📷 Photo by Matty Hilzenrath
New Jersey is a beautiful, dense place where three shops can forego any territorial tendencies found in other places, and unite to create one really special video. NJ, Travel and Underground all have riders represented in Matty Hilzenrath‘s NJ instant classic, A 20 Of Regular.
It is safe to say that those of us running skate publications have a high affinity for Rob Taro’s work. His renown Timescan series, which started in 2019, takes a something-out-of-nothing sensibility learned from a childhood in small-town New Jersey, and takes it into the often claustrophobic, high-bust street spots of Japan. Rob’s videos and parts are full of lines connecting opposite sides of the street, mountainous banks with obtuse runways, and cutty nuggets of marble that stick out to only those with a discerning eye for the skateable.
There is a distinct energy to a skate tour video. Not “we got an Airbnb in Paris for ten days and this is what we filmed,” but a genuine sprawling tour — more along the lines of lightning-in-a-bottle magic first brought to the world by landmark projects like the DC Super Tour and Harsh Euro Barge. Those videos created a vibe that every crew of skateboarders ripping around a continent has been chasing ever since, even if they are too young for those projects to have been part of their formative years. It’s all in the spirit they instilled.
We teamed up with our friends at Carhartt WIP and “Giddy” series architect, Romain Batard, to bring you “Snacks In Progress: The 2025 World Tour.” The only caveat is, that we didn’t actually go on tour — we just managed to compile every bit of outtakes, water bucket fiascos, European #spotporn, B-roll, unseen and maybe-worth-seeing-again footage from the past ~year’s WIP trips to create a fun companion piece ahead of whatever summer travels you might have lined up. Features a lot of QS favorites. Hopefully, it feels like a tour, or at least inspires you to go on one with your buds ;) Shout out Ragers Inc.
📷 Photo by Eka Seneth
Our friends up at Civil in Providence, Rhode Island are approaching their 20-year-anniversary, yet only now releasing their first-ever, full-length video.
Rhode Island is our smallest state, and as you might have learned from the feature in the last Skate Jawn, that makes the endeavor of an all-Rhode Island video particularly susceptible to spot fatigue and well-worn A.B.D. scrolls. The Civil Video is set to release soon (makes sense that a watershed moment like a shop’s first video would produce DVDs), and today, we are presenting John-Nestor Gamez’s part as a preview.
Beyond their oh-so-2000’s shop name [abbreviation for “Soo Hot Right Now”] and them being one of the first stores in Germany to carry QS gear, we’ve always felt like kindred spirits with Munich’s finest shop. We’re both descendants of what scholars call “The Blog Era,” during which we synthesized the conversations of our wider skater social circle — centered around skateboarding but also touched on life, sports, partying etc. — and created an online publication out of it. In the time since, SHRN parlayed their weblog into a physical store; we became the thriving newsroom that you see before you today.
