This article about the lifecycle of tricks in skateboarding really brought back memories for me. It heavily references the early nineties, the period I was most active in skateboarding. As noted in the piece, it was a time of big pants and small wheels. Lucas Wiesenthal, who wrote the piece, focuses on a few particular tricks, one of which is the pressure flip. Wiesenthal relates how quickly tricks came into vogue and how, just as quickly, they went out.
The skate video that first brought jazz into my consciousness in a very real way was Stereo Skateboards A Visual Sound. After seeing the movie, I started wearing brown dickies and buying John Coltrane CDs. Not everyone in the skateboarding community was into the film, with it’s mixture of black and white stills and footage recorded on Super 8. I was smitten with the aesthetic, though. It was an acknowledgement of something that I had always thought — skateboarding was just as much art as sport. To this day I can’t listen to fast, post-bop jazz without wanting to skate.
A fellow microblogger has been posting videos of himself freestyle skateboarding and it has reminded me of how artistic the form can be. One of my favorite freestylers is the Rodney Mullen-influenced Japanese skater Isamu Yamamoto. Yamamoto is sponsored by Powell Peralta (yep, that Powell Peralta). Looking for his videos on the Powell site led me to another amazing freestyler, Kilian Martin.