the Four: August '24
Your curated list of my fav skate vids last month
Four the Slvts
August 2024
Do you fuck with skate videos? Like really fuck with them, like like-like them? From the glossy creations of multinational money fonts to shops, cliques, and crews; across continents and around your corner; across generations and terrains? Do you enjoy them raw, uncut, the percussion of pop and pregnant clickclickclickclickclicks of moments being born and the pitched hum of four-wheeled victory riding away, pure fishscale?
Then you, dear reader, may be a slut for skate vids, and you have found a fellow reveler here. This is Four the Slvts, i.e., what happens when a washed art critic and aimless writer gets a new grip and gets weird on their favorite thing and decides to proselytize. I’m always watching these things and love to nerd out on them, so I wanted to share what I’m into with you. Quick note on the name: it’s my hype phase when I need a lil energy for a trick, born of a cheap clamato michelada morning on the shores of Seneca Lake and inspired by my favorite clip of all time from the indomitable Lizard King. It’s also a cheap pun and a clarion call for people as obsessed as me. Shout out to Luca for my logo!
(And this may be the beginning, for good or for ill; the vision for the future is not only these capsules but articles — interviews, profiles, embeds, artist galleries, stupid trick tips done old school prose style, basically something more like a zine ((and maybe one day not even all by me, so don’t worry if my coked out stream of consciousness thing (((real VICE commenter description))) doesn’t do it for you)) — but quite frankly I can’t do that for free, so I need to hook some of y’all first.)
Every month will come a curated list of releases; not necessarily the best releases, or the most anticipated releases, or the buzziest releases, but releases meeting one holy criteria: that I toootally think you need to check these out. So below goes, arranged in the order I randomly chose …
Four the Slvts: August ‘24
So much for Will Miles, Johnny Wilson, and Ant Travis to live up to, carrying a conglomerate-cum-cult that against all odds found acceptance in the scene … and worth every moment of their Herculean labor. For a brief idea of what exactly we’re dealing with, Four Down Deity, Black Nike Butcher, He-Who-Flies-From Roofs Joseph Campos goes off in here, his handful of tricks – and who can be upset at the limited appearances, considering all the moments caught on tape already? — enough to bring the curtains down with perhaps the most suicidal ride on grind of all time … and that’s only intermission. Quickstrike is a planetarium’s worth of stars — selected highlights including Durao making ollie souths safe for me (fuck your Scientology-defined ‘real trick’ list, btw, go clear the fuck away from me); Limosines pulling up to pop off, a luxury ride with a spider inside; Olympians unleashed upon the streets to devour where they belong, where they are free, no judges, doing it for the un-ticketed crowds and the disciples de la rue – culminating in the Euro contingent crushing it with slack-limbed steez all while running flood pants for the hammer rain. Fucking Deedz!
I fucking love a clique vid. Something which calls to mind the crews with which we used to ride, or maybe still do; perhaps it is a function of when I began in the early aughts, but putting tricks to film and score — even when they’re objectively JV as fuck, b/c I’m definitely the worst actually-trying skater you know — is still among my favorite things, an act of creation of its own. And so it is that C’mon Yo captures not only that essence, but also what else makes the crew vid the idiosyncratic source of pure joy … especially one from an unsung scene, with rarely seen spots and local flavor, which in this case is Boh and bluntsmoke. Gang International are hard-shelled skaters with their claws firmly clinched around the Crab Capital, so deeply Baltimore they get literally swallowed by their city. And Yoo Sun Shin’s pop-gospel closer is especially charming.
Let’s hear it for the fucking full lengths!, the kinds with production values and a vibe — in this case, Dutch Euro Caper, as black skullies and a bank robbing van give way to black and white and that delightfully continental vibe, the kind not limited to Catalonia. YMMV, but I’m a fan of the grayscale as broadly deployed here; a soupcon of Cherry is exactly to my taste, and so much the better when the rippers are, to me at least, relatively unknown.
Fucking hate if one must, but the mixture of styles and skill levels in a video like The Pit — a fledging effort from a small wheel company, cooking in the Texas sun and field dressing the Land of the Longhorns — is always inspiration for me. Here’s some riders unafraid to get grabs on, to hit transitions (including those in the street, always close to my heart and a surefire way, along with four downs, to get a spot in the Four) with a fried trick selection that — excuse the cliché — keeps Austin weird. I’m a noted ATX hater and I fully put that aside. There’s Instagram sensation Marissa Martinez fresh from Venice, ditch dives galore, and even a handrail hippy jumping flash appearance from impossible impresario Jamie Sedo.
honorable mentions
daniel wheatley for blanket, ‘soul crusher’
UCSB skate club, ‘report card’
david letho/ACE trucks, ‘broke’
jared cleland/creature, ‘burn the flames’
devin bagnoli/techne, ‘diablo short’
black label, ‘light the match’
That’s it for this incredibly late selection of August’s awesome offers. Going forward I hope to do these in a more timely manner, but depression is notably a bitch and it took a while to wake up. See you in September, go fucking watch these. And if you see me aroud we gotta talk about that no-regard-for-human-life ride on.
-BDZ