Footage Chasms, The Ultimate Answer, And An Alternate Quartersnacks Ballot

In Douglas Adams’ cautionary coming-of-space-age ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ series, men at one point design, construct and program a computer powerful enough to deliver the answer to ‘life, the universe and everything.’ The momentousness of the answer upon its final calculation, ’42,’ is undermined by its numerical and rather tingly nature. Their next technological plate of crow was to design, construct and program a computer powerful enough to supply the actual question, though it is unclear whether this strategem saved the ultimate answer-seekers from being torn to bits by an angry mob.

Thug-motivated New York City scene chroniclers Quartersnacks this month asked an only slightly less weighty question: If you were to bury five video parts and five full-lengths released between January 1, 2010 and today under your house for future generations to reference when they discover skateboarding, what would they be? Loaders of the website subsequently were directed to enter the five best video parts, in order, followed by the best five full-lengths, in order.

Mind the gap, gentle reader, as you are swallowed into a gaping chasm of IG footage comps, Thrashermagazine.com web entries and full-length contributions from a constellation of pros, ams and assorted bros that sputtering economic gravity pumps cannot stop from expanding. The Snack Man requests favorites, and so these shall be received. But tweaking the first iteration of the question — burying only a handful of vids for future generations to unearth — exhumes an entirely different answer.

Would such a time-capsule document contain the subjective faves of its stuffer, including subtle but essential variations on Love Park ledge, backside noseblunts, prohibitions against varial kickflips and kids under 16? Or might it objectively map the body of 2010s skating, with all its gasface-inducing ender-enders, its thirsty moneyraking, its aching tragedy, its wonderful stylistic entropy? Which five video parts* could guide some 2050s hardflipper through this expiring decade’s ups, downs and wooly sideways moves? Is it possible to capture a whole decade in a five-part ‘mixtape’ or is this the type of ill-considered subintellectual exercise best left to archaic blogging platforms and their sludge-dripping ilk? Let’s read on.

Tiago Lemos — ‘Press Play,’ 2016

Did any individual person over these past ten years expand and warp the known boundaries of skateboard possibilities more than loose fitted bio-Brazilian Tiago Lemos? The answer is maybe, but they all could be stacked and concrete poured over them and still Tiago Lemos could switch backside tailslide the lot. His godlike pop only is one part of the picture, and in this clip for DC he dishes forth various handrail barges and pants-wrinkling technicalities like the nollie inward heelflip backside lipslide.

Nyjah Huston — ‘Til Death,’ 2018

This long-in-the-making union of Nyjah Huston, Nike and Ty Evans aligned the sector’s highest-powered and most bankable entities to create a relentlessly hyped part that was at once gobsmacking, expensive looking and oftentimes difficult to watch. Nyjah Huston has come to embody a certain kind of moneyed excess, both on and off the board, and as global wallets open and the hoopla machine winds up ahead of the 2020 Olympics, ‘Til Death’ was an apt warm-up act.

Blobys — ‘I Like It Here Inside My Mind, Please Don’t Wake Me This Time,’ 2016

Polar’s rise to prominence in the early ’10s marked the power shift away from the distributor-conglomerates like Crailtap, DNA and Black Box, raised up on THPS-driven largesse in the years before the skate economy’s bottom fell out, and Pontus Alv’s pulsing, frenetic full-length debut for his Nordic board designer cemented the new vanguard. The Polar dudes scattered their shove-its, wallrides and no-complies across Europe, New York and the Pacific Northwest, but if you were to bottle the aged grayscale stone, fast-and-loose street schralps and Continental accents that wielded influence across much of the decade’s second half, you would pour out something like the Paul Grund, Roman Gonzeles and Kevin Rodrigues JV that closed this vid — bashing walls and curbs, early grabbing and disastering through swinging chains and neon glare past midnight in the Paris cuts.

Lacey Baker — ‘My World’, 2017

Fragmentation of skateboarding’s controlling constellations over the past decade, aided by Instagram, canny companies and the proliferation of screenprint brands, helped throw doors open to any number of comers, importantly including a fresh and focused female generation. Lacey Baker is pushing forward the front lines, dealing in a rapid-snapping brand of tech at home atop SoCal pic-a-nic tables and East Coast monument blocks alike, here flicking impeccably over a bench, there unfurling a noseslide nose manual to flip out combo to the delight of some young Ghostbuster.

Alien Workshop — TWS ‘Cinematographer Project,’ 2012

Josh Kalis was off the team for like three years and it still got him emotional! It goes without saying that the skating, music, lineup and aesthetic here in this, last part in Transworld’s second ‘Cinematographer’ outing, held up as the decade ran its course. Alien Workshop stood at its eleventh hour apex with Dylan Rieder wrapping one of his impossibles over a picnic table, AVE tackling the Heath Kirchart hubba backside, Tyler Bledsoe threading a backside tailslide across a tight top step, some screwball Omar Salazar stuff — and then Gilbert Crockett and Jake Johnson rising to the pro ranks, that switch kickflip, the nollie backside wallride with all four wheels, the switch front blunt. It’s hard to imagine one video part touching ten years’ worth of heights, tragedies, power shifts and stylistic milemarkers, but this one set up an awful lot of them.

*Naming five feature-length videos that capture the era is relatively easy. They are, in no particular order, all of the Bronze videos.

Immortal Technique

A body blow to the soul of skateboarding as Dylan Rieder makes a way-too-early exit from an arena that needed him around. Just a few days after Bill Strobeck issued review material from “Cherry’s” 2014 ‘style class’, there’s a void left by a persona with enough forward lean to tuck shirts and cuff pants, and brute force that could land a regular-stance ledge trick on Thrasher’s cover in 2014. Cancer is pointless and terrible.

The switch backside bigspin flip that ends Transworld’s 2006 entry “Time to Shine” remains gnarly enough for Walker Ryan to lament his own struggles landing a similar version in the Figgy Thrasher, and at the same time there were deeply excavated lip concoctions like the noseblunt slide revert. The eponymous Gravis part got Dylan Rieder a perennial period to accompany single-name status and did as much as any project to legitimize and elevate the standalone online video part, that wrapped-not-spun ollie impossible over the bench demanding rewinds half a decade later. “Cherry” delivered a sort of peak Dylan Rieder, good naturedly teasing girls and honing the frontside flip/360 flip/fakie flip/impossible to finely barbed hooks. The art-film-slash-video-part for his Huf shoe played like a greatest hits reel that basically could’ve only come from this dude.

Dylan Rieder’s contribution to all this isn’t quantifiable, which is partly the point. He rose up with the technical chops and California-dream profile that opened a potential path to a Ryan Sheckler lifestyle enabled by the deepest-pocketed surf and sport gear sponsors. Instead he sought counsel from addled iconoclasts AVE and Dill, pared back his trick repertoire and designed skateable loafers; his Street League runs read like some lyrical argument for quality over quantity, and he got to see the movement he helped shape flow across borders in “Cherry,” setting one of the more vibrant arcs for skating so far this decade.

Besides a body of footage and photos that now won’t taper off or fizzle out, though, Dylan Rieder’s sometimes easy to caricature approach wound up proving, again, one of those truisms not just of the skate biz but a lot of times life in general – how commitment and consideration to left turns in life can transform those early-on arched eyebrows and half-hidden snickers to grudging respect and eventually full-blown fandom. Wish there were more.

4. Dylan Rieder – ‘Cherry’

Is this the year Dylan Rieder decided to stop worrying and enjoy being Dylan Rieder? Probably not, but it’s sort of entertaining to theorize the how and why as to this paring-back of his skating in recent years — this is not such a one with 10 tricks to his name, and whereas it would be nice to see those switch backside bigspin flips and backside bigspin outs taken out for a walk now and then, Dylan Rieder appears content to zero in on a few tricks — 360 flips, kickflips switch and regular and frontside, the impossible still — lovingly handcrafted and polished for max oomph and richness in the instant document that was Bill Strobeck’s ‘Cherry.’ Whether a natural sequence of progressions from the course charted within the Gravis section or an outcropping of the fuck-you money he gets from DKNY and whoever else, it’s heartening all by itself to see a dude who would be an alternate-universe candidate for the reality show/energy drink/corporate contest axis not just migrate away from multinational sponsor lordshippery, but continue to hone his tricks in the bargain.

Long Pork

Teenage angst is the eternally renewable fuel source upon which the skateboard industry may be said to rise and fall. As a power to be harnessed it can be as tender and benevolent as a caressing summer breeze, or as tormentous and destructive as the most esoterically named tropical swirly. Deck designers for decades have sought to sate teens’ hunger for scary skulls, subversive violence, conspiracy oddments and more recently easily recognizable Plan B logos; while Wet Willy and Flameboy once earned lucrative dollar bills from soccer-mom purses, such gateway graphics hooked several generations’ worth of minimum-wage paycheck earners who later would seek out socks emblazoned with weed leafs and several varieties of T-shirts that explain the veritable black holes of society from which the wearer, now more affluent and bejeweled, once had emerged.

With the notable exceptions of Rocco-sanctioned Wu-Tang album cover riffs, one-off series bowing to the continued influence of professional firepole navigators or the fleshy urethane peddled by the double entendring Hubba Wheels, lust is perhaps among the least-celebrated cardinal sin when set up against the various drill fights, junk-food odes, thirst for bling, militant anti-jealousy campaigns, and strategic piling-out plans, yet there may be plausible arguments that it or one of its derivatives underlies every ledge crooked and nearly all 360s flipped.

Does it reflect lingering prepubescent discomfits or fear of some phantom parent peering over our collective shoulder that Hook-Ups couldn’t make the post-millennial transition, that Stance magazine’s Maxim-aping spreads went unsubscribed to, that Big Brother bizarrely became more family-friendly under the watchful eye of Larry Flint? Are there alternative explanations for the general collar-tugging and furrowed brows prompted by the adult situations featured within Dylan Rieder’s wingtip commercial for Huf this month, which left some viewers breathless and others vaguely panicked, like being caught late at night surveying the more risque precincts of their parents’ vinyl collections?

Dylan Rieder makes a certain subset of his potential customer base self-conscious and frustrated, and rightly so. He has the luxury of turning in Street League runs that come off more like a half-demo, half-commentary on the point-stacking repertoires of Chaz Ortiz and Nyjah Huston; as transcribed within this spring’s immediate classic “Cherry,” his 360 flips, switch kickflips and backside smith grinds are worthy for consideration as works of art. Perhaps seeking inspiration within dog-eared months of Supreme’s early aughts calendars, Dylan Rieder with his shoe commercial seems to have redirected the rhetorical query to his railside admirer in “Cherry” toward the viewing populace at large, with one of the era’s great switch backside kickflips floated in place of a question mark.

Others unearth darker tones to these primal urges. Bronze Hardware Company already demonstrated globally that it owns computers capable of making the best video clips. Yet in Bronze’s latest offering, affectionately titled “Enrons,” Joseph Delgado’s Flushing ledge ticklers, an alternate take on the subway gap ollie and an obvious contender for video part of the year from hardflip lifter Jordan Trahan come spiced with smouldering gazes from hair-tossing and moistened vixens, simulated and/or animated mature acts as well as high definition video camera footage. It is obviously an exclusive video, yet Bronze also pays tribute to the wages of death and dismemberment explored in onetime movies made by clothing maker XYZ several decades ago.

Is the latest Bronze video file truly actually an elaborate metaphor for the exhibitionism rampant in today’s extreme sporting industry? Is it solely a matter of days and/or weeks before Alex Olson ups the ante with clips of unclothed, poorly lit bodies within Bianca Chandon web promos? Would this be biting Pontus Alv’s post-Cliche time in the wilderness? Was Nelly right? Could an inevitable skate video parental rating system top out with 56, and will Ian Reid ultimately mount a legal challenge that rises to the Supreme Court?

Reality Rap f. Galactic Magnetar (Prod. by DJ Cattywampus)

In a testament to the reliable if rickety supply chain logistics tenuously connecting video-makers with skateshops, “Cherry” hardcopies now are safely installed upon brick and mortar shelves and therefore the real sport concerning Supreme’s not-quite-so-long-awaited inaugural offering can begin: guessing and tabulating what will ultimately become the video’s most-copped moves. Bucket hats, wrist casts and tucked-in tanks all are obvious contenders, as these must be. But what of head-to-toe zoom-pans, Baker2G/Screw-mo interludes and the amorphous front-to-back montage-collage edit — a tantalizing prospect for aging pros who may wring more mileage from 38 seconds of footage by sprinkling it intermittently throughout a lengthier production, and potentially pulling another five seconds of screen time by tacking on a bailed flatground trick to the end of a line?

It is a dense movie. Toward the end of the video there is a clip that encapsulates the whole deal pretty well, wherein Tyshawn Jones and Nakel Smith, two amongst the new vanguard offered here by Supreme, chitchat briefly before Tyshawn Jones slides down his pants and bends over a Citi bike in pursuit of a clandestine whiz, while Nakel Smith runs, jumps on his board and gaps out to a beefy feeble grind, thereafter cheered from nearby benches by among others a pigtailed Alex Olson, apparently mid-cell phone call. Elsewhere the vid meanders through apartmentsful of idle kids, a fistfight, adolescent come-ons, an irate vagrant shouting and slapping himself repeatedly in the face and again Alex Olson, heated and manhandling an oldster who ignores a plea to scoot himself off a prized spot.

Alex Olson, who maintains one of industry’s more transparent pro regimes, recently broke down the episode and expressed some remorse, in what’s probably a reasonable manner for a subculture that is currently fumbling its way toward a place that has room for even former rollerbladers. In some ways Olson’s Tumblr mea culpa was a far cry from the comparatively more sterilized walking-back statement that Nyjah Huston disseminated after his remarks that girls shouldn’t skate courted a certain amount of PC backlash. One could argue that for Alex Olson, who maintains his own sponsorship ties to international corporate concerns, the stakes were similar to whatever Nyjah Huston may have believed he faced, given that Alex Olson’s former coworker Peter Hewitt was reportedly booted from his position for recounting a graphic and similarly un-PC poop scenario in an interview.

Dylan Rieder, who shares billing with Alex Olson to open the third act of ‘Cherry,’ ponders the debate over ‘big’ companies’ intentions in and commitment to skateboarding in an interview in this month’s TSM, namely, that said big companies may be fairweather profiteers that duck out the back door at the first sign of an early-90s style collapse:

”I appreciate everything Adidas and Nike do for skateboarding, and they pay some of these dudes really good money where they’ll be retiring off it, but how long is that going to last? They’re going to be in skateboarding until skateboarding is not cool anymore and then what is it?”

Alex Olson and “Cherry” impresario Bill Strobeck can speak from some experience here, given how Quiksilver’s abrupt exit from the skateboarder-sponsorship game freed both up to work on Supreme’s vid. The track record though suggests that the recent economic typhoon engulfing the industry has sunk more skateboarder-operated ships, ranging from DVS’ bankruptcy, Es shoes’ apparent hibernation, the diminished status of players such as Adio, Ipath, Elwood, Vox, Circa, etc. (It can be debated elsewhere whether Gravis, whose skateboard footwear effort also is defunct, counts as such an “independent” shoe outfit.)

Dylan Rieder’s shoe boss Keith Hufnagel, in a separate recent interview, ponders a different question: Rather than exiting when times get tight, what if the big ones instead remain and consolidate their position, strengthening their hands for when economic sunrays again deign to shine on the biz and expanding their status as content/cultural gatekeepers?

“Yes, there are some pros these days that are able to make a great living off skateboarding, which is amazing, but it’s a sad day for skateboarding when skateboard footwear and the industry in general is becoming more and more controlled by these big corporate companies. The more accepted these big corporations become in skateboarding, the harder it is for the smaller, independent brands to compete and maintain a voice, which unfortunately results in the corporations having a large influence on the direction and shape of skateboarding.

…When skateboarders get kicked off teams for smoking weed, getting too drunk or just doing one stupid thing, then things have changed. With skateboarding becoming so commercialized, there are sacrifices to be made on both ends. The big companies have to realize what subculture they have gotten involved with and deal with everything that comes along with it. But skateboarding has also changed as it has become more mainstream. For better or for worse it’s just not what it was before. This discussion is for the older crew and maybe some of the young guys, but I don’t think most people care anymore or even understand.”

One could ponder whether Supreme, wielding its renowned reputation as a vibe-heavy tastemaker, played a meaningful part in Nike’s third and successful attempt to develop a “skate footprint,” paving the way for various of its multinational rivals to follow suit and wage blistering combat for shoe-wall real eatate and market shares? It’s debatable, similar in fashion to the true origin of time itself, but it’s interesting to look at the unvarnished street scenes afoot in “Cherry” from this perspective, especially since it isn’t like Supreme had to do a video, much less what will for sure be one of the great ones of the year, lingering over the raw and illegal, same as “Sabotage3,” the House video and so on.

Will ‘Cherry’ inspire a shop-video dynasty in the pattern of the hallowed FTC vids? Has Bill Strobeck achieved the to-date pinnacle of HD skate videomaking? What cards may Anthony Pappalardo have yet up his sleeve? Who will be the first to lampoon the inset image with something like a grinning Fred Gall in place of Camille Row? Is Fucking Awesome off the hook as far as videos go for a minimum of four or five years?

The Incredible Shrinking Alien Workshop

Singular as it was to see the Dill/AVE ‘Dear John’ letter pop up on AWS’s site last spring, it is wild to look upon the ‘Team’ page in recent weeks and count just four working professionals and two amateurs, half the year-ago number, and relegating 30-years-young 2006 Sect inductee Omar Salazar to de-facto elder statesman status. Setting aside Heath Kirchart’s retired jersey and the mercurial standing of Rob Dyrdek the absentee landlord, if you were to trim now-departed ridership from the ‘Cinematographer’ section (and keep the between-clip clips) you’d get about a three-minute vignette; just three parts from ‘Mind Field’ would survive.

The narrative seems to go like this: aging bones and the lack of any equity stake in the company that employed them for some 15 years, Van Engelen and Dill dipped after seeing the title to DNA’s corporate UFO change hands multiple times in recent years, in the most recent case supposedly finding out only after the fact that Dyrdek had abruptly flipped the company to sunglass investor and Street League licensor Pacific Vector Holdings. (‘Despicable Me’ teaches us that a vector possesses direction and magnitude, while Pacific refers to the ocean that abuts California.) Sans these sometime-roomies and industry spirit-guides, Ohio-rooted bean-planter Kevin Terpening quietly exited, followed by the long-anticipated departure of Mikey Taylor, Grant Taylor’s seemingly preordained leap to Anti-Hero and most recently that of onetime franchise fakie 360-flipper and recent DKNY booster Dylan Rieder*.

The slow ebb of branded professional talent from the AWS roster over the past three quarters probably does not rise to the level of the World Industries ship-jumping of the mid-1990s or the nearly absolute Toy Machine team abscondiment that left Ed Templeton and Austin Stephens to rebuild by themselves the house of the Transmissionator. The steady grabbing of coats leaves open the question though as to whether the exodus has yet run its course. The curb-carving hair-greaser known to fans as Donovon Piscopo is seen to remain close with the DAVE contingent; hardly a fortnight can pass without wallride impresario Jake Johnson being instagrammed in close proximity to Polar hardgoods and he has really started to do a lot of no-complies these past 18 months.

Are the quartet of Jake Johnson, Omar Salazar, a recently reinvigorated and spectacleless Tyler Bledsoe, and Gilbert Crockett — who for one has voiced on the record his commitment to remaining aboard the grand Alien trip — strong enough to sustain and refresh this hallowed and murky well of Midwestern weirdness? Did recent “collaborations” with the estates of Warhol and Haring** signal a grasping at creative straws for a company with one of the strongest track records of art still going? To what extent are DNA’s new owners vexed by the exits, versus what their financial models may have divined prior to agreeing the purchase? Will the excellently disjointed TOUROHIO clip from late last year come to be seen as bridge or a bookend? Are the personnel moves to be interpreted as some right-sizing of DNA’s pro-level staffing, given Josh Kalis’ recent comments to the effect that even the MTV-moneyed boardroom chessboxer Dyrdek struggled to keep the company financially viable?

*Noting the Dill and Ave note, as the industry becomes increasingly press-release driven it seems more and more strange when companies keep silent on the departure of marquee names, especially those of years-long riders, instead quietly deleting them from their websites and re-screening their boards.
**does the world need a Radiohead album of Beatles covers?

In The Great Dice Game That Is The Skate Shoe Business, Gravis IVSK8 Wagered, Rolled And Lost

Winter arrived early this week for the action-goods provider Burton, as P&L discontent forced tough decisions at the top that abruptly left Nordic sweater Arto Saari, stylistic watchword Dylan Rieder and others shoe deal-less and set adrift on the ice floe that is free agency in the current economy, increasingly resembling a scene from one of the early, J Strickland-helmed Baker videos where a poor dude is rolling on the ground and groaning in super slow-mo. Is what it is and all involved are wished well, though things appear somewhat brighter for pro and am endorsers of Analog brand pants, who according to this press release will enjoy certain hand-holding procedures throughout this difficult period:

Regarding the Analog surf and skate teams, we will be working with each team rider individually on an exit plan to transition them out of the brand.

The gap in sponsorship largesse is expected to be felt most heavily by Southern California thrift-store proprietors, several leasing agents and various weed spots, while the hardgoods industry collectively contorts and careens as it attempts to financially nose manual through a global recession period. Consumers could be said to lose out by way of a thinner selection of goods available for our paycheques and one less competitor to keep honest rival shoe sellers, yet the untimely demise of Gravis’ “IVSK8” lineup could signal that a deeper and more troubling loss already be lurks elsewhere, buried among footnotes in the great balance sheet of our psyches.

Foisting another footwear choice on an oversaturated population, backed by a big snowboard concern and incorporating a rather on-the-nose identifier amounted to long odds facing the Gravis venture from the jump, but was the company’s true crime being too daring? The much-derided Dylan pro model and later loafer drew wide attention but by all accounts made relatively few sales when stacked against the various iterations of the half-dozen vulcanized templates that have domineered shop walls for what seems now like the better part of the last decade, possibly the longest span of time a shoe trend has held sway over a previously fickle subset of trend-hoppers.

In a time of war abroad and economic upheaval at home, have shoe choices skewed too far toward the safe, familiar and disposable, virtually ensuring that even the likes of PJ Ladd cannot persuade us to spend freely on a technology-forward, expensive signature model? Did Gravis roam too far off the stylistic reservation without a properly tested avalanche transceiver? Or must we make conscious, tribal decisions to periodically embrace outlandish design silhouettes so as to maintain our group ‘edge’?

Dylan Rieder Reveals Bleak Worldview That Includes A Futile Struggle Against Robots, Sort Of Like In “Terminator 2”

At Boil the Ocean Affiliated Blogging and Alloy Solutions plc, self-styled observer of the contest scene, this recent Dylan Rieder interview came across as troubling, in the ‘extreme’ even. Rieder, once characterized as skateboarding’s “golden boy” by the second-best dude on Element* and maintainer of a face that has launched one thousand message-board posts, talks in stark terms of how he struggles to compete in The Street League, against a formidable new form of competitor. To wit:

You should be rich; you’re in Street League.
Yeah… after taxes and all it’s not that exciting. You can’t win any money out of there anyways competing against fucking robots. It’s the same top 3 people all the time taking all the money. They need to have a cash limit, like if you win 500 grand you get kicked out to help the rest of us who can’t land everything first try; maybe give us a shot at the money.

Dylan Rieder reveals that increased automation on the contest circuit has made it more difficult for him to pay his bills, similar to the plight of former auto factory workers in Detroit.

How did you end up in Street League? You’re the oddball. You’re not doing push ups, you’re not plugged into the wall. How did it happen and do you enjoy yourself?
Yeah, it’s alright. Dyrdek is my boy, Workshop and all. Maybe he just wanted another Workshop rider. He called me and asked me if I wanted to do it. Why not? It’s extra dough in my pocket. I’m normally not too fond of the whole contest circuit thing but I got a mortgage now. You got to think about the extra pennies that can help pay the gas bill. I don’t mind it. It is what it is. You show up, you bail a couple times and then you go home. I’m not in it to win it. Under the circumstances it’s not even physically possible because everybody can do everything every try and I’m not that technical of a person.

The bleak tone in Dylan Rieder’s latest interview suggests that he has resigned himself to a lower socio-economic tier, destined to be outperformed by machines programmed with contest-point maximizing algorithms and sneered at by former coworkers. The potential loss is even greater when you consider that Dylan Rieder is, similar to Matt Hensley, Jim Greco and the Muska, among the few fashion innovators of consequence in recent years. As new owner of DNA Distribution and Dylan Rieder’s employer boss, does Rob Dyrdek have a legal obligation to try and lift him out of the dumps, possibly by leading a sing-a-long? If life sucks for Dylan Rieder, is there any hope for the rest of us? Do NASCAR fans really “do it better”?

*When “Time To Shine” came out, at least

Boil the Ocean Is Out Here Asking The Tough Questions About The Transworld Vid Dudes

When is a Transworld video not another Transworld video? Why is a raven like a writing desk? Who framed Radric Davis? Should censored Waka Flocka songs be allowed in skateboard videos? Or allowed whatsoever? If this blog website had snappy answers to any of the above it would be a more worthwhile endeavor for all, but like the increasingly malleable nature of the annual TWS video-offering itself, the only true answer may lie in an enigmatic vortex.

Does Mike Anderson embody the Transworld vid in 2011? Multi-platform media company Bonnier Corp may like to think so. Fashionably bearded and blessed by forefathers like the Gonz as well as this-gen figureheads such as Van Wastell, Mike Anderson is doing the right tricks and with panache. His switch 360 flip has meat on the bones and he can face down speed wobbles on hills and waterslides but what got me going more so than footage I’ve seen of this dude in the past is the almost disdainful nonchalance upon doing whatever trick. Thinking here ride-aways from the kickflip 50-50 stall and the frontside flip 50-50 on that humper-doodle. And maybe also the gap to switch backside 50-50, one of the better tricks in the whole video. To zero out the equation we can nod to the quiet gnarliness of the switch frontside 50-50 on the skinny bar, one of those I didn’t really notice the first couple times through.

Almost 30 videotapes/DVDs/mp4 files into the Transworld dynasty the makers tend to dig themselves into stylistic ruts but at this point they’ve got enough well-worn components to flex here and there. Witness the return of the intro montage for this one, with Toy bros trading shots at the same spot, some Leo Romero and a sorta puzzling-looking trick in a line by Josh Kalis. Judicious slow-mo applied to Dylan Rieder’s latest bench-clearing impossible that is as mind-bending as any of his other recent ones. Theotis Beasley and Nestor Judkins make their turns as rookie professionals and in the interest of a Beasley-esque focus on the positive it’s worth noting the thing of beauty that is the handrail kickflip backside tailslide in his part rather than moaning further regarding the uncalled-for censorship of an innocent Waka Flocka.

Was stoked to see Shane O’Neill’s ender-tribute to the Muska’s legendary kinker grind, many a summer Transworld vid ago, but to capture the hazed-out hands-in-the-air spirit of the Muska you really have to skip ahead to Wes Kremer’s fairly brilliant showing here, one of those examples of a dude who can put together a pretty complete skate video part without seeming to sweat it all that much. Shreds transition (pop-shove it noseslide), knows retro (kickflip tailgrab should have been in the section), gets gnarly (kink rail backside 50-50), can slow-float moves like the frontside shove-it over the bench, like how Kareem Campbell used to. By the time he wraps up the hydrant ollie line it’s consistent carnage until the end and if this early-90s get-live hip-hop closing part song thing becomes a trend, at least Wes Kremer is getting in on it while it’s still cresting.

Previously the late-model TWS vids have been compared to recent entries in the AC/DC catalog, with some comfort factor in knowing what you’re going to get, but the flipside is a risk of increasing disposability and fleeting impact — I’d be hard pressed to remember the last time “Hallelujiah” occupied the DVD tray, Tyler Bledsoe backside tailslides and all. Most new TWS vids at least initially seem to improve on the previous one but maybe in the era of daily webclips and internet-only parts the full-length production is bound to have a shorter shelf life especially if it’s a once-yearly affair? With the producers this time around seeming to make more of the fact that each summer’s TWS vid is filmed in “only one year” will they eventually shift the calendar to film for 18 months, or two years, to fully mobilize the hype machine for maximum sales powers? Would the Muska stand for his hardcore lyrics and/or lifestyle to be censored in a DVD? Didn’t say any of these questions would be answered, btw.

6. Dylan Rieder – “Dylan”

Whether or not he was as backed into a career-corner as his going-there “Epicly Later’d” made it sound, the Jake Burton-underwitten one-part promo wallop did a fine job resetting the gameboard for Dylan Rieder this fall. Earlier we were comparing him to Heath Kirchart due to danger-moves like the handrail switch flip and the boardslide to bus dodge, but rewatching this a few months later and there seems like a really “Visual Sound” tinge to some of this stuff like the bar ollie/frontside 180, the schoolyard line and that sidewalk run with the long lipslide on the white block… maybe it’s the button-ups. Still a little out to lunch on the Dracula cape-drawing moves with the forearm but supremely stoked on his left foot in the backside smith grind, resurrecting one of the better non-Penny kickflip shifties out there, and how many of his teammates filmed clips for his part.