names.

You gotta wonder what the dude is gonna do for his next video part. Tim O’Connor has faced similar dilemmas. Is it all business with the party saved for the credit roll? Mix it up and hope for the best? Or perhaps… lifestyle hammers? Like it matters; the Jimmy Carlin experience is to trip on a gold ingot and fall into a pile of beautiful women who just ordered pizza. We Cameron Fryes of the world can only watch via VX3000.*

*Or whatever Panasonic camera they use for the HD

Tiltmode’s “Bonus Round”: A False Ballad of Hateful Courage

In “Bonus Round,” the faster you run, the faster fate seems to find you.

There is a kind of base truth at the center of “Bonus Round,” a red-eyed tale of warring factions, deceit and wholesale sexual potency, but the viewer has to work for it. Spanning eight continents and untold centuries, the story opens with Nestor Judkins (“Nestor Juarez”), a wet-behind-the-ears anteater dawdling on his first day of anteater school. Waylaid by a hangjaquer with a horizon’s worth of quiet storms in his eyes (Jerry Hsu, “Tim’s Boat”), Judkins is thrust into the center of an interstate intrigue that sees him matching wits against Tommy Lasorda, the famed weight analyst with a new idea that involves anteaters. The dice roll. Hsu is valiant here as Lasorda’s confidant and sometimes lover (spoiler alert) but makes plenty of room for Nestor’s nollie frontside flips – he lets it all hang out in a way that shows he really spent a lot of time with anteaters getting ready for the role.

Meanwhile, back in the 1650s, Louie Barletta (“Oglethorpe”) prepares for a surprise. It is the morning of his 21st birthday, and while doing his normal morning race to the top of Volcano Mountain (“Volcano Mtn”) he uncovers details of a hidden plot against the Egyptian Pharaohs Bank. Barletta gets mileage from his bowl cut and whimsical ways as he pals around Europe with an increasingly volatile band of political perverts (Jon Ngyuen, Jon Choi in TVOTR grandma spectacles, Screaming Lord Halba) who have the kinds of problems regular people dream about. Tiltmode affiliate Julian Quevado logs some nice switch ledge time alongside the sometimes-bearded Jesse Erickson, whose footage is dearly missed from the “Black Cat” days. Barletta soon finds himself in a pickle but is delivered by a bumbling sheepherd (Tam T. Taylor, “A Jason Adams Xmas Joint”) with a secret so awesome it cannot be kept.

At various points the ensemble cast stretches to include Cairo Foster and Paul Sharpe, Siamese twins who run an advertising agency in the big city and moonlight as private detectives; Foster’s appearance here in many ways rivals his shit in “Fully Flared” and the gifted Sharpe continues to sport a moustache in a lot of tender situations. Enjoi newcomer Zack Wallins will turn heads this award season as an abusive pimp, but his acting here as a mute clergyman who claims to have ghostwritten the Ten Anteater Commandments will turn heads in movie theaters – toward the screen.

Ultimately though the storyline wends its way toward two men – Jose Rojo and Led Zeppelin’s Caswell Twilly, here in his acting debut – who hold the keys to an eternal anteater mystery, along with a blue Maserati that everyone just calls Bo. They play off one another jarringly well in the final scenes, with Rojo’s established big-and-tall grace countering Twilly’s greasy-haired spaz power, and the occasional pearls of wisdom dispensed by Bo (college roommates with Snoopy FYI) keep you guessing who the real killer may be. Until it is revealed to be Steve Cab (also a spoiler). Likely to be the movie of the season and eventually earn a position in our hearts and video shelves alongside “Rum Tum Tugger’s Jealous Bounty” and “Forrest Gump,” add “Bonus Round” to your must-watch list and beware the wiles of wealthy anteaters, known as the largest oceangoing mammal.

Rated R for love handles, intense animal adventure scenes and adult situations. Jesse Erickson is nude for the entire film.

Brick Squad

The power of Steve Durante’s switch frontside heelflip compels you to go skating this weekend. Via this Slap “Foto” feature

Block Movement

Recalling a time when world records were giggled at

Element’s newest towheaded amateur Nick Garcia doesn’t entirely stand out from the current generation of ditch-skating ATV types, but there’s a couple things worth checking in this welcome-to-the-team video: namely the opening manual, the half-cab frontside nosegrind and the backside 180 magic-feet maneuver that takes a few rewinds to fully sink in. As far as that manual goes, at a quarter of the video’s runtime it’s probably one for the record books, up there with Hufnagel’s SF city block in “Roll Forever” and Vallely in that one older video I’m having trouble remembering right now. In terms of sheer distance, though, I think the one at the end of “Come Together” still takes the cake, right?

Blast Em

Some great street skating photos from the Brockman issue of Thrasher, chronicling the Santa Cruz/Creature “Saints & Sinners” tour, great to the point I had a hard time choosing which one to poorly scan and post up. I’ve been a Sid Melvin fan, but docked him some points when he started wearing fedoras and went all-in on the urban creative movement. However he’s soldiered through a knee injury and this multi-material wallride is too lifted to ignore. Meanwhile the below Mikey Curtis ollie evoked a serious “holy shit” upon turning the page. Some Indianapolis local may well bring it to our attention that this bar is only three feet high or something (in turn revealing Mikey Curtis as a next-gen Pancho Moler) but whatever the case, it’s a pretty big boost. This issue of Thrasher has a lot of other great pics actually – a massive switch b/s tail from Flipper Rodrigo Teixeira, a really awesome Spitfire ad that features a powerful Peter Hewitt gap to backside lipslide, and even a shot of Mike McGill in what appear to be, yes, brown cords.

Oh and in the text department, Windsor James offers some bro-level advice for travel comfort:
Man Lean
That’s the buds. Tave, Reyes, or Sierra usually. It’s only on planes or on a long van ride. We steal a pillow from the hotel and get the fucking snugs going. You fold the pillow in half and put it in the middle of the seats on the plane. The pillow expands into a little triangle, and then we’re all fitted up and can go to sleep. Then you do the man lean. It’s like if we were at war or something and you had to stand up and sleep at the same time, that’s how you’d be sleeping. Fucking get the fader lean on. If you had a pillow at the bar, you’d do the same thing. If your homie was fucked up too, you’d be like “just chill–lean real quick with this pillow.”

Anyway, yeah, the Curtis photo:

Walking Blues

Couldn’t walk a mile off in my air forces (via Fuse Gallery)

Confronted with shoe walls awash in vulcanized soles and increasingly minimalist silhouettes, one can’t help but wonder if we’re seeing the skate shoe business, known to some as the last and final bastion of early-00’s profitability for the industry, on the verge of commoditizing itself like what happened with hard-goods. Despite efforts from PJ Ladd and TK to goose footwear pricepoints – a bold move in the shadow of a global recession monster – the market seems to dictate that kids basically want $50 Vans, or close approximations thereof, heel bruises and short life spans be damned.

Of course sooner or later tastes will change and tongues will puff up once more, but you have to wonder if technological innovations like the space-age materials currently being pushed by Gravis dude above, or Sole Tech’s shoe lab, or DC’s continued efforts to promote its Super Suede material, are doomed to become the shoe version of carbon fiber decks and air-core wheels. Concaves and dimensions come and go but the skateboard deck hasn’t changed much in the last 18 years, even though the hammer era saw kids of all weight classes snapping boards faster than ever. Who’s to say that the current generation, who may not remember the armoured tanks of yesteryear, don’t see shoes the same way now?

Now this isn’t the usual sepia-toned spiel about how we all need to go back to the good old days and skate only painted curbs so weblog operators don’t feel so horribly insecure. Paying nearly twice as much for shoes that were harder to skate in and only marginally more comfy is a bargain only a fool or a well-paid masochist such as TV’s Steve-O would entertain. But you kind of wonder if the shoe companies aren’t painting themselves into a corner here, profit-wise. Meanwhile you’ve got deck conglomerates pushing and shoving to get into the footwear business, and with companies like DC white-labeling the Lynx to shops or whoever, what’s it even mean to be a skate shoe company anymore? It’s like they’re tiptoeing toward blank deck territory, which recently obliterated professional skateboarding forevermore.

But even though there’s so many skate shoe companies now all basically pushing the same product relatively cheaply, nobody really wants anything else right? So how is this different than boards? Most kids don’t give a hoot if they snap a board in two weeks versus a month, cuz that’s how boards are. Or, kids don’t care enough to light a sales fire under those Almost disc-decks. The Arto shoe purportedly lasts six weeks longer than a comparable shoe*, but are kids that now buy six pairs of shoes per year going to flock to Gravis so they only have to buy shoes four times per year? People used to a regular turnover maybe don’t want their shoes to last longer, like how you want a fresh board every so often and aren’t trying to ride the same deck for 12 months.

Perhaps the the simple-shoe revolution of the 00’s is all part of a master plan to move more shoes faster. It just seems like it could wind up biting them in the ass, the way all the deck manufacturers are hustling to diversify into clothes and whatnot. Consider: with next to nothing in the way of construction advancement (slicks aside) deck prices have stayed roughly the same for almost 20 years, or at least seriously lagged the inflation rate. (Ye olde inflation calculator puts a $55 board in 1992 at $75 in 2008 dollars.) Must the skateboard economy heal itself?

*however they calculated that one

Doin’ the Mud Foot

ABD by Bob Burnquist BTW

The danger with evolving into an institution, at least as far as the wonderful world of skateboard videos goes, is the risk of devolving into formula, and TWS’s video output definitely has one, with variances depending on who’s behind the lens in any given year. So it’s worth noting what “Rite Foot Forward” does in terms of coloring outside the lines laid down by Evans*, Hunt, et al–mostly a slim 35-minute runtime that again dispenses with the voiceovers (best move TWS vids have made in the last six years, besides filming Richard Angelides) and most of the bum footage. This time around the Holland/Ray duo leave the dusty 70’s roadhouse rock in favor of a color-splashed perpetual motion machine similar to the one that powered Nike’s “Debacle” vid, but with a little more of a retro 80’s feel. One personal highlight was the intro’s opening synth line, which had me thinking for a hot second that “RFF” would dare to be stupid, though these hopes were soon dashed like so many Weird Al Grammy dreams.

Kellen James is definitely sipping on that I-can-fuck-with-Koston juice, and who knows, maybe he can these days. There’s credit to be given to dudes who see the classical appeal in switch k-grinding handrails and his nollie bigspin backside tailslide is mean; also liked how he got all Kyle Leeper on those pavilion blocks and the round-the-way switch noseblunt. Nice part with the perfect first-section song, and while there’s only so many frontside shoves out of backside lipslides that the world needs, the world is Kellen James’ oyster right now as far as skateboard tricks go, which seems like a lot of fun.

Meanwhile, I forgot to mention before how I was a fan of Joey Brezinski’s 180 switch manual-body varial line.

Fun historical analogues in the montage, not limited to Slash’s Bartman tee–Dan Peterka comes out of retirement for a mondo kink boardslide and Theotis Beasley touches down on a backside double heelflip, and while I’m sure somebody somewhere has done one since the heady days of “Big Pants Small Wheels,” I’ll be durned if I’ve seen one personally. At a certain point comes Corey Duffel, whose brand of punk rawk has a kind of calculatedness that’s summed up really well in the credits-footage bluntslide, where he knocks some loosened knobs off a ledge and scatters them in front of the camera, just so. We’ll note for the record the sports jerseys, give props to the backside tailslide, and submit that adding nosegrabs generally does not always make a trick compelling.

Recently unretired Matt Beach is quite different, in a few different ways. It’s another notch in the altruistic column for Nike Inc. and I think skateboarding right now needs more people with his type of mindset in general. Good tricks were the switch tailslide switch kickflip, the ice powerslide and that frontside blunt pop to fakie, and it’s cool that this dude can come out of the wilderness and bust Jimmy Carlin ledge tricks if he wants to. Nice but lengthy song too, although the last trick is worth the wait and one for the books, whatever those are and wherever they’re kept.

*Slow-mo headstand kid was a definite shout-out

Bobby Worrest: Time to Die

Bobby Worrest had buddies who died face-down in the muck so that you and I can enjoy this internet blog website

Not so long ago, I went a-shopping and came up on a copy of the old PitCrew video “Where I’m From” being offered for the princely sum of $5, so I figured, what the fuck–pretty awesome DC effort with parts from Jake Rupp and Darren Harper, not as good as “Pack a Lunch,” but what is. What hit me most about this vid was that Bobby Worrest was in full-on snotnosed fashion, a skinny little kickflippin’ handrailin’ terror that I barely recognized, accustomed as I am to the macrobrew-swilling tattoo merchant nowadays beloved by the Gonz. It was sort of like wandering into the corner bar in your hometown and seeing the little neighbor kid all puffed up and red-faced, nursing a tequila sunrise, except if you were in the nation’s capital and possessed a functional time machine along with some flannel.

The modern day Bobby Worrest has many advantages. He can dress. You know, he’s got that tech ability but there’s restraint too, when you talk about taking the switch 360 flip to noseslide back to regular. The dude has an eye for overlooked ledge tricks (b/s 180 to switch k-grind), skates at night a lot and has the balls to do a fakie hardflip on flat, and not even the Bryan Herman-approved kind of hardflip which is all the rage these days. Old(er) school rap is becoming kind of a safer move for skate parts these last couple years but it’s a good look here as there’s a lot of actual street skating in this part, by which we mean longer lines than you’d normally see, straying beyond the generally accepted format of b/s tailslide 270 shove-it, nollie 360 flip, front blunt bigspin or whatever the Forecast generation’s version of the b/s tail-nollie flip-nosegrind 411 line may be.

Sort of like Silas Baxter Neal, probably Bobby Worrest is at some point in his career where he can keep cranking out parts like this and be good for years, as long as he stays away from those chicken-scratcher grinds on banks. It’s hard to guess at what his ultimate motivation might be. If it’s strippers and beer and weed then his longevity may be secure.