From an ergonomically conscious, low-emissions chair, we are invited to gaze from full-bleed windows upon an empire to hold — sands and wave, manicured desert fauna, native wood, electricalized vehicles, a rain garden. It is a world of opportunity, progression, mindful hustle and passion, with no single-use plastics, preserving natural spaces and personal wealths for future generations. On the weekends, good wine, and good friends.
The game is real estate development. The stakes: Working capital, and maybe, your life. First in are the sharp-nosed swift simmers that take the choicest, juiciest morsels and move along when the throbbing, silvery schools press in. For these must settle for smaller, faster, needier bites, budging and shoving and taking what they can. Always hurried, because you know what comes next: The massive, ironclad submersibles, their snaky sucking hoses pulling in everything not fast enough to flee, their bowels a-churn with knives and rotors chopping all into low-cost slurry for the industrial processors that pulsate privately above.
This is the world, and its strife. As an Instagramming financial pontificator, former pro skater Mikey Taylor’s fiduciary goal is to be the early swimmer, not a slurry-bound slowpoke. In the sphere of real estate, there are buildings to be gut rehabbed, multi-unit leasables to be securitized, tracts to be acquired at auction for a song. And yet, it is all the same sea. What if there were another?
Bronze 56K became the first company to drop a skate video in the ’20s, earning several experience points and perhaps a cash award. (As a privately held company Bronze 56K is not obligated to publicize its financial performance.) ‘Hardware For The Masses’ revealed itself to be another timeless entry in Bronze 56K’s discography, now arguably among the most consistent of any company currently in operation. Bronze 56K always has been a spendthrift entity, repurposing defunct software logos, beer commercials and Wolfenstein 3D editions to conjure among the most powerful branded shirt conglomerates east of St. Louis.
Can tricks too be exhumed, gently brushed and refurbished in a retrofied way to again command a market premium? Bronze’s cultural dumpster divers work these seams too. Consider the humble frontside 180. The board goes up, it turns, you turn, and ride away clean. For decades far too basic for lines, and after thorough early-00s hucking by the likes of Andrew Reynolds, Dustin Dollin, Kerry Getz and Jamie Thomas, it summarily was cast aside as a stair or gap rattler in favor of variations involving flips, shove-its and/or switch-stance. For years the frontside 180 rotted as though entombed beneath an aromatic, regenerative compost heap. Then arrived muckraking New Jerusalemer Dick Rizzo, coiled and unshaven. In Quasi’s seminal ‘Mother’ Dick Rizzo boosts back-to-back frontside 180s down the Bronx’s Jerome Ave banks, turns a switch one over a gold rail under security pressure and goes regular off a miniscule bump to standard-sized bar; in Bust Crew’s deep-tissue tingling ‘Nightmare Van’ last year, he jumps another frontside 180 into a kinked bank ride-out. Italian Bronzester Jacopo Carozzi likes them, and in ‘Hardware for the Masses’ Adrian Vega turns one over the Pulaski wall in a line, while GangCorp youngster Dougie pops one off a bump to stair, and on IG frontside 180s over a studily built wooden bench.
As the World Economic Forum convenes this week to ponder the monetary conundrums of our time, could real estate technicians, uninspired by rental returns and flexy property valuations, direct their intellectual horsepower and florid body heat toward overlooked tricks such as the frontside 180 that exhibit solid returns and honest thrills even if they may not feature in a Primitive vid? Does the frontside 180’s market valuation increase, and the potential return on investment decrease, with each such clip collected in a Bronze 56K vid? Does former SOTY Kyle Walker’s frontside 180 in ‘Be Free’ stand as an early indicator that the trick is ripe for a ’20s resurgence?
boil the ocean 