Escapists

In the 1994 Rick Ross blockbuster ‘Speed,’ main character (also named Rick Ross) is a man who refuses to be pinned down. Haunted by a past he cannot put behind him, chronically unable to drive 55 and enveloped in weed smoke, he is in each moment running from the last. On an empty by-way near Miami — a sweltering port metropolis where people go to cast off their pasts and sometimes, themselves — Rick ‘Rick Ross’ Ross escalates a routine radar trap into a manic flight from Johnny Law, scrambling past the leather-gloved grip of justice and hurling himself over a guardrail, entrusting his fate to the the Atlantic’s chilly bosom. The stakes are his life.

Are the rest of us any different? The seven pressed maple plys, the circular urethane and the shiny metal trucks, properly nutted and bolted together, function variously as a mental off ramp, a time machine, an escape hatch of the soul. The physical transport element is window dressing for the transportative powers of simply rolling down the street, capable of teleporting a person into a different mood, an earlier age, a livelier body less beaten down by time, injury and much toil. Skateboarding has long been a refuge for the kid with the shitty home life, lonely at school. All-consuming battles for tricks can carry a sense of obsession and even futility, but carry the side benefit of blotting out the stress and hurry and noise that can consume the remainder of the day’s waking hours. Pros and others speak of ‘blacking out’ moments or more in the final pursuit of landing some long-fought trick; the ensuing euphoria is often cited as one of the things about skating that draws and hooks people, and the forced mental tunnel-visioning required to get there is probably a main factor behind skating’s Venn diagram overlap with addiction.

Videos can be similarly transportative. Whereas a single-trick clip shows a moment in time, footage of lines thrills with possibility — the far corners of some spot hinted at the edge of the fisheye lens, the uncertainty of where the run will go or what trick will come next, how long it can be pushed. Pontus Alv, a master of the form, grasps this: “What I always try to do is to hide the future for the viewer,” he said in Solo in 2016. “When you film from behind you see where he goes and watch his foot position and figure out what he’s gonna do. I always start filming a line from the front, cause the viewer has no clue then. The more you can hide, the more dramatic it gets, the more energy you add to it.”

Locales work the same way, with the vast and seemingly untapped plazas showcased in Lordz ‘They Don’t Give a Fuck About Us’ as important a part of the video as Bastien Salabanzi, William Phan, Alex Carolino and Florentin Marfain, vicarious spot tourism for US heads that went levels deeper than what Flip and Es and 411VM had brought. Michael Mackrodt built his one-man ‘Fishing Lines’ franchise around exotic spot-seeking in places like west Africa and Siberia. One of the most engrossing videos of the 2010s, ‘Ordos’, included no big-name pros of the day, mainly starring a near-empty city in Inner Mongolia and all the boundless, otherworldly potential it held.

Next in this lineage comes the Nocturnup Taipei video published earlier this month on Free, part of an ongoing project from Daryl Dominguez and Nick Richards that centers on skating some of the world’s most congested cities at night. The practical result is to film tricks that’d be impossible during the daytime crush of pedestrians and traffic, but the sum is much more than the excellent clips — plunging the viewer into a twilight maze of grimy loading docks and indoor malls that never close, a haze of smeary streetlights and crowds of idle scooters. The half-dozen skaters in the crew pop up grates to jump street gaps and do Miles Silvas tricks on tile ledges, threading among midnight street festivals and lone sidewalk sweepers. All around the city reaches into blackness, until the sun starts to rise as Daryl Dominguez battles a 360 flip bomb drop.

Will escalating jet fuel prices and the threat of global recession further throttle wanderlusting pros, and keep the world’s remaining untapped skate spots the domain of their locals for a few more years? Has Michael Mackrodt assumed Kenny Reed’s historical role as the plug for handrails not yet frontside crooked grinded by Jamie Foy, or stonework plazas not yet worked over by Mark Suciu? What was Rick Ross’ plan after jumping into the channel?

Summertime Mixtape Vol. 10 – Devine Calloway, ‘Let’s Do This!!1’

A shining example of classically cornball TWS editing and a ‘big’ song in the post-Ty Evans/Jon Holland era, Devine Calloway launched the second act of his career via Chocolate and DC after previously popping up as a braided City Stars shorty. It was a time when you could kick off a video part with a nollie backside bigspin and pack a suitcase full of New Eras for an international flight, and Devine Calloway was peaking, one of the first dudes to take the recently reclaimed backside bigspin down sizable gaps and making rarely recommended stuff like the nollie varial flip and 360 frontside pop shove-it look kinda incredible. He’s in the breeze, flannels flapping, floating over that SF street gap, board always spinning back to his feet with plenty of time to spare. 

Summertime Mixtape Vol. 10 – Ray Barbee, ‘Can’t Stop’

In between getting ripped off by multiple generations of Chocolate team members, Ray Barbee played a cigar-chomping card sharp in the Firm’s big 2003 video that turned into a swan song for the ex-Bones Brigadier brand that brought up Rodrigo TX and Frank Gerwer, among others. Ray Barbee was a vet a few times over at this point but there he was, hitting the Barcelona spots like Sants that were starting to bubble and running through the current LA schoolyards, parking lot gaps and sidewalk bumps with that impossible-to-replicate smoothness, fully decking tricks in the deep end and plunging down big banks. 

Summertime Mixtape Vol. 10 – Adidas, ‘Greece’

Before ‘big shoe’ consolidated its power and sorted pro skateboarding into three major camps, the sportswear conglomerates’ contracting activities produced teams with a certain eclecticism of lineup that went a long way toward establishing the programs’ credibility and capacity to add something to ‘the conversation.’ They resulted in vids like this 2012 Adidas one, a high point of the Juice Design-steered, geographically organized period, which caught a good deal of the early triple-striped squadron in top form. There’s Pete Eldridge blasting monster switch tricks with the ‘Bootlet 3000’ shotgun blasts echoing somewhere, Lucas Puig still in the early innings of a peerless two–decade run, Silas Baxter-Neal doing a load of tricks he probably still could do, and a pre-thickening Jake Donnelly, massively tweaking switch flips between sun-bleached boat rides, rubbery synthesizers and umbrella drinks. You assume there is a Tim O’Connor clip in there somewhere. 

Summertime Mixtape Vol. 10 – Steve Durante, ‘Inhabitants’

For a minute or two in the waning days of the Dubya Bush administration, Steve Durante looked about ready to form Habitat’s new core. A Jerseyite rocking a Fred Gall bun, Steve Durante translated the Wenning hunch and ledge tech to the pivot fakie/brown cords era, ratcheting up the difficulty quotient a notch or several with tricks here like the switch frontside shove-it 5-0, the switch backside lipslide variations and the nollie noseblunt pop-out in the middle of Cincinnati’s most knowed loading dock ledge. This dude was one of the few on the national scene putting in time in Philadelphia during the lull between the Stevie/Kalis era and the Sabotage resurgence; the line here through the Muni plaza still could slot seamlessly into any of the latter crew’s vids. 

Summertime Mixtape Vol. 10 – Spencer Fujimoto, ‘Peep This’

There is a looseness to this part that kicked off Zoo York’s 1999 comp vid that now looks like some product of a less-calculated age, when people would do their thing in the sessions over the course of the season and when the filmer put it together you’d maybe wind up with a tight couple minutes, multiples of the same trick and a ratio of orange t-shirts to overall footage that’s probably yet to be surpassed. Both Spencer Fujimoto’s nollie backside flip off the Keenan Milton bump and the one over the Brooklyn Banks wall are gems, and rather than making it the ender, the section starts off with the heaviest clip, the frontside shove-it into the courthouse bank. It clicked though in a vid that was more about the mix of heads, the lines and the crowded streets, versus the still-nascent arms race for enders.