Like A Farmer

What in the wide wide world of sports is a “Training Field?!” Ummm hellooooo, it’s a F A C I L I T Y. There’s a quick feature on the making of the Palace Calvin Klein collab up on GQ. If you want some more Willem Dafoe New York content, highly recommend you watch Light Sleeper from 1992, assuming you’re ok with your movies being more ~vibes~ than plot. Written/directed by Paul Schrader (dude who wrote Taxi Driver obvs), and Susan Sarandon is hot af in it (lol) 🥵

Switch flip goals via Jessyka Bailey’s part in There’s Ruining Skateboarding video, which went up on Thrasher late last week.

Sometimes the skate gods smile down upon you, and you and some friends get a lot of time at Forbidden Banks. SOMETIMES. All that and more in Misc Moments #4 from Marcello, Nabi, Caleb, and the Canal boys.

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No Time To Blog

Photo by Greg Navarro

Feels kinda crazy starting a QS update without a picture of Keith… Was tempted to use some of Pat Steiner’s modern art masterpieces this week, but we have a whole year-end content season for that! ;)

Jawn Gardner leads the charge on an important message with a nine-minute documentary about shedding the stigma of discussing mental health issues in the skate community ♥

On the chance that you haven’t been catching the …Arizona Iced Tea skate team edits on the TWS site (..yeah!), some of the most insane skateboarding in New York released this year was via their trip edit, e.g. the back tail off the marble kicker, the switch frontside flip across from the Stock Exchange, etc. TWS just posted up the first two raw edits from it, and wow it is crazy to look back at how desolate the city was last fall.

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Like Glowstick, We Crack Then Shine

Antonio tomfoolery in the QS Dunk that is coming out pretty soon :) Photo by Jason Lecras

From a skate house above a chicken shop by Southbank to a GQ feature: Fashion-writer-who-actually-skates-and-can-write, Noah Johnson, profiled the minds behind Palace for a feature in Famous Men’s Magazine™.

Heckride interviewed Johnny and Mitchell’s brother, Andrew. Very excited for Coots’ video ♥

There is no shortage of crust evangelists working in New York skateboarding today, but every once in a while, there’s a part so endlessly dedicated to spots with eight things wrong with them that you need to stop and give #respect. Charlie Cassidy’s 4 x 4 part is one of those, and Vague mag has the part + an interview with him about it. The cast of In Crust We Trust would be proud :)

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It’s Not Bro Time It’s Showtime

Photo via The Shady One

Everything is a YouTube link this week, so if you’re showing up here to get your read on, you’re better off taking your ass to the library ;)

Antics is a sick 18-minute New Jersey video by Hugh O’Hare, featuring a mix of homies from Branded and Travel Skateshops. Lots of time put in at the Newark Peach Ledges and Big Screen Plaza (still boarded off unchanged, btw.) Shout out to anyone grinding the edge of a glass pane. Shout out to the drop-in at Museum of Natural History (those security guards sure have had an interesting pandemic….) Shout out to Anthony Gordon’s part and front crook fakie.

It is *so hard* to show off your great skate hair in a winter edit. 80% of the footy in Josh Payner’s new winter video blog is in beanies, hoodies and gloves, so the skating itself is left to do the talking :) Also, these edits are awesome and inspiring. Here’s the first one.

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Deeper Understanding — An Interview With Charlie Birch

Interview by Farran Golding
Collages by Requiem For A Screen
Original Photos by Marimo Ohyama & Alex Pires

It seems like just the other day that Palace was a small U.K. brand buzzing with montages filmed on VHS tapes, and P.W.B.C. news segments aimed at a skate industry still coming to grips with how to use the internet. In the ensuing decade of successes, it has remained unshakably English in its vision — even the fact that Jamal Smith is the only American to turn pro for the brand rings of a certain “foreigners appreciating your homeland in a better way than you do”-type thing.

To the American eye, Palace rose to prominence in that void left by Blueprint at the onset of the 2010s. In the time since, the world of U.K. skateboarding feels like it became closer intertwined to our own. This of course is thanks to Palace, yes, but also because of things like Isle’s unanimously adored “Atlantic Drift” series, the Yardsale videos, Free becoming one of the best alternate channels for skate media, and the inspiring success of the Long Live Southbank campaign.

With little context for how the U.K. scene actually operates, we asked Farran Golding — the man behind many of the deep-dive features on the Slam City Skates blog — to interview Charlie Birch, Palace’s newest teamrider, who we don’t know all that much about on this side of the Atlantic ;)

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