1. Bobby Worrest – ‘Hometown Turf Killer’

Are ‘au natural’ street plazas going the way of the proverbial buffalo as city councils approve expensively designed, corporate-sponsored alternatives to be tucked safely away from the gentle arts of commerce and civic life? Was Bobby Worrest, by soaking his first and best of three 2014 video parts exclusively in DC’s notoriously hard-to-skate Pulaski plaza, making a point to us all about using every part of such diminishing urban resources, from its highly regarded dish to the bitty handrails? Was he really high-tailing it from the cops at 00:25? Such questions are unanswerable at best and at worst open up the possibility of galactic damnation, which would make it incrementally more difficult to draw continued pleasure from the way Bobby Worrest threads his way through the spot, sometimes seeming to chart his route on the fly (like the line with the frontside 180 nosegrind revert), getting chummy with ledges and with no wack tricks. His lines in this part are varied and deep with hard tricks (switch frontside bluntslide, switch kickflip backside tailslide, switch kickflip frontside noseslide, etc etc), sparing little notice for traffic of the human or auto persuasion. Whether it was the U.S. government shutdown, Zero’s molar-rattling ‘Cold War’ vid, salvation via Nike from the dregs of shoe sponsorlessness or just ‘his people’ (as pictured following the final switch flip), something kindled a fire beneath Bobby Worrest’s sneakers this past year, and the adoring populace can only hope it continues to bubble, blister and blacken his foot-flesh well into 2015.

Mission: Fun

Did Forrest Edwards teach Jamie Thomas to enjoy life again, as Punxsutawney Phil did for Bill Murray in the famous movie ‘Groundhog Wild’? The answer is yes, but this is simply a trick question, because Forrest Edwards really did so for all of us. Yet the Reynolds diet-endorser may have at least tangentially sparked Jamie Thomas with regard to Zero’s ‘Cold War,’ which features the best Jamie Thomas part in perhaps a decade — the kinked hubba kickflip 5-0, the ‘Misled Youth’ cast cameos, a fresh assault on Rincon, and the euphoric ender ending pictured above.

But how do we get there from here? (Via the Zero ‘Thrasher’):
I don’t know that carefree fun has ever been my style. A lot of people judge me for that. That was the beef that Muska and I had back in the day. He wanted to cruise around, get gnarly, have fun and not really take it that serious but still get stuff done. I didn’t feel like I was talented enough to just cruise around and hope stuff happened. My fun is more of an enjoyment of the mission. It’s just setting out on a path and accomplishing it. That’s what drives me. There’s obviously lots of smiles along the way, but I’m not just carefree floating around.

One did not have to see ‘One in a Million’ to conceptualize the unpredictable effect Forrest Edwards has upon any nearby bros. In the case of his new boss, Forrest Edwards’s board-twirling antics at the Clipper ledge seem to have inspired Jamie Thomas, on the doorstep of 40 years old, to follow suit and/or attempt the impossible. Is Forrest Edwards’ speedy flow-to-pro journey that much more impressive considering he did not toil for years in the Black Box warehouse as he sought his spot? Do Jamie Thomas’ floral button-ups suggest a more relaxed attitude toward work and play now that Dane Burman’s 50-50 grind has secured the distribution’s future for another generation? Is Erik Ellington’s cap-over-the-hood a throwback to San Diego superhero Peter Smolik’s glory days or a stab at Axl Rose-influenced ‘outsider’ fashion?

Who’s Got It For Cheap

In the latest sign that we collectively have abandoned our humbler roots in favor of active sporting trophy cups and lucrative endorsement deals, one of the cardinal learnings of the 1990s seems to have faded from memory. Like so much L.A. confetti pushed before the broom of a blind disco custodian, skateboarders* seemingly have discarded their collective ambition to be like rap singers.

Perversely, more than a decade and a half since the grand fragmentation of street-skating into various splintered genres and jeans fittings, it is the black-denimed and tattooed long-hairs who seem closest to maintaining a form of business mind-meld with the likes of Gorilla Zoe and Charles Hamilton. As the internet buccaneers set sail and pillaged the profitability of compact discs and DVDs alike, urban musicians, many confident in their ability to subsidize any lost musical revenue with the street kind, largely abandoned the blockbuster commercial release ritual in favor of flooding the zone with a steady stream of sometimes tossed-off but generally more interesting and immediate free releases, oriented around building and maintaining a support base rather than trying to squeeze a shrinking number of dollars from an antiquated medium, which requires cutting in any number of increasingly irrelevant corporate interests to boot.

One-off web-centric video parts aside you maybe could draw a thin and blurry line between the decades-old concerns that still insist on a multi-year production process with the requisite release-date pushbacks, monthly ad campaigns and internal deadline turmoil that seem attendant upon such projects, versus the Magentas, Palaces and perhaps Adidases whose trip clips and internet parts skew more toward the mixtape format, without the gravity of a once-per-decade project pervading everything.

Jamie Thomas a few years ago, when Zero was like 20 dudes/dudettes deep, described a certain plan to release annually a video that would tot up whatever footage had amassed over that time period and bestow it upon the salivating masses. It sounded logical, but “Cold War” seems to have wound up following the established build-and-release pattern, maybe due to Zero’s famous adherence to rigid standards. Now comes Emerica with the first in their “Made” series, this one featuring about one-third of their team, in what’s alleged to be a succession of smaller videos that would appear to harken back to the medium’s optimal runtime of 20-30 minutes, as laid down under interplanetary law by wizened walruses able to communicate telepathically and also with crude grunting sounds.**

Must this be the way of the future for all as TV-stand real estate is ceded to Roku boxes and streaming services? Has Skate.ly already become the unofficial DatPiff.com to the industry, and Quartersnacks its Traps N Trunks? If Mark Suciu has laid claim to the Gucci Mane analog, who is our Lil B? Which company, if any, has the courage to release the skate-video equivalent of the long-feared “all-skits rap album”?

*Or maybe just those that don’t run companies
**Nike purported to be doing something similar, but with 50 dudes on their team and several years between each video, it seems like sort of a half-measure.