It is December. Can you believe it? The year that began with you suggesting to a friend, “Hey do you want to go to an outdoor dining shack in 18-degree weather with snow on the ground to have a beer because if I stay inside my apartment any longer I’m going to claw my own eyes out,” and that friend going “Sure!” is coming to a close.
As we do every year, thus begins our [mostly] scene-specific Top 25 countdown of things that defined the past twelveish months.
We all know the ancient proverb: “One man’s infrastructural banality is another man’s tailslide.”
But for all the details of cities that skateboarders pay a perverse amount of attention to — the positioning of cracks before stairs, the shapes of curbs, literal fucking trashcans — our ability to isolate a select few traffic medians as desirable places to hang out at is an under-appreciated tidbit of our lunacy.
To the average person, a median divides two opposing directions of traffic. Unless someone is an engineer, there is absolutely no reason to spend any of their precious time on earth thinking about one. To a skateboarder though… it’s not a ledge, it’s not a curb — it’s a ledge on TOP of a curb.
Given our struggles of just being left alone at a decent-enough ledge, some of our more able-bodied colleagues sought refuge in the soothing serenity of New York City traffic. And like many parables of post-Financial Crisis skateboarding, this one begins with Jake Johnson.
Photo via Jersey Dave
Thanks to everyone who grabbed something from the webstore over the weekend. Holiday QS goods should have made their way to most U.S. shops by now. Arriving in Canada + Japan this week. Europe + everywhere else next week. Thank you for the support during these shaky times ♥
If you missed it in July, now would be a good time to read Farran’s #longform Slam City interview with Tom Knox about …lines.
“It is like Tom Knox is doing missionary work, faithfully showing that London is skateable. He ardently skates his home surroundings, teaching us, like a prophet finding a spring of water in the desert.” — Everyday Hybridity re: the spots in Tom Knox’s “Atlantic Drift” part.
Thrasher posted the interview with Leo, Cher and Stephen about Glue Skateboards online.
Anybody selling hard goods can attest to the “skateboard boom” that began in the lockdown months. People who had not picked up a board in years because life got in the way were buying new completes because, like, wtf else was there to do?
But what about those who never let life entirely get in the way of skating? For them, this past spring was a tidal wave of free time that no gainfully employed adult skateboarder thought they would experience until they were retired with bad knees. It was a pass to be 17 again, at least for a bit.
As outlined in 2019’s outing, Josh has been on a half-decade streak of filming parts mostly on his two days off from work a week. For a sizable chunk of 2020, there was no work, so this year’s is an extended edition — complete with cameos from some extended QS family members who haven’t popped up in an edit for deep.
Edited by Eric Cruz. Appearances from Connor Champion, Kevin Tierney, Troy Stilwell, Zach Baker, Kadeem Walters, Ty Lyons, Meatball, Ryan Santiago, Cyrus Bennett, Haffa, Antonio Durao, Ron Parker.
The only constant is change or some shit like that ;)
So much nineties New York footage on the #repost circuit is us re-mining R.B. Umali’s amazing archive over and over that it’s a shock to see something from then that you haven’t seen before. Alex Corporan started going through all his old tapes, and put together a montage as a preview for a Revisted-esque project he’s working on.
Grand Collection has a short commercial with Connor Champion on the occasion of their Umbro collaboration — loosely inspired by the DC Kalis commercial that played on TV twenty years ago. (Filmed in New York! Not Philly!)
