We invite you to celebrate Valentine’s Day with us this year, via a specially engineered mix by our dear friend Coryindahouse. (Anyone who has attended a Dime Glory Challenge will know Cory as 1/2 of the team behind the DJ booth.)
…and if you don’t have a Valentine this year, or yours freshly left you heartbroken, well, there’s something in here for you too. Keep listening. From Aaliyah to Zaytoven, it’s all there ❤️
One of those “most of it is from the same two videos” weeks. If you’ve seen them, you know ;)
Happy Valentine’s Day 💋
It feels like it has been an eerily quiet season for New York scene videos. You can blame the worst winter in a decade, but winter has typically been the perfect time to edit shit from the past year. This week, we’ve ran stuff from Chicago (statistically worse weather than us), Lisbon (where it’s been raining all winter), and today, Maine (look at a map.) I guess we gotta work more to afford to live in this fucking place or something like that.
ANYWHO, we at the QS office love a seasonal skate video franchise: think Jeff Cecere’s 2022-2024 December three-peat or that era when every summer came with a Bronze video. For three winters now, Michael Babbitt and his crew have been reporting on the happenings up in Portland, Maine in skate video form. Three videos in, it feels like Portland thrives on the sort of spots that pop up in that liminal period between construction projects and may not last more than a week, or the sorts of things that can only be skated while negotiating with someone already halfway into calling the cops. Between the trio of projects, it barely feels like they repeat spots. We asked Mr. Babbitt how such a small scene manages to cast such a wide net: “did you guys barely repeat spots through the past three videos?”
We have written before about the assortment of textures that come together to make Lisbon’s skate spots. In just the opening minutes of Lucas Marques’ part in Call Me When U Get Home, you encounter an asphalt lump into a sliver of diamond-plate, a brick volcano outlined by cobblestones, plus a line that starts with grinding on glass and ends with a wallride on marble. Next, you’ll notice they don’t even bother hitting the more perfect famous spots recognizable to outsiders. Feels like they’re leaving those to us tourists. Where’s the …friction?
It was almost a year ago to the day (right down to the Knicks-Celtics weekend match-up …which luckily turned out better this year), that upon Chicago’s Uprise Skateshop releasing a two-punch of parts from Will Morton and Vince Guzaldo, we remarked how nice a new Uprise full-length would be.
Well, it turns out they’ve been working on one. For the past three years. Just before the weekend (late pass, sorry), Harry Reynolds dropped Where You Been, a 26-minute Chicago scene video from the Uprise family.
