2014 New York Skateboarding Year in Review: 20-16

Photo via Lurker Lou

Part two of our annual countdown series. Part one is here.

20. Marble at the T.F.

Throughout its history, Tompkins obstacles have been wood, steel, rubber, and sometimes even glass. The ability to move these materials without much manpower has been essential to the spot’s transient nature. Only the flat and The Crack™ remain — everything else is just passing through until some green-suited bandit musters up the nerve to remove it.

T.F. culture experienced a shock this summer when a foot-tall, slanted slab of marble mysteriously appeared inside the baseball diamond. It became the first marble obstacle in Tompkins history, and dubbed The Tombstone™. This two-foot-wide piece of rock broke the record once held by the blue rail for the longest-standing loose object of the post-Autumn era. Claims of liquid-nailing it to the ground were abound in May and June, except that was, like, way too much work for anyone to do. The spot was gone as mysteriously as it appeared by the end of the month.

A video posted by . Kevin Tierney (@youngkev) on Jun 6, 2014 at 2:11pm PDT

19. Someone Attempts to Croudsource Jumonji’s Bail

No comment necessary.

#respect

18. The M.N.M.F.T.B. Controversy

2013’s fifth most pivotal moment was someone doing the first ollie over New York City subway tracks. Then, via a comment on said post, we learned that Koki Loaiza was not the first one to complete such an ollie. M.N.M.F.T.B. did it at the Fordham Road stop a year earlier. Being the accredited media institution that we are, we printed a correction in January, observing that given the apparent lack professional media personnel available to M.N.M.F.T.B., it was easy for us to miss this milestone. However, that does not diminish his widely uncredited accomplishment.

Then, one of the principal documentarians behind that now-known-to-be second subway track lambasted us for our celebration of “low fidelity, random, insignificant, or unimpressive” skateboarding. The result was one of the greatest comment threads in this website’s history, and a year spent soul-searching for #significance :'(

Shout out to The Bronx though.

17. The Rebirth of the Bronx Bump-To-Bar, 2014’s Spot For Good People of the Year (S.F.G.P.O.T.Y.)

Photo by Mike O’Meally

(More illustrated examples here.)

The courthouse is a bust, the Harlem green box is long gone, the Bronx bank-to-ledge is seeing decreased visibility, and Houston Street construction is yielding less photogenic spots than in past years. People who are good at skateboarding needed something fresh to check-off tricks on. Videos thus saw a rediscovery of the Bronx auto body bump-to-bar, which otherwise saw the bulk of its coverage in mid-2000s Dobbin Block videos, before the bar got installed.

16. Microscopic but Noticeable Shifts in Rap #musicsupervision Standards

For over a decade now, the northeast-based skateboard media has been adamant about only editing footage to Big L and Wu-Tang songs, remixes of Big L and Wu-Tang songs, and remixes of the remixes to Big L and Wu-Tang songs. They’d insist that we “need to get garbage rap music out of skateboarding” whenever a rap song that’s actually being listened to by normal humans in cars was used in a skateboard clip. Those people can rejoice in the Group Home #musicsupervision spike of 2014 (see #2), but at least more liberal-minded skate video makers are exploring their emotions by way of “Tuesday,” and supplanting Dipset songs with Migos in archetypal #fun edits.

Bonus Mini Top 5 — Best #musicsupervision of 2014
5. Migos – “Peek-A-Boo” in Trevor Colden’s “Welcome to Skate Mental” part. The fact that they went ahead with one of the most absurd songs on the entire mixtape, knowing it would piss off everyone in the Thrasher comments is quite admirable.
4. Chief Keef – “I Don’t Know Them” in T.J, Nakel, Kevin Bradley et al’s “cherry” part. Can’t imagine anything working as well as this did for that part, SMLTalk be damned ;)
3. Don Omar – “Danza Kuduro” in “Medalla.” The #1 least likely song to ever wind up in a skate video.
2. Luther Vandross – “Never Too Much” in the Shorty’s montage from Brick City Street Styles. D.I.Y. clips are pretty low on the rewatchability scale. Except if you throw some Luther in there — regardless of how random it may look on paper — you are good.
1. Gwen Stefani & Eve – “Let Me Blow Your Mind” in Max Palmer’s Paych part #whenthebeatdrops