Fall QS merchandise is arriving at U.S. & Japanese shops now. Check your local shop’s IG for availability, and our stockists page for a local QS dealer (that page actually needs to be updated, tbh.) Arriving in Canada, Australia and Europe this week and next. Fall 2019 gear will be available in our webstore next Monday, October 28th @ midnight E.S.T. (So technically Sunday night.)
You have 72 hours left to vote in the QS Readers Survey about the best parts and full-length videos of the 2010s. We’ll have the results for you in November ♥
Looks like the solid barrage of upstate New York videos is gonna keep rolling in 2019 (see #5.) The Seasons guys have a new ten-minute video on Thrasher entitled “Albany 2.5” with tons of Empire State Plaza footage, and a mini S.F. section at the end.
Wasn’t really sure what to expect from this upon click, and it thankfully ended up being smiles the whole way through ♥ Here’s a good seven minutes of Fred Gall iPhone footage at some D.I.Y. spot and a bunch of typical New Jersey crust.
ICYMI: Cooper Winterson unlocks another dimension of ConEdison Banks in his Skating Is Easy part.
Had a bunch of “wait, that spot’s been gone for years” thoughts watching this, and then realized it’s more of a remix than a new part. Either way! Any B.A. is good B.A., and Grant Yansura was nice enough to pull together a bunch of his [mainly New York] footage from SB Chronicles 3 and onward for a new-old “Slappy Seconds” edit, which includes a handful of unseen clips.
Not a lot of content like this going live on the skateboard internet in the age of Instagram Stories: the Village Psychic dudes drove from Minnesota to Memphis to escape the cold and did a long[ish]form blog post with photos about their journey.
One of those “I’m not really sure wtf this is about” Boil the Ocean posts: something about testing for weed and the Olympics ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Forever love that double noseslide line. Or any double noseslide line, for that matter. Matt Velez uploaded three minutes of Mark Wetzel raw files to his YouTube.
“Without that skater/photographer communication, you have no choice but to sit and wait for the photo to show itself. It felt like I had photographed a wild leopard in the jungle.” Bobby Worrest — 360 flip noseslide. Photo by Jeff Comber. Head over to King skate mag for the full blurb.
*First great video part of 2019 alert* The scientists at Palace realized they needed some young blood on the team and got Heitor Da Silva (alum from the same Swedish skate school as Oski) onboard. He has an awesome new Adidas part out right now (that backside flip, switch frontside flip line…), and an interview about his journey from Brazil to Norway to The Triangle™ over on Grey. Could have probably dug a bit deeper on the song, but oh well.
Me, you, and Cyrus Bennett have the same favorite skateboarder. Hint: he skates more than everyone, for longer than everyone, is older than everyone, and is more oblivious to what’s going on in skateboarding that everyone.
Traffic scanned a 2005 TWS article about a D.I.Y. tour they did in Hartford, Albany, Rochester, Akron and Pittsburgh back in the early days of the company, with words from Ricky, and a bunch of rad photos. Never knew they were the architects behind that still-running Albany bank-to-ledge. #respect.
The Village Psychic guys like Borough Hall a lot A.K.A. they made a video of all their 2018 iPhone footage. They look high, but when the hell were those plastic orange blocks there?
Spot Updates: Not the most oft-skated spot these days (unless you’re winding up there after getting kicked out of Bigscreen or something), but there’s not much to skate at Penn Plaza anymore, as the building put astro turf all over the upper portion of the spot.
Jersey Dave’s part from Stop Fakin’ 3 + cameos from Freddy, Quim etc. is online.
“I guess it’s kind of like, for example, a guy builds his dream house and then he goes off and has a cabin in the woods elsewhere. You know, a lake house. When you can have that, obviously that’s a privilege. You don’t always want to be at the one place, and it’s overrun with children and remote control cars and rules.” Village Psychic with a piece on the rules of contributing to and skating D.I.Y. spots.
We’d mark this as non-skate-related reading, but everyone knows it is just as skate as anything else on the list ;) NY Maghas the complete history on the rise of halal carts in New York. “Halal carts cross barriers. Cheap food triumphs over bad politics.”
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.
