A Swiftly Tilting Planet

In the 1990s, when skateboarding grew old enough to cadge cigarettes and thrill to petty crime, power derived from personal networks. Such networks were built of blood and bodily tissue, pulsating to the sounds of East Coast rap tapes, testing slang proficiencies and stiff-arming those deemed not ‘with it’ enough to merit tribal admittance. Over time, as these fleshsome blobs ingested hard currency and heaved themselves into shapes resembling semi-functional business apparatuses, they drew the eye of larger, more heavily weaponed entities, and they fought one another for pride of place and insubstantial dollar figures. All the while, their squishy amoebic forms stiffened and sparked, hardening into circuits and coagulating around wifi hot spots.

It’s a story learned by many at a young age, laying down to sleep upon straw piles and inside comfortable caves with natural stalagmite transitions. But power these days is welded to influence, a sword toted only by a certain few — those who earn it through questing, and those bloodthirsty and wily enough to acquire it by force. And, it is always sharp.

Nowadays, ‘moments’ flit by more fleetingly than ever. In our current one, the largest and most fearsome blade of influence is wielded by the Ted Barrow-curated Instagram account ‘Feedback_TS.’ The outlet punches far above its 5,700-follower weight, drawing into its orbit street-skating GOATS who yearn to be down, style magnet pros fresh off this year’s front-running full-length, and countless droves of aspirant comer-uppers lured by those juicy twin carrots, momentary fame and internet validation.

@Feedback_TS is more than a despotic judge, jury and executioner baptized in ‘Trilogy’ and ‘Mouse’ trick selections with a firm grip on format and presentation. Ted Barrow is not a pro, notwithstanding a memorable part in 2005’s ‘Lurkers 2’ alongside Jason Dill and Charles Lamb. He doesn’t get money from the skate industry. Harsh judgement and unvarnished opinion sometimes are served up, but no meanness or bitterness. Similar to the largely self-directed Slap board thralls, to skatepark heroes and strivers and the occasional professional, it is told like it is. To an extent, @Feedback_TS embodies the info-age singularity that has turned the skate biz inside-out, as the internet provides the world’s double-set early grabbers a platform on par with annointed worthies such as switch backside co-practitioner Miles Silvas and loveable oldster Jeff Gosso. Here lie isolated meadows and abandoned box canyons for creatures such as Revive and New Jersey bodybuilding manual regulator Weckingball to mutate and thrive, independent of the well-worn cart tracks, gladhanding and favored bazaars of the established skateboard business. In this turbulent realm, retired blog proprietors function on the same level as Eric Koston.

Is the right analogue to @Feedback_TS that of a wizened older brother, or maybe more accurately that worldly, well-meaning but unapologetically subversive older neighbor who probably smokes drugs and for sure operates beyond the bounds of the established family hierarchy? Between Ted Barrow and the resurgent Brian Wenning, have we entered a head-spinning and somewhat demoralizing era where switch backside smith grind shove-its rank as ‘old guy tricks’? Does the growing influence amassed by this instagram account raise concerns that it has become systemically important, with any deletion or protracted absence leaving impressionable kids adrift and guardrail-less, while parents, significant others and non-skating ass roommates wonder what happened to the deadpan voice dispensing trick terminology and occasional bursts of art history from behind the bathroom door whilst the fan is going?

The Battle Hymn of Ren McCormack

As a web blog Boil the ocean site faces unique challenges and may even be a dying breed similar to a breed of dying dinosaur. Semi-coherent and tiresome 4000-word posts have relinquished valuable readership to Mountain Dew listicles, clickable Tumbly sites and other increasingly micro platforms. Police Informer, Skateboarding Sucks, Carles and YouWillSoon all hung it up and now you got Andrew Sullivan warning that operating a blog could cause physical harm or even dinosaur-like death.

The video age did not shove skate photography into the proverbial tar pit in such a fashion but the internet age surely seems to be strangling the skate print-media sphere, perhaps within a vat of dangerous tar. In recent days beloved U.K. standbys Sidewalk and Kingpin decided to stop printing magazines and focus on computerized publishing, along with Germany’s Monster. This ominous gong rings out through the noble halls of Valhalla shortly after Slap and Skateboarder’s similar decisions to become online-only publishers portended a further initiative to stop publishing new content altogether, with Skateboarder’s website stocked with a Sept. 2013 issue and Slap distilled down to its message boards.

The speed at which generations turn over within skating suggests that, just as few current park ledge tailsliders recall a time when footwear logos did not default to a swoosh, within five years’ time the same may go for all but a small handful of physical magazines, specialty items turned to amid days-long power failures or the refuge of he or she who fatally cracks his strokable glass of choice. More noses warmed by gently shining screens and fewer physical paper pages in time could similarly cull both the number of photographers the industry is able to meaningfully support and the landing pads for their art, particularly if future trick-claiming scandals infect wheel and shoe buyers with a baseline distrust for anything beyond raw footage set to appropriately curated Atlanta rap songs.

As ever this Blogg site’s thoughts go to the children, or rather more specifically those children who eventually may find their trick quivers bizarrely stunted by a dearth of photographs. Whither the one foot ollie, that occasionally majestic and uniquely 1980s maneuvre that when correctly captured has the power to move a man such that he sloughs off decades’ worth of middling Hollywood toilings and industry false-starts and remembers only impressively shredded Airwalk high-tops of summers gone by. And yet the one-footer remains that peculiar and little understood enigma whose majesty almost entirely dissolves on film, with AO and Antwuan Dixon turning in some bizarre renditions lately and Grant Taylor’s comparatively more classic execution residing on transition rather than the streets.

Can the one-footer subsist in a severely constrained skate photo galaxy, a hellish nightscape where fevery competition from bigspin double flips and sugarcanes leave a scant few pages for the sometimes-AKA ollie north to continue in its most pleasurable form? The Skateboard Mag last month showcased a lovely one-footer by yung CJ Collins, a promising lamppost for all current comer-uppers, and Chris Cole featured a tailgrabbed version in this month’s — though an ominous tone also emanated from the current issue, as its cover required an image of a cell phone to incent potentially befuddled youngsters to peer inside.

In the future, will aging new-schoolers promote crowdfunding campaigns to secure remaining magazine page-space in a one-footer conservation effort? Did the ollie impossible’s resurgence already prove such repertoire rebounds are possible? Will the Vision Shoe Crew reunite for an acoustic tour of intimate East Coast venues? Shall time prove J Strickland right again?

Castiatic Tackle

Big Punisher the rap singer famously weighed 700 pounds at the time of his untimely passing several centuries ago. This achievement, unequaled by rappers of his time or since then, made true the statement that this onetime government-named Christopher Rios had more heart than would-be rivals in the game because it later was revealed that his heart was three times the size of a normal human’s, a Grinch-like feat that alongside his body of work enshrined eternally Big Punisher’s non-player status.

Would Transworld Skateboarding have enjoyed similar canonization had the Tracker-birthed publication evaporated at the height of its Sears-catalogue engorgement? The future of the past unoccurred is but a shadow out of time and a colour out of space. However, a confluence of worldwide economic tightenings, growths within internet page browsing, and the collective lines of ethernet speed snorted by Youtube uploaders, hard/softgood manufacturers and Pro Spotlight-eligible pros themselves seems over the past decade to have exacted a fleshy toll upon the World’s Number One Skateboard Magazine*.

TWS has hovered slightly above the 100-page mark in recent months, roughly same for The Skateboard Mag. Days when colourful and pro-endorsed hair gels and the dairy industry trade group balled for position alongside Baker boards and decades-old urethane concerns seem to have faded, with some choosing instead to pursue unique clicks and views on Quartersnacks.com and the Slap message-boards, while a new vanguard of more-virtual board outfits slings merchandise straight off white-labeled web blog platforms. It is a departure from the heady days of 2003, when TWS’ 20th anniversary issue boasted four different covers enveloping 408 pages; ads for Seek, Artafact, Germ and Fuze; two separate spreads featuring Toan Nguyen and one with Anthony Pappalardo backside tailsliding a hubba.

In recent weeks, Palace made several ripples for having an ad in TWS at all — which when you think about it is an uneasy look, re: one of the better-selling (and better-conceived) board companies of the day sort of deigning to show up at the party. Elsewhere, magazine ads taken out by Supreme and Fucking Awesome similarly have been seen as a novelty. While the remaining big three mags experiment with placing print content online in various forms, recent jumps from print to digital for Skateboarder and Slap ominously withered on the vine.

Worse, print publications increasingly appear locked in a slow-burning battle against a posse of nimbler websites able to post clickbaitable content willy-nilly without regard for print deadlines, touring schedules and the lassoing of press-ready adverts. In a broadening competition for the thumb-scrolling consumer of skate-related text blocs, this corner of the pasture has earned some coups: Jamie Thomas last month confirmed to Jenkem Mag recent rumors that Zero and Fallen would move to Dwindle, about a week after the site put up a thoughtful interview with recently-out photog Sam Maguire and a few months after they got Paul Rodriguez to run down the model for his board company. EXPN.com some months back interviewed Ty Evans on his post-Crailtap plans and earlier this month got Chris Cole on the record about quitting Zero (though without bothering to call him on press-release linguistic exercises or his statements to the contrary a few months ago).

Transworld the other day did land Habitat treehugger-in-chief Joe Castrucci on the company’s future with a heartwarming video to boot, though Jenkem the same day posted an interview with rider-wrangler Brennan Conroy that featured a shade more industry laundry aired.

The websites do not offer products for sale to coax revenue from lucrative zones such as airport bookstores and the remaining Barnes & Nobles. But they seemingly hold an advantage in being able to regularly crank out buzz/worthy list items. They’re also able to occasionally capitalize on the print mags’ own content, such as Nyjah Huston’s comments regarding girls and skating, which subsequently were walked back. They can freely post up more-lengthy items that don’t readily lend themselves to photo-powered features, like Muckmouth’s endlessly entertaining and entertainingly endless ‘Back in the Spotlight’ series and Jenkem’s Big Brother-worthy interview with ‘Tyler’ the skated-in sock enthusiast, or the more meditative feature on Tony DaSilva’s post-Foundation pursuits.

TWS and TSM and Thrasher could move similarly and sometimes do; witness Transworld’s own recent scoop, catching up with a fresh-out messageboard darling Jereme Rogers. You’d imagine though that they’re more constrained with the machinations of producing an actual physical product every four weeks, the expenses that go alongside supporting staff photographers, designers, writers and ad-sales officials. It has rightly been said that print magazines’ role these days includes some gatekeeping, and that a photo or interview in a magazine means more and lingers longer in the collective consciousness, and they have maintained as the de-facto locales for hosting and posting serious ‘internet’ video parts. But one worries how long this persists when the every-four-years generational shift skews more and more toward informing itself via mobile phones and whatever vaporous, cloud-infused technology may lurk just over these brave and binary horizons, for instance a floating monocle that allows the wearer to surf a web and look at his or her phone through the other/opposite eye.

Thrasher remains relatively fat and seems kind of insulated to all of this, having harnessed its SOTY award as a magnet for exclusive campaigner video parts, shifting KOTR toward a WWW serial and generally tethering its fortunes to the same winds of extreme whimsy that have lifted the boats and market shares of Anti-Hero, Independent, Spitfire and Vans over the past half-decade. For better or worse, how many TWS or TSM logo shirts do you see on dudes outside the page that bears the subscriber postcards?

What does the ‘culture’ if it can still so be called lose without mags of record, available to impressionable groms as they wander their junior-high libraries and kill time while their moms peruse supermarkets? As the multinational footwear vacuums of Nike, Adidas and Converse briskly hoover up teamriders, should we similarly consider the vision of a future centered upon one or two print mags and a host of bootstrap-pulling, internet-based contenders? How have the dwindling number of skate magazine pages affected the photographer ranks, and will an honest living be makeable should the pendulum of publication shift squarely to the internet? How much do the board/shoe/etc companies themselves, nudging their teamriders toward cultivating flighty Instagram followings, bear responsibility for shifting eyeballs away from the printed page?

*Billed more recently as ‘Skateboarding’s Finest’

Slap’s “One In A Million” Web TV Show Dishes Out Tough Love, Bro Hugs With An Ominous Message Dudes

When the U.S. economy crashed in the 1970s it was time for Americans everywhere to look in the mirror and face up to some home truths about the way folks were living at the time. Giant, luxurious ghetto sleds guzzled up gas by the boatload. Reams of cloth were being squandered to create extravagant disco pants and cocaine residue encrusted every tattered scrap of U.S. currency plunked down to see expensively produced Hollywood blockbusters including “Airport,” “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Hugo the Hippo.”* Now too, following a decade of excess that saw Rob Dyrdek perversely create the world’s largest skateboard, Danny Way construct the “Mega Ramp” and rumours of a mega picnic table from the Axion team, onetime City skateboards star Alex Klein holds up a reality TV-shaped mirror to depict the harsh state of the modern day industry.

Whereas last year’s OIAM focused mostly on fun-but-competitive-but-still-fun seshes at famed Bay spots, when it wasn’t focused on the Forrest situation, this year’s edition uproots the premise and casts it into warts-and-all New York City where urban grime is dressing for producer Klein’s mixed-greens salad of rotting values and wrongheaded challenges that function as a take-out version of the movable feast for corporate interests that Klein believes the activity has become in ’12. In one man’s tormented vision of this business, which sort of resembles the storyline to one of the Tony Hawk Pro Skater Playstation games, hungry up-comers literally live in a company-sponsored skatepark draped up with product placement, giving thanks when showered with a meager offering of sponsor-branded woodgoods and denim. In this OIAM, prefabricated and local government-approved sk8 facilities are the destination of choice just as often as your cellar doors and organic stair sets, and survival depends on split-second acts of self-promotion and stepping up to trade show-style physical challenges.

“You should know that a big part of skateboarding is learning to market yourself,” declares 5boro’s Steve Rodriguez, the words crashing down with all the condemnation of a convicting judge’s gavel. Contestants born into a seasonal rotation of series graphics sheepishly offer sharpie scrawls and Sears catalogue castoff collages, daring the viewer to recall an era when the likes of Jeremy Wray and Neil Blender arted up their own boards. A more faint of heart storyboarder may have dreamed up a Hollywood hogwash ending that sees the youth rise up and rebel, robbing the warehouse of decks and shoes to sell for dirt-weed funding and rave entry fees. But Alex Klein has seen the industry eat up and spit out too many eager ams to fool anyone with false hopes for a better future yet to come. The winner of this contest will immediately shift into filming/demoing/promoting mode for his new clutch of sponsors, resolutely sporting multiple logos on his New Era as he places respectably upon Dew Tour podiums and, in time, thanking his country for the honor of donning a red-white-and-blue uniform for the Olympics after testing free of some illicit substances.

*Spoiler alert, the hippo did it

Is Forrest Edwards The Reality-TV Villain We’ve Been Waiting For?

Pity the eventual winner of Slap Magazine’s “One In A Million” contest, for this lucky young man will forever be doomed to push in the long, unsmiling shadow cast by Forrest Edwards, the switchstancer from Riverside who almost immediately cemented a position as the breakout character from what has become a sort of “America’s Next Top Flow Kid.” Aged 18 or 19 years and already a master of the lefthanded compliment, Forrest Edwards is estimated by scholars to have come of age right around January 8, 2004, when a younger and more tender U.S. populace met and introduced itself to a onetime political consultant named Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth, villainess of Donald Trump’s initial run of “The Apprentice.” A lesson told in nine weeks: negative attitude, abrasive behavior and “not here to make friends” mindset buys notoriety that is worth its weight in American Idol text-messages.

Mango, the free-spirited ditch skater with the bad haircut, does not make Forrest Edwards laugh. Switch backside heelflipping a solid set of stairs does not crack his lips into a smile. Cigarette dangling dangerously from his mouth, Forrest Edwards broods and bides his time on those occasions when a handrail, double-set or ledge is not within reach. He’s not sorry that he broke Daryl Angel’s deck and transition is for old people and those intent on wasting an opportunity to carve out a piece of the lucrative sponsorship pie. He knows the names of the forgotten reality TV gods like Puck and Richard Hatch who long ago painted on television’s cave-walls the arcane lore, if you are not on-screen, you at least ought to be spoken of, and damn the consequences.

The web-evolution of the “One In A Million” contest has birthed a camera-ready series that, with a bit more coverage of after-hours chill/party sessions, could stand alongside all your “America’s Next Top Models” or “Real World Road Rules Challenges” in terms of painfully earnest moments of self-realization, product placement and shoehorned-in celeb cameos. In Forrest Edwards they have an Omarosa figure in spades, as he explains how he makes it all look so easy while making a run at being skating’s most divisive figure of 2010 — a tall order against the likes of Jereme Rogers, Brian Wenning, Antwuan Dixon and Shane O’Neill.

But do our times call for a Forrest Edwards? Following a decade marked by the rise of the Tilt Mode, Daewon Song’s goofy genius, assorted Jackassery and the Odd Couple stylings of Rob and Big, might Forrest Edwards’ unshakeable discontent be an antidote for too much fun? Dead-eyed and silent, Forrest Edwards seems to look upon a skateboard as a tool useful for proving his worth Mark Whiteley, his OIAM rivals and the world in general, comfortable with the sexual orientation of his go-to tricks and equally at ease when doling out quotables or bigspin-flipping stairs. Our nation’s economic house of credit cards in shambles and the prospect of a long economic slog ahead, Forrest Edwards’ single-minded fixation upon the prize serves to remind us that none of this is a game, that he is not playing around, even when brazenly choosing not to skate at any given time and instead offer advice on personal conduct or a balanced diet.

Brick Squad

The power of Steve Durante’s switch frontside heelflip compels you to go skating this weekend. Via this Slap “Foto” feature

Have It Your Way

“Our burgers are fucking delicious,” perhaps

Hitching your wagon to the whims of the masses can make for an interesting ride. Decision by consensus has produced some amazing cultural milestones in our time, including but not limited to the Soulja Boy dance, David Archuletta and Wikipedia.

Of course public opinion is often way off to the point of blowing it entirely: CNN entrusted the internet peanut gallery with reporting power, which produced a sort-of plausible but still wildly untrue story about Steve Jobs nearly dying. There’s the inexplicable appeal of “The Mummy” movies, as well as David Archuletta.

I’ve noticed that skateboard-minded advertising is similarly hit-and-miss in this way. Real boldly rolled the dice with a minimalist ad generated by the Slap message board brain-trust, specifically known Hero Member “sal23,” in reaction to some apparently questionable prose accompanying the current campaign. Anyway, behold:

Real’s populist/“plain folks” approach seems to have resonated with the masses, who heaped plaudits on sal23 (“with the their/there/they’re shitty grammar and all”) to the point that he is no doubt entertaining offers from Leo Burnett, among others.

Z-mogul Stacy Peralta had less luck with his recent “Whopper Virgins” ad for BK, in which he served up the floppy sandwich to the moribund citizenry of far-flung zones in Thailand, Greenland and Transylvania as a kind of ultimate taste test against the mighty Big Mac. Or something. It’s only sort of interesting and kind of long, but if you wanna watch it, here it is, funny outfits and all:

Peralta wound up getting slagged in the media for exploiting third world residents’ marginal sophistication when it comes to fast foods:
-“Outrageous” declared Sharon Akabas of the Institute of Human Nutrition at Columbia University
-“Insensitive” stated Marilyn Borchardt, development director for Food First

More distressing, Peralta came in for even more flame-broiled criticism from online comment forums:
-“The most nauseating, soul-destroying bit of corporate propaganda that I’ve seen in a long time” clucked one anonymous poster.

Of course the King and his court probably meant to stir the coals a bit with the ad, working people into a tizzy before coming back to sweep us off our feet with the scent of roasted cow-flesh. Hopefully Peralta fares better with his new documentary on the Sharks’n’Jets, where he may be playing for significantly higher stakes.

Up Your State

Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

If you haven’t seen the new SLAP, A., you’re blowing it because each issue is a collector’s item now and will surely fetch dozens of dollars on Ebay in the near future, and B., you’re missing out on an Upstate New York article featuring a bunch of good Joe Brook photos, such as the shittily scanned one above of Jose Pereyra moving a k-grind pop-over through an appropriately bleak environment. This article is also notable for featuring not one but TWO brothers-of-pros (Jeremy Jordan, Doug Brown–no, not that one, the Listen Brown), and for featuring a photo of Kenny Reed that is shot on American soil and involves no ethnic headware or backside ledge tricks. No joke.

Perennial Slap favorite Curtis Rapp also is featured, which makes this as good a time as any for all of us to revisit the video with the third-best soundtrack of the last five years.

Slap throws in the paper towel

In Dolby Digital

On the off chance you pulled up the Slap magazine homepage today instead of linking straight to the messageboard, you may have seen confirmation of that which has been rumored for a while now: Slap’s going to an all-digital format. The obvious read on this is that Slap wasn’t pulling in the ad dollars necessary to keep a full-on print operation afloat, which unfortunately is all too likely in the current climate. Skateboarder subscribers would do well to think long and hard before the re-up, in this uninformed wag’s opinion.

While Slap’s the first to dive in, other skateboard publications are busy testing these waters–see also the allegedly all-digital consolation round for Big Brother, for instance. And those who went out and bought “And Now” guiltily hoping for another year of free TWS inside (yeah, me) found instead a generous offer for a free “digital subscription,” promising such intriguing features as “store trick tips” and “access from any computer!” It’s all Web 2.0 over there.

Shit. Even Thrasher has a website now, and Jake Phelps is a widely known caveman who was born in a cave and currently lives in a cave that was gut-rehabbed a few years ago in a rapidly gentrifying portion of SF. So this internet thing may have legs after all.

The downside for Slap of course is that you generally have to sell several web ads to make the money of one print ad, despite the fact that, you know, you can tell exactly how many people see the web ad and link it directly to the advertiser’s online emporium. However, advertisers like having their shit in a tangible form, which can be taped on junior highschoolers’ bedroom walls and passed around at trade shows. Another possible downside is Slap’s e-track record. If you add up the number of times Slap’s messageboard has crashed in the past eight years, divide it by the cast of webmasters, square that figure by their average tenure and round down for these people’s demonstrated proficiency… let’s just say Mark Whitely’s squad has its work cut out for it on the web front.

But if there’s any magazine to restructure itself around an online community, it would have to be Slap, who for reasons that still elude me managed to attract enough comprehensible posters that some level of intelligent discourse was fostered, and despite the best efforts of dearly departed anger-mongers such as Wheelbite.net, it’s managed to continue. All due shoutouts to Vov Vurnquist and the pontoon boat.

Slap’s recent efforts to incorporate the messageboard into the print publication have seemed sort of labored–too many inside jokes for outsiders, too little context for those who already know what’s up–and giving posters mini-profiles was the sort of purely bizarre idea that you have to respect in the way that you respect, say, for instance, Snuffleupagus. But I think they were doing the right thing by trying. God knows other websites would kill for the profile and weight the Slap messageboard carries, and Whitely & Co would be idiots if they didn’t try and harness it in some form or another.

So here’s hoping they Google it up and find a way to get ridiculously rich while making everything free and open to all comers. It’ll be a shame not to see Slap at the shop anymore–it’s still pretty much the only magazine consistently taking chances and making an effort to push the envelope in terms of accepted content, and Whitely’s spot in skateboard’s history books is certainly secure at this point. Fingers crossed that this transition is, to labor a metaphor, the first keystrokes of a new story, rather than the final touches on a brick-and-mortar gravestone.

“These guys are idiots so I was just running with it”

When I was little I used to read skate magazines and bug out at the crazy stories spun by pros in their interviews because they seemed to live such wild, reckless lives. Case in point: the Andy Roy interview in BB, which I could scan if somebody hasn’t already done it, Shiloh, etc. Jim Gagne of all people had a really entertaining interview in a mid-90s Thrasher I have somewhere. And Ryan Kenreich, I think, had a pretty hilarious interview in the waning years of BB where he broke down his lengthy arrest record.

Nowadays of course most interviews are bland as plain yogurt–name, sponsors, hometown, how’d you get into skating, blah blah–and the stories about getting fucked up and whatnot have become pretty passe, if not quaint. But now and then I read something that, while it doesn’t bug me out like it would in the past, produces a laugh or something for the same reasons.*

Anyway, in the May issue of Slap there’s a tag team interview with David Gravette and Devin Appelo that was pretty funny. I have to marvel at the logic at work in this story, really.

David Gravette: It started out as five of us walking through the streets with ski masks. One of us was carrying a crow bar, the other one had a thing of rope, and the other dude had a flashlight.

Devin Appelo: Didn’t we have a saw?

DG: No. Anyone who saw us out the window was gonna call the cops, but these guys are idiots so I was just running with it. So we walked to the house–it’s this big Indian museum with a bunch of Indian artifacts. Taylor’s plan was to jump on the roof and take a smoke ventilation piece out and rappel in. We found out when we got there that the shingles were too icy to climb up, but Devin used his crow bar to pop the door open. We walked in and hung out for a bit. I had to convince Taylor not to take a bear pelt. He was running around with the bear pelt over him pretending to be a bear and ran into a pole. Then Taylor and Devin wanted to light a fire in there.

DA: Dude, how cool would it be to light a fire in there?

DG: I was like, no, we gotta go.” So we left and Devin was like, “Let’s get on this train, it’ll take us back to where we wanna go.” So we get on this train in the middle of winter in Portland and it’s so cold. We’re holding on and it started picking up speed for a second and I was like, “Dude, we’re not gonna be able to jump off if it keeps going!” It kept going for a bit and it got pretty scary, but then it slowed down and we hopped off. We weren’t really close to anywhere near where we wanted to be, but it was alright.

Slap: Spell “alligator.”

DG: Fuck you. What if I get it wrong? I can’t even try right now; it’s too dangerous.

DA: Dude, I could never spell that word.

DG: I can write it. A-L-I… Does it got two L’s?

DA: No, I don’t think so.

DG: It’s just A-L-I-G-A-T-O-R, right?

Slap:There’s two L’s, but I’ll give you an “A” for effort, idiot.

DG: Dude, this is gonna make me look like a dumb ass.

Despite (because of?) his general idiocy Gravette has been skating like a man possessed this last year. He landed the new TWS cover with one of his kinker rail attacks and the photo above from the Slap interview is pretty bananas. I half-expected Reynolds to tap him for the Deathwish lineup, because shitty as it is, third-tier companies like Creature tend to have a hard time hanging on to their young guns. Plus he has the TWS video part coming up. Get your money up Navarette.

*Like many skateboard bloggers I am over the hill and nurse serious nostalgia for the 1990s. Don’t get mad, I’m only being real.