Above The Fruited Plain With Torey Pudwill, High On Freak Pills

Cue the kickflip lipslide to switch k-grind and out the door goes any notion that Torey Pudwill might put some kind of lid on the video game tricks in favor of putting his oodles of raw talent toward something like a concept-part, and that’s okay — Pudwill gets it in wearing mustard yellow sneakers and anything less than his usual all-the-way-turnt-up tech probably would be uncivilized. The line through those La Brea* ledges sparks the idea life again, until he goes supervillain with the backside noseblunt and starts kickflipping sidewalks and twirling over pic-a-nic tables, but when this dude applies himself to tricks like that bump-to-bar nosegrind and the backside smith grind through the blue kinker rail, if I was a cellar door searcher, I’d be glad Torey Pudwill’s not out there looking to eat my lunch the way it seems like he could really do on the energy-drink contest circuit if he had a good day.

When he did that looong backside noseblunt I sort of moaned and it came back louder after that launch-ramp b/s tailslide. Dario Rezk gets points for subtlety on an off-the-flat ender, even with pop being one of Pudwill’s stocks in trade. When it came out that Thrasher was going to be the exclusive home to this latest marquee web-part, and the ensuing hype cycle on the website in the last couple weeks, I got to thinking this was Plan B’s way of trying to slot Pudwill in for SOTY. It would be hard to argue with. No doubt these are precision moves, nollie flip backside tailslide bigspin flip out, but those arms work in his favor because if we’re putting a technician on the pedestal I’m going for the sweaty, hairy unhinged one versus the switch-flip-switch-b/s-tail-coloring inside the lines of Shane O’Neill. If Pudwill comes back with a part filmed in the second half of 2011 featuring a load of frontside tailslide and frontside smith grind tricks then it’ll be game over.

*Or wherever — you know, Danny Garcia localizes them

The Beak Is Back, Maybe

Can’t be stopped

As you can imagine, even in the freshly minted year of our Lord 2010, the Muska is never far from our minds around here. Whether it was his days pioneering the cargo pant as the Shorty’s team captain, the clear sunglasses-and-headscarf combo of Circa’s heyday or his resurrection as a white-denimed Hollywood nightcrawler, Chad Muska’s legacy looms large. So large in fact that I was gobsmacked no less than twice yesterday during my usual You-Toob clip perusal by the way Muska fulfilled the dream with one of his token moves, the backside noseslide.

I’ve been hard-pressed to keep up with the various “You/U/Eu” video contests and other excitements that seem to be constantly churning over at the Berrics, but was prompted to click this one because it had an odd name that I incorrectly thought belonged to a single person, and also because it came from Mexico, home to some bros that do a lot of body varial tricks. The Muska moment arrives at 2:33 with a healthy noseslide through some sizable kinks and taken back to regular which is always a good look with this move.

Elsewhere on the planet, globetrotting Yankees fan Kenny Reed stretches his backside 5-0s to worldly proportions and revisits a few obscure spots en route to a (spoiler alert) truly massive noseslide down something like 50 steps. The sheer length is one thing but what makes this noseslide really classic is how low the ledge is and the never-say-die way that Reed skids it out to the bitter end. Kind of comical but it’s interesting to see a resurgence of these more basic tricks these days. People like Davids Gravette and Gonzales are promoting 5050s again when there’s a gnarly handrail involved, although for years it seemed like that trick had been discarded as too basic* to even consider. If noseslides creep back into the rotation, perhaps there will one day be no need to twist boardslides into feeble grinds.

*disregarding Anthony Pappalardo, in which case that seems like the whole point