Immortal Technique

A body blow to the soul of skateboarding as Dylan Rieder makes a way-too-early exit from an arena that needed him around. Just a few days after Bill Strobeck issued review material from “Cherry’s” 2014 ‘style class’, there’s a void left by a persona with enough forward lean to tuck shirts and cuff pants, and brute force that could land a regular-stance ledge trick on Thrasher’s cover in 2014. Cancer is pointless and terrible.

The switch backside bigspin flip that ends Transworld’s 2006 entry “Time to Shine” remains gnarly enough for Walker Ryan to lament his own struggles landing a similar version in the Figgy Thrasher, and at the same time there were deeply excavated lip concoctions like the noseblunt slide revert. The eponymous Gravis part got Dylan Rieder a perennial period to accompany single-name status and did as much as any project to legitimize and elevate the standalone online video part, that wrapped-not-spun ollie impossible over the bench demanding rewinds half a decade later. “Cherry” delivered a sort of peak Dylan Rieder, good naturedly teasing girls and honing the frontside flip/360 flip/fakie flip/impossible to finely barbed hooks. The art-film-slash-video-part for his Huf shoe played like a greatest hits reel that basically could’ve only come from this dude.

Dylan Rieder’s contribution to all this isn’t quantifiable, which is partly the point. He rose up with the technical chops and California-dream profile that opened a potential path to a Ryan Sheckler lifestyle enabled by the deepest-pocketed surf and sport gear sponsors. Instead he sought counsel from addled iconoclasts AVE and Dill, pared back his trick repertoire and designed skateable loafers; his Street League runs read like some lyrical argument for quality over quantity, and he got to see the movement he helped shape flow across borders in “Cherry,” setting one of the more vibrant arcs for skating so far this decade.

Besides a body of footage and photos that now won’t taper off or fizzle out, though, Dylan Rieder’s sometimes easy to caricature approach wound up proving, again, one of those truisms not just of the skate biz but a lot of times life in general – how commitment and consideration to left turns in life can transform those early-on arched eyebrows and half-hidden snickers to grudging respect and eventually full-blown fandom. Wish there were more.

Tags: Dylan Rieder