Urethane Logic no. 1

selfishly going skate rat marnell on Hockey IV

Urethane logic f.t.s, with all apologies to Cat …

I.

This is a long time coming and there’s lighting.

I waited to watch Hockey IV in the dark and in orbit, b/c there are still videos like albums that pass the Pappademas Test and muscle everything else into the boards — brining the wood, as my sportswriter ghost says — and they deserve to be enjoyed like albums, like with full attention and no outside light to call your attention away, just their glow. And the fog settles in the sulci like Santa Barbara before 11am and behind the eyes without a face the Urethane Logic starts rolling, clickclickclickclickclickclick, you know the sound. And it reminds me of crescent moon scars and Cat Marnell and things feeling free but dangerous, a hyena escape, Victor Hugo’s imprisoned thunderstorm rolling along outside the window, where’s it supposed to be, hot purple forks flying.

Images flash and instead of impatience with the artsy melange — a handplant to kick it off helped — I feel it, driven by the fife and drum, b/c killers know how to score action, right? Skull-faced Boeings and bladed weapons and a burning McDonalds and snatches of skateboarding and soft greyscale illos and portraits like Do’s and Don’ts, (which I admit I miss b/c the it was a safe space to be a bitch ((although we’re better off without it))), fly by. Ends on a field, overcast just how I like it, below a hill topped with castles burning, so I’m thinking about horses. The whole vibe’s Medieval, the metalhead middle schooler font (compliment!) maybe why? The whole thing’s blown out a bit and cold, like a broken window — an aesthetic I enjoy. But basically I’m saying don’t let the opening montage scare you off if you like your skating uncut.

That skating perfectly fits, of course. Slams are few but fucking brutal but there’s somehow no slamsploitation; things get murdered, but there’s technical stuff too. There’s a blend of styles; I know it’s corny but muscular is the best description for John Fitzgerald, which contrasts perfectly with the fast and smooth-as-a-laser-cutter Nik Stain. Waist high 50s and eternally long boardslides get barged, but things get complex and even playful too; see the flips Diego Todd whips around like Taz, or Kevin Rodrigues’ geometry-gouging double wallrides and stump ride, 4 up 4 down.

‘Art school barbarian,’ I call it to everyone I’m stoned txt evangelizing to. And instead of being enraptured I’m ugh sry inspired, the neon on for the first time in a while. So we’re getting stylized too.

I think about my old problematic fav from the pre-medicated days, which I haven’t done in a while. I literally became a book critic (I was really fucking good too, in the embarrassingly florid way fresh writers are; Paste Magazine agreed) as a scheme to ensure a first/first of How to Murder Your Life four years before it was released. I didn’t write for VICE for no reason; I didn’t call this hopefully sporadic feature Urethane Logic for no reason.

I’m ahead of the 20 year cycle — sooo hot. It’s channeling time.

II.

All that starts with a white Thrasher tee which never hangs off my shoulder blades right — a gift for the subs — and a secondhand Gucci necklace that thumps just below my sternum like a second heart, a pair of black ancient adidas running shorts and black socks and low-pro marshmallow Breana Geering Eras that I bought in Buffalo but made my heels bleed at Alix Rice like I got shot by Paris but have been broken into fine house shoes since. Just enough of a purposeful apartment shambles look to get me to do something. A pot of black coffee, lamotrigine, and a green/resin hit from a gifted bowl (I’ve never bought my own) as a French inhaled offering, what escapes carrying a prayer for rain and lightning b/c I waited until the day before publishing for that exact chance. Into my nose, into the lungs.

Ha!, and drops run down the siding.

I light a rosemary & thyme candle white as cut, ‘hand poured in Toronto.’

I had a Hockey once, first deck I got from Uprise. The one w/the highlighter background and the black&white strips of some guy who resembles the Beyonder (what if it is?) and I was fucking excited, because it was time for something new and I wanted to support the shop. The guy gripped it for me — I fucking hate gripping boards; beer and/or a bowl for whoever’s down to do it for me — and left a nice top sheet halo, that satisfying curve-kissing-curve like when your toecap is in the pocket.

She had the bull shark nose, squared off like a boxer, and the punchy disposition to match. We never got along, every ollie awkward, every fakie front shuv off, although with satisfying pop. In retrospect, I blame the concave, b/c it turns out I like ‘em flatter. And she was very good at my favorite trick, gotta thank her for dialing the dump trucks in. Now she’s a carpet board, where that steepness and I better agree.

Anyway, I didn’t love the board, but it was fun to see it in Shocking Moments Caught on Video which is like one of my favorite parts of all time. Opening trick, massive back smith in the black Nikes. I fucking love Joseph Campos and his being gone — it’s Violet now — is really the only disappointing thing. IV fucking thrives post break-up, so the only one missing out is me.

III.

Let’s talk symbology, b/c I’m a washed fine art critic, remember?, as seen in Frieze. The Nike SB Zoom Blazer Mid in black/white/white/white is a symbol, one which is a personal icon for me much as the grey/red Double E and the Accel — in Penny Brown, please — before it.

I skate those shoes but I’ll never touch that colorway, b/c honestly I don’t rip near hard enough. Go back and look, look at some of the heaviest hammers dropped by SB riders and tell me you don’t notice them, black/white/white/white. Maybe it’s bias or a logical fallacy, but hand to god they’re there more often that not, or like it really feels they are. They’re a symbol for something bone-rattling that will forever be beyond my reach, and I like them that way. Besides, my next pair are Intimidator-inspired like the Monte Carlo I shamelessly love.

Let’s talk ‘art’ too. I made collages to go with this. I was going for fake mag ads, a marketing rollout for the vid that doesn’t exist insofar as I can tell — and I obsess over magazines, they’re my favorite visual art form, not to copy Cat, so I hope I’d know what from. I’m aware they don’t match Hockey’s real aesthetic and promise that’s by design.

98% of my material comes from a complete, shrink-wrapped-when-I-got-it run of Transworld Skateboarding, every ish in ‘08. The purple lighting has been waiting patiently, because I didn’t want to waste it. It’s from a Terrell Robinson Darkstar ad, speaking of sketch-metal medieval. One of the best things about collage — one of my favorite things — is when the materials tell you they’re up. It’s best to wait for these things; make something else in the meantime. I’ve got an Omar Hassan head wound smiling like the Cheshire Cat waiting in the wings.

But obviously Hockey didn’t exist in 2008, so I cannibalized some Thrashers, which I hesitated on. But look, these guys are putting their bones on the line, right?, so it seemed ekphrastic to take the bone folder to these. Of all my tools, those are my favorite; so fucking cool sounding, so plain, somewhat macabre, so useful for softening the spine and then pulling a page clean like you’re fucking Sub-Zero.

Anyway the Urethan Logic extended to an Exacto first.

Honestly I think they’re better than the writing they were meant to accessorize. Which is dope.

IV.

Ok here’s where I get back to the skating and try and tie this all together and the secret is Ben Kadow. He doesn’t close — honors go to Stain — but he does loosely tie this whole thing together, b/c I was thinking about Marnell due to him. It’s an odd association, to be sure; famously messy beauty editor and pro skater. But there’s parallels, even if I’m the only one that sees them (which I’m hopefully not).

I think a huge key is the whole Downtown Thing; I don’t know if it makes sense, but in Manhattan its Lower over Upper and East over West and Kadow comes crashing into a lot of other skating like Leah McSweeney did RHONY, something downtown about it, confident and off kilter and fashionable but like … hard edged? Like those metal-capped curbs. And funny, fucking funny, as he told O’Dell.

Kadow’s skating is funny like in the way getting hit by an ambulance is funny, or robbing a convenience store just to turn around, eyes on the cashier, and run smack! into the doorframe, right into your height. Funny like keeping a switch frontside flip that’d give purists a stroke but is perfectly shambolic. He skates with the languid liquid violence of a bullwhip or a boomslang, almost apathetic at the moment of attack until pop! he smashes a front 50 on the fucking top rope and the feeling comes out. That’s something of a signature trick to my mind, by the way, and one that I think does a fine job of encapsulating what’s special here: it’s among the first and simplest tricks most skaters learn, and its elevated — in this case, literally — by where and most importantly how he applies it. It’s like the whole world is brought to heel beneath those two trucks. He’s charging at all times, right into the stairs, right into the ground; he’s wrenching a nollie and manny bonking a pile of trash.

And of course he ends with one of those signature front 50s on a rail whose use is impossible to divine and when I watch it a hot purple fork of lightning splinters behind him just as he mugs sitcom-style to the camera after the make and I’m very high and the neon comes on for a little bit and it’s fucking nice, dude.

Literally lightning struck — like literally, sluts.