Ten more Javi De Pedro, ‘Heritage’ — wallie backside tailslide with no bump and some of the year’s most heavily boned landings Dick Rizzo, ‘The Reuben’ — It was a wrap when Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz came in. Ronnie Sandoval, ‘Appreciate U Bro’ — Heavy drama, but among our best in the bowls and embankments Josh Arnott, ‘Impressions’ — Kind of off-putting to see DC retros pushing across U.K. cobblestone but maybe all you need is a killer backside tailslide and 360 flip? Jordan Trahan, ‘Bunny Hop’ — The kickflip over the garbage bin immediately gets noticed to the all-time listmakers, along with Danny Garcia’s ‘Mosaic’ one and Tom Penny’s in ‘Welcome to Hell’ Mark Humenik, ‘Bert’s Vid 2’ — This dude sometimes seems like he is dealing with some form of lower-body ADHD where his feet get agitated if they aren’t doing a trick every few seconds Grant Taylor, ‘Constant’ — Over the next few years, a handful of residents will have GT and Thrasher to blame for crowding up their downhill alleyway John Shanahan, ‘SabotageXDC’ — Jimmy Gorecki deemed the nollie backside flip over the can the trick of the year and was he maybe right? Tyler Surrey, ‘Vagando’ — Top-shelf filming and out-of-the-way spots combine for one of the more enjoyably disorienting and surprising vids from the always-reliable Tyler Surrey Jacopo Carozzi, ‘Baker Video With Jacopo’ — The master of Milan’s Love Park with the endlessly bubbling pot of ledge tricks
Slipped in between the broken glass and Skid Row screamers in Jason Hernandez’s Technicolor property damager was one of 2009’s less intuitive tag teams. Shane O’neill’s sterilized tech matched well with Theotis Beasley’s gangly gap flights, tagging off on the stairs and ledges to a sunny love song that felt like an oasis in one of the heavier features of the time, am team or otherwise. It now reads like a postcard from a simpler age, pre-influencer follower maintenance and Olympic obligations, when a couple kids could throw on the New Eras, chill amongst the wreckage of a global economic collapse and film tricks on colourful flatbars.
Years ago, before all our troubles and sadness, demonic possession was ‘buzzworthy’ and a hot topic. From time to time, shivers and consternations would be raised high by satanic board graphics, unholy amusement park field trips and unlucky shoe numbers. In those easier and younger times, much could be chalked up to youthful irascibilities and in-good-fun nose-thumbing. At times, though, things veered darker and weird, most famously in 2012 when a published Lucas Puig sequence featured the freshly striped-up Frenchman switch hardflip backside tailsliding with a water bottle in hand, immediately kindling frights that one of the most promising, ascendant talents of the time had been supernaturally captured by the faded spirit of Chris Lambert’s professional skating career.
Ghostologists and statistical occultists never delivered conclusive proof either way. Yet as so often is the case in the spirit world, unintentional consequences followed. Clutched between the sweaty and griptape-calloused fingers of ams, pros and various bros, water bottles became commonplace, the hand towel occasionally was revived by SAD’s spiritual descendants, and kickflips with VX in hand became a way to flex on the rapidly grizzling GoPro generation. Elevating the discipline in 2017, Philadelphia ledge maestro Dylan Sourbeer barreled through Muni with a t-shirt in hand; in a much-replayed DC spot bumpering Thrashermagazine.com uploads, the Macba block was kickflipped while grasping a second board. Most infamously of all, career regulator Bob LaSalle in the Dime Video dominated both ledges and a gap while a handling a loaded pistol.
Now, everyone is older. Grant Taylor, onetime taciturn teen, is a family man, chatting with Thrasher about his recent Los Angeles migration, a two-kids-and-a-dog realm of avocado toast and crossover hybrids. “I like that feeling of just getting lost,” he muses to celebrity photog Atiba Jefferson in Thrasher. “And that’s how you end up finding new parks, playgrounds or places to go. All the food, too. My wife and I love trying new things and eating out or getting take-out now because of COVID, so that’s always fun.” The global pandemic emptied SoCal’s streets and back-routes in time for Grant Taylor to trade in the bowls and Slayer for his first extended dip into the handrails, hubbas and ledges in some time; now, winding down Nike SB’s ‘Constant,’ he is as natural on the alleyway steeps as any GX’er and young enough still to tangle with a bull-ride backside 50-50 and the gap out to backside lipslide.
Grant Taylor’s West Coast adulting bleeds through midway into the part after he carves backside up an asphalt blob and spins a frontside 360 wallride thing that brings around his left hand, clutching what appears to be either a formidable banana or a Salinas-fresh organic zucchini straight out the farmers’ market. Draped in Bob Seger’s ‘Still the Same’ — the bittersweet old-head’s answer to the Virginia Slims-ready bop of Orleans’ ‘Still the One’ — it is a yellow flashing signal, at once a requiem for misspent youth shrinking in the rear view, the promise of high-fiber and low-guilt sustenance ahead, and the ever-present risk of slipping out if one’s guard falls too far.
With the wellness trend now claiming item-in-hand clip-getting, must we brace for a backlash that puts triple-decker burgers, bottom-shelf vodka bottles or, for optimal photo/video incentives, energy beverage tall cans in the palms of the next generation? Could a rejection of big boy/loose fit denim usher in a return of Ali Boulala-ready blouses and vests that call for knives, perhaps even clamped between the teeth? With street grabs thankfully out of fashion*, are dudes’ hands subconsciously searching for something to hold? Could wider adoption of bananas, zucchinis, carrots, cucumbers and other similarly-shaped produce help to turn the tide against safety hands, fairly maligned?
The year was 2008. The global economy was beginning to circle the ‘toilet,’ U.S. presidential hopefuls were balling for position across primary-voting states, food riots shook several countries, and in Baton Rouge, singer-songwriter Webbie released ‘Savage Life 2,’ propelled into the musical mainstream by the feminist anthem ‘Independent.’ This manually spellchecking ‘club banger’ told the story of a street-savvy and successful career woman who, occasionally to the surprise of Webbie and featurees Lil Phat and Boosie, rejects their patriarchical advances to acquire and pop her own bottles, leave the club early for work when necessary, and exhibit few if any onion ring aromas.
Have you ever tried to reach out to any of these Instagram stars?
Torey Pudwill: Yeah, I hit up that kid Versace Plug*. He told me, “I don’t do sponsors.” That threw me off so I told him, “That ain’t what this is!” He never hit me back. I guess he’s on some new shit.
The implications were enormous: Here was a kid out of continental Europe turning down one Skater of the Year and another credible coulda-been to continue filming clips with his friends for ‘tha gram.’ Rather than submit to the industry machinery of compulsory product-drop hashtaging, camera-specific filming missions and associated hobnobbing, @versace_plug has spent however much of the ensuing years he deems appropriate skating, perfecting the fine art of the trap-soundtracked park clip, tending a Nike hookup, and gathering flamey emojis from pro skaters and fashion industry admirers. By the all-important follower metric he is batting 400K, nearly halfway to his onetime would-be employers’ personal totals and multiples of the meandering Thank You enterprise, with next to none of the traditional ‘coverage.’ To Be Sure, gifted others have walked from the industry’s embrace — Travis Stenger, the sorely missed Ted DeGros — but @versace_plug seems never to have had much careerist aspirations to begin with, and crucially, hasn’t really appeared to seek much validation from the industry, which nevertheless continues to lavish upon him positive emojis and comments.
Until Friday, that is, when @versace_plug delivered a part for Thrasher. It is a fairly comprehensive distillation of his IG exploits — big stair sets, leaned landings, bigspin flips, costly shoes, Chief Keef with hyperactive hi-hat cymbals. There are some surprises, like the hardflip up the long stairs, the spastic-fast between-stack nollie flip, the nose manual down the hubba, the Bastien Salabanzi-channeling kickflip backside lipslide shove-it on the micro rail. It is a serviceable, even impressive answer to the long-running mystery of what @versace_plug might produce if he directed his considerable skills and laconic, moneyed style toward a video part. But by making such an effort and offering it up to the center of the skateboarding universe in 2020**, is he risking the posture of aloof indifference he has cultivated via rejecting the blazen path?
Is this whole topic neutralized and rendered moot if he winds up getting onto Primitive? How much of @versace_plug’s digital clout derives directly from his top 10-level choice of handle? Has @versace_plug made a convincing enough case to be added to the short list allowed to do varial flips? Or is this in fact a ‘trick question’ and no such list ought exist whatsoever?
Among the tangiest fantasies of the current, sportswear conglomerate-controlled era is the notion that skateboarders — long overlooked for their perseverance, pain threshold, creativity, daring precision — at last are recognized as equals to those jockstrap-equipped stadium-stuffers boasting major leagues, high exalted commissioners, and medical care generally unreliant on Superglue. It’s a charming tale of a ragged band of misfits made good, still rough around the edges but with hearts of gold, earning a seat for themselves at the big kids’ table of professional sport.
Much like the men, women and genderless robots of ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ who work together to overcome years of interstellar warfare to work toward harmonious human-robot relations of the diplomatic and carnal kind, it is a charming dream. But in this, our Year of the Pig, it remains only that. While majority league minimums in baseball, football and hockey variously challenge lower-tier talents to support a family on $535,000, $480,000 and $650,000, respectively, in skateboarding dudes are autofilling ridesharing applications and, if they’re lucky, receiving boxes with a suitable number of non-wack shoes to sell or trade.
Nevertheless! The most enduring and profitable entertainments find new ways of telling stories that already are well-knowed, if not necessarily true. On the eve of the world’s largest sporting event, Nike this week debuted a new video commercial file, portraying Eric Koston as a 40-something Tom Sawyer figure, mischievously creeping into the backyard of close bud Kyrie Irving to skate a coincidentally empty pool with a few of his closet friends from the 400-person Nike SB team. After Kyrie Irving’s high-cost technology system hips him to these skateboarders’ rascally plan, he uses the security-challenged Apple FaceTime technology to engage Eric Koston in lighthearted banter, humorously admonishing him to ‘call first.’
The commercial on its merits is fine. Its main misstep is propelling an unconvinced audience into a fantasy land where multimillionaire NBA stars and pro skaters are jovial, back-slapping peers — a story, perhaps, that is nice to tell one’s self. But remember, it’s the NBA player’s mansion and pool, not Eric Koston’s.
Another path would be for Nike to recognize and satirize the already lopsided dynamic. Eric Koston, Lance Mountain and Alex Olson slouch in an office doorway facing a mid-level Nike marketing official, who tells them they need to come up with a concept for a Nike skateboarding commercial — “some ramp stuff that’ll play in the Midwest,” he barks before slamming shut the door. Out in the hallway, Kyrie Irving walks by with his entourage, on his phone loudly scheduling pool cleaners for the upcoming weekend when he’ll be out of town. The Nike SB riders look at one another and begin texting their teammates.
Cut to the session at Kyrie Irving’s freshly emptied pool, where Eric Koston peels off a roll of bills for a couple of lounging pool cleaners, while Lance Mountain, AO and others film tricks.
Cut to the following Monday, where Eric Koston delivers the edited footage to the grouchy Nike marketing official. They put it on in his office, and Kyrie Irving again passes by with his entourage in the hallway — but this time Kyrie Irving looks in and stops, staring at the screen. Eric Koston slumps down in his chair as Kyrie Irving looks from the screen to Koston, back to the screen. Kyrie Irving gives Koston a quizzical look: “Wait, you work here?” The commercial ends.
Did skateboarder’s hopes for a professional minimum salary level die along with Rob Dyrdek’s dreams for a skaters’ union? Does there exist a ‘rough cut’ of Nike’s commercial in which Kyrie Irving clowns Eric Koston and his compadres for not having video game characters in the last 10 years’ worth of THPS titles? Is this commercial ripe for parody by the remaining aggressive inline rollerbladers, except where they’re barging Lance Mountain’s backyard pool?
Have you felt it? Only recently it was Madonna’s ex-boyfriend Dennis Rodman, the former WCW wrestler, providing a septum-pierced window into the mind of Kim Jong Un, heir to the legendary North Korean golf dynasty, ahead of talks toward a nuclear disarmament. Beyonce and her rhyming spouse Jay-Z rented out the Louvre for a recent music video featuring Jay’s golden Indiana Jones medallion, while DJ Khaled plugs Weight Watchers. Onetime baseball tycoon Jose Canseco later aired his personal goal to join the emerging U.S. space battle force, an interplanetary armed squadron geared toward asserting American values to space’s infinity — and beyond, if duty, honour and extraplanetary riches require. Ours truly is a bold age of discipline and strength, forged in courage and rare-earth minerals, impossible to dilute.
Could it all be a simulation? Scientists have begun to seriously contemplate the question, which if nothing else seems a natural for a non-retrograde Alien Workshop board graphic. The rigidity of mathematical and physics principals hints toward rules for some ‘Big Game’, but really it’s the seams that sometimes show. One worldwide famed instance involved the mass memory glitch that occurred when the ‘Berenstein Bears’ series was erroneously replaced with the misspelled ‘Berenstain Bears’ version in our current when, igniting fury and hair-tearing confusion among readers.
There’s plenty more. In ‘Deathwish Part Two,’ published to the Thrasher.dotcom video engine weeks ago, one of Beagle’s HD VX-replacers briefly captures a splash of skatepark graffiti that includes a spray-painted ‘Nike SB’, some mistaken cut-and-paste job from a reality in which the Greek goddess of victory’s namesake company is some scrappy bro brand hawking t-shirts off BigCartel. Elsewhere, Erik Ellington sells loafers with golden tassels. Andy Roy, freed from jail, a famous TV game show host.
Scott Johnston, in a recent Chrome Ball interview, alludes to an alternate timeline in which his indelible Mad Circle part was soundtracked not to the perky, radio-friendly unit shifter ‘Peg’ but to an entirely different Steely Dan song, widely assumed to be ‘Any Major Dude Will Tell You.’
Justin already had a Steely Dan song picked out but it was a different one. I ended up going through the CD and finding another one that I liked better, which was the one we used. I guess I just kinda took it and did it. (laughs)
Scott Johnston’s ‘Horns’ part, with its tightly controlled switch 360 flips, is known across this land’s towns and botanical gardens as a classic of the form to be copied to the best of anyone’s abilities, mammal and invertebrate alike. If one accepts/assumes this existence to be a simulation, one also must accept and, ultimately, celebrate the certitude of multiple versions of this same simulation playing out simultaneously, with slight variations, infinitely. It’s easy to envision dozens of editions of our current reality, multitudes of laptop and plasmoid TV and smartphone screens playing Scott Johnston’s ‘Horns’ section, each one soundtracked to a different Steely Dan track plucked with wild abandon as Scott Johnston sifts through a bottomless sack of Steely Dan CDs in Justin Girard’s apartment lo those many years ago, his hand casting and reaching further and deeper into a black night staring back with an eyeless, blank reflection on our artificial existence.
As the trumpets and infrastructure spending of another Olympic Season fade, can we find solace and hope in technology growing closer to reviving the body of the too-soon-gone Walter Becker, if not his Jose Cuervo-bathed soul? In a post-all era, is tagging the names, let alone logos, of multibillion-dollar sportswear conglomerates the height of subversivity? Does Khaled really swallow those weight-reducing foods? If all this is just one of an infinite number of simulations playing out, are your odds of being in a good one versus a wack one roughly even, or would an advanced civilization prefer to study only ones where shit goes wrong, Love Park gets demolished, Prince ODs, Danny Way’s ‘Tru, B’ part never comes out, Max Geronzi switches over to skating exclusively novelty old-school setups, and Kyle Nicholson never gets a full shoe deal?
Grim days as the United States confronts a missile-wagging Vladimir Putin, unreasonable natural disasters and now, an embarrassing Olympic chapter on the increasingly nuclear Korean peninsula. Despite the best efforts of Shaun “Flying TomatoTM” White and several mighty American curlers, the country that eagles built went home the most medal-poor in 20 years and badly underperformed its podium-claiming potential, according to FiveThirtyEight, a blogging website concerned with important numbers and equations.
To reclaim international glory, the U.S. is counting on the only tried-and-true solution to overwhelming sporting odds: the ragtag band of misfits. Skateboarding, a sport ostensibly invented in the U.S. (if one ignores Josh Stewart’s ‘ancient alien’ theories), offers the best chance for America to assert its citizens’ physical primacy on the planetary stage, while justifying all that feigned ignorance of Japanese security guards’ exasperation over the years when the Olympic torch is lit in Tokyo. No doubt, federal data scientists are building algorithms to rank candidates based on flatground contest consistency, after-black hammer intensity and general ‘swagger,’ that hard-to-quantify ‘X factor’ that could help put the USA over the top in a tight medal race.
But it will take more than gumption and snappy one-liners. To achieve ultimate glory, top-tier skateboard competitors are thinking inside the box: specially designed space-age boxes, to be exact, which have become involved in unique and revolutionary exercise regimens. Jumping up and down on these expensive exercise boxes, human scientists believe, is the closest approximation to the ollie that is possible within the confines of a properly sanitized, chromed-out gym.
Physical advisers to Ryan Sheckler, no stranger to tightly plotted TV dramatics, suggested that he jump up and down on a box as part of his gym exercise regimen. Sean Malto, pursuing a comeback from his gruesome ankle injury, similarly employed a variety of special gym jumping-boxes. Danny Way, in his envelope-pushing way, perhaps already has moved beyond the box to swinging giant medieval spheres. But Americans do not hold a monopoly on advanced box technology, as Brazilian Street League phenom Leticia Bufoni also has come to know the box-jumping technique and its powers.
Nyjah Huston could represent the United State’s best hope for a 2020 golden coin. Having balanced his energy by finally shifting the mass of his long-shorn dreads to his torso, arms and neck via assorted tattooings, Nyjah Huston is pushing the boundaries of possibility on handrails, this week releasing an 11-minute long video part to help promote new Nike products. It is a video filled with tricks made to end lesser full-lengths, such as the curvy-wurvy frontside 5-0 grind, a backside smith grind backside 180 out on a kinked handrail, a mile-long backside tailslide and, perhaps in tribute to Dan Pageau’s freshly funded legacy, a switchstance trip down the fearsome El Toro handrail. It’s unclear how heavily Nyjah Huston has been box-training, but a watchful eye on his Insta Gram site shows that a high-tech training box is never far away in his gym.
Is jumping up and down onto a special athletic box how Nyjah Huston gained the power to contort his body and achieve his ‘Til Death’ tricks? Will advanced box jumping sets help ward off chronic traumatic encephalopathy or are the bros cracking some brews and hoping for the best? Did Omar Salazar predict all this with his yelpy off-board parkour stylings? Is Shaun White already jumping up and down off boxes as he pursues his life goal of becoming a multi-board Olympic gold medallion holder, but putting himself at risk of overgolding?
Beyond your typical personal chemistry and blood oaths, one key to great skate duos of any era is a certain peanut butter-meets-chocolate stylistic matchup. It was true for Jason Dill and AVE, for Louie Barletta and Jerry Hsu, for Mike Carroll and Rick Howard, and it was true for Dustin Dollin as he introduced his preternaturally gifted ‘filmer’ in Volcom’s 2004 pronunciation challenge to tongue-tied shop employees worldwide. Dustin Dollin by this point had established himself as one of the highest-functioning soaks among the Baker squad, solidified via Transworld’s ‘Sight Unseen’ and ‘Baker2G’. By this point his rapid flick, penchant for hairy crooked grinds, and frontside heelflip were known across the hills and dales, but Dustin Dollin’s tricks had a little different flavor when sandwiched around those of relative newcomer Lewis Marnell, who was toward the beginning of his too-short run. The Dunks still were fresh and the hair had yet to dread but other pivotal pieces in the Lewis Marnell repertoire — the heelflip, 360 flips both ways, the switch varial heelflip — already were fully formed.
In neon-toned and bumbling eras past, technology was to be bemusedly regarded and toyed with, or ultimately cast aside. Powell Nose Bones, Rip Grip, lappers and Bridgebolts vied for premium positioning within griptape-scarred glass cases, promising attractive profit margins and incremental on-board advantages. As these were briefly coveted, idly worshiped and discarded, skaters remained in thrall to the Old Ways, gleaning yearly glimpses at the future handed down by Thrasher’s pagan oracle Mephisto, engaging in various griptape superstitions and praying to volcanoes.
What changed? Like most facets of modern skateboarding it can be traced to the 1990s, when cheap electronics baptized a new generation of videomakers, stuffed-tongue lucre-funded and Flash-laden websites for DC Shoe Co USA, and a Storm surge of yellow t-shirts ultimately birthed the Osiris G-bag (whose influence has vibrated across the decades). As a generation of ramped slo-mo induced motion sickness sufferers can attest, it soon became impossible to avoid wallowing in digitized video parts, lovingly retouched photos and ender-level tricks captured within cassette tape-sized telephones and beamed within seconds to tens of thousands of screens worldwide, enabling near-instantaneous commentary on pants size.
Now, a bold and bristly vanguard of new products stands intent upon elbowing its way to the front of the technological queue, competing amid steadily rising sneaker prices and highly designed special fitting t-shirts in the perennial combat for skaters’ discretionary spending:
Nike SB Eric Koston Hyperfeel 3: Eric Koston’s latest attempt to match the runaway success of his early Es shoes* manifests itself as a genetic hybrid of shoe and sock, doing one better the interior-sock playacting of shoes past such as the old DC AVE, and suggesting mystical powers similar to those enjoyed by fantastical mash-ups such the liger, pegasus, manticore and chimera. Superlatives aplenty adorn this garish creation, including the timeworn ‘game-changing’ and ‘disruptive,’ always an ominous sign. Only time will tell whether the sock component passes the oft-brutal smell test represented by the wafty smell that comes from days-unchanged socks, and whether this crossbreed proves itself a reliable steed such as the mule or a doomed mash-up like the aquatic car.
The Curb Stone: As the 1993 expose ‘Jurassic Park’ demonstrated, the laws of unintended consequences ride high in the saddle when man plays god, occasionally requiring lofty insurance payouts. So it is with the Curb Stone, an upgraded rub brick purpose-made for simultaneously smoothing and slicking ledges with a high-grade composite material conceived to dominate various concretes and cements. Useful for sure, but potentially unlocking a Pandora’s Box with its power to reshape the world around us. Holding the authority and gusto to create ledges, hubbas and wallride-friendly surfaces anywhere within reach, will this Stone inevitably result in pristine mountain ranges and national monuments such as Mt Rushmore refashioned to be slappy-ready and rack up valuable ‘Likes’ on sociable computer networks?
Chocolate’s ‘Carabiner Cup’: Water quality and availability is widely predicted to be the cause of future wars and strife, and such trembly fears have unleashed investment dollars that would head such global conflicts off at the proverbial pass while also handily clipping to one’s belt loop. Chocolate, that supplier of graphical socks and party cup sets, has introduced a Carabiner Cup capable of resolving world water availability threats through a unique and burgundy coloured technology that makes seawater drinkable with the help of a gentle flame. The years ahead will reveal whether Chocolate’s powerful scientists stay on a helpful path for people or pursue more controversial theories, such as musing about atom bombing rival planets on late-nite TV.
In the latest sign that we collectively have abandoned our humbler roots in favor of active sporting trophy cups and lucrative endorsement deals, one of the cardinal learnings of the 1990s seems to have faded from memory. Like so much L.A. confetti pushed before the broom of a blind disco custodian, skateboarders* seemingly have discarded their collective ambition to be like rap singers.
Perversely, more than a decade and a half since the grand fragmentation of street-skating into various splintered genres and jeans fittings, it is the black-denimed and tattooed long-hairs who seem closest to maintaining a form of business mind-meld with the likes of Gorilla Zoe and Charles Hamilton. As the internet buccaneers set sail and pillaged the profitability of compact discs and DVDs alike, urban musicians, many confident in their ability to subsidize any lost musical revenue with the street kind, largely abandoned the blockbuster commercial release ritual in favor of flooding the zone with a steady stream of sometimes tossed-off but generally more interesting and immediate free releases, oriented around building and maintaining a support base rather than trying to squeeze a shrinking number of dollars from an antiquated medium, which requires cutting in any number of increasingly irrelevant corporate interests to boot.
One-off web-centric video parts aside you maybe could draw a thin and blurry line between the decades-old concerns that still insist on a multi-year production process with the requisite release-date pushbacks, monthly ad campaigns and internal deadline turmoil that seem attendant upon such projects, versus the Magentas, Palaces and perhaps Adidases whose trip clips and internet parts skew more toward the mixtape format, without the gravity of a once-per-decade project pervading everything.
Jamie Thomas a few years ago, when Zero was like 20 dudes/dudettes deep, described a certain plan to release annually a video that would tot up whatever footage had amassed over that time period and bestow it upon the salivating masses. It sounded logical, but “Cold War” seems to have wound up following the established build-and-release pattern, maybe due to Zero’s famous adherence to rigid standards. Now comes Emerica with the first in their “Made” series, this one featuring about one-third of their team, in what’s alleged to be a succession of smaller videos that would appear to harken back to the medium’s optimal runtime of 20-30 minutes, as laid down under interplanetary law by wizened walruses able to communicate telepathically and also with crude grunting sounds.**
Must this be the way of the future for all as TV-stand real estate is ceded to Roku boxes and streaming services? Has Skate.ly already become the unofficial DatPiff.com to the industry, and Quartersnacks its Traps N Trunks? If Mark Suciu has laid claim to the Gucci Mane analog, who is our Lil B? Which company, if any, has the courage to release the skate-video equivalent of the long-feared “all-skits rap album”?
*Or maybe just those that don’t run companies
**Nike purported to be doing something similar, but with 50 dudes on their team and several years between each video, it seems like sort of a half-measure.
boil the ocean 
