Covid Beards, Flame Beanies, Cargo Sneakers And Other Detritus From This Pandemic Year

Ten further
-Josh Wilson, ’Hardware For The Masses’ — lighting up Michigan City, pre-Covid beard
-Jahmir Brown, ’DC’ — near-knockout blow for the famed Pyramid ledges
-Nik Stain, ‘John’s Vid’ — dude needs a pro model flame beanie
-Patrick Zentgraf, ‘Kiosq’ — no matter the country, strong switch backside tailslides and track pants will eventually draw Primitive’s attention
-Jake Anderson, ’Cheap Perfume’ — to go with the helicopter heelflip frontside 360, there’s a great clip of a lady holding a tropical fruit and gasping in disbelief
-Javier Sarmiento, ’Jarana’ — the don of the Basque country can still do switch smith grinds, frontside and backside, in lines
-Chris Colburn, ’Heatwave’ — if Element’s weird arms’-length management of this dude and his backside 180 to switch frontside feeble grinds on handrails leads to yacht rock music vids like this, maybe it’s all fine
-John Shanahan, ’Cargo Sneaker’ — noseblunt to fakie on a handrail is rare, but pop shove-it to noseblunt on a ledge may be rarer
-Amelien Foures, ‘Introducing’ — Orlando Blooming tech on tree stumps
-Griffin Gass, ’Nervous Circus’ — flips-out that may be unrivaled right now

Are You People Paying Attention To The Things Jackson Curtin Is Doing Right Now?

This photo should be enough. Great skater, super hard trick, exactly the right angle, tweaked to the maximum, pants right. Time was, you’d painstakingly tear out a page like this one in the Milton Martinez Thrasher and tape it onto the wall. That still happens, but the time for wall-staring slowly is passing into shadow. Soon enough, our walls will stare at themselves.

The photo’s primal waves lead to another, more fundamental question, which is whether the swipe-happy, dead-eyed and flesh-consuming populace is giving Jack Curtin his proper due. In a world that criminally overlooked Ryan Gallant’s late-period surge, only now seems to be appreciating the treasure that is Javier Sarmiento, and failed to elevate Steve Durante to household name status, it is not an idle question.

A seminal technician with international flair and an allergy to basic-ass T-shirts, Jackson Curtin approaches the 2020s a seasoned veteran, but from ‘Pack a Lunch’ onward he seems never to have blown up relative to the skill and stylistic levels implied. Last year, he switch kickflip wallrode and switch backside noseblunted a chunky hubba for the ever-inscrutable Skate Mental label. This year he slid through New York for the Gridlock series, ripped Pier 7 and the SF Library amid the broader SF reinvigoration GX1000 set off in the hills and Supreme carried to EMB, and last week he slapped up trickblockers and put a noseblunt onto the Carroll/Chico block-to-block list for his most recent New Balance shoe design, centered on the increasingly on-burn black and clear colour scheme.

Is everybody properly savouring the current Jackson Curtin moment? Can the collective powers of Jack Curtin, Tyler Surrey, Tom Knox and recent DC Shoe Co USA defector Tiago Lemos unite to somehow make it cool to wear grandpa shoes with with a big letter N on the side? What are the odds Jack Curtin could get back to Pulaski for a joint part with Bobby Worrest? Should Paul Rodriguez, dealing with Primitive’s steadily expanding roster, spend some of his Naruto duckets on the apparently still existing Deca and put on Jack Curtain, JB Gillet, Daewon Song and fuck it, Carlos Iqui?

Prodigal Spaniard

If anybody needed proof of the youtube-era truism that every kid these days can do every trick, the Sk8Mafia video does the job, where you’ll find kids in freely rippling tee shirts mapping flip tricks out of nosegrinds and other once-unspeakable combos now rendered ABD in and around San Diego. All that puts a bigger premium on the curveball pickup of Javier Sarmiento, a dude who for this site’s phantom adbucks stood at the absolute pinnacle of streetstyle about a decade back, probably peaking near the time of the still-quality Can’t Stop part and even today you don’t see that many folks nollie flipping out of f/s noseblunt slides (present company excluded).

Sarmiento’s hiring to endorse Sk8Mafia brand goods serves the planet by plucking the dude from the type of obscurity only achieved by a European pro whose link to the US hardgood media markets goes out in classic whimper fashion. But it’s a little bit topsy turvy also, like Howard Roark going to work for Peter Keating or lending your dad money to secure a boat loan. Perhaps Peter Smolik’s greatest attribute is that he has never apologized for his role as the nucleus of “The Storm;” whereas Javier Sarmiento back then was working in refinements, in the years since “YeS” he has probed deeper tech, such as nollie bigspin flips and nollie kickflip 360s (?) out of crooked grinds — laborious tricks compared with the beauty with which he can still crack a frontside flip over a bench, switch b/s tailslide backside flip out, edge off a frontside crooked grind in the middle of a ledge, or (have the vision to include a clip of Rodrigo TX blasting) a switch hardflip off a whoop-de-whoop in camouflage pants.

It’s all mostly quibbling though with the main point that Javier Sarmiento’s still skating and still getting support after Es went into the can — Sk8Mafia’s posted the whole vid for free on their website.