3. Diego Najera — ‘Adelante’

It has been a good year for 90-degree catches, from Tyshawn Jones’ vicious backside drifts to Josh Wilson’s expertly turned varial flip in ‘Mother,’ placing him among the trick’s few acceptable practitioners. Striped-pants rippler Diego Najera makes the list with one of the finer switch inward heelflips since John Igei flew a black flag over the Pier 7 block, piloted with the gentle giant grace that this dude has settled into over the past coupla years. From his opening performance of the dope dance in its classic form, you know the vid is gonna be good: Diego Najera’s upper-body trajectory on the switch kickflip up New York’s three up-three down is so perfect as to fool the watcher into thinking there maybe weren’t any stairs there at all; a nollie frontside 180 nosegrind 180 out is managed with no tic-tac, a feat; he spreads a Kalis wingspan on the beautifully filmed 360 flip and later on cab flips into a crowdful of Macba bustle, no pit stains. This dude has the typical Primitive flip-trick command but also a taste for some lesser-dones, like the nollie flip backside nosegrind on the little rail or the backside noseblunt to fakie on the bench, and heavily skating Primitive’s attractive Don Pendleton series hurts none at all.

Scenes From The Spring 2005 DNA Distribution Catalogue

Vicious cycle

He’s probably not too excited about Diamond either

There’s nothing like a good Jason Dill interview really. He’s frequently semi-coherent, names names and talks shit freely, and he seems to have a really good memory in spite of how much drugs he’s supposed to have done. I was thinking the other day actually how it’s been a while since Dill shot his mouth off and lo and behold, Don Pendleton talked to him for a feature at Black Lodges, a webzine/online artist collective of sorts that features a blog by Eric Stricker, presumably moonlighting from TWS message board supervision.

Most of the interview involves Dill waxing Dillish on Polaroids, his grandma’s photo albums and being vaguely heartbroken, but at one point Pendleton gets him going on the topic of streetwear and his own streetwear company Fucking Awesome. Then the cantankerous Dill materializes, nursing a serious case of seller’s remorse:

Yes, I am a cynical fuck. I can’t stand the brands that are out here. That’s why I killed my brand for a while. But every time I try to kill Fucking Awesome, I end up bringing it back and people are asking for more. I can’t stand these fucking brands. I can’t stand any of that streetwear horse shit anymore. I can’t believe I ever got into it. It is what it is, you know.
…
Like, I made a clothing company and I’ve got fucking skateboard rappers wearing it. And I’ve got Paris Hilton’s latest boyfriend wearing it on the E! Channel or whatever. I don’t want that. And people wearing it on the covers of their fucking lame albums. Fucking dumb. I hate everything.
…
Yeah, when I first did Fucking Awesome, it took off like a rocket. One day it was just our funny little thing and it was fun….we were selling it through Supreme and they helped me launch it and get it out there. I remember the guys at Supreme were like, ‘Enjoy yourself now because it’s going to suck eventually.’ And I was like, ‘It’s not gonna suck.’ But yeah, it really sucks now.

Certain of us could be like “well, what did you think would happen,” but we all know that accomplishes little besides maybe chalking up a couple internet snark points. But it reminded me of a similar hard-learned lesson learned about a decade ago by one of Dill’s bosses, Mike Hill, about not being able to choose your audience and seeing your baby co-opted by retards. From Sean Cliver’s “Disposable”:

The success of the alien graphics came gradually. It started out as a cult following but then developed into a trendy nightmare. People would tell me how our shirts were really popular with ravers. This was the last thing the Alien Workshop was about–a bunch of overly social people dancing to techno while dressed for year-round trick-or-treating–and it was quite devastating.

One day a shop account called and said Madonna had just been in their store and bought one of our shirts. He was all excited and thought we should be, too. I remember going berserk and screaming about why would they sell it to her, that they should have denied her. But you can’t control these things. It happens to bands all the time: the people who drove you away to the point of marking something yourself out of frustration end up your customers.

Addendum: the illustrious Police Informer also was on the Jason Dill wavelength this week.