The Back of Union

October 20th, 2011 | 9:44 am | Time Capsule | 1 Comment

NY Skateboarding posted the exact same clips yesterday, so please pardon any redundancy.

Falling in line with other archival treasures that surfaced earlier this year, here are two great lifestyle-ish skate clips featuring Harold Hunter, Rodney Torres, Steve Rodriguez, and others. They cover a wide array of nostalgia points: excellent sneaker choices that would be seen as “retro” should they be worn today, the swooshy Adidas track pants that the 90s were quite fond of, a fence-lacking Banks wall, the original “Back of Union,” and perhaps most notable for those who enjoy making their lungs black, a $2.35 price-tag on a pack of cigarettes. It is also good to know that Rodney was capable of 360 flip lipsliding a handrail fifteen-years ago. Can’t say anyone should be nostalgic for skating in Northface jackets with snow on the ground though…

Check out Manolo’s channel on YouTube for more clips. (Not to be confused with the guy who does all the re-edits.) There’s almost seventy of them and they cover about fifteen years of footage.

A Comprehensive Guide to Rap Video Skate Parts

May 20th, 2011 | 10:03 am | Features & Interviews | 28 Comments

It seems that whenever Jereme Rogers releases one of his “rap songs,” conventional skateboard media outlets continue to grant him exposure. These videos usually draw the ire of those nostalgic for the Coliseum era, when Jereme was switch flipping stairs to Buena Vista Social Club. Even non-skate related circles have given his frequent masterworks of second hand embarrassment some contemplation. We’re all guilty of (well, not Quartersnacks…not until this post anyway) offering Jereme airtime, instead of ignoring him in hopes that he would simply disappear or get committed. He, like many other inadequate rappers, subscribes to the fallacy that equates having “haters” to success. The only way we could win is by not paying attention.

However, his recent rap videos and audition tapes for a potential sequel to Whiteboyz are not the first instances of skateboarders attempting to mesh themselves with the mystic world of rap music. The following is a (cautionary) guide to the occasional rap video skate part, and why it has typically been a bad idea, long before Jereme Rogers made us wonder if he bumped his head too hard when he fell off the mattress in Wonderful Horrible Life.

Deeper in the Skate NYC Archive…

May 7th, 2011 | 9:23 am | Time Capsule | 6 Comments

It has been a quietly monumental week for New York City skate footage, at least from a historical perspective. While the Skate NYC Apple Juice documentary is quickly working its way over 5,000 YouTube views, several lesser-exposed video clips have been released to accompany it, and they might be even more precious than the doc itself. I have no clue who “skinnypoo” is on Youtube, but he just uploaded a fifteen-minute gem of raw, late-eighties New York footage featuring Harold Hunter, Hamilton Harris, Jamal Simmons (first black man on the cover of Transworld), Ryan Hickey, and even Steven Cales, all in their teen years. We’re talking people who already have sparse video appearances throughout their regular skate careers, let alone footage of them skating Tompkins in 1989.

These videos, along with the documentary from earlier in the week, have quickly managed to fill in the aforementioned late-eighties/downtown gap that the Deathbowl doc glossed over. It’s amazing how there is barely any Banks footage throughout the videos, yet plenty of Midtown, World Trade Center, and Tompkins stuff, not to mention a few cutty East Village spots, including the (now blocked-off) manual pad in front of P.S. 19 on First and 11th, and the two-stair curb next to the NYU dorms on 9th Street between Third and Second. You can go two decades hearing about an era of skating that was barely documented outside of a few iconic Shut or Harold Hunter photos, and then out of the blue, someone unloads thirty minutes of never-before-seen footage. The stuff that turns up on YouTube is absolutely amazing…

Skate NYC (1986-1990) Mini-Documentary

May 5th, 2011 | 1:50 pm | Time Capsule | 1 Comment

There isn’t exactly an abundance of video coverage for New York in the late-eighties and early-nineties. There’s obviously Vallely’s Rubbish Heap part, and Matt Hensley in Full Power Trip (and I guess the NYC section in Future Primitive, but 1985 isn’t the late-eighties…feel free to include links to anything that may have been missed in the comments), but none of those guys are actually from New York. Even the Deathbowl documentary glossed over this period, only tackling it from the “history of Shut” angle.

Well, God bless all the neglected storage spaces throughout New York. NY Skateboarding posted Apple Juice, a mini-documentary by Skate NYC, a skate shop that was in operation from 1986 to 1990 on Avenue A and 9th, which happened to be stored away in some dusty box for years. It’s not exactly a full-fledged skate video, but a previously unseen look, at least from a cultural standpoint, at what skateboarding in downtown New York looked like at the onset of the nineties. Features Harold Hunter, Jon Carter, and others, with a variety of locations no longer with us, including the World Trade Center, The Brooklyn Banks, and the original three-stair ledge version of the Fuji Building on 52nd Street and Park.

“All these kids, they have such fear about getting older, and they’re so happy being fourteen or fifteen. Boy, that is such a distinction from when I was a kid. All we wanted to do is get older, we couldn’t do anything out our age. These guys have a whole world that is defined on every level by what they do, and the only fear of getting older is that you’re going to lose what you have now.”

Check out the feature on NY Skateboarding for more images and history on Skate NYC.

Also Related: Eli Gesner on the history of New York skating, Brooklyn Banks interview week

Quartersnacks Celebrates the Decade: Volume 5

December 26th, 2009 | 1:39 pm | Features & Interviews | 6 Comments

122609.jpg

Hope you had a good holiday. Lets keep this thing going..