The Bigspin Sleep

Scene opens in a musty office; it’s dimly lit, the only light streaming in from the frosted windowpanes, and now the door, which creaks open to admit DAVE. Across the office sits BOB, behind his desk in the shadows, smoking a cigar. BOB motions for DAVE to take a seat, and he does. There is a pause as BOB sucks on his cigar.

BOB: ‘She’s Cheating.’

BOB spreads a handful of polaroids across the desk and gestures to DAVE to examine them. DAVE does, and begins shaking his head, clearly agitated. His face, when he looks up again at BOB, is a mixture of shock and anger. Briefly we can see ETHYL in a photo, with another man, his face obscured by a hat. BOB, calm, puffs again on his cigar.

BOB: ‘You Deserve It.’ (He fixes DAVE with a cold glare.) ‘You Changed. Don’t Ask Me When.‘

BOB slides another set of Polaroids across the desk; briefly, DAVE is seen with several different women. These further agitate DAVE; BOB next passes a set of papers, which look like bank statements and receipts. DAVE begins to leaf through them, then looks up.

DAVE: ‘OK Then.’

DAVE stands and, returning BOB’s icy stare, reaches into his jacket pocket; it’s implied he is going for a weapon. BOB pushes back his chair, revealing that he already has a pistol drawn — and it’s pointed at DAVE. 

BOB: ‘Play Dead.’

DAVE looks at BOB, looks at the pistol. BOB cocks it, and DAVE hurriedly drops to the floor.

DAVE: (muffled, his face to the floor) ‘I Just Took A Bite Of Dirt.’

BOB: (gesturing with the pistol toward the door) ‘Mind How You Go.’

DAVE: (still on the floor, cowering, eyes fixed on the pistol in BOB’s hand) ‘Easier Said Than Done.’

BOB, in one motion, holsters the pistol, steps around the desk, and reaches down to grab DAVE by the collar, then hoists him up and shoves him toward the door.

DAVE: ‘OK, We’re Leaving.’ (He stumbles, steadies himself on the doorjamb, and sneers at BOB) ‘Thank You For Your Patience.’

We see BOB now has the pistol in his hand again. He half-raises it in DAVE’s direction.

BOB: ‘Then Again…’

DAVE: (Seething) ‘See You Later.’ 

DAVE half-slams the door; we can hear his footsteps trailing away down the hall. BOB replaces the pistol in his shoulder holster and, eyes still on the door, puffs his cigar. Behind him, the closet door slowly opens, and ETHYL steps out — confidently. She strides to BOB’s side, slides an arm around his waist, kisses him on the cheek, plucks the cigar from his fingers and takes a puff.

ETHYL: ‘Good Riddance.’

The office lights go out. A moment later, the office is empty, and we see HORACE, the custodian, emptying the trash can beside BOB’s desk. Pouring its contents into the bin on his cart, we can see HORACE glancing at hotel receipts, airline tickets, and finally, a half-crumpled photo of BOB and ETHYL, embracing on a beach. HORACE shakes his head and tosses it with the rest of the garbage.

HORACE: ‘Sounds Like You Guys Are Crushing It.’

We watch HORACE push his cart out of the office and close the door; the last thing the audience sees as the lights go out are the words printed across the glass: “Bob’s Detective Agency.”

Screenplay by Harry Bergenfield, Pontus Alv, Federico Hazama, Tactics, Bill Strobeck, Drake Johnson, Joshua Simpson, Harald Reynolds, Jeff Cecere, Bye Jeremy, Logan Lara, Neema Joorabchi, Steve Mastorelli, Vincent Milou, Alltimers. NOTE: All proceeds from this production will go toward replenishing the reservoir of one-word skate video titles.

2. Nick Matthews – ‘HUF Welcomes Nick Matthews To The Team’

Imagine having committed to longterm body memory the exact combination of torso contortion, forefoot balance, ankle flick and split-second timing such that you now possess Pupecki grind kickflips out on command, the way Chicagoland’s Nick Matthews seems to have done. No longer the most feared flow dude in circulation, Huf became the first big operation to take the increasingly obvious step of elevating Nick Matthews to its formal team and presumably mailing out the first of what ought to be years and years of cheques. These and other payments are required to formally recognize the sheer difficulty of the things he repeatedly has done over the past couple years and continued to do here — ranging from a gargantuan street gap, the incredible block-to-block backside lipslide, to a fakie blunt to fakie and switch heelflip frontside blunt, in a line — Steve Durante level. Nick Matthews’ laser-eyed gaze is a smart match for any of the companies supplying him with equipment, but especially Huf, which consistently has delivered some of the best-constructed* videos in recent memory.

*if lazily titled

Summer of Bad Vibes

Summer’s strength wilts and, seems like before we’re really prepared, darkness steps out. On the world stage, blunt talk of nuclear war; fires rage across the continent; monstrous storms bringing flood, pestilence and misery; and last month, the sun itself blotted out. Steely Dan is permanently fractured with Walter Becker’s death. And tragedy again in skating as beloved dad, bro, lensman and barbecue grandmaster P-Stone is lost to a car wreck, the driver Girl’s Cory Kennedy, booked on a DWI charge, and carrying this burden for the rest of his life.

What else? The Ride Channel, that once-churning aggregation portal that Quartersnacks perceptively pegged as a HiphopDX for skating, is itself deteriorating — adding items of varied relevance now just in fits and starts, and in a troubling suggestion of early-stage dementia, each day posing to its pensive visitors the same question: Why Isn’t Chicago a Bigger Deal in Skateboarding?

Mike Munzenrider’s dutifully researched feature offered a range of answers — weather, resolute policing, general not-giving-a-shitness among locals — and these may well be. Does Chicago need to be a bigger deal in skateboarding? Chaz Ortiz, when he’s not buying out the bar with high-level mages, seems to be making a mighty effort to reclaim and elevate the greater metro area that set him on the path to X-Games glory, while making restitution for Trueride-flavored lines like this. But even in his most powerful Diamond t-shirt, Chaz Ortiz can’t carry 2.7 million souls on his back alone — Chicago’s been second, third, whateverth too long, plenty grimy but too Midwest to chart with the cellar-door-turned-bump-to-bar-wallride pro contingent that gravitates toward East Coast crust. In Chicago, crime wars leave dead children on the streets and the money always seems to be running out.

Not that the town has no talent. But it’s on some other shit. ‘Realm,’ the latest in a string of increasingly gnarly videos from Chicago’s Deep Dish collective, opens on a bombed-out husk of a city shot through with militarism on the march and authority’s heavy hand always just beyond the frame. The skating happens in the shadow of architectural marvels and across crumbling foundations, by streetlight and under those battleship-gray skies. CJ Kelly draws night lines down the block that go on forever, noseblunts and wallrides bumping off poles and fences. Nico Rizzo tosses a nutty manual to no-comply down some steps, DJ Plummer scrapes off sparks and Mason Barnard whirls one of the crazier manual tricks in some while on a fat marble bench. It is wildly panted Brett Weinstein who breaks the knob off though, bigspinning both ways up an industrial-strength Euro gap, popping tricks over puddles, backside lipsliding up and through viaduct crust and, at the end, climbing up and down through the bowels of the Chase building to unload a pile of lines. This dude hits some minor-key harmony between Gino ledge tricks and the going transfixation on wallies and varial flips, and gets in one of the crazier transfer ollies since that kid jumped out to Jason Dill’s ender block.

Probe deeper and you come to Chicago’s Ssquirted collective, which has been making videos for five or six years now that seem geared to disorient and abrade, placing viewers inside dimly lit rooms where stuffed animals are ominously scattered, and weirdly costumed characters preen just out of focus. In vids like hoEphase and this year’s bracing ‘PSYKO’ and ‘bLoWiE BuNnY’, voices get pitched down, skate footage slowly rotates and threats of violence and occult imagery fade in and out. A lot of stuff drips. The tricks blur between all this like one of those dreams where you can land everything until your grip loosens and the lights go out and you find yourself with blood-drenched hands clawing at your board.

Are the dissonant and sometimes harsh vibes out of Chicago the right ones for skating at this summer’s jarring end? Will these harsh and forbidding vids pull more people to skate Chicago or keep them away? Did Darkstar anticipate some of this doom and pathos when resurrecting its unoly knights? What’s next?

4. Neen Williams – “Chickenbonenowison”

The unscientific layman’s catchphrase known as the “law of averages” teaches us that random outliers become less frequent when spread out over a large enough sampling size. Projecting the 2007 estimate of 13 million U.S. skateboarders, then reported have grown at a 10% clip for each of the three previous years, to rise at a similar rate in an economic climate hostile to hockey equipment purchases puts us around a very rough 19 million today, a crowd that stands in constant danger of tipping into an echo chamber of stock kickflip flicks and natural-transition pivot fakies. For this reason handcrafted tricks like Neen Williams’ heelflips and backside tailslides and backside noseblunt slides (especially to fakie) stand out that much more from the din and Baker’s Deathwish imprint made the most of the dude’s focused mindset by using his awesome footage to anchor their Shake Junt video (Dustin Dollin made a pretty ripping return too). Extra bonus street points awarded for elevating the frontside pop-shove it to ender status, one of the bigger ones I can recall ever seeing. Neen Williams’ skating is well handled by the Baker Boys editing squad who get that really good tricks oftentimes look best without all that varnish and lacquer. Feel like the filming here in particular is on point, something I don’t notice all that much usually, or maybe it’s just how much this dude is killing it here and there.

Also noticing now that we’ve got three nollie varial flips in this list which certainly merits a really really long think piece all on its own.