As the talent level astride multi-plied-and-coloured popsicle sticks and their occasionally spoonier prodigal forefathers careens forward, sometimes at such a rate as to make close observers dead-eyed and unmoved by steadily rising tides of ledge byzantazia, the skill-level forest easily gets lost in the YouTube-clipped trees of crooked grind nollie inward heelflip bigspins and switch bigspin backside lipslides. Coming to terms with NBDs sprinkled into that second-class content citizen, the web-only clip, can only further remove our collective hive-mind from the basic eye-foot-and-sometimes-hand coordination required to even push down a street.
When Young Gun Charlie Bowdre cautioned that geeks off the street need not apply to be regulators of the hard calibers later celebrated by Warren G, he could just as well have been drawling about skateboards. Whereas your typical civilian, presented a basketball, could likely execute a rudimentary dribble and/or free throw, attempting to handle the tingly and critical building blocks carved out by Alan Gelfand and Rodney Mullen may lead unhappily to ER trips, bellylaughs of derision or both.
So what would the world’s sundry and assorted geeks, perverts, players and pushers make of the daring new GX1000 clip, opened with several stomach-turning minutes of hairy hill bombs down San Francisco streets? What would they see if they peered over their overflowing canvas sacks of Trader Joe’s to witness one of these screwball lines being filmed? The first dude leaps off a curb cut or over a bar, swerves into the street and scooches his wheels back and forth to slow down, while the second follows hunched down, potentially dragging one foot occasionally and pointing a souped-up video camera at the first one.
Might such a geek quizzed hazard to guess that the ‘better’ rider of the two was the one entrusted with costly electronics, required to keep pace with whatever speed is set by his comparatively unencumbered subject and charged with avoiding just as much traffic? Will Ty Evans-endorsed low flying follow-cam drones settle this question in the future or serve only to displace any remaining filmers who have not added ‘cinematographer/director/brand manager’ to their Linkedin pages? Will such a shift issue loathsome economic skate-industry ripples to the same degree that driverless cars are projected to swell human unemployment rolls? Will human filmers again become relevant after artificially intelligent drone filmers achieve self-awareness and start missing tricks due to repeatedly checking their instagram accounts?
boil the ocean 