So Arizona, Get Your Act Together & Hail the King

January 21st, 2013 | 1:49 pm | Daily News | 2 Comments

carwash

“But what I can’t understand is why people in a hot-ass desert town like Tucson, Arizona, wouldn’t want a day off work. It’s not like you have to do something black on that day. You know, you don’t have to read Ebony magazine. You don’t have to watch Soul Train. All you have to do is not work.”

Might want to read this instead of lurking the Slap board today: Playboy’s full January 1965 interview with Martin Luther King Jr., which happens to be the longest and most in-depth interview he has ever granted any publication.

Rest in Peace Lewis Marnell. Manolo already came through with a great five-minute tribute edit of Lewis’ footage.

“I’d rather watch Busenitz ________.” Today, that blank is filled with “cruise around mostly low-impact European spots and drive home the fact that America sucks for skateboarding.” Those spots look incredible.

Skateboarding Bloopers: Handrail Edition

It only took an hour after Dece Vid‘s release for somebody to rip Yaje’s standalone part to YouTube. Let’s all hope this isn’t Yaje’s final part. (Fun Fact: Most of the footage in that part is ~two-years-old.)

New Iron Claw iPhone montage featuring crowd favorite, Phil Rodriguez.

Jordan Trahan, Jimmy McDonald and Rob Gonyon (another crowd favorite) rip around Tribeca and the West Village in the latest Berrics “Off the Grid” segment.

Slam City Skates has a quick interview up with Lev Tanju, the architect behind Palace Skateboards, about the company’s future, sense of humor and Southbank.

Brooklyn Banks contest results from April 4, 1998.

ICYMI: Aaron Herrington is really good at skateboarding.

Is Mooney in the new issue of Vogue L’Uomo (Italian Vogue) wearing a QS sweatshirt and described as a “skateboarder semi-professionista?” Yes. Yes he is.

QS Sports Desk Play of the Week: Ish Smith JUMPS OVER John Wall, turns around, and blocks his shot. Also, his name is Ish.

Quote of the Week:

– A girl’s review of the new Green Diamond video. (Via Mike Heikkila)

Time to watch basketball. Enjoy this cold-ass week.

Links From the BBQ

May 29th, 2012 | 9:00 am | Daily News | 2 Comments

Scott Johnston at the building across from the New York Stock Exchange. Sometime in the nineties.

Monday links on a Tuesday…

The rumor mill about Zoo York phasing out of skateboarding has been building for quite some time, but it’s finally official. Zered Bassett explains what happened, and why everyone except pretty much Brandon Westgate is now off the team. (Black Dave, Kevin Tierney, and the AMs are all still on.)

The team at Live Skateboard Media remixed Lucas Puig’s Transworld pro spotlight part (the part that brought back the noseslide) by throwing in rap music, Biggie interviews, those ever-so-popular VHS glitch effects, etc. Better than the original, though not the French Montana x French Mariano part we all envisioned.

On Memorial Day, the Green Diamond put together a tribute clip to Slappy Cove, the second most #whitestylez spot in New York City skateboard history. (Bubble Banks is obviously the first.)

Random Flip Cam footage from the Flipmode Squad riding around Queens and occasionally skateboarding.

Some kids take the PATH train into the city, skate 75% of the spots between 110th and 140th, edit it to ASAP Rocky, and upload it to YouTube.

You know those waxed concrete triangular banks that were across the street from the Brooklyn Banks at the Verizon Building? Well, they tore them all out, except for the one at the end.

Rick Ross publicly stated that he had $10,000 for anyone who ran across the court during a Heat Finals game (sorry Boston fans, but you guys are just as insane as the overly optimistic Knicks fans from four weeks ago if you think you have a shot) wearing nothing but a MMG shirt. Some dude did it during a second round playoff game, got arrested, charged, held on $6,500 bond, and didn’t even get his money, presumably because he didn’t read the part about it needing to be a Finals game.

Quote of the Week:


Get some work done this week. Have a good one.

Can’t Go Skateboarding Day

June 21st, 2011 | 4:25 pm | Time Capsule | 12 Comments

As most spend the first day of summer / “Go Skateboarding Day” at various skateboard industry P.R. initiatives, Quartersnacks would like to reflect on many of the spots that are no longer with us. We would hypothetically love to go skateboarding today, but the ways of the world continue to make the act of riding a skateboard outside of a designated space more difficult each and every year. (All due respect to all those who continue to advocate for skateparks, but skateparks are not a replacement for street spots. Leave that sort of logic to sixty-year-old city council members, not people who actually skate.) Predictably, many of these places have fallen out of the public’s concern since people have ceased skating there (maybe 2 out of 11 had or have a greater general public v.s. skateboarding public occupancy ratio.) It’s amazing just how much people love to complain when you give them something to complain about, and how little they actually care once the end-point for their desired result happens.

Thanks for the memories.

Keep your kids out the kitchen!

February 21st, 2011 | 10:08 am | Daily News | 4 Comments

The much mythologized Burger King at Fulton and Gold Street, of Brooklyn Banks era fame, is officially gone. Even though its relevance dwindled over the past decade (beyond the “free” refills utilized by cost-cutting skateboarders), it is still among the most prominent fast food establishments within skateboarding’s history books. Be sure to check out Quartersnacks’ Brooklyn Banks week from last summer for plenty of stories about this particular Burger King and some background info on its significance.

Kevin has a checkout in the new (April 2011) issue of Transworld. Here’s a picture of the page. It’s not a scan, so it’s not the best quality, but you can still mostly read everything there. That Sunset Park 5050 is pretty wild.

They moved a bunch of planters at the Mars 2112 bank on 50th Street and Seventh Avenue. The runway used to be a tight curve in, and now the thing is approachable from straight on. Makes a difficult spot mildly less difficult to skate.

Danny Falla already shot a photo (with snow in the background, of course) of a backside flip over the ledge to street gap across from the Federal Reserve. You can get time there, but the outdoor guards will kick you out after a while, insisting that you’re going to sue the Federal Reserve when you jump into traffic and get hit by a car. That actually sounds like a brilliant idea.

Probably the funniest video of an ollie up a curb you’ll ever see.

An interview with the man behind The Chrome Ball Incident, which addresses the frequent question of what the name means. (“The Chrome Ball Incident was a comic strip that Neil Blender used to come up with every now and then. It was a three-panel comic strip and the chrome ball would come through and just smash something.”)

Here is part two of 2nd Nature’s California trip, this time in San Jose. Check last week’s post for the Los Angeles edition. San Francisco is slated to be up next.

There’s a new, pretty gnarly-looking, all-brick quarterpipe to a wall at the Below the Bridge skatepark in Bayonne. Given the weather’s turn for the worse, it looks like refuge might continue to be sought there for quite some time.

Ryan Gee with a 1997 Quim Cardona classic at the old Jersey City Hamilton Park pyramid.

Another throwback clip of the week, thanks to the person who linked it up in the last Monday Links post: Keith Hufnagel and friends from Transworld’s fifth video, Interface. The ollie up on the bench, over the planter to lipslide on 37th Street still has to be one of the sickest tricks ever done in New York. You can catch a lot of the photos from this bit of footage in these interview scans we posted a while back.

Quartersnacks tee shirts and cruiser boards will be available for purchase off the website tomorrow morning. Real this time.

Quote of the Week:
“Do you even know what The Onion is? It’s a fake newspaper.” — Tron Jenkins
“Damn, really? I always think it’s mad real.” — E.J.

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The Events That Defined New York City Skateboarding in 2010: 10-6

December 28th, 2010 | 1:16 pm | Features & Interviews | 7 Comments

Slightly behind schedule, but down to the final ten… #25-21, #20-16, #15-11.

10. The rise in popularity and subsequent banning of Four Loko

The lifeblood of New York skateboarding has always been diluted with alcohol. When sizing up the abilities of skateboarders in this city, is it important to not merely assess tricks, but the social environment within which these tricks are accomplished. It is not what tricks you can do, but what tricks you can do after waking up at 5 P.M. with half of a six pack you purchased at 4:48 in the morning still in your fridge, a pounding headache, and your friend-who-used-to-skate’s unread mass text about his acquisition of a bottle in six hours. Film a part amongst this madness (or avoid it altogether), and you will be ranked among the greats. If you falter, well, you’re just like the rest of them.

This dependence on alcohol is not comical, or tangential by any means, and it all begins with one simple exposure. For the pre-internet nineties, it was the frequent sight of the 40 ounce bottle in Kids that told youngsters what to drink. In the early-2000s, half of the under-eighteen contingent that would skate flat in the back of Union Square past 10 P.M. was introduced to alcohol through Sparks. And even further down the line, the 2008 opening of Trader Joe’s on 14th Street brought forth the availability of $2 wine for a whole slew of younger degenerates, bringing new relevance to the otherwise outdated term, “wine-o.” But 2010 was hit hard with the youth-marketed Four Loko beverages, which fueled this past summer with relentless forays into bad decisions, and can now be found on Craigslist for $10 a can.


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