Davos Man And The Risk-To-Reward Ratio Of The Frontside 180

From an ergonomically conscious, low-emissions chair, we are invited to gaze from full-bleed windows upon an empire to hold — sands and wave, manicured desert fauna, native wood, electricalized vehicles, a rain garden. It is a world of opportunity, progression, mindful hustle and passion, with no single-use plastics, preserving natural spaces and personal wealths for future generations. On the weekends, good wine, and good friends.

The game is real estate development. The stakes: Working capital, and maybe, your life. First in are the sharp-nosed swift simmers that take the choicest, juiciest morsels and move along when the throbbing, silvery schools press in. For these must settle for smaller, faster, needier bites, budging and shoving and taking what they can. Always hurried, because you know what comes next: The massive, ironclad submersibles, their snaky sucking hoses pulling in everything not fast enough to flee, their bowels a-churn with knives and rotors chopping all into low-cost slurry for the industrial processors that pulsate privately above.

This is the world, and its strife. As an Instagramming financial pontificator, former pro skater Mikey Taylor’s fiduciary goal is to be the early swimmer, not a slurry-bound slowpoke. In the sphere of real estate, there are buildings to be gut rehabbed, multi-unit leasables to be securitized, tracts to be acquired at auction for a song. And yet, it is all the same sea. What if there were another?

Bronze 56K became the first company to drop a skate video in the ’20s, earning several experience points and perhaps a cash award. (As a privately held company Bronze 56K is not obligated to publicize its financial performance.) ‘Hardware For The Masses’ revealed itself to be another timeless entry in Bronze 56K’s discography, now arguably among the most consistent of any company currently in operation. Bronze 56K always has been a spendthrift entity, repurposing defunct software logos, beer commercials and Wolfenstein 3D editions to conjure among the most powerful branded shirt conglomerates east of St. Louis.

Can tricks too be exhumed, gently brushed and refurbished in a retrofied way to again command a market premium? Bronze’s cultural dumpster divers work these seams too. Consider the humble frontside 180. The board goes up, it turns, you turn, and ride away clean. For decades far too basic for lines, and after thorough early-00s hucking by the likes of Andrew Reynolds, Dustin Dollin, Kerry Getz and Jamie Thomas, it summarily was cast aside as a stair or gap rattler in favor of variations involving flips, shove-its and/or switch-stance. For years the frontside 180 rotted as though entombed beneath an aromatic, regenerative compost heap. Then arrived muckraking New Jerusalemer Dick Rizzo, coiled and unshaven. In Quasi’s seminal ‘Mother’ Dick Rizzo boosts back-to-back frontside 180s down the Bronx’s Jerome Ave banks, turns a switch one over a gold rail under security pressure and goes regular off a miniscule bump to standard-sized bar; in Bust Crew’s deep-tissue tingling ‘Nightmare Van’ last year, he jumps another frontside 180 into a kinked bank ride-out. Italian Bronzester Jacopo Carozzi likes them, and in ‘Hardware for the Masses’ Adrian Vega turns one over the Pulaski wall in a line, while GangCorp youngster Dougie pops one off a bump to stair, and on IG frontside 180s over a studily built wooden bench.

As the World Economic Forum convenes this week to ponder the monetary conundrums of our time, could real estate technicians, uninspired by rental returns and flexy property valuations, direct their intellectual horsepower and florid body heat toward overlooked tricks such as the frontside 180 that exhibit solid returns and honest thrills even if they may not feature in a Primitive vid? Does the frontside 180’s market valuation increase, and the potential return on investment decrease, with each such clip collected in a Bronze 56K vid? Does former SOTY Kyle Walker’s frontside 180 in ‘Be Free’ stand as an early indicator that the trick is ripe for a ’20s resurgence?

Summertime Mixtape Vol. 5 – Dustin Dollin and Lewis Marnell ‘Chichagof’

Beyond your typical personal chemistry and blood oaths, one key to great skate duos of any era is a certain peanut butter-meets-chocolate stylistic matchup. It was true for Jason Dill and AVE, for Louie Barletta and Jerry Hsu, for Mike Carroll and Rick Howard, and it was true for Dustin Dollin as he introduced his preternaturally gifted ‘filmer’ in Volcom’s 2004 pronunciation challenge to tongue-tied shop employees worldwide. Dustin Dollin by this point had established himself as one of the highest-functioning soaks among the Baker squad, solidified via Transworld’s ‘Sight Unseen’ and ‘Baker2G’. By this point his rapid flick, penchant for hairy crooked grinds, and frontside heelflip were known across the hills and dales, but Dustin Dollin’s tricks had a little different flavor when sandwiched around those of relative newcomer Lewis Marnell, who was toward the beginning of his too-short run. The Dunks still were fresh and the hair had yet to dread but other pivotal pieces in the Lewis Marnell repertoire — the heelflip, 360 flips both ways, the switch varial heelflip — already were fully formed.

The Functional Baker Boys

The true glory in growing old and finding one’s self with little or nothing left to prove is that it carries wealth in options. Bill Murray, that graybeard vanquisher of ghosts and pro jock to the Dalai Lama, honored fellow oldster David Letterman last month by leaping out of a secretive cake chamber and proceeding to take shots to the dome. Jack Palance, that silver fox of the US prairies, saw fit to parlay his time at the Oscar podium into boasts about the size of his bowel movements and several one-armed push ups. Betty White this week joined Instagram.

So too in the skate biz, where pro careers now offer second and third acts, there are elder statemenships to be carved out, with Jeff Grosso lovingly hollering at the collective industry to get off his lawn, French Fred Mortagne pulling back the veil on the early years of Barcelona paradise, and Tony Alva donning a puff-ball stocking cap to level-set the Vans video.

Andrew Reynolds and Mike Carroll still have a few miles in them but the heavy retrospecticus vibes and general grown-manning going on when the frontside flip impresarios deposited themselves upon the Crail Couch the other day suggested some pondering toward whatever roles await them as full-time company-runners, number-crunchers and talent-pickers. At this point Andrew Reynolds has been on the sober straight-and-narrow longer than his service under the Pissdrunx, and in interviews he’s been steering kids clear of drugs and drinking for a while now, but it is nevertheless a bit jarring to hear him take shots at Migos:

Advice for the youth?
AR: Don’t smoke weed. Don’t listen to whatever they’re saying in all this trap music, whatever that shit’s called.
MC: MOLLY!
AR: That music, I listen to it in the skatepark and people play it, nonstop, the same song over and over. And I like hip hop. But that new shit though is like brainwash, Migos and all that, like fuck. That’s like, and I see on Instagram, the kids, their little statement about them, is like ‘skateboarding and weed.’ It’s like, alright. And the music is just like ‘disrespect women, money, drugs.’ That’s pretty much it. And if they’re not listening to anything else besides that then that’s just pounded in, all day long.

Andrew Reynolds never has attempted to whitewash his past or foist his teetotaling on his riders, and one must assume that for now his official stance toward Migos music is the same. It’s not clear whether Dustin Dollin owns ‘Rich N—- Timeline’ but the sometime devil’s spawn in the ‘Propeller’ divulges that he holds down the other end of the Baker spectrum, apparently the last bleary-eyed pro standing from the Warner Ave 7-day weekend after his assorted bendermates stepped away over the years:

Thrasher: [A]re you the last Pissdrunk?
Dustin Dollin: I cannot confirm that rumor. Pearcy still drinks. Dancer still drinks, I’m sure. But yeah, out of the celebrity skateboarders in the public eye, I may be the last. I may be the last of the OG Pissdrunks, but there are thousands of them out there now. Thousands and thousands. And growing! But yeah, Jim doesn’t drink. Ali doesn’t drink, Elissa doesn’t drink, Andrew doesn’t drink, Erik doesn’t drink.
…
T: Can you still get tricks hammered?
I mean, every day that I go out skating I’m usually drinking and I try to get a trick if my body’s able. So I guess it’s every time I go skating.

Part of Andrew Reynolds’ legend status no doubt flows from about two decades’ worth of steady output that’s managed to consistently raise the bar, whatever his personal circumstances. But there’s a statistical argument to be made in favour of Dustin Dollin’s boozy functionality, previously revealed through his self-appointed role as KOTR footage logger/point tallier/stunt motivator and the staying power of the dudes he’s helped put on, but mainly via his own skate tricks themselves. A review of assorted Youtube clippings and Digital Versatile Discs from Baker2G’s Y2K release to the present indicates that among the named Pissdrunx, Dustin Dollin is the second-most productive in terms of minutes’ worth of video parts released, coming in ahead of now-dry peers Erik Ellington, Jim Greco, Ali Boulala and Elissa Steamer:

Does Dustin Dollin’s statistical outlier status reflect genetic advantages possessed by Australians in the barroom? What of New Jersey, and might Fred Gall similarly skew averages when stacked against peers less beloved of Sambuca, Ozzy concerts and plunging headlong into burning buildings? Would Andrew Reynolds take genuine offense to the ‘Better than the Beatles’ meme? Will legitimate musicals finally earn Migos the respect they deserve?