In the 1994 MCU tentpole ‘Forrest Gump,’ the titular superhero is an ageless avenger, moving through historical turning points to right wrongs, defuse diabolical plots and above all, extract vengeance upon criminal villains. In those intrigue-thickened halls of the Watergate Hotel, he walks; here and there, he battles communist forces and faces down the cruelest storms of nature itself to become a de-facto founding father to certain industrialized shrimping conglomerates, so widely known and revered in the current age.
But these are all stories. Skateboarding has Daewon Song, and he originated the hardflip. This past week he returned once again, playing opposite Atlantic Drifter Mike Arnold in ‘DaeTrip,’ one of the more inspired curveball pairings this side of the 2020 Bobby-and-Hjalte buddy pic ‘Looks OK to Me’. In the newly uploaded video file, Mike Arnold escapes from London’s grayscale hecticism via a wrinkle-resistant ‘Daewon skate tape’ that possesses psychadelic properties. Soon enough Mike Arnold has joined Daewon Song in a sun-bleached paradise of ditches and semi-conventional manual pads, where they pass boards through pipes, skate rocks and dodge bars — Mike Arnold contributing print pants-ready material such as a nose manual revert to switch firecracker and further contributions to the Lloyds blocks lore, while vest-era Daewon Song lounges in the fakie manual position amongst slaloms and other terrain, with the flips out, naturally.
It’s no knock on Mike Arnold and Drift maestro Jacob Harris to recognize that Daewon Song’s man-out-of-time presence elevates what otherwise might be another worthy entry to the excellent AD body of work — though it also provokes a deeper pondering of Daewon Song’s astounding longevity and vitality, occasionally breaking from the video part treadmill to join forces with era heavyweights in what increasingly suggests a FORE Gump or Dr. Who-esque mission across roughly three and a half Earth decades at this point. In the mid-1990s he was there helping flatground godfather Rodney Mullen extend his pro career by another decade, easy, in the ‘Rodney Vs. Daewon’ series; in the 2000s he teamed with beanie-and-beard tech-gnarist Chris Haslam to transform a derelict auto shop into the miniramp-meets-‘Mousetrap’ fever dream that was Almost’s 2006 classic ‘Cheese & Crackers.’
Look closer and you may find Daewon Song moving behind the scenes of yet more seminal moments in the hard rock maple universe, and beyond — take the 2001 Mike Vallely/411VM joint ‘Stand Strong,’ in which a tank topped Daewon Song provides a switch crooked grinding and noseblunt sliding counterbalancing force to Mike V’s mute grabs and street-plant pontificating on what appears to be a Black Label/Deca tour of Australia. In Deca’s ‘2nd 2 None’ and again in Transworld’s ‘IE,’, he proved himself a friend and partner to California’s plastic picnic table and bench industry, and more recently he has helped to school backside tailslide sitter Torey Pudwill in the ways of running a board company, while lending support to refugee-turned-doughnut magnate Ted Ngoy.
Is Daewon Song quietly on a decades-long ‘Quantum Leap’-style mission to set right history through a series of increasingly convoluted fakie manuals and bluntslide combos? Is it only a matter of time before he winds up doing a shared part with Fred Gall that could involve fingerflip variations in that one Albany pool out in the woods? What about joining with Bob Burnquist to reimagine the ‘Cheese & Crackers’ contraptions on a Mega scale, involving helicopters and perhaps a fakie manual fakie flip base jump into the Grand Canyon?
Tags: 2nd to None, Adidas, Adjacent Drift, DaeTrip, Daewon Song, Deca, fakie manuals we have knowed, FORE Gump, Jacob Harris, Mike Arnold, Mike V tour life, Peter Capaldi, Quantum Leapin, red tapes, shrimping, Stand Strong, the doughnut game, The Thick Of It
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