In a time of ceaseless flux, resourcefulness and ingenuity are the watchwords that launch names onto marquees and plump cartoon moneybags. Similar to Beyonce’s smash hit revenge album ‘Lemonade’ but with visa problems instead of Jay-Z cheating on you, Brazilian pop sensation Tiago Lemos found Montreal’s spots and poutineries wide open to his throwback DCs after an alcohol-infused airline excursion got his US papers yanked. In what has become a hallowed annual event, the Tiago Lemos footage dump, Canada’s premiere Canadians ‘Dime’ blessed various masses this week with their latest ‘Knowing’ mixtape release, compensating for a shortfall in bowling ball hammers with generous helpings of international nomad Tiago Lemos, his bionic ledgework and multicoloured DC sweaters gracing the ‘City of Saints.’
‘Knowing Mixtape Vol. 1’ was rightly regarded as one of the most shocking and introspective vids of the time. Still, it is used to calm jittery racehorses and inspire young businesspersons clicking shut their briefcases before heading out to close their first big deal. Lacking the same level of bowling ender-enders, Dime unites now with Tiago Lemos as the world’s preeminent switch backside tailslider faces a career crossroads. With a Primitive video release looming — presumably to unload his DC-clad footage prior to taking his talents to a major international sportswear conglomerate — and after that, putting all of Brazil on his back for the 2020 Olympic gold hunt, Tiago Lemos in the coming years may well have less time to toss ‘white rappers’ over picnic tables among friends on Quebecios hillsides, or engage in lengthy dap sessions in container-shipping yards.
Draped in XL cotton, here Tiago Lemos unloads an all-time switch shove-it rewind over a bench, a switch heelflip tailslide on a gap to ledge, a switch heelflip nosegrind during some only-in-Montreal session for the ages that also featured Jake Johnson jumping on a switch Pupecki grind. Elsewhere skateboarding’s collective kid brother Etienne Gagne twirls a nollie backside bigspin noseblunt, Leon Chapdelaine hops from a backside smith grind out and down some stairs, and Tristan Funkhouser bluntslides out to a base jump. There is Alexis Lacroix’s weirdly impressive duckfooted backside tailslide and the always worthwhile Antoine Asselin, cultivating a Jimmy Carlin look.
Does ‘Knowing Mixtape Vol 2’ represent one last carefree nollie frontside crooked-grinding summer vacation for Tiago Lemos before having to ‘get serious’ for career and country in the 2K2oh? Did the Dime people get the boot from that one bowling alley or merely shut it down eternally? Is the cat riding Alexis Lacroix’s shoulders through the China Banks part of a new generation of ‘skate pets’ including recent pro Murdy The Dog, ready to carry the sub-subculture forward from famous and moneyed skate pets of yesteryear including Meaty, Liam and the well-traveled Girl goldfish?
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.
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.
Nate Pezzillo — ’Untitled 003’
A monster going up and over Muni’s cylinders — and squeezes a shove-it Suski from Love Park’s shriveling husk
Marcello Campanello — ’Mode’
Fakie boss in the Borroughs, with the cab kickflip backside tailslide
Austyn Gillette — ’Radiant Cure’
Switch shove-it rewinds with extra savoir faire
Charlie Cassidy — ’NY Archive’
Glass slicer boardslide and that backside noseblunt — skates like a Philly dude
Corey Glick — ’Souvenir’
Helping put Foundation into the conversation again with gusto, a fakie flip switch backside smith grind and a will not to clip on that last, scary jump
Shintaro Hongo — ’Pick Up’
The thought of rural Japanese spots is a trip — ferocious backside flip and bluntslides
Jake Johnson — ’Purple’
A glimpse of the master in his Penny period
Kyle Wilson — ’YS Video’
The float on the switch heelflip
Brian Delatorre — ’Purple’
GX OG, at home nollieing backside over a tremendous bar, or reclining in a backside smith grind
With Oedipal vibes, Quasi’s inaugural full-length at long last arrived last week, spiced with temptation. As ever, messageboard banditos probed and hunted for stray links ahead of the official online release. Shortly after it finally hit, an electronic threat from former Throbbing Gristle frontperson Genesis P’Orridge of all people torpedoed the original Youtube link. This forced resourceful computer-rippers to seek out alternate hosting capacity via sites specializing in sophisticated adult entertainment of a different stripe, and left the rest of the world pondering what air cover their web caches and private-browser settings might provide in their pursuit of ‘Mother.’
For those ponderous unfortunates cursed to read between life’s lines and leave no Magic Eye poster unstared upon, it has been tougher still. DNA analysis obligates any video historian to place Quasi’s first full-length within the same creative lineage as ‘Photosynthesis’ and ‘Mosaic,’ citing teamrider and darkman resumes, Ohio geospatial data and the winking juiciness of the Pappalardo hamburger.* It is easy, upon the seventh or eighth watch of this excellently put-together video, to speculate idly as to any nods or winks involved with soundtracking an intro to ‘Band on the Run,’ hailing the heady freedom and risk of escape and liberation — this from the company that announced its emergence from the Alien Workshop/Pacific Vector meltdown with the declarative “no more corporate blues,” and wind up this vid with some oldster stating that he’s “looking just to get away.” The rorshach-test qualities of many Quasi graphics invite similar ponderings: Do all the race cars, motorcycles and fast-running dogs similarly speak to themes of speed and escape? What about the Dale Earnhardt tributes and those drippy sculptures? How much of this is designed mainly to befuddle deck consumers who may feel on sturdier ground with pizza-themed art or endless iterations of a stylized letter B?
Whatever cipher is to be found in Quasi’s graphics, on maple or judiciously sprinkled amongst the footage in ‘Mother,’ probably serves best as a vehicle or backdrop to the team and its skills – all of which ‘go,’ in the parlance of our times. What really merits those mysterious VHS tapes’ positioning alongside the earlier yellow, gray, orange and white cassette ancestors is the video’s careful crafting and exquisite tricks. Forestalling much of the talented flow squad gets ‘Mother’ under the critical 30-minute bar, even with timeless-feeling intro and credits sections. There’s a parallel universe somewhere with full Jake Johnson and Al Davis sections, sure, but their material here is presented in the most resourceful fashion possible, and the efforts of the other bros and ams — especially the ams – more than get the video over besides.
Justin Henry, latest of the Ohio torchbearers, delivers on years’ worth of early promise, gliding and jamming his way over spots on both coasts, fusing otherwise disparate moves into weirdly smooth alloys like the bigspin backside lipslide to firecracker out, or the wallie leap to noseblunt slide. The Grant’s Tomb backside noseblunt is there. Beltholder for greatest hair in the industry, Josh Wilson, blasts multisyllabic flip tricks over various bars and dangerously dings some other ones, along with an intense ollie out of a tall wallride. There is Tyler Bledsoe’s most recent addition to the backside tailslide canon, an almost painfully good Jake Johnson flowerpot backside kickflip, Al Davis thundering switchstance down a cascade of mountain peaks.
Gilbert Crockett, who seems yet to let up from a string of heavy parts following 2015’s ‘Propeller,’ constructs a throbbingly manual-heavy closer that includes an unhinged fakie flip switch manual to switch frontside shove-it out and the rather intense kickflip nosemanual over the guardrail and down the embankment, plus other crazy shit like a scary fence jump and a switch backside nosegrind at the JFK bank to ledge. But it is Dick Rizzo with the most pumping, vital section, cracking over bars and banging down on fire-engine red cellar doors with a weirdly fluid grace, or jumping catlike over the boulevard after half-spinning switch into some griping grayhairs’ beloved banister. There are lovely dips on the backside smith grind and switch backside 5-0, the sounds of the under-bridge wall blast deeply satisfy, and the backside nosegrind revert to GT rollercoaster makes good on the pain and leaf-diving required to reel it in.
Does Quasi have the bench-depth and belly fire to come back in six months’ time with another vid showcasing Drake Johnson, Justin Drysen, Dane Barker and all those Justin Henry tricks that didn’t make it into this one? Is Bobbito back to reclaim his spot after being displaced by Shadoe Haze? Will this year reunite the Dayton diaspora in video releases if Fat Bill completes the new Supreme/FuckingAwesome one and the now three-years revived AWS brings the Joe Castrucci-helmed release described by now deservedly-pro Frankie Spears?
*Note: Boil a Ocean Weblog briefly considered registering @PappalardoBurger on Instagram, and using this to make several humorous posts relating to various video parts in the voice of the burger itself, but ultimately chose instead to leave it to parties who could do more justice to such a concept, rather than linking back to a meandering and partially thought out internet screed
In Richard Connell’s 1924 classic ‘The Most Dangerous Game,’ a big-city trophy hunter washes up on a remote island, soon revealed to be inhabited by a philosophizing fellow hunter. Over a stately dinner, the host identifies himself to be a prize hunter too, as well as something of a freethinking homicidal. Stalking elephants and leopards had grown tiresome, he explained — hence the island equipped with treacherous waters, occasionally delivering via shipwreck to its proprietor the only remaining worthwhile quarry: Men. Soon, a new hunt is on.
Among the improbably growing ranks of skateboard filmers, the thrill of the hunt tends to scale alongside duration. Instagram-ready clips are single-digit ‘Duck Hunt’ level potshots; the one-off/solo part barely Bambi. There is a worthy challenge in nailing and transcending the attention-span sweet spot that is the 15 to 20-minute promo, with a couple full parts and a couple montages, or the footage-dumping ‘mixtape’ project of similar length. But in this woolly realm, the most dangerous game is the full-length video —- its gaping maw of hubris, its difficult-to-wrangle girth, its often unbearable weight, threatening to trample less-seasoned filmers under viewers’ colossal expectations.
Having conquered skateboard professionals, shops and the upper-shredding masses, what prey remains for those moneyed alphas of the industry, the industrial shoe merchants? Mastering the full-length video, that great unquantifiable, that tantalizing money pit, that great ‘Branding Statement,’ continues to beckon and tempt international sporting goods manufacturers like some VX1000-mic’d siren song. For Nike Inc., this has been a slow process. The Oregonian sportswear conglomerate dipped in its toe-piece with 2004’s ‘On Tap,’ flexing some plotting and production and a little bit of those Rodriguez acting chops, but never fully committing. Nike saved that for 2007’s bloated misfire ‘Nuttin’ But the Truth,’ which saddled some truly great skating, a still-corralable team and perhaps the all-time greatest Danny Supa part with an insistent storyline that, while intriguingly bizarre, asked far too much of a skate video viewer base freshly armed with DVD ‘skip’ buttons. Jason Hernandez’s excellent ‘Debacle’ project from 2009 hit all the marks for length, range and focus, but led into the increasingly rote ‘Chronicles’ series, which by the third installment had devolved into a transactional, paint-by-numbers affair.
Adidas, which for a while mastered the five-to-six minute road trip video with rotating picks from its more diverse roster, also veered into a predictable pattern to where it eventually seemed obligatory to attempt something bigger — and they wound up with 2016’s ‘Away Days,’ overlong and too top-heavy with too many good parts that wound up buried. The Juice crew seemed to struggle to construct a project greater than the sum of its parts, linked by something more than Gonz vignettes and blurred shots of streetlights and moving cars.
Now comes Cons, Nike’s subsidiary for the thrift-shop set, which moves without the weight of the world’s biggest sporting goods franchise stuffed into its canvas and rubber. For this reason Cons maybe squares a bit easier with skateboarding’s historic resume of scruffiness, artsiness and a general low-fi bearing, and ‘Purple’ headmaster Ben Chadbourne plays up this angle from the opening frames, typing out an introductory monologue on mid-century equipment (though not without some mobile-phone shorthand).
‘Purple’ justifies a good chunk of its 45-minute runtime in a way that, say, a Primitive full-length might struggle with, that is, diversity in style and approach. Straightaway Bobby De Keyzer pops out of all the backside noseblunts, sets his wide-bottoms whipping with a switch backside 360 in a line, and displays a mean halfway half-cab flip — but then you veer into Sage Elsesser, languid over tall bars, and what seems like whole-body lipslides. Kevin Rodriguez brings his abrasive wallrides and grabs in a Neubauten shirt, though Pontus Alv’s more-frenetic framing maybe was a better look for him, while Aaron Herrington stays on his ‘Welcome to Hell’ shit and there’s a weirdly endearing amount of Corey Duffel clips throughout. Underground style soldier Eli Reed swerves switch over a China Bank long bench, Frank Gerwer briefly reprises his star-making Transworld turn and Brian Delatorre somewhere in the middle dishes out maybe his best part ever, a half-switch scorcher that incorporates some brawny Al Davis moves and a wild new branch line from Black Rock. There’s some curated roll-ups courtesy of Sean Pablo, a mind-numbing Sean Greene ollie and then Louie Lopez, offering another few minutes of heaters with the occasional curveball — the rarely seen fakie frontside shove-it, a night line at Third and Army.
But it is Ben Chadbourne’s choice to close not with the obvious enders from a SOTY coulda/shoulda-been, but rather a comparatively skimpy contribution from the mercurial Jake Johnson, that argues strongest for Cons pulling off the full-length better than its larger-revenued predecessors. It’s easy to make the ‘quality over quantity’ argument justifying Jake Johnson’s solemn two minute wind-down to ‘Purple,’ even if it’s also a little disappointing, given prodigious recent output elsewhere. This though is the same logic that placed Guy Mariano’s ledge-heavy part last in ‘Mouse,’ not Eric Koston’s handrail-heavier section with its NBDs; or when Birdhouse’s blockbuster ‘The End’ stuck by its winking sketch to close on a shorter Bucky Lasek section rather than the stadium-touring Tony Hawk; or how Bill Strobeck’s ‘Cherry,’ among the strongest full-lengths of this aging decade, came with hardly any conventional ‘parts’ at all.
Does humankind’s hope for deeper Jake Johnson satisfaction now hinge upon the coming Quasi video? How many angles did Sean Greene’s ollie need for real? Was Adidas putting Dennis Busenitz last in ‘Away Days’ a left turn or playing it safe? Were people allowed to smoke in prior big shoe company videos? How come there were no Game Genie codes that let you shoot the dog in Duck Hunt?
“Skateboarding is now 1 step away from the Olympics,” Ride Channel mystics pronounced this week, with all the hollow reservation of an over-the-hill fighter demanding through spat-out teeth and blood to be put in for another round, and all the limp-necked surrender to be revealed in a fistful of counterfeit blimp tickets. This pursuit, once the domain of renegades, outcasts and losers, now is not called but rather ordered up to the big leagues, its youthsome mettle having proven a fuel too valuable for ratings-hungry sponsors to let sit unburned for another decade while the Olympics’ viewership virility flags. The 80s gave, the 90s took away, the 00s gave back — to some — and though a declining number of hard-good consumers and an ever-thickening stew of bootstrappy board companies slicing thinner and thinner pie wedges to share amongst independent and multinational competitors alike, skateboarding’s talismanic powers to restore youth have become impossible for the Olympics to ignore.
It is difficult to envision Olympic podiums, matching uniforms and the brassy pomp of various national anthems when Ryan Garshell, Yonnie Cruz, Al Davis, Brian Delatorre, and Jake Johnson are battling irate homeowners, ditching cops, spraying graffiti and barreling crossways into traffic in the bracing and much-awaited ‘GX1000’ vid. Like the ‘Sabotage’ series emanating from the other coast this vid seems less about polishing tricks and placing them on a pedestal for admiration than hunting them through hills and alleys, wrestling them to the ground and cutting notches in the belt after wiping any blades clean of blood let by both parties. The way they let the hill bombs run out with no music has an intensity impossible to concoct with slow-motion drone filmography, and its montage structuring is refreshingly dense, difficult to digest in even a few watches how tech Yonnie Cruz gets in those hills or the burliness of Al Davis’ wallies or all the things Brian Delatorre can do at crazy speed, setting aside the added challenge of having the police, the homeless, and various powers of SF-dwelling Silicon Valleyites arrayed against them.
And yet several planes of existence above, the Olympics may not be so different. Marauding from country to country, city to city, this nationless entity allegedly floutsrules, generates anger and resentment among some locals and from time to time gets kicked out. Some may argue the Olympics embraces a ‘skate and destroy’-like ethos as it briefly sessions municipalities and leaveseconomic and structuralwreckage behind. The Olympics meanwhile immortalizes its achievements on high-performance video media and looks for the next spot.
Should skateboarders, rather than fearing and loathing the Olympics’ pyrotechnics and ferocious currency-dealing apparati, embrace it as a spiritual partner amid a more existential battle against local, state and perhaps federal authority figures as well as various other opposition figures? Could Yonnie Cruz handle one of those abandoned Sarajevo ski jumps and bobsled tracks? Switch? Will a future Olympics judging panel be required to review the GX1000 files as a reference point for tricks that Jake Johnson previously has proven are possible to be wallied into? Did the Cool Runnings dudes pass a test detecting drugs capable of enhancing performance and/or reality? What about Yonnie Cruz’s switch backside 360 tho?
While making Jake Johnson the marquee no-complier, wallrider and shove-it man on Polar may have been a concept terminal in its redundancy, it is enduringly awesome to see the dude apply his raw and wiry talent to the genre, birthed as much by Josh Stewart’s ‘Static’ series as anything else, and stretch it to gobsmacking distances. Jake Johnson’s line down the black bank etched itself into Alien Workshop’s apparent eulogy and in profile recalls those dudes surfing Portugal’s freak waves, while the now-famed frontside slappy down Clipper pops up with as little warning as the idea that anybody would try such a thing at that spot in the first place. The squalling guitars here are a serviceable Dinosaur Jr approximation and if there’s any knock at all on this footage it might be that there’s plenty more room for Jake Johnson to unbottle some of deep-web technical ability, like the fakie ollie to front blunt, but it is fabulous to watch him in this zone.
Loudly, the “Lego Movie” demonstrated how this earthy life is built upon deception and a series of injurious failures, with the slim chance of revolutionizing society or overthrowing a malevolent dictator baked in to stave off utter hopelessness. So it may also be in the boardgoods galaxy, where increasingly it would seem that proprietorship of a deck company is tantamount to some sort of Sisyphean trek in holey vulc-soles, or several pelvic fractures, or maybe just an unfulfilling relationship.
Alien Workshop owners Chris Carter and Mike Hill’s grab for the brass life-ring of corporate ownership devolved into a game of M&A hot potato that may have soured them on the business for life, Jake Johnson said in an interview the other day: “I don’t think these guys wanna do it anymore. I think that they’re pretty pissed off.” Smoothie king Andrew Reynolds, in a separate interview, described running Baker and its affiliates more like a labor of love: “I own some skateboard companies and there’s not that much money in it. I see the truth.” Pontus Alv, owner/operator of by all accounts one of the more successful board companies at the moment, sounds fatigued as he oscillates between evaluating Chinese factories and trying to hold down a pro career: “It’s a shit load of work plus trying to be a team manager, going on a tour, promoting the brand, trying to skate…. I try to work with other people but a lot of times I just end up doing it myself because I can and they don’t have the same vision as me.”
Boards have yet to devolve into unfashionable utilities. The hierarchy of professional image and personal branding dictates that deck sponsors provide meaningful direction that appears to matter to the international footwear conglomerates that riders require to pay various mortgages and car notes and things. Nike, Jamie Thomas says, helped shepherd Trevor Colden from Mystery to the swish-heavy pastures of Skate Mental, and conspiracy theory-minded observers will note that EU comer-upper Karsten Kleppan did a similar two-step from Lakai and Element in recent months.
So are board company owners doing it wrong? The argument has been made that owning professional sports teams should not be a profit-seeking venture, but rather a long-term luxury investment similar to a yacht or bankrolling a Ron Artest CD. Rather than paper dollar bill wads, rewards arrive in the form of grand intangibles and assorted life hammers such as the prestige that comes with fielding a championship team or sweatily mounting a Grammys stage to collect hard-won trophies for hit Ron Artest singles. Sports team owners enjoy earthly delights like fostering relevant cultural memes, cheering as your employees innovate new ways to involve animals in celebrations, and build in the lab with the Pandas’ Friend formerly known as Metta World Peace from time to time.
Former World Industries Chief Financial Officer Scott Drouillard, in a recent interview with Jenkem, described blindly speculating on Florida swampland as preferable to working for a skateboard company, and the rationale for selling out over a decade ago:
All of us had invested all of our wealth in this company, and there were three big factors. One, the overall economy and stock market was at a historic high, going off the scale. Two was our industry… Our industry was blowing up! And knowing it goes in cycles, about 10 year cycles, we knew we were really at the explosive peak of it. Lastly, is how we were managing the company. We were hitting home runs like 3 out of 4 times, and you can’t be expected to continue hitting home runs like that forever.
Viewed through such a lens, does this portray decades-deep boardsportsmen such as Tod Swank, Ed Templeton, Mike Carroll and Rick Howard as grinning masochists? Does Steve Rocco, reclining on some Malibu beach, kick himself for not finagling a stake in the Big Brother-spawned Jackass franchise? Would there be more rap careers if board companies were backed by deep-pocketed benefactors? Would there be worse ones? Are Pat Pasquale and Nick Trapasso employing some Billy Beane-esque algorithm in building the Life Extention team, or only their video soundtracks?
Several years ago, Emerica shoes marked the end of a bold and promiscuous era by releasing “Stay Gold,” billed within urethane-wise punditrydom as “tha last video ever.” Girl and Chocolate under their own advances a short while later launched “Pretty Sweet,” also the last video ever, and Plan B toward the end of 2K14 widely is expected to place a MegaRampTM-shaped capstone on the video era upon completing “Tru, B” which not only is understood to be the last video ever but furthermore to potentially never come out at all, just to make the point.
Where does this leave our independent video maker? If you are named Ty Evans you actually are a Filmmaker and shall be contracted to a burgeoning action sports production house for the use of proprietary Filmmaking UAVs and certain other automated devices that aren’t yet all legal under county-specific statutes penned by wizened barneys. For the remainder, do they continue to absorb the financial hardships, bristly market risk and hours spent lying in gutters, occasionally sprinkled with sustaining dollops of funding from shoe conglomerates or free boards from their bro’s warehouses?
There are relatively few big-name companies attached as backers to “Statics 4 & 5,” Josh Stewart’s sprawling ode to nocturnal nooks and crannies of the five boroughs, and the steadily clattering insomniac tunnels that stitch them together. At this point Josh Stewart’s sunk the better part of two decades into filming skating and making videos, he’s spoken of the challenge making a living at it even before the internet obliterated both the hardcopy format and the longform video, and more recently talked about how he gets money videoing more-pedestrian shit, probably with additional perks such as sensible hours and fewer threats from wayward autos and authorities.
Is this Josh Stewart’s last Static vid? Maybe or maybe not, but between the Henry Edwards and Jeremy Elkins and Peter Sidlauskases of this current plane of existence it seems the curse of the independent video filming life will continue to cloud and arouse youngsters’ minds, whether or not board and shoe makers deign to continue sinking years’ worth of marketing budget lucre into full-length DVDs or high quality Blu Ray products for HD TVs. Josh Stewart, as elder a statesman in all this as Dan Wolfe or Fred Mortagne at this point, suggested this may not be such a bad thing, in spite of any ensuing financial hardships, or perhaps because of them:
One of the rad things about the skate video as an art form is that most of the people doing good work in the indie video scene aren’t motivated by financial gain. And it makes it more pure as an art form when it has to be done on the side of making a living.
The “Static 5” opening sequence, with its tribal chanting, drums and dudes silently walking through tunnels, gives you a sense of how Josh Stewart may view shit and moustachioed literary analytic types might be inclined to draw some “Last of the Mohicans” analogy.* In a time when social media-abetted personal branding has incented standalone video parts and projects catering to specific dudes’ approaches to skating, the 4th and 5th “Statics” are one of the more cohesive and well put together full-lengths in quite a while. The Slap board commentary cycle may have reduced Josh Stewart’s aesthetic to “cellar doors” around the time of the third installment but there’s still few who can argue better for it, and with the exception of the Bronze vid, to which it really is unfair to compare any video, there is no better soundtrack this year, occasionally ripped straight from the trains and platforms.
With the volume of cellar doors transferred to and bars hopped (Aaron Herrington grabs the no-comply title straight from the jump) it was wise if indulgent to bisect this project into a pair of “Photosynthesis”-optimized runtimes, even though there’s satisfactory variety when it comes to this type of skating. Aaron Herrington goes bio down three banks, Yonnie Cruz is awarded most ambidextrous, Brian Clarke displays a rarely seen frontside noseslide shove it and Brendan Carroll behaves similarly with a nollie manual. There are cameos by some of Japan’s street alchemists whose style really has no father but could plausibly claim the “Static 2” Traffic/Puleo parts as an irritable uncle. Dustin Eggeling turns in the obligatory fakie frontside noseslide shove it and thereby soothes certain 1990s ghosts, Jimmy Lannon continues to embody one of the better examples of how less oftentimes is more and Jake Johnson does his mountain ride, with the skate sounds dialed down and guitars turnt similar to an Alien video. Jimmy Mastrocolo, Daniel Kim and Keith Denley should do parts in next video Josh Stewart does, if there is one.
The best-made part in this entry though may be Jahmal Williams, who Josh Stewart pairs with an aging subway dance squadron led by a dude who claims to be over 45 and literally toiling underground, “keeping the art alive” on behalf of tourists and passing worker bees. Jahmal Williams still has it, boosting up traffic barriers and igniting one of the better filmed rick flips recently and issuing a memorable “one more” plea in pursuit of nighttime breakdancing glory and possibly the promise of parachute pants riches yet to come. If these are really the last ones of Josh Stewart’s “Static” series, they do it justice and make a case for the dude mastering his craft, copies can and should be purchased from Theories of Atlantis.
Taking another run at this as the prior attempt to lay out this idea didn’t get all the way there and, lord knows Maybach Music Group isn’t afraid to go back to the well.
The thinking was, has somebody done a wallride (90-degree wall, off a flat surface/sidewalk/etc) and then grinded (say a 50-50 or 5-0) the top of the wall, with wheels remaining generally in the wallride position? The Jordan Sanchez, Stefan Janoski and Silas ones referenced in the previous episode of ‘Diced Pineapples’ all involve a bank up to the wall, gnarly though they all be. The Forest Kirby one is pretty close, and very gnarly indeed, but had been visualizing more like a grind that locks in briefly on a square ledge. Danny Sargent’s in 1281 and the bro in the ‘Welcome to Hell’ friends section both kind of end up transitioning to the top of the ledge, I’m thinking more sitting sideways.
This dude is on my wavelength: “… a normal bs crooked grind could be an unnormal fs nosegrind. daewon could probably do it …”
Thinking like the Jake Johnson pic above, except if his trucks were about eight inches higher, scratching at the top of the wall. Thanks for bearing with me yall
boil the ocean 