2. Miles Silvas – ‘Numbers Edition 3’

Realistically, which is to say in the realm of reality, track pants movement-pusher Miles Silvas made this list, inconsequential as it is, with just the knee drop after the switch frontside bluntslide in this part. The depth of his talent and taste though means he delivers another fulsome video part of his uncommonly singular style and near-peerless choice in tricks — in just the first minute here he’s got a backside bigspin the hard way over a handrail, a backside noseblunt at a tough-to-recommend speed, and Cam’ron. Nobody really is landing tricks like this dude (see: the hubba kickflip backside tailside roll-away, or after the switch backside heelflip over the bar) and there’s not so many who measure up when it comes to mind-bending backside tailslides in general, variations on which this part is sort of built around. Quibbling is restricted to how Miles Silvas seems to have toned down his outfits from the LRG pattern wars.

Summertime Mixtape #2: Cairo Foster “Real to Reel”

Cairo Foster was a great ambassador for Real because he did such a good job straddling the technical stuff that burned the Bay into the map in the early/mid-90s and the heavier, trick-centric movement brought on during the hammer area, but he never came off as too worked up about either one. Around the time this video came out I remember seeing Cairo Foster skate a sweaty July demo in a warehouse with the garage doors all pulled up, where he was the sole dude to hit up the big handrail from the awkward side and backside tailslid it to boot, an impressively off-kilter trick that squares with the way he gets this part moving with that ollie over the block to backside noseblunt. This section’s less cinematic than Cairo Foster’s big breakout role in TWS’s ‘the Reason’ but probably a better representation of what he was about at the time, scanning some well loved SF spots, the early years of his long-running love affair with the nollie hardflip and a beaut of a switch backside flip over the library channel. Recall watching this video often from a folding chair in a sparsely furnished apartment that also featured a mattress on the floor and clothes arranged into piles; on another day I maybe would’ve picked Nate Jones’ section in this same release.