In honor of the 2 Chainz NYC debut, February marking one-year since the release of Codeine Cowboy, 2 Chainz signing to Def Jam (and thankfully not MMG), and all the TRU University graduates out there, it’s only right we declare this to be 2 Chainz Week on Quartersnacks. (Speaking of theme weeks, Chrome Ball is currently having a Jersey week.)

Much like 2 Chainz tacked on T.I. to the end of the original “Spend It” to create a “remix,” we tacked on 2 Chainz’s live performance from Monday, plus contributions from Theotis Beasley and Palace Skateboards to form a remix of our “Best of 2011” clip (sorry RhiRhi.) The intoxicated iPhone camerawork is obviously horrible, but it’s hard to keep a phone steady when you’re in a room full of people screaming “GILBERT ARENAS!” and “SIMILAC!” Consider it a tribute to lazy remixes as well.

2 Chainz, Quartersnacks, Palace, and Theotis represent maybe 38% of the things that matter in western civilization for 2012, so any redundancies of recycled footage can easily be forgiven. It’s also disgusting that there are a bunch of 15-year-olds sitting on YouTube crying about Theotis’ list not including Wu-Tang, Big L, or The Smiths. Between the downtown-favorite “Ignition” remix, “Wet Wipes,” “Dey Know,” and “Hard in the Paint,” his parts have consistently had the best selection of songs that people actually like on their own, not what they’re “supposed to” like. Stay schemin’.

If it’s yours, you should spend it.

The Santa Monica Sand Gaps were one of the few Los Angeles area institutions shitty enough to be embraced by the east coast. Despite the beachside setting (and perfect ground), the Sand Gaps garnered worldwide recognition based off a few holes in the floor, a not-so-great rounded-off ledge and zillions of small specks that would eat their way into your bearings, and made those jealous of Los Angeles’ 70-degree winters and schoolyard pavement respect its existence. It is Los Angeles’ version of a famous skate spot that should have never been a famous skate spot, i.e. Astor, Tompkins, etc. It was also the subject of many jokes said at Gigliotti’s expense (the only Los Angeles native to ever be on QS payroll) throughout his time living in New York (“Where are you guys going skating today?” “Just meet us at Sand Gaps.”) Let us not forget it was a favorite among visiting New Yorkers.

The gaps are now filled in with trees. Though the ledge remains, the spot is still called “Sand Gaps.” So, much like the big banks remaining after the city ruined the small ones and took out the ledge section, the soul of the spot is unfortunately no more. We send our sympathies to Joey Brezinski, Robbie McKinley, Chris Roberts, and of course, Giglotti the Great.

Sand Gaps, if you were from New York, we would have loved you so much more than we already did. Give a good home to those trees.

THE MONUMENTAL 2 CHAINZ NYC DEBUT IS UPON US (AND SOLD OUT.) “I HAD MAD PEOPLE CALLING ME ASKING WHY I DIDN’T GET THEM A TICKET, I’M LIKE, ‘I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW YOU LIKE 2 CHAINZ.’”

“In 1992, I filmed an interview with my friend, former pro skateboarder, Jeff. Jeff was at the lowest point of his career. This footage has been unseen for almost 20 years.” Peter Sidlauskas = Oscar winner by 2043? Billy McFeely “Best Actor in a Leading Role” winner by 2036? Not no, right?

Kalis now owns two of the benches from Philadelphia City Hall. Skateboarding wins. (Supposedly, a bench like that runs for ~$5K, which means you could make a perfect skatepark with $30-40K, zero “ramps,” and a paved lot…)

Jimmy Marketti uploaded a montage of new old footage that looks like it came from the mid-2000s. Unseen Rob Campbell clips, Andrew Reynolds second angles, and a somber look at the original back of Union Square.

Some raw footage live from the Tompkins bench, a dive into the odd mind of Shawn Powers, and Tribeca Park stuff that you could probably skip. Tompkins > Tribeca.

While on the topic of nineties west coast company excursions to the east, this 1994 clip of the Girl, Chocolate & Firm east coast tour (from 411 #8) is worth a look. There’s a New York section at the end, but it’s mostly lifestyle clips.

A well-written, contemplative, and occasionally Freudian analysis of “why l*ngb**rds suck” by Will Staley. Naturally, someone in the comments posted a link to a video insisting “You have no idea what can be done on a l*ngb**rd. It puts skateboarders to shame.”

“Skateboards as props in rap videos hit a new, unforeseeable, low recently in Soulja Boy’s video for ’50/13.’ Dude on the left is holding a deck with no griptape, trucks, or wheels. It is not a skateboard; it’s just a board.”

A pair of interviews from two of the finest content-creators in skateboarding went online last week, and they’re definitely worth your time: Robert Brink and Patrick O’Dell. The O’Dell one should have been more in-depth, but whatever.

The Be Pretty video is now online in full. Highlights include a front 3 up Three-Up-Three-Down and a Flushing grate gap NBD, and a reminder that Big L was ahead of his time with the whole “From New York and never was a fan of the Knicks” thing, considering the current 7-13 mess we’re in.

Quote of the Week:

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Last but not least, happy birthday to the G-Man. Hope to see you back living in New York this year.

“WE ON THE WAY.”

It’s great to have south Jersey/Philly-based skaters going pro for major companies these days. It was also great to have Philly rappers (or at least one) resurface to national prominence last year. Considering skateboarding and rap are the two dominant concerns of this website, it should come as no surprise that the first re-edit of 2012 merges Real’s latest pro teamrider, Ishod Wair, with the Maybach Music Group’s latest pro teamrider, Meek Mill. Meek Mill saved the late-summer/early-fall of 2011, by drowning out the sound of people playing that lame collaborative album by those two boring rich guys with his repeated proclamations of being a boss. For that, we salute him and Ishod (another boss) with this remix.

Sometime in the near future, we’ll devise a non-rap re-edit for a change of pace. They just have to come back full swing by the summer though. Dreamchasers 2 should be out by then. We’re still going to be stretching 4:3 and mixing HD with SD, don’t worry…

Alternate YouTube Link: Pool, I don’t ever swim

Torey Goodall, arguably Canada’s second finest athlete after Steve Nash, spent a considerable portion of this past fall in New York. If you could collect lifestyle hammers into one four-minute video part, his month-and-a-half here would be the lifestyle-equivalent of Mariano in Mouse. Unfortunately, the cameras are rarely rolling for those, and they are often left to memory and legend. Instead, we managed to film a quick part for Quiksilver Canada, aided by the many beverages that fuel Torey’s brand of stylish and most-likely-hungover skateboarding. If “The Notorious Partyboy Soundtrack” is the official partyboy mixtape, this is without question, the official partyboy skate part. After all, has anyone else drank a martini in a video part, or filmed a line with a King of Diamonds haircut before? Shout out to the whole NBPS family.

This video is a collaboration on two levels — Quiksilver x Quartersnacks & 2 Beerz x 2 Chainz.

Contributing filmer: Rob Harris.

Alternate YouTube Link: This Polo, not Izod.

“Oh 2 Beerz is back in town? I need to get a new roll of film.” — Boss Bauer

“I love when Torey comes to town, it’s like a holiday. Everyone gets off work and shit.” — T-Bird

How sick would it be to have a custom “New York” version of the Shorty’s wave logo on a tee? In another life, would Shorty’s be Max B’s favorite skate company due to the wave imagery? After all, he did shout out San Diego at the end of this song.

The history department at Frozen in Carbonite came through, yet again, by bringing to everyone’s attention this seldom-seen gem from the 1998 Church of Skatan video, Wild in the Streets. It features the Fulfill the Dream-era Shorty’s team riding around the east coast in a van containing a young Giovanni Reda, stopping off at the Hackettstown skatepark, Boston, and Philly, presumably in the days of heightened Love Park/City Hall police presence, as the section is all FDR and Burnt Cat footage. The New York ender is the best part though. Aaron Snyder was the only one with any New York footage in Fulfill, right? Smolik remedies that fact by destroying Pyramid Ledges with some tricks that would still hold up today. No real surprises there, he’s ahead of his time, blah, blah, blah…

It’s easy to imagine the day Smolik was at BAM as the nineties equivalent of the day Waka Flocka came to 12th & A. We’re all still kicking ourselves in the teeth for missing it…

That gap is totally the opposite of chill.

Jail AKA Killer Kowalski AKA Zach Malfa-Kowalski has consistently been one of the best (and most active) New York-based skate photographers over the past several years. He also has a good hardflip.

Zach updated his website with a new layout and a bunch of recent work (ZachMalfaKowalski.com.) There are photos from the summer 2010 Quartersnacks and Nike SB project (including some shots that didn’t make it onto the site), Zach’s work on the catalog for Habitat’s strange foray into the footwear market, and a whole gallery of straightforward (mostly east coast) skate photos. Plus, there are portraits, landscapes, Corey Rubin teen heartthrob fashion shots, and all that other art school stuff. There’s also a blog on there now. Shout out to every photographer who doesn’t have a Tumblr.

Related: In case you missed it, back in November, Zach shared his archive of Jake Johnson photos from the Chapman and Mind Field years with us.

It finally snowed. Can you people shut up now? Did you get a chance to rock your ‘Lo boots? It’s supposed to be 52 and rain today, so hopefully, this is all gone by Tuesday. Photo by Ian Reid.

New York is kinda hurt, huh? Our baseball team doesn’t have a soul, our basketball team is permanent garbage, our hockey team is irrelevant, our best rapper is 42 (thus also garbage), and our best rapper of the last ten years is serving a 75-year prison sentence. So, it makes perfect sense for our hopes to rest on a doofy whiteboy quarterback…

Shout out to the Lev and the Palace crew. They won a European Skate Brand of the Year award. They’re also riding around and getting it.

E.J. put together a nine-minute homie cam montage featuring Yaje shredding flatbars, people dressed as robots vibing out to 2007 electro hits, and Juicy J cameos. This clip makes E.J. the first person to edit footage of Black Dave the Skater to music by Black Dave the Rapper. If you’re into art and shit, check out this video of E.J’s recent show, Inimicus.

Some nostalgic reflections on Slap, and the generally grim future of print skateboard magazines from a shop owner. That blog also has a respectable alternative list to Transworld‘s “Top 30 Most Influential” from last month.

Skate Mental pays homage to skateboarding’s most infamous shoe and the largest overlap between early-2000s skater and graver (goth + raver = gothic raver = graver) culture, the Osiris D3, in their spring 2012 catalog.

Be Pretty is a NY-based video by Esteban Jefferson. They have been putting it online piece-by-piece throughout the past week. Young kids shredding cutty New York spots. Not mad at it.

Late, but the DQM site has an interview up with Brian Delatorre discussing the Skateboarder cover, iPhones, Instagram, and falling victim to technology. Speaking of falling victim to technology — This is next level insane.

The young don of the T.F. Roctakon’s intern, Slicky Boy, has a new freestyle out over the How To Make It In America theme… “Made me spend all my ones on 2 Bros. / I want two of those slices / ’cause my mind is feelin’ real righteous.”

Already posted this on Facebook, and it has nothing to do with skating, but in case you missed it, this is the most G shit ever. If a skater was going to jump out of the ninth story of a Wilshire Boulevard office building, who would have the best chance of talking him down? Carroll? Rick? The Muska? Rob C? Tony Hawk? Peter Bici?

Quote of the Week: “People who take other peoples video work and remix it are simply faggots.” — Hella Clips Comment on the QS Ishod Remix Teaser

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Torey 2 Beerz video on Wednesday. Ishod video on Friday. The NPBS mixtape celebrates its one-year anniversary around this time. If you didn’t download it a year ago, 2011 probably sucked for you.

The all-montage video died when YouTube became the destination for footage of people who didn’t have enough for a full part. “One hit wonder” status held by many 411VM Chaos heroes has found no modern equivalent. (Maybe if you have a few tricks in a friends section, and your name still comes up on autofill when you search it?)

Poisonous Products may be the first shot at the montage video’s modern revitalization in hard copy form. It is the latest video from Jeremy Elkin, who’s responsible for Lo-Def and Elephant Direct, two other concise offerings that documented skating in this small quadrant of North America (loosely bound by Montreal and New York.) The video is all lines, and all filmed in New York.

A combination of cellar door skate culture, and New York’s growing lack of reliable plaza spots has made the whole “skating shit you see in the street” thing fairly standard protocol. And luckily, this video never dips into annoying, “I majored in sculpture, so I’m going to skate this lump of concrete into a curb” spot selections. The absence of single tricks could easily go over your head because the all-line “concept” is so natural to skating here in 2012.

Poisonous Products is reminiscent of an EST video — and that’s meant in the most complimentary way possible. The music, jumpy editing, and graphics may have caused those videos to age poorly, but for their time, each issue was a great survey of who happened to kill it throughout the city in a given summer. This video has a similar “Diary of a Summer” feel to it (it was filmed between November 2010 and November 2011.) The key difference is that those early-2000s EST summers all circled around base spots like BAM, the Banks, and the Volcano. There’s none of that going on today, so there’s a modern, outer-borough-inclusive vibe to the footage.

The video’s main novelties come from seeing Kevin Tierney experiment with connecting skate spots, as he does a line from the Courthouse Drop to Black Hubba, and watching QS-favorite, Leo Gutman, manage a three-trick line at the Crosby Garage. Otherwise, Aaron Herrington, Daniel Kim, and Leo provide some of the video’s finer line choreography.

Perhaps more important than anything, Poisonous Products and EST 2 are the only videos in history with the prestigious distinction of giving Rob Campbell the ender.

[Teaser 1, teaser 2, teaser 3, teaser 4, teaser 5, teaser 6 above.]

It’s fun to watch footage of a specific city before actually stepping out to skate it. At just under fourteen minutes, this video makes that easy to do. The soundtrack is a mix of KRS-One, Lil’ Kim, and a Big Daddy Kane posse cut from the era that lends credence to Nas’ observation that Jay-Z “used to rap like the Fu-Schnickens” (QS Rap Desk Sidebar: That “Stillmatic Freestyle” > “Ether.”) The level of skating in New York has obviously gotten a lot better since EST was around, but the VX footage, montage format, and holding-on-to-the-golden-years rap soundtrack all give Poisonous Products that retro feel of twelve or so years ago. It’s either “old new shit,” “new old shit,” or like Jeezy said, “young old school.”

Kalis co-signed it, and that goes a long way. Supreme, KCDC, and aNYthing on Hester Street are all selling copies. For web orders, it’s $10 on TheoriesOfAtlantis.com.

…will be from one of the bigger videos of 2011. Ever since the Alien one, a handful of people assumed that every major video would receive an obnoxious QS remix treatment, despite the fact we’ve only touched two of the five thousand videos released between spring 2009 and today (three parts from Emerica’s Stay Gold and the extras to Since Day One.) The next one is in honor of Ishod Wair turning pro last month. It’s great to see South Jersey/Philly (well, northeast in general) kids get on the national radar and their names on boards from respected companies. With the amount of insane skating going on these days, too many of them often live as local/YouTube legends, or as “that kid who did such-and-such down *insert a famous east coast spot.*” Congratulations to Ishod for achieving a much-deserved pro status.

Not that there was anything wrong with the James Brown staple used in the original part, but we had to switch it to be a bit more absurd than most skate videos tend to go these days. Teaser below. Our remix drops on Friday, January 27th. That way, you can go skate all day, and do the whole “Ciroc boys” thing all night.

Related: Ishod’s Since Day One mini-doc segments on the Real site, Ishod Wair Since Day One B-sides, Ishod in the Quartersnacks / Nike SB summer 2010 video

“Ayy Puffy, stop making those ‘I Miss J. Lo’ records!”