My friend pulled some truly punk rock ingenuity, learned from years of bunking down with crusties and sketchy West Coast kids. In MacGuyver-like fashion, he injected a nearly-parched inkjet cartridge with rubbing alcohol in order to coax out enough ink to print both of our invites to the Nike SB Nothing But the Truth video premiere. Even though I didn’t witness my friend’s feat of Yankee can-do spirit, his simple retelling ended up being the most interesting event of the evening.

Located amongst love hotels and gauche rock clubs, the theater used for the video premiere is a stark futurist slab with concrete façade — a venue more inclined towards reprints of Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent than commercial skateboard hype. Apart from the extravagance of Nike’s promotional crew renting out a theater in Shibuya, there wasn’t as much flash and pop as I expected. Nothing like the Shanghai premiere with ramps, several of the SB team, and a bouquet of scantily-attired girl-hires. Maybe the budget had already been blown on the video itself, and the remaining green would get further cashed out in RMB rather than yen. That’s casino capitalism doubled down: marketing and venture commerce + faddish extreme sports = bloody consequences for bad judgment.

The subdued crowd of style-fiends in expensive denim and fitted T’s with requisite 59 caps and unscratched boards seemed nonplussed by the chic theater, and this indifference hung thick in the auditorium air. Two kids sat quietly beside me, rocking a pair of expensively-swooshed windbreakers cut and patterned from a 1980’s steroid-muscle beach aesthetic. They murmured “hot” or “amazing” or “scary” as key moments of physical jeopardy and triumph blazed across the screen.

Skaters in the video rocked-and-rolled and proved street credentials with tricky flips done switch over (requisite) gaps or big flips over handrails to waiting embankments. The filming relied on pre-lit environments and careful choreography while the edits were fast and clean. It left the skaters sanitized and ironically unremarkable in their consummate displays of rare skill. Nike SB has labored to infuse their brand insurgency with legitimacy, but their image-crafting gets in the way of actually revealing how skaters perform split-second miracles through careful calculation and control. Besides Chet Childress’ scenes and a few sequences shot on scarred and barely-ridable concrete highway barriers, the skating itself was mostly a series of predictable set-pieces which belie the risks and intensity of finding spots and dialing them in.
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