Caviar came out on December 28, 2010. The week between Christmas and New Year’s is a dark abyss of un-productivity and not responding to e-mails, so it doesn’t really belong to either year. We’ll count it for 2011.
Phil Rodriguez didn’t ruin every skate career based on name brand handrails, or do two of the few remaining regular stance never-been-dones over a picnic table (or skate to a song from a car commercial.) No, he didn’t bring back the noseslide either. But if you’re old fashioned, and judge video parts based on how much they inspire you to go shred new spots and learn new tricks, rather than as benchmarks for the absurdly high level of progression skateboarding reached in a given month, then Phil’s part is better than pretty much everything else released in 2011.
The part manages to be distinctly New York, even without recognizable spots, and completely organic, never “trying” to be weird/different/abstract/pick a word. It somehow makes a noseslide nollie big heel look fitting alongside wallies and firecrackers. If you knew nothing about it, it’d be hard to tell whether it comes from 1997, 2007, or 2017 (the same can be said of other QS favorites.) People might think it’s a New York bias, but this part made us want to leave the house to go skate more than any other in the past year.
Flipmode/Bronze already released a throwaway clip as a preface to a new full Phil Rodriguez part in 2012. Lurker Lou is also working on a video with him for Iron Claw, so there’s more to look forward to in the future.
Boil the Ocean is doing a detailed “Best Parts of 2011” countdown, so you should read that if you want insight on the past 12 months from someone who pays more attention to skateboarding as a whole.
If you simply crave more year-end mania, here are ten video parts that stood out in 2011. One per video. An asterisk denotes that the given part would have been better off edited to Juicy J’s enchanting love ballad, “She Dancin’ Like She Fuckin’.”