Time Capsule | Quartersnacks

Forgotten Skate Videos: L.A. County (2000)

Time Capsule September 27th, 2012 · 9:50 am · 14

During last month’s trip to Los Angeles, the few moments not spent arguing with cab drivers were used to debate topics relevant to any 60% beer / 40% skateboarding getaway. A discussion of forgotten L.A. skate videos came up (hence the LaLa Land inclusion in our Out of Office reply), causing us to remember Listen, Land Pirates, A New Horizon and L.A. County, the best of the bunch.

L.A. County was released during a transition from the classic white tee and chino schoolyard videos (see: World, Girl) to Phase One of the “everyone is good” era that began in issues of Logic, and peaked with In Bloom and Street Cinema. This shift would have been a lot smoother if The Storm never came out, and dudes didn’t spend three years thinking they had to nollie heelflip out of everything.

To the distant observer, the L.A. in this video had an actual *street* skating scene. USC was still around, they skated random shit on sidewalks (something that has been regaining popularity in recent history), and got enough time at the D.W.P. benches to make it look like a plaza spot — not a “let’s hope we get more than two minutes to skate here” Hail Mary mission. With blockbuster skate videos still around the corner, southern California-based projects had yet to resemble six-month highlight reels from the same five handrail spots.

A [Not-At-All] Comprehensive Guide to Prominent Jewish Pro Skateboarders

Time Capsule August 23rd, 2012 · 10:53 am · 21

Pages 1 & 2, Page 3

A few weeks ago, we discovered a song by Trill Entertainment affiliates Lil’ Mal and the late Lil’ Phat entitled “That’s My Ju.” After listening to it 400 times, our editors called a late-day meeting, vowing to work deep into the night on a series of storyboards for an “All Jewish Skateboarder Re-Edit” to this outstanding piece of work. They were not even halfway done with their first pot of coffee before hitting a wall. There really aren’t that many Jewish pro skaters… Wait, are there any at all? As the “All Jewish ‘That’s My Ju’ Re-Edit” started to seem like a fleeting possibility, we desperately called for help in the social media realm, with few concrete findings that link people of Jewish origin to the world of professional skateboarding.

Frozen in Carbonite Instagrammed pictures of a ‘zine produced in 1993 that tackles this subject. The ranks have not changed much in twenty years. In fact, Jordan Richter converted to Islam, so the ‘zine’s headlining Jewish skater isn’t even Jewish anymore. Several Twitter sources suggested Mike York and Julien Stranger, and Danny Weiss might apply if he rode a skateboard for more than two hours each year, but Jewish representation remains strangely thin in pro skateboarding. Perhaps the two or three up-and-coming Jewish skateboarders could procure a Not Another Gentile Skateboard Video and allow us to edit the friends section to “That’s My Ju.” (A “HYFR” ender section is also an absolute-must.)

Until then, enjoy “That’s My Ju” as a standalone song. Or suggest that a Jewish friend who skates use it for a part. R.I.P. Lil’ Phat.

Normally, we’d shout out Amare Stoudemire right about now, but that dude lost a fight with a fire extinguisher, so screw him.

First you drink Snapples, now you sipping Mo’?

Time Capsule July 5th, 2012 · 1:18 pm · 11

“Where is Royal Flush right about now?” It’s funny how when you skate, there’s “the Jake Johnson song,” “the Rick McCrank song,” “the Mariano song,” etc. “Worldwide” by Royal Flush is most definitely the Keenan song. Just check the YouTube comments.

In our annual Keenan Milton R.I.P. / reminder of how Mouse is the best skate video ever post, here is Keenan and Gino’s part from Mouse plus the radio skit near the end, with commentary from Spike Jonze, Aaron Meza, Eric Koston, Guy Mariano, Mike Carroll, and Rick Howard. It’s from the Girl/Chocolate box set, which you should most likely already own. (It’s $32 on Crailtap, if you don’t.) It’s not much, just Mariano talking about how you can only use “timeless hip-hop” if you’re using it for a video part, as opposed to, you know, Band of Horses or some emo shit. We firmly disagree with his entire non-“hot song of the month” stance either way. There’s some stuff in there about the good-ol’-days when Spike Jonze didn’t know how to use a greenscreen, too.

The Most Influential European Sweatpants Skater

Time Capsule June 3rd, 2012 · 4:06 pm · 6

Souljah Griptape (grip companies need content too!) uploaded a handful of Flo Marfaing footage, donning it as a “lost” Seek A.K.A. Hip-Hop Workshop part. (For people who started skating in the past seven or eight years, Seek is a company that was under Alien and Habitat for a little while in the early 2000s. It had Kalis, Dyrdek, Mike Taylor, Colin McKay, Alex Carolino, and Flo on the team.) The footage isn’t really “lost,” because more than a few tricks have since appeared elsewhere. It looks like part one of a multi-part clip.

Flo’s 2002 output in worth note for skateboard historians because 1) He pre-dates the rediscovery of flatground 360 shove-its by five years (the downtown L.A. line in Carroll’s Fully Flared part…Gino technically “brought it back” in Yeah Right!, but it did not have as widespread of an effect), and 2) He’s the most influential European in the “skating in sweats” movement.

It was just a feeling, like before, everyone was cool with each other, and it was like nobody got on the team unless everybody was like, “Fuck yeah, let’s do this.” Seek happened because we wanted to do a world company, where it was like riders on the team, but it wasn’t like, “He rides for the Euro team” or “he rides for the Brazilian team,” but just, “This is our team and we’re all homies.” Like, Flo and Caralino are two of my favorite people and skaters, and we didn’t want to rock with them on some Euro team shit. Flo was like, “I want to do this and show the world we can skate for U.S. companies.” And it was working and we were filming, and I thought our video was going to be sick.

The story I got told was that there weren’t enough graphics people and they weren’t able to spend enough time on the company, so they just deaded it. They just deaded it overnight. They wouldn’t bring Flo and Alex back on board with us, which was another thing that pissed me off, and they just wouldn’t do anything. They were just like, “No, we’re over it.” We were like, “Hey, well wait ‘til the video comes out, and see what happens,” and they just deaded it. So, I went back over to Alien, and I think that was the time when they were slowly changing into this new direction that they were going. It was never the same. — Josh Kalis, November 2010. Read more Seek conspiracy theories here.

The Zoo York Institute of Design

Time Capsule May 31st, 2012 · 10:11 am · 15

In the introduction to his interview with Zered Bassett, Chris Nieratko details how Zoo York was once a source of pride for east coast skaters. A few buyouts and a decade later, nobody sets up a Zoo board with a geographic bias in mind anymore. Even if the company completely phases out of skating, people will forever nerd out over their first three videos (Mixtape, at this point, is just as much of a hip-hop classic a la Wild Style or Style Wars as a classic skate video), and chances are, most who began skating after Zoo ceased being any sort of an east coast status symbol have seen those videos and cried about how all the spots are gone.

You can’t type “zoo york ads” into a Vimeo search bar and get any results, so a lot of younger kids won’t see the old Zoo ads. (They probably won’t see the new ones either…do kids still look at magazines?) Those ads are just as full of classic nineties east coast iconography as the original videos.

The Zoo ads throughout the nineties were HIP-HOP at a time when that meant more than leaving comments about how Lil’ Wayne sucks on every pre-2000 rap video’s YouTube page. Other companies even jocked their whole hip-hop scrapbook vibe when it was appropriate: Transworld styled article layouts for east coast skaters with Zoo’s look (see here), west coast companies would run Zoo-esque ads for their east coast riders (see here and here), and start-up east coast brands like Illuminati, Metropolitan, and Capital all had a bit of Zoo DNA in their ads. It’s unfortunate that now, even when paired with a sick photo, Zoo ads look pretty generic.

Thanks to the internet’s leading scanner-based skate sites, we gathered a handful of ads from 1994-2000 into one place. The scans are stolen from The Chrome Ball Incident, Police Informer, and Skate.ly.