The great grit pendulum creaked further toward the Jersey industrial swamps this week, as Mark Suciu, he of the coffee cup and the dog-eared classic, was spotted on IG skating shirtless in a tropical ditch wearing camo pants. The digital video footage was notable, as even cynics no longer can cast such moves as so much Thrasher-pandering given Mark Suciu in 2022 is at last a SOTY laureate, suggesting something bigger is going on here. Do we head into this bold and burblesome summer of 2022, knowed to some as the dos-oh-deus-deus, with Mark Suciu a convert to the camo pants set? Only the mountains know, and some secrets they hold deep in their chilly, immobile embrace, like the legend of Shock G’s gold.
There can be little argument that this current epoch ranks as a kind of camouflage golden age. Freely available and often correctly spelled, the Rothco-or-white-labeled-equivalent camouflage cargo is at once both a rank-and-file staple a la Dickies and Levis, and a reliably bankable premium product, regularly surfacing via collabo activities including but not limited to the likes of Huf, RealTree, MossyOak and Vans. Supreme has developed its own realistic camo prints, and Palace too.
The path of ‘the culture’ toward this place of diverse and varied camo patterns n’ prints has been a long and winding one since Matt Hensley podiumed the cargo short varietal in the late 1980s. Despite making appearances across the Brooklyn Banks, EMB, Love Park and Lockwood over the course of the 1990s, the camo pant frequently was sidelined at various points in favour of designer jeans, swishies, cords, and on certain feverish after-hours road trip stops, nothing at all. The road has also been potholed with wrongheaded choices, most notoriously Stephen Lawyer’s day-glo mash-ups that looked like something vomited up by a blotter-addled army surplus store.
All of these different things lead us to the unlikely scene of Josh Kalis, longtime endorser of DGK’s enlarged woodland print and one whose camo bonafides have been the subject of little question since at least ‘Time Code,’ preemptively asking his Instagram following this month to absolve him of what, in 2022, may nevertheless remain a camo faux pas to a decades-deep camo classicist. Donning a snow camo jacket, designed to help soldiers launch surprise attacks in frozen tundra environments, with traditional woodland printed pants, best suited to temperate deciduous forest combat or stylish hiking, Josh Kalis acknowledged the unconventional combo in the IG caption: “and yea.. I have woodland Camo pants and white urban Camo jacket on. Who cares.” The apparent transgression cannot outweigh the camouflage cred that Josh Kalis has banked since being among the few to successfully pull off snow camo shorts in the 1990s, though the textual shrug belies his (accurate) view that such a duo wouldn’t have flown back then.
Was Josh Kalis, seemingly throwing together whatever was around to turn wrenches on his sports cars, in fact quietly testing the waters for a late-career bucking of long-held camo norms? Who’s gonna be the first to skate in ghillie pants? Has Stephen Lawyer, bored with pushing the dimensions and possibilities of camo combos, moved on to fashion prints and cartoon dinosaur scenes?
Jenkem, the Web 2.0 endeavour currently bidding to outlive its by-decades forebear TWS, recently saw fit to challenge social media’s persnickety algorithm-twiddlers with a Ride Channel-worthy list feature matching up pro skaters with celebrity rap singers, an exercise in debate-stirring that stirred obligatory debate in comments sections and other corners of our web-0-sphere. As a throne-sitting timekiller it functioned reliably, ranging from the defensible (Stephen Lawyer/Lil Pump) to the deeply incongruous (Dylan Rieder/Tupac), while overlooking obvious parallels such as Terry Kennedy/Terry Kennedy and, most criminally, Josh Kalis/Juicy J.
For several decades now Josh Kalis and Juicy J have lived out curiously concurrent career and life paths, a few of which this here blog technology will explore with immediate effect. Both are widely admired veterans of their respective crafts, wisely sticking to their lanes and rising above fickle and frothy trend-tides to maintain clout and even elevate their statures in what would otherwise be considered their professional autumn years. Both will forever be associated with mark-making as part of iconic crews, formed in their respective home bases: Josh Kalis burning Philadelphia onto the map with Stevie Williams, Anthony Pappalardo, Brian Wenning, Kevin Taylor and others among the Love Park squad; Juicy J in Memphis with DJ Paul, Project Pat, Lord Infamous, Crunchy Black and Hypnotize Minds. It’s possible that Juicy J recorded his famous song ‘Slob’ around the same time Josh Kalis 360 flipped the can for ‘Photosynthesis.’
The sometimes-knowing cartoonishness of Three 6 Mafia’s peak era, similar to the Love Park era-height swishies and bulk boots, remains respected for its honesty and has come to be celebrated, convincingly aped and at times even transcended by a generation that at best twinkled in their parents’ pupils when the original shit was going down. Josh Kalis and Juicy J, after staying loyal to their original outfits probably longer than they needed to, both wound up signing with their proteges. Sensing a niche for a codeine-guzzling, pill-swallowing elder statesman figure, Juicy J looked upon a young guard of doom-draped devil-worshippers not as competitors or pretenders to be squashed, but as fresh energy for collaboration, legacy-burnishment and money getting:
“Them guys are like family members, man. I was on Twitter and everybody was hitting me [like], “Yo, yo yo, you gotta check out these guys, man. $uicideBoy$, their music sound like y’all. It sound like old Three 6 Mafia.”
Josh Kalis too has embraced his uncle status among the Love Park-resuscitating Sabotage crew, returning to Philadelphia to contribute a part to volume 4, and helping put them and newly pro-decked John Shanahan on with DGK:
A lot of these guys, Shanahan specifically, are at the forefront of creating a new look with the old stuff. I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s his own interpretation of how he makes the mid-to-late 90’s-style look for him and that puts him in a lane of his own. He’s not copying me; he’s doing what John Shanahan likes. It’s taking some of the stuff we did or looked liked to the next level—-the John Shanahan level. His skating is like a better, more-modern twist of ’90s skate. Obviously he’s got way more pop than I’ve ever had.
Josh Kalis has only a handful of tricks in DGK’s new ‘Thoro’ vid, but his and Stevie Williams’ fingerprints are all over it as Dylan Sourbeer, John Shanahan, Kevin Bilyeu, Justin Adeniran and others stomp through Muni and assorted other Philly spots in an HD ‘Sabotage Lite’ masterminded by Brian Panebianco. The steadily sprawling DGK team here is distilled into an East Coast subdivision that occasionally veers into Washington and Chicago’s similar-looking inner-city plazas but never stays too long from those wax-smeared white benches and jumbo-sized board game pieces. Dylan Sourbeer goes end-to-end on an unbelievable backside nosegrind; Kevin Bilyeu deals out a meticulously flicked over-bin nollie flip that’s a QSTOP10 shoe-in; Justin Adeniran bangs a slow-twirling nollie hardflip into a bank and John Shanahan shove-its into various k-grinds and finally the pro ranks, for what seems like his third video part in six months or so.
Does Josh Kalis’ recent reunion with Michigander photog Mike Blabac presage a long-deferred and much-needed resumption of Juicy J’s musical partnership with DJ Paul? What does it say that Josh Kalis has got a brand-new pro model shoe out and not, say, Eric Koston? Will the kids right now in diapers and sock-shoes, who will inevitably one day revive John Shanahan and Brian Panebianco’s own retro stylings, be able to 3D print new Lynxes and Boxers or will they be forced to face off with laser swords at midnight in some Love Park replica to claim the handful of remaining deadstock pairs?
Dig if you will, this Instagram StoryTM from the past week; Josh Kalis’ royal blue Lamborghini plum full and overflowing with magazine-stuffed mailers, antique sneaker boxes, cardboard deck shippers. And even more laying on the nearby grass. This unlikely scene brought to you in part by Josh Kalis’ social-media cattle call for autograph seekers, volunteering to sign by mail copies of his late-career Thrasher cover blast — but also via a growing and steadily less-satiable desire for some physical artifact registering one as a knower, if not participant, in some secret circle, some had-to-be-there, grit spun into gold on the spinning wheel of time’s passage, various other painful metaphors.
Is the skateboarder a natural born hoarder? That muse that reformulated schoolyard banks into asphalt waves and disableds’ ramps into springboards for high-bar vaulting is kin to the spark behind the Psycho Stick, Fucked Up Blind Kids, Modernist Chairs and various others — but for a limited time only, as seasonal order sheets and mailorder catalogues open wide their maws for fresh products, series graphics, new colors, and exclusive collabs by, for and about the homies. As nostalgia deepens to the point that people tune in to watch retired and beloved pros flipping through old CCS catalogues, each new print ‘Thrasher’ and ‘TWS’ issue begins to look like a collector’s item, every board on the shop wall a potential hanger, every pro with a couple video parts under his belt a legend.
The bulldozing of various multimillion dollar pro sporting stadiums has left any number of garages and basements festooned with sets of numbered, uncomfortable, plastic fold-down chairs, suggesting if nothing else a missed revenue source for cities like Philadelphia and San Francisco as beloved ledges and hubbas fall under the pavement saw. But as our collective grip upon the baubles, trinkets and other physical links to the past grows increasingly white knuckled, it’s worth pondering whether such an instinct for preservation perhaps springs from the activity’s fundamentally destructive nature — wood scraped and snapped into splinters, metal beaten and ground into bizarre shapes, concrete corners rounded off and cracked away, urethane coned and yellowed to a cloudy-urined hue.
Jake Johnson, to QS: “That’s what brought so much attraction to skateboarding in the first place. The message had to do with breaking down societal standards, and destroying personal property.”
Is the destruction-driven quest for preservation arising from some pit-of-the-stomach guilt, fear of forgetting forevermore some sentimental article in a long-ago attic or basement, an unhealthy obsession with clinging to one’s youth, or some festive combination of all these? Will the science-minded deck restorers turn their talents toward reviving wrinkled and water-damaged Active catalogues for ultimate posterity? How long until a ‘Storage Wars’ episode stumbles upon a unit stacked tall with boxes of some pro’s forgotten decks, shoes, t-shirts and stickers, initially thrilling the bidders yet ultimately crushing them upon their reveal as mid-00s Dwindle graphics and Macbeth footwears?
Yet as Andy MacDonald and others understand all too well, one day’s lifted bar soon becomes the next day’s hurdle to be ollied, and later kickflipped, and eventually kilty mcbagpipped for an after-credits clip set to a whimsical indie-rock tune. Just days before Tiago Lemos seized the switch back tail crown, Antonio Durao had the internet agog at his own back to back assault on waistline-topping planters in Numbers’ second video drop, to the delight of Miles Silvas and Rodrigo TX and the vacant-eyed indifference of unnamed cell phone lookers. This all arrived a few days after Dylan Rieder’s birthday reminded how he once lifted a backside smith grind onto a Thrasher cover-meriting ledge.
Across history’s compendium of burlyledgetricks, these have been cause for celebration. But concerns have arisen among musty academic circles over a perceived ledge disparity that some experts fear may be growing. As anointed ones such as Tiago Lemos and Antonio Durao hoist their trucks and tails onto ever-higher blocks, planters and hunks of raw cement, there are separately signs that many others appear to be making do with less and less. According to the emerging theory, a slappy revolution, once conceived as a reclamation for the common man, is showing troubling signs of becoming instead a cage, a ceiling which grows ever more difficult to penetrate. While powerhouse pros claim more and more available ledge inches via high-altitude feats, increasingly curb skating is celebrated, stylized and fetishized for the world’s remainder, a disparity that grows more troublesome as ‘middle-class’ ledge spots like Love Park and JKwon increasingly face the bulldozer.
Do Boston’s Eggs, Paris’ Republique, and Los Angeles’ Swoosh-reconstituted LA Courthouse represent sanctuaries for ledge skating’s increasingly squeezed creamy middle? Will some type of social engineering be attempted via plunking cinderblocks on top of red curbs, and meanwhile chiseling down ledges deemed by ivory-tower eggheads to be ‘too high’? Is concentration of ledge height inches in the hands of a smaller few part of a broader ‘trickle-down’ theory under which smaller ledge-oriented masses will be inspired to seek out larger ledges and ultimately add inches to their own frontside crooked grinds and backside smith grinds? Is Tiago Lemos for real?
Thirty-eight years ago to the day, Memphis rap posse Three 6 Mafia uncannily predicted the brassiness and unbridled vamping of this 2016 US political election season in the motion picture release ‘Choices 2,’ an airy farce with a rhetorical title referencing how two people compete to be the ‘People’s Choice’ and win the ‘People’s Choice Award,’ also knowed as the US presidency. Over time the prize has gone to saxophonists, cowboy actors and even enjoyors of post-retirement Jay-Z songs, but many of the heartiest feats of achievement that shall define the 2016 contest still lie ahead.
Several miles below sea level, the deep-pocketed forces steering the skateboarding industry from an underwater base confront their own conundrum. Josh Kalis, he of the nigh-spotless twenty-plus year career, channeled the syrupy spirits of DJ Paul and Juicy J to record his own ‘Choices,’ a satirical short film that alternately bemoans and bellylaughs at the long-armed reach of international sporting equipment companies into skate shops, sweeping less powerful companies’ shoes from shelves and leaving a paucity of options for the toecap-chewing hardflipper.
It can be no coincidence that the messenger for this unhappy fable is Josh Kalis, whose reintroduction of the ‘Kalis Lite’ to a generation of Love Park-fetishizing saboteurs comes as the most important geopolitical shoe event of the year. Despite its hikey sole and lack of air bag, the ‘Lite/LTE’ is the most credible-yet throwback to the puffy shoe era*, boosted by a particularly East Coast persuasion of nostalgia arising out of #skateshoewars and Philadelphia spot paleontology. The Kalis Lites, the most vital release from DC in years, also comes as sporting apparel makers Nike and Adidas try ever so softly to nudge skaters’ sweatstained wallets further ajar, coaxing dollaridoos toward higher-tech footwears that command fatter margins and further cement the big, swinging corporation as the dominant force in skate shoedom, widening the gap between their space-age materials and those lesser peddlers of vulcanized suede.
But a good decade into this slim-shoe era, as the Janoski continues to run roughshod over besocked $150 Kostons and rivals’ new pro models retain slender, suedey templates, the tech shoe remains susceptible to falling back into its typecast role as a periodic fad. The rubbered-out Airwalks and Etnies briefly ushered in the 90s before Jason Lee and Jim swept the table clear for a generation of grunge rockers, conscious MCs and others to wallow, before DC began slowly turning up the tech with the Boxer and the newly-reissued Syntax. The oft-maligned D3, also recently reissued, arguably represented the apex/nadir of this period, before Nike’s Dunk fanned the Luddite spark struck by Tom Penny’s Accel-boosting Menikmati part, and within a few years the Half Cab ascended to the throne. Es, which never fully relinquished its mantle of Schemes and Logics, entered the cryogenic chamber as the vulcanized sole trampled all comers.
Are the recenttechystabs a sign that the tide finally is turning away from simplicity or just further fodder to an every-ten-years-tech-shoe fad? Could a longterm tech-shoe revival help propel Quiksilver into a new glory age of booze and boardshorts? Is independent shoe company booster Josh Kalis making a bigger and broader design statement when he talks about ‘choices’? Will the fact that Oscar-winners DJ Paul and Juicy J have one up on Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock and Charlie Chaplin ever truly sink in with the general public?
*Which perhaps not coincidentally overlapped with the Puff Daddy era
Occasionally fitted like Puffy’s Hamptons pool boy and targeting tricks at times like DGK’s answer to Dylan Rieder, swamp threat Dane Vaughn has been one of the more interesting dudes coming up among the company’s third generation, or fourth, or whatever it may be with Stevie Williams piloting nautical clothing concerns, Jack Curtain riding for Staba and Keelan Dadd striking out on his own. The sun is shining on Dane Vaughn, nudging noseblunt slides across sporadically reluctant planters, kickflipping into a frontside noseslide on JKwon’s tall block like it’s a curb, laughing off a nollie inward heelflip to calamity crash and on the ender, defying any type of conventional wisdom as to the smooth handling of a barely imaginable block-top move.
Only 172 days ago*, widely knowed pharmaceutical supplier Actavis plc vulgarly displayed the power it holds over rap music when it voluntarily withdrew its promethazine codeine cough syrups from the pharmacy shelves of the globe, sowing general discord and seeming to press the fast-forward button on the worldview of regular slurpers. What emerged as a crackdown however rapidly evolved into syrupy brinksmanship among rap stars who bidhandsomely for remaining stock, boasted of possession, and elsewhere prompted soul searching upon the end of a purply era.
Does another Love Park drought, or perhaps wholesale extinction, loom over Philadelphia and the world at large? Sabotage co-impresario Brian Panebianco has suggested as much. For longrunning fans of the polished stone blocks, this troubling outlook could position the law-abrading video series’ fourth installment as the crowded Soulja Boy countertop of Love Park footage, looking to the ‘Sabotage 4’ dudes to mine the once and future JFK Plaza as thoroughly and deeply as any preceding generation, steeping the planters, tiles and various temporary structures in a rich stew of blood, sweat and mouthwash under the gaze of their VX1000s.
Whereas the Sabotage skaters, graffitto artists and vagrants have nearly single-handedly revived Love Park in recent years, it is remarkable that such a plainly skatable, photogenic and history-soaked spot remains dominated mainly by locals, versus the flocks of migratory pros and steely-eyed wishers that perch up at the world’s JKwons, South Banks and MACBAs. In ‘Sabotage 4,’ Californian expat Mark Suciu rattles off several of his hyper-technical ledge couplets, Walker Ryan passes through to glide a switch backside flip down the gap, Philadelphia expat Josh Kalis transposes his Love Park template to LA and Chicago blocks, but the vast bulk of the Ty Evans-approved video length is doled out to locals.
The wiry Jamal Smith abruptly opens this video with an array of shove-its and heelflips that vacillate between the spastic and lackadaisical, commemorating the tornado spin’s pending 10-year** by applying it to a ledge. Dylan Sourbeer builds on his promo-spillover part with two songs’ worth of soldiering through the Love ledges and occasionally beyond, breaking from the double-stroller and lazy landings to unfurl some of the crazier backside tailslides at the spot so far. The vid’s heaviest thunderbolts though may be cast down by yung Joey O’Brien, capable of Mariano-approved half cab k-grind reverts on rails and Barley-crushed frontside 360s over cans, who cinderblocks out a handrail route to the fountain and penetrates Love Park’s concrete underbelly via one of the longer lines at the spot recently (also wild were the 180 switch crook lines and the impeccably twirled 360 flip into the bank).
There’s worthwhile arguments to be made over any lethargic fumes of stagnancy emanating from decades-worn spots. But the fact that these dudes, most of them not pros, can year by year wring fresh mileage from what may be the most improbably longlived plaza spot domestically, conjuring progression from only about a solid city block’s worth of urban blight, reflects a lot about what this whole deal is supposed to be about in the first place and what’s perhaps at risk as the powers that be subsidize fenced-in and preapproved ‘free-speech zone’ analogues.
Will a true and final demolition of Love Park as it’s currently regarded spark a black market in tiles and ledge chunks that are rumoured still to lurk within the garages of certain ex-Philly pros to this day? Could a ‘Sabotage’-inspired wave of mouthwash guzzling force manufacturers to cull it from pharmacy shelves? If Love Park somehow maintains will future VX-toters be forced to roll out a triple-seat stroller to arouse nostalgia purchases from a rarified class of skate grampas?
The ancients believed the frontside pop-shove it possessed various herbal and medicinal qualities that buoyed healing and promoted weight gain. Jordan Trahan, only tangentially related to the earlier-mentioned Jordan Sanchez and famed Alaskan ‘puzzleboss’ Jordan Kiwitroop, knows the names of the forgotten gods and how properly to revere them. As the afterglow gathers toward the close of Bronze’s understandably powerful ‘Enron’ Film this year, Jordan Trahan in two short minutes fulfills many prophecies of old that longer, more expensively made video parts failed to consummate this year. Really, this section harboured all relevant affairs, including a fully cracked backside bigspin and lightly floated hardflip, but to it we endeavor to staple Jordan Trahan’s internet-famous JKwon 360 flip, anointed as an ageless heater by none other than Josh Kalis himself and widely recognized as 2014’s most impactful trick in which a board spins 360 degrees and flips at the same time. As earlier mentioned in the Book of Revelation, ‘I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a 360 flipping board, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war.’ And yet as the fella says, certain individuals don’t want war.
A discrete plea to crowdsource a Dennis Busenitz You-Tube link: In the way one can be struck by a sudden craving for a Burger King Whopper or a grape-flavored cigarillo, midweek brought an overpowering urge to cue up the footage for what Thrasher “ledge-lord” T-eddy recipient Josh Kalis declared to be the best manual trick performed ever at the pier. This ad came around 2007 and apparently before Busenitz made the hop to Adidas. The clip wasn’t filmed in time to make “Roll Forever,” was too far on the left side of the Western hemisphere for inclusion in “Diagonal” and my first guess, Volcom’s “Let’s Live,” wasn’t right. Sifting Real’s “Kitchen Sink” odds-n-ends video didn’t turn it up. The desire remains strong to the point reviewing various Thrasher and TWS video montages remains under consideration.
boil the ocean 
