“Everyone deserves a chance to show their heart.” Aaron Wiggs was the most recent guest on Lee Smith’s Mission Statement podcast, discussing the BLM sidewalk sale at McGolrick Park, losing family to coronavirus, and more heavy topics (there’s laughs too though.) An inspirational listen, and an affirmation that we’re all capable of making a difference ♥
Steve Mastorelli has a sick new edit out featuring a bunch of New Jersey dudes, a stubborn hubba ledge, a 10/10 frontside 180 nosegrind the helicopter way, etc.
Nice! So we made it two weeks without having to rally for a skate spot’s survival on a Monday Links post… This time, the spot is an ocean away, but in this media enterprise’s opinion, it’s the best spot in the world — even better than Tompkins when there are two boxes! Everyday Hybridity has the most current update on Prague’s Stalin Plaza being fenced off / condemned to renovation.
It’s all fun and games until Balenciaga actually does a renegade runway show at Blue Park next September.
A dear friend, “Zach from Crown Heights,” called into The Brian Lehrer Show’s episode about the “cost of climate resilience” to provide a T.F. anecdote to the ongoing battle with the East River Park renovation. The convo in question happens just after the 17-minute mark. Whole episode is worth listening to if you want some context as to how this whole issue came to be in the first place.
The World Trade Center — with its centerpiece, the Twin Towers — opened just a few months before the Knicks won their second championship in 1973, and symbolized a new, modernized era of New York City. As literal twins, the Towers are excellent symbols for the push and pull of capital versus culture which, by the 70s, was really coming to a head in American society. They were the biggest buildings in the world and just one wasn’t even enough.
“tis the season…for skating Seagram because the security window’s view of the ledges is obstructed by giant Christmas trees :)
Someone ollied that Vespa bump-to-bar that T.J. did in “BLESSED”…the other way.
“People always ask me about that day, but honestly, it was truly terrifying…Like, what better thing to do than go skate around? Sure, it’s kind of a frivolous thing to do under those circumstances, but at the same time, that’s the point.” Chromeball talks Mike O’Meally about skating in New York on September 12, 2001 + gets the stories on a bunch of his photos, many of which were shot while living in the city.
“As designer and architect, everyone always asked if I wanted to design skateparks, but I was always kinda annoyed by that question. I love skating skateparks, they’re fun, but I never thought about that.” Solo has a sick interview with ant colony aficionado, Alexis Sablone. Fully wanna try the walnut thing next time I see some ants…
Maybe the best part uploaded from the Buffalo-based Jeb video so far: Justin Grzechowiak’s section is a nice reminder that upstate New York should probably be on par with Boston, D.C., et al. as a get-out-of-the-city destination for us all, but I’m sure upstaters would prefer it staying the way it is hehe.
I’m sure there’s like a twenty-page Slap thread about it, but Matt Rodriguez was really on one in preceding a lot of the shit that would become popular practice in 2014-2018, especially for a lot of office favorites. (Maybe the same could be said about that entire 2005 I-Path video in general.)
Despite our many Ludditical tendencies — like an asinine reverence for a MiniDV camera that was born the same year as Meatball — skaters can all agree that the internet has been a great thing for us. You can argue about megapixels, what to call a nollie cab (the correct answer being “nollie cab”), and which tricks do and don’t deserve Renaissance; the globalized culture of skateboarding has benefitted as a result of our generation’s interconnectedness. From the ease of recording it, to the ease of uploading, sharing, and seeing it, makes it feasible to peek into any scene to see how people skate, dress, talk, and talk shit.
For a person from the eastern United States, one thing that I’ve come to terms with is how little my peers and I actually know about the scenes and histories throughout Europe and really, much of the world outside of the U.S. I thought I knew a little something about the U.K. from watching Blueprint videos, liking Tom Penny, and retaining a handful of shit that’s gone down at Southbank, but in recent years of following dudes like Science Versus Life, I’ve been shown myriad photos from mags, photographers, skaters, and spots I had never heard of.
This sense of cluelessness is heightened when sitting down to watch Palace’s first video. Palasonic, a seemingly authoritative report on what’s going on in London, was logged camcorders of the cavemen, captured digitally on a tripod from a VCR, then edited on a twenty-year-old Macintosh. Convoluted as this may be, it gives the vid a sense of timelessness and intertextuality with a regional past that, frankly, I know very little about. So, I talked to Lucien Clarke, the man with the video’s seven-minute ender, whose rumored to be able to singlehandedly sell out even the most flamboyant Triangle-stamped kits just by filming an Insta line in them.
