
The Five Best Tricks That Have to Do With Impossibles in the New Dylan Rieder Gravis Video:
5. The impossible to 5050 down the hubba ledge is a maneuver that will solidify the resurgence of impossibles within modern skateboarding to a more absurd height than ever previously imagined, granting it the sort of ubiquity that coincides with the 360 flip or the nollie flip. Only time will tell how long it takes for east coast “trendsetters” to adopt this trick, and grant it permanent residency in the canon of previously neglected tricks (the backside 360, the no comply, etc., thanks Gino.)
4. The impossible to nose manual down the low hubba ledge, that could easily be straight out the nineties if not for the distinctly post-millennial skateboard fashion at hand and fancy HD camera. Give him some baggy chinos, a XL tee, and film it with a Hi-8 and see how well it fits.
3. The impossible tailgrab. I previously would have never thought that such a maneuver could look appealing to the eye, especially since grabs on street are the most unnecessary things known to skateboarding, right up there with doing a no-comply to revert your stance in the middle of a line, but there are exceptions to this rule. (Another major exception is Benjamin Nazario’s kickflip backside grab down the FedEx six-stair in 2002.)
2. Angle two of the impossible over the Seaport Bench.
1. Angle one of the impossible over the Seaport Bench. My policy on the use of slow motion is that it is absolutely useless, unless it makes it easier to see the trick at hand, i.e. if it is difficult to understand what trick is being done without slowing down the movements onscreen. Mouse barely had any slow motion, therefore, its overall usage is unnecessary. Not only is it unnecessary, it’s stupid. It is just that the majority of videomakers (skate-video-makers are not filmmakers, and skate videos are not films, sorry) have the little kids filming their friends convinced otherwise. This particular trick made absolutely no sense when Bill Strobeck dropped it into one of his B&W montages a while back because it went by so fast. The slowing down of things enables us to see the nuances of the trick in question. It is so absurd that it tends to slip everyone’s mind when discussing the best tricks done at Seaport (P-Rod’s switch back tail, Matt Miller’s switch back lip, Pudwill’s flip back smith, and if you’re as stylistically inclined as you should be, Anthony Correa’s most-tweaked-backside-smith-grind-of-all-time from Peep This.) Seeing it in the beloved slow motion shed some light on the otherwise illogical feat at hand.
But then again, maybe that’s because we’ve all been to that spot, and have never seen any of the others ones in person, so those could all be just as crazy.
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