“If you’re reading this then it’s already too late. You’re hooked, addicted, in for life, past the point of no return. You’ve been into snowboarding for a while, you love it, so much so you go to the WWW’s ‘on the regs’ and know a thing or three about who’s who, what’s what and where who-did-what-when. But the tertiary buzz of daily web edits is wearing thin, it isn’t enough of a fix. You find yourself needing that deep blackout drunk of the FULL VIDEO.” – Excerpt from Think Thank’s Methods of Prediction zine.

On June 1, 1967, The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, arguably one of the greatest rock albums of all time. Not only was the music as electrifying as it was technically groundbreaking, but so too was the way in which The Beatles presented the breakthrough album. For the first half of the decade, three-minute pop ballads owned the airwaves. The root of the issue came from the format of the 78-rpm speed records that were commonly used for studio recording. These records were just long enough to record a song three to five minutes long, and in turn stifled the creativity and musical integrity of the era’s artists. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonley Heart Clubs Band aimed to stray from this norm, and The Beatles strived to create art in a continuous musical form, utilizing the album as a whole. The record came packaged in a highly decorated sleeve, complete with the lyrics of the songs, fictitious stories from the band’s alias (their alter ego being Sgt. Pepper and his Lonely Hearts Club Band), and cardboard cutouts of whacky, miniature caricatures. The record itself was not banded with song tracks, a tactic used to encourage the listener to play the album from start to finish, only pausing to flip the record over. Paul McCartney would go on to say in his biography, Many Years from Now, that the album marked a significant growth not only for the rock world at large, but for the artists behind it as well. “We were not boys, we were men… artists rather than performers.”

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Methods of Prediction is a cohesive culmination of the greatness that is Think Thank. The mavens of mini and their riding are on point, but what really makes the video stand out is its presentation to the snowboard community. The effect it has, consciously or subconsciously, is one worth mentioning.

Before even popping the DVD in its player, the show had begun. Enclosed with the disc was a lively, stylized zine, just below 40 pages in length. The zine features cover art by rider Desiree Melancon, and pictures of the crew’s various expeditions throughout. The zine is comprised of handwritten poems, blurbs and anecdotes, some more vague than others, all of them in distinct regard to our magical world of snowboarding.

Growing up, I remember how amazing it was when my brother and I received a new VHS, or in later years a DVD, of a new full length snowboard video. Often it wasn’t one we requested, but whatever the kid working the local shop told our mom she should buy for us. We would watch those videos dozens of times, inebriated on the blackout drunk that, as mentioned in the Methods of Prediction zine, can only be brought about “in such a putrid vacuum as this, the small strange cultural backwater that is the snowboard video.”

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In thinking of what music has had the greatest impact on pop culture in recent years, I am hard pressed to come up with any particular song. While they may get the most radio plays, hit singles are rarely what stick out in people’s mind as they reflect on this topic. Swimming Pools may have been the song that roped in Kendrick Lamar’s listeners, but it’s good Kid, m.A.A.d city, the album in its entirety, that people will be talking about for years to come.

In this day in age we have become misconstrued in our spoils, especially in regards to video footage of snowboarding’s professionals. As mentioned in the Methods zine, “The tertiary buzz of daily web edits is wearing thin, it isn’t enough of a fix.” Like cigarettes on speed, one is too many and a hundred is never enough. The package that Think Thank has produced is in itself “an insurrection, an actual physical printed snowboard artifact.” The Internet is great for immediate accessibility, but tangibility is timeless.

Head over to Think Thank’s website to purchase a copy of Methods of Prediction. In the meantime, here’s a couple segments from the video: Sammy Spiteri’s full part and a short edit from Think Thank’s time this summer at Mt. Hood. Although, if you agree with the notion of this review, you know a few minutes of footage won’t really satisfy any real craving…

Arbor Snowboards :: Arbor x Think Thank ~ Sammy Spiteri – Full Part from Arbor Collective on Vimeo.

https://player.vimeo.com/video/140603941

Think Thank Session 6 from Think Thank on Vimeo.