Psychic Fluids, Astral Forces And Further Fruits From 2018’s Video Cornucopia

Nate Pezzillo — ’Untitled 003’
A monster going up and over Muni’s cylinders — and squeezes a shove-it Suski from Love Park’s shriveling husk

Marcello Campanello — ’Mode’
Fakie boss in the Borroughs, with the cab kickflip backside tailslide

Austyn Gillette — ’Radiant Cure’
Switch shove-it rewinds with extra savoir faire

Charlie Cassidy — ’NY Archive’
Glass slicer boardslide and that backside noseblunt — skates like a Philly dude

Corey Glick — ’Souvenir’
Helping put Foundation into the conversation again with gusto, a fakie flip switch backside smith grind and a will not to clip on that last, scary jump

Shintaro Hongo — ’Pick Up’
The thought of rural Japanese spots is a trip — ferocious backside flip and bluntslides

Jake Johnson — ’Purple’
A glimpse of the master in his Penny period

Kyle Wilson — ’YS Video’
The float on the switch heelflip

Brian Delatorre — ’Purple’
GX OG, at home nollieing backside over a tremendous bar, or reclining in a backside smith grind

John Shanahan — ’Street Sweeper’
This year bringing back the fakie pop shove and tic-tacs, and with a pro deck in the works, revealing at last what lies beneath the Flexfits

Do The Spirit Animals of GX1000 And The International Olympic Committee Howl At The Same Red Moon?

“Skateboarding is now 1 step away from the Olympics,” Ride Channel mystics pronounced this week, with all the hollow reservation of an over-the-hill fighter demanding through spat-out teeth and blood to be put in for another round, and all the limp-necked surrender to be revealed in a fistful of counterfeit blimp tickets. This pursuit, once the domain of renegades, outcasts and losers, now is not called but rather ordered up to the big leagues, its youthsome mettle having proven a fuel too valuable for ratings-hungry sponsors to let sit unburned for another decade while the Olympics’ viewership virility flags. The 80s gave, the 90s took away, the 00s gave back — to some — and though a declining number of hard-good consumers and an ever-thickening stew of bootstrappy board companies slicing thinner and thinner pie wedges to share amongst independent and multinational competitors alike, skateboarding’s talismanic powers to restore youth have become impossible for the Olympics to ignore.

It is difficult to envision Olympic podiums, matching uniforms and the brassy pomp of various national anthems when Ryan Garshell, Yonnie Cruz, Al Davis, Brian Delatorre, and Jake Johnson are battling irate homeowners, ditching cops, spraying graffiti and barreling crossways into traffic in the bracing and much-awaited ‘GX1000’ vid. Like the ‘Sabotage’ series emanating from the other coast this vid seems less about polishing tricks and placing them on a pedestal for admiration than hunting them through hills and alleys, wrestling them to the ground and cutting notches in the belt after wiping any blades clean of blood let by both parties. The way they let the hill bombs run out with no music has an intensity impossible to concoct with slow-motion drone filmography, and its montage structuring is refreshingly dense, difficult to digest in even a few watches how tech Yonnie Cruz gets in those hills or the burliness of Al Davis’ wallies or all the things Brian Delatorre can do at crazy speed, setting aside the added challenge of having the police, the homeless, and various powers of SF-dwelling Silicon Valleyites arrayed against them.

And yet several planes of existence above, the Olympics may not be so different. Marauding from country to country, city to city, this nationless entity allegedly flouts rules, generates anger and resentment among some locals and from time to time gets kicked out. Some may argue the Olympics embraces a ‘skate and destroy’-like ethos as it briefly sessions municipalities and leaves economic and structural wreckage behind. The Olympics meanwhile immortalizes its achievements on high-performance video media and looks for the next spot.

Should skateboarders, rather than fearing and loathing the Olympics’ pyrotechnics and ferocious currency-dealing apparati, embrace it as a spiritual partner amid a more existential battle against local, state and perhaps federal authority figures as well as various other opposition figures? Could Yonnie Cruz handle one of those abandoned Sarajevo ski jumps and bobsled tracks? Switch? Will a future Olympics judging panel be required to review the GX1000 files as a reference point for tricks that Jake Johnson previously has proven are possible to be wallied into? Did the Cool Runnings dudes pass a test detecting drugs capable of enhancing performance and/or reality? What about Yonnie Cruz’s switch backside 360 tho?

6. Brian Delatorre – “MIA”

Habitat might’ve been guilty of playing to type a little bit in putting on Brian Delatorre even going beyond the easy ponytail jokes, but if his MIA closer part didn’t goose his career trajectory somehow then things may have been in much worse shape for 2011 than they otherwise were. There’s maybe a handful of dudes out there taking the same sort of risks this guy does on hills and it’s always cool to see dudes who go for the gusto on set-up tricks, like here where he’s nollie flipping or nollie backside 180’ing up the curb before blasting off whatever handicap ramp. It’s nice to see use of the nollie varial flip down a gap and the way he keeps swinging at some well-worn SF spots. The ender fits that spot like a glove too.