Been There All The Time

Deck-consuming purchasers this week shall don blindfolds, take up swords and ponder their own misbalanced scales of justice as Alien Workshop unveils ‘Bunker Down,’ the resuscitated Ohio conspiracy-and-equipment merchant’s first formal video offering since resurfacing toward the beginning of the year. In its way it is a precedent-setting case — whereas half-hearted stabs have been made toward rebooting once-lively board concerns such as ATM Click and Vision, and companies such as World Industries, Toy Machine and Plan B have staged comebacks after replacing much of the companies’ prior rosters, AWS’s amateur-powered reincarnation represents an attempt at a complete slate-wiping reset without first letting its name first marinate in some nostalgic yearslong purgatory, or a pivot toward bargain-bin products.

Sovereign Sect disciples reared on grainy images of rural blight and zoomed in shots of creepy crawlies have been heartened by now-daily photos and video clips on the Workshop’s Instagram portal that show Mike Hill much in command of the company’s signature visuals, ensconced in an abandoned nuclear research facility of some description, bought by Dyrdek. Absent hanging onto (M)other’s founding fathers, rebuilding the team from scratch was a smarter plan versus resetting with knowed pros or amateurs, lured from establishment sponsors and bearing their own baggage. Promising returns already are seen in Joey Guevara’s hilltop to alley marauding, Brandon Nguyen’s wall scaling and Frankie Spears’ handrail riffage, before Miguel Valle’s reliable lens, boring through lesser-chewed crust inside Detroit, upstate NY and other locales various. These dudes’ skating smacks of AWS to varying degrees, not far off the spectrum mapped by the company’s post-‘Mindfield’ additions, and time has validated many of the company’s prior pluckings of lil-known am talent, from Pappalardo and Wenning to Taylor and Johnson.

That grand and fickle arbitror, the marketplace, will judge whether this steamlined and refreshed Alien Workshop will remain a prowess player upon board walls and social media feeds for the years ahead, but its trajectory bears close observation — roughly 2200 miles to the southwest there have been ominous rumblings within the Crailtap camp, which already has seen three high profile departures and enough recent, billowy smoke around the prospective ship-jumpings of decades-deep Girl stalwarts such as Eric Koston and Guy Mariano so as to reasonably presume some type of fire. With the careers of other gen-one Crailtappers in their autumn season and the intentions of the Altamont cash-injectors toward lesser-loved hardgoods operations unknowed, it seems fair to ponder the future of another upstart turned industry pillar whose influence has receded like so many 90s-pro hairlines.

Is a wholesale reboot of Girl doable or desirable when vested owners such as Mike Carroll and Rick Howard are still capable of justifying their pro model products and Cory Kennedy, among Girl’s latest-annointed pros, appears in the SOTY mix? If Girl’s flow program were mined for such a baseline reset would Antonio Durao’s thundersome switch 360 flips provide air cover for any and all other newcomers? Was Plan B’s ‘Tru, B,’ bereft of all legacy professionals save the unsinkable Pat Duffy, actually a ‘Bunker Down’-style reset in all but name? Should the Alien Workshop have held the bagpipe hymn in reserve for their comeback release, or will the opening chords of BIG’s ‘You’re Nobody’ replace those of ‘Little Ethnic Song’?

Did the Plan B Video Really Come Out?

What happened at the end of November 2014? It is a question that may vex intelligent physicists and lyrical masterminds for years to come. The easy answer is, Plan B released their re-debut video movie “B Tru” after a heady 9 years of anticipatory anxiousness. Like many video releases, it raises questions about the basic nature of reality and human perception. Did it really come out? This is a more difficult question*.

Befitting the Snapchat age, much of the substance, happenstance and Stance socks-related materials surrounding the video are not what they appear, leading the viewer by his or her trembling and possibly tatted hand into an advanced unit of smoke and mirrors that requires at least a leveled Staff of Clarifying to navigate. And even then your Staff may be heisted from your Bag of Holding by any number of untrustworthy NPCs. As OPEC crashed global crude oil markets and millions of turkeys fell under American knives, what had long been billed as the triumphal reconnoitering of the Plan B destiny revealed itself as something else: none of the original reboot lineup had sections, including currently serving vets PJ Ladd, Colin McKay and Danny Way. Opening the video was the spracking Chris Joslin, a gap-fixated bazooka dealer little understood just six months ago and who would seem to singlehandedly obviate many of Plan B’s earlier-acquired hot shoes. The young bro, it would seem, was built for 360 flipping off buildings and publicly endorsing Plan B skateboards; the messageboards have him married at 18 and blowing off post-premiere champagne rooms to skate a park. Let the bidding commence.

Heady days that followed included a mysterious message from Danny Way pushing off his own, years-in-the-making video part and Hawaiian infrastructure reveal as much as another year to conform with scheduling of an unknown DC project. Colin McKay gave an interview in which he seemed to promise Ryan Sheckler would again attempt to make good on his hot-check El Toro backside kickflip, possibly with Chris Joslin in tow for an entirely separate 20-stair flip trick to record. The video interview abruptly vanished shortly thereafter.

Simultaneously rumors began to swirl around Trevor McClung’s part-opening burn of an unnamed pizza delivery driver, who borrows a board to skate a dumpster with the Plan B bros and lands his trick, only to try it again and slam, earning laughter and derision from Trevor McClung, a superior skater. “Don’t quit your day job,” Trevor McClung counseled, in a blistering takedown said to have earned a potential late-arriving invitation to the 2014 Hater’s Ball, and particularly searing as the day job in question already is less than glamorous.

The latest warping of our current reality** arrived last weekend, when Plan B video-closer Torey Pudwill did not win Skater of the Year. It would be a relatively short astral projection to reach several alternate realities where he did earn the shiny trophy, or others similar to it except with added useful tentacles in place of arms or other hallmarks of shadow earths that we cannot fathom. (One also can endorse multiple versions of this “Tru Earth” in which Sk8Mafia’s Wes Kremer, who won, also again earned the award but with minor variations, such as a $50 billion cash purse or a science experiment gone awry in a nearby laboratory that by sheer chance afflicted Peter Smolik with radioactive powers that expanded his mass by 300 times, to a scale such that he wreaks havoc upon downtown San Diego before receding back into the ocean to sleep beneath the waves near a warm lava vent.)

The purpose and responsibility of semi-readable blog web pages is to parse only the reality that is readily glimpsable, and truly Torey Pudwill’s video-closing part is difficult to comprehend on these grounds. His backside-approaching ledge and handrail tricks are increasingly otherworldly, from his five-times-kinked backside lipslide to the mile-long backside noseblunt pop-out to his fearsomely hiked backside smith grinds, shoulder high or up a railing. Whereas previously-claimed tricks failed to materialize elsewhere Torey Pudwill hoists aboard the fleshy, shark-bitten carcass of his own white whale, a backside lipslide kickflip to backside noseblunt, one of several such moves that in some other dimension might set Cory Kennedy to perspiring beneath his white linen and Panama straw hat ensemble. The backside noseblunt hubba transfer and blizzardy bigger-spin flip are others.

There is a natural but perhaps fading aversion in skateboarding, in years past a haven for slackers and outcasts either self-styled or actual, to the capital-S sports concept of playing to win, and through this prism Wes Kremer’s seeming obliviousness to the world in general is at the least endearing and at most worth celebrating (alongside his own uncanny skills and envelope pushing, up the side of the Clipper ledge or wherever). But maybe coming through and delivering the sort of conversation-changing footage that this Plan B movie for years promised, while longer-serving colleagues opted not to, and burnishing the company’s now 20-year video legacy is a different type of accolade for Torey Pudwill, sort of like the ones referred to by Quartersnacks deity and Project Pat’s bosom Canadian chum Aubrey Taylor in his song ‘Trophies, B.’

*Don’t forget how that one Plan B video was called ‘Virtual Reality, B’
**Dictionary.com describes reality as ‘property or real estate.’