In Lars Von Trier’s 2009 romcom ‘Antichrist,’ a pivotal scene finds star-crossed lover William Dafoe perceiving a wounded fox, played by Miles ‘Tails’ Prower, who snaps off a loose piece of his own skin before delivering the meme-capable warning: ‘chaos reigns.’ Hark: It’s 2020, stand up and take a look around. Barely a month into the new decade and we’ve stumbled into a global plague. The American political fabric frays, with dark murmurings of civil war. Nuclear apocalypse is deemed nearer than ever.
What balm then for the burdened soul, as winter tightens its frosty grip and tortured men bear their hopelessness in the night’s bleakest minutes? Don’t look to music, where captains of entertainment can only hand Grammys to gothic trap warbler Billie Eilish*, or the sporting world, mired in tragedy and scandal. In skating, lost friends and a universe threatening to fracture, as rumours a-swirl of a split in the FuckingAwesome/Supreme camp over unspecified disgruntlements** on the parts of Tyshawn Jones and Na’Kel Smith.
East coast future-horror merchants Terror of Planet X are not the first ones one might look to for soul soothement. The most-recent installment of their terminally strong-quality ‘Crop Circles’ series, revealed to Thrashermagazine.com users this week, opens with discordant strings, disembodied voices and cryptic shots of bridges and various logistics assets before dissolving into a crust survey to rival Fred Gall’s recent IG postings. Among TOPX’s midatlantic workingmen are fakie hardflip user Corey Huber, bridging a big gap to backside tailslide; Muni stairset kickflipper Adam Hribar cranks a bigspin out of a fronstide crooked grind, the always-quality Dylan Jeffers switch varial heelflips a can and Chris Mathis bumps not just to a bar but a kink after.
It is Joey Pyle’s part, bubbling up after a stress montage, that hits like an unseasonably mild midwinter’s day, sidling through the industrial grime with a sunny line through technicoloured banks and a steel drum band rattling out a Big Easy funk standard. It’s loosey-goosey enough to pop in multiple backside 50-50 shoves, there are some deeply pleasing 360 flips, and if you squint at one point you’d swear he nollie flips the old EMB big ‘seven.’ When it is over, you feel refreshed, and perhaps mentally prepared to flip the calendar to February.
Skate video makers long have knowed of the twinkling and transportative powers of tropical motifs, with increasingly obligatory Puerto Rico wintertime trips, and steel-drum music supervision, employing it to strong effect in ‘Static 4’ and ‘Dece Vid’. Like any psychoactive item, however, all this carries risk of overindulgence. The docu-drama series ‘Yacht Rock’ in a late episode depicted the twisted and cultish Parrot-heads, led by a blowgun-toting, cheezeberg-focused version of Jimmy Buffett, employing kidnapping schemes and tropical-scented depressants whilst robotically bobbing heads to the ‘Magaritaville’ crooner’s ocean-beezy guitar strums.
Could Joey Pyle’s excellent and psyche-soothing ‘Crop Circles II’ part be prescribed by doctors to patients suffering from seasonal affective disorder, as part of a holistic treatment programme also including Banana Boat-scented candles and frequent daiquiri injections? Do tropical indulgences threaten to act as a ‘gateway drug’ toward a perilous life of violent hedonisms and ‘latitude adjustment’ garb? Why aren’t more people making use of the backside 5-0 shove-it, long a reliable East Coast weapon? Did Costa Rica retiree Daniel Haney pioneer the tropical beach bum lifestyle in skating with his bucket hat and wise real estate investments?
*the new Cam though
**but probably money
boil the ocean 