Some of your faves are name-searchable
Parallels between Daewon and Lutzka content, consideration of a PR pitch, a 20-year job anniversary, Tony Hawk did not get married on Little Saint James, 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.
Stiff, gormless reality
Rank: 1
Mood: 💻
The above adidas feature, which follows Mark Suciu and Daewon Song as they visit and skate notable spots from earlier stages of Song's career, is spiritually similar to a recent Dern Bros. video that sees the Bros. hang out with Greg Lutzka and then skate notable spots from the early stages of Lutzka's career in Wisconsin.
Both videos are entertaining in their own ways — it is genuinely astounding to watch the level Suciu operates at on a skateboard, and it will never not be morbidly fascinating to see the Dern Bros. cut an ad for Better Help — and both traffic in a bit of nostalgia, taking the stars of Almost Skateboards Round 3 (2004) on a tour of moments that are also, in a way, our moments if you spent an innordinate amount of time watching those videos in your youth.
Where these two pieces differ is in their execution. While each can rightly be labelled "online content," the effort and artistry in the editing of the adidas piece, driven by the talent of two SOTYs and the filming and editing of Greg Hunt, to use tired marketing parlance, elevates it. Dern Bros. are YouTube slop — slop that I'll gladly go to the trough for every now and then.
It feels somewhat unfair to compare the two, given their differing production budgets and creative visions, but they are essentially the same thing produced for the same purpose: to get people to open up YouTube and engage with a long-form advertisement, one that a person can see themselves in. That is also the stiff, gormless reality of a mannequin: it's something to drape a product over. Still, there's an odd comfort in knowing that a gussied-up mannequin can be genuinely enjoyable or even inspiring.
What is disturbing, however, is that Daewon Song, one of the greatest skateboarders to ever walk this earth, tried to focus a board like this:
"Meta, expose all of my personally identifiable information"
Rank: -2
Mood: 🕶️🧥
Every so often, an email from a PR person lands in my inbox. Sometimes it's a simple product announcement, no inquiry attached. Other times, it comes with a pitch: do you want to write about or collab on this thing? "Collab" generally means some asymmetrical exchange of promotion, like hosting a product giveaway in this newsletter.
It's always interesting to be propositioned like this as a writer, in a way that makes one question their public perception, because it means there is a paid professional out there who, after doing some preliminary googling, has decided there's a possibility that I might be interested in writing about whatever they're pushing.
Not that doing this sort of work is somehow beneath me, I'm just not interested, and it makes me genuinely curious as to what would give off the impression that I would be. I'll do the occasional book review, but I like books and that's different. If I feel compelled to write about a new product, I tend to take a pretty critical eye.
And if you're a regular reader of my work, including Simple Magic, then you know that's just not something I've ever really done here — until now.
A couple of weeks back, a well-meaning PR person started emailing me about embargoed "Meta Super Bowl News." This sparked some initial curiosity: why would someone doing PR for Meta reach out to me, author and proprietor of a skateboarding-related newsletter, regarding "Super Bowl News."
Initially, I wasn't interested, so I didn't respond. A few days later, embargo lifted, they followed up with a teaser for a pair of Oakley Meta AI Glasses Super Bowl ad spots. The PR pitch detailed the campaign, titled “Athletic Intelligence Is Here,” which apparently "marks the arrival of sport’s next era and captures how Oakley Meta delivers a real-time competitive edge for athletes."
The spots feature, among others, Spike Lee, Marshawn Lynch, iShowSpeed, Akshay Bhatia, and Olympians Kate Courtney, Sunny Choi, and Sky Brown. Brown had to be why the PR person was reaching out — a skateboarder, a person who writes about skateboarding. Of course. I didn't respond.
Then on Monday, I received a third email, this one including the ad spots in question, promotional assets, a blog post, and the explicit ask of whether I was "interested in covering Oakley Meta's first-ever Super Bowl commercial." The spots are bad; you can watch one here:
It bears repeating, but that PR person is just doing their job. I work in marketing to pay my bills, I get it. But I also find it offensive that someone would ask me to cover commercials for Meta's pervert glasses. The things that creeps use to film people without their consent. Creeps that include members of the American gestapo.
The push to normalize this line of products seems to be going better than the awe-inspiring flameout of Google Glass back in 2013. The tech itself at the time was of much lower quality than what's possible with Meta's versions of these "wearables," but back then, the good people of earth were also keenly aware that this was a product geared almost exclusively for those looking to secretly surveil everyone around them and thus, Google Glass wearers were roundly mocked, kicked out of public and private spaces, and the product swiftly discontinued.
What's changed in the subsequent decade plus? Probably our willingness to surveil ourselves. Life became posting. With that, the borders of our personal privacy shrank. Now, it's simply normal for people to take out their phones without hesitation or shame to film long, straight-to-social-media videos of a cafe's charming interior and every unwitting patron in it or snap photos of someone else's dog without permission. Many of us have been so taken by social media's pull that we've forgotten that this is sick behaviour.
One of the primary selling features of the Oakley Meta AI Glasses, per Meta's blog post, is that you can use them to post to Instagram. Who needs glasses that can post to Instagram? Another is that sports fans can "stop watching the game through your phone’s camera app. This is especially critical when you’re attending a big game or championship match-up, because that’s where history is made. Stay present and keep your eyes on the ball while your Oakley Meta glasses capture epic moments that you can then relive, just like you experienced them IRL." Especially critical! Alright then.
As far as the glasses' "Athletic Intelligence" goes, do you really need your glasses to tell you what the weather or wind speed is? If anything, this half-assed product pitch makes it plain that they've given up on the pretext that these are useful for anything other than being a camera attached to your head. Tools for content creation and/or privacy invasion and nothing more. Why else would Meta be planning to put facial recognition technology in them?
And that's my coverage of Oakley Meta's first-ever Super Bowl commercial.
A job, a career, a life
Rank: 20
Mood: 👶🧒🧑🧓
"David has been on the longest — besides me." Tony Hawk said of David Loy's 20-year tenure on Birdhouse Skateboards last week. It's a mildly tongue-in-cheek comment because Hawk will always be the longest-tenured Birdhouse rider, since he founded the company some 34 years ago. In fact, Birdhouse and Loy are the same age.
Twenty years is a significant, well, what would you call it? Milestone? Of course. But it's also something else. In our contemporary capitalist landscape, holding onto the same employer for one decade is a feat. Two decades is an outright anomaly. Maybe that's what it is.
There are some caveats, of course. The most prominent is that professional skateboarding, despite the label of "professional," is rarely a job in the traditional sense. Most don't make money that would amount to a living wage, and given the peculiarities of an industry whose cultural production is primarily advertisements for branded products, as long as you remain marketable or well-liked by the people who put names on skateboards, you can have your name on a skateboard for as long as that company exists.
Twenty years is nothing to sneeze at, though, and Loy and Birdhouse celebrated the occasion with an aptly titled new video part, XX.
It is far and away the most complete, cohesive, and enjoyable offering of Loy's career. Loy himself calls it his "best video part" in a recent Thrasher interview with 'sletter friend Ted Schmitz. Always one to huck himself, before Loy lacked vision for spot and trick selection. Big drops, long grinds, brow-furrowing flyouts all blurred together in a mess of action that defied taste more than exhibited it — the skateboarding equivalent of dubstep. That also fit the — and there is no way to describe it politely — corny raver aesthetic that guided his sartorial decisions through much of the 2010s.
In XX, Loy hucks, but where, how, and with what are more considered and creative. His contemporary fits likely aren't to most people's liking, but they feel more natural to Loy as he's grown into himself.
Hawk acknowledged Loy's overall evolution in a way that could loosely be described as complimentary. "When he was a kid, he was a ball of energy. Just wouldn't stop skating. Was probably a little loud for other people's liking. Talking to David now... he's just much more mature."
That maturation was borne from significant personal change and tragedy for Loy, including the loss of his brother and his own struggle with substance abuse issues, as he told Thrasher. After separate stays in rehab, over three-and-a-half years later, he remains sober and is doing the best skateboarding of his professional life.
Despite, or perhaps due to its anomalous duration, today, Loy's career doesn't look much different from that of most professional skateboarders: a collection of odd jobs. Besides skating, Loy helps Mike Mo Capaldi with unspecified tasks at the PSL and performs team manager duties for a "peptide company."
The latter is a route more PROs have been taking to both extend their careers and establish an off-ramp. Dakota Servold, featured in a well-produced piece for Platform last week, detailed how he lived in Leo Romero's closet for four years, during what was arguably the height of his own career. Now, while still a professional skateboarder, he works for an athlete management company, travelling with and aiding other professional skateboarders, most of whom are his friends and share the same sponsors.
It seems like a sweet gig, something of a payoff for a lifetime dedicated to such an unforgiving profession. Of course, there's more to the game than money and how it's earned, as Loy's boss, Tony Hawk, points out.
"I want to congratulate David on his video part, of course, but mostly on his journey to sobriety. That is by far the hardest thing that he's done. It's a celebration of his 20 years on Birdhouse, but the fact that he's healthy is way more important."
Speaking of Tony...
Some of your faves are name-searchable
Rank: -4
Mood: 🏝️
It seems that if you reached some level of fame or notoriety, or just existed and published on the internet up until, say, 2019, there's a good chance that your name shows up in the Epstein files.
Many of those people are in there for truly horrendous reasons — collaborating with, procuring from, or generally cozying up to the most notorious pedophile in modern history. Others might have had an article of theirs cited in an email, or, like writer and programmer Paul Ford, were included in old Twitter "in your network" emails that spammed the inbox of the most notorious pedophile in modern history.
That's been a much-publicized issue with the Epstein files releases: the haphazard and uneven nature of their redactions and delivery. The names of people who should be public in these correspondences are often redacted, sometimes very stupidly so, while explicit images labelled "potential CSAM" were not, nor were victims' names and other personal information. The releases also contain unverified tips and complaints related to the case, and there are millions more files yet to be released.
Tony Hawk is mentioned in the Epstein files three times. Two of those are due to duplicate promotional emails for Stan Lee's Comikaze conference in 2012 that featured an "Activision Arcade" and a showcase of Tony Hawk Shred. The other is a message from a Threat Intake Examiner at the FBI National Threat Operations Center to a Special Agent. The message includes a complaint from an alleged victim (content warning) that claims they were on "Epstein's island" at the same time that "Tony Hawk got married on the island."
The existence of this complaint started to gain traction online earlier this week. I reached out to Hawk's team for comment on Tuesday, and they said the claim related to him is "not true — Tony has never been to Little Saint James, and his wedding took place in Fiji."
Hawk has been married four times. His most recent wedding took place in Ireland in 2015. The previous was held in Tavarua, Fiji, in 2006. The photos are available on Getty. Hawk's first two weddings took place in 1990 and 1996, respectively. Epstein didn't purchase the island until 1998. Given those timelines, all of which are publicly available online, it's apparent to anyone willing to look that it's unlikely any Hawk nuptials took place on Little Saint James.
The photographer at Hawk's wedding in Fiji was named Mark Epstein, which happens to be the name of Jeffrey Epstein's brother. That, perhaps unsurprisingly, led many online to conclude that the 71-year-old mysteriously wealthy "real estate magnate" and brother of the most notorious pedophile in modern history was moonlighting as Tony Hawk's wedding photographer.
Given that ongoing revelations about Epstein and his vast network of known associates continue to grow in their depravity with each passing day, it does seem like anything is possible, but this claim is not.
Still, online speculation ran so rampant, including a boost from the continually odious ShreddER News, that Hawk addressed it via Instagram Story on Thursday and apologized for getting Wyoming-based action sports photographer Mark Epstein "pulled into the misinformation vortex."
These are extraordinarily strange times, and finger-wagging isn't going to help (or convince) anyone, but if we're going to make sense of — and make it through — this current moment where shared reality has become malleable and subjective, it behooves us to do the bare minimum of googling before posting.
Something to consider: Support Beam, a lovely short film by Matt Price starring Brad Cromer for the latest issue of Plank.
Good thing:
Another good thing:
Village Psychic
Some good San Francisco things:
Walker Ryan
Timothy Karoff
More good thing:
Good thing about a bizarre thing:
Max Read
I love this type of thing:
jacobsawyer
Until next week… there is a dog in the park playing fetch. It runs toward you, toy in mouth, and drops it at your feet. The toy is covered in slime, mud, and other damp park detritus. This isn't your dog, you don't have to throw the toy, but consider how happy it will make this creature who looks up at you expectantly. What will you do?
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.
