Of existence?
The SLAP messageboards are down, Jaakko Ojanen and Josh McLaughlin are up, Vincent Alvarez desecrates a barrier, squeezing 33 minutes out of one, 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.
Of existence?
Rank: 2001
Mood: 🪦?
At the time of publication, and for about the last week, the SLAP messageboards have been down. Stuck in maintenance mode, decades worth of news, rumours, shitposting, slander, appreciation, inside jokes, serious and cynical debate, and online camaraderie sit in purgatory. Such is the nature of the internet, a thing we like to hold as permanent in our minds but is instead exceptionally fickle and fragile.
As a Pew research paper from last year underscores, "38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later." According to the earliest captures available in the Internet Archive, SLAP's messageboards go back to 2001.
It is a feat that they have lasted this long. SLAP Magazine went out of print in 2008, yet its digital remnants — the creation of John Trippe — have remained for nearly a quarter century, thanks in part to the largess of High Speed Productions and generations of volunteer administrators who keep the site functional. Over that time, the messageboards have continued to be one of the most vital veins of information sharing in skateboarding. Whether it's gossip around new videos and roster changes or freewheeling conversations about anything remotely skateboarding-related, even the serious subjects that most outlets steer clear of, someone will be posting about it on SLAP.
The messageboards are not for everyone. "Hating" on things is often its base functionality, as one admin would tell Jenkem in 2017 while explaining their username.
I sorta fell off for a year and then got back on in 2006 and went with the name HATE! It came from Peter Bagge’s 90s comic “HATE” sometimes seen with an “!” in the title, and thought the word “hate” also meshed well with what everyone likes/dislikes about SLAP—hating everything.
At times — or at all times, depending on who you ask and especially if they've faced SLAP's ire — that hating turned the messageboards into a toxic swamp, uninviting and aggressive toward the uninitiated, as well as women, the LGBTQ+ community, and anyone deemed as having "kooked" it, whether deserved or not. It is still a place for rampant, senseless trolling, a hallmark of any anonymous forum, though the mood and moderation have seemed to improve in recent years. To that end, I've witnessed the SLAP community tell bigoted posters to both get fucked and get them to a place of understanding as to why their bigotry is harmful — the occasional magic of the anonymous internet.
During the "Does Skateboarding Need Journalism?" panel at this year's Slow Impact, someone in the audience asked the panel what role the SLAP messageboards serve in the skate media landscape. I said something to the effect that the messageboards fill a void left by traditional media. They are the space where skateboarders from all over the world come to learn and talk about skateboarding in a way that doesn't happen elsewhere. But it is also a void in itself. A place where facts are often superseded by opinion and where rumours are allowed to fester. Sometimes for good, often not.
It's difficult to say how much of an effect the SLAP messageboards have had on the skateboarding industry, but the industry certainly pays attention to them. Some figureheads like Jamie Thomas, Josh Kalis, and Jason Rothmeyer even pop in and post, sometimes to defend themselves, dispel rumours, tease projects, or whatever else to varying degrees of success. Why would they subject themselves to the anonymous hordes? I'd surmise it's because they understand that if you're lurking and posting on SLAP, a forum that still looks and functions like it was made in 2001 — because it was — you genuinely care about skateboarding, meaning that posting there is as good as any press release service.
The SLAP messageboards and its users have been around so long and have such a history that they've even developed a shared language whose etymology can most often be traced back to typos:
"Spanley" = Kevin "Spanky" Long
"of" = someone getting kicked "off" a company's team roster.
That's what happens when you spend enough time with people who have shared interests in the way SLAP users do. It's a memetic, evolutionary tic of community. Even myself, primarily a lurker and only an occasional poster, find SLAP's quirks of language slipping into my own.
To be clear, we don't know if SLAP is officially of existence or why the site is down. I reached out to a couple of folks from High Speed Productions but haven't heard anything substantive back. In any other circumstance, I'd visit SLAP to find out what was happening, which, if this is it, is a fitting legacy.
Less impact but more impactful
Rank: 1
Mood: 🪣
This isn't to say that Jaakko Ojanen and Josh McLaughlin weren't "creative" skateboarders in the past; they certainly were, but with their most recent efforts, Ojanen's It's Better? video part for Free Skate Mag and McLaughlin's Venture Part, we get to see the furthest evolution of that quality. They sniff out new angles on old spots and fresh approaches on untouched ones, leaving with tricks that straddle the various bucketed categories we prefer to use: tech, creative, gnarly, dork, etc.
Jaako Ojanen in It's Better? and Josh McLaughlin in Venture Part
That's one of the more interesting aspects of enjoying a thing for an extended period of time — you get to watch it change. In skateboarding, trends come and go, rippling through and contorting the skateboarder's product (tricks), but those tweaks and twists of preference are felt most clearly when you take in the individual's canon as a whole. Ojanen has been around long enough that he's gone from phenom to mystical being, to on the outs with the industry and back again. He's a talent so rich and versatile that to watch his incredible output in chronological order is to see a skateboarder grapple with simply being too good at skateboarding. The standards are tiresome. There must always be a better way to do something, and Ojanen will find it.
In an accompanying article for his It's Better? video part penned by Max Olijnyk and published in Free, ASICS brand advisor Kaspar Van Lierop described Ojanen's skateboarding as "unexpected." Element Skateboards team manager Phil Zwijsen would drill down further, getting to the heart of Ojanen's current state of being.
“The way he skates has evolved; he’s on the best of it now,” says Phil. “He may not think that, because before he was jumping and stuff, but I think he really found his way of skating now – which is maybe less impact but more impactful.”
Vincent, why? No, please, don't do this.
Rank: -1
Mood: 😥
Longtime readers of Simple Magic know that I am a Vincent Alvarez mark. A low-impact icon of the highest order and a skateboarder unafraid to get dirty in a ditch or build a spot outright, Alvarez has maintained a multiple decade-spanning career by being both driven and just himself. It's an admirable approach and career. This is why it pains me to admit that Alvarez has committed a sin of significant order.
In a piece of promotional content for his clothing sponsor, Dickies, called The Work, Alvarez gives us a peek into the process behind his latest print ad, which included fixing up a barrier overlooking a busy Los Angeles thoroughfare. The "work" is where the crime, or at the very least, bylaw infraction, takes place.
What the actual hell, Vincent? You may be asking yourself, did he set up a slender concrete kicker up to the middle of the barrier that is so tall it touches the top of the obstacle instead of concreting a reasonably-sized transition along the length of its base that requires you to still traverse up the barrier itself to reach its lip?
YES. That's exactly what he did.
At that point, you're no longer skating the barrier! It's merely a ramp up to a ride-on grind. I'm all for spot-fixing and even modification, but this is total debasement. A disrespect to the Jersey barrier as an obstacle, a canvas, and an altar. Don't make me link out —
Cole Nowicki
Anyway, Vincent, you've accrued enough Simple Magic Appreciation Points (SMAP), which go toward a person, place, or thing's total SMAP score, that you'll come out of this incident okay. But please, in the future, and for SMAP's sake, just slop a little 'crete at the base, okay?
Sniffling through it
Rank: -2
Mood: 🤧
I know that spring is here, has sprung or sprang, because I can feel it in my face. There is a throbbing and a tightness. One eye leaks and the other cannot open. Mucus both plugs and flows through the passageways of my nose. I know spring is here because I try to skate through this, treating my body's reaction to the earth's seasonal actions like a shinner or a swellbow — just ignore it and it'll go away.
Unfortunately, that is not how this works. Allergy medication and tissue or toilet paper are the only salves. I know this. It happens every year. Some are worse than others. Sometimes, all I can do is close my eyes and wait. But here's the problem: if you don't open your eyes, you'll miss the blooms.
Turning one minute into 33
Rank: 2
Mood: 🤔😌
When my YouTube algorithm first fed me a 33-minute long Guy Mariano b-side video, or Loose Threads, from his particularly short section in Dickie's 2024 release Honeymoon, I stared at the thumbnail in something approaching disbelief. A 33-minute extrapolation of an approximately one-minute and 15-second "part" is an absurd, almost alchemical length to go to in order to wring more content out of content.
Then I watched it. And enjoyed it. Unabashedly so. Perhaps because, somewhere in my subconscious, I remembered or realized that the rough cuts and b-sides, the content-from-content, are different in purpose and intent from a traditional skateboarding video or video part. Here, we get to watch Guy Mariano, a living legend close to a half-century old, struggle and strive and succeed and make friends with strangers on the street at serious length. It is a slow, somewhat frustrating watch, and utterly fascinating.
Mariano executes a pole jam down a set of stairs at J-Kwon flawlessly about a dozen times. Why? Because that's just the way he operates. The line in the wading pool where he enters the pool, exits it, only to re-enter and re-exit it once more, took him what appears to be an entire afternoon. None of the "makes" are solid. Each is marred by ugly tic-tacks, awkward pushes, and so forth, yet he kept going. Kept working at it. Hard. The version they used in Honeymoon is not the one I would have, which is compelling in its own right.
This type of "content" — apologies for using the term so many times, but this is just what this is — is meant to be consumed differently because it is different. A video part is a finished product; this is loosely curated BTS of the NBDs. Something to put on when you have nothing else to do. The skateboarder's supreme effort is repackaged to be enjoyed when you have none left to give.
Something to re-consider: Travel plans to the United States.
Jasmine Mooney
Good thing: I happened to read this after watching Cade Cunningham's game-winning buzzer-beater against the Heat on Wednesday and I may have to jump on the bandwagon. Nothing like some good sportswriting, I tell yah.
John Saward
More good sportswriting? Yes, please:
Maitreyi Anantharaman
Another good thing:
Well, well, well, another good thing:
Mark O’Connell
Wonderful new HTML Review thing:
Eileen Ahn
Until next week… there is still love in this world. In fact, it's all that's left.
Laser Quit Smoking Massage
NEWEST PRESS
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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
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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.
