End of the Month / Seasonal Depression Links

January 31st, 2011 | 4:14 pm | Daily News | 6 Comments

This forecast is absolute murder. The ghost of winter 2010-2011 is definitely going to leave many reminders in our springtime recovery efforts, as well.

Japanese MTV ran a New York sightseeing bit on Supreme back in 1996. It’s a time warp into what skating seems to have looked like fifteen years ago: World Industries boards still up on the wall, a copy of Mouse in the video display, bulky-ass skate shoes, Triple Five Soul being down Lafayette Street (That actually lasted much longer than 1996, but unless you were trying to keep swooshy cargo pants or army green bucket hats with stash pockets alive, that probably had little bearing on your existence), and Nas in his Raekwon-envying, confused, chipped tooth era.

Assuming you’re like most people who skateboard and check Crailtap regularly, you have already seen this. In case you missed it, the latest Mini DV Drawer features the B-roll version of Mike Carroll’s masterwork of a downtown Los Angeles line from Fully Flared. I wonder what the original fakie flip inclusive rendition was, before it got switched to the switch frontside 180 / backside flip combo.

Although this website has never really been on some naïve message board nonsense by dwelling too hard (or at all) on skateboarding’s duo of most visible representatives (aside from occasionally complimenting Ryan on his New York based skate tricks)… Sheckler and Dyrdek are really fucking these kids up by endorsing something called “Bill My Parents.”

Some late-90s New Jersey footage from Robert Brink over at Already Been Done. It’s an over four-year-old upload, but it’s new to me. Features some raw Tim O’Connor and Pancho Moler footage, plus shots of the beloved Hoboken Ledges.

The Chrome Ball Crack Rock Incident presents the Hubba Hideout photo collective.

A token Norwegian has done his best in channeling one of the more difficult endeavors in Southern California schoolyard bank skating, by skating the parallel six-stair rails at the brick section of Columbia from the actual incline. Well done.

There are some new ledges in Boston, they look beveled, but the good ground would probably make up for that. Hopefully the snow covering the northeast right now thaws out by July.

Howard Glover has uploaded the Brooklyn section of his Pre-2K video onto Vimeo. Half of the four minutes is set at the best spot to ever reside on Kings County soil. Billy Rohan insists that the Parks Department stores all of the marble they remove from renovations in some warehouse, i.e. it never simply gets thrown out. We should write up a letter telling them to keep their skate parks, and just install a few skate friendly plazas throughout the city with already-skated-on marble.

They have security guards watching that stupid wall on Bowery & Houston now. Art game is intense, bro.

Quote of the Week: “Tanqueray is like drinking a Christmas.” — Ben Nazario

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This is going on the front page, too big for the sidebar

January 27th, 2011 | 10:39 pm | Daily News | 10 Comments

Thank you Amare, Chandler, Felton, Gallinari, Williams, Turiaf, and of course, Landry Fields, our favorite potential-pro-skater-turned-ball-player. Miami played awful (by their standards), but we’ll take it.

Dwayne Wade > Lebron James. Then and now.

New York, Ten Years Ago: Video Edition

January 27th, 2011 | 3:52 pm | Time Capsule | 3 Comments

Blackout was a video released by Satva Leung in 2001 or 2002 as a promotional piece for his of-the-time venture, Judah Skateboards. Much like Zoo York’s E.S.T. series, it is an assortment of montages split up by region, and provides a nostalgic look back at what New York skateboarding looked like ten years ago, before the internet changed everything, and kids got significantly better. (Here’s the photographic edition of “Ten Years Ago,” in case you missed it.)

A chronological list of observations:

Instrumental boops and bleeps have slowly become an outdated safety-zone for soundtracks in east coast skate videos. They had a stronghold on song choices in the beginning of the file sharing era, as they provided original music when record companies were looking for new candidates to sue for copyright infringement after their business model collapsed. Today’s standard seems to be bands from Brooklyn and Baltimore.

With the remodeling of the spot formerly known as Chinatown Ledges, and the demise of the big banks, we have lost the two dirtiest spots in New York (as rightfully pointed out in a Skateboarder article.) The Fat Kid spot might lay claim to that title today, but we’re open to alternatives for picking up strange diseases and rashes after falling.

Dag Park is an oft-forgotten entry on the “Spots I wish were still here” list. The best ledges / best ground combo in the city that you didn’t get kicked out of, circa 2000-2001.

Even though it hasn’t been nearly as long, the [spot across from] Javitz Center is missed, too.

People who move to New York with skateboarding largely in mind, but gradually lose interest (at least in actually skating New York, if not skateboarding altogether) in exchange for potentially lucrative art careers are not a new phenomenon by any means. The Muska has been on that program for quite some time.

Even though Dave Mayhew is disregarded by historians on the basis of his participation in The Storm, he has one of the best tricks ever done at the Banks. (Seriously, bikers are the only ones who ever launched off the big banks, and he backside flipped off of them…over a police barrier, i.e. he figured out how to treat the big banks like the small banks, pre-fence installation.) He was also ahead of the curve in doing impossibles out of tricks. Carroll had to step up and make it more legitimate, though.

Westchester spots look a lot like midwestern spots. Aside from Sue’s Rendezvous. That spot looks like it’s in Atlanta.

Remember when people who mostly skated Manhattan found out that there were a lot of recycled plastic benches out in Brooklyn?

The Flushing grate maintains to be one of the few New York skate spots where all of the best tricks have been done by locals. (For an internationally known spot, “local” means the tri-state area.) So other regions were never up for the title. James Reres will probably hold it for a while longer.

Anthony Correa would make a great Chrome Ball Incident post. The Zoo ad of the nollie half-cab crook revert at the Houston ledge has always been a favorite.

Blackout was the last video with enough foresight for future legends to give Geo “TOMA!” Moya the ender.

Continue reading for the montages of the other cities, just don’t expect anything great, as this video is being discussed for historical/archival reasons, not because it is exceptional in any way.

Wooh Da Kid (“All my white friends say Wooh Da Kid is rad! YES!”) actually made a significantly better Blackout recently. As there are probably ten non-disintergrated copies of this left on VHS throughout the planet, thanks goes to the original uploader.

The Parallel Between Bobby Puleo & Albert Pike

January 27th, 2011 | 11:19 am | Daily News | 33 Comments

A handful of people inquired about this site’s opinion on a recent Bobby Puleo interview (although the word “interview” should be used lightly, as the rubric of journalistic standards doesn’t exactly lean in favor of an interview with someone being published on their own media outlet, as opposed to an unbiased third party’s platform.) Between insisting that Austyn Gillette skates like the remaining millions of skateboarders, the fact that this website is guilty of showing people from other places spots (i.e. showing the entire world spots), and knowing the “What the hell?” factor that arose from an early screening of Deathbowl to Downtown, where this guy’s influence (which he mistakes for everyone else’s lack of creativity) was able to contort history so much that someone could claim he “Pioneered the New York style of skating,” we’re going to stay out of this one. The whole thing comes off as a skateboard-equivalent of one of those conversations where someone will rattle off five artists that “ruined hip-hop,” while championing the fact that Ghostface has made the same album for five years in a row.

Nevertheless, Billy Rohan, a native of Florida, a state mentioned as one of the corrosive forces behind the declining state of “art” in skateboarding, wrote a significantly more bigger-picture-encompassing response on his website, which aligns with a lot of where this website’s beliefs stand:

“Whether or not this interview destroys his skate career has no relevance in your mid-thirties. The true legacy of Robert Puleo will rest with art historians 200 years from now in museums throughout the country. Much like Pike, who spent his final days being taken care of by his fraternity brothers with just enough money to survive and who eventually died penniless, only to be entombed in America’s sacred pyramid years after his death.

So to does Bobby Puleo at the least deserve to have the respect and care of the brotherhood of skaters that recognize his devotion and contribution to the art of skateboarding. Theres a much larger world out there waiting for Bobby Puleo, his Mausoleum in skateboarding will live in the minds of people who grew up listening to Wu-Tang, watching him skate in the Infamous video, La Luz, Static and Mad Circle [videos], who said to themselves, ‘I want to leave my shitty town in Florida and skate that dope marble shit in NYC or SF or London.’ Not because we wanted to take you out, but because you inspired us to think differently about our surroundings and all that’s out there to be explored. Thank you Bobby Puleo. If this is your farewell interview for skateboarding, where ever you rest and no matter how much money you don’t have, the ideas you sparked in thousands of street skaters across the world will never be replaced with marketing money.”

You can read the whole thing here.

Filed Under: Daily News | Tags: , ,

Chevy painted tropical, awimbawe, awimbawe

January 25th, 2011 | 1:18 pm | Daily News | 28 Comments

As video-makers have become increasingly afraid to edit skateboarding to offensive music, and continue to submit to a fairly narrow scope of sounds (People insist that these decisions are all based on what Pitchfork approves, but that seems more like a scapegoat than the real reason), loud, obnoxious music largely intended for strip clubs has been cast aside. A safety zone for song choices exists, which makes a lot of skate part music just sit there, as a passive accompaniment to the part, and not elevating the skating to a more reflective-of-the-skater nature. This phenomenon allows a team like Expedition, seemingly filled with white guys who probably like all sorts of weird rap about hacking computers and hacking limbs, to edit an entire video to generic soul songs, or a video for a shop in Miami, a city that has probably played more Tiesto than the rest of the country combined, and provided us with so-goddamn-ignorant-that-even-Quartersnacks-can’t-cosign-it “artists” like DJ Khaled, to be edited to MF Doom and West Indian infused Muska Beatz derivatives.

Smolik might have looked like a total kook goonin’ hard with some San Diego derelicts at the train tracks, but sure as hell knew that’s who he was, and what he was trying to put across with his part. Or that Koston wanted to live in Los Angeles. And I hate that song. But it works. If you want to skate to Katy Perry because you have a crush on her bosomy physique, do it. Make people on YouTube tell you the song ruined the part. Make them thumbs down your video because of the song. As long as it’s what you wanted, and who you are, do it. Skateboarders always complain about non-skaters “trying to look like them” — maybe it would be way harder to do that if the images that you put out there actually reflected you, and not what 95-percent of skate videos tell you is okay.

Case in point: Pryce Holmes put together a bunch of Charles Lamb’s footage from various European* endeavors that occurred in 2010. Complete with gunshots, four or five song changes, girls screaming, and the “Polo” remix, a song I can personally attest to being a Charles Lamb favorite. But, with the industry figure heads constantly pushing against such downright offensive part compositions, Pryce was forced to provide a “white boy mix,” so less open-minded media outlets could utilize it without alienating a skateboard audience that they hope to one day find indistinguishable from one another, probably for marketing reasons.

*Plus C.I.A. Ledge, but we have already revealed that C.I.A. was deemed “the best ledge in New York” by a master of European skateboarding, therefore it does not break the cohesive feel of the part.

There’s a chunk of real good footage that was also left out of this part, so don’t be too surprised if you see a round two someday.

Click here for the whiteboy edit. And even though this site’s favorite “Young” is Jeezy, as we schedule updates around prominent release dates, we can gaurantee that there will be like eight or nine new clips the day Young Dro’s album comes out. (If and when, obviously.)

 
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