1. Jordan Trahan – ‘Static VI’

Various points have come in years past in which it seems as though the proverbial ‘envelope’ cannot be pushed much further, be it handrail flip-intos or A-to-B-to-C-to-D-to-E ledge combinators. People always find a way, and in 2023 here you have Jordan Trahan, perspiring through New Orleans’ nooks and murk, blurring the boundaries of what might clumsily be called the ‘control’ school, revolving around wallriding and wallies and so on. Like kindred spirit Dick Rizzo, he’s a regular doer of impossible-seeming stuff, like, er, a wallride frontside 180 to wallride down on a metal fence in in his ‘Hurricane Party’ clip, but Josh Stewart’s ringing ‘Static VI’ gives his skating the full-length video-ender treatment, to great effect — a slow-burn song that one imagines has been kept in the drawer for such an occasion, exquisite filming and a spot spread that veers from ‘could post up for days’ ledges to that flower-petal volcano that seems tailor-made for one of his 360 flips, and ‘Grains’-ready locales like a barge loading ramp. Jordan Trahan flows and weaves over and across all this, tucking his knee to get the back truck up onto a steep 5-0, mousetrap snapping over the bars, nudging a frontside noseslide pop over to regular on that fat round bar. His way with the steeps makes plausible the idea that in some other timeline, he is a mean pool skater; the ‘Static VI’ parts have been dribbling out online, the full physical production is available here.

Summertime Mixtape Vol. 11 – Jordan Trahan, ‘Fais Low Low’

It would’ve been a good deal of fun to have Jordan Trahan around in the early 1990s curb combo days, to see what kind of ripples his formulations might have created in the broader space-time continuum and what may have been named after him. He has a couple good ones in this Ace trucks vid, like the frontside tailslide to frontside 50-50 and the frontside noseslide to frontside crooked grind, interspersed with some bros, vibraphone, and various hunks of metal and asphalt that Jordan Trahan never fails to find ways to wrap his board around.

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. 

Got That Work

In Upton Sinclair’s 1906 action adventure epic “Welcome 2 Tha Jungle,” protagonist Jurgis Rudkus immigrates from Lithuania to Chicago, a realm of industrial opportunity ripe for fortune making and dream chasing. Despite his oxen-like strength and physical endurance, Jurgis’ entry into the working world offers mainly wages of humiliation, injury, poverty and misery, ultimately destroying his family life and setting him on a path to hoboism. Eventually, Yung Jurgis moves into violent and organized crime, at which point the reader is like “finally.”

More than a century later, like subgrade urethane capitulating to a screechsome blunt-slide, time remains a flat circle. Chocolate, the Torrance, Calif.-based deck concern whose video output has often dealt with themes of desperation, justice and living at the boundaries of the law, returned last month with the Crailtap camp’s most vibrant full-length vid in nearly 15 years, the fantastic, Keenan Milton-quoting ‘Bunny Hop.’ The stakes aren’t nothing — there hasn’t been a formal Choco production since the first W. Bush term, and most of the dudes with parts haven’t been on the team more than a couple years — but it starts off poking fun at the uncomfortable truth that’s become apparent for board companies yea this past decade, which is that most of them don’t got much money. “You wanna do a full-length video in 2021?” the incredulous Crailtap accountant scoffs at the ‘Chocolate Tour II’ trailer’s opening, rejecting a proposed rooftop spine ramp and underwater sequence. “You gotta find the money yourself. We don’t have it.”

So begins the young Chocolate team’s plunge into the bowels of working-world hell. As an apprentice real estate agent, Erik Herrera is ignored in his futile task to sell a falling-apart bungalow; Stevie Perez becomes a paid guinea pig for experimental brown-coloured beverages, and later has foodstuffs and screamed insults heaped upon him at a pizzeria. The team furrows their brows as they are led down a digital primrose path into what appears to be a bewildering crypto scam, and Carl Aikens endures verbal abuse and word salad dished out by Chuck of Chuck’s Skate Barn fame, now living a Howard Hughes-esque lifestyle centered around persona fitness and online charts. Like Yung Jurgis before them, before long the hopelessness and debasement overwhelms the young Chocolate team, soon turning them toward robbery, break-ins and fiery auto-insurance fraud.

On its face, the ‘Chocolate Tour II’ trailer clip (followed by Sam Cooke’s ode to forced labour, “Chain Gang,” soundtracking the conventional intro section) can be read on its face as another entry in the skateboard sphere’s long-running aversion to the proverbial ‘office job’ and various other career paths more square than kickflip backside tailsliding ledges in overseas locales, a trope that’s likely helped keep low-cost talent accessible to the skate industry. It’s easy, too, to be reminded of the Girl/Choco camp’s own business-world sagas over the past decade, the Crailtap assets bought and sold and merged by barons of private equity, longtime family members decamping for corporate sportswear gigs or to launch rival hard-goods operations.

But as the video gets underway — in between James Capps’ crackling wall gap 360 flip, Erik Herrera’s run-it-back-five-times backside noseblunt, Jordan Trahan’s garbage bin leap into the top five all-time kickflips, Stevie Perez’s window-rattling wall banger, Vincent Alvarez’s switch backside noseblunt pop-out and Carl Aiken’s hazy magic — the secular world shows how much has shifted since the first Choco movie portrayed skaters as literal outlaws.

As the 2021 calendar petered out, a law firm literally opens its doors to let James Capps, Stevie Perez and Erik Herrera hit the rail out front — and edits release forms for them to sign on the spot. Vincent Alvarez gets spot tips from a car wash attendant and is lightly mothered by a phone-filming cop; a tie-wearing oldster gives Carl Aikens his personal thumbs up, judging the trick an “excellent job;” in midtown, an aging suit confides to James Capps that “I love what you guys do” and deems skating the best sport in the world; passersby poach photos and a cop car stands by while the Choco bros take a few more tries; a big rig operator declares Jordan Trahan a “bad motherfucker,” accurately. And whereas the ‘Chocolate Tour II’ clip leaves the current team in a state of lawless desperation, the walk-ons from legacy pros portray hope for success beyond the skate industry, with Stevie Williams overseeing an industrial cannabis operation, Richard Mulder a smooth-operating real estate agent, Federico Vitetta a detail-oriented (if volcanic) restaurateur, and Daniel Castillo successful enough at some digital economy shit to afford enhanced reality goggles.

Does ‘Bunny Hop’ simply detail the dark side of the contented 9-to-5erness showcased in the intro to Girl’s ‘Doll’ a few years ago, which featured Griffin Gass as a focused shelf-stocker, Mike Carroll as a relaxed postman, and Niels Bennett as an intrepid vintage clothing merchant? Could Thrasher’s recent ‘Skaters With Jobs’ feature encourage aspirations beyond barbacking and car-based gig economizing, or will it choke off critical future talent flows? Will “Chocolate Tour II” result in a federal examination of sanitary and worker safety practices in the burgeoning ‘Chocolate Pow’ industry? What’s up with no Hosea Peeters?

2. Carlisle Aikens – ‘Bunny Hop’

There’s maybe other people who can make tricks look as smooth and powerful as Carl Aikens, but not so many whose skating can communicate the freedom and infectious fun the way that this dude and his XXL jeans can, melon grabbing down big sets, surfing through the plazas, switch bigspin kickflipping a double set and snapping nollies straight over poles. In Chocolate’s ‘Bunny Hop’ he rolls in all the elements from his prodigious output the past few years via N. Rollings, Melodi and Huf, and then some, unflappable in his roomy pants and rippling flannels, at ease floating kickflips on the sidewalk or hucking nollie backside 180s from roof to roof. He’s got a solid look-back landing on stuff like the switch backside tailslide and switch frontside bluntslide, and seeing his name in the chunk font this month gives that rare assurance of everything being in its right place.

4. Erik Herrera – ‘Introducing’ (Chocolate)

This year’s laureate for best hair in skating, Erik Herrera last winter got the official bump up to the rejuvenated Chocolate team, a move that seemed overdue the minute he stepped on one of those boards. This dude has a feathery grace and a way with the tank tops that has been primed to push past all those SoCal spots he has been ripping these past few years. As per Choco’s fantastic ‘Bunny Hop’ vid that’s all in progress, but this one from earlier in the year laid out all the components — the backside 180 nosegrind revert out past the steps, the fakie 360 flip up and over and down the brickpile, heelflips landed way up on the nose, the dive-bomb catch on the massive backside flip past the sidewalk and up the steps. As a bonus, Erik Herrera, like putative future Chocolate teammate Hosea Peeters and a few other dudes, also shops at the same underground outlet still hawking HORTY apparel.

A Kinder, Gentler Nation: Brush-Stroke Bluntslides And Skatespot Compassion

Humankind’s deepest yearning is to prove its dominion over the earth. For centuries man has cleaved rock and mountain to make way for our cars, mine its riches and festoon our teeth with rare jewels. Our efficient canals link the planet’s most profitable oceans, our scientifically enhanced farms dividing the land’s flat spaces into squares and circles to feed our teeming masses. From space, our cities and giant walls can be seen by any alien species still questioning who may be in charge down there.

Skateboarding, among several noteworthy human-race developments of recent decades, is hardly different. Mastery of one’s environment has been a central directive since banana boards were pointed into drained swimming pools in the era of Gerald Ford, and even more so once broadening decks and bouncier wheels were turned loose on ‘the streets.’ Santa Cruz rallied followers beneath its ‘Pave The World’ banner; in the 1990s, Concrete Powder was the magazine title that captured prevailing attitudes toward the expanding urban blanket. In the 00s, certain skaters including Wade Speyer and Fred Gall came to be synonymous with demolition, while the intro to ‘Fully Flared’ showcased in hi-def the literal destruction of spots as they were being ripped. Today, one of the culture’s long-serving creeds, ‘skate and destroy,’ is emblazoned for all eternity upon graphical sweatpants. At its core, skateboarding represented a primal human reaction against an increasingly artificial world, one to be discovered, used, discarded and left behind.

Ledge-repainting gestures of figureheads such as Jeremy Wray and Mark Gonzales notwithstanding, this energy of late has seeped sometimes troublingly into the human realm, with security guards in recent years shoved to one side to get the clip, and heated debates with house spots’ owners or renters. But the quiet expansion of the ‘adulting’ trend and a handful of recent clips suggest a kinder, gentler approach to spots as skateboarding collectively pauses to take a hard look at the origins and effects of its decades of antisocialisms, real or postured.

Carlisle Aikens, the reinvigorated Chocolate engine’s most-productive piston, and whose skating occupies an extreme corner of the smooth/powerful X-Y axes, provided a glimpse last week in the Parisian-flavoured Bye Jeremy clip, softly brushing a stonework out-ledge with a switch frontside bluntslide that whispered where others, like Jake Johnson, previously have thundered. It called to mind a similarly soft-shoed frontside blunt from Josh Wilson in Quasi’s ‘Grand Prairie’ vid from earlier this year, eased down a hubba shortly before a wholesome mother-and-son voiceover on bondo-ing injured spots. The fakie frontside noseslide ticklers in Jacopo Carozzi’s ‘Samurai Safari’ Sardinia vacation a couple weeks ago were reminiscent of Brandon Biebel’s heavyweight dancing from the nollie side a few years back. And the other day, in between slamming down ditches and banks, Ronnie Sandoval in Vans’ vibrant ‘Nice 2 See U,’ lightly tapping a rail on a backside 5-0 transfer where a more harshly inclined individual may have stomped.

Could a more tender approach to spots represent skateboarding’s typical contrarianism rearing up against the hard-pressed pinch and crossed-up ’90-10′-style 50-50s? Are people going easier on spots as year by year, more succumb to the wrecking ball? Does all this have something to do with why so many dudes were wearing gloves in the Vans vid? Could now be the time to roll cryptocurrency gains into lappers and Z-rollers?

Summertime Mixtape Vol. 9 – Richard Mulder, ‘The Chocolate Tour’

Who from the OG Girl/Chocolate camp was still peaking after ‘Mouse’ besides Koston and Carroll? Here in 1999 is Richard Mulder, bass turned way too high, missing no steps since ‘Nautilus.’ In the second half of this Zero-speed edit he’s ripping through the East Coast, putting a beauty of a switch backside 5-0 grind onto Kalis and Stevie’s picnic table and anticipating Brian Wenning’s rise at City Hall. Aside from Gideon Choi’s achingly good and deservedly revisited stuff, there weren’t many to put a hurting on the Chaffey ledge transfer like this dude.

The Snowblower Is The New Bolt Cutter

The story of ‘earth’ (the planet) is defined by the eternal tug of war between man and his environment. Viewed from above, land is carved into multicoloured squares and circles, crops to feed man’s teeming billions. Below ground, humans tunnel into soil and rock to extract minerals and gemstones that power cities and festoon foreheads. While tropical islands are constructed from trash or military equipment, each day people display their own minor triumphs over nature, driving heavily laden trucks up hills, relaxing in aeroplanes, boldly growing plants in Antarctica.

Erik Herrera, young fleet-foot now riding officially for Chocolate, this week put up another W for humankind, melding numerous pushes and an anti-ableist cement slope to fling a backside flip over a sidewalk and up a five-step, stoking out Tyler Pacheco and mankind generally. Despite the lack of a slow-mo angle, this backside kickflip more narrowly represented another ripple in the decadeslong environmental push and pull that birthed, developed and continues to define skateboarding. Asphalt embankments provided the friction and gravity for Z-boys of old to approximate surfing sans water; the pools later barged helped ferment the outlaw raiderisms that would be required to persist through the skatepark closures and vert ramp scrappings that would follow. Forced adaptation to office plazas, loading docks and schoolyards required fashioning tricks and entire disciplines around the street biome, working within the terrain’s natural limits and sometimes toppling them. The ingenuity required to translate picnic tables and staircase aids into platforms for innovation and progression allows a new form of vision, like slipping on the enchanted sunglasses from ‘They Live’ and seeing the Sistine Chapel in a New Jersey backyard.

Watching backside kickflips like Erik Herrera’s, on screens powered by rare earth minerals and housed within temperature-controlled rumpus rooms made out of dead trees, it’s easy to feel victorious. Science and technology have provided bondo and sawzalls and the power to make nigh any spot skateable; Thrasher’s March 2021 issue featured a how-to interview with a masked superhero knowed only as ‘Knob Buster.’ Those with mall shop and video game money, properly funneled into the pockets of laid-back warehouse landlords, have unlocked private TFs capable of sidestepping both security and inclement weather.

Yet all of this is a feint, dodging the real and ultimate authority: weather. No less a visionary than Mike Carroll recognized the climate’s paramount rule when, in the ‘Modus’ credits, he mutters his capitulation to the wind, seeking solace in the embrace of a video game controller when persistent breezes made all flip trick attempts pointless. Pat Duffy and Ronnie Creager and Marc Johnson wowed generations by taking on handrails and pic-a-nic tables in the rain, but these remain novelties, with malevolent nimbostrati continuing to reroute domestic and international filming trips to local bars. Even in these pandemic times, the only surefire cure for winter is southbound airfare.

Or is it? The same combination of ingenuity, courage and hardheaded masochism that hurls bodies repeatedly down stairs in pursuit of the clip, and that certain euphoric zen, are now pushing the meteorological envelope further than ever before. John Shanahan’s uncanny ability on the slippery snow-skate is one thing, but as blizzards rake the U.S.A. over past weeks, ways are being found to best even the uncooperative climate itself. The Philadelphia contingent again curls their collective lip toward any barriers before their ledges and cans — deploying a damn snowblower to cut paths between Municipal Plaza’s benches, leaving gaps for young Chris Falo to push and pop over as needed. Further west, Josh Kalis’ Grand Rapids group took the same approach to liberate an even more minimal spot from old man winter’s icicle-fingered clutches, in Boston and Cincinnati they’re skating snowbanks. Kevin Bilyeu’s bubblegoosed nose manual and trash can kickflip aren’t even the point, it’s the principle involved.

Is the snowblower the new bolt cutter? Could an iced-over parking lot or frozen Canadian pond, properly Zamboni’d, host a powerslide event worthy of a wintertime Dime Glory Challenge? Will the future bring affordable and localized weather-controlling machines to skateparks and leave yet-to-come generations that much more confused over why anyone bothers with street spots at all, or will varied temperatures, locales and other environmental trappings be required to properly model the premiumly priced softgood pieces that will support the pros of the day?

10. Hosea Peters — ‘Interlude’

Until such time as the Crailtap executive management team entrusts Chocolate’s ‘20s to Carlisle Aikens, Jordan Trahan and the uncommonly smooth Erik Herrera, this Daniel Policelli-made Hosea Peters part does just fine. It has yet to be determined whether the fluffstache is an earnest Tim Selleck aspiration or a practical means of SEO-esque differentiation among the daily footage flows, but consensus supports his choice in tricks, pants, spots and associates — note the drape of the denim as his soles cling on after the kickflip k-grind, the backside bigspin, plus fakie crack pop. It’s as much the belt-looped cap and the bro’s board bowled over as it is the big 360, the double-set three-hitter with Carl Aikens and Erik Herrera, or any of the other tricks knocked out here, apparently over just a couple weeks.