Warm Fuzzies, Cats And Dogs, And The One Line That Remains Uncrossable

Winter early moves to wrap its frigid grip around the U.S.A., and in the bristleish and untucked realm of the skate-board, the season of warm fuzzies already is at hand. U.K. department store operator John Lewis released its annually anticipated holiday ad, which this week cascaded across screens of varying size via a thumbnail image of a days-bearded middle ager squeezing on a helmet, prompting reactions ranging from ‘don’t I know that guy’ to ‘I am that guy.’

As an apparent product of the secular advertising industry, the ad cuts unnervingly close to the bone for those old enough to lack the schedule flexibility to hit anything but the most-packed or least-lit park hours, but young enough to reject throwing in the towel (or resist You-Tube perusals at work). The majority of the ad plays the DadBro’s quest for a kickturn less for laughs and more along the lines of some pitiable yearning to reclaim youth or maybe a midlife crisis, until a knock at the door puts the whole thing into a much different context (that’s also very 2022 in its take on who’s down these days). After years of harnessing 720s and kickflips to market carbonated beverages, packaged foods and haircare products, it is a welcome shift.

Half a hemisphere away, in a California schoolyard (but not that kind), the seven-ply Sterling Coopers of WKND up-loaded a ‘Clueless’ style walking tour through the brandings, identities and cliques currently occupying various positions across the industry, Internet and life generally in ‘Alan Gelfand High.’ The menagerie, festooned with neck braces, noxious fumes and pregnant cheerleaders, skewers the nature of the industry and skating itself, sometimes gently and sometimes less so; Paul Rodriguez, Big Nakie, Nora Vasconcellos, Heath Kirchart, Rowan Zorilla and various others all are allotted screen time to illustrate the ecosystem’s wide-ranging coexisters, until arriving at the one line that narrator/guide Bob says represents “social suicide” (which is to say, rollerbladers), presenting the WKND team-riders with a stark choice.

It’s a well-crafted and details-laden reframing of a familiar story in service of a collab product line between WKND and blader brand Them Skates. The project seems geared toward furthering and challenging the more-accepting place that skateboarding is now in, where varial kickflips and other dad tricks are freely filmed, the most questionable music selection and fashion choices of the early 2000s are embraced, and vibe triumphs over podium placements and NBDs. There are long rambles to be penned about inclusivity and how far things have come and how far they have yet to go, but there can be no doubt that things are in a different place than they were 10, 20, 30 years ago.

And yet, there is a line that WKND’s norms-challenging commercial avoids entirely, a group for which John Lewis’ heart-warming TV commercial opens no doors. While collabing with a rollerblader company in 2022 is to sample the often lonely, widely derided outcast path required to be a skateboarder in the early 1990s — from the comfort of what’s now a firmly established and generally understood subculture, if not a particularly celebrated or lucrative one — the quantity of heart and flame emojis in response to ‘Alan Gelfand High’ heavily outweighed the raised eyebrow ones and the relatively few expressions of outright disgust from the old guard. The truly daring collaboration, though, would be in the less-underground and more vigorously reviled realm of the scooter, its clanking platform and unwieldy handlebars challenging all notions of style and execution and geometry, its ranks made legion by innumerable preteens flopped across skatepark quarterpipes, a wreckage of GoGurt entrails leaking behind them, phalanxes of red-faced parents bearing water bottles and sunscreen forming a fearsome rear vanguard.

In this story, are the scooter riders of our day the ugly duckling rejected by its snooty swan peers, or a demon to be recognized for its unholy nature and summarily cast out? Are Los Angeles-area trailblazers 10C41, who released earlier this year on their channel a scooter vid called ‘RazorBLADE’, once again way ahead of the curve in pushing of envelopes? Does the heavily underground nature of the modern rollerblader scene make them by default cooler than skateboarders, with all the day jobs, confused looks and jeers from passing cars to prove it?

Term Limited

Aging may be the great skate industry adventure of the ’10s, as grizzled pros test the tolerance of weathered ligaments and brittling bones in an ongoing quest to avoid that unholy wyrm, the Real World, and its most loathsome prison, the Day Job. There are a few who two decades ago may have seemed obvious candidates if one were to choose a moon-shotter capable of stretching a pro career into a third decade, like Eric Koston or Daewon Song or Marc Johnson. There are are others whose misadventures and various rabbit-hole plungings made them less obvious picks, such as Jeff Grosso and Fred Gall and Guy Mariano. Yet here we are.

Jason Dill, a veteran who never really warmed to half-measures when it came to things like video part construction, socks height or New York City nightlife, appears to have embraced old age as lustily as any slot-playing, shuffleboard-pushing three-time divorcee. Witness his silver fox persona, his grayed and thinned hair, his floral shirts, the Britannicesque recollections of days gone past and concepts ripe for resurrection. As he raises a brood of young street urchins with partner Anthony Van Engelen, Jason Dill also has honed an ability to emotionally wound that appears as needle-eager as any sourpuss granny. From his recent Playboy interview:

I’m now past my third year of FA. I’m proud of what we’ve done. If you are a company making stuff, you need to have it in the back of your head that, hey, I might have to kill this thing one day for the greater good so it doesn’t look like a bunch of bullshit. Imagine if Mark Gonzales got to end his skate company, Blind. How would we look at it today? Imagine if Mark had made some deal with Steve Rocco, the owner of his distributor, early on, like, “I’ll totally do this, but when I think it’s time that this is done, I get to put out an ad that says, ‘It’s done. We killed it. It’s over. Thank you.’

Jason Dill didn’t have to take it there. For skateboarders ‘of a certain age,’ Blind’s last 15 years or so as a stable for a Canada-heavy lineup resembling a Digital Video Magazine board team will always take a back seat to the ‘Video Days’ lineup and, later, the Ronnie Creager and Lavar McBride-led ’Trilogy’ generation. Nowadays, you’re hard-pressed to place your hand on a Blind board outside the Tech Deck assortments cradled within the boxy bosom of Walmart. In fact, they’re outlawed. But with his reminder that Blind’s heyday now lies a beagle’s lifetime in the past, Jason Dill’s prodding of old sores is an exercise in discomfort matched only by grouchy grandmothers’ bitter questions over the fate of hand-knitted blankets long ago vomited upon, washed and relegated to life’s basement closets.

Time’s grinding passage has yet to reveal whether Jason Dill or Pontus Alv — another long-in-the-tooth owner of an insurgent board company that lies under his control, and who has expressed similar sentiments — will avail themselves of a Hunter S. Thompson exit strategy, rather than some much-later forced transfer to a mall store-ready nursing home. Do they possess the determination and financial buffer? The skating mind seems wired for Quixotic pursuits that can batter the body, plague the mind and sometimes, sear the soul — literally throwing one’s self down a set of stairs over and over again, sometimes for days on end. Quitting while one is ahead, whether in the sense of a sound body or arrest-free permanent record, may not pay dividends in the form of shoe contracts and soda-pop endorsements. For every Heath Kirchart and Scott Johnston showing themselves the door rather than be escorted out by younger, abler-bodied teammates, there are multiples of beloved pros whose ratio of video footage minutes to pro deck graphics looks increasingly lopsided.

Can pros turned board company proprietors be relied upon to serve as judges and executioners weighing the street cred of their own enterprises? Should company owners freely discuss the concept of forced euthanasia, for will this only perplex the Dutch?

I Might Be Wrong

But watching these Heath Kirchart off-cuts from the Emerica vid, I feel like there’s a passing moment around 8:49 here, where he’s hopping into the golf cart en route to landing that giant 360, that you can see the thought of maybe not retiring pass through the motorcycle helmet…

You Won’t Have Heath Kirchart To Kick Around Anymore, Except Maybe On His Bicycling Blog

Hushed whispers and anxious talk these past weeks that California’s Heath Kirchart may have won skateboarding. Whether such a thing is possible, or even within the tremb-ly bounds of reality, matters little to them who speak of web-winged horrors in the night and terrible, elder gods whose names are better lost to fabled memory. We find ourselves confronting a post-‘Stay Gold’ gap that fits like an abyss and is that much more perplexing for its almost welcome appearance.

It’s maybe wrong to say Heath Kirchart went out “on top” as he didn’t really wear the hungry contender hat — Rob Welsh once notoriously described himself as your favorite skater’s favorite skater, and probably that isn’t really the right hat to put on Kirchart either, but maybe something closer to your favorite skater’s most feared specter. His shadow was a long one, stretched by negative vibes, bushes-hiding and the occasional bout of physical violence, and it will grow with time. And perhaps the completion of certain American biking challenges.

So maybe better to say he left* on his own terms, though the Kirchart of the Thrasher interview might try and argue the point — saying more like forced out by tougher competition or something. But compared to a slow, five-year slide through fourth- and fifth-tier shoe sponsors and elastic cable accessory endorsements, it could have been much less dignified. And it was without a blaze of sour grapes, or grabbing for some Hollywood brass ring, as interesting as that concept may have been.

Possible knocks on Heath Kirchart: A Career On Four Wheels? With counter-knocks
-Skated for Birdhouse during the height of the cartoon graphic/Tony Hawk deification era
—Was in “The End,” among the best 90s videos; damaged property and lit fires with future “Hater’s Ball” honoree Jeremy Klein; ate shit skating a bus stop

-For much of his tenure, a “handrail skater”
—Unless I’m wrong, was the first dude to backside noseblunt such a handrail; christened El Toro; that lipslide shove-it from the Foundation vid

-Turned in a half-dozen tricks for his last video “part”
—Jumped the mega-ramp/set a higher bar for “street dudes” taking the plunge; told everybody they could stop paying him afterward

Others?

*Barring a comeback, which would inevitably bring comparisons to Jereme Rogers

5. Heath Kirchart – “Mind Field”

Heath Hirchart mustered all the forces of darkness to close out Alien’s “Mind Field” with the requisite sparks a-flying and some bonus bigspins for the ADD-addled YouTube generation. Every Heath Kirchart video appearance is a kind of event on its own, to the point that his appearance on O’Dell’s “Skate Talk” set viewership records only topped by the recent appearance of the self-awareness challenged JR. While JR’s message is about believing in yourself and balling out at the club, contempt for his fellow man festers in Kirchart’s heart, but much like the Incredible Hulk he seeks to channel it in useful ways such as backside lipsliding long rails and breaking the noses of mere mortals. With this part women trembled, the ground shook and minor miracles occurred in nearby counties, as anticipation grew for the Emerica whiteout.

Now That’s What Boil the Ocean Calls Skateboarding (’00s Edition): 20-11

20. “Ryde or Die Vol. 1,” 2001

One of the last videos with that 1990s feel, Rob Welsh came storming through with a section that observers and supporters had been waiting on since he popped up in the Mad Circle video. Kind of like the Pier 7 opener, there maybe are flaws to this section, but they’re awful hard to make out amid the crooked grinds and Wu-affiliated musics. Aside from the fade-to-whites, “ROD” also features rare full-length appearances from Kevin Taylor and Clyde Singleton, who floats that monstrous bar ollie, and Joey Pepper comes off all forward-thinking nowadays with his Stooges song and backside nosegrind pop-out 180s; this video also featured a pretty good John Igei part and a Mannie Fresh instrumental, ensuring it a top-20 position.

19. “In Bloom,” 2002

TWS’s first am-boosting video featured two of the most visceral parts committed to DV tape this decade from Trainwreck and TNT, more than balancing out the comparatively humdrum footage from the young Evan Hernandez and Mikey Taylor. Tony Trujillo was at the height of his powers, clinging onto tricks he should’ve bailed and ending with a sort of literal smash. People who don’t skate have watched this part on my TV and termed it poetry in motion, and also tight jeans. Whereas P-Rod stood on the cusp of cashing in his little-kid chips for a spot on Girl and probably should’ve had the last part with all the switch gap stuff, it becomes difficult to logically argue against Slayer and 100-mile-an-hour handrail jumping by the rapidly sleeved and unfairly maligned Alex Gall, practitioner of a truly brutal form of gnar skateboarding. I wish he’d stuck around. Finally, this entry would be remiss not to mention the inclusion of Chris Cole when he started getting more interesting, indulging in the Misfits and the Love Park gap.

18. “Man Down,” 2001

Everything that “Tilt Mode” was and more, except a little less, since there was no Juvenile and Steve Cab didn’t take another run that one crazy handrail, perhaps on sound advice from his lawyers. Saying that the Tilt Moders re-injected “fun” into things misses the point and can make the sayer sound embittered for his or her own bizarre and unfortunate reasons, but videos such as “Man Down” did seem to make a point to encourage drinking, indulging in peculiar fantasies, and generally taking things less serious than the pros who stare at handrails, or wap themselves over the head with their boards for instance. Marc Johnson’s last trick in this video was a switch hardflip backside tailslide, which Rodrigo TX did for his last trick in the Flip video last month. Marc Johnson also skated to the disco Rolling Stones and if you slow-mo certain tricks you can see him bludgeoning seal pups for fun and profit.

17. “This Is Skateboarding,” 2003

Retroactively the Emerica video with the kinda-silly title gets lumped in with the leather-jacket-and-basic-handrail-trick movement from the early part of the decade, which it was part of sure, but “TIS” had a lot more depth than that thanks in part to the crack production squad of Miner and Manzoori. Opening on a dismal/dour note with a subdued Heath Kirchart section, they meander through the noisome world of Ed Templeton and his ollie impossibles, the most legitimately urban Tosh Townend part, and the last major effort from Chris Senn who did that crazy f/s pivot. Kevin Long roared onto the scene here, spinning both switch and frontside, and the Reynolds closer has that opening line for the books and some serious left-field tricks like the switch backside shifty.

16. “The DC Video,” 2003

DC’s vaunted debut video was notable for a few reasons, including Rob Dyrdek seeming to make a sincere effort, Josh Kalis tossing off a switch version of his ‘Photosynthesis’ ender into the credits, and Colin McKay skating to Jimmy Buffet while foreshadowing the rise of the Geico insurance lizard. The video as a whole though gets over on three parts: Anthony Van Engelen’s blistering crooked-grind melee, Brian Wenning doing less than five tricks regular-footed throughout his other great video part, and yea, the Danny Way. A generation in skateboard-years later the mega-ramp is a known commodity, with its own X-Games designation and related baggage, but seeing the iron man jump and twirl and soar over that thing for the first time was a very, very nutty thing to see, and the victory lap with the rainbow rail sealed the deal.

15. “Mind Field,” 2009

Reminding us what a video can do aside from whomping you over the head with unending ledge combos, “Mind Field” returned Alien to form in time for the decade to close out after a few years of soul-searching brought the company to Burton’s doorstep. Purists will quibble about putting on Arto and distribution strategies but in the end-results department “Mind Field” was a triumph, dragging AVE back out of the gutter, putting a match to the incendiary Omar Salazar, letting Jason Dill do as he must and anointing Jake Johnson as a new standard-bearer for New York City – before Heath Kirchart blows through and wipes out everything. Maybe if we were doing this list five years from now, this video would be higher.

14. “Vicious Cycle,” 2004

For an outsider this Zoo-backed production signaled a sort of generational torch-passing as far as high-profile New York types – you had Vinny Ponte yelling at people and Robbie Gangemi doing those frontside blunts and Danny Supa, sans Supa-suit, with a bigspin-flip higher than a regular person’s head. It’s hard to ignore Zered Bassett though, seeings how he comes through and switch heelflips over a house or something in basically every section, and all the then-young guns have pretty amazing shit: Charles Lamb, Eli Reed, Brian Brown and most especially Lurker Lou, whose low-key opener features many colorful varieties of the Etnies Rap, and Aquil Brathwaite, who was on some serious Lavar McBride in “Trilogy” and who I would’ve bet the farm was gonna be huge.

13. “Mosaic,” 2003

Some bemoan Habitat’s westward shift in terms of personnel, but the squad might have been at its strongest when it struck a balance between coasts. Featuring the dirtbag debut of Danny Renaud, with Brian Wenning and Anthony Pappalardo at their respective heights and Jason Dill’s planned/unplanned all-line section, all differentiated the first Habitat vid and realigned things for everybody else to a certain extent over the years to come. One of the few videos where either of the last two sections could’ve closed it, but it’s hard to think of any other moment in time when poised Peruvian Danny Garcia could’ve dropped the curtains, and nollieing a gap to k-grind remains a pretty crazy thing to do even years later.

12. “Baker2G,” 2000

The video that launched a thousand apparel companies centered on black stretch denim. This video shocked upon arrival, first and foremost with the foul-mouthed Knox Godoy, second with the skating, and to a lesser extent the assorted antics and guest appearances from Brad Hayes, Hoops and Chad Fernandez. Greco’s backside noseblunt and Reynolds’ nollie noseblunting ascension to Koston heights aside, the influence of “Baker2G” was felt just as heavily off the board, and it’s to their credit that the bros have stuck to their niche in and out of 12-step programs while finding new ways to heft a middle finger toward authority, for instance, the Olympics.

11. “Real to Reel,” 2001

A Bay Area classic in the spirit of “A Visual Sound,” “Sick Boys,” and “In A Major Way,” Real’s early ’00s entry is still the best case for Nate Jones’ elevation to flower-child style icon, and watching this video again is kind of bittersweet when you wonder how much further he could’ve taken things, what else could’ve been, etc. But “Real to Reel” also launched Hensley revivalist JT Aultz and the barnstorming Dennis Busenitz, with Mark Gonzales refocused on street lines and Cairo Foster at or approaching some sort of peak. Max Schaaf on the money board and shit, even this video’s credits section approaches classic status.

Boil the Ocean SOTY Short List 2009

Just throw it in the bag

This year seems like last year, kind of, as far as there not being any type of clear front-runner for the most hallowed of skateboard awards that is not distributed in buckets by the Maloof brothers. There’s no Daewon or Danny Way or Arto Saari no-brainer, and while there are several semi-brainers (useful for commentors such as myself), the politics and squishy qualifications and completely opaque selection process makes it all the more interesting and fun to pointlessly speculate. And so we jump in.

Leo Romero: I kind of feel like if that Skateboarder cover had been a Thrasher we wouldn’t even be bloviating on this, but the uphill path of the inscrutable Leonard is part of his appeal – jumping ship from Baker to Toy Machine years after several former bloodsuckers headed headed the other way and left Ed & co. with their hands in their pockets, alongside a general negative attitude that many have favorably compared to Emerican elder Heath Kirchart. Leo has a potentially ground-shifting video part in store with “Stay Gold,” and while it will not drop this year, Phelps and his buddies have been known to move pre-emptively, and who doesn’t like to look smart?

Heath Kirchart: The buzz is that the Thrasher camp may not have enough love for the brooding bro with the red-carpet disses and vending machine business, but I don’t know. It’s not like the dude goes around handing out cookie bouquets to the other mags, and to a certain degree you could imagine the Thrasher powers that be digging a devil-may-care mode of operation. It would sorta be a safer pick too, since Heath K brought a show-stopper video part in 09 and potentially another one next year. Cons, he hasn’t done much for Thrasher and he skated to Morrissey.

Sean Malto: A teen heartthrob who lives his own reality show, baffling security guards with nollie frontside feeble grinds and shredding the Pacific Northwest with Julien Stranger. Green but his Thrasher cover was among the year’s gnarliest and the non-stop skateboard mission seems to always have room for a stop or shoutout to his beloved Kansas City; a pro model shoe is not far off and he’s had enough footage drizzled out here and there to mold a passable follow-up to “And Now,” but Malto’s 09 slow burn has yet to fully flare, and I’m not sure the cover, rowdy as it is, would get him over.

Dennis Busenitz: The current Slap Board messiah would seem to have SOTY at long last sewn up, with an internet-smashing video part, talked-about contest runs, many good photos and a pro shoe to boot.* He’s a Nor-Cal gnarler who can schralp transition and/or spit out switch 360 flips, he’s with the right companies. If there’s a downside I guess it’s the lack of any super-handrail heroism or mega-ramp fireworks or some type of singularly groundbreaking trick, but then again, maybe that plays to his advantage. In ten years a Busenitz SOTY win would probably come to be seen along the same lines as Chris Senn, which is to say those who know would know, the rest would be wondering “why not P-Rod” and there’d be a certain amount of “you had to be there”

Lizard King Mike Plumb: Let’s put him on the list. The zaniest Wallenberger with a stupider tattoo/carving every month, and he’s a decent interview. Kind of a long shot maybe but one could argue he’s fairly representative of where skating is these days, which is to say, both trick- and movement-wise.

Anthony Van Engelen: The odds might be stacked against him but to my mind the case has never been stronger for an AVESOTY and the brow-furrowing AWS decks it would probably produce. He has a couple magazine covers, a blazing video part, a harrowing comeback story, a bunch of tattoos and he wears Vans. As one who birthed the current fascination with speed and successfully fused hesh grime with precision tech skating he’s for sure a contender from the career standpoint and probably a SOTY everybody could agree with on some level.

Torey Pudwill: Just throwing it out there, Jake Phelps knows who he is and he’s given it to fresh-faced pros before. But, the lack of follow-through on the Wallenberg nollie flip might cost him precious support in the Yay area.

Zered Basset: the King of Zoo York coulda won it the year he made the “Vicious Cycle” part as far as we’re concerned but he nearly hit that mark again in the “State of Mind” video (still thinking the MOP was totally brilliant) and he has been on the Thrasher radar for some time. The drawback might be that he’s been kind of below the radar compared to some of the charge-happy spotlight grabbers like teammate Brandon Westgate, but an elder statesman might be the one to usher the tradition into the next decade.

It seems like there should be some kinda transition dude in here so, I don’t know, Lance Mountain. Insane as Bob’s mega-ramping has been, our view is that he’s a little bit too TWS/Fuel TV these days for Thrasher’s taste. While on the topic it seems like Justin Brock has whatever “rookie of the year” awards wrapped, unless Grant Taylor gets em.

*get it

tak: “I think they started drinking way before it started”

“You guys live in little shelters where you don’t answer questions”

I hadn’t tuned in to Patrick O’Dell’s “Skate Talk” live internet webcast chat call-in show before tonight, because I generally forget about this stuff until I read about it elsewhere a dozen or so times, but for whatever reason I recalled that Heath Kirchart was going to be taking questions from the assembled minds of the web-enabled skateboard community. So I cued it up in the background while I parsed the prepared statements around the Active purchase and after a half-hour was set to write it off as another failed web 2.0 experiment, like message-board interviews with freeze-ups and a fuzzbox phone… until the slurs got the better of Heath Kirchart and he started demanding to know why it took them five (?) weeks to slot him as a guest on the show.

“I mean, you guys are my friends…”
“Why was I not a guest?” (Asked every 15 seconds or so)
“Why did you only ask me after Nick Trapasso defaulted??” (asked when the point was made that Heath Kirchart was a guest right now. He kept returning to the word “defaulted” which I thought was interesting for whatever reason)
“Why am I only being asked now. Why”
“Why did it take five weeks to have me on?”
“I’m your backup”
“Boosh, you’re not in a position to be making decisions”

To some extent skateboarding is about exerting control over your environment, sort of, and it speaks to the mastery of Heath Kirchart that he’s apparently able to do this in social situations as well, since the last 20 to 30 minutes of the show were basically variations on this theme. Which was far more entertaining than watching him roll his eyes at questions about game-of-skate strategies. Though he did lay to rest the question that has kept many a skateboard blogger awake nights: “was your last trick in Mind Field a tribute to Josh Beagle?” Answer, no.

The Grimness and Grace of Heath Kirchart

Superbeast

Somehow, though a combination of reticence, grouchiness and no small amount of punishing gnarlitude, former Barbarian at the Gate and sometime bikini contest judge Heath Kirchart has over the years perfected the quality/quantity cocktail of skateboarding career moves that most never get right and others probably shouldn’t even bother with, to the degree that few dudes’ video parts are as hotly anticipated as the greasy-haired fellow who these days motors across the country decked out in somebody else’s military medals. It’s a beautiful thing, that such a willfully antisocial weirdo can surface once every few years, command our full attention, and yes, cement his place in the history books by earning the title of TWS’s Best All-Around Skater.

In terms of what he films Heath Kirchart generally isn’t reaching for the high-hanging tech/gnar fruits plucked by the likes of Chris Cole and Eric Koston, and he’s not chasing the biggest/highest/farthest challenges for bonus points either really. And it’s not as though he pulls from a bottomless bag of tricks either (shoutout to the bluntslide and backside flip). But there’s a kind of contemptuous recklessness in the way he skates, heaving himself onto a handrail or slowly twirling ten feet out of some skatepark bowl. And intensity. Oodles and oodles of piping hot intensity.

This sort of grim nonchalance fuels Heath Kirchart’s thundering bloodbath of a bookend to “Mind Field” on a suitably dour Morrissey note as we lap up the usuals (backside noseblunt, switch kickflip, frontside noseslide, frontside tailslide) and some newer ones (switch heelflip, backside lipslide bigspin, kickflip nosegrind, the JT Aultz/ollie over to noseblunt slide); in the meantime we’re treated to a hyperventilating owl and an effort to loosen up the collar of the shoelace belt look for summer ’09. It’s not a party exactly – it seems like it never really is with this dude, even when him and Jeremy Klein were terrorizing shrubberies over a decade ago – but when he gets his inner whipsaw or whatever revved up there aren’t many who shove-it out over gaps or bomb frontside boardslides down hubbas or eat shit better than Heath Kirchart really. And it was nice to see the TSM covers, years old though they may be.

Eleven Initial Thoughts on the Alien Video

via Epicly Laterd

-Jake Johnson had the best part.
-AVE got his handrail mojo back, in a major cot damn way (b/s nosegrind)
-for guys with their own, private skateparks, you’d think they could get more footage
-Kalis taking the bigspin-to-ledge switch made me want to, you know, something
-a handful of intentional-or-not homage/tributes to past DNA productions, among them Jake Johnson’s regular-footed Lenny Kirk, the wind-ups, Mikey Taylor’s nollie f/s noseslide to fakie and Heath Kirchart’s kickflip-as-pretelegraphed ender (sort of)
-Jason Dill’s abiding love for the indie-rock Phish is rather endearing
-Omar Salazar’s Stallone grind brought the house down
-Heath Kirchart, fuck, but err what happened to the all-white part?
-Mikey Taylor still rides for the long frontside 50-50
-A nice effect: somebody breaking a glass concurrent with Tyler Bledsoe touching down a bigspin
-A suitable amount of razzmatazz and middle-America flotsam.

Who out there thinks they can make a better video this year?