Bent hangers of history
Chris Joslin does it, ASICS goes on (a guided) tour, Swim Skateboard Co. is buoyant, a reminder of some good things, 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.
Bent hangers of history
Rank: 20
Mood: 💪😌💪
It has become something of a rarity for a singular skateboard trick to break through and capture the attention of skateboarding as a whole. That's not unexpected; the skate media landscape is just different than the days when monthly magazine cycles drove the cultural conversation. Then, when a big-time move landed on a cover or in a spread, by design, it had to be looked at and marinated on until the next issue dropped. Now, there's a whole generational subset of skateboarders who primarily consume skateboarding videos and photos through their phones. Scroll and they're gone.
There's also something to be said for skateboarders becoming too good. This may sound like semi-satirical blame-casting, but if we're being blunt, the level of skill and ability of the average professional skateboarder has just been pushed to a point where it can become desensitizing. Innumerable is the amount of handrail kinks that have been ground through in the last decade. On top of that, there is only so much the human body can take before it gives, so there has to be a limit somewhere, a ceiling to shock and awe.
What gets us is when people still find a way to push past that perception. It usually helps to have an iconic spot for us to measure a maneuver against. Tyshawn Jones' kickflip over the subway tracks a few years back was one of those moments. And there's a reason the twenty stair set at El Toro High School had been the backdrop of at least five major magazine covers since the '90s — it's the ultimate measuring stick.
If you do something there, the vast majority of skateboarding immediately understands how fucked up it is. And if someone is unfamiliar with the spot, they just have to look at it to get it.
It should be noted that all of those covers I could find (if I missed any, forgive me) are of tricks done down El Toro's handrails.
- Heath Kirchart, lipslide, Transworld, February 1999
- Arto Saari, frontside-boardslide, Transworld, April 2001
- Shane Cross, nosegrind, Transworld, February 2005
- Jamie Foy, frontside-crooked-grind, Thrasher, January 2018
- Adrien Bulard, backside-tailslide, Transworld, July-August 2018
It's not that tricks haven't been done down the stairs; there have just been so few because, well, look at the thing. There hasn't been anything done down those twenty stairs that tops Dave Bachinsky's kickflip from almost twenty years ago. (Shoutout to Ryan Decenzo's nollie, though.)
That was until this week, when Thrasher revealed the cover of their November 2025 issue on Instagram, featuring Chris Joslin, like some flightless bird crashing to earth with a 360-kickflip under his feet.
It is a stunning physical achievement. Almost unbelievably so. If you had doubts, the sequence of the make floating around online should snap you into this new reality and its possibilities.
Speaking of sequences, that Thrasher Instagram post is a carousel of three photos, all by Atiba Jefferson. The first is the cover. The second is of a veiny, yolked out Joslin, shirt off, celebrating the make.
You can hear the let's fucking go through the screen. The third is a photo of a joyous, relieved, and perhaps even weeping Joslin as he holds his children.
While the sequence of the 360-flip tells us the story of the trick in its seconds-long existence, proof, in other words, the above photos tell us much more. That reaction from Joslin makes sense; this is redemption. He famously almost 360-flipped El Toro, riding away and falling off the board, sometime around 2018. After showing the clip of the near-make to the hosts of the Nine Club that year, he'd say, "fucking hell, do I really want to go back and do it?"
In 2023, a Storied feature detailed how hellish an experience those initial attempts were. The impact alone bent the trucks on two separate setups. In the piece, Joslin says that while he knows he didn't "do it," in his head, he did, and knows he could. But going back to get it, to suffer all over again, would just be for a clip, for other people. And if he did go back, he might even try something other than the 360-flip. He sounds as if he's accepted the moment and let it go.
Well, he went back and did it, for us — and himself, one assumes. What is most remarkable is how much time has passed between the previous attempts and the make (which one assumes happened this year). In the Storied piece, we see archival footage of Joslin toting his young child, still in a carriage, to El Toro, this fresh human being on the scene as their father risks his life. Some 7-8 years later, he returned with two walking, talking children in tow, both watching their father put everything on the line.
While that danger is very real (I previously compared the risk to Mark Coleman's daughters watching him get brutalized by Fedor Emelianenko), the payoff is sublime. A memory forever shared, his children witness to what will likely remain the greatest achievement in their father's professional career. The gravity of that is not lost on Joslin; you can see it on his face.
All those years in between the almost and the rideaway were filled with career highs, lows, intense garage-gym workouts, turmoil with sponsors (why hasn't Lakai posted about Joslin or his 360-flip yet?), and more, culminating in this.
A stunt is enough to make a trick break through, but a story makes it matter.
Then there's whateve this is...
Keep going, Victor
Rank: 1
Mood: 👟🛗
What happens when you let someone with vision, like Jacob Harris (along with Jake Gascoyne), film, edit, and direct your full-length skateboarding film is that you wind up with something that has, well, a vision.
I wrote this about Harris following last year's ASICS feature, Next Vibrant Screentest.
It is remarkable that Jacob Harris, who is one of the most singular filmmakers working in skateboarding today, has exacted his particular and increasingly absurdist vision with almost all of the major sports shoe companies that have made their way into the industry. Nike, adidas, and New Balance have all paid Harris to get weird. Or, more accurately, they've paid for his brand of weird. That distinct British droll, marrying the visually and sonically stunning with the patently silly, like the Big Mouth Billy Bass that haunts his Atlantic Drift series like a flapping, flopping spectre.
Harris has recently been at the helm of ASICS' first video offerings, where he's been experimenting further, entering more bizarre realms. To see him realize this with a resume littered with blue-chip brand names is a testament to his work. Generally, a brand wants something on-brand or, at the very least, brand-safe, but Harris is very much his own brand. The logo of a shoe company pasted onto the bumpers of his films cannot overshadow that; it can only underwrite it.
If Next Vibrant Screentest is any indication, hopefully, his next efforts will continue to push how far and how much a company is willing to pay to accept his art in lieu of advertisement.
Harris certainly does push in A Guided Tour, the narrator itself a fun quirk, but that absurdity and the absurdity of the skateboarding is balanced well, neither sacrificed for the sake of the other. It's a credit to the ASICS brand that they've let him define their vision in the skateboarding space, as it does help them stand out (even if Harris has moonlighted for most of the others).
If there's a risk in that, it's in how ASICS will come to see itself if the two ever part ways. How do you do anything less than Harris' vision when you've already been doing so much? But that's for another time, let's enjoy the tour while it lasts.
Coming into view
Rank: 1
Mood: 🏊
Okay, there it is. We're starting to get a picture of what Swim Skateboard Co. is up to. What initially looked to be a solo project launched by elusive PRO Kevin Terpening in early 2023 would eventually grow, adding Dan Plunkett to the team before the year was out. Then the veterans were joined by up-and-comers, including Ethan Loy, who has been on an absolute tear since, and Ryan Connors and Justin Drysen, both of whom got the well-deserved welcome to PRO-dom two weekends back.
The "branding" of the brand is still hard to pin down, and the board graphics could just as easily be part of the latest drop from Jacuzzi Unlimited, but the dynamic of the Swim team is clearly the pitch more than a cohesive aesthetic: here are interesting skaters doing interesting tricks on interesting spots — like an acoustic version of A Guided Tour.
In Grinding The Tape, we get that in spades. Justin Drysen is fast, powerful, and navigates tight alleyways and worrying bump-to-bars with a confidence he'd teased but is now on full display. There's also more Ethan Loy, who may be the gnarliest "creative" skateboarder that we have.
And then Connor closes the show with a technical showcase that jostles between silly and tasteful, ultimately leaving the viewer asking the screen in front of them, what the hell.
Seriously. What the hell, man. However, how does Swim fare when faced with the ultimate question posed by each of those viewers: Does it make me want to buy a board?
Kinda, yah.
Anniversaries and feeling good together
Rank: 1
Mood: ✋👇🗞️
Over the course of publishing Simple Magic these last four years (this month being the newsletter's semi-official anniversary), it would not be entirely forthright to say that writing a newsletter every week (sometimes multiple times a week), one that is ostensibly about skateboarding, is always interesting.
Sometimes, not much has happened in the sporting bubble that inspires more than a handful of keystrokes. Often, I find myself writing about the same subjects from just a slightly different angle. Occasionally, in an effort to keep things fun for myself, I'll try to evince some profundity out of a mouse's demise or write a poem in lieu of a review. All of which is fine, I think. Not everything out there has to be interesting or inspiring all of the time. The boring can make you bore further into something to see what comes out the other side. And a little mundanity makes the genuinely exciting things stand out.
Video via @weather_tooth on Instagram
Case in point, a few Saturdays back, a friend and I stopped in to check out the festivities at the 10th annual Stop, Drop, and Roll, an annual "all-women, girls, trans, non-binary skate jam," organized by Rose Archie in Vancouver. From toddlers to adults, newbie skateboarders to professionals, there was a shared energy that would be hard to describe without falling into the saccharine. Everyone was supportive, psyched, and beaming. Skateboarders helped one another learn tricks, get up from falling down, and plot their contest runs. Children screamed with joy while riding down embankments. Parents watched their kids figure themselves out on a board. Friends hugged. A Palestinian flag hung from the fence at one end of the park, and another was painted on the cinderblock wall at the other.
This communal delight was palpable before the contest had even begun, and being in the midst of this pleasant commotion for just half an hour was invigorating. All of these people gathered to celebrate skateboarding, each other, and simply being together. It was more entertaining and felt more real than watching someone grind a triple-kink handrail in another video part uploaded and forgotten.
Not that the two need to be at odds, mind you. There's room for all of it — the first three quarters of this newsletter are dedicated to it — one's just more emotionally material, revelling in its own earnestness, a reminder that caring about your community is exciting.
Some things to consider:
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Spencer Ackerman
Emanuel Maiberg
Joseph Cox
Good thing: Boil the Ocean on the big Red Bull drop-in.
Another good thing:
Katie Heindl
A good, heartrending thing:
A good thing about a bad thing:
Charlotte Klein
Some good Natalie Porter things: Natalie's book, Girl Gangs, Zines, and Powerslides, is out now! If you're in the Vancouver area, the book launch will be at Antisocial's new location(!) on Sunday.
We'll also be doing an event at the Vancouver Public Library next Tuesday.
If you're in the area.
Natalie Porter
An excerpt from Girl Gangs, Zines, and Powerslides.
Posted by
Templeton
Some good Farran Golding things: Farran is hosting a panel next week.
Skateboarding offers multiple creative avenues outside of the act of skateboarding itself. Writing, photography, videography, art, design and brand building are all woven into skate culture. But even for those with the strongest creative itch to scratch, knowing simply how and where to start can be difficult. As part of Skate Nottingham’s ‘Skateboarding In The City III’ festival, Skate Bylines are hosting ‘First Light’ which hopes to inspire skateboarders in undertaking artistic pursuits.
Farran Golding
Want to take part? Click the link above and submit a question.
He also put together a big-ass beautiful zine to celebrate two decades of Division 24.
Speaking of panels: A video of our panel from this year's Slow Impact is online.
ANOTHER literary thing: 'sletter friend Jono Coote is heading on tour for his latest book, Threatened By The Bell Tolls of Time. Pick up a copy from Red Fez Books and catch him IRL if YITA (you're in the area).
Vague
A Kader thing:
A good cover thing: The new issue of Skate Jawn is out now. I wrote another thing about barriers for it, because of course, alongside some amazing photos of River Tavis taken by Carter Spinks.
skatejawn
A good pod thing:
Another good thing about a bad thing:
Ismail Ibrahim
A thing from last week:
Cole Nowicki
Until next week… things are bad, they are going to get worse, but it won't always be so. Another way is possible.
Laser Quit Smoking Massage
NEWEST PRESS
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My collection of essays is available now. I think you might like it. The Edmonton Journal called it a "local book set to make a mark in 2024." The CBC said it's "quirky yet insightful." lol.
It won the 2025 Alberta Book Publishing Award for Trade Non-Fiction Book of the Year.
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.
