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.
We have a capsule with Nike SB releasing this Saturday, April 14. It’s definitely our best one! More info soon ♥
Gonna throw in an early left field link, but the Pass~Port in Greece edit is the best (i.e. watched it more than once) trip edit that’s dropped during 2018’s Winter Getaway Footage Dump Season (yes, I know Australia is in the southern hemisphere.) It’s always nice to learn of some nice new songs in a skate edit too :)
“That’s what I keep telling myself, ‘maybe in ten more years.’ Those ten years go by and I’m still not ready. Actually, I’ve come to terms with it, this is it.” Skate Jawn interviews productivity legend, Dave Caddo.
“In a Warhol-esque version of a future skate industry where 1% of pros earn lavish salaries and the rest ball for position, will everyone have their own brand, with price-points scaling higher in accordance with gnarliness and footage releases?” Boil the Ocean on pros’ t-shirt ventures, and the cult of Jerry Hsu’s Sci-Fi Fantasy brand.
Even if it is in the Times + includes the phrases “daredevils” and “neoliberal training grounds,” Jeff Ihaza’s feature on how skateparks came to be understood, accepted, and built passes the litmus test of linkable traditional news outlet skate coverage.
While the Times may think we “won,” we also lost one of the best ledges in lower Manhattan this past week. The deknobbed ledge at Seaport that was more-or-less a go over the past year-plus is now knobbed not only for grinds, but for manuals too!
Normally don’t care about “oh, so-and-so already skated to that song”-isms — especially in this fickle footage economy — but “Blowing Up Fast” holds a special place in many hearts. This guy does a line at Three Up Three Down, hypes up P-Rod, and has never seen Baker Has a Deathwish, which is totally fine because it’s almost ten-years-old now goddamn.
If you need affirmation of how incredibly difficult it has been to do these posts over the past two weeks, look no further than the fact that Thrasheris posting astrology content, this girl is still looking for which one of you who spilled coffee on yourself at Herald Square, and apparently, EVERYTHING is “going right” in skateboarding right now…Spring can’t come soon enough.
“I used to be more of a character back in the day and just dive into the river, swimming for the board and making people laugh. I remember Jaime Reyes gagging because I was in there doing backstrokes. They say swimming in that shit helps your immune system.” Village Psychic spoke to Brian Wenning about some of the spots that were instrumental to his skating.
Caddo and Lou gave up on skateparks in 2016. It looks like it has beenworking out.
(Three raw clip links in a row, see what I mean? Springtime hellooo where r u…)
PFP5, the latest installment of Michael Sassano’s now long-running Westchester skate video series, will be premiering up in Peekskill on Saturday the 14th. Teaser here.
The crooked rail at Columbus Park is maybe the last place anyone expected to see a slappy front nose 270 A.K.A. the Explore Page, but there it was in Matthew Martin’s Hombre Hardware part.
“Cyclist stabs skateboarder during street spat.” Ok, the “It’s a fucking bike lane, asshole!”-guys are getting a bit out of hand.
This clip got posted on April 8, 2007 (Marcus Garvey rails were a new spot then…), and dubbed “The Neverending Winter.” Same mood eleven years later (a lot of these spots are still around), though I wish the quality of the upload wasn’t full trash.
Dime’s re-appraisal of Joe Valdez’s legacy has New York skateboarders living closer to the edge, just hoping that Thrasher doesn’t blow it again.
The Courthouse is a bust, it takes months of research to discover a Black Hubba N.B.D., and all the tricks on the Bronx bank-to-ledge are starting to look the same — how do you grasp the attention of the jaded skateboard-viewing public in 2015? How about risk a potential bath in what Jerry Seinfeld once described as “the most heavily trafficked, overly contaminated waterway on the eastern seaboard?”
Ever since its ascent to premier spot status, the main gripe about Chinese Seaport has been its resemblance to a skatepark. It’s not enough for a perfect ledge spot to exist in lower Manhattan, MFA-weilding skateboarders are still weary as to whether or not the spot is #legit. “I can’t film here man, I might as well put L.E.S. Park clips in my part. Let’s go up to 20th and C and skate some rocks.”
While staring into the deep abyss that is Brooklyn, someone found a hack to make Chinese Seaport #legit. You don’t skate the ledges at all (gross, that’s for skatepark kids!) You skate the railing, off the ledge, risking a fifteen-foot plummet into the brown bog water that separates Manhattan and Kings county.
Some research revealed that the East River is not nearly as polluted as it once was, rendering it perhaps a few notches below Valdez on the skateboard trick #legitimacy scale: “The East River has an unattractive, greenish tint, and a few floating Doritos bags, sure. But on most days, the levels of bacteria meet federal safety guidelines, according to state and local officials. Even when the bacteria levels in the water are high, it’s unlikely that swimmers will get sick. If they do get sick, the severity will probably be more along the lines of eating bad Chinese food.” …and everyone knows swimming exercises every bone in the body.
If things go wrong, there’s a chance you might, like, disappear, but that’s apparently not much of a risk when paired against the prospect of an A.B.D-free Manhattan skate spot ;)
Beyond being some of the most expensive property in an already laughably expensive city, the waterfront has been instrumental to the progression of technical, #lowimpact skateboarding in New York. The city has always been a decade behind California in terms of technical ability, but had it not been for the development of the Seaport, a flip-in trick might’ve forever been a myth to New Yorkers. Just think: did you ever truly see people doing reverts, nollie flip-ins n’ shit before someone thought to put angle iron on those wooden blocks? Not really, right?
With Seaport 5.0 being the frontrunner for 2014’s “Spot of the Summer” (in a lead comparable to Chris Brown’s for equally important “Song of the Summer” honors), we take a look at the five forms that Seaport has taken throughout these past twenty years. While reading this, please keep in mind that there is barely anything resembling a “normal, straight ledge” at any Manhattan skatepark.
