What A Time

Last Monday Links of the year ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Top 10 will return on Friday, January 8th. FWIW, this week, all of it would be from Davonte Jolly’s Godspeed video for Illegal Civ (a drive-in theater skate video premiere was a fire idea btw) + the new Yardsale video.

To pine for warmer days, check out the Public Skateboarding video by Tom Albin. 31 minutes, all filmed in New York, and as wholesome of a friends video as you could possibly get. Friend edits to “Never Too Much” always hit.

Boil the Ocean has embarked on its annual journey of picks for the year’s ten best video parts.

Here’s a YouTube comp of Seven Strong IG loosies.

Back smiths on brick ledges in the new edit from Hotel Blue.

Our friends at 4Ply magazine helped tally and cull all the data for the QS Readers Poll this year, and shared some random stats they found that we didn’t run with the lists.

“Okay, this can be done. How do I do it?” Monster Children posted up the full Huf retrospective article from its photo annual issue.

Reda and R.B. shot a day-in-the-life video with Duron Simons of Gangcorp.

Zered Bassett is the latest guest on the Mission Statement podcast with Lee Smith.

D.O.A. has a new edit out: “Escape From D.O.A.” JD from Labor has second part ;)

A long curb and a D.I.Y. spot walk into a Max Hull edit behind Newtown Creek… (It’s funny how maybe ~30% of New York skate footage in 2020 is in the vicinity of either Newtown Creek or the Kosciuszko Bridge.)

The ender of this Independent Trucks raw files segment has the full battle of Ryan Townley’s wall trick at the Washington Heights bump-to-bar-to-hill (Tyshawn “BLESSED” backside flip spot.) Whole clip is nuts though.

Thrasher has a video of Grant, Rowan, Gerwer, et al. skating the Supreme S.F. bowl.

NY Mag offered up an end-of-the-year tribute to the belated China Chalet.

Quote of the Week: “It’s fun that Tony Hawk isn’t hot.” — Abada. (How different would skateboarding be if our most famous representative was really hot?)

This got uploaded to YouTube at the start of February 2020. That was the final month when any of us were able to live in denial of the upside-down world that we would soon enter. I remember ripping it off a YouTube-to-MP3 site before the album came out, and that MP3 — background noise from the talking in the video and all — being a personal soundtrack for the lead-up to huge lines outside grocery stores, anxiety-inducing press conferences on NY1 every morning, and nobody being too sure of what tomorrow looked like. Even after the album came out and there was a mastered version of the song, this one just sounded better.

This music video is nothing yet everything and absolutely perfect at the same time. It’s two guys buying a bottle at a liquor store before they (presumably) go party for the night. It’s the brief interactions with strangers, the nods to acquaintances, the feeling of the night’s potential leading you anywhere. It was simple, yet felt profoundly foreign and nostalgic when coming back to rewatch this video over and over throughout 2020. There was always this giddiness to doing a pre-party store run, and this video captured something so subtle about pre-pandemic life in an incredible way. It helps that the song is so great, too.

Like the top comment says: “Low budget video feeling like a million dollar video.”

Here’s to feeling giddy in 2021 ♥ have a good one.

6 Comments

  1. that yardsale (YS2) video has me feeling so strange… the trick selection is sick, the filming/videography is great, but the style is messy as heck.

    every two seconds i’m like “okay handtouch…okay tailscrape… okay landed sideways…okay bussup bussup”

  2. the more refined and clean anything gets whether its music art skateboarding etc, there will always be another direction pulling back and making it messy.

  3. @ saxomophone,

    fair point actually, I just can’t get into the mess myself. The gents in YS2 are certainly skilled, don’t get me wrong there, I just mean some of those “lands” were worse than sponsor me tapes.


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