A lovely person who can also rock a fedora
There's "Ripped in Half," a wellness check on Flip, the precision of Aleksi Suovaara, Connect Festival, and more.
The definitive weekly ranking and analysis of all the skateboarding and other things online that I cannot stop consuming and how it makes me feel, personally.
More Poe, let's go
Rank: 1
Mood: 💔
As is customary in any There Skateboards video, you are guaranteed several things: glowing friendships that pop through the screen, great outfits, lo-fi and charming edits, and fun, solid skateboarding.
All those boxes are ticked in their most recent project, Ripped in Half. There are the many crop tops of Samiya Smith and Marbie Miller, who both deliver what is likely their best performances to date, alongside the high fashion of Kien Caples, the show-stopping clips of Lau Willems, the underrated technicality of company-head Jeffrey Cheung, and all of it tied together in a messy yet intentional edit by new team rider Trish McGowan. In other words, Ripped in Half feels as There as There can feel.
That's without even mentioning Poe Pinson, who not only turned proe for the brand in advance of the video's premiere but closes it out in career-defining fashion. From the late-flips and shoves out of natural kickers which she'd clearly been honing at her hometown local, to a stunning Nordic three-piece, a phat San Francisco kickflip-to-hill-bomb, a wild shove-late-shove in Barcelona, the various hucks down handrails, an extreme crook pinch, to a darkslide ender, Pinson covers so much ground, in such impressive fashion at just 20 years old, that it's suprising she didn't have her name on a board sooner. She already had it on a whole damn skatepark.
Pinson's section in Ripped in Half feels like the full realization of a talent we've had glimpses of throughout the 2020s. She has shone in Street League, placed fifth at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, regularly makes waves on Instagram, and seems like a lovely person who can also rock a fedora — two things that were once thought to be mutually exclusive.
It's both trite and incorrect to say that any one thing or person is "what skateboarding's about," except Poe Pinson is what skateboarding's about. She skates hard as hell, is fun to watch, has a good time with her friends, and isn't afraid to get silly with it. Is that not the grand appeal of all of this? What most everyone strives for while on a board?
Here's to more Poe; we could use it.
Wellness check: Flip Skateboards
Rank: 2025
Mood: 🤕🥊
While in Bordeaux for Connect Festival, I saw Tom Penny hanging out in the courtyard of Cour Mably, wearing what was possibly the largest jacket I had ever seen. He pulled it off, to be sure. The sighting also got me thinking: what's going on with Flip Skateboards?
Earlier this month, one of the brand's brightest remaining stars, Alec Majerus, was formally introduced to Arbor Skateboards, a move that, in other times, would be considered a stunning fall at worst and lateral at best. In 2025, it's a legitimate upgrade.
Remember Flip's Trio?
That’s the reality of the skateboarding industry. A brand’s import and relevancy are fragile, and, as skateboarder, economist, and professor Thomas Kemp has described it, cyclical. That cycle appears to have sped up and become more volatile in the age of social media, where a company’s social capital and capital-capital can often be affected and erased by the same thing that we’ve been convinced keeps them afloat: posts.
There’s also the reality of declining, aged leadership. Flip was once skateboarding’s premier brand. Its seminal video, Sorry, a touchstone for an entire generation of skateboarders, will stand the test of time, and at the time, helped establish its place in the industry and culture. A place Flip would retain for a few more years, releasing the imaginatively titled Really Sorry and Extremely Sorry, along the way. During that stretch, the brand would also do what skateboarding brands need to do: regenerate.
Flip used its stores of cultural cache to attract the next generation of top riders, including PJ Ladd and the late Shane Cross, whose tragic death in a 2007 drunk driving accident involving fellow Flip team member Ali Boulala cast an unavoidable shadow over the brand. Still, Flip pushed forward, adding future Thrasher Skater of the Year David Gonzalez and a trio of new riders who would, at different intervals, become some of skateboarding’s biggest stars.
Louie Lopez, Curren Caples, and Luan Oliveira were literal children when they were introduced in 2009's Extremely Sorry, and that talent scouting and industry support they subsequently received paid off. All three eventually became ringers, but it didn’t seem like Flip knew what to do with them. By the early 2010s, the brand had stalled creatively. Flip’s already questionable board graphics veered from uninspired to outright lazy, which they remain.
By that point, the brand had already begun to shed the names that helped establish it. Arto Saari went to Alien Workshop in 2008 (but would return in 2011). Mark Appleyeard defected to Element two years later. If the brand had a heart, it would be Geoff Rowley, who left Flip in 2015 and eventually started his short-lived venture Free Dome. All three had been named SOTY while on the Flip roster.
As the 2010s closed, so did Flip’s last grasps at relevancy. They began "reissuing" the Tom Penny Cheech and Chong board graphic as if it had never gone out of circulation. Lopez and Caples left for greener pastures. Then Majerus. Finally, a few weeks back, Oliveira called it quits after 18 years with the brand. That’s an entire lifetime. It’s also the end of Flip’s last, best era — their upstart trio is all grown up and gone.
Again, that’s normal, the slow brutality of time. Flip Skateboards has been in operation since 1987 (rebranding from Deathbox to Flip in 1991). A skateboarding company simply existing for 38 years is a feat and a testament to the brand's place in skate history, even if it limps along in the present, living in and attempting to milk the glory of its past.
Anecdotally, I can't remember the last time I saw a Flip Skateboards product in the wild. Flip's website is, to put it mildly, a mess. If the "decks" page URL is to be believed, it hasn't been updated since the summer of 2021. The company appears to have outsourced its online sales to Skate Menu, where their product page features multiple signature board models for Oliveira and Majerus, who no longer ride for the brand.
It's tough going. To see something that once lived so large in the minds of so many become a cheap facsimile of itself is like a beloved boxer who keeps making the walk, long after their timing and chin have gone. That's when it becomes just a job, where there is no other choice but to clock in and take your lumps.
Perhaps that’s a bit too dour. If the business side of it makes sense, at least sense enough to continue in this seemingly diminished state, why wouldn't they? Flip still has a sizable, if geriatric, stable of big-name skaters to leverage nostalgia with, like Saari, Penny, Bob Burnquist, and Rune Glifberg. They also have genuinely exciting talents like Liz Akama, Lucas Rabelo, and Cory Juneau. However, it’s doubtful they are making much, if any, money from their association with the brand, or what future it can provide them.
To once again consider the aging boxer, besides protecting one’s health, hanging it up also protects legacy, if you care about that sort of thing. If you do, there’s always the option to bow out gracefully like Roger Skateboards, or you can do your level best to evolve, like Baker and Deathwish.
If you do neither, you might finally wind up with something to apologize for, if not to others, at least to yourself.
Fast, smooth, precise, clean
Rank: 4
Mood: 👓
One of the fascinating things about sports, including the sporting element of skateboarding — the attendant skill and ability required to do so at a high level — is that a person can be preternaturally, generationally talented, and still stink. Not in the functional sense, because yes, they can expertly manipulate the skateboard or move the basketball up the court or return the tennis ball or whatever else, but that they can do so in a way that is a mix of ugh and meh.
Nikola Jokić, potentially the best basketball player going, looks lumbering, almost oafish as he decimates his opposition. But the keyword is looks. He is devastatingly effective, even if he lacks grace. There are some hockey players, like Brad Marchand, who are so good that it is annoying, as is reflected in his playstyle. In skateboarding, a lack of style or restraint can mean that even the most technically difficult tricks look visually appalling.
It's why someone like Tiago Lemos shines: he marries the technical, powerful, and stylish in an almost soul-pleasing fashion. He never goes overboard, because it's a fine line with trick combinations; too many flip-ins and outs will make the eyes roll, but if not enough effort is put in, that laid back labour will likely be forgotten. Is there a happy, pleasurable medium for technical, creative skateboarding? If so, Aleksi Suovaara may have found it.
Fast, smooth, precise, clean. That's all you really need to describe Suovaara's work. In his latest video part for Poeticcollective, Wander, he spreads all four adverbs across Paris and beyond, flipping in, out, manualing around, and finding unique angles to spots old and new.
During the last iteration of Simple Magic's prestigious, pound-for-pound #1 four-eyes ranking, Suovaara entered the list at #7, although I couldn't for the life of me remember his name at the time. I sure do now.
Low-effort travel blog #4: Connect Festival in abstract
Rank: 1
Mood: 🇫🇷
This isn’t to say that I’m responsible, but a number of things happened soon after I arrived in France in early October. The country’s government collapsed, its embattled Prime Minister resigned after just 27 days in office, its former president, Nikolas Sarkozy, went to prison, and some jokers Pink Panthered their way into 88 million euros worth of crown jewels from the Louvre.
History is always happening; that much is clear. What comes after is understanding and working alongside it to help shape whatever comes next. This, in a somewhat sideways entry into the idea, is what the past and current slate of skateboarding festivals and conferences, academic and otherwise, attempt to achieve. From Pushing Boarders, Vladimir Film Festival, Slow Impact, Stoke Sessions, Skate Nottingham, Connect, and more, there is a new and growing branch of skateboarding thought and experience.
During the academic workshop at Connect last week, researcher and Pushing Boarders co-founder, Thom Callan-Riley, referred to skateboarding as being in a "discursive space, a place of world-building." Where skateboarders take skateboarding and look inwards, outwards, and whatever other direction there may be, to see what might come of it.
Connect itself is a festival of "skaturbanism," a concept that the festival's website describes as such:
Skaturbanism, born from collaboration between skaters and municipalities, aims to integrate skateboarding into the urban environment, in a spirit of sharing.
Cities like Bordeaux, Malmo, and Copenhagen have adopted innovative programs, seeing skateboarding as a cultural, social, economic, and environmental lever. This movement is part of circular urbanism, favoring the sharing of existing spaces.
By promoting urban play, soft mobility, and strengthening social cohesion, skaturbanism contributes to the transition towards sustainable and inclusive cities.
How that comes through in a festival format is "a program combining exhibitions, conferences, workshops, screenings, concerts and skateable sculptures" that Connect and its organizers, like Léo Valls, hope will be "a space for reflection and experimentation around the city of tomorrow."
It's a novel way to approach approaching skateboarding. It builds on conferences past with its own twists, discursive-like. It's also one that appears to take its own message of promoting cultural growth and change seriously, this year making efforts to offer up a safe environment for a more diverse and inclusive selection of programming and presenters, where it may have fallen short in its previous edition, per Goodpush.
Posted by the Goodpush Team
As for the content of the Connect itself, there was a substantial amount to take in and chew on, and I plan to do that at greater length once I've had time to digest things, but overall, it is always inspiring to be around people who genuinely care about skateboarding and its place and impact on the world around them.
After events like this, there tends to be a feeling of what's next? How does one turn talking and skating and hanging out with friends into action? Part of those subsequent steps has already been accomplished by simply being with one another, meeting new people, and, well, connecting. Relationships breed ideas that can lead to action. And with a conference that has a broad but fixed focus on "skaturbanism," there was much to take away regarding working with one's own local governments to help sway them toward skate-friendlier directions, if that's what one chooses to do.
The inspiration is there and plentiful; what shape it takes is up to the participants.
Swag update:
I'm home now and will be mailing out the first batch of orders this afternoon. Thanks again to everyone who's ordered Simple Magic merch! If you'd like your own, please feel free to click this link.
Something to consider: longreads about gooning.
Daniel Kolitz
Good thing: 'sletter friend Joe Allen with a heater in Hairline by Serious Adult, published by the pals at Skate Jawn.
Speaking of the pals at Skate Jawn: The piece I wrote about barriers, River Tavis' excellent skateboarding, and Carter Spinks' excellent photography is live on the Skate Jawn site.
Zach Moeller
Another good thing:
Snack
Yes, yes, another good thing: I was lucky enough to catch the premiere of the latest H3ADZ video at Connect last week, which was published by Vague. Great stuff. Also chatted briefly with the man behind the video, Harrison Woolgar. Lovely guy.
A good gaming + skating thing:
Ben Komins
A good phones + skating thing:
Village Psychic
A good academic studies thing: The latest Leisure Studies.
A good Skate Bylines thing:
Farran Golding
A thing from longtime skateboard outlet... CNN:
Seems great that the entire U.S. economy is being kept afloat by this:
But when the METR team looked at the employees’ actual work output, they found that the developers had completed tasks 20 percent slower when using AI than when working without it. The researchers were stunned. “No one expected that outcome,” Nate Rush, one of the authors of the study, told me. “We didn’t even really consider a slowdown as a possibility.”
Rogé Karma
Until next week… if you happen to shave your entire head after being inspired by one of Bruce Willis' fits in 12 Monkeys, be prepared to confront the actual size of your head.
Laser Quit Smoking Massage
NEWEST PRESS
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A collection of essays that I think you might like. The Edmonton Journal called it a "local book set to make a mark in 2024," The CBC said it's "quirky yet insightful" (lol), and it won Trade Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the 2025 Alberta Book Publishing Awards.
Book cover by Hiller Goodspeed.
Right, Down + Circle
ECW PRESS
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I wrote a book about the history and cultural impact of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater that you can find at your local bookshop or order online now. I think you might like this one, too.
Photo via The Palomino.
