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 beautifully unconventional 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 fiercely 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?

Dukes of September

For those who dwelled and acted upon the era of the mighty dinosaur or throughout the Western European colonial push, the millennia pass and pile up with the unyielding weight of bargeloads freighted with rotting warhorses, their corpses bloated by rot and festooned with arrows of the legions that overran their slain riders. ‘Timeless’ often is unholstered as a descriptor for tricks or styles enduring across years, pants-fittings and upper padding materials; alternatively the adjective applies to semi-straddler Claude Van Damme’s century-hopping lawman and this Marky Numbers pic from the recent Omar Salazar TSM, in that the move featured and its boisterous presentation might’ve full-bled across some mid-1980s Thrasher or Transworld photo feature and anywhere in-betwixt.

Exhibit 1415190805031112051819 From The ‘Frontside Noseslides Are Among The Most Picturesques Of Slides’

The ‘outdated’ Brian Clarke dons his 1995 uniform for this one from the Caples/Lopez TSM, which also features a backside noseblunt from Guy Mariano that appears unhampered by any lazer flips and a really cool story about John Motta spelunking for spots in sewers.

Snuh

Not a lot to say here, other than that this was one of those photos where you’re flipping through the magazine (TSM, Jaws cover) and you stop and say “damn.”* Marc Johnson has nearly a Mumford eagle-is-landing thing going on with his arms here and a nice hat. White tee, blue jeans and a kickflip backside tail, these components could have equated to a classic photo 20 years ago.

*Another one from the same issue is Jon Dickson’s nollie backside flip

Diced Pineapples

Looking at the Skateboard Mag the other day, this little Donovan Piscopo interview, and got to fantasizing about tricks. As you do. Folks like Jake Johnson and Wes Kremer recently have been out there taking the wallride to strange new places — what if you were to take Donovan’s grind here, lose the bank underlying the ledge, and a dude just did a wallride into this trick*? Sort of like a pool coping scratcher maybe, but you’d think a body could put their mind to it and lock both 58’s atop the corner for a little bit anyway. Thinking it over a while I started to wonder if I’d actually seen somebody do a trick like this at some point, in a photo or video. Unfortunately due to severely limited capacity and general neglect, my brain is never going to have the cataloging capabilities of a Police Informer or a Chrome Ball or a Vert-Is-Dead. Instead I cast myself upon the mercy of yall. Can anybody recall somebody wallriding up into a ‘vert’ scratcher grind like this, without a bank to start from?

*with or without the grab

To Have And Have Not

The mildest U.S. winter in decades has helped reduce reliance on private indoor facilities rented for the purposes to safeguarding 360 flips from rust and cobwebs in recent months, but deeper strife may yet lay ahead. Zered Bassett, raised in one of the top five richest U.S. states that has in the past witnessed the decline of the once-lucrative whaling industry and other turmoils, suggests in the Appleyard TSM that skateboarding may be watching the rise of its own so-called 1%, and an inevitable widening of the income and performance gap between two increasingly disparate camps:

The Skateboard Mag: To go back to Street League, why don’t you compete in that contest?
Zered Bassett: Why are we talking about Street League? I’m not a contest skater, man.
TSM: I think you’re capable of doing really well in contests.
ZB: I don’t have a skatepark that I can skate and learn tricks at to take to a contest and feel confident enough to skate the contest well. If I had a skatepark that I could skate with my homies every day and learn shit, not in the public eye, I’d feel way more confident.

It’s a well-worn chestnut that for every Mark Appleyard, switch backside flipping in finely tuned leathers and pushing a Jaguar, there are a half-dozen less-fortunates manning liquor-store tills and filling large dump trucks full of debris and then dumping them at a dirty dump. Heath Kirchart, receiver of several signature shoe payment deals, took to delivering pizzas and servicing snack machines upon his self-directed retirement, though these have been described equally as labours of love as well as of economic convenience. Things are tough all over out there and keep in mind this isn’t some fly-by-night youtube hot-shoe we’re discussing here, this is Zered Bassett, who’s either a Red Bull energy beverage contract player or a consistent chooser of its embranded hatwear.

Yet Zered Bassett goes wanting when it comes to private parkdom, a challenge to developing the sort of machinelike consistency that makes Nyjah Huston, Chaz Ortiz and Ryan Sheckler such riveting competitors to watch amass those hard-to-follow Street League points, and bring home the big moneybags (or the chance to fall victim to high-profile jewelry heists). While Paul Rodriguez parlays his Fuel TV heroics into sponsorship arrangements with Target Corp., in turn providing branded obstacles with which to expand his personal training ground, Zered Bassett moves to Brooklyn and farms his beard.

While Nyjah Huston blows tens of thousands of American dollars on hot cars, Ricky Oyola spends his winter driving a truck in Philadelphia. And as Rob Dyrdek lays peacefully asleep on his yacht off the shores of Key West, the bullet-riddled body of some unknown onetime pro ‘boarder, stone dead, is borne ashore by friends and well-wishers in the still of night after a lifetime of hard choices and short chances finally caught up with him on that one last run back from Cuba.

Fred Gall Attempts To Wallride Heavy Machinery While Under The Influence Of Being Fred Gall

Serial New Jerseyan and IRS scofflaw Fred Gall long ago cemented his status as one of the most compelling magazine featurees with his legendary interview in Strength. There, he discussed courting police batons at Ozzfest, fighting in Ohio, going to jail abroad and Lenny Kirk. Fred Gall has been an odds-on favorite to pile out at any given moment for more than a decade now and he continues to surprise us, so maybe it shouldn’t have caught me so off guard when flipping through the new Skateboard Mag there is an account of Fred Gall applying his classic blunderbus approach to what sounds like it would be one of the more jaw-dropping tricks all year and maybe of all time.

When we got to the “spot” the first evening, it became apparent that traffic was moving way too fast for him to … Oh my god! He just jumped on that bus. Well, with the first attempt out of the way and the bus going 30 or so, Fred, who was spun around in the gutter laughing and slightly spooked, looked up and said, “I think that’s too fast, ha ha!” He is a maniac. Everyone was thinking, “We’re going to watch Fred die here and now. Wonderful.” He dusted himself off, grabbed his board, and set up for the next one. You see you have to wait for the right bus with the smooth back end. Maybe one out of every five was the right kind and maybe one out of every twelve was the right speed (anywhere from ten to twenty miles an hour). Needless to say, for the next two nights we spent a lot of time at this spot.

The full-bleed photo on the opposite side is pretty ridiculous, not only for what Fred Gall’s aiming to do, but also that there is a dude A. about two decades deep into his career B. willing to work several nights straight trying this particular move C. at risk of significant bodily harm D. and arrest E. in a foreign country and F. laugh about it. After mulling it over a while I was reminded of the opening seconds of this part where Fred Gall had a brief cameo and pondered the tribute angle, but I’m guessing this was all weighted more toward for the fuck of it. Or fully paying off the federales.

Throwback Magazine Wallpaper TSM Page Number Super Quiz Opportunity

Way back when, there was a point in which my room went wall-to-wall with magazine page paneling that pulled heavily from the old TWS photo issues with lots of full-bleeds, “Sightings” and now-vintage DCSHOECOUSA ads. Jim Greco’s switch kickflip down the old Med Choice gap in the Nirvana shirt was featured, and I think a Neal Mims roof gap 360 flip. This is one of several reasons I could not run a scans blog, alongside a fuzzboxed memory bank when it comes to who had ads in what issue and generally being poor at scanning I think. But on top of the Cory Kennedy sequence from the Transworld below there were at least four pages I’d tear out of the new Skateboard Mag if I was doing up a new wall, starting with this Ryan Lay 5-0 — the perilously close-to-the-wall switch b/s lipslide a few pages later is another one* and so is Anthony Schultz’s bump-to-fence blaster on page 112. Anybody care to guess what the fourth one is?

*They’d have to be on different sides of the room though because I’m not about to put two photos of the same dude right next to one another, bad form etc

Let’s Discuss The Most Controversial Sequence On The Internet

Haters in time

An uproar burst forth upon the seas of gentlemanly internet discourse this week when a SkateboardMag blog revealed a photo sequence of Anthony Pappalardo, known professional, plying his trade with a couple of ollies. “Foul” cried some, claiming that not only could they ollie themselves, but that neither ollie was particularly big or dangerous. Both of these statements are true, but uncovering the deeper, more long-winded truth requires a trip through time.

It was once the year 2000. Flying cars were commonplace, personal credit was freely available and Anthony Pappalardo was executing nollie heelflip frontside noseslides while making “urban” pants choices. But today the clock has rolled back, erasing years of sales growth and trick progression. Ollies are back. Cruising on a 70s-inspired skateboard is the choice of dreaded granolas and professional shoe endorsers alike and the biggest show on television wallows in the hair-grease and flop-sweat of philandering 1960s ad executives.

Christopher Colombus, in an apocryphal story that dates back even further, once strutted into a state dinner when a hater (of some description) stopped him, perchance to hate. The gist of it was that CC was not that hot of an explorer, and that the West Indies would’ve been inevitably found by anybody who pointed their boat far west enough, et cetera. Colombus famously ice-grilled the guy and then told them that he bet anybody he could make an egg stand on its end. After others tried and failed, Colombus squished in one end of the egg and stood it up, declaring “now that you’ve seen me do it, it would be easy for anyone.”

So too with Pappalardo? Oh, to be a fly on the wall of a Brooklyn woodshop. Someone on the Slap board said something to the effect that after watching the bonus footage on the “Prevent This Tragedy” DVD they were pissed at the apparent lack of effort APO seems to be putting forth (somewhere in there, he makes a couple half-hearted ollies onto a slanted plank on a hill, and bails an ollie).

You could make the argument though that there’s plenty of pro-types who’ve made their bones and sailed into their sunset years on a raft of coping slashes, frontside rocks and more recently switch 360 flips. Pappalardo may be pushing it as he retains a youthful look despite a hospital-patient pallor, and a pro model shoe to boot, but I think he could still turn it on if he wanted to (citing the nollie 360 flip recently spun on Epicly Laterd). Would it come off as gratuitous if the pursuit of ollies over nollie heelflip frontside noseslides were a conscious choice? Or simply elevate the level of his hustle?

Northwest Green

I guess what I took away most from Tyler Bledsoe’s interview feature in the recent Skate Board Mag, where he is crowned with that less-established but perhaps harder-working magazine award of “YBAM,” is that he likes the color teal. More than that, he employs it tastefully. It is most pronounced in the above pic, detailing a bossy backside tailslide where he had to launch past the handrail, and could alternately be a case of Bledsoe looking to expand his internet fan base, where teal was recently voted the most favorite shade of blue, or perhaps a show of Pacific Northwestern solidarity toward the Seattle Mariners.