Leo Valls Takes Advantage Of A Hurricane To Make A Case For The Continued Relevance Of Tail Devils, Grappling Hooks

The kindest gift that Paul Rodriguez ever bestowed upon the industry was making switch 360 flips down double sets look not-really-trying casual. Upping the ante in one’s mid-teens to not only top-drawer difficulty but seeming no-sweat execution put a fresh floor under tricks that pushed boundaries and set the stage for a weird and wondrous era in which random YouTube kids compete with professionals for unique page views and thumbs-up identifiers. It also enabled dudes who aren’t up to switch backside noseblunting handrails to differentiate on metrics such as speed, aesthetics, geography, or wearing suspenders. French cobblestone ticklers Magenta have based their whole deal on agility and architecture without fussing a great deal over filling up their tech/gnar power meters, pumping out a stream of sliding- and pushing-packed vids that have refreshed and divided the populace in ways similar to the Stereo videos of yore, except with more Wu-Tang Clan.

Making a New York vid probably has been on these dudes’ list as long as the Los Angeles schoolyards were for the Palace guys, and watching their new ‘Panic in Gotham’ clip you get a sense of the zest with which they screeched their wheels across these hallowed streets, even if most of the marquee spots were disregarded in favor of jumping whatever benches and bars they ran across. New York long has been associated with chutzpah and some balls are helpful if you aim to insert clips of flatground shove-its or a repeat of one of those one-footed slider moves, but this raises interesting questions around the role of these caffeinated French purists, and tricks like Leo Valls’ tail-skid to slappy noseslide.

Are the Magenta bros in their tightly fished, powerslide-mining fashion pushing as much innovation as the likes of Corey Kennedy or Torey Pudwill working over a DIY parking block ledge? Would their efforts be classified as ‘lateral’ progression, devolution or some as-yet unknown direction? Is there room for Magenta as a hardgood manufacturer to differentiate on products amenable to their styles of scooching and spinning, like ceramic wheels or tailguards? Could Magenta and Nissan collab on an environmentally friendly grappling hook that enables urban skaters to hook a ride on a low-emission vehicle?

R.O.T.O.R.

Time was, back in the early 1990s, when parking lots were paved with shredded nails and one video came out every 18 months and all videos were 8 minutes long, the sweet and shining nuggets were pretty easy to sift out from the mud and silt. Now, the 24-hour Hella-clips cycle and shrinking availability of footwear team slots has kept pro boarders and those who would be slow on their collective grinds, and tricks that once might have echoed through the years like a Jovontae Turner 360-flip or a Mike Maldonado brick-wall ollie now are lucky to rise above the din of uploads for more than a day or so. It is in this spirit that we link to this Anton Myhrvold video part linked up by SML Wheels, and in particular the wild abandon that characterizes the first trick in the line at 3:33, a short stroll down the block from the place where Josh Kalis offered a slightly different version a few years ago (was he the first one to spin that trick switch?). The whole section is heavy.

Explosive Sticker-Price Explosion In Stickers Sets Inflation Alarm Bells A-Ringing

Skateboarding has long seemed impervious to the whims of inflation, with a deck and grip-tape in 1990 costing roughly the same as it does today, a conundrum that has confounded shop owners and time-travelers bent on achieving quick profits. Logic rules that over time a good either rises in price as ingredient or construction costs increase, or becomes cheaper due to advances in more efficient production techniques and more easily mined minerals. In skateboard decks’ instance, technologically advanced choppers derived from multi-blade Gillette razors have eased the felling of Canadian hard-rock maples, but the giant iron weights needed to press plies together and form decks have grown more dear due to increased demand from coastal New Jersey exercise parlours.

But fallout from the worldwide economic volcano could change all. Easy-money policies pursued by the Fed and other central banks have raised fears that nebulous and weird “bubbles” could be a-growing in certain segments of industry, risking catastrophe. So sayeth Esther George, Midwestern Fed banker:

“”Prices of assets such as bonds, agricultural land, and high-yield and leveraged loans are at historically high levels. A sharp correction in asset prices could be destabilizing,” she added.

On the internet, Ebay is an electronic marketplace where web users can buy bundled tongue depressors and floppy disks by the pound, or gently used pants. It is a digital bazaar where bargain-hunting is the law of the land and strange economic aberrations can develop, challenging monetary norms and thought processes. So it is that skateboard stickers have undergone a mutant outgrowth in price, with the “buy it now” demand of $16.99 for one cassette-tape sized decal running a hefty 3,400% premium to the 50-cent rate prescribed by glass case curators nationwide in 1994.

Here, fond remembrances of the passing Bridgebolt fancy of the early 1990s costs $8.00 to relive in sticker form. This Powell sticker ostensibly from the 70s is the size of several dimes, comes with ‘authentic’ centering error and is $32 to buy immediately. Elsewhere, two American dollars sought for a couple SMA stickers possibly reflects the harshness of Europe’s sovereign debt problems. Other entities, such as Apple Computer and HURLEY.COM, also make skateboard stickers.

Could a neon-coloured Steve Rocco Sims sticker selling for $27 or a $100 asking price for a larger Powell decal jostle the economy in an unfriendly way? Is there a market for recently unearthed Tracker stickers? Will packets of Bad Boy Club stickers ever find their true home? View more stickers currently on offer here.