Aesthetica (2008) — The Margin

Aesthetica is Standard Films’s 2008 release, directed and edited by Travis Robb and produced by Mike Hatchett. You can support and buy a copy on iTunes but I highly recommend finding a DVD copy, which you can inquire about by contacting Mike and Standard.

Aesthetica cover photo of Mads Jonsson by Cole Barash.

By Jonathan Van Elslander

The most consistent disagreement in the years I worked in a snowboard shop was over the music. It started when we hired a new guy, who came over from the shop next door. Our shop was centred on bigger brands and older customers, while they had younger staff and cooler gear. We sold Burton and Capita, lots of “freeride” boards to dads. They sold Dinosaurs Will Die and Public. Despite the differences he was helpful and we enjoyed his company. But we got sick of his music.

Soon after starting he took some control of the atmosphere at the shop, including the displays and the music. But the range of things he deemed cool enough was narrow and got old fast: Smashing Pumpkins, Slowdive, Cocteau Twins, songs from the last Vans or Supreme video where we couldn’t make out the words. If someone else put on something he didn’t approve of, he would scurry out from wherever he was and change it instantly.

The issue with the music was “is it cool enough?” Slowdive was. Paul Simon wasn’t. Soon that obsession extended to the videos we played as well. He whittled down a selection of less than twenty that soon we were all sick of. It was made clear that videos focused on fun or funniness weren’t to be played. Suzy Greenberg 270 The Movie, one of the most enjoyable videos of the last decade, was watched once, heavily criticized, and never played again. Everybody Everybody – one of the most underrated videos of the last decade – was “mid.” If we reached back for an older video, it was from a small selection of vintage versions of a similar idea. Early Absinthe videos, TBs 1-4, Subjekt Haakonsen. Videos that we’re cool and serious, that featured a little bit of fun but not too much.

Eventually even he got sick of what might be called the “shoegaze and post-punk aesthetic” (best summed up by, of course, a Catfish meme), and expanded from serious to camp, but only for a certain era. The selection of Boss’s “I Don’t Give a Fuck” for Frank April’s part in Déjà Vu (2013) was corny and dumb, but white guys in basketball jerseys of Forum’s That (2006) was classic. Given enough time, the corniness started to be cool again. Maybe in twenty years he’ll finally warm up to Suzy Greenberg. But I still won’t be able to tell if he’s laughing with it or at it.

Meme courtesy of **The Catfish Chronicles**

Forbidden were things from that middle era that didn’t fit the aesthetic and didn’t have the ironic charm: videos that were earnest. This included if they were casual and fun (Robot Food rarely got played, Airblaster videos never), but was especially true if the video was serious (Absinthe before Now/Here (2010) was fine, but not anything after that). The music, clothing, and trick selection of those serious videos had been dropped by the nostalgia-driven industry and there wasn’t enough tongue-in-cheek to make it camp. Nothing was more taboo better than late Standard Films.

I’m not too proud to admit that the first snowboard video I really remember was That’s It, That’s All. I had no idea there was such a thing as snowboard culture when my mom came home from Boarders Anonymous in Winnipeg with a copy on DVD. Over the years I watched it god knows how many times. What endeared me most was not mountain lines or the double corks but what draws me to rewatching now: the goofy and loveable characters, most of all Mark Landvik. The video features some of Landvik’s best snowboarding, but he is also its key character, providing personality that saves it from sinking into a too-serious biography (this is maybe why it aged so much better than the other Brain Farm movies). The video makes a point by starting off mocking its own aesthetic, with Landvik dressed as a Wyoming cowboy criticizing the music supervision and (controversial) filming techniques. It wasn’t the riding but this goofiness that most brought me back when I wanted to sit and watch the whole video. My mom can attest that I sat and watched the DVD extras, where Landvik runs around rainy New Zealand nature sanctuaries screaming “birds!” in a poor Steve Irwin impression, almost as often as I watched the snowboarding.

So when I went out to buy a snowboard video with my own money for the first time, it was Landvik’s name that I looked for on the DVD case. That landed me a copy of Aesthetica, Standard’s 2008 film (produced by Mike Hatchett but directed and edited by Travis Robb), which featured, besides Landvik and X-Games regulars Kazuhiro Kokubo and Torstein Horgmo, a list of names that were meaningless to me at the time. It turned out to not have the irreverence of That’s It, That’s All.

Now that those names mean much more to me, rewatching an old video is muddled by the odd cruelties that befell snowboarding’s transitional era from physical media to digital. Just as YouTube now will ruin an editor’s hard work by refusing to allow certain songs, iTunes would do the same, forcing music changes from the original DVD edit. If you can’t find a DVD player now and are stuck with an iTunes copy of an old video, you’ll probably find a lot of different songs than you remember. On the DVD copy of Aesthetica, Mathieu Crepel rides to a funny but charming cover of Joy Division’s “Shadowplay” by The Killers. On iTunes his part is set to “Solemn Show World” by Parts and Labour – a good song but not the one I have burned into my brain. Even worse, the iTunes version pairs Eric Jackson with “Break It Down” by LA Symphony, wordy rapping overtop of a cheesy party time beat like was so popular in snowboard videos at the time. All I can do is browse DVD players at the thrift shop and hope to be saved by @lostsnowboardvideos.

I can never quite predict what vintage aesthetics are redeemably cool and what are just out of date. Forced to rewatch Aesthetica now, the sheen of nostalgia ripped away by the song changes, it’s clumsier that I remember. I can see now that it doesn’t have the goofy charm of That, nor the timeless sensibility of Absinthe’s Neverland. But that doesn’t mean I think it is deserving of the dustbin. Popularity is a fascinating influence on what gets revived and what isn’t. If it was oppressively, inescapably popular, we might get sick of it for years before its suddenly back (this is the case with all sorts of early 2000s cultural artifacts, from nu-Metal to Tony Hawk to the Forum Eight). If it was always overlooked, it’s ripe to be redeemed. Standard videos post-2000 don’t quite fit either of those categories.

If you were born after 1988 and before the widespread availability of the car-compatible AUX cord, then there was probably a time in your life when you were sick to death of Neil Young’s “Rocking in the Free World,” which blasted incessantly from FM radio stations and long-haired uncle’s boomboxes for years. It’s not exactly a subtle song, the boomer guitar solos and the beat-you-over-the-head message. Neil, however, has always appeared more concerned with getting his message out there than the reception of his artistic choices. In “Rocking in the Free World,” he’s most concerned with how various states of repression, both internal and external, cloud and oppress our lives. The great tragedy, he says, is a child that will “never get to be cool.”

Before your buddy bought a waders and moved down the highway to Squamish, there was Eric Jackson.

I would like to know how sick of that song people were, and whether or not they thought it was cool, when they first opened a newly released DVD copy of Aesthetica and found it was the song for Eric Jackson’s opening part. After the opening credits, Jackson kicks off the video opening his window blinds to find clear skies and celebrating with goofy fist pumps before riding down a trail on his sled with a snowboard strapped to his back and some long implement held between his teeth. Then he straps in and drops off a ridge over some mud with the mystery item now in his hand and takes a few choppy turns down some uneven spring snow. His voice plays over the footage and it seems like he’s going to make his attempt at one of snowboard videos’ oldest, and usually wordiest, cliches: describing what snowboarding means to him. But then he says “So I got to keep this short and to the point. I love to snowboard. It’s my favourite thing to do in life.” He arrives at an open river and wanders – fully clothed – into the water. The camera cuts back and I notice the item he’d been carrying is a fly-fishing rod. He softly tugs on the line as the water flows by and his voice, a gentle stoner drawl, continues: “But I think the only thing that comes close to snowboarding is fishing. Those are the two things that make me feel most free.”

Aesthetica is a pure snowboard video in a classical rider/video-part sense. There is no narrative through line. Besides Jackson and a few brief other moments – Xavier De Le Rue recounts an avalanche, Mads Jonnson fawns over Johan Olofsson – there are no other voices besides the songs. Though Mark Landvik’s personality shines through in his riding – set to “Pitbull Terrier” by Andre Nickatina & Equipto on both the DVD and iTunes – it’s not a focus like in That’s It, That’s All. Despite kicking off the entire video, Jackson’s comment about fishing goes nowhere. Any exploration of fulfillment is never mentioned again.

But narrative through-lines are rarely important to snowboard videos; it’s the sense of a coherent aesthetic that pulls a video together. To a kid watching a video, it’s the sense of cool, of something bigger than themselves put together by all these different people, that endears them to a video. I was a thirteen-year-old Neil Young fan when I first saw Aesthetica and saw it purely through the eyes of all-encompassing newness that young people have (for years I thought that Eric was the older Jackson brother solely because I’d heard of him first). I assumed back then that every song in every video was handpicked by the rider, and so “Rocking in the Free World” linked me to Jackson. And from that one line about feeling free, which is so silly to watch now, Jackson seemed old, wise, knowledgeable. It established to me that he was thoughtful, that snowboarding wasn’t just a hobby to him. It was those moments, before and besides his snowboarding, that made me a fan.

Maybe the single most surreal thing about looking back on old snowboard videos is how young everyone is. When I was eighteen I ran to buy a copy of a book because Forest Bailey (older, cooler, wiser than myself) was reading it in a video – it turns out Forest is only a year or two older than me. Despite That’s It, That’s All being structured like a career retrospective, Travis Rice was only 26 in 2008 (honestly that still genuinely doesn’t make sense to me). Eric Jackson was in his early twenties when he was filming for Aesthetica, though his beard suggests otherwise.

Filming snowboard parts is a young person’s game, partly because of the inevitable failings of our bodies, but also partly because making art is also a young person’s game. The Pieta, “It’s Alright Ma,” the ender in Shoot The Moon: Mike, Bob, Jed were all under twenty-five (Anderson was barely twenty actually). The energy of being young is a hard thing to describe, but a few lucky people capture it. There’s a million reasons to speculate on why so many generational talents seem to luck into their best work at young ages but if I had to put my money on one thing I am drawn to the idea that young people are not yet concerned about parroting their idols. The concept of originality, of newness, is not yet relevant to them because everything is new. One song, one painting, one snowboard video can’t seem derivative when you have so little of a grasp of the history of the form. So young people simply find what they like, digest it, and set out to make their own.

When we get older, we internalize the need to be cool, a feeling that morphs over time in the more pretentious need to be “good,” to have “taste.” We hold ourselves to more and more asinine standards and get eaten up by the feeling that our creations will never stand up to all the things ever made and all the things ever canonized. Those who come to find a balance in these things do so because they realize that nothing is ever truly 100% original: everyone who ever lived is a product of their influences. Great artists often make art in response to other well known, or overlooked things. They understand that great things can be made with explicit deference to things that have come before, in Homage. And they also understand that eventually we need to let go of expectations and let art be released into the wider world where it escapes our grasp and finds belonging in other people. But what is becoming increasingly common is that someone finds a creative outlet and produces something great at a young age, before they are consumed by the self-doubt the culture industry pushes on us like a dealer.

This is to say, if you are too concerned with making something great, you will never make anything at all. Snowboarders who once produced rapid-fire five-minute parts once a year instead produce thoughtful three-minute parts every three years. This isn’t to say there aren't important things to be learned by taking it slow, by being thoughtful about what you put into the world, but only some of the people who slow from high outputs to slow ones are slowed down with that in mind. Many of us are slowed by perfectionism, by insecurity, because we begin to hold ourselves to unrealistic standards. So much of the good art, of the good snowboarding, is produced by people of any age who are not beholden to what is good or what is great. It’s just that the naivete of young people makes it easier for them to ignore those standards. Something is cool to them because it relates to the emotions they have within themselves and then they create something based on that inspiration.

Where was this in the best straight air conversation? Mads Jonsson

The goal as we get older is to “stay young” in this sense. To continue to shirk what we think the culture expects of us and make what we want to make. Travis Rice, Jed Anderson, Erik Jackson and many other snowboarders are still producing incredible snowboarding ten, fifteen, or twenty years later because they believe in their own vision. They are not afraid, or they are able to overcome their fear, of seeming goofy or wack or uncool or… cringe.

“Cringe,” and its miserable nihilism, it is without a doubt the first thing most young people would reach for if they watched someone lead off their video part (in the first part of a major video production) with “Rocking In The Free World” and a quote about how fishing connects with your soul. But that’s now, not 2008. At the time maybe “cringeworthy” was the right word, long before it was distilled into the preeminent catch all insult of a generation. But if you look back on those years, very little of it is “cool” in our current sense. The gloomy realism of the post-Landline era is missing entirely. The music is over the top and often wildly corny (even my beloved soundtracks to the original DVD), the outfits even more so. Half the parts in any video feature giant park jumps that cost god knows how much money to make just to produce shots that occasionally seem less than stellar. The riding is interspersed with hammy clips or snowboarders trying, and often failing, to act funny.

Back then, even the intros were silly, creating characters out of every rider. But somehow they manage to feel much more authentic than the supposedly true-to-life blue-steel rider intros now. That or Fuck It or Vacation introduce each rider with a corny skit. Capita’s Defenders of Awesome introduces the nicknames instead of riders and then the nickname’s backstories. Transworld’s Get Real accompanies every name title with a collage of items that are supposed to distill the personality. It’s all cringe. Even the coolest snowboarders on earth can be dorks sometimes. We’re all cringe.

But the overwhelming dismissiveness of the average young person wielding the word cringe is a different beast. Sometimes I genuinely worry that cringe will do more damage to art and culture than any idea in my lifetime, that an obsession with ensuring your public persona is recognizably understated, is without the hallmarks and embarrassments of passion, that what you really care about is not caring, or that you are doing your darndest to appear that you do not care, will leave us not with bad art but with no art at all. That the fear of saying the wrong thing or looking the wrong way or wearing the wrong outfit will leave us with a global literature of esoteric aphorisms, will leave us with visual art consisting only of abstract grey photos of nothing, will leave us with snowboard videos that are nothing but thirty seconds of black outfits (but not shoes with black uppers with black outsoles – that’s cringe) and a single challenge-rail 50-50 set to a soundtrack of droning noise. It will leave us with a snowboard community without the Jackson’s and their mountain man hippyness, without Nick Visconti and his maximalist punk, without Hana Beaman and her part-punk part-surfer freedom, without Desiree Melancon and her poetic touch, without Mike Rav and his spiraling infinity. Because all of those things hinge on caring. They hinge on passion. Those people are my heroes because they care. If our culture strives to show, above all else, that we don’t care, if young people become increasingly obsessed with presenting themselves as “not cringe,” then we will be left with nothing at all.

The underlying point of going back and watching snowboard videos is, for better or worse, trying to remember how you felt then. The best-case scenario is that the credits roll and you’re just as excited about snowboarding as you were when you were a teenager. But if you are wrapped up in what is cool and what is cringe, you are forever doomed to miss the point. The biggest takeaway I took from my exposure to self-defeating skate-shop cool guys is that everything comes back around to being cool eventually. If we’re too hung up on finding the right level of self-expression, the right amount of emotion, the right amount of honesty, we risk losing the pieces to history. There was a time when TB4 was uncool, a time when Optimistic was overplayed, and now there’s a time when Aesthetica is corny. But media moves fast and things get lost. If some hero of an archivist misses collating a certain era of snowboard videos because they are currently viewed as cringe, we are at risk of losing them forever. There were only so many VHSs, DVDs, and magazines printed. They named the channel “Lost Snowboard Videos” for a good reason.

Some aesthetics age better than others. That doesn’t mean they aren’t worth revisiting. Torstein from his ender part.

The solution to me is to completely do away with the notion of cringe as it currently exists. Sure, it’s inescapable to laugh or even cringe (in the literal dictionary definition of the verb) at some of the outfits or the skits or the soundtracks in those old videos. But snowboarding is always snowboarding and snowboarding is always cool. The best of us, whether they wrestle with self-doubt or not, snowboard in a way that makes any preconceived notion of cool irrelevant. They are too focused on creating what they want to create. The ones who manage to extend that feeling as they get older do so by shirking the rapidly shifting paradigm of taste. Travis Rice has always been bad outfits and giant jumps. Desiree Melancon has shirked the idea which tricks are “in.” Jess Kimura has always had her heart on her sleeve. Mike Rav has always been rolling around on the ground. All around them, their entire careers, aesthetic trends have come and gone. The specifics of their lives, their outfits, their music have changed, but the philosophy hasn’t.

I’m not going to defend Aesthetica’s every artistic choice. Some of the songs stumble. Some of the tricks have aged terribly. As with nearly every snowboard video from pre-2020 (and many after), it really is incredible how little space the producers afforded women. And yet I am certain that Aesthetica was made in good faith. It was made with a vision of producing something that everyone involved thought was good. Not what they felt the culture asked of them, not what they felt would age well. They made the video they wanted to make, not the one they felt they should make.

Aesthetica ends with Torstein, set to Beggin’ by Madcon (the iTunes version gets Black Eyes by Snowden, arguably a better song), a moderately corny upbeat hip-hop cover of The Four Seasons, the sort of song that seems spawned in an laboratory for a FIFA videogame soundtrack. Even odder, Torstein’s part begins with a ninety second single shot of a lap through the park and pipe at Northstar, of all places. Throughout the part the outfits are heinous. The song is silly and probably takes too much attention. The park clips are funny. But it works. It’s fun. It’s worth watching. It’s a good video part that I am happy to return to. The thing is Torstein, like Travis, has never been properly cool. His street footage is written off as a park guy out of place. The jacket colorways are consistently ridiculous. He’s always been a little too jock, a little too European, and – frankly – a little too good.

But that idea of cool is formed on the back of our – my – influences. Soon after I found a copy of Aesthetica I started piling up Videograss DVDs and ripping Make Friends or Die videos from Youtube. That’s what formed my cultural conscience as a teenager. But if I’d never stumbled on them, I might have ended up the sort of person devoted to the talented and brightly dressed Euros of that era, those odd outsiders from the North American scene that never once ride without a full jacket, pants, and goggles. I might have ended up spending years defending Torstein and Halldór Helgason to the Videograss fans (I’m trying to make up for lost time now). But I went the other way and for too long became a devotee of too narrow an aesthetic, a fan only of my own sense of cool. What did I get from that? Like many people, it was a shock to me when he was the only person in five years of Natural Selection that really, genuinely, gave Rice a run for his money. Because I had missed decades of Torstein’s riding. I had missed decades of good snowboarding.

No one can ever say that Aesthetica doesn’t stick to its guns. With Torstein, it ends like it began, grade-A snowboarding overlooked for no good reason. The vibe, the music, the direction is consistent. If you were to somehow strip back all the characteristics intrinsic to the era when it was made, you would find a well put together snowboard video ends. But art is inextricable from the process of creation and so we’re left with a time capsule: with Mark Landvik and Slim Thug, with Eric Jackson and his fishing rod, with Torstein and his jackets, everyone else’s aesthetics be damned.

Jonathan Van Elslander is is a writer and snowboarder, as well as the editor of The Margin. Originally from Winnipeg, Manitoba, he has lived and boarded around British Columbia for the last ten years. The first time he bought a snowboard video with his own money he walked to Boarders Anonymous and bought Aesthetica.