I started reading about skating before I started skating; the September ‘99 Transworld issue I bought at Hook’s Pharmacy coverstarred Chad Muska ollieing through a split tree. When my cross-country team drove from Indiana to Brevard, North Carolina’s distance running camp the summer before my eighth grade year, I devoured the magazine during our van ride down. A girl on my team asked if I skated. “I’m getting into it,” I said. Back home after, I bought a Kryptonics complete from Galyan’s, then spent a couple years skating backyard flatground, expanding with new motivation to reconsider local sports courts, campuses, churches, courthouses, parking lots and strip malls with my brother and Corey Newkirk.
My sixteenth birthday came with my driver’s license and my parents’ used green Jeep Cherokee. I placed an Enjoi Chumpwagon sticker on the back window underneath the windshield wiper and began driving up to and around Indianapolis, then Louisville and Cincinnati, Chicago more rarely. I met so many skaters then, through my last years of high school into college summers between New York, boys like me who were turning into men riding our skateboards, obsessed with videos and making them. Indy Beautes and MoonTower are my main crew affiliations. Matt Zwiesler blessed me and Waldo with guest tricks in his Life Won’t Wait part for Rise Skateshop.
Post-college graduation, my time in Indiana comes during annual weeklong visits. Plenty of skaters live locally, while others like me dispersed into diaspora. Andrew Meredith and Michael Shafer reside in Long Beach, where they’ve been doing Less Than Local for approaching a decade. One afternoon in 2010 I was at Alex Olson’s house in Venice before a Prada party on Rodeo and heard the marching band across the street playing “Soak Up The Sun,” which is to say I like the riff of Less Than Local’s “Listen to Sheryl Crow” graphic as a tempting invitation to bliss. Make America Skate Again hats may be a product better discontinued, while Less than Local otherwise projects a wallflowered outsider artist adjacency befitting a troupe of Hoosier transplants into crowded SoCal scene. When I see their new video That’s an Idea featured on Thrasher, I crack a Pineapple Spice Tepache can, drag this sativa Bruce Banner Ghost vape and hit play.
Sisyphus pushes a lightbulb to the top of stairs from which bulb falls shattering into shards of an idea. First song prompts my girlfriend asking from the front room, “Are you listening to ABBA?” Montage skaters, modestly dressed, lay all their love on horizontal spots with the attentive vigor of those who chose to move somewhere particularly for the lifestyle reason of summer every season. Shafer drives a trusty old pickup truck and pops beach dazed combinations between chats with dogs, while Meredith fakie flip body varials into Griffith Park bank. The bearded covershot ditch rider slides into slipstream leaving ABBA’s “Luv Island” after lariat flipping to fakie over that crusty L.A. hip to drop from the Famous Stars & Straps video.
Less than Local invites viewers into the cantina for strategy session regarding the reason we’re all gathered here, welcoming Mitchell Meuser to the team. Around corner booth with drinks of choice, Less Than Local masterminds pitch “enlightened alien skateboarding” and “Wild West showdown,” as premises appear animated and acted onscreen while gentlemen narrate before their mates shout them down. The bar maiden slaps these fools to attention. Fucking show us Mitchell Meuser skating! That’s an idea they’ll drink to:
Less than Local’s greater than sign axle spins over videoradio string scrapes. V like in VNIVERSITY morphs into Michell MEVSER’s noseblunt across an arroyo crossing curb cut topping drainwash dropping shove-it in a red t-shirt, pleased at clean result. He power slides into switchcrooks filmed below popped out fakie on red angle iron beneath blue Cali sun as Breeder’s “Cannonball” explodes. Meuser backtail shoves San Miguel’s neck-high brick banks in a baggie fit and low beanie, snapping a poppy varial heel before smiling back at filmer. For next single, Mitchell wallies into back hurricane on white hubba I think Jim Greco switch frontside flip 5-0ed. Niche-laid sign assists Mitch in mounting lipslide atop remarkable red screened metal frame into grinding 5050 down dismount as drums pound and garage rocks.
The wax stained grey curb along weathered blacktop bank accepts Mitchell’s front blunt bigspin in baggy black tee, faded stone trousers and dusty olive shoes with black Adidas stripes. Shafer onlooks Mitchell’s back 180 nosegrind twisted down onto front lipslide along the court adjacent bank to curbs I’ve seen Ben Allen and Adam Abada skate. Mitchell channels Chris Joslin to whip lofty backside flip 270 degrees over vast drainage hip in a blue baseball cap worn forward, then back in a beanie and tee shirt like Pappalardo front blunting the far side of a lengthy bench with a little gap out popped to fakie in a meditative park. Mitchell ollies onto ascending ledgeride past planters then drops into back tailslide over four stairs toward school building auxiliary entrance. He wallies a barrier into a blacktop backlot and wallieride shoves upon bank to cinderblock wall. Another sunny day facilitates Mitchell’s crooked grind downround the curve of the lengthy barrier Johnny Matarazzo skated in his Thunder Trucks part.
On a skater laid transition to descending ditch top that Gifted Hater skates in his Pocket Mag Followed, Mitchell looks like Jesse Erickson tiltmoding back 180 into fakie 5-0 to regular, same spot next with front blunt leaned into back 180 nosegrind to switch dismount. A Chris Dobstaff sized hubba gets back 180 heelfip nosegrind. Mitchell crooked grind tail grabs the same tall, mellow seven stair rail that he then back lip shoves and front 180 fakie 5-0s in three different outfits, including again Mitchell’s trusty red t-shirt third. Art Market 9-flat-9 receives hefty half-cab than satisfying back heel two-piece chime.
Frontside goofy through fragrant bougainvillea, Meuser 50/50 grinds black wrought iron handrail downspanning 5-flat-8 stair pathway. Mitchell’s ender arrives with parking garage sweep scoping to focus on his backside boardslide that somehow sparks as he ascends the brutalist edging barrier toward parking level’s end, pops past perpendicular bumper barrier and absorbs drop into more boardslide across and down the basement bound barrier where he creates sparks twice more en route to rollaway. Has he slid his plastic rails down to their attaché bolts that scraped sparks across this rough, untrodden path? Whatever method, this is exceptional sewerside stuntman skating, a Scott Bourne Slap cover level timeless hammer that fully deserves whatever accolades anyone feels like bestowing. Larry Bao slam dunks and credits groove through the end of this 10 minute engagement. Thanks to the boys at Less Than Local for promoting Mitchell’s inclusion to their chosen family, strong acquisition from a modest name in the game.