Fixed Friday: Mystical

Welcome to Fixed Sunday! Sincerest apologies on the lateness, but we’re back with your weekly dose of fixed axle features. Before we get into the column, I’d like to call a little attention to two great recent entries to the fixie canon, Alex Curfman’s “One-Hand Wonder” clip and Ed Haponik’s “Mystic Dumps” trick. On with the show!

This week has a mix of concepts, but is intended to be a follow-up to my “Mystics” clip for LSFC last week, so you might want to check that out also. Before we get into the tech-y stuff, though… foot start to bucket stall! Preloading a mount and then propelling a dead yo-yo into it with your foot is a fun trick to add to your arsenal, simply because it’s one of the rare moves that’s easier to perform while sitting down.

The second trick in the video is what we’re calling a “mystic”, a gentle cousin to the kickflip transition and the dumptruck. The basic idea behind a mystic is to swing a stalled yo-yo off-plane so that it is turned upside-down and dumped onto another string. It seems like a fairly logical followup to dumptruck dismounts, but planebreaking transitions are still fairly unexplored terrain, so while traces of the trick were floating around there wasn’t really a name for it until Ed put out “Mystic Dumps”. This trick sums up the concept of flipping from one mount to another very succintly while simultaneously paying tribute to Paul Escolar’s classic magic drop trick, and I highly recommend learning it.

Having said that… I personally find mystic dumps a lot harder than the trick in this video, which is a mystic from a double or nothing stall to an inverted trapeze stall, so if you have a hard time sticking the landing on Ed’s try this one out. Throw a double or nothing stall, and then swing the whole formation forward as though you were going to kickflip or dumptruck out of it. As the yo-yo gets to be about horizontal, curl your non-throwhand finger and point both your hands in towards your body to guide the yo-yo onto the back string. This transition takes a little time to get the feeling of, but is a great way to mix up your stall transitions.

If you’ve already advanced past both mystic dumps and 2or0 mystics, trick #3 might amuse you: it uses the same chopsticks truck as my first trick in DCUS Chillin’, but lands on the string instead of dismounting, which somehow sets up a reverse GT stall. Trippy! Ten points to the first person to kickflip a reverse GT…

The trick at 30 seconds is a fun, silly whip. If you’ve been looking to get into stall whips but don’t know where to start, this one features a fairly easy setup and a nice delay before the landing. It opens with a 2or0 stall, followed by a dunk, which sets a ripcord up on the string for the whip. Take your non-throwhand finger out of the loop and whip the string around your throwhand into the gap… which is conveniently held in place with your free hand, because stalls let you do that. I enjoy this trick because it’s based off of the modern 1A grind/whip formula, but the “grind” portion is actually made much easier by stalls.

Next in line is another technical mystic, this time based on an old Jason Lee chopsticks combo (referenced also in Imperialism.) The opening sequence can be a little confusing: mount trapeze stall, and cross the string over your thumb as you dismount, which creates a wrap around your thumb as you mount a trapeze-bro stall. This trick departs from the other combos when you mount back in a stall over your thumb, at which point you swing back to the back string (as in 2or0 mystics) and then perform a second mystic onto the middle string, which puts you in that weird “i’m not actually a bucket” mount. My personal favorite thing to do upon landing a stall in this mount is actually another Jason Lee masterpiece, “wiggly thing”, though my wiggles aren’t as clean as his… but you can also dismount or do whatever.

The final combo is a recent favorite, “Boyfriendcat loves Sea Glass.” It opens with a pinwheel that lets me launch vertically before a 2or0 chopsticks stall, which adds a nice touch of drama. Dismounting to behind the head zines and then cross-armed 1.5 stall is a bread & butter combo for me, but it gets spiced up a bit when it’s swung upwards and pushed out into a horizontal pinwheel, naturally continued into a UFO. The benefit of launching from a 1.5 instead of a trapeze is that the string is naturally set up for a whip, and I put my concentration face on to catch the UFO in a horizontal whip… phew!

Anyways, that’s it for this week. Thanks for letting me be late. Beat’s available to download free on my Soundcloud. Go watch Mystics. Okay.