The Masticator was started by two Minneapolis-area visionaries as a zine in the summer of 2004. Issue two was never realized, and half of its founding force moved to Brooklyn. Three years later, the electronic version of The Masticator has far eclipsed its single print-bound predecessor. Today, The Masticator posts art reviews, random urban snapshots, gentle political mockery, and other short articles on subjects like cars, fashion, and books.
This video is best seen in a larger format -- see it in a full-screen version here.
Basically, these guys are jumping off of Norway's steepest and highest fjord cliffs with small, light parachutes. The object though, is to soar for a while using flying squirrel-like wingsuits. They used to do it in the winter, jumping off with skis so they could get a good distance from the cliff walls. Now they do it in the summer, merely jumping off the cliffs.
One jumper, Loic Jean Albert, explains 1:17 into the video:
"At the beginning of wingsuit base jumping, we were trying to get as far from the wall as possible, so basically clearing the whole thing, but now it's getting boring so we play around."
That means flying nearly close enough to cliff jagged faces that they can touch them, diving in and out around rock formations as they free-fall, and then glide, twist and somersault, and dive again. It's breathtaking to watch.
About 3:12 into the video, a Norwegian named Espin Fadnes swoops down over a winding mountain road, buzzing the ground at an alarmingly high speed before soaring off over the next drop-off. It's chilling to see a man fly like that, gracefully, without visible propulsion. It's not like Superman; more like an animal.
Here's another ski video: extreme skier Glen Plake on a monoski in a scene from one of Greg Stump's movies. Watch how calm his upper body is while his legs move like pistons through the moguls. Add to that the fact that his feet are bound together on one board -- not a snowboard. His skills are rivalled only by his mohawk.
Ski Cross: The Sport that Short Attention Spans Built
Are Americans utter philistines when it comes to entertainment? Consider the story that European football, er, soccer fans like to tell about how Americans lobbied to increase the size of the goals to make for higher scoring games. The rest of the world liked the game the way it was.
Or how about the popularity of NASCAR, with its endless left turns, over Formula One with its higher-tech engines and more complicated courses.
Downhill skiing has been slowly losing popularity in America over the last couple decades. Part of it is the rise of snowboarding, part of it has to do with how expensive winter sports can be (equipment, lift tickets, etc.). But a big part of it must be how difficult it is to become an expert.
In an article in the sports section of today's New York Times, we're introduced to ski cross, a sport that will be in the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, one that many hope will help revitalize skiing for Americans. But is this sport, which is the equivalent of roller derby on skis, taking all of the subtlety and technical skill out of skiing in order to appeal to the American short attention span?
Take American skier Daron Rahlves, one of the best racers of his generation. He's won the Alpine World Cup a dozen times. He retired three years ago as a traditional racer, but at his peak, he was recognized all over Europe as a celebrity. And yet in America, no one really knew who he was.
Below is a video -- the only one I could find of Rahlves' racing -- that shows his famous crash at Adelboden in the 2006 Olympics. He walked away, but was out for two weeks with injuries (a relatively short time). In traditional ski racing, crashes like this are a frightening danger, a byproduct of the sport.
In the next video, we have ski cross. Here, like in roller derby, crashes are the point. Now that Rahlves has begun ski cross, he is suddenly an American celebrity. “Everywhere I went for a while — the post office, the hardware store, wherever — someone stopped me to talk about the X Games,” Rahlves told the Times. “They had seen it live, on prime-time TV. Ski cross is not some renegade sport any longer.”
The Times produced that video a year ago; Rahlves has since won ski cross at the X-Games.
Below is another ski cross video -- one that shows the sort of chain reaction crashes that make the sport exciting to watch. In this sequence, American Casey Puckett was leading a ski cross event in Grindelwald, Switzerland last March, but gets hit from behind in a smash-up that takes out three of the four competitors. Puckett is the one lying motionless at the end of the video. He was unconscious, and suffered a concussion and a season-ending shoulder injury.
We have a way of simplifying things in America, of finding the heart of something and simmering it down so that little else is left. Racing cars in a highspeed oval. Getting to the bottom of a snowy hill as fast as possible with bumps and other skiers as obstacles. Where an F1 course might weave through a city's streets, the NASCAR oval track is built for racing. Likewise, the ski cross course: it isn't using the natural features of a mountainside, but taking it and molding it with jumps, bumps and drop-offs for the racers.
Ski racing is jumping the shark, trying a crazy stunt to save the sport. It's not the existence of ski cross as a sport that should sadden skiers -- it looks fun and it's fun to watch -- it's the normalization of it. It's an underground sport gone mainstream, and once it hits the Olympics, it's all over. When over-caffeinated attention-deficit pastimes and their creators become the tastemakers, the rest of the mainstream suffers. The scalpel is replaced by the amputation saw.
