#TRENDWATCH2023 — The Search For This Moment’s Really Long Ledge

Human beings are infatuated with ways to measure their endurance: Usain Bolt’s 100-meter dash, Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game, 76 hot dogs in ten minutes, etc.

In ledge skating, this measuring stick is holding a given trick over a long ledge. If it stands to reason that everyone’s first time doing anything on a ledge is a quick grind off the end, then holding it the distance is the true form of mastery.

For this purpose — in New York, at least — The Grate™ is a unit of measure.

Have you been getting really good at backside tailslides? There is no doubt that one of your idiot friends will ask, “D’ya think you could do it over the grate?”

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Seven Steps To Tompkins

Jenkem has an interview with Trung Nguyen, the architect behind last year’s most talked-about trick, and Big Parody.

“We are sad. People can say we are overreacting and that this spot will likely be liberated, but there is a gross feeling seeing the city prioritize something like this.” Village Psychic made a tribute to their local curb on the occasion of… the city knobbing a curb — appropriately titled, “Sadman Plaza.”

The QS office favorite Rios Crew out of Budapest just dropped a new video, entitled Uccsó. They’re as atmospheric and third-eye-open with the spots as ever, but it’s the filming that truly took on a new dimension in this one.

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After Church Incredible Hulk

Photo by Colin Sussingham

The New York Times has a profile of Alexis Sablone and her most-frequented haunts around New York City — everything from bookstores to skate spots.

“It all started because most of the tricks I wanted to film, no filmer got too excited about filming them; the level was not high enough and some tricks didn’t make much sense.” Didn’t see this get posted around nearly as much as it should be: Our boy Ruben Spelta has a new, mostly self-filmed, vignetted, and very awesome part for Magenta that was inspired by Krooked’s Gnar Gnar video.

A ~minute of new Jake Johnson footage? Baby I’m ready to go 🎶

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Five Favorite Parts With Paul Rodriguez

Circa 2010 photo via the first-ever QS party ♥

If you cite the era surrounding Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater as when you first started skating (we all know nobody started skating in 2000 because they miraculously saw Photosynthesis in their dreams, stop pretending), P-Rod was likely one of your first favorite skaters. He was one of the main dudes in his mid-teens ripping as hard as established pros then, so it’s funny to see that a lot of what he looked for in his favorites back then was …people in roughly the same age group as him, ripping as hard as established pros.

Some of these turned anecdotal, which is obvs what you’d expect from someone who spent the majority of his life in the skate industry e.g. apparently he talked about the Baker thing in his Nine Club, which I missed, but had no idea that was ever in the cards.

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#LUXURYWATCH2019

Sometime during those drunk final ten days of 2018 when no e-mails went answered, an associate mentioned the difficulty of isolating “trends” as we approach the final year of the decade. In this era of post-everything where the past exists at the same time as the future, what even qualifies as a #trend? Gone are the simple days of noticing a sudden spike in camo-panted legs at Tompkins, or bleached heads doing no complies and being able to declare: “trend!” No, in recent years, the #trendwatch has leaned towards psychological states of being, and on occasion, fully fallen short of fruition. Even something as under-a-microscope as “BLESSED” is a more refined version of what the same cast had already been molding since 2014.

And then, the associate says [name redacted for fear of “YOU’RE WHAT’S WRONG WITH SKATEBOARDING!” retribution], “What if the 2019 Trend™ is simply skating in really expensive shit?”

This goes beyond Dill or Dylan being inspired by Prada shoes, or Pappalardo waiting for a flight with his Louis luggage. Obviously skateboarders have been documented with nice shit before, but now, you open Instagram and see Lucien Clarke and P-Rod posting photos of them in Louis Vuitton outerwear within an hour of one another. Further out in the Instagram universe, in a galaxy most-closely observed by those who list their favorite skaters by handles rather than government names, there is a burgeoning sect of volunteer teamriders for Gucci, Versace, and Burberry. At a cultural crossroad where Playboi Carti is one of Jay-Z’s biggest influences, there seem to be two choices across all spectrums: reenact a skate version of the intro from John Shanahan’s It’s Time part, or take advice from the other Jonah Hill sports movie, which is, of course, “adapt or die.”

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