New York City Skateboarding & Degeneracy
September 2nd, 2010 | 6:20 pm

A New Era of Skateboard Media Has Begun

“‘Cause you know I’m doing 300,000 every week! Unless they take the shit down, then I gotta throw it back up. Start me back at the beginning, but I’m still killin’ ‘em.“

Skateboarding is finally getting its head on straight and taking some welcome cues from the rap music media world. As we enter an age where everyone is good, and essentially spending their adolescence tailoring their skills in well-built skate plazas, personality-building supplementary materials may be needed to help distinguish Cory Kennedy from a kid that skates like Cory Kennedy. And this means more than just a Crailtap “Fives” where Mike Carroll’s status as the world’s greatest skateboarder is reaffirmed. Anyone can rap about coke, fat asses, and Louis Vuitton, much like anyone (well, anyone who’s good) can nollie flip a fourteen-stair nowadays or switch crook a gnarly rail, but it will be the behind the scenes videos that help us decide where our allegiances with various athletes stand. Just as long as no one gets shot.

Yums, a shoe brand spearheaded by Soulja Boi, one of the greatest internet marketers in the history of the medium (I say this with utmost sincerity — you don’t have to like him, but if you disagree, then you’re wrong, simply put) took a saavy WorldStar-esque spin on the world of skate gossip in relation to the Manny Mania fight that seems to have eclipsed every other New York related skate event this past summer. We can only hope that this is the beginning of an endlessly entertaining path of Kat Stacks videos victimizing Alex Olson, or maybe a skateboard equivalent of the “oh you mad ’cause I’m stylin’ on you” classic.

(Stating this for no reason: The black suede Stevie Reebok is one of the most underrated skate shoes ever, if you have some pairs buried under your house because they were selling at stores for $30 at one point, e-mail me.)

Spotted via 48 Blocks. The fakie heel nosegrind at the end of the Pulaski line is pretty sick.

August 31st, 2010 | 2:03 pm

Classics From the Distant Mid-2000s

Given that the environment surrounding skateboard videos in 2010 typically shoots through a one-month cycle, in which the routine of them being premiered at some bar, uploaded to YouTube, released on DVD, deleted off YouTube, re-uploaded onto some sketchy eastern European video sharing site predominantly used for personality gauges of mailorder brides, and finishing their lifespan with a three page topic on Slap that usually dies out around the time some token asshole says “It’s kind of boring, I don’t get why everyone likes it so much,” it’s hard to maintain a longstanding presence, or even find something you may have missed from years before. The phenomenon is particularly pertinent to local videos, which went from their nineties/early-2000s existence of being passed around their respective regions on VHS dubs, to the complete opposite end of the spectrum, where every single twelve-year-old has a HD camera and desperately tries to make the defining document of their generation, right before the majority of their friends find out about cocaine and start filling out their art school applications.

Everyone knows that Mixtape is the best New York video (of the nineties, because “New York” videos don’t really exist anymore in the same way, unless you’re Flipmode.) Maybe if you’re more concerned with dat real hip-hop than with skateboarding, or are a Japanese person who doesn’t know who Eric Koston is, it’s your favorite video of all time. Choosing such a distinction as a clear-cut statement is more difficult for the 2000s, given that there are probably, like, a hundred New York skate videos that have been forgotten by this point. But unless you have personal allegiances, a safe top three would be Vicious Cycle, Flipmode 4, and Lurkers 2, probably the best time-capsule of what it was like to actually skate in New York during 2004, with the drives to Staten Island to pretend like you’re in California for a few hours, and the shift away from skating the Financial District with the recent loss of the little Banks.

Lurkers 2 has been uploaded to Vimeo for about two months now, and is teetering around one hundred views, which is only fuel to the suspicion that it is criminally under seen outside the immediate circle of Manhattan and North Brooklyn inhabiting skateboarders. Plus, it’s a good way to cap off August. The quality looks decent, not what you’d expect from the age of faux-HD Vimeo uploads, but you’ll live. Features full parts from Dharam Khalsa, Ted Barrow, Jason Dill, Ian Reid, Lurker Lou, and Charles Lamb. Has a riveting opener by Aaron Szott, and cameos from Quartersnacks team members, Matthew Mooney, Ty Lyons, and Pryce Holmes.

A few relevant links: Quartersnacks’ 2006 review of the video, and links to some alternate edits from the video.

August 25th, 2010 | 9:53 pm

Straight Off the Block With It

Flying to a far off land for a few days. Sitting on a few racks of footage on metal grates in SoHo as well. You know how the end of summer clips go. We blew it last year, because there was none. Everyone was busy wasting money on the westside. You know where. But as the cliché goes this year, it’s just “not the same in 2010.” Our productivity level would happen to agree. (That’s a good thing.)

If the people from Jersey Shore are telling the truth, the summer ends on Labor Day weekend. You can’t wear white sneakers or boat shoes anymore. End of Summer clip dropping Labor Day weekend. Is this a trailer for the new clip? No. It’s just a quick reminder that we still suck. Except the line on the rocks, that’s actually pretty sick, you just need to go there to kind of understand it. It doesn’t make much sense otherwise.

Although already a trending topic, has there even been a song for summer 2010? “B.M.F.” not counting because Ross sucks.

Features Switch Michael Strobert, Alexander Mosley, Josh Velez, Ty Lyons, Geo Moya, Matthew Mooney, Torey Goodall.

Become a QS fan on Facebook, follow on Twitter, or don’t do anything and be content with it.

Two “End of Summer” selections embedded after the jump.

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August 25th, 2010 | 9:41 pm

Bollywood Thuggin’

It’s always a pleasure to see the old fashioned dinosaur and its DV tapes get some shine in the ever increasing landscape of iPhone cams and HD cameras, all pushing at opposite ends of the spectrum simultaneously. Rob Harris threw together an assorted clip of dinosaur-filmed throwaways involving handrails, Bollywood themes, loading docks, and beards. Yes, beards. There are a lot of beards.

August 25th, 2010 | 6:54 pm

Video Review: Emerica’s Stay Gold

Yaje had the best part.

This past Monday, Bryan Herman, some asphalt, and a couple picnic tables reminded everyone of how fun schoolyards looked in the nineties, before eleven-minute video parts and people not named Daewon made this particular sub-genre of skateboarding synonymous with tedium. What exactly possessed the people responsible for editing Stay Gold to choose a song that kind of sounds like some distant relative of muffled instrumental hip-hop (“It’s a throwback to da golden age, yo!”) to go along with it is anyone’s guess. While watching this video, a fun game to play is trying to fit any of the songs used throughout its soundtrack into a particular genre of music and see how close you get. If you do happen to find an applicable genre, then try to picture the people that actually load up this stuff onto their iPod or car. I basically feel no guilt whatsoever for editing Daniel Lebron or Ben Nazario footage to Gucci Mane anymore, because I have physical, living evidence of people who actually do listen to Brick Squad. “Luh Dem Gun Sounds” has 4.2 million views right now. I have never met anyone who listens to the stuff they put in this video, and contrary to popular belief, I do know a lot of snobby white people with life-long devotions to all sorts of music not featured on Dirty Glove Bastard. Has the always troublesome relationship between music rights and skateboarding videos really gotten this bad? (If it has, it might be unfair to include music choice and its appropriateness as a critique for skate videos. Plus, since most skate videos are viewed on YouTube these days, simply turning the volume off and letting iTunes rock is another solution. That’s what I suspect most people do when they watch Quartersnacks clips.)

Everyone killed it, and the list you expect to appear on any summation of this video is obvious. There’s just a certain intangibility that comes with describing certain parts as being “less interesting” than others. It has nothing to do with the spots of choice, because this video makes an effort to portray Southern California as one endless parking lot, and it becomes apparent which individuals are better equipped with the navigational tactics to mediate throughout the given forest of parking spaces than others. Nor does it really have much to do with the types of spots, because handrail and gap skating is no less subject to the varying degrees of interesting-ness than ledge or “abstract spot” skating. Some people make you care, other’s don’t. Arguing about a skate part being boring, when it is clear that the person up for discussion is insanely talented, is like debating whether Lil’ Wayne is a good rapper — the number of cases for him being a genius or a mumbling retard are equally distributed on both sides of the scale — it is just a matter of which particular ramblings you want to emphasize to build your case. Non-legacy video parts are either “Fly like an ostrich” or “Hustler Muzik,” it can really go either way depending on who’s watching it.

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