2. Chewy Cannon – “Diagonal”

Hat flipped backward and polo shirt fluttering in the wind, Blueprint’s Chewy Cannon skidded, slid and scootched to a new level this year via a combo of breakneck speed, spastic technicalness and a ’90s eye for trick selection. This dude is one of the chosen few who can make both cranium-endangering crashes and frontside boardslides on ledges look good, and Adidas’ “Diagonal” found him weaving in and out of pedestrians, pets and pests while doing an impressive job of making it look as though he’s got no particular plan in terms of what’s to come next. Half the time, like on the hubba b/s tailslide, it’s like he’s barely hanging on, other times his feet seem glued to the griptape as though it were that magical Paradox griptape that is aligned with your inner chi, and perhaps this is indeed the horrible secret behind Chewy Cannon’s success.

6. Dennis Busenitz – “Diagonal”

Even without the Thrasher crown, whadda year for Dennis Busenitz – hitting three stripes’ worth of pro shoe paydirt, contest runs that won the Dew Tour of internet buzz, and a sizzler of a video part that ensured career elevation beyond a message board reign inherited from the likes of Bob Puleo and Gino Iannucci. The secret Busenitz sauce seems to lie in a frothy mixture of speed, unholy control and a supreme confidence that whatever those magic feet do next will work out for the best, and he pours it lavishly across this section the Adidas Europe vid, which he maybe got into by virtue of sharing a motherland with the Herzogenaurach-based outfit. Beyond the big-bounce ender the highlights I guess are the neck-high kickflip on the Ft. Miley hip, the no-push switch smith grind, that lengthy b/s nosegrind and his 180 switch k-grind that seems to stick right to the ledge. Not sure if this is the peak of what Dennis Busenitz can bring in terms of video-section heat but even if not it’s a pretty awesome placeholder ahead of the Real video.

Veni Diddy Vici

Render unto John Lucero…

Haven’t heard a great deal of buzz over the new Black Label video, which debuted a few weeks back, something that could be chalked up to people being busy tearing up obsolete Berrics brackets, downloading any of the other 40 videos that came out this summer, or still watching “Debacle” which is high in this blog’s personal running for top five vids of the year (maybe). Whatever the case the venerable Black Label spirit is very much intact through this new production, despite parting ways with half the team; scraggly speedster Vince Del Valle I had heard of, and mainly associated with that one Adidas ad where he’s doing a backside tailslide shove-it on a ledge above a set of stairs – it made a more interesting ad than usual because they’d gone with the still shot instead of the sequence, well-timed with the shove-it halfway to his feet, which probably incited a few arguments amongst the current crop of driveway kickflippers as to what trick it was supposed to be really.

When Vince Del Valle popped up as the first elephant on parade in “God Save the Label” I was hoping to see how it turned out, since that maneuver wasn’t in his “Diagonal” clip… alas, not. But there’s plenty of chicken-fried flavor to this part, which includes tricks over pieces of trash and a proper 90’s-style switch` hardflip into a ditch – on a related topic VDV also packs one of the more classical 360 flips in a world gone mad with Brian Boitano flare-foot.  Also nice: the underpass escalator backside lipslide, pictured above, the tailslide to regular on a rail, cruise control on the multicolored bank and the horns chiming in for the helicopter ender.

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…”.