Nickel-Plated Pockets

It is an interesting time in the shove-it industry. Over the last several of years, it seemed like the shove-it was making a serious bid against the kickflip for market share over bumps-to-bars and cans, after the backside bigspin overpowered the backside kickflip in the ratio of victory-lap tricks. The recent indulgence in conventionally ‘ugly’ and ‘dad tricks’ even has found a place for the fakie frontside pop shove-it, among the least aesthetically pleasing forms. As skateboarders push out the walls to make things freer, fairer, less strictly hierarchical and more open, it is clear that the shove-it has benefited.

As a trick, the shove-it always has stood with a more utilitarian bearing than its chief rival, the kickflip. This is because the 180 degree rotation swaps the typically longer and wider nose with the shorter and sometimes more tapering tail, potentially altering the way you pop the next trick, what the next trick even will be, or any number of other butterfly-winged effects on the planet around us. A kickflip, or any of its fakie/switch/nollie versions, solely flips the board in place, leaving it in position to immediately be popped again in the pusher’s preferred position. One can kickflip a board, land and keep going, unhassled. The shove-it leaves the board in a different place, and perhaps, one’s mind as well.

Now comes Blake Norris, student of the old SF spots and gods, with a grab bag of a trick list — an inward heelflip lipslide, a blaster of a backside heelflip and a half-cab into the bloodthirstiest bank as yet unknowed by Milton Martinez. Between the China banks, the hills and a crazy one on Clipper, Blake Norris mid-line screeches a backside powerslide that quickly spins 90 degrees further into a shove-it, midway through a downhill line. For sure it’s cool to look at, as a trick, but it retains the shove-it’s purposefulness, moderating speed at the same time.

Could broader incorporation of powerslide shove-its into the ongoing hill-bomb wave, possibly elevated by the GX1000/Supreme axis, mount the shove-it’s most serious push yet to counter the kickflip? Who’s done a frontside powerslide shove-it? Speaking of shoves, will Blake Norris’ wallride nollie backside bigspin on the fence squeeze grudging approval from longtime detractors of the unfairly maligned bigspin varietal?

Due To Skating To An Unreleased Steely Dan Demo And Other Services Rendered, Niels Bennett Hereby Is Named Your 2020 Skater Of The Year

Think about the totality of human history. Go ahead. It’s about 200,000 years. A long time, but not that long. Some highs (discovery of fire, the toboggan, automatic bill-pay), some lows (the extinction of the unicorn, alarming levels of space garbage), and in between numerous creamy middles. Yet perhaps the most shocking conclusion over this period is the relatively small number of people have set skate parts to Steely Dan songs.

‘Bro,’ a knowing bro may say. ‘Recall Mike Santarossa, later to be Prime’s most reliable nollie backside kickflipper, skating to “Do It Again” in a demo footage-heavy section for Powell’s “Scenic Drive” that also included the rarely spotted half cab to frontside smith grind 180 out.” This is a fair point, driven home with bloodcurdling abandon by the fact that the terminally smooth Tony Ferguson in ‘North 2’ later would reprise the same song. A deep-thinking bro may go on to highlight how ‘Dirty Work’ soundtracked the latter half of Dan Narloch’s boss level section in the late ’00s Midwestern seminality ‘Boondoggle,’ or that Studio snippeted ‘Boston Rag’ to open its 2012 ‘Mood Lighting’ project. It would have been really difficult for Logan Lara to avoid incorporating ‘Reelin In Tha Years’ into a ‘Boys Of Summer’ release at some point.

And yet all of these choices made by individuals over the last ~25 years fall short in their own ways, for instance by leaning heavily on the somewhat generic if well-executed ‘classic rock’ projections of the early Steely Dan catalogue, before they fully steeped their music in jazz arrangements, kicked off all those other dudes, and plowed through hundreds of millions of dollars in studio time for days-long pursuits of the perfect take. Here in human history, and indeed the planet’s own, Scott Johnston stands apart in Mad Circle’s Bay Area document ‘Let The Horns Blow,’ using ‘Peg’ in a choice that has reverbrated and frequently gyrated through time.

With untold eons yet to go, now comes Niels Bennett, onetime amateur for Girl, this week promoted into the professional ranks via the svelte and vaguely clown-themed ‘Nervous Circus.’ After introducing Australian ripsaw Rowan Davis, some frontside flip reminders from Tyler Pacheco, a couple Sean Malto clips that suggest he could at this point be older than 17, and four straight minutes of Griffin Gass’ thundering, early-Andrew-Allen-meets-Primitive tech, Niels Bennett sails in with a satisfactory-sounding backside 5-0 and a string of high-fives to his forebears. There is a Rick flip, a frontside heelflip bigspin at Fort Miley, a fakie frontside flip the hard way over the Keenan Milton rail in LA, a fakie backside nosegrind 180 out at New York’s pyramid ledges that must for sure have been done before, but this good? The switch frontside bigspin is a post-millennium take on that one planter gap a bunch of those dudes used to skate and he has previously provided Chaffey materials.

Mark Suciu, who may be viewed as a spiritual predecessor to Niels Bennett, embedded similar themes into his ‘Cross Continental’ part in, wow, 2012. But in addition to a vicious and strategically placed fakie ollie and the incredible looking bluntslide to backside tailslide across the Flushing grate gap, Niels Bennett presses humankind forward via the incorporation of ‘Let George Do It,’ a deeply mined demo gemstone cast off by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen early in their 1970s vision quest. The song is in one swoop a sturdy vehicle for Niels Bennett’s loose limbed and cerebral tricks, a nod to his probably more fastidious Chocolate forebear, and a recognition that musical supervision decisions still exist that will stand up across human centuries, while remaining beyond the psionic clutches of Youtube’s copyright beholders.

Are unsleeping and relentless song-recognition algorithms to blame for the Siberian unicorn’s untimely extinction? When’s the last time you turned up the volume when ‘Is There A Ghost’ began bleating out of the speakers? Are switch frontside bluntslides for Griffin Gass similar to a 50-50 grind for everybody else? Does the dreamsicle color scheming of Niels Bennett’s debut OG model fill you with a childlike sense of longing for times past, or an inescapable woe over spilled popsicle sticks coagulating into sidewalk blobs, and guiltridden memories of slain unicorns?