The best part of my day is sitting on the toilet and burning company dollars watching the new ____ edit that just dropped.

The internet might be killing culture and our brain cells and an insurmountable number of other important things, but as a skateboarding fan, it is marvelous. Every day, I am delivered some new delicious thing to consume, observe, adore, and then talk shit about on Slap. Where would I be without it? Probably somewhere nicer than I am now. But who would I be? Someone happier. I adore it nonetheless. 

On Saturday, I was delivered a brand new edit from Cons, Evergreen, featuring a slew of relative newbies - Shane Farber, Zion Effs, Brian O’Dwyer, Ariana Spencer, and Eddie Cernicky - and hand crafted by Ben Chadourne and Ryan Lee. My cheeks puckered at the excitement. I watched it once, then someone banged on the door and I yelled at them to fuck off, and they yelled back that there’s a line outside, and I yelled back that the line can fuck off, then I watched it again, and might I say, it is a sweeter wine the second time. 

Unfortunately for you, my neurosis and self-obsession will not allow me to contain my bullshit opinions to the padded walls and fuckwit audience of Slap Message Boards; I am compelled to infect the cool, sexy minds of what tedious demographic studies tell me are the Monster Children audience. That in mind, here are five initial takeaways from Converse Cons’ Evergreen.

Hey, do you like roofs? Cons does.

Roofs roofs roofs. Ceilings to some, roofs to skaters. If you ask me where Evergreen takes place, I would say on a roof on a hill, and that isn’t a bad thing. So much of a clip is as about the spot as it is the trick benign done, and I appreciate a dangerous approach. If you do something incredible on the most bland looking ledge, it doesn’t matter. It is forgettable. Why do you think people don’t use park footage? Shit’s boring. 

I will take Ariana kickfliping off of a roof and over a gap before I take a switch back noseblunt on a perfect gray splattering of concrete, and the preference for doing good tricks over, onto, and off of weird, high, dangerous shit, is clearly shared by the Cons team. 

Shane Farber is your new favorite skater… or he will be in a matter of years.

He’s definitely mine. I’m in love. And I consummated that love by rewinding sections of his opening part over and over and over, particularly when it came to trying to dissect what exactly the trick was that I was seeing. I also carved his initials into my chest with a kitchen knife and sang a prayer to the devil asking to turn him pro. We will see how that pans out. 

Shane got first part, and with no delay or hesitation by means of opening-video-montage whatsoever; those motherfuckers knew how good his part was so they dove right in. Fuck a title. Back smith a rail. Bitch.

His part was so good that I felt like I got better at skating for watching it. All of this sounds like hyperbole, allow me to elaborate. Apart from outliers like Foy (who we all presume will be SOTY this year and I’d therefore like to take this opportunity to be the first to say congratulations on another win, your impeccable ability to not die when it seems like you should, the gaping mouths you put on all those lucky enough to see you skate in person, your southern drawl, and the well-deserved, absolutely shattering orgasm that you’ll experience while unwrapping the eight-digit New Balance SOTY bonus check), it is trendy these days not to be seen to try hard. Don’t get me wrong, you can try, just not too hard. It is in style to land things sloppy and to take the safe route, and to not give much of a fuck if you did it or not, and also hey, don’t go too fast if you don’t have to (think Aikens, or any of the kids with moptops clammoring for FA riders’ table scraps at Chevy).

Shane - and to be fair, most of the Cons team, they have a reputation for speed assault - says fuck all that. Let’s try. Let’s try to skate something in a weird way, in a way that looks good but is unpretentious. Let’s do a bluntslide into the Fort Greene bank and then ollie onto the platform, ride off it, and ollie mid-fucking-air over some trash cans or whatever. Shane really gives it a go and isn’t too cool to show it, and I am won over for it. Give Shane two more video parts and perhaps a steady board sponsor (@hockey @edglrd wtf?) and he will be as industry standard lowkey fave as Jake Johnson has been for the last two decades. 

Hiring Ben and Ryan was the best move Cons could have done.

I have always been a fan of Converse Cons. I remember getting a free pair back in 2011(?) around the time that they were sort of starting up again in earnest and feeling elated that they (someone?) would provide me, a child, with free high-quality equipment to do what I love best. Even better: I sucked at skating! But that didn’t matter. I was completely won over. To this day, I exclusively skate Cons. So in that way, I am already biased in favor of the brand and anything they put out. A real sucker. They got me. However, it must be noted that their popularity spiked around 2015-2018, when they had everyone on Polar, everyone on GX, and a significant portion of the Supreme/FA squad, coming to a head with the release of Purple. For a number of years, Cons was ubiquitous, and they still are, but it must be said that their full-Nelson stranglehold on skateboarding core culture has loosened a bit in the ensuing years. 

The stranglehold is loose, but not in a bad way. They didn’t burn out, nor fade away - Cons remains core, and which is a hard thing to accomplish in skating. This is due in no small part to the unique and authentic brand representations - video, print, photo, - kept true by Lee Berman, Ben Chadourne, and Ryan Lee. Having Ben and Ryan make Evergreen is a continuation of a preserved brand identity. When you watch a Cons video, it is identifiable. It doesn’t blend into the Strobeck-copycat-stew, nor the Primitive gleam, nor does it embellish its authenticity - it doesn’t have to.

It’s good skating, first and foremost. Every Cons video I have ever seen has been technically and stylistically impressive in terms of the quality of skateboarding, but Brian O’Dwyer’s skating is as good in Evergreen as it was in the Baker/Deathwish video earlier this year. What makes Cons videos special is the artistic component - the perspective of the filmmakers, Ben and Ryan. Ben is probably the best fisheye filmer in the game. Ryan has a knack for making b-roll not the most hideously cheesy shit in the world. Ben sees things through the lens that I don’t, and then zooms in on them. Ryan can make a bullshit spot look like a surprise. 

This is perspective, talent, applied to skateboarding. Their cinematography (yes, I used the word, fuck off) makes the video a uniquely-Cons video rather than simply the sum of five talented skateboarders, in the same way that a WKND video is specifically and identifiably a WKND video, or Pass~Port is specifically and identifiably a Pass~Port video: they possess a style of filmmaking that encapsulates the personalities and tone as well as presents the skating.

Zion is already cooler than me, and that worries me.

I love Zion Effs. I have met him twice. He is a chiller, and his skateboarding makes me want to cry; his skateboarding tucks me in at night, kisses my forehead and says, ‘shhh don’t worry about the future of skateboarding, I’ve got it all taken care of,’ and I fall into a deep dreamless sleep. In Evergreen, the guy didn’t disappoint. Every clip was handcrafted to fill me with glee. My concern is slight, but I cannot help to possess it, if only for the very reason that he is so adored. He is so cool that I worry he will reach a point where he no longer needs to skate. 

Sure, he loves that shit. He is core as fuck, but he’s also so cool and easy going - so much of a chiller that I can see him very easily going the way of ‘vibe’ skater, where he kind of gets caught up in the periphery as so many promising youths have in the last couple of decades. It’s a tale as old as time (or I think since like 2004 when I started paying attention to this sort of thing): a skater starts out really ripping, the people’s champion. Then someone goes, ‘oh, dude, come to this fashion show,’ and then it’s, ‘oh, dude, I can’t go skating, I’m in the fashion show.’ Now this skater is putting out the occasional trip footage and a park clip here and there, but most of their feed is them with celebrities and doing something in Europe… there’s talk of them starting a brand but it’s unclear if it’ll be skateboarding related- this skater is fucking models and forms a cocaine habit, they have a pro board but the company is like, ‘hey man, you’ve missed the last eight trips and two videos, there are other kids who are hungry for your pro check…’. And then what? No more Effs parts, no more kisses to my forehead. Just me sitting up all night watching Evergreen in a dark room alone, wondering what could have been. 

The life of the cool vibe skater is a glorious life, but as a selfish skateboarding fan, I hope that for nobody. 

You still have to be good to get on Cons.

No vibes allowed. No homie hookups, no guest slots, no clout chasers. No one on Cons is there simply because they’re a fun personality or a good time in the van or because they’ve got a lot of Instagram followers. They’re on Cons because they fucking rip. The first thing that Eddie did in the video was backside ollie into a fucking wall from flat in a line. The second thing Eddie did was ollie over a garage into a bank and hill bomb. The thirty seventh thing Eddie did was backside ollie into the fucking Louvre. That’s the bar. 

One of the things that I like to complain about the most is how it seems easier than ever to get sponsored, and how it has little to nothing to do with how hard you work at skating to get there. You can stack Instagram followers for being a vintage reseller and get a pro board. You can be a wacky circus trick skater with a contrived style and extra baggy pants and get a pro wheel. You can exclusively put out slo-mo park edits of you feebling the most regular flatbar on the planet and get on Nike. You can simply hang around the crew for long enough, doing front fifties on the box, and you will get a box, a pro bolt or board or shoe or whatever the fuck, and make enough money for a loft apartment in Manhattan.

These aren’t pro skaters, these are influencers. Cons rails against that. There is not a single person on their team - pro or am or flo - whose skating does not either satiate or frighten me, and for that, I appreciate them.