Throwback Magazine Wallpaper TSM Page Number Super Quiz Opportunity

Way back when, there was a point in which my room went wall-to-wall with magazine page paneling that pulled heavily from the old TWS photo issues with lots of full-bleeds, “Sightings” and now-vintage DCSHOECOUSA ads. Jim Greco’s switch kickflip down the old Med Choice gap in the Nirvana shirt was featured, and I think a Neal Mims roof gap 360 flip. This is one of several reasons I could not run a scans blog, alongside a fuzzboxed memory bank when it comes to who had ads in what issue and generally being poor at scanning I think. But on top of the Cory Kennedy sequence from the Transworld below there were at least four pages I’d tear out of the new Skateboard Mag if I was doing up a new wall, starting with this Ryan Lay 5-0 — the perilously close-to-the-wall switch b/s lipslide a few pages later is another one* and so is Anthony Schultz’s bump-to-fence blaster on page 112. Anybody care to guess what the fourth one is?

*They’d have to be on different sides of the room though because I’m not about to put two photos of the same dude right next to one another, bad form etc

Master and Servant

Human junk

There is a hazy, dreamlike quality to the generally ripping footage slathered across the 51-minute runtime of Slave’s inaugural video offering “Radio Television” that you could say reflects the company’s underlying theme: a demented fantasy existence of big-boned, bearded and beered-up old dude skateboarders, and the twisted dreams of those kids who aspire to this lifestyle. Sort of like the ads, it sometimes looks like the screen’s been smeared with dirt.

When Jamie Thomas gave Ben Horton’s bloodthirsty tiger room to chase and devour the gazelles of this hallowed industry, there was some mumblings and grumblings about how Slave was some type of Black Box AWS knockoff, or a transparent attempt to build a functioning Anti-Hero replica without the years of hard living, jail time and the crippling departure of a budding Brazilian superman. Watching the “Radio Television” video you kind of get the idea that these type of theories overshoot the Slave bros’ aspirations, which seem to revolve around concrete parks, marijuana, late-night cable TV and in certain cases the aforementioned beard farming. There’s an abundance of stock footage, yeah, but it’s thematic and generally thrown in in a way that’s closer to the Baker Boys productions than anything out of the DNA camp, and the notion of “artsiness” resides several counties away with a restraining order.

The overall idea is probably closer to Black Label, and in certain instances the Slave dudes manage to out-Black Label the Label itself, a half-assed idea of mine prompted by video opener Anthony Schultz, whose maybe most impressive clip is nollie inward heelflipping up the sizable three-up-three-down steps in SF. For the arachnophobic there are maybe one too many scary spiders and definitely a lot of the lipslide-to-switch-crooks type combos, the feeble to b/s lipslide is pretty wild. The other bookend, spacebound Jon Goemann, employs a Dylan Rieder-type flow amongst the transitions and doles out power moves like a switch bar hop and the wallride over the ditch ramp. Maybe his rail shit (kickflip 5050, switch f/s noseslide, fakie artoslide) got him the last part by default, or how he put a frontside spin into Rowley’s madness ditch.

Ex-Zero recruits Mumford and Allie surface somewhere in the creamy middle – Mumford’s into Whale Wars and yellow hats now and seems solely focused on making the pool tile sing, when he’s not seeking to crack open his head on padless/helmetless loops. Jon Allie, working a moustache that makes him look like a cross between Cooper Wilt and John C. Reilly, still has a nice frontside tailslide but also hangs onto that tendency to make a line out of a flatground trick and then a rail jump – the one with the b/s nosegrind pop-out was way better and kudos out to the backside 180 nosegrind toward the end.

The core of this video, and possibly company, seem to be the likes of Sean “Frecks” Stewart and Danny Dicola, barrel-chested brothers in spirit of Andrew Allen, Fred Gall and Jabari Pendleton who test the bounds of no-complys and dive headlong into huge banks. Frecks the redbeard likes the tailgrab and does this pretty sick frontside blunt fakie over a little grass gap, whereas Dicola blazes around the parks and cracks a tall rock-to-fakie in some ditch. If I had one complaint about this video, and it’s not the music for once because the soundtrack is pretty amazing, it would be that looking up at the actual world after watching it is kind of like taking off a pair of sunglasses, and there needed to be more 360 flips done by Conhuir Lynn.