Q.S.S.O.T.Y. Alumni Alert — Leo Gutman’s ‘Vague’ Part

Though we are still a few months off from year-end recap season, the winner of “Best Facial Hair Assortment in a Video Part” is a clear shoe-in. Leo Gutman — who hoisted up the imaginary Q.S.S.O.T.Y. trophy in 2013 following his masterful closing section in Jeremy Elkin’s Brodies video — spends his new Vague mag part donning an assortment of looks that would make one of those laminated posters in the front window of a barbershop jealous.

More »

Skating Blue Park Is Living A Lie

Our spring line of QS merch will be available via our webstore on Wednesday at midnight E.S.T. (so, technically, Tuesday night). Arriving at U.S. shops now. Arriving Europe, Japan, Canada, globally this week. Check our stockists page. The jackets are fire this season, and the shorts are the best thing we’ve ever made :)

You can find a preview of our spring & summer merch here

Hey, it was a good run ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

“Skateboarding went down some pretty crazy roads at this time but your trick selection escaped unscathed. I can’t find a single photo of you doing anything embarrassing of the early 90’s variety.” Let’s start this week off on a positive note, with this heartwarming Scott Johnston interview over on Chromeball.

Jenkem rolled around downtown thirty deep with Gang Corp.

…aanndd Gang Corp has a new five-minute video from their headquarters up today.

Twenty seconds of new Jahmal Williams footage is better than zero seconds of new Jahmal Williams footage ♥

From The Ground Up” is a short video from some Bronx-based youths. Fun to see yet another generation of kids shred the Courthouse, plus the ender line at Fredrick Douglass Circle in front of the cops’ faces was so sick.

LurkNYC makes its routine return to the Rick Owens store for volume twenty-five of its “New York Times” outtakes series.

The Elkin raw tapes are still coming through. Leo’s front board 270 behind Supreme is still fire. And it’s so funny how dated footage from even 2013 looks now.

/* end Crosby Street-related links.

“Talking about partying, I heard that you earned the title ‘King of Copenhagen’ because of your party skills.” “It’s a heavy title that belongs to Rune Glifberg.” Solo skate mag interviewed Call Me 917 rider, Hugo Boserup.

Excited to revisit this (haven’t watched any of them besides the Love Park episode in over ten years) — someone uploaded ALL of the ON Video segments over on YouTube. Maybe rip the ones you want to watch, because this is liable to get deleted like a lot of 411VM uploads once the archive got acquired.

Village Psychic takes a look back on the seminal DC Shoes Super Tour.

The Sternum Trucks Instagram has been going off lately.

QS Sports Desk Play of the Week: NBA Champion, Nick Young.

Quote of the Week
Inquisitive Gentleman: “How did you get a black eye?”
Roctakon: “So, I was letting Trippie Redd DJ…”

The S.J. interview sent me on a Hiero wromhole (yes, I know he’s never skated to a Hiero song), but all the nineties S.F. talk etc. got it going…

…but but but the weather has me back on the QS office’s summer anthem for the past three summers, about to be four.

When Quarters Cry

Just as promised

Kurt Havens, the Academy Award winning filmmaker behind 2012’s Twomanji video, is back with another full-length VHS / Hi-8 / old camera (?) project entitled Ballhog. It’s pretty much a vintage-tinged Bronze B-cam video from the past couple years, and features iconic parts from Mark Humienik, Billy McFeely, and Josh Wilson.

Gang Corp, Frog, Humble, The Skate Kitchen, and Hardbody all have spreads in the new issue of Japan’s Eyescream mag. Probably won’t do you much good if you can’t read Japanese (the Google Translate camera feature is sick though), but still rad to see nonetheless. Shout out to everybody.

Oh, and Genny posted the raw photos from the Humble pages.

Jesse Alba made a loving tribute to our #MCM, Nolan Benfield, and then Frog Skateboards went and posted some quick extras from their trip to China last year.

Show me, don’t tell me.

Damn, imagine wanting to skate the Veteran’s Memorial 12 that bad? ;) jk. Marco Kada covered a lot of ground across the city and outlying areas (who even remembers the last trick on the Jersey City Hamilton Park five block spot…Zered’s Vicious Cycle part?) for his rad “New York Nice Guy” part.

Habitat has a clip of Fred Gall’s final session at Shorty’s.

Listen to your mom, but also listen to Zalfa — who once ruptured his crank skating the Big O in Montreal, peed blood, went to the E.R., came out a few hours later, and shot a photo of Max Palmer while wearing a bloody hospital gown. He has an interview over on Skate Jawn. Don’t ever ask me who my favorite photographer is again.

“You know he’d get his mental health check and go straight to Ralph and drop two grand on a fucking moleskin pair of trousers or something.” Some Monday motivation for anyone currently living on a couch in an apartment they don’t pay rent for: Free interviewed Lev Tanju about all the cool shit Palace has been doing in London these past couple years.

There’s a Bobshirt documentary. Can’t tell if there’s new footage tho.

Some more Elkin extras from Leo Gutman’s 2013 Q.S.S.O.T.Y. run.

Old parts, new uploads: Connor Kammerer in Spirit Quest + Dustin Eggeling in Static 4. This is a really pointless observation, but it’s kind of wild that the last Static video is already almost four years old.

QS Sports Desk Play of the Week: And then Russ thought…”fuck that overtime shit.”

Quote of the Week: “My celebrity crush is Ali from Travis Porter.” — Pad Dowd

Can’t say the QS Rap Desk has actively been checking for new Wayne songs these past ~five years, so a bit “late” on this one (came out on Christmas), but wowwwowow.

There’s a fire remix video dropping on here tomorrow Wednesday ♥

Flu-shion Week

Photo by Colin Sussingham

Happy birthday Zach Baker ♥, breaker of 4 boards in 40 minutes.

R.I.P. (?) Le Dome. Based on documentation available on this side of the Atlantic, it’s tough to tell whether the plaza is getting demolished in full, or they’re just resurfacing it with Skatelite. (Yeah, it’s not local news, but recent local skate spot news stops around, um, that wallride / drug-use area outside of Newark Penn Station being skate-blocked / crack-blocked.) In presumed memoriam, here is an old #PFW QS compilation of all Flo Marfaing’s Le Dome hubba tricks, an old post about the greatest line ever done there, an old post about the only 5050 kickflip that ever mattered, and a clip of The Shady One going all-in #respect on a 5050 after a plane claim.

“Kevin Tierney wouldn’t shut up about how he was going to switch laser flip the Le Dome double set even though it had already been done 15 years ago.” Solo has an appropriate article about the Bronze crew’s most recent trip to Paris.

Matt Velez uploaded Calzone is full, and John Valenti uploaded N.Y. Archive in full.

What the fuck: “You have to take a blood and piss test to skate [the indoor park] so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that most locals skip that option.” Medium skate mag has a short feature about how people manage to skate in Russia during the winter.

“This is the best time to skate Rick Owens.” There’s a fun new Bluecouch edit up.

The summer 2012 edition of Elkin’s raw files is now live, featuring a bunch of footage that would end up in Leo’s 2013 Q.S.S.O.T.Y-earning Brodies part.

Village Physic interviewed Reda about the rules of being a skate photographer in the social media age. (Unsolicited link to Reda’s Bobshirt interview because it’s the best.)

There have been a few of these over the past couple years, but Vice has a feature about skateboards’ three-decade avoidance of inflation. I have a feeling that if we keep writing these things it’s gonna be some “be careful what you wish for”-shit and we’re going to walk into a shop and boom, $85 for a deck with grip. Thanks everyone!!!

There’s a Brujas x Gang Corp event at the Spin Club on 23rd Street tonight, 8-midnight + there’s a Deckaid show at NJ Skateshop in Hoboken on Saturday, from 7-10 P.M.

QS Sports Desk Play of the Week: Everything fun in the NBA last week mostly happened off the court, so let’s get weird and give play of the week to the most complicated way of preventing a ball from going out of bounds ever.

Quote of the Week
C.J: “How long is fashion week?”
Fashionable Gentleman: “A week.”

A Short History of New York’s Longest Lines

Ricky Oyola, godfather of the east coast “filming a line via just skating random shit on the street”-practice, once expounded on his peak skateboard dream: doing a line through Philadelphia’s then-standing City Hall, into the street, up into the Municipal Services building, back down the stairs, across the street, into Love Park, through Love Park, and end at Wawa.

The closest he got on record was a line from the end of City Hall, through the intersection, and into Love Park in Eastern Exposure 2, but it did establish a lingering precedent for connecting spots. Apart from Ricky and that Joey O’Brien Sabotage 4 line where he starts at Love and ends up in the garage beneath it, spot connecting does not have a rich history in Philadelphia.

Or anywhere, really — because doing a line from one spot, through the street, and to another, is fucking hard. There are variables (people, traffic, pebbles, maybe two sets of security, acts of God), and a pressing anxiety of missing the final trick in an already-long line, which gets amplified by the fact that fifteen other things went right up until that point. As you will soon learn, spot connecting is something most people do for the sake of doing it. In the majority of cases, they stick to their safe tricks.

Like Philadelphia, New York is a dense and layered city. Many of its streets are narrow, and depending on where you are, three or four spots could be across from one another. New York never had a “Big Three,” but it does have three different types of benches on four different street corners, and over the years, skateboarders here have kept their third eyes open and far-sighted.

More »