Do You Believe In The Healing Power Of Kyle Wilson’s Skating?

The world rent by heartache, disease and strife; millions in the grave, recriminations and poisons spat across borders and Zoom meetings, liberty in retreat. A schism in Britain’s royal family over yung breakaway royals sets teeth grinding and ferments mistrust across the empire that was. Not even Oprah can fix it, and in streetwear’s woodgrain-floored and white-walled halls, fears of a tug of war between the Old World and the New over cultural claim to the 20th-Century people’s princess. This year was promised to be better.

But hang on a minute. An unsettlingly temperate spell drains off snowy piles, and one needle at a time, there is hope for a global pandemic to be pushed back. From up out of the HD digital video files of Austin Bristow last week came ‘Portions,’ a comprehensive but tantalizingly brief glance at the Palace Group’s recent London activities through non-vintage lenses, arriving on the cusp of a spring gesturing toward a better summer ahead. Everyone is here, Danny Brady doing Danny Brady things at Canary Wharf, Chewy Cannon resplendent in blue jeans and backward ballcap, Heitor Da Silva running it back in real time, Rory Milanes switch frontside blunting off a stone cliff face, Lucien Clarke putting up this young year’s toughest switch inward heelflip to date.

Tom Penny and Tom Knox and a lot of other dudes pop in, but even in a more intensive rendering than is typical for some of these skaters, much of the vid flows by in a kind of fog left after the smouldering bomb crater left by Kyle Wilson, who commands the start of the vid. It’s a collision of black denim, hugely floated tricks, switch backside tailslides and switch heelflips and certain other decades-tested streetstyle standbys. Early on he’s rodeoing a wallie up onto a waist-high block, later hucking a big backside 180 at South Bank, swerving his landings all over the place. The molten, fiery core of this video part is a ledge line at dusk, when Kyle Wilson is pushing switchstance between blocks, a massive camo parka billowing around him, its hood liner easily the fuzziest seen on British shores since Brian Wenning switch backside smith grinded at Milton Keynes, its value likely rivaling Rob Welsh’s multi-payment plan Giants bomber. It is over in a few seconds and feels like it will reverberate for years.

Is Kyle Wilson the best skateboarder alive, as Slam City rhetoricizes? Why not? It is the fundamental question that comes up watching his roundly unimpeachable footage. Why not switch frontside noseslide a stupid tall ledge and then roll off some big drop? Why not blast a frontside flip as high as you possibly can before setting up for the stair set ahead? Why not politely explain to the young and sophisticated bicyclist that you need to jump that wall so you can crush the landing and shortly afterward firecracker partway down the stairs? Why not see how high you can pop that shaped deck? Why not give Ishod Wair competition for the world’s most coveted rollaway? Why not believe in a better season ahead?

Can a few minutes of incredible skate footage inject confidence and optimism not only into the tricks and session ahead, but prospects for the planet at large? Did you also catch similar vibes seeing the reinvigorated Fred Gall do a fakie ollie to noseblunt slide pop-in on a skatepark quarterpipe? How many cheap and easy payments might be required to secure a Kyle Wilson-cozy camo parka and, perhaps, peace for the House of Windsor? If web logging web sites were paid by the question mark could even the most meandering, run-on sentence typers drape themselves in fine, MLB-endorsed distressed leathers?

The Sun Rises on a New British Empire, Which Also Includes Francis Showerface As Well As Chewy Cannon Nosegrinds

When did the sun set on the first British skate empire? Views differ, but the rubbery, tearing sound of overreach could be heard in the intro to Blueprint’s generally great ‘Make Friends with the Colour Blue’, when the squad that built a movement on overcast skies, soot-stained streets and ‘Wandering Star’ opened with sun-sloshed Los Angeles art installations and the jaunty notes of ‘Birdhouse in Your Soul.’ Like tea-thirsty monarchs of old, the British Isles grew to become a realm too small for Blueprint, and waiting for the world took too long; Europeans and Americans were signed and it was off to the New World to compete with Southern Californian palm tree tenders on their own turf and terms. An effort noble in its aim, perhaps, but doomed.

An amusing exercise a month or so back, when Grey published the instant-classic Rich West shot of Mike Arnold’s phone booth hippy jump, was inventing metaphors to read into it. Like, might this board and body barreling through a derelict telephone compartment represent a magazine transcending the digital wave pounders painfully remaking the media sphere? Do the stomped-off nose and tail demonstrate the bloodthirsty courage of the forest mammal, caught in a trap, chewing off its own leg to escape, the sort of frantic bravery required to persist as an under-the-radar talent pushing U.K. skating through a global industry slump? Something to do with the fractious Brexit vote and Michael Gove’s perplexing applause technique?

It feels like another British wave is cresting. Around seven years back the initial Palace clips began to surface. Blueprint foundered five years ago. In 2015 the venerable Sidewalk mag wound down its print edition, later that year Free emerged. Blueprint fragment picker-uppers Isle’s ‘Vase’ debut vid at the end of that year polished Paul Shier and Nick Jensen’s already-secure legacies, but more notably launched Tom Knox and Chris Jones onto the global stage in one of that year’s most cohesive videos. The vibrant and jellyfish-scented ‘Atlantic Drift’ series since then has elevated them further and granted an international platform to dad-bodded Mike Arnold, who put his own dizzying spin onto the one-spot part at Bristol’s Lloyds Amphitheater.

Now comes ‘Palasonic’, a long-in-the-waiting ‘official’ full-length from those skate-cum-fashion standard bearers of the British Islands. It lands as much of Palace’s squadron seems at the height of their powers — Lucien Clarke is ripping Carroll spots, Danny Brady still is going in 15 years after ‘First Broadcast,’ Rory Milanes appears still well in his window, Chewy Cannon has had several years to hone and hopefully rebroaden his spastic wallie/360 repertoire, Shaun Powers has established his international artistic bona fides, Jamal Smith filmed 1995’s best 411 commercial. In recent months Palace rebuilt Radlands and got Lucas Puig.

Can Blondey McCoy’s much-reposted collision-turned-cartwheel off a purple hack be infused with some similarly labored metaphor for the Palace full-length finally dropping? Has the GX1000 crew’s recent focus on hill bombing left an opening for the Haight Street-originated hippy jump to be colonized by the British? Can human achievement in general surpass Chewy Cannon’s bank-to-ledge nosegrind or can we only hope to match it?

7. Rory Milanes – “City of Rats”

In a tumultuous year for British skating, what with the mass exodus of the Blueprint roster and international monetary policymakers airing concerns around a potentially destabilizing bubble in Palace-branded asset prices, it fell to London stalwarts Slam City Skates to re-center the 2012 scene and Rory Milanes to deliver the closing argument. Rory Milanes did one of the best parts in 2010’s “This Time Tomorrow” and steps up here in decidedly U.K. fashion, kickflipping brick channels and wearing stripedy sweaters to properly downbeat music and overcast skies. Straight off the bat he spins a nollie twister across a street gap, skates some high ledges, has a beauty of a switch backside kickflip, full command of the frontside 180 fakie manual/5-0 and a danger poke over the final bump-to-bar. For me this section took a little while to sink in, given Rory Milanes’ tricks don’t hit with the bombast of a Chewy Cannon, but I think he comes in as a solid bridge to some of the best skating of the now-closed Blueprint chapter.

Up With Smoke

Can a shop video to succeed without doubling as a love letter to the city in which its backing store is based? The enduring ones, like by Coliseum, FTC, Orchard, Uprise, MIA and Fobia, have been as much a ‘where’s where’ of the meanest spots as they are a ‘who’s who’ of the dudeliest dudes on the scene and while it’s gotta be a blast wallowing in all those marble ledges under the Spanish sun, you’d think most DVD purchasaurs really are not trying to see the local bros going Mr. Me Too at the spots the top-rung pros scraped clean five years prior.

For those who furrowed a brow at the outsized representation of AZ ditches and Boston loading docks in the last Blueprint video, Henry Edwards-Wood invites you to spend a solid hour submerged into the claustrophobic, bustling, brick-lined canyons of London, where streets drip with smoke stains, spray paint and wrought iron. Slam City Skates’ “City of Rats” has been out for a while but has rarely left the player this summer, as all these Palace, Blueprint, Landscape and other dudes shiver and sweat through what looks like one long, generally overcast season here, all the hovels and tight alleyways and weathered stone served up like red meat to “Static” faithfuls. South-Bank gets a loving soliloquy and two of the best-loved spots in this video include a sidewalk ledge set up for lines to close out with flatground tricks over a red rumble-strip and a thread-the-needle street gap into a corridor that’s probably far gnarlier than it already looks. It is jarring when, early in the video, you can see a Texaco sign.

Nick Jensen’s first run communicates the basic idea through a sidewalk bump to noseslide on a windowsill ledge, and isn’t long before he is back at that one sidewalk gap (switch 360 flip this time) and South Bank, where for weeks I have struggled to recall whether anyone else has kickflipped that high bar in the past. For a while it’s a parade of all the dudes you want to see skating these spots, like Joey Crack coming with the movie’s best nosegrind, a line from Snowy starting with an ollie snapped into a bank that celebrates all that is fantastic about that dude and the galaxy that we live in, Danny Brady pushing lines that confidently extend his career to the decade mark and Neil Smith steadily going hard, manualing into some big launch over a gate.

Palace’s Karim Bakhtaoui has garnered fame as a sort of London edition of Darren Harper, and witness elsewheres the light-footed Pluhowski styling of Jin Shimizu, looking relaxed in this sometimes oppressive environment. He’s flipping his board around and not too fussed, the chain ollie to no-comply submitting a general lesson in quick work under pressure. Lucien Clarke and Steph Morgan combine for the best kind of shared part, one where you can always tell which dude is up, and Lucien Clarke looks to be spending some time to craft one of the best nollie inward heelflips on the market. Ender-ending Rory Milanes helps the Palace dudes more or less corner this vid, going around the horn with a backside smith grind, completing the circle on a nosebluntslide 180 back in, switch jumping a block and capturing a Chewy Cannon cameo that in general sees these dudes at the peak of their power right now.

Palace this week opened a temporary store that enables the company to directly tap Supremesque demand levels for their triangular optical illusion logo that already has sold not-so-gently-used softgoods for hundreds of pounds sterling in transactions, moderately rattling international currency segments. Celebrity-spiced embrace of the company as its thematic output has tilted closer to All City and further away from Silverstar has driven some internet backlash, and if the rule holds that the best retort to such critiques is to let tricks do the talking you wonder whether hefty proceeds from the pop-up boutique will finance some China trips to seal the deal on their own VHS sooner rather than later, but coming off the strength of this Slam production I’d sort of rather they stay home.