Baker’s generational handoff over the course of its seven-year weekend since ‘Bake and Destroy’ has gone better than a lot of its old-guard board brand contemporaries, aided by the company’s more malleable and freewheeling character and recent, forceful returns of formerly wandering veterans like Kevin Long and Sammy Baca, who really came out of the wilderness to put a calf-socked Chuck onto 2019. As far as distilling Baker’s ethos for the Ross-shopping set, covering the late-’10s trick spectrum and general get-in-the-vanness, Tristan Funkhouser’s ‘Baker 4’ rave-up fired on all cylinders, combining a speedball crouch and the type of wild lower-body contortions that Baker spirit animal Ali Boulala shimmied across an alcohol-drenched floor in an earlier installment (see: pyramid ledge, backside smith frontside shove-it out). This is for sure the yung T-Funk’s best and most-developed skating to date, between shit like the wallride shove-its, the overpass 5-0 rollercoaser and the stomach-churning float after the last 50-50, but the screaming ollie out to frontside wallride — teed up by his friends hollering at gapers, a GX bomb while the crew loses their minds, and needle-thread through what looks like a TV film unit on lunch break — is basically a Baker video all by itself.
Posts Tagged ‘DC’
6. Tristan Funkhouser — ‘Baker 4’
December 26, 2019Matt Miller Takes The Midget Picnic Table Game Of Inches Up About A Foot
January 22, 2013Like the cellar door and the Jersey barrier, the miniature picnic tables native to Southern California practically encompass their own subgenre at this point. Across the past say, twenty-five years, you can pick and choose your peaks and choice practitioners — from the ’90s era take Sean Sheffey’s fakie ollie, Kareem Campbell’s 360 flip 5-0, Gino Iannucci’s last trick in “Trilogy,” Keenan Milton’s switch flip, Daewon Song from 1994 to 2000. New millennium you could put in there Justin Case’s switch backside noseblunt, flaring in his DC uniform for a Ghetto Child ad before burning out, later on Alex Olson’s sideways jump and maybe Torey Pudwill’s hardflip. Lucky contestant this decade is Norcaler Matt Miller with a heavier-than-most nollie 180 into a switch backside noseblunt revert. This would be one for the Police Informers or Chrome Balls to adjudicate, but I’m not even sure I’ve seen the more-common half-cab version on one of these lunch spots.
7. Evan Smith – Independent Trucks Part
December 24, 2011Remember being drawn to rewatch this part because of the meandering street lines, especially the ones taped at night. These are the type of clips that capture that free and sorta sneaky feeling that I think Brian Anderson was getting at in the “Modus Operandi” voiceover, but with less soundstage strings attached, just pushing your board down some empty street doing tricks without having to worry too much about cars or pedestrians or cops or running out of pavement. Before this clip I didn’t pay Evan Smith a lot of mind but this is a well put together section that’s judicious about filming a few good rail tricks at good angles and throwing in odd curveball, like the ender. This part is a good bookend to the Zach Funk one in terms of spots and I like to mute the volume and put on “Planet Caravan.”
Bobby Worrest Vies With Danny Way To Be Skateboarding’s Eminent Conservative Thinker
May 2, 2011Second perhaps only to the earth-shaking development that Usama Bin Laden had been discovered and killed in a high-value military operation was last night’s surprise emergence, pictured above, of Krooked Skateboards pro Bobby Worrest as a conservative commentator on Fox News Channel. Worrest, as he publicly hailed the elimination of Bin Laden as a terrorist threat to the U.S. and other sovereign locales around the globe, immediately fueled speculation that he had effectively thrown his hat into the ring to represent the views of extreme/conservative sportists in the coming election cycle.
By anteing up as such an “ambassador” of goodwill and bridge-constructor between the worlds of action sports and Republican thought, Worrest’s move also served to flag a coming generational shift in the role, held for more than a decade by Danny Way who has long embraced traditional family values. Way in the past 10 years has pushed to broaden his brief by traveling to emerging markets such as China, whose Giant Wall he leaped in 2005 to symbolize the converging paths of the Earth’s two remaining superpowers.
Worrest’s high-stakes gambit to situate himself as the prime mouthpiece of “Y” Generation skaters could brew turmoil among conservative ranks, which are seen reluctant to let go of Way, a proven performer who captured the galactic land speed record for skateboarding a few years ago. Worrest’s unshaven appearance is said to have ruffled feathers among senior party officials and he continues to be viewed by many as a classical “beltway insider” since he grew up less than an hour from Washington D.C.
Explaining his views on U.S. military commando operations abroad, Bobby Worrest in 2009 told ESPN Sports that the movie character John Rambo is “a big inspiration.”
Higher Than Man, No Free Beats — White Powder Beats Vol. 4: Gangz Gunz N Gold Grillz Edition
March 8, 2011Checking in again, briefly, to lob up one of my all-time favorite ads from when Brian Wenning’s ascendancy to East Coast legendhood was happening in the pages of magazines as opposed to Youtube entertainments and DC was continuing to experiment with color-schemes for what was at the time their fastest-selling model to date. Found this by happenstance tonight, searching for some unrelated magazine cover (no luck there btw). Kind of like thrusting your hand deep into the duffel bag of life and pulling out a long forgotten t-shirt that still fits, but is maybe musty and discolored. If I remember right, this appeared in a TWS that featured a 20-questions sort of feature with Wenning where he switch backside smith grinded a little handrail also. Think there was maybe a Rick McCrank article. I remember all this because naturally it is not among the seven or eight or ten boxes of skate magazines littering the basement/garage. Also love the light in this photo. To link this somehow to what’s currently happening we can draw a vague line to Tom Asta’s going-pro video that’s slated to go live on the Black Box website in about 23 minutes and chances are will include some form of switch heelflip at this same locale.
Off The Dome
April 11, 2010Walking Blues
August 12, 2009
Couldn’t walk a mile off in my air forces (via Fuse Gallery)
Confronted with shoe walls awash in vulcanized soles and increasingly minimalist silhouettes I can’t help but wonder if we’re seeing the skate shoe business, known to some as the last and final bastion of early-00’s profitability for the industry, on the verge of commoditizing itself like what happened with hard-goods. Despite noble efforts from PJ Ladd and TK to goose footwear pricepoints – a bold move in the shadow of a global recession monster – the market seems to dictate that kids basically want $50 Vans, or close approximations thereof, heel bruises and short life spans be damned.
Of course sooner or later tastes will change and tongues will puff up once more, but you have to wonder if technological innovations like the space-age materials currently being pushed by Gravis dude above, or Sole Tech’s shoe lab, or DC’s continued efforts to promote its Super Suede material, are doomed to become the shoe version of carbon fiber decks and air-core wheels. Concaves and dimensions come and go but the skateboard deck hasn’t changed much in the last 18 years, even though the hammer era saw kids of all weight classes snapping boards faster than ever. Who’s to say that the current generation, who don’t remember the armoured tanks we used to push around in, don’t see shoes the same way now?
Now this isn’t my usual sepia-toned spiel about how we all need to go back to the good old days and skate only painted curbs so I don’t feel so horribly insecure. Paying nearly twice as much for shoes that were harder to skate in and only marginally more comfy is a bargain only a fool or a well-paid masochist like TV’s Steve-O would entertain. But I kind of wonder if the shoe companies aren’t painting themselves into a corner here, profit-wise. Meanwhile you’ve got deck conglomerates pushing and shoving to get into the footwear business, and with companies like DC white-labeling the Lynx to shops or whoever, what’s it even mean to be a skate shoe company anymore? It’s like they’re tiptoeing toward blank deck territory, which recently obliterated professional skateboarding forevermore.
But even though there’s so many skate shoe companies now all basically pushing the same product relatively cheaply, nobody really wants anything else right? So how is this different than boards? Most kids don’t give a shit if they snap a board in two weeks versus a month, cuz that’s how boards are. Or, kids don’t care enough to light a sales fire under those Almost disc-decks. The Arto shoe purportedly lasts six weeks longer than a comparable shoe*, but are kids that now buy six pairs of shoes per year going to flock to Gravis so they only have to buy shoes four times per year? People used to a regular turnover maybe don’t want their shoes to last longer, like how you want a fresh board every so often and aren’t trying to ride the same deck for 12 months.
Shit, I don’t run a shoe company, maybe the simple-shoe revolution of the 00’s is all part of their master plan to move more shoes faster. It just seems like it could wind up biting them in the ass, the way all the deck manufacturers are hustling to diversify into clothes and whatnot. Consider: with next to nothing in the way of construction advancement (slicks aside) deck prices have stayed roughly the same for almost 20 years, or at least seriously lagged the inflation rate. (Ye olde inflation calculator puts a $55 board in 1992 at $75 in 2008 dollars.) Skateboard economy, heal thyself…
*however they calculated that one
From The Muddy Banks Of The Great Gray-Green Greasy Limpopo River
February 3, 2009
All set about with fever trees
I would like to begin this week by welcoming back one of my favorite shoe color schemes of years past, the gray/white/black/dark green combo that I personally trace back to the first run of the original Kalis model on DC, released in 2000 or so.* (Try as I may, Google turns up nothing helpful and unlike certain Canadian blogs I don’t have vast expanses of frozen tundra on which to stack boxes of old sneakers into fun igloo shapes.) Basically, the upper (?) was gray, with dark green detailing; the midsole (??) was white and the bottom of the sole was black. In a time of kaleidoscopic D3 color-feasts I remember marveling at the relative subtlety of the whole deal and, upon purchase and wear, even earned a personal thumbs up from the best skateboarder in town at the time. These were charmed days to be sure.
Anyhow, I got a very bizarre but also disturbingly welcome sense of skateboard shoe deja-vu when I spied this new color of Lakai Telfords on deck for release sometime this year (below), and only a month or so later saw a pair of Adio shoes (above) in Thrasher that tapped pretty much the same palette.
Now, I thought I saw a similar color of Etnies Raps somewhere recently, which would make this color a certified trend and also certify me as a footwear trendspotter, all but assuring my escape from WordPress skid row and onto one of those street fashion websites that Lupe Fiasco or the Cool Kids name-check in their conscious-but-not-really-conscious hip-hop songs. (I assume I also would get rich at a certain point.)
*Probably the idea predates this, but I haven’t any clue at all.