Cool Marketing Trick | Simply Ranked
Plus: Jamie Foy is your SOTY, Lakai counts down, good/weird gifts, a necessary evil, "Triple or Nothing," and more.
The definitive weekly ranking and analysis of all the skateboarding and other things online that I cannot stop consuming and how it makes me feel, personally.
FOTY
Rank: 1
Mood: 🏆
In the end, and if we're being honest with ourselves, it couldn't have gone any other way. Over the weekend, Jamie Foy was "surprised" with his second Skater of the Year award, first taking home the prize in 2017 and now 2024. Skateboarding at that high a level for the last seven years is a different kind of impressive. As I often repeat here, to be good is one thing, but to be consistently good is another, and that's what Foy is. He's also consistently improving. His technical abilities have always been absurd, but over the last few years, he's been pushing it with the best of them.
Is it a bit anticlimactic for Foy to take it again? Sure. Many of us, including myself, assumed he would win months back. We got a little bit of a horse race with Elijah Berle and Braden Hoban's late surges, but it was never really in question. Could Didrik Gallasso have won? There was a case. I wanted it to happen. But that's okay. It's all made up anyway. You can give yourself SOTY if you like. It's just nice to have something to talk about. And hey, we all got to watch a lot of quality skateboarding, so we're all winners if you really think about it.
Cool Marketing Trick
Rank: 31
Mood: 🤦
It's a bold move for the new owners of Lakai Limited Footwear to, in the aftermath of their thoroughly embarrassing public pillorying at the hands of the skateboarding community who have shown them nothing but outrage and contempt after promising to retain and promote the legacy shoe company's workforce and skate team only to quickly axe them all, to then update Lakai's "team" page (which was briefly taken down following the acquisition and shitstorm), with a countdown clock teasing the reveal of, well, a new team.
It's unclear who greenlit this, but the most public-facing target of disdain throughout this saga has been Marc Roca, the Spanish businessman behind the takeover, who assumed the role of CEO and whose LinkedIn bio reads simply "Turnarounds."
I'm no businessman, and I certainly don't, as Roca's venture Inversal does, "find high-potential distressed e-commerce brands... acquire and perform a cost-cutting turnaround to each distressed brand, and make sure lenders are paid accordingly," but I imagine it'll be pretty hard to right an already ailing Lakai after you've alienated the core skateboarding community to such a degree that even Mike Mo is scoring off you.
While there have been rumblings about who will be running this new skate program and who might be on it, nothing has been made public (gotta wait until January 31, 2025, fuckers!). Perhaps this speaks to the state of the skateboarding industry that, one assumes, high-calibre skateboarders would even consider accepting product from this hollowed-out version of Lakai. As it stands, the brand is toxic; to rep them is to put a stain on your career, akin to the zombie Blueprint Skateboards in the early 2010s. As Mike Munzenrider put it on Bluesky, "We need a term for skaters who cling to the wreckage of these brands after the actual team has been kicked off … it’d be pretty close to 'scabs,' tho that isn’t quite right."
Besides all of that, I've got to admit that a countdown clock is a great gimmick. An underutilized Cool Marketing Trick.
Cocksure
Rank: 1
Mood: 🐓
If you come from a family that celebrates Christmas, or at least the commercial driver of the season, which is gift buying and gift giving, then you are likely familiar with what you're about to experience next week: some weird presents.
Before going any further, I should acknowledge that criticizing a gift that someone you love has given you out of the goodness of their heart, wallet, and in celebration of the birth of their lord and saviour is a jerk thing to do. However, sometimes you receive something so far afield from your general tastes and interests that you are forced to question who you are and how you present yourself to the world.
My dear mother is the champ of weird Christmas gifts. One year I received in the mail a box of items that could have only been procured from some sort of wandering prank merchant, as they included a Chinese finger trap and a jar containing an ill-defined viscous substance whose entire purpose was to stick your fingers into to elicit farting sounds. She once gifted me a heavy steel wall-mounted coat rack and a much larger wooden wall-mounted coat rack that doubles as a shelf a few years later, despite my apartment having ample closets and hangers. Santa-themed oven mitts? Yep. A birdcall that sounds more like the grinding gears of an old Chevy? Oh yeah.
While puzzling and disparate, these gifts all have their charm. But none compete with or have grown on me in the way this one has:
Why my mother would think to get me (and my brother!) a stylized portrait of a rooster from a local artisan is unclear, but what has become apparent is how much I enjoy it. While it doesn't hang on any readily visible walls in my apartment for obvious aesthetic reasons, I have placed it on the shelf of the wooden wall-mounted coat rack, which I installed in my large storage closet. A closet that I open multiple times per day to retrieve my bag or bike, squish a piece of cardboard into the recycling, or find some item I've placed or misplaced. And each time I slide open that door, the rooster is looking back.
This daily confrontation is always a small delight and an immediate, bewildered prompt — why this? Why? What was it that my mother saw in these cocks and thought, this sure reminds me of my boys? Whatever it was, it was worth it, and I look forward to whatever is next. I'd guess either a bone saw or a beanbag chair.
Necessary evil
Rank: ♾️
Mood: 🧘♀️
I've spent a lot of time in this newsletter dumping on Primitive Skateboards' proclivity for horrible, no-good collabs. At the beginning of December, I likened Primitive's truly awful offering with the movie Elf to human excrement. That is a sentiment I stand by. However, while we don't know if the brand's tortured series of collaborations is a key financial driver, they must do alright since the company keeps churning them out. And if that's the case and they're what allow Primitive to continue producing solid-to-great videos like this week's WILDFIRE, I may have to come to terms with the fact that Primitive x Sriracha is a necessary evil.
Speaking of good videos
Rank: 1
Mood: 💌
On Tuesday, Jeff Cecere uploaded "Triple or Nothing" to his YouTube channel. In the vein of his previous titles, This is a Window and Mind How You Go, "Triple or Nothing" demonstrates the power of not just a well-crafted video but one put together with vision and intent. Here, however, Cecere is operating on another level.
Dedicated to the late Max Maffucci, who has the first full section and is shown in raw b-roll and stylized interstitials throughout, you can feel what Maffucci meant to Cecere and the rest of the crew. "Triple or Nothing" is a tribute to their friend and the thing they — and many of us — love to do together. Going out and skateboarding, whether you're filming a video or not, is an exercise in friendship.
Looking for spots, skating spots, struggling at spots, succeeding at spots — those are indelible human experiences that happen best with one another. Skateboarding is communal. What matters more, getting the trick or having fun with the people you like and love? Getting a clip is gravy.
"Triple or Nothing" isn't necessarily mournful, but the subdued, almost contemplative soundtrack and extended cuts of friends embracing, smiling, laughing, and simply being among each other certainly remind us of how important that all is. Not just the skateboarding but everything around it. That comes with it. Skateboarding is the excuse. A facilitator. The playground we fool around on.
While that emotion is in the foreground, the skateboarding is there, too, and it packs an equal wallop. From Jace Detomasso's shocking opener to Maffucci's smooth, carefully constructed lines, Zac Gavin's head-scratching ability to ride up walls, and Salomon Cardenas Jr's powerful and creative finishing sequences, there is much to like and gawk and rewind over. "Triple or Nothing" is a love letter to a friend and friendship as a whole — and sometimes your friends are just really good at skateboarding.
Something to consider:
Mohammed R. Mhawish
Good thing:
Natalie Porter
Another good thing: Barrow is back, baby.
A good pre-order thing: You can pre-order Maen Hammad's Landing now.
Landing by Maen Hammad explores the lives of Palestinian skateboarders in the occupied West Bank as they navigate the layered realities of Israeli settler-colonial domination. The book offers a thesis on skateboarding as a form of resistance to a headspace of violence. Documented between 2015 and 2022, it captures the fleeting moments of escape and the indomitable spirit of skateboarding. Through an interpretive dance of imagery and text the book presents a powerful counter-narrative—a taste of the Palestinian refusal to succumb.
A depressing but not surprising thing:
Liz Pelly
A small town thing:
Nora Loreto
A "the carceral system should be abolished, but..." thing
Until next week… this, for some, is a season of merriment and joy. Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la. Whether you subscribe to that or not, I wish you warmth and love as the days grow cold. Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la.
Laser Quit Smoking Massage
NEWEST PRESS
--------------------------------
My new collection of essays is available now. I think you might like it. The Edmonton Journal thinks it's a "local book set to make a mark in 2024." The CBC called it "quirky yet insightful." lol.
Book cover by Hiller Goodspeed.
Right, Down + Circle
ECW PRESS
--------------------------------
I wrote a book about the history and cultural impact of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater that you can find at your local bookshop or order online now. I think you might like this one, too.
Here’s what Michael Christie, Giller Prize-nominated author of the novels Greenwood and If I Fall, If I Die, had to say about the thing.
“With incisive and heartfelt writing, Cole Nowicki unlocks the source code of the massively influential cultural phenomenon that is Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and finds wonderful Easter-eggs of meaning within. Even non-skaters will be wowed by this examination of youth, community, risk, and authenticity and gain a new appreciation of skateboarding’s massive influence upon our larger culture. This is my new favorite book about skateboarding, which isn’t really about skateboarding — it’s about everything.”
Photo via The Palomino.
