Oh So We’re Good Now With Fakie Frontside Shove-Its Fam?

The ancient Egyptians, knowed as a people sprung from the intergalactic union of slender dog-headed humanoids and architecturally inclined space aliens, based their centuries-long dynasty upon advanced mathematics and in particular, the power of three. Just as star-guided numerologies dictated the design of pyramidal tombs and, later, the sport trike, so too can these be drawn upon to identify and analyze a prickly and little-foreseen situation confronting ‘the culture’ in 2019: the unlikely normalization of the fakie frontside shove-it.

Lo, the pathway to this current state of affairs was laid equally by the ascendance of Polar, where an early vid nodded to and propelled the shove-it, and the broad rejection of ’00s kickflip culture, characterized by thirsty ams balling for position by adding toe-centric flip tricks into or out of various other activities, or clamoring for ever-larger parking lot gaps. The frontside shove-it, notoriously difficult to photograph, in recent years has offered both a reprieve from the switch frontside bigspin, largely discarded as a gap-chomping tool, and the backside bigspin, thoroughly rinsed as a line-ender as the current decade limps to its unknown conclusion.

Where does this leave hot shoes hungry to differentiate their video part/montage slice/IG post from the footage glut’s deafening roar? There are few untouched trick deposits of years past left to be mined, and those still remaining can be treacherous — enter verbose career risk-taker Jason Dill, whose Vita-shod stairstepping became an instant rewind in the VCR age and has rightly become the stuff of legend. The current generation, though, holds up this rare gem and turns it topwise, gazing beyond the set-top dismount and fixating instead on the mostly forgotten trick preceding it, a fat fakie frontside pop shove-it over a barrier.

Beyond the frontside pop shove-it, the nollie pop shove-it for years has been a standby for popping over fences and blocks, the regular pop shove-it has enjoyed a resurgence recently as a kickflip alternative over bumps-to-cans and -bars, and switch versions continue to have their place in lines and down gaps. Whereas the nollie frontside pop shove-it might remain too near a relative to the unfairly maligned nollie backside bigspin, the fakie frontside pop shove-it, not much better aesthetically, is finding unlikely traction. Austyn Gillette, still fleet of foot despite life’s heavy wear, threw one over a bench and down a drop in his ‘Radiant Cure’ part last year. John Shanahan, cut-and-sew curator of the late-90s movement who also has assisted in the debatable reclamation of mustard-coloured tees, pulled from Dill’s ‘Photosynthesis’ archives for his Thoro ender. And last week, Skyscraper City Quasi flowee Nick Matthews hopped perhaps the best-looking recent example at Flushing’s recently hot gap, pristinely popped and whip-quick spun.

Is the fakie frontside pop shove-it’s rise an offshoot of the ‘dad trick’ movement, the tip of a ‘Brutalist’-minded stylistic school centered on ugly tricks including but not limited to varial flips and wallride nollie outs, or something far more weird and outlandish? Which would score higher in a Street League impact section, a fakie frontside pop shove-it or its more successful cousin, the fakie heelflip? Who’s gone one over the big wall at Pulaski?

From The Window, To The Wall

The bong in this reggae song

One wonders if this new age of up-rail tricks and high-speed hops are the beginnings of skateboarding’s next arms race and the inevitable pendulum-swing away from ledge-combo tech skating, or if it’s just a placeholder before we see pro-bros shift their focus back to fulltime handrail/gap chomping. I’m looking to the early 90s pressure flip heyday as a benchmark here by the way. Parking lot pavement chewed up hot-dog shaped sticks for hours upon hours in kids’ pursuit of the most flippin’est flatground moves possible, which in turn helped clear the way for Jeremy Wray and Kris Markovich and Ricky Oyola and his Metallica CD to re-assert a different idea of what we skateboard riders should be concerned with, namely power and speed, which the Busenitzes and Romeros and Olsons and Salazars bring to bear nowadays – replace K-mart parking lots with wax-dripping ledges, sheared-off boards with worn down wheels, etc etc.

If you haven’t seen the Adidas Europe video, called “Diagonal” for reasons that escape me right now, you are probably already familiar with the shocking and true story of how Dennis Busenitz hurdled one of those Sants benches (as well as the stairs). If you watched the whole thing you know that Barcelona has its own version of Rob G, Mark Gonzales does some cool tricks, Tim O’Connor still skates gaps, Petr Horvat and Jeremy Reinhard may eventually rival Dylan Rieder for high school girls’ locker-door space, and there’s another good Sean Malto part. The real question though is what got into Chewy Cannon, who skates pretty much like he did before, only thrice as fast and at times seeming like he’s pulling tricks out of a hat that’s in the process of flying off his head as he charges the next hubba or manual block or, at times, old lady.* Anyway what’s cool about this part is not just that the dude is blazing fast and, in the Busenitz tradition, maintains good form and hangs onto tricks for dear life (backside tailslide that one rail hubba) but that he seems like he’s got some new tricks in the mix, which isn’t easy or anything. And, God damn it all, he looks like he’s having fun, even whilst dining on an ashtray or “bin” or however the Europeans term those things. My current working theory: perhaps he’s simply high on life, just like the Baker dudes in their new tour video.

*Is there something with Euro dudes and getting in old people’s face? I mean damn. Referring here to Jani Latiala’s last trick in the Blind video and all those tricks the Lordz guys popped over the poor old dude sitting in the little chair at the end of the block in “They Don’t Give A Fuck…”.

Greg Lutzka Wins The Dew Tour That Is This Earthly Life

One Toyota to rule them all

Like many others, my imagination was captivated this week with the revelation that frontside-favoring Milwaukeean Greg Lutzka completed an agreement with Toyota to produce a line of white cars with a drawing on the side. While it may have made more sense for Toyota to go with, say, valley boy Mikey Taylor for this honor given his fondness for street racing and, one can only assume, Tokyo drifting as well, you have to commend Lutzka for his business savvy and sheer ballsiness, managing to convince a global car company to adorn the side of a hatch-back with a funny-looking moustache dude pulling his pud.

(Notice to Madison Avenue: This is exactly the type of low-brow, bottom-of-the-barrel approach that I keep trying to tell you resonates with kids today. And this is why those kids are tomorrow’s today’s Toyota buyers.)

Wikipedia (where someone, possibly on the Lutzka payroll, keeps rather close tabs on his trophy-packed contest schedule), tells us that the Matrix is Toyota’s Heathcliff to the Garfield that is the Pontiac Vibe. It has received mixed reviews for safety, much like Greg Lutzka’s trick selection. Yet it also received solid marks for reliability, much like Greg Lutzka’s trick selection. Again, I refer you to the exhaustive Lutzkapedia contest compendium.

Now a lot of people poke fun at Greg Lutzka, or as he’s increasingly known, the Greg Lutzka. There was that embarrassing month-long stint on Krooked, a partnership rumored to have come apart following the revelation that the GL adorned his bedroom walls with his own likeness in the form of Illennium ads or what have you. And one of my great regrets of last year was that I never devoted one of these none-too-precious postings to the kind of amazing Globe section, themed as it was with French techno music and some really sweet “Krazy Kings”-esque special effects.

But the Greg Lutzka’s earnest Midwestern cluelessness is deeply endearing, and puts his finger-snappin’, hat-wearin’, frontside flippin’ spinnin’ in the sort of perspective that you can’t get when he strolls the club in a leather jacket. Why, just a few years ago the kid needed a sit-down* to learn the proper way to wipe and discard the wasteful, shameful, hateful “tissue glove” method.

Now look at him. His name sparkles proudly on the side of a Toyota hatch-back. He knows Lil Jon and Ryan Sheckler. He sells his own hat made from the skin of synthetic frogs, developed in a secret laboratory owned by Oakley glasses. Australian footwear concern Globe recently approached him to design a shoe, which does closely resemble the Muska’s vaunted Sky-Top, but this is hardly a mark against the Greg Lutzka. As we all know it is nigh impossible to fade the Muska, and one can only hope to follow his lead. Which the GL wisely has done in this instance. So don’t try and tell me the kid hasn’t made it.

*from a Big Brother writer, no less