Crushing Monsters at Oscar Wilde's tomb
RIP Roger, low-effort travel blogs, a Vans wellness check, 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.
RIP Roger
Rank: 1
Mood: 🪦👻
Humming in the background of skateboarding, both its industry and culture, are a series of companies, most quite small and hyper-local. These endeavours, best described as "labours of love" as opposed to "money-making," may "break even" if fortunate.
These companies and their attendant brands are best when they have a regional purview, but can often extend beyond, whether by adding team riders from other parts of the country or globe, or by simply making cool enough shit that people want to buy it from outside of that hyper-local scene.
These brands serve several purposes. They give the local skate scene something to get excited about, and they also provide the people who run them with something to do — an underrated mode of inspiration. These brands can also act as a springboard for up-and-coming talent, offering recognition for their abilities that gets noticed elsewhere, if elsewhere is somewhere they wish to go.
All in all, the overall purpose of this substratum of skateboard companies, whether explicitly declared or not, is community building. There's a good chance that many of you reading this have had one of them in your life, whether directly or on the periphery. Brands run by friends, acquaintances, and even enemies. They probably had names like Phlegm Skates, Jazz Purist, or TNA Board Co.
Brands whose products were proudly repped and the little universes they built fondly lived in.
I grew up around friends who ran projects like Fruit Union, Farm, Firewood, and Folk Skateboards, and they were a truly enlivening thing to support and even be on the roster of a few of them. That didn't mean I was particularly good at skateboarding, but good enough to get in the van or receive a couple of boards and hang with friends who had a shared vision in mind.
Those are memories that hold and will continue to hold, long after the last of those now-faded graphic tees are gone. The same can be said for Roger Skateboards, which announced that it was closing up shop last week.
While it's a stretch to call Roger "hyper-local," seeing as the brand was available in stores around the world and had, at times, an international team, their efforts were geared toward their local Austin, Texas, crowd. Under the art direction of Michael Sieben, Roger was always fun, funny, and easy to root for, like any good local brand should be. It felt like something put out by your friend. Roger also made damn good videos.
And when we talk about community building, how many Rogers of the Month were there? The tongue-in-cheek monthly flow program offshoot was a unique way to highlight up-and-coming talent, or just pals, who were "sponsored" by Roger for roughly 30 days. It's hard to track everyone who was a ROTM, but a quick scroll through the internet finds names like Cole Wilson, Ryan Spencer, Clint Walker, Ted Schmitz, Trung Nguyen and many more.
That's the type of energy and effort that skateboarding thrives on, but it also becomes demanding and difficult to maintain, as Sieben wrote on Instagram last week.
When Stacy Lowery and I started Roger in 2008, we didn’t have a 5-year plan. To be honest, I think we were both surprised when the company lasted more than a year. But it did. And then it just kept going. Before we knew it, over 15 years had passed. And during that time, priceless friendships grew.
But now we’re saying goodbye to our friend Roger. We no longer have sufficient time or energy to dedicate to the brand, and phoning it in feels like a disservice to both the team and to ourselves. So, it’s with heavy hearts that we willingly pull the plug rather than watch our friend wither and fade away.
That is the way to go out: self-aware, good-humoured, and with others in mind, as Roger has always been. Those memories will hold.
Low-effort travel blog #1: Palace of Versailles or Street League…
Rank: 1
Mood: 🇫🇷
Sometime around 6:30am local time, our plane landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport. Unable to check into our lodgings until 2pm, we decided to take things slow. We ambled through the airport, sleep deprived. I attempted to order a chicken sandwich something-or-other from a chain cafe and wound up with sausages wrapped in cheese. Merde.
We took a taxi into Paris and walked around the neighbourhood where we would be staying. We sat in a cafe on our computers or with books and ordered as much as we could so it didn't feel like we were just there to while away the hours, even though that's exactly what we were doing.
Eventually, that felt bad, and we kept moving, dragging our bags and ourselves around the city. We talked about the things we'd see. The museums and galleries and architectural marvels. The food and wine, and, for me, the skate spots we'd like to try. Soon, time began to press down on us. The grime from a day of travel an accelerant of this weariness, or, I guess, a deaccelerant, as I wanted nothing more than to lie down.
Then there it was, the little extra spark I needed to keep going, scrolling on a street-side billboard:
I gasped — an advertisement for Street League Skateboarding. The event would be in town while we were here. What fortuitous timing. My partner sighed. There was so much to see and do while we were in Paris, and I wanted this.
Yes, this. What if we were blessed with seeing Aurélien Giraud do a hardflip-late-flip or Rayssa Leal claim yet another victory? Are those not of historical relevance, too? Perhaps even more pressing since they exist for mere seconds at a time. The Palace of Versailles will continue to be there, as it has been, for hundreds of years.
I'm not sure if this was a convincing argument, but it might have more weight once we'd had some sleep.
Wellness check: Vans
Rank: 82
Mood: 🧇
Readers of this newsletter, or anyone simply paying attention, are aware that Vans and its parent company, VF Corp, have been having a tough go of it, business-wise, in recent years. Their efforts to right the ship with Project Reinvent, which, per Retail Dive, was designed to "help the conglomerate enhance brand building and sales strategies in North America. It also called for boosting revenue results at its Vans brand... [and] naming several new executives, including a new president for Vans and a new VF COO," appear to have been ineffective.
That plan, announced in October 2023, was followed less than two years later by mass layoffs across VF Corp's suite of brands, resulting in the layoff of 400 total employees, including 82 at Vans.
For outside observers and those in the know, it's created a discordant experience, which I touched on in August.
From those in the industry I've spoken to since, it truly was a bloodbath, with one Vans team rider stating that everyone they used to liaise with at the brand is now gone. [Days after the layoffs], Vans would go ahead with its shoe release party for The Curren, "that included bringing hundreds of skaters, media, and influencers out into the desert to indulge in, as detailed in the [event's subsequent] YouTube recap video description, 'a broken full pipe under a chandelier... the sounds of yacht rock from a string quartet, rich caviar, and smells of leather scented cologne permeating through the air.'"
That was written following Vans' announcement that the recording artist SZA had been brought on as a creative director. A high-profile move, certainly, but an overall confusing one, which I tried to make sense of at the time.
SZA could very well bring new creative life to the company. However, for Vans, a company that has struggled in recent years to create a clear picture of what its brand is or wants, especially in the skateboarding space, this muddies things further.
In the months since, Vans has pushed through a series of both interesting and baffling moves. The company released a "Premium Old Skool" designed by team rider Efron Danzig, which features buckles and a high heel.
The shoe launched during a Vans x Interview Magazine New York Fashion Week event, a genuinely novel way to celebrate a shoe that stands out from the rest of Vans' SKUs as much as it does, and ties Danzig into a scene/market where she is primed to excel.
Taylore Scarabelli
Will the shoe sell? Who knows, but it's an encouraging risk to take, if anything, showing that Vans is willing to try different things and, to use cursed marketing parlance, "elevate" their upcoming generation of talent.
Days after that event, news broke that VF Corp had sold Dickies to Bluestar Alliance, whose portfolio of brands includes Hurley, Off-White, and Bebe. VF Corp would get just $600 million for the workwear brand, a significant dip from the $820 million the company paid for it in 2017.
Per Shop Eat Surf, "[Dickies] last reported full-year growth in the year ended April 2, 2022, when revenue increased 19% to $837.7 million. Dickies’ revenue has been declining double digits since then, including in the most recent fiscal year ended March 29, 2025, when revenue dropped 12% to $542.1 million compared to fiscal 2024."
That report goes on to say that "during [an] earnings call in July, VF Corp. CEO Bracken Darrell emphasized that the company remained committed to Dickies despite the brand’s challenges." Then, just two months later, "In a statement announcing the sale to Bluestar, Darrell said the Dickies sale will boost VF’s balance sheet... VF Corp. expects to use proceeds from the sale to reduce its debt, which has been a key focus of the company’s turnaround strategy."
As Vans continues this latest "turnaround strategy," it has released a collection with legendary skateboarding photographer Atiba Jefferson, called "United Through Skateboarding."
Conceptually, it makes sense and highlighting someone like Jefferson, who is such a central figure in skateboarding media, is cool. More effort should be made to celebrate the people who have helped document skating; their contributions are integral to our understanding of skate culture itself. They'd cement that idea further with a Thrasher piece that follows Jefferson returning to his hometown in Colorado with a selection of Vans riders.
It's worth noting that, throughout these pieces or in the campaign rollout, Vans doesn't mention that Jefferson works for the company as a "brand curator." (You can find that detail if you click through to an FAQ in the initial press release.)
Nevertheless, it's a different, interesting approach to marketing. However, Vans also returned to their old stomping grounds of generating unfortunate and negative sentiment after Sci-Fi Fantasy's Corey Glick, now a former Vans rider, recently shared an Instagram hardpost of himself skating in ASICS.
There may be some behind-the-scenes details we aren't privy to, but letting a talent like Glick go, so soon after his star turn in Endless Beauty, is a shortsighted move that seems representative of the company's broader struggles, given it's not entirely surprising. Or, as one Instagram user put it:
Low-effort travel blog #2: Crushing Monsters at Oscar Wilde's tomb
Rank: 1900
Mood: 🪦📚
Once rested, take a walk around Paris. Who knows what you might see?
A skateable curb that's hundreds of years old, any number of fishnet-centric Fashion Week fits, Sargent's Madame X, perhaps even a fascinating seminar by #skatetwitter alum Olivier Jutel on "A Critical Theory of Venture Capitalism."
There's a good chance you might run into some celebrities, like Carlos Ribeiro, who's in town for SLS, as he misses a nollie-crook at République, or the double banks that Tyshawn Jones nollie-heelflipped into in a pair of Louis Vuitton Timbs, and the grassy walls at Bercy Arena that the stars of Flip's Sorry skid down in the video's intro.
You may even begin to question your understanding of celebrity itself as you stroll around Père Lachaise Cemetery, taking in the final resting places of those like Honoré de Balzac, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, and Anna Karina. Beyond the inherent morbidity, there is a strangeness in seeking out the dead in this way. Doesn't their spirit exist more fully in the works they've left behind, not the stone structures that may or may not contain their physical remains?
That isn't to say these exursions don't have meaning. The epigraph on Oscar Wilde's tomb is a verse from his poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol.
And alien tears will fill for him
Pity's long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn.
Wilde wrote that poem while in exile after serving two years' hard time for having sexual relationships with men, charged with the crime of "gross indecency." His tomb would later become a place of pilgrimage for outcasts of all sorts. Stephen Fry, who played the writer in Wilde (1997), once famously described its import.
Here's this man who believed when he died that his name would be toxic for generations to come. For hundreds of years his work wouldn't be read. He would stand for nothing but perversion. Utter disgust of a society that couldn't bear people like him... His tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery, in Paris. It had to be restored because the polished stone of its surface had corroded through kissing. Thousand and thousands... Wouldn't it be allowed once to just wake him up for five minutes just to tell him that, then he can go back to sleep again?
A glass barrier was erected to protect the tomb from that overwhelming love. That also meant things could find themselves stuck on the other side of that barrier, say a can of "Punch" flavoured Monster Energy lobbed at the entryway to Wilde's place of rest.
A meaningless act that cuts in all directions, pulling the memory of a literary icon into the terrifying hollowness of our present, where notoriety itself is the primary currency, merit or connection an afterthought — something to desecrate with a third-rate energy drink flavour for a laugh.
However, if you round the tomb's corner, the barrier is also a reminder that it only made those compelled to kiss Wilde's tomb work harder, as new, bright red lip prints dot the stone, far above the glass — marks of mourning and celebration persist over a century later. That's energizing, isn't it?
Once rested, you might see any one of these things, then you keep walking.
Something to consider: "A Hill to Die On" by Jasper Nathaniel in the Paris Review.
Good thing: Natalie Porter in Jenkem.
Natalie Porter
Another good thing:
Marcus Waldron
Swag thing: Thank you to everyone who ordered Simple Magic merch last week! I'll start shipping those off once home on the 23rd. Also, if you tried to order from outside of Canada and the site told you I don't do that, it lied. I do, I just had the settings wrong because I'm an idiot. It works now. See for yourself :)
Good song:
A "why not" thing: I don't follow or care about baseball, but I have decided to bandwagon with the Blue Jays. Wish us luck.
Chris Thompson
Until next week… if you accidentally order a couple of sausages encased in melted cheese, don't worry, it's pretty good.
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.
