6. Casper Brooker – ‘Cathedral’

If a body were going to draw up a list of ways to make filming a skate video more difficult than it might otherwise already would be, Casper Brooker and Jacob Harris’ Drift-adjacent Nike production from last spring has a bunch of ideas – keep it not only to one spot, make it a busy one, and go when nobody’s around; film mainly lines but include nearly no pushing, and orient a load of the hardest stuff around ledge tricks to manuals, a sub-subgenre that was at one point relegated to the credits section gag reel. South Bank is plenty photogenic, Casper Brooker for sure brings some heaters like the fakie manual to fakie ollie down the steps and the big boost out of the backside smith grind, and these dudes really don’t need much else – a block and a bank.

1. Tom Knox — ‘Atlantic Drift’

Is there such thing as a perfect video part? Determining an answer may require intensive quantitative computing, enchanted armor, and forensic analysis of Mark Gonzales in ‘Video Days,’ Guy Mariano in ‘Mouse,’ Jason Dill in ‘Photosynthesis,’ Dylan Rieder for Gravis, et cetera — all of which lay beyond the operational and budgetary constraints of modern weblog technology. Doesn’t watching the inevitable-feeling Tom Knox/Jacob Harris brick-and-bubblegoose masterpiece press the question though? It is a rapper-producer partnership as strong as any there were, probing and working many threads across ten engrossing minutes that mine London’s vacant schoolyards and blocks of flats — smirking humor, heartache, family, memories of spots and days past. It is tempting to sift for the nods and references, or ponder how many tries the street gap nollie out of the kickflip nose manual took, and whether the frontside boardslide to fakie after the backside 360 was spur of the moment. But the real reward is getting lost watching Tom Knox and Jacob Harris wind on and on through these claustrophobic brick and stone labyrinths, soaking in flourishes like the backside powerslide after the 360 flip to make it around the corner and cannon blasts like the monstrous curb cut ollie over the can to backside lipslide, set against incongruously beautiful summer days in an accursed year. Just cuz it’s obvious don’t make it wrong.

The Bold And The Beautiful

Those who have had the fortune and blessings required to hit a grand slam in a major-league baseball game know that it’s a unique feeling, difficult to replicate with vibration-equipped VR gear or the powers of one’s wildest imagination. Bedreaded San Diego Padres shortstop Fernando Tatis Jr. met and introduced himself to that feeling one bubbly and Covid-free August night last summer, whamming a certified whammer in the eighth inning against some hapless Texas Rangers.

But Fernando Tatis’ power move was met not with lusty cheers and pumping fists, at least not entirely. The circumstances of his grand slam — the Padres already far ahead late in the game, the struggling Rangers pitcher having already thrown three balls — placed Fernando Tatis at odds with the mystic and unwritten arcana of the baseball codes, in this case, it being considered bad form to run up the score against a floundering opponent. His meaningless four runs, much like a misassembled burrito, became the subject of heated debate for weeks among players, managers and the vast digital peanut gallery.

Mason Silva, prodigious gap/rail/ditch/all of the above destroyer, struck again last weekend, casually uploading to ThrasherMagazine.Com another 4-plus minutes of tremendously heavy footage, at the tail end of a SOTY campaign that carries all the inevitability of a blurred stair set looming on the edge of a vignetted fisheye lens. The past few years’ kinked-rail sweepstakes has produced a new breed of steely-eyed and deadly confident Rustyholders, but Mason Silva lifts the bar as far as relentlessness — he has put out four video parts this year, all of them blistering, full of impossible-seeming stuff, and you’d take long odds putting down any money that he won’t be back at the table before mid-December.

The SOTY video deluge has a way of dominating any other ‘conversation’ at this point in the season, for better or worse. Tom Knox’s beautifully constructed, brick-strewn London symphony for Jacob Harris’ sterling ‘Atlantic Drift’ franchise got a couple good days of high-profile burn before Mason Silva resurfaced, and that’s it. The statement-of-purpose punk howl from the Glue collective got a deserved center stage — but just for a bit. As of this typing, John Shanahan’s Chicago-shaded DC Shoes vid has the big top window, but Mason Silva’s boardslide-to-boardslide thumbnail’s still up there, quietly dominating.

Skateboarding has long nursed conflicted feelings toward effort. It takes some, of course, to steady one’s self for the drop in, to crack the first ollie, to labor hours in pursuit of the trick. Reared safely beyond shouting distance of coaches, referees and gamekeepers, giving too little effort has often been easily excused, even celebrated — witness the decade-long legacy riding of first-generation Girl and Chocolate pros, or Geoff Rowley’s tune-in/drop-out monologue for Tom Penny’s recycled-footage ‘Menikmati’ part. Too much effort, though — even in the modern era of agents, round-the-clock content production and overall ‘professionalization,’ there can be pitfalls.

For proof, consider the world of Mega-transition skating, which more than other disciplines has revolved around competition, at least financially. In his 9 Club appearance, helicoptero wrangler and veteran Flip man Bob Burnquist related a story about skating a MegaRampTM rail competition with Danny Way, among others. Bob Burnquist, noted switchstance practitioner, said he began dropping in switch, and soon was approached by Danny Way, who was doing the same.

BB: He said, you know I’m trying the switch 50-50. …He was like, when we grew up, talking about him and Colin, when one of them touches a trick… and I get that. And I wasn’t planning on doing the switch 50-50, I was planning on doing a switch nosegrind, because I knew he was doing that. This is strategy, competition mode — if I play ping-pong with you I’m not gonna want to lose. I can still be your friend, and be totally fine. But in that moment it seemed like this front came, and I respected it, but it kind of bummed me out a little bit. 

…I kind of pulled back. When I skated the contest, I didn’t really go for stuff. I just was kind of holding back, and that kind of hurt me a little bit, because I don’t like doing that.

Bob Burnquist went on to explain how the experience motivated him to film all types of crazy MegaRailTM tricks for Flip’s 2009 vid ‘Xtremely Sorry.’ But a couple years before that, Bob Burnquist had seen the backlash that can come from not holding back. At the 2007 X-Games*, Jake Brown blasted a 360 ollie over the contest’s 70-foot gap before taking a 540 23 feet above the MegaQuarterPipeTM deck. Later, he spun a 720 over the gap right before popping too far off the quarterpipe and plunging 45 feet to the flat. After Jake Brown was helped get up and incredibly walked off the ramp, and things settled down some, Bob Burnquist dropped in, sailed a switch backside 180 over the gap, then launched a 16-foot-high 540, winning the contest. Jake Brown got second, and Dave Carnie rendered his verdict:

DC: after that slam, I think the gentlemanly thing to do would have been to have just ended the contest right there and given it to Jake. He was in first place. He had won. But no, Bob had to go and take his extra run and try and win it. As I’ve said, he didn’t win it, but the fact that he wanted to beat a fellow skater who had just taken one of the hardest slams ever isn’t really congruent with the spirit of skateboarding. Or even the spirit of sport, for that matter. When did “winning at all cost” creep into skateboarding?

In the marathon that the SOTY race has become, Mason Silva doesn’t seem like he’s trying to take anything from anybody, laid low by injury or not. He is in his proverbial window; can he be expected to let up? How is it possible that he hit the top rail three times in that one ditch clip from the Spitfire part? Does Primitive’s ‘Fourth Quarter’ closer Miles Silvas have more ammunition after his own Spitfire and Primitive minutes over the past month? Is the fact that Tom Knox is helping raise three small children at home through the pandemic being accurately factored into any SOTY consideration? Since Mason Silva seemingly is healthy, fearless and ahead in the count, could he maybe please ollie again the stair-to-bank gap from his Thrasher cover, to get a better video angle?

5. Chris Jones — ‘365 Days On Planet Earth Pt. 1’

Atmospherics fog and drip through the efforts of Jacob Harris, probably the UK’s leading videomaker now working — his long lens is less claustrophobic than Bill Strobeck’s, letting the spots, places, squishy ocean creatures and, importantly, his Isle-aligned subjects room to shape the part or clip or whatever it may be. It was Chris Jones earlier this year living and surviving abroad and at home, conveying gray skies, memory, apprehension, comfy sweaters, switch backside ledge tricks and sometimes gathering one’s self inward to fit through tight spaces. All the brick and muted tones and plinking piano easily carve a place for this alongside the best of Britain’s output over the past 20 years.

6. Tom Knox – ‘Eleventh Hour’

Blueprint’s legacy looms large, so it is a mark in favor of presumptive torch picker-uppers Isle that Tom Knox’s engrossing section in Jacob Harris’ ‘Eleventh Hour’ could have been plucked from anywhere in between Danny Brady and Nick Jensen in ‘Lost and Found.’ No cobblestone seems too rough or bank too bumpy for Tom Knox, switch heelflipping into long steps and lazily nudging a shove-it out of a tall backside tailslide here, pushing envelopes with a backside bigspin fakie manual and the jump out to backside lipslide and the cascading last line. The spots obviously look awesome and the more off-the-wall tricks sprinkled here and there, like the switch backside 50-50 frontside 180 out, set the skating here apart from your urban tourist Street Leaguer types.