5. Joey O’Brien – ‘Sabotage 4’

Nuff respect due to Alex Olson’s ringing Republique line, Greyson Fletcher’s concrete slopestyle, Josh Kalis’ backside noseblunt face-off and Gino Iannucci’s 40 shove-its to freedom, but Joey O’Brien’s run in, out and under Love Park’s granite skeleton ranks not just as the year’s best run of tricks but among the craziest ever at a spot that’s yielded some of the most memorable for all of earth’s eternity. In the fourth ‘Sabotage’ volume Joey O’Brien proved willing to and capable of digging his fingernails deeper into Philadelphia’s hallowed and hectic crust than even many of his mouthwash guzzling compatriots, chiseling through handrails and gaps to keep pro-level fans from usurping any curtains as wrecking balls again threaten to end this latest Love era. If wink out it must, there are worse ways to go than under the twinkling neutron star that is Joey O’Brien’s tightly spun 360 flip closer.

Midwinter Video Roundup: Am Chowder

Extra good with the soda

I have this secret theory that the ultimate reasoning behind Brad Staba’s alleged master plan to require everyone on Skate Mental to wear Nikes is really about the fat photo incentive checks keeping all the kids paid to a certain degree, and maybe less likely to raise a stink when asked to model a Mike Carroll chest-hair T-shirt for the Crailtap catalogue. But who can know these things.

So this little video, it was cool and all, except when it was done it left the feeling that I’d been watching the same dude more or less the entire time. I don’t know. I like Daryl Angel pretty good. We have a lot of fun with Ty Bruckheimer and his wide-eyed techno-reverence for top calibre skateboarding, but I thought that old HD test reel featuring lil’ Daryl Flannel worked pretty good as a showcase for really beautiful skate filming, even if the whole deal was in ultra-slow mo and comprised about 45 seconds of actual footage stretched to the length of a two-hour feature film. The Skate Mental promo is pretty much the opposite, two-song part with minimal filler and slow-mo. But I still felt like I seen a lot of these tricks already, just at a quarter of the speed and twice the resolution. The bar ollie to 50-50 caught me off-guard, he can get urban-creative; the switch backside tailslide on the barrier was big. Was the first song the Breeders? Fairly awesome either way.

With Shane no-apostrophe-Oneill I could almost fool myself into thinking it was Daryl Angel again, what with the backside bigspins and backside lipslides, except for certain tricks where it was like watching Jesus Fernandez. The nollie kickflip backside tailslide bigspin was pretty nutty and there was a nice “yeah” after one of his manual tricks. John Motta stands out I suppose because he brings more wallrides than the other dudes, and maybe more European footage, like the blazing backside 180 fakie manual helicoptero that was in Transworld I think? The varial heelflip to fakie grinder was cool and he did some convoluted ledge combo that I’m sure will have Joey Brezinski powering up “Skate 2” with a quickness. And a slick backside lipslide to backside tail.

The sort-of homogeneous skating aside it’s truly cool that there seems to have been pretty much no effort put into the production of “Chowder,” and it incorporates a lot of elements I wish got more consideration when skate video “directors” are doing the modern day equivalent of hooking together their VCRs and thumbing the pause button… i.e., sub-15 minute run-time, no intro, some interesting angles on well-worn spots (bank to bench) and some lame humor. Also, setting a pedestrian aflame with the powerslide blowtorch. I really don’t know if they’re selling this video or what.