Infinite loop (thank you, Stephen)
Plus: GUESS what, Midler? GIF appreciation, Marina Gabriela appreciation, bigspins and the crumbling of big spin, 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.
GUESS what?
Rank: 1
Mood: 👖👖👖
The overall structure of "professional skateboarding," or how and why a person gets paid to skateboard or is compensated for their cultural relevance within the skateboarding world, has remained relatively unchanged over the last 40 or so years. A brand, looking to market its product, assembles a roster of skateboarders that they feel add value to that brand, and then pays them, most often very little, to serve as a living, breathing representative for their product.
There was generally a cohesiveness, or at least some semblance of order, to how those teams of skateboarders were put together, which typically revolved around on-board style and aesthetic. Big rail and gap skaters who wore tight pants and band t-shirts were likely fits for the Zero, Foundation, or Toy Machine skateboards of the '90s and early aughts. A-Team Skateboards was a gimmick brand that focused solely on hyper-technical skateboarding. Skateboarders would often accrue a suite of sponsors that aligned with those personal sensibilities. There was intention behind those decisions, however forced or corny they might be.
Things have shifted in recent years. For one, there is less money for skateboarders in the skateboarding industry, as there is less money coming in for those brands, which means fewer paying roster spots are available. That has left professional skateboarding, for most, less a career opportunity than a node in the gig economy. As a result, the once-dominant preciousness around cultural integrity, the oft-cited phenomenon of "selling out," has lessened as income sources have dwindled. Find a benefactor where you can.
Energy drinks. Coconut water. Canned water. Weed, beer, and knife companies. Donuts, pickles, socks, whatever StockX is. The modern PRO now has to find ways to monetize their personal brand instead of solely contributing to the monetization of their sponsors. Run ads on your YouTube channel. Do Instagram #sponcon hard posts. And as skateboarding continues its Olympic era, more non-endemic brands see opportunities in the industry.
That's why it's not terribly surprising that longstanding fashion brand Guess Jeans would present a Thrasher Magazine-produced and published video project featuring Alex Midler.
Midler is one of the best examples of world-class talent who has struggled to maintain the necessary components of a professional skateboarding career: sponsors. He's bounced around to many over the years, moving on for personal reasons from some, to getting dropped by others, including Red Bull, who pulled his contract after he was shown on broadcast at the X Games drinking from a Monster Energy-branded water bottle.
That's how fickle this game is. Now Midler's Instagram feed features plugs for his Yerba Madre deal and Guess Jeans video part — an eclectic collection if there ever was one. Does it matter that neither company seem to know or care about skateboarding on a deeper level beyond whatever attention a high-calibre talent can direct their way? If you're the one trying to pay your bills, probably not. The Guess Jeans website doesn't lead to anything Midler or skateboarding-related when you search for it.
All that said, he is still one of the lucky ones. Is it weird that he's officially on Yerba Madre before Vans? Yep. But at least Midler has sponsors, however haphazard they may be. What this piecemeal approach portends for the industry going forward is anyone's Guess.
Infinite loop (thank you, Stephen)
Rank: 1
Mood: 🔁
The beautiful, foundational thing about the Graphics Interchange Format is its ability to infinitely loop short bits of video. This is great for memes, of course, as any tedious reply on social media can be easily supplanted by Blinking Guy forever blinking or evil/horny Jack Nicholson nodding ad infinitum. However, the GIF is also an underappreciated medium for taking in skateboarding. Tired of rewinding your VHS copy of Photosynthesis or scrubbing back on that YouTube video to fully appreciate a trick? Just let the GIF rip.
Over and over and over, that maneuver will cycle until you stop it. How better to pick out the small things? The subleties. Sometimes it takes a few viewings to catch how the front toe shifts on the board mid-slide as it sets up for a flip out, or the way the body reacts to taking impact and how that often reveals a skater's true "style." Or you may simply see a trick that leaves you in awe and demands rewatching, like Pedro Biagio's frontside-shove-it-frontside-5-0-back-180 in Baker Skateboard's latest release, waterCRACKER.
It's not often you see a combination with two alley-oops in it. Both the frontside-shove-it into the grind and the backside-180 out are unnatural ways to enter and exit the 5-0, a feat that Biagio makes look wholly naturally. The alley-oop backside-180 is even more of a 140, yet he rides away from the odd angle with surprising speed.
Scroll up and watch the GIF again. Magnificent. Did the late Stephen Earl Wilhite, the inventor of the Graphics Interchange Format, ever consider what niche pleasure it would bring? In a 2013 New York Times article, Wilhite claimed to have never made an animated GIF himself, so perhaps not. The headline of his obituary credits his creation of the compressed image file, a whole life compressed into one achievement — but one that allows us to appreciate the achievements of others.
C'mon, scroll up one more time.
Check the clock
Rank: 1
Mood: 🕐
About Time is a fitting title for Marina Gabriela's latest video project, published by Free on Wednesday. The young São Paulo, Brazil, native has been around skateboarding's public consciousness since at least 2019, when she began appearing in various late-stage Berrics content. She's also been a presence on the New Balance Numeric and Primitive Skateboards teams for some time, with her friend Tiago Lemos even crediting her with helping him get on their rosters during a separate interview with Free.
That relationship between Gabriela and Lemos runs deep, as she detailed in the same piece.
It was when I was little… My brother used to take me to the skatepark with him. I remember meeting Tiago the day I learned how to drop-in… He was the one supporting me, telling me I could do it, so after that I started looking up to him and tried to skate with him every time he was around. There was this time when he showed up at the park and started filming me, posted it on his Instagram, I didn’t even have an Instagram at the time, but I was hyped. I got on Instagram because he told me so.
That mentor-mentee relationship is both sweet and seems to have been beneficial, as all those years later, Gabriela has put on a polished, technical showcase in About Time. It's a clear evolution from her appearance in Primitive's Define and a Bones Wheels segment in January, one that's complemented by an overall upgrade in production value.
To pursue professional skateboardering as a career path, as noted at the start of this newsletter, is a choice to toil amid uncertainty, financial and otherwise. While remaining relatively low-key, Gabriela has put in the work over the last half-decade plus, building toward her best effort to date. Now, this is her time.
Big spin
Rank: N/A
Mood: N/A
This might be the best bigspin ever done on a skateboard. It's near impossible to speak in absolutes when writing about a sport where objectivity is just subjectivity wearing a pair of Groucho glasses, but the magnitude of the action can't be ignored. Can it be backed up with statistics? Not exactly. Just opinion and conjecture — the keystones of skateboarding fandom.
Still, you can say it. You can claim the affirmative about most anything. A person doesn't need data points, experience, or even cursory knowledge. Is your dad actually the world's best? That mug you got him sure thinks so. Did Jason Derulo really fall down the stairs at the Met Gala? No, but I mean, who knows.
On the extreme end of this, Western society descends deeper into collective delusions every day. From those led by the political snake oil salesman who run our countries to the AI-generated, we love to just say stuff and believe stuff, no matter its veracity, mostly, it seems, because we can — beef tallow-soaked French fries are healthy? We have the constitutional and charter-enshrined right to lie through our teeth.
It's the truth we struggle with, even as it bears down on us. Despite continued reams of well-documented evidence of soul-cleaving human carnage spanning nearly two full years, it remains an affront, and in many cases a punishable offence, to say that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. The New York Times opinion page finally said it last week, then had bedbug Bret Stephens deny it this week. The Washington Post reported a harrowing story on the forced famine and U.S.-backed slaughter at the farcical Gaza Humanitarian Foundation "aid sites," as the EU’s antisemitism tsar says raising money for starving Palestinian children at a bake sale is "ambient" antisemitism.
An Australian man wrote about the Columbia University pro-Palestine protests on a little-seen personal newsletter (that he deleted before his flight), and that was enough to get him detained and deported from the land of the free and the home of the brave. Mahmoud Khalil, a protester at Columbia, was abducted by the state and sent to prison for months at the behest of an extremist Zionist organization called Canary Mission, which is often described as a "hate group." On the gay dating app Grindr, you can't write "no Zionists" in your bio.
Samantha Cole
In Canada, our government still, after all this time, can't muster the courage to do anything actionable about a genocide this country actively supports, despite the desperate pleas from its citizens. Instead, the Canadian government just says stuff. Hollow statements followed by the passage of controversial bills that ignore Indigenous land rights. They award hundred-million-dollar contracts to military contractors charged with committing crimes against inmates at Abu Ghraib, while pro-Palestinian activists continue to be silenced for saying the truth, for demanding action, and an end to the destruction of a people.
If there's any positive, it's that the big spin no longer appears to be working as support for Israel, which has given up its attempts to hide its genocidal intent, has cratered in the West. The truth cannot be avoided, but the time for words has long since passed, and those complicit Western governments still refuse to do anything as the atrocities mount. Whatever future they usher us toward, no delusion will save us.
Something to consider: I dunno, I thought this piece was great!
Good thing:
Another good thing:
Barry Petchesky
Sure, why not? Another good thing:
Some good academic things:
Brian Glenney and Sanders Hölsgens are back at it with another paper, Of skills and tools: Skateboarding as city craft.
Abstract
This paper seeks to understand the sports- and crafts-like skills skaters acquire and maintain to navigate the built environment. Building upon the anthropology of the senses and the praxis of enskilment, we argue that skaters engage in a plurality of complementary learning strategies, from institutionalized sport-based regimes to in situ city play. Our contribution to recent ethnographic scholarship on skateboarding is that we position its enskiled practice as a city craft. This emphasis on craft reveals meaningful facets of skateboarding as structured around an entanglement of emplaced knowledge and material apprenticeship. Associating skateboarding with craft, we conclude, broadens and deepens our understanding of how skaters come to know.
Plus, Harry Meadley's PhD thesis, The Art of Skating Institutions: Incidental Positionality as an Artistic Strategy in Reappropriating Civic Space, is now online and free to read.
Rest in Peace: Ozzy played a significant, quantifiable role in skateboarding culture, and is also responsible for one of the more cathartic experiences I've been a part of.
John Darnielle
Until next week… don't forget to bring your swimsuit. And a towel. Maybe a book and an apple, too.
Laser Quit Smoking Massage
NEWEST PRESS
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My new 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.
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.
