At the crossroads of history
Independent Trucks flirts with its past and the present, Jhancarlos Gonzalez crosses paths with my physiotherapist, the spirit of skateboarding, 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.
Pull on it really hard three times
Rank: 1!!!
Mood: 😱🫣
"Skateboarder? I've been seeing your kind for a long, long time," was the first thing the physiotherapist said to me as he stood in the doorway of the treatment room, not looking up from the clipboard in his hands. The fifth or sixth thing he said was, "I'm pretty handsy. If I get too handsy, I'll charge you extra."
He had a grip on my ankle, which at the time resembled a grapefruit bisected by the meat of my leg. I had rolled it severely, multiple times, over a month earlier. X-rays came back negative for a break, but something still felt off. Dr. K touched and squeezed the pooled blood floating around the ball joint, quickly diagnosing the issue: misaligned bones in my foot were impeding the healing process.
"I'm going to pull on your foot very hard, three times, and then we're going to watch the swelling go down," Dr. K claimed, not unlike a foolhardy skateboarder who believes the trick they're about to attempt is easy, a warm-up.
The difference is that he is professional. He pulled hard once; the pain was immense. Shocking to the point that I could do nothing but yelp and laugh. I immediately understood the sounds that had been coming out of the treatment rooms while I was waiting to be seen — screams and cackles like the feasting of hyenas.
He reefed on it again. I howled. "Look," Dr. K said, and we both watched the swelling go down. Second try.
Outside of his office, as I hobbled toward home, I came across a patch of Bondo at the run-up and landing of a massive brick double set with an accompanying kinked handrail. That's funny, I thought to myself, that anyone would even prep a spot that clearly can't be skated. I took a photo to share in the group chat.
Several months later, this appeared across social media feeds everywhere.
Jhancarlos Gonzalez, while on tour with the Independent Trucks team in Vancouver last August, risked his one precious life on the above gap-to-lipslide outside of my physiotherapist's office and was rewarded with a Thrasher cover and the rank astonishment of anyone who has ever seen this thing in person, including Red Dragon Moses Itkonen, who shared on Instagram that he was there in person for the stunt and also gave a shoutout to Dr. K, who has been seeing his kind for a long, long time.
Mellow. | Photos: @yvrspotbook on Instagram
And, as Gonzalez demonstrates, for good reason.
There it is
Rank: 360
Mood: 👻
If skateboarding has a spirit, the best place to catch a glimpse of such a phantasm is, perhaps paradoxically, in the physical act. It's there in the fleshy reality of what skateboarding demands that its essence as apparition appears.
When Marius Syvanen survives a hellacious case of speed wobbles at the base of a towering ditch — that's it. Alexis Sablone muscling a heelflip over a cobblestone street. There it is again. When Zion Wright jumps down a gigantic double set and lands directly on the last leg of its handrail, yes, its presence is there, too.
These are moments that pull us and demand repeated viewing. The draw is both obvious and hard to put a finger on. Such is the power of the humble GIF, which allows us to view this spirit on loop. It showed itself again recently.
Did you see it? Take another look. It's in the form. The control of the twist. How Jake Wooten's body rotates in such a tight, concentric configuration, perfect as if drawn with a compass. His board and his heels slightly overturned — torqued. It's beautiful, really. This movement is enough to keep your thoughts from straying to the Red Bull hat and Lakers jersey. The spirit agnostic, living in anyone, anything.
At the crossroads of history
Rank: '78
Mood: ❌
One of my earliest memories as a skateboarder is of being put on defence. My older brother and I were at our mother's place of work, a sign shop. There, she and her colleagues designed and produced, as you would expect, signage. Decals for storefront windows, car wraps, awnings, street signs, billboards. Logos for small businesses in a small prairie town.
That day, we'd stopped in after school to ask for a few bucks to get a snack and some change to play arcade games at Flintstones, a local restaurant and arcade run by family friends who absolutely did not license those Hanna-Barbera characters before slapping them on their own storefront. Using the characters in their branding made sense, though. They symbolized familiarity and comfort, speaking to children and adults alike.
As we turned to leave, an afternoon of Metal Slug awaiting us, my mother's colleague Mike saw the logo on the back of my brother's sweater and asked, with some surprise in his voice, if that was an iron cross, like the Nazi's used.
I was around nine years old and had barely cracked a social studies textbook, so I wasn't sure what to say. My brother, similarly caught off guard, told Mike that it wasn't some Nazi thing; it was the Independent Trucks logo. A skateboarding brand and nothing more. I echoed my brother's defence and we were off to the arcade.
This was not the first or last time that connection would be made, and for understandable reasons. As the story goes, Jim Phillips, the logo's designer, spent time “toying with the iron, or Maltese cross,” rounding its ends. The design was initially rejected for being "too Nazi," but Phillips ultimately convinced the company's higher-ups to use it after finding a photo of the Pope in Time Magazine sporting a similar round-ended cross.
"If it was good enough for the Pope it was good enough for them, and the rest is recent history," Christian Kerr wrote in Jenkem during the summer of 2020, as Black Lives Matter protests surged and another round of discourse about the cross logo was taking place — a common enough occurrence that the Independent website has a page dedicated to the matter. Kerr also linked out to a templated response, the file dated 2018, that the parent company of Independent, NHS, appears to have sent to concerned parties titled "Independent Truck Co. Logo Clarification."
"Due to recent events each of us has an improved awareness of hate and hate related symbols and from time to time speculations have arisen that our logo is a Nazi Iron Cross which is used as a symbol of hate." The letter begins, before going on a long defence of the logo's design, culminating in a relatively defiant stance.
"Due to this rich history and many different variations and meanings, we believe that all symbols including crosses must be evaluated in the context for which they are used. For Independent and its supporters the Independent cross logo stands for passion and dedication to the activity of skateboarding. It does not and never has stood for the promotion of racism or any other negative idealism."
It's unclear exactly which "recent events" the letter was referring to, and really, it could be anything. "Recent events" continue their awful, violent pace. Was it the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina, that saw neo-Nazi's march through the streets shouting "blood and soil" in 2017? The rash of hate-fueled mass shootings that continue to take place year after year, with the vast majority of those shooters being avowed white supremacists?
Presumably in response to the mounting questions and criticism, which required both a stock letter and a separate webpage explainer, Independent quietly moved away from its cross logo in 2022. Without a formal announcement, it disappeared from the baseplates of their trucks and their seasonal clothing drops. Some celebrated the move and others were upset, decrying cancel culture, like professional dipshit and bigot Tim Pool. A good portion of people didn't understand the hubbub; it's a logo for a skateboarding brand and nothing more.
That's ultimately the crux of NHS's explanation in their stock response.
"Choosing this logo for Independent was because the artist and founders thought the logo looked cool — nothing more, nothing less."
Which is entirely plausible. Likely, even. Objectively, the logo does look cool. It's probably frustrating to be an employee of NHS and believe the cross to be anodyne while you get called a Nazi or fascist sympathizer. If you're a semi-interested skateboarder or outside party and the only discussion you see about this decades-spanning controversy is in the comments of Instagram posts, the grumbling of bros at the skatepark, or the gnashing of teeth from culture-warring, engagement-farming media personalities, it might all seem a bit tiresome.
However, Independent understood, at least on a surface level, the semiotic shifts that have and will take place. They've known since the '70s that anything approaching the — iron, Maltese, whatever you want to call it — cross was an edgy choice; they initially rejected that design. They've had to answer questions about it ever since. I faced questions about it as a child, over a quarter-century ago in rural Alberta. That's because there is a profound, inescapable meaning ascribed to that symbol, even if its ends are rounded and not flat. Even if the Pope's garb bore some version of it. Even if now, for some, the "logo stands for passion and dedication to the activity of skateboarding."
Independent knows this because they stepped away from it. That is, until recently, when cross-logo stickers, patches, and t-shirts started showing up again. Peter Hewitt's Instagram feed is full of them. Tony Hawk wore the shirt, Ruby Lilley slapped the sticker on her board. Curiously, Independent hasn't directly promoted this new product on its channels or introduced new be-crossed SKUs to its site, which makes this reintroduction happening around the official edges of the brand even more peculiar.
Are they testing the waters? Is it a soft re-launch? Has Hewitt gone rogue?
And why now? What's changed in the intervening years? Is it because "woke" has died and it feels safe enough to ease it back into circulation, any pushback easily withstood? Are they hard up for cash and circling the sorry drain of nostalgia in hopes of a lifeline? Maybe it's no more complicated than a desire to return to the brand's "heritage," whatever one would make of that.
"Why now" is an important question, because the regular observer and consumer can't be blamed for making the connection that the revival of this logo is getting teased at a time when the United States government is quite literally recycling Nazi propaganda with only minor tweaks (rounded ends instead of flat, one could say), as it sics its camo-draped Gestapo, led by a diminutive Nazi-cosplaying dork, on the American public. Murdering, disappearing, and destroying the lives of countless people.
What is a person supposed to make of that timing? Is it the continued stupiding of the skateboarders' mind or something else? Because these symbols have meaning, whether we like it or not.
Much ink has been spilled and hot air spent saying that something as small and silly as a skateboarding brand's logo doesn't mean that. What doesn't get brought up often is that some people like that meaning.
One summer, when I was a teenager living in the Kootenays, a new guy showed up at our local skatepark. He told us that his name was X (seriously) and he had recently gotten out of prison. He was nice enough at first and a decent skater, too.
Summers in the Kootenays can be torturous, the heat oppressive. One afternoon, X had sweated through his t-shirt, which, like my brother's old sweater, bore the Independent cross logo, big and bold on its backside. X stripped the shirt off, revealing a large swastika tattoo that extended from shoulder to shoulder. By that age, I knew what that meant.
Does that mean the Independent cross logo is an explicit nod to Nazi imagery because this neo-Nazi wore their shirt, or that everyone who wears that logo is fascist scum? Depends on your point of view. But it's not a leap to imagine that's why X was wearing it, because these symbols have meaning, whether we like it or not.
Later that day, X called one of the older park locals, who is Black, a racial slur as he was leaving. That skater called up his friends, they all jumped into the back of his pickup truck, and chased X out of town.
Something to consider:
Kerry Howley
Good thing: I finished reading Jono Coote's Threatened by the Bell Tolls of Time this week and it is excellent. Grab yourself a copy.
NoBeerOnADeadPlanet
Another good thing: A new issue of SBC is out. Find at your local (in Canada) or online.
Yep, another good thing:
Zachariah Webb
You're goddamn right, another good thing:
Haha! You thought there weren't more good things:
Robert P Baird
Good thing about a bad thing:
Luke O’Neil
A good pod round-up:
Justin
lol, hell yeah:
smccroskey
Until next week… it's soup season. Get your vat out, throw all of your favourites into it, and get that thing a bubblin'.
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.
