MUTT vs. BULLDOG

Yet another skating bulldog. I just don't get it.

Edited out the "pet psychic", a human-weary but sk8-dog-curious Rodney gets down (and jacked) with mans best friend. Never seen a dog carve before.

BACKSIDE STRAIGHT JACKET HEAD PLANT REVERT.

I distinctly remember seeing this when I rented the painstakingly long Savanah Slamma VHS tape from the video store on Wheaton Way. Same place I rented Animal Chin and got immediately hooked for life.

Hands down one of the best contest runs ever, second only to Neil Blender's run where he had a can of spray paint in his pants of which he used to paint a wall mid-run. Honorary mention should also go to Dan Drehobl's oddly-similar (perhaps an homage) human crash test dummy run circa '93 in...Philly? (Seen long ago in a 411, #6 or 7.)

They don't make 'em like that anymore.

p.s. If you haven't checked out Grosso's Loveletter's to Skateboarding, you're missing out.

OLD WORLD ORDER

Banger of a video (Manolo's mixtapes are the illest) for the weekend: World Park Mixtape

To this day, World Park, which I only went to once, remains one of my favorite skate parks ever. It was nestled in a shitty warehouse in what I think was Lawndale, just between Hawthorne and North Redondo. Private to Rocco team players and various friends of the teams, it was an unsupervised den of inequity/hell. And it saw not only the hellfire wrath of kids without adults (but with spare cash), but also some of the most progressive skating in the early 90's tech boom. Whenever this park showed up in a video part I got really hyped. It was all about the noise. That little warehouse was a huge acoustic drum. The clanking of the metal lips on the ramps, the hollow wooden boxes echoed when wheels touched down, the banshee wails reverberating in the rafters whenever a trick was landed....it enhanced what was already really good footage -usually something you hadn't seen before.

When I went there, I met Daewon Song for the first time, as he was our chaperone for the night. I'm sure I geeked it, but I do remember enjoying the park to its fullest, skating until late in the morning. And I of course remember every single thing he did there that night. Blunts on the hip spine (4" worth of wood/coping), mach 3 tailslides to heelflip out across the box, his usual barrage of manuals, 360 flip fakies on wood laying against the wall almost vertically, and showing us how he could kickflip with his foot in the extreme heelflip position. He also challenged any of us to try and "take him down." Don't you always wrestle before you skate?

That building will never Rest In Peace after what it went through at the expense of Steve Rocco and his band of misfit toys. Small wheels, flip your board, tricks for cash, kick a hole in the door, climb the walls, howl at the moon, claim to be the King of the Wild Things.

WHY DO YOU RIDE THE SKATEBOARD JOHNNY????

Man the Cap'n is looking haggard. But I think that was par for the course. His hair is the exact shape as Tony's helmet. I used to dig the Kangaroo.

VELOCITY vs. INERTIA

Any downhilling on video is good video. Eating shit, well, reality. Usually hilarious. You live on to ride another day. There was a kid in my part of town that became a vegetable by downhilling. But he didn't have any practice! Crazy kids.

WOODWORK

Where are all these amazing fuckers coming from??? Stumbled upon this randomly on the interwebs. Quick footed ninja kid, good loosey-goosey yet somehow solid style, Mark Sucio. Amazing trick selection, reverts everything the wrong way, big or small looks to have the same (none) impact on him. Honorable (or Questionable) mentions in this corner are the gap to front board to fakie at the SF Library, nollie cab front board a rail, the back tail to over gap-to-3 stair at Pulaski Park (did I get that right?), ssbsnb a rail, the ridonculous ender...oh, just goddamn everything. I like the fact that he does lots of runs. Oh, and the rarest trick in his part, reading a book.

THE WHEELS ARE ON THE GROUND!

 This song will perseverate in my brain until I am dead. Love the stunt girl tick-tacking around and around and around....

THE RESULTS ARE IN...

BEST OF 2011

BEST TRICK: 

James Hardy, frontside 180 to switch backside 50-50 the Clipper. This is gnarly. I always loved this trick, evur since da Gonz...

BEST PART:

This is a tie, so I'm just linking to Youtube. No posting here. (takes too damn long.)

a. Anything . by . Daewon.

b. Torey Pudwell's Big Bang 

c. Alex Perelson, Real Since Day One (Sorry, you gotta find this on your own. Just think 540 body jar.)

BEST PHOTO:

Goin' artsy on this one. Jack Sabback is rad. 

FAVORITE PART:

While living in L.A., the beige plastic school yard picnic tables were the uber bench. In the 90's, it was quite popular to do flip tricks over objects on flat. The plastic benches were hard enough to pop a good flip trick over. But if you could do something on, up or over a table on flat, that was about as good as it got. Even ollieing them was a struggle. And everyone knew exactly how big they were, so it was a (gold?) standard ruler for Big Pop. Jeremy Wray was the first to have a run with 2 flippies in a row (heel and back heel), and the only, for a long time.

So this is part nostalgia, and part recognition. You rarely see the tables anymore. Bryan Herman comes thru, pays his respect to the 90's, and kills tables for ever. And makes it look easy. Why bother now? Sort of like Tom Penny "shutting down" the chain banks in SD. I love that it's just an intro too. And Tom Waits is the icing. Thanks Herman.

I ONLY WANTED TO SEE YOU SKATING IN THE PURPLE RAIN...

Aside from the cost of ruined gear, skating in the rain is underrated.