City of Analgesics

I'm sure a heavy back catalogue of spots in the Los Angeles area looms large in the mind of just about any skateboarder. Who's done what. Who killed. Who lagged like a cripple. It's no secret that a small vicinity of land mass has pumped out and played host to a sizable portion of raw skating over the last 20 years (perhaps on a per capita basis that even rivals New Jersey). Gonz to Girl. Menace to Marko Jazbinsek.

It's hard not to feel that LA dropped off the map a little in recent years. Post-Barcelona explosion, shit got way more spread out and international. No longer is LA the top dawg city of four wheels. Outside of Daewon Song, it's common place nowadays for dudes to have half the globe covered in a video part. It's hard to fathom the pull that California and LA specifically had on the skate world 10 years ago.

You could see the cohesive zeal of the region start to slip after the LA County video came out. I'm not trying to write off a whole generation of dudes that came after, but once Chris Franzen's time zone dipped, some of that LA spark faded. I guess kids get tired of seeing the same spots in every issue of a magazine, so the spots go unskated until they're new again. People go elsewhere, and the limelight on the city dims a bit.

Good skaters can come from anywhere, but some real LA street shit has been hard to come by the last decade. That's not to say it's not there. Take a look at Vincent Alvarez. Straight kills. More to the point, take a look at this dude I'd never heard of before, Justin Guillen:

(Disregard the embarrassingly bad intro on this one)






If that doesn't give you some faith for progressive nu-Menace bone thug rawdoggin, you may as well never touch a ledge for the rest of your life. Gone but not forgotten, the city of angels will rise again.