I Might Be Wrong

But watching these Heath Kirchart off-cuts from the Emerica vid, I feel like there’s a passing moment around 8:49 here, where he’s hopping into the golf cart en route to landing that giant 360, that you can see the thought of maybe not retiring pass through the motorcycle helmet…

Title TK

Even without flipping it over and looking for the little logo you could probably tell skateboarding bears a “made in America” seal just because of the tendency towards going big, and sometimes going overboard. Big pants/small wheels, goofy boys, paint-on pants, substance abuse, stair counts, ledge combos, the personas of Alva, Muska, Mike Plumb, et cetera. The mega ramp. You have your top dogs specific to a certain latitude/longitude as the pendulum swings this way or that, for instance Ron Knigge or Josh Kasper or Ray Underhill, and then what turn out to be the more longview types that might rise up during one era or another but don’t wind up being defined by it and find ways to roll with whatever’s going at the moment, say Carroll, Daewon Song, Jason Dill, Grant Taylor — Mark Gonzales. Like, there may be more technically skilled or bigger-jumping dudes going at any one point, but if you’re watching “the Storm,” you’ve got Jerry Hsu on one hand and Scott Paezelt on another.

All of which is a typically long-winded way of coping with a melting of mind following a couple watches of Eli Reed’s entry in the X-Games “real street” competition, a minute-long clip that’s a little gratuitous as far as including a couple magazine cover clips and some of the more original (versus “creative”) tricks to come along in a good while. If I was, heaven forfend, a judge on “America’s Next Top Flow Bro” I would formulate some sound bite to the effect that Eli Reed has a “point of view.” Like, who’s doing nollie bonelesses on name hubbas? Switch backside 360 manual? I’m sure there are some “Forecast” seeds that have pulled similar 360-flip nosegrinds and switch bigspin flips but a key difference is that this dude’s method has that appealing stink on it. Switch k-grind for the 90s dudes and wise use of the big switch ollie, which also helped get me onboard with Mikey Taylor during the City Stars days. A minute long and this is easily one of the best sections all year, I hope he gets the $50k or whatever it is.

I Pledge Allegiance To My Swag Vol 1., Or: R U Still Down?

Back in the year 1996, many were rewinding Satva Leung’s switch frontside flip and gearing up for several years of cargo pant ownership, while Saturday Night Live alum Al Franken penned a book of political satire that also included a hearty endorsement of the seemingly all-powerful Lexis Nexis search tool, and an anecdote about growing up during the time of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. The point of that parable was that as a Jewish family, Franken’s folks felt as though they had an obligation to support the struggle of other groups of people struggling against marginalization.

Now it is 50 years later, machines do our bidding and the eras of disco, alternative music and cargo pants all have come and gone. The magazine King Shit publishes this week an interview with a woman in the process of no longer being a man who also skates. She is from North Carolina, knows her way around a switch backside tailslide and seems generally guarded. Which probably makes sense, since one of the mostly endearing things about this little realm is a sort of terminal immaturity that lends itself to hopping fences, sassing authorities and buying merchandise with all types of skulls and fire on it. Alongside a healthy appreciation for bathroom humor comes a mentality where a rumor that pro X might be gay, for instance, can rise up and be chattered over for something like a decade.

If you look to the Slap board, that often harsh portal into some of the views that get kicked around your typical skatepark, everybody’s pretty supportive of this woman, while lodging various quips and whatnot. It is worth pondering from the perspective of considering skating an outlier subculture. Coming up outside California around the time Thrasher ran the tombstone on its cover, skateboarding was for sure an outsider’s pastime when it came to parents, peers and assorted authorities and so occasionally, when being shown the door of some loading dock or other, that you had some taste of the challenges faced by other sorts of folks regarded as lower-value or below the norm by the powers that be.

(Here’s a placeholder paragraph where can be shoveled all the necessary and true disclaimers about this pursuit being rooted in a kids’ hobby that we all make a conscious choice to take up, and how there are and will be far worse trials in the world than getting kicked out of spots, termed a “loser” and/or dressed down by the police or security guards.)

In the run-up to this interview being published I wondered about whether or not people would have supported this girl’s deal as much in 1996 as the folks on the Slap board seem to be this week, how much of this is indicative of society being more open of mind in 2011 and so on. One of the concerns rambled on about in the past at this blog-site is what becomes of the social fabric of this little realm, with now at tens of millions of kids owning boards, sanctioned skateparks supplanting street spots, lessons and coaches and sports agents and TV shows, yadda yadda. And at what point a sub-culture can still claim outsider status if more kids are kickflipping than playing shortstop, and whether skateboarding still sets out a welcome mat for misfits, or if they’ll still even want to come in? It seems like in the past there was a time when such types gravitated toward skateboarding but these days you wonder if it’s skateboarding that needs more folks like this girl.