After an arduous road, some heart-wrenching misses, tens of thousands of makes, much blood, a lot of sweat, and maybe not a whole lot of tears — we have arrived at the Game of G.R.A.T.E. Finals between Frankie Spears and Mark Suciu. The winner takes home a fat stack of 20s. Everyone else has to go home and train for next year.
Thanks for being along for the ride 🤝
The “return” of the full-length skate video is something that has been forecasted on such a loop that we can safely conclude it was never at risk of extinction in the first place.
However, in this past month, two of the year’s marquee releases both clocked in at a few minutes shy of an hour.
Palace’s Detroit 313 video is notable because it took seven years to film — an eternity in the social media era, and an echo back to skate videos’ blockbuster “golden age” when two or three full-lengths a decade was a reasonable cadence for a brand.
At a time when everything falls under the label of “content,” it is easy to fall into a routine. We are all guilty of it.
📷 via @nefariousgrimace
“The thing is, if H&M knocks on the door tomorrow, buys the building out, we can’t do shit. We can’t win. But what we can do while we last is prove that we are trying.” WNYC profiled Kyota Umeki, and his family’s long-running St. Mark’s businesses, Search & Destroy and Kenka, which he runs with his brother. Cannot wait for Kyota to be mayor. [Related: Our interview with him from 2023, conducted on the eve of him opening the Star Shop before being old enough to buy a beer.] In hindsight, I feel bad for having a panic attack during Q2 of Game 4 while watching it at Kenka with everyone — because what better place to watch the greatest Finals comeback in history — but sometimes you need to stand two feet from your TV alone completely dehydrated, and hope the plane isn’t crashing 🤗 Thank you O.G. Anunoby, the most effective anti-anxiety drug / pilot.
“EZ FUN” is the new video blog entry from Kader Sylla and Tristan Warren. Starts out with some New York stuff up through the Violet premiere some weeks back. That handrail on East Houston is bound to see a good number of visitors this summer ;)
A glorious week for bank skating: lil’ diamondplate banks, really steep almost-wall banks, kinda-a-quarterpipe-kinda-a-wall banks, brick manual pad [???] banks leading into a keyhole [???], Brooklyn Banks, gap-to-banks, and the Max Palmer spot is not not, right?
Love the wildlife in the PLUS x Thrasher video 🐊
Have a wonderful weekend ❤️ Go skate a bank.
The winner of this one goes on to play the winner of the other finalist [leaving a name out in case you’re just joining us and haven’t caught Tuesday’s episode yet] in the finals.
The finals match-up goes live next Wednesday, July 1st.
