Ramp News

New to the Hiawatha, the once angle-ironed vert wall gets pool coped and recycled skateboard tiled.

With winter seemingly coming to an end, things are getting back to normal:

First time downtown this season and the first guy I see skating is Sissi at the rainbow banks. #allisrightinmpls

— tj moran (@spacerased) March 30, 2014

Speaking of winter's hopeful demise, here's one last bit of #HQ foote, inspiration for future rainy days.

Longfield Out of Nowhere

To wit: envy of another's bag of tricks usually boils down to foreignness and difficulty. Adam Longfield gives trick envy in bushels, mainly of the frontside 360/heelflip kind. It's always a treat when clips like this pop up because Longfield is not a dude who pops up with a clip in every video. The vintage of this 1:30 means little, as I'm sure I've seen only a handful of it.

Assorted Feelings

"He's not good-looking, he's beautiful."

— Mike Munzenrider (@mmunzenrider) March 22, 2014

Oh gosh that was Chloe Sevigny.

— Mike Munzenrider (@mmunzenrider) March 22, 2014

Supreme video is giving me body issues.

— Mike Munzenrider (@mmunzenrider) March 22, 2014

@mmunzenrider dylan and Alex skating to that inxs song is the sickest thing ever. So soft.

— spencer:( (@wookienuts666) March 22, 2014

@wookienuts666 yet so model blazingly hard.

— Mike Munzenrider (@mmunzenrider) March 22, 2014

All the chicks in "cherry" look 90's so there's that going for them and the video too.

— Mike Munzenrider (@mmunzenrider) March 23, 2014

Album art really made it a foregone conclusion, I see now. pic.twitter.com/mnC0xJ5sUg

— Mike Munzenrider (@mmunzenrider) March 23, 2014

A way to self-plagiarize that's transparent--"cherry" (the Supreme Video) got me pretty good and geeked this weekend. Having spoken to dudes, reactions have ranged from "It's good for what it is," to my own, tempering reaction of "It's imperfect, but not that imperfect, and it's wholly what it is supposed to be." This is high ad and art, success in selling the feeling; this is pretty succinct:

Kids 2: Cherry

— 若いベース神 (@RE1000) March 21, 2014

I watched "cherry" early Saturday morning and went into the day with slightly dreamy perception, that feeling of leaving the theater and reentering the world. Chalk it up to winter's last throes and a need for sun and city, the successful transfer of the feeling. The skating is all there. Strobeck made it all happen. Top three video of the year, probably.

Henry And The End Of History

Good writing about skateboarding has been leaked onto the World Wide Web. Happy belated 25th birthday, WWW.

Boil The Ocean is a bit perturbed by Ronnie Creager's exit from Blind, introducing the concept of a 1990's Doomsday Clock. The choicest of cuts:

Guy Mariano’s comeback for the Lakai video set the clock back by a full ten minutes, the largest increment on record, igniting controversy among some pundits who claimed the trick selection in fact merited moving the minute hand closer to midnight and others who argued for setting it back by as much as an hour on general principal.

The clock has proven a magnet for criticism over the years, with some arguing that the 1990s are destined to live on forever in the hearts of those who truly believe, and others who maintain that the 1990s ended at the stroke of midnight on Jan. 1, 2000, an event knowed to some as ‘Y2K.’

Could Henry Sanchez' brief comeback tour be seen as a momentary "End of History," which could have propelled skateboarding into a perpetual state of 1990s-ness? We'll never know.

Elsewhere, Jenkem has a Kyle Beachy essay in which he ruminates about why we Pretend We Haven't Grown. It's on pain and suffering and how skateboarding is probably more akin to the universe than a god. At least that was my reading. A choice cut:

This is the secret treasure hidden inside of our pursuit of skateboarding. The activity is so terrible for us, and cares about us so little, that we can’t possibly do it without loving it. Which means that even the ugliest and biggest assholes in our midst are capable of love.

And whether we admit it or not, we seem to know this by now. Six decades in and skateboarders have learned a thing or two. We still bicker but we can’t pretend we haven’t grown. In 2014 we seem to be skewing closer and closer to that utopia of suum cuique pulchrum est: to each his own is beautiful.

There's a worthwhile tangent in there about the power of words and, based upon that tangent, the first (and only, as of this writing) comment on the essay is the hot skate take to end all, beautiful in its precision and predictability.
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Program note: I interviewed Robbie Brockel for Red Bull, right here.

Summit, Briefly

I never made it to the Summit park, too bad, because of the looks of that bowl, but now it's all gone. Places beget scenes and scenes make memories. An autopsy reveals that a lot of this footage (presumably) happened a bit ago. Looked fun.

Please Stand By