We are old (sung to the tune of the 2011 hit single "We Are Young" by Fun. ft. Janelle Monáe)
Zach Harris on skateboarding juicing every last drop from its aging legends, Joslin and Lakai had a good Friday, Estonia bankrolled Jerry Gurney's travel expenses, 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.
We are old (sung to the tune of the 2011 hit single "We Are Young" by Fun. ft. Janelle Monáe)
A special correspondence by Zach Harris
Reynolds eats fruit because he’s old.
That’s not a knock on fruit, which is delicious and nutritious for all ages; it’s the punchline to what has become one of skating’s most enduring inside jokes. Andrew Reynolds, like the rest of pro skateboarding’s gas station grocery shopping man babies, was a Y2K burnout who, powered by produce, grew up, got sober, got healthy, kept his flame stoked, and stayed gold for longer than anyone could ever have imagined.
It’s been 15 years since Forrest Edwards was on a skate reality contest trying to out-huck John Fitzgerald for sponsors and referencing Reynold’s dietary choices to defend the masculinity of eating an apple, but Andrew is still eating fruit. In the print ad welcoming him to New Balance, Reynolds holds a bag of oranges and bananas. When Highsnobiety visited Reynolds at home for a profile celebrating his new New Balance pro shoe, the cover of the magazine featured Reynolds whipping up a strawnana smoothie with chia seeds. Fructose and fibre, man, you just can’t beat it.
46-year-old Reynolds is, as far as I can find, the oldest pro athlete of any kind to ever release an introductory signature shoe with a sneaker brand. There are no NBA players signing new brand deals in their mid-40s. There are no NBA players in their mid-40s. In an industry struggling to find its footing in the rapidly approaching future, it doesn’t feel like a great omen for skateboarding that the most heavily marketed pro shoe of 2025 is for a guy who’s been pro since 1995.
Skateboarding can never truly get old because skating is a hobby, not a business, and new 8-year-olds are picking up their first board every day. Those kids might not care about Andrew Reynolds because they are 8, or 13, or 20 (a 20-year-old in 2025 would have been 5 years old when Stay Gold dropped). With most of the overwhelming media rollout focused on his past, longevity, and aging feet — as far as skating goes, the release came with six tricks packaged into one minute and seven seconds of slo-mo heavy new footy — the Reynolds release push felt more like an Animal Chin-era Powell reissue than the drop days for Ishod’s Nike or Foy’s New Balance. It doesn’t make me feel great about what’s coming next for the industry as a whole.
It’s always good to remember that skating is still pretty new in the grand scheme of things. We haven’t had much opportunity to watch aging pros like Reynolds go gracefully into their elder years, and to be clear, Reynolds’ aging has been about as graceful as it gets, but I would still argue that dropping a personality-backed pro shoe at 46 is, like the sneaker itself, clunkier than intended
And still, it’s hard to fault Reynolds for wanting his name on a New Balance shoe or crafting a sneaker that perfectly cradles his aging arches, and equally hard to fault New Balance considering how well the shoe seems to be selling, but the prolonged idol worship of skating’s early street icons and style gods is starting to feel stale. If one more shoe brand dips its toe into skateboarding’s deep end with the assistance of Gino Iannucci lifestyle footy, so help me god.
As skateboarding ages, the ability to kickflip has truly proven to be the fountain of youth we all hoped it to be, but with so many Peter Pans flying around the industry, the new crop of lost boys feel particularly directionless.
The focus on aging superstars certainly isn’t exclusive to skating. Parallels can be drawn to Hollywood, the Billboard charts, pro sports, and more. It makes sense, too — most of our heroes are active longer than ever before, and the new kids have bad vibes and look up to Twitch streamers. But skating’s entire foundation was, for better or worse, built on a system of vibe checks and balances that starts before puberty. We already have a well-vetted set of next-ups; it’s just hard to trust the industry to provide them the same superstar opportunities.
I’m hopeful that there’s a plan at Adidas to give Lil Dre, Nikolai, Kader, or Zach Saraceno a genuine pro model shoe, but I’m not holding my breath. Why haven’t any of the sportswear brands poached Jahmir from DC? Is a 20-year retro for P-Rod higher on the priority list than making a Yuto pro model or planning the Tanner Burzinskissance? Paul, who is now 40, debuted the Nike P-Rod 1 when he was 20.
I have no doubt that those questions have been asked and answered in marketing meetings, but those same marketing meetings are apparently full of guys who are fucking obsessed with watching Gino push and think 50-year-old Koston is the best person to roll out an ultra-limited, hype-worthy friends and family Jordan 4 colourway, so, y’know.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Reyonlds is great and every Baker board is a wonderful reminder of his contributions to skating, I just worry that focusing too hard on squeezing every last drop of juice from skateboarding’s aging legends will end up neglecting the cultural orchard that produced it. And then what?
Good Friday (for some)
Rank: 9.5
Mood: 🤔💵👟
Things couldn't have gone much better for Chris Joslin. Last Friday, while participating in Street League Skateboarding's "Santa Monica Pier Takeover," which, as the event's name suggests, was located on the Santa Monica Pier and replicated, in diminutive form, the Santa Monica triple set, one of skateboarding's premier proving grounds for those looking to make their name.
Joslin, who has made a career out of jumping down exceptionally large things and is perhaps the best we've ever seen at that particular act, was reasonably considered a favourite to win the event, which would be his first. But things didn't start well for the Cerritos, California native.
After missing his first three trick attempts out of seven, he'd rally to land three of his last four, including a visually unpleasant but technically formidable nollie-inward-heelflip-backside-180 down the triple, to complete a surprising and impressive comeback. An emotional Joslin would thank his late grandmother for the victory, while also making sure to draw attention to the large, unsubtle Lakai Limited Footwear logo on his t-shirt.
Joslin, whose contract with longtime shoe sponsor Etnies wasn't renewed following the sale of Sole Technology, its parent company, last year, used his appearance at SLS to announce his new home at Lakai. That's both savvy marketing and a curious move, considering Lakai was also recently sold and embroiled in controversy after its new owners axed its founders, Mike Carroll and Rick Howard, and the brand's roster of skateboarders followed.
In short order, this version of Lakai-in-name-only announced its rebuild effort, introducing a new team and releasing a video to a mixed reaction online. It's unclear how their effort has fared so far, but Lakai scooping up Joslin and having him win a major contest with their logo pasted large and loud across his chest is certainly better promotion than whatever they've been doing so far.
It would be easy (and fair) to criticize Joslin for aligning himself with a brand that ambles on as a hollowed-out version of its past self, which was already a shadow of its former glory and stumbling toward a dire fate, but he's also a 29-year-old father of two who needs to support his family. If Lakai is willing to pay him money, which allows him to continue skateboarding as a profession, why not take it?
It's an awkward state of affairs, to be sure — during the broadcast, Paul Zitzer noted that Rick Howard was somewhere in attendance, meaning he likely watched the logo of the company he helped created top the podium — but for Joslin, if all you're trying to do is pay your bills and put some more gas into the tank of your career, the rest is just noise.
Visit Estonia, Jerry
Rank: 1
Mood: 🤘🇪🇪🤘
Personally, I think it's awesome that Estonia's tourism bureau paid to bring Jerry Gurney to their country.
Just a quick rant, thanks for humouring me
Rank: 404
Mood: 🤖🔫
“Quite a lot of voices say, ‘You can only train on my content, [if you] first ask’. And I have to say that strikes me as somewhat implausible because these systems train on vast amounts of data.”
“I just don’t know how you go around, asking everyone first. I just don’t see how that would work... if you did it in Britain and no one else did it, you would basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight.”
That quote, which you may have already seen floating around online this week, comes from Facebook's former head of global affairs, Nick Clegg, and is pulled here from The Verge via The Times.
It's a vulgar display of whinging we've seen before from the likes of OpenAI, who framed pushback against their already massive-scale theft of copyrighted material, including a legal victory by Thomson Reuters, as existential in the United States' race for AI dominance against China.
"OpenAI’s models are trained to not replicate works for consumption by the public. Instead, they learn from the works and extract patterns, linguistic structures, and contextual insights," OpenAI claimed. "This means our AI model training aligns with the core objectives of copyright and the fair use doctrine, using existing works to create something wholly new and different without eroding the commercial value of those existing works."
Providing "freedom-focused" recommendations on Trump's plan during a public comment period ending Saturday, OpenAI suggested Thursday that the US should end these court fights by shifting its copyright strategy to promote the AI industry's "freedom to learn." Otherwise, the People's Republic of China (PRC) will likely continue accessing copyrighted data that US companies cannot access, supposedly giving China a leg up "while gaining little in the way of protections for the original IP creators," OpenAI argued.
It takes a sickening level of hubris to claim that your money-bleeding, planet-destroying technology, which was already showing its limitations regardless of this purportedly necessary theft, is so important that it supersedes the rights of every person who has ever created anything.
These large language models and sundry "AI" products, which have been deemed the future of humanity by those looking to cut workforce expenses by using apps instead of people, remain more hype than help, to a dangerous degree. From being consistently incorrect about basic prompts to people becoming dependent on flawed technology, what is the point of any of this beyond trying to corner a market forced into being?
There's ample evidence to show that LLMs often fail to streamline the simple jobs they're tasked with. Is giving them more stolen data going to change that? At what point does the bubble burst? At what point do we push back against these career-dipshits who are, against our will, and the law, pushing this garbage on us (and lobbying governments around the world to make their efforts legal)?
That's without even mentioning that we can do a better job using our own brains to address most, if not all, of the problems these companies claim their tech is providing the answers for. Here's a suggestion: make something actually useful! I even came up with a few ideas off the top of my head that they can use for free:
- Sustainable, scalable source of green energy
- Phone that stops its owner from playing YouTube videos in cafes at full volume
- Measuring tape that doesn't make that horrible sound when it retracts
- Funding for necessary social services by finally paying a fair share of taxes
- Fleshlight that connects to Apple Music and Podcasts
- Cigarette that doesn't kill you and still looks cool when you smoke it
- Dog that never dies
Something to consider: These dummies are ruining everything, including themselves, for "AI."
John Herrman
Reece Rogers
Good thing:
Farran Golding
Another good thing:
Snack
Well, well, well, if it isn't another good thing:
Natalie Porter
More good things! You can pre-order Natalie's book now:
An earlier this week thing: Sophie Yanow whipped up a wonderful comic for the third dispatch from Dirt x Simple Magic's Sensuous Skateboarding series.
Sophie Yanow
A good, tough thing: An illuminating read after watching the Pee-wee as Himself doc series.
Matt Wolf
Until next week… if possible, move your head around in a circle, clockwise and then counterclockwise. Look at the floor, the wall, the ceiling, the other wall. If you're outside, look at the ground, whatever is on your right/left, the sky, whatever is on your left/right. Do this until you begin to feel loose. Not just in your neck, but whatever exists inside of you — consciousness, soul, etc. Move your head around until it becomes meditative, until you're late for a meeting. Until all that's left is you spinning through space.
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 thinks it's a "local book set to make a mark in 2024." The CBC called it "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.
Here’s what Michael Christie, Giller Prize-nominated author of the novels Greenwood and If I Fall, If I Die, had to say about the thing.
“With incisive and heartfelt writing, Cole Nowicki unlocks the source code of the massively influential cultural phenomenon that is Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and finds wonderful Easter-eggs of meaning within. Even non-skaters will be wowed by this examination of youth, community, risk, and authenticity and gain a new appreciation of skateboarding’s massive influence upon our larger culture. This is my new favorite book about skateboarding, which isn’t really about skateboarding — it’s about everything.”
Photo via The Palomino.
