Quartersnacks Best of 2010s Tribute: Quasi “Mother” & Brandon Westgate “MADE: Chapter 1”
Note: This post is inspired by Quarternsacks Best of the 2010s reader survey. I decided to write reviews for some of my picks that made the Top 25, but not the Top 10.
Best Full-Length Video #18: Mother (Chad Bowers, 2018)
What succeeds something limitless by design? The answer almost didn’t happen due to the intersection of skate video music rights and the Internet, with the original streaming link to Quasi’s Mother going down nearly immediately. A brief download link appeared through social, a permitted pirating that circumnavigated YouTube and skate media ad traffic. Still, leaked supply met the immediate demand skaters generated for Mother Collective before Mother’s release, staying loyal as Quasi Skateboards grew inside the space between a nixed initial namesake and their now instant classic full-length debut. “I don’t think the name matters,” Chad Bowers, former Alien Workshop team manager and Quasi founder, said in 2016, “It’s what you do with it.”
An all-white screen dissolves into a swelling intro montage pulling the skate cinema heartstrings of a generation raised on Castrucci, Hill, Carter, Evans, Hunt and Holland, immediately bringing us into the world of Dayton-based Quasi: a band on a run away from the past and towards a viable future controlled by their own seemingly stoned, Eno-loving hands. Gilbert Crockett compared Quasi’s rider-inclusive approach to a magazine. Sparse squared visual collages fill our eyes much like the double-sided full color newsprint posters that accompany Quasi orders, with photos of the skater’s mothers jump cut and interspersed with skate ephemera and lower 48 b-roll.
Justin Henry confronts disrespect personified before quickly becoming an actual skate motion picture. One of today’s few skaters introduced almost through still photos alone, Henry executes a wallie gap to beyond locked noseblunt slide heard ‘round the growing world of skate internet digital portals. A Pacific Northwest visual vortex commences with Tyler Bledsoe’s sharply selected ledge and gap destruction. A white-framed Jake Johnson and Al Davis provide a music-free switch tutorial intermission, in-between the Kate Bush soundtracked destruction by Josh Wilson and Dick Rizzo’s Bobbito-approved New York night mission tapestry, the tip of a crescendo that peaks after Crockett calls curtains.
A boutique team’s lifetime can be as brief as a promo, a handful of episodes, or strive towards that proverbial Full-Length ©. Mother is a mixtape-turned-art project that showcases a tight collection of talent that brought a unique angle to skate amidst a social media induced, Olympic bound decade that’ll be remembered instead for the creativity ushered in by smaller, as-if-not-more-impactful brands like Quasi, one of few skateboard companies that have actively spoken out and raised funds against gun violence. Mother preserves what we fear losing the most — happiness and a planet on which to pursue — a visual homage to that odd America of not just Dayton but the distances covered across a geographically united, socially disjointed country rooted in such quasi world peace.
Best Individual Part #23: Brandon Westgate — MADE: Chapter 1 (2013)
Crime robber tales detail their calling cards, a term derived from those literal cards left when visiting and not finding someone home. But what so-called villain has the class to give flowers to the victim at a murder scene? A bouquet of them at that, for an elderly woman whose heart condition was potentially exacerbated by this Rhode Island hammer-delivering mercenary, flying in from Cranberry Bog USA straight into skateboarding’s headquarters of undulating concrete gnar — San Francisco, California — and Emerica’s green-soaked lens. Just before the GX1000 crew turned hill bombing into a Supreme-endorsed daredevil act of reclaiming space — and projecting anxiety directly into viewers hearts and minds — Westgate turned hills into line spots. I imagine former Adrenaline pro-turned-filmmaker Jon Miner seeing Westgate as the interpolation of Cardiel, Rodriguez or Salazar’s finger-mimicked fantasies come to life, with Westgate’s short muscular jock’ish frame attuned more so to unique New England harvests than skate trends. The back to back, double handrail leaping madness, leaping up loading docks, Wray-sized backside 360s — it’s still Westgate’s destruction of the city’s trademark avenues in a single two-trick line that personifies the balls and grace behind his post-make bouquet, a gift that backhandedly embodies one of many infamous Jake Phelps quotes about skateboarding in the city — “You can’t knob the hills.”
