8. Pat Burke – “Radio Television”

Depending on where you fell in the grade-school spectrum, the character projected in Pat Burke’s gleefully unhinged Slave part is either the carefree, truant bro you aspired to ape or the greasy-haired underachiever you wasted your time being, unless you were busy doing k-grinds along big curly handrails and kickflipping upon the heads of unwary cyclists. It was not all that long ago that we pored over the way this dude lands his frontside-flipping tricks just off-kilter enough and his eye for scouting embankment landings, so maybe it’s more helpful to point out how Pat Burke won the great Slave raffle of between-trick stock footage with the National Geographic clips in this section. The moody eyes of a feasting lion and the frenzied chewing of hungry hyenas help to drive home the point when Brotha Lynch Hung mentions his list of power-up items including “ounces of OE and a sack of that Indonesian shit and a 9 millimeter clip for you to dump.”

Master and Servant

Human junk

There is a hazy, dreamlike quality to the generally ripping footage slathered across the 51-minute runtime of Slave’s inaugural video offering “Radio Television” that you could say reflects the company’s underlying theme: a demented fantasy existence of big-boned, bearded and beered-up old dude skateboarders, and the twisted dreams of those kids who aspire to this lifestyle. Sort of like the ads, it sometimes looks like the screen’s been smeared with dirt.

When Jamie Thomas gave Ben Horton’s bloodthirsty tiger room to chase and devour the gazelles of this hallowed industry, there was some mumblings and grumblings about how Slave was some type of Black Box AWS knockoff, or a transparent attempt to build a functioning Anti-Hero replica without the years of hard living, jail time and the crippling departure of a budding Brazilian superman. Watching the “Radio Television” video you kind of get the idea that these type of theories overshoot the Slave bros’ aspirations, which seem to revolve around concrete parks, marijuana, late-night cable TV and in certain cases the aforementioned beard farming. There’s an abundance of stock footage, yeah, but it’s thematic and generally thrown in in a way that’s closer to the Baker Boys productions than anything out of the DNA camp, and the notion of “artsiness” resides several counties away with a restraining order.

The overall idea is probably closer to Black Label, and in certain instances the Slave dudes manage to out-Black Label the Label itself, a half-assed idea of mine prompted by video opener Anthony Schultz, whose maybe most impressive clip is nollie inward heelflipping up the sizable three-up-three-down steps in SF. For the arachnophobic there are maybe one too many scary spiders and definitely a lot of the lipslide-to-switch-crooks type combos, the feeble to b/s lipslide is pretty wild. The other bookend, spacebound Jon Goemann, employs a Dylan Rieder-type flow amongst the transitions and doles out power moves like a switch bar hop and the wallride over the ditch ramp. Maybe his rail shit (kickflip 5050, switch f/s noseslide, fakie artoslide) got him the last part by default, or how he put a frontside spin into Rowley’s madness ditch.

Ex-Zero recruits Mumford and Allie surface somewhere in the creamy middle – Mumford’s into Whale Wars and yellow hats now and seems solely focused on making the pool tile sing, when he’s not seeking to crack open his head on padless/helmetless loops. Jon Allie, working a moustache that makes him look like a cross between Cooper Wilt and John C. Reilly, still has a nice frontside tailslide but also hangs onto that tendency to make a line out of a flatground trick and then a rail jump – the one with the b/s nosegrind pop-out was way better and kudos out to the backside 180 nosegrind toward the end.

The core of this video, and possibly company, seem to be the likes of Sean “Frecks” Stewart and Danny Dicola, barrel-chested brothers in spirit of Andrew Allen, Fred Gall and Jabari Pendleton who test the bounds of no-complys and dive headlong into huge banks. Frecks the redbeard likes the tailgrab and does this pretty sick frontside blunt fakie over a little grass gap, whereas Dicola blazes around the parks and cracks a tall rock-to-fakie in some ditch. If I had one complaint about this video, and it’s not the music for once because the soundtrack is pretty amazing, it would be that looking up at the actual world after watching it is kind of like taking off a pair of sunglasses, and there needed to be more 360 flips done by Conhuir Lynn.

Pat Burke’s Arrested Development

40 break

Let’s use Chris Cole’s SOTY as a stepping off-point for some chatter around the new Black Box Dist. videos, how aobut? File Pat Burke alongside David Gravette, Bryan Herman and other gleeful rabble-rouser types who seem to want nothing more of this earthly life than to cut class, blow smoke rings and kickflip shit. The scuzzy Virginian’s section in the Slave production “Radio Television”, maybe/probably the best one in a good video, has that slightly intoxicated spark of youth that for a lot of us made this whole thing exciting for reasons aside from jumping gaps and sliding blocks, in the days before you could skate the prefab park for gym class credit.

Meanwhile the kids like young Pat Burke probably would not care, similar to how he may or may not have cared about potential internet nitpicking over a sorta-janky switch kickflip he does before the fakie heelflip to switch crooked grind in this section, or any potential consequences involved with nollie backside flipping into a big scary bank. There’s the opening mudbath and also a noseblunt/lipslide surprise sort of thing in here that suggest a Spicoli/Trapasso/Lebowski type of rolling with punches going on with his skating, and it seems as if he likes his one red striped polo shirt about as much as switch frontside heelflips, and both probably suit him.

There’s a kind of rotten majesty that this section has in spades, a who-cares spark that dims when dudes get older and battle their demons and gotta skate for their mortgages and car notes and whatnot, even if they’re lucky enough to be packing a backside heelflip informed by a few summers at Lockwood or something. Well, except maybe Duane Peters. Then again it’s probably an indication you’re getting old yourself when you watch this kid Pat Burke slide a little whooping noseblunt on a quarterpipe and envy the whole scenario for the trick itself, but also that school’s-out-for-the-weekend feeling that gets fleeting pretty quick. Hold onto it, young Burke, and make sure you thank the gods of onion rings and canned beer with each switch heelflip and all the sweet animal feasting stock footage for the video.