By Andrew Murrell

Shortly after Conor Charleson’s Slight Inclination part debuted last week via Free Skateboard Magazine, editing mastermind Dan Magee prompted me to find all the easter eggs he’d included in the part. Challenge accepted… and lost. Although I clocked a couple of things instantly (don’t worry, I’d recognize that shade of orange from Lost & Found anywhere), I eventually had to wave my white flag and ask Dan to explain what the hell he meant by “a Welsh audio easter egg” (his word when we spoke initially) and save me the headache. I’m glad I did: there’s way more hidden throughout this part than I’d ever expect, from an overarching architecture-related theme to Fight Club references. Here’s a full breakdown, courtesy of Dan himself.

Conor Charleson, StonePenge, and the Hunt for a Secret Society

The central theme of Conor Charleson’s Slight Inclination is based around Conor’s favorite spot: The Joseph Paxton Memorial, or ‘StonePenge,’ in Crystal Palace, London. This is the spot Conor skates at the very beginning of his part as the music kicks in.
Joseph Paxton was a Victorian architect, gardener, and the publisher/illustrator of botanical dictionaries. Paxton designed the original Crystal Palace glasshouse and his sketch on a piece of blotting paper was, by chance, the first “blueprint” for Blueprint Skateboards. Magee used images taken from Paxton’s sketch in his own first sketch of a Blueprint graphic when the company started in 1995.
Paxton also completed designs for the Rothschild family during his career, and, coincidentally, was born in a village just outside of Dan Magee’s hometown and died in the hometown of Greg Conroy, who illustrated the characters seen in this part (more on that below).

If you look at the Paxton memorial from the skateable side, its layout and geometry echo symbolism often seen in Masonic Lodges as a representation of King Solomon’s temple, with a bust of Paxton’s filling in for the central all-seeing eye present in Masonic Lodges. The objects comprising the intro/outro’s animated collage represent Paxton’s bust, the skate spot & Paxton’s botanical illustrations. The intro and outro animations also feature:

One of the monoliths found at the spot that forms part of its geometry.
Two sphinxes found in Crystal Palace Park where the skate spot is located. These also connect to the footage at Highgate Cemetery, where you can spot slanted pyramid shapes as Conor walks along Egyptian Avenue and Circle of Lebanon.
A mason’s arch featuring a keystone with slanted sides, which also mirrors the metronome Conor holds.

The metronome being held by Conor not only matches the intro music, but is also similar in shape to the objects Conor loves to skate. He is captured holding the metronome in front of a flyover support under the M4 motorway, which itself is an inverse shape of the metronome.
The remaining 16mm footage is linked together under a fictional premise that includes factual elements: Conor is searching for evidence of a secret society of architects that designed structures he could skate, with Paxton and the StonePenge spot being central to this. We see him at the huge monolithic slanted tomb of Glasshouse designer John Loudon and his wife, both of whom also happened to be gardeners who wrote botanical publications, in the London suburb of Pinner, at the pyramid tomb of Francis Douce, who collected many volumes and manuscripts including botanical dictionaries, and in Hampshire.

Skate stuff

Conor Charleson’s Slight Inclination is a thematic part echoing Bobby Puleo’s V5 part: both focus on the skater mainly skating obstacles that he is known to excel at (wallrides and cellar doors, respectively).
The first skate video Conor saw was Blueprint’s Make Friends With The Colour Blue and he wanted his part to reflect a similar feeling, so Dan Magee edited his part with Lost & Found and Kevin Coakley’s Make Friends With The Colour Blue part in mind.
When Conor cracks his skateboard creditcarding his Biffin’s Bridge (that’s a taint for all you American English speakers out there), you can hear a snippet of the intro to the live version of Guns ‘N’ Roses Live and Let Die. Conor is Welsh; the first Welsh video part Dan Magee edited was Matt Pritchard’s part in Anthems. He skated to the original Paul McCartney and Wings version of the song.

The end credits start with the words “You Have Been Watching,” a Dan Magee editing trademark first featured in Blueprint’s Waiting For The World. This was originally inspired by the credits of British films and TV shows of the 1970s, such as It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum featuring Windsor Davies, who grew up not far from Conor’s hometown in Wales.

Cartoon Characters, Subliminal Messaging and more

The flash frames we see throughout the part are inspired by the subliminal messaging in David Fincher’s Fight Club, where Tyler Durden is inserted into a single frame or a man’s penis flashes across the screen with accompanying crackle sound effect. When Conor credit cards in the intro, an illustration flashes across the screen, suggesting a motif. Fight Club also features Meatloaf as Robert Paulson. Meatloaf’s I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That) is Conor’s go-to rock opera number when performing karaoke.

The composition of the shot in which Conor descends a children’s slide is a real-life application of the golden ratio, an example of sacred geometry, in architecture.
The animations throughout the part turn Paxton’s bust into the stone head from the cult film Zardoz. The plot of Zardoz involves secret societies and features a character named Arthur Frayn who describes himself as a “magician by inclination” in the film’s opening monologue. Judging by Conor’s last tricks, he also is a magician by inclination, and when he does the front rock at the end of Slight Inclination, Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 in A, Second Movement plays. This is the piece also plays during the ending message of Zardoz.

Throughout the part, and within the end credits specifically, feature caricatures of Conor drawn by Greg Conroy. These drawings are a nostalgic reference to the Hanna-Barbera cartoon credits. Furthering this reference, the font used in the credits is lifted from the Hanna-Barbera logo of the 1960’s and is colored in the same orange as the credits text in Lost & Found (which also used a similar font).

Overthinking Conor Charleson’s 'Slight Inclination'