On the same day that we dropped Toda Fuerza’s Havana edit, we got an email asking, “We saw you posted a Cuba edit. What about a Vietnam edit, another place where the skate scene is only just now beginning to grow exponentially?”
The two polarities of QS are that we are incredibly interested in what’s happened at the ledge down the street from the office, and we love a video out of a scene that we know next to nothing about. Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, is certainly one of those places.
📹 Video by Adam Abada
Back in 2021, when we did part two of the oral history behind all the skate photos featuring the Twin Towers, we got Atiba on the horn to talk through a few shots from ~1997. In doing the digging for those, he happened to uncover a small cache of unscanned New York photos he forgot about because they didn’t feel like much at the time, but obviously took on new meaning as the years went by and the world changed.
In the midst of Atiba’s monthslong media tour promoting his latest Vans collection, we visited him at his office to see just what else he had in the stash from New York. For a guy who got started working in skateboarding in San Diego in 1995, headed into what can only be described as a “golden age” for print media, we wanted to know what he saw, shot, and remembered from this city that was generally only a novelty in an era dominated by the west coast.
Moneyline is the new Miami scene video from Justin Stout, the videographer behind past Andrew projects Rascal and Yastle.
The vid is anchored by heavy appearances from Josh Wolff, Rezza Honarvar, Victor Lustig and Henry Barco, alongside a wide net of familiar faces to anyone who’s gone down to skate Miami in recent years. And as those visitors can attest, stacking for a video in Miami month after month, year after year takes work — fixing spots, keeping an eye open nuggets unturned, and knowing that the best new spot might be some shit that only lasts for a week before construction changes it forever. A Miami video from a few years ago looks nothing like one from today. They skate that marble Brickell fountain that was all over videos in the post-COIVD era zero times throughout this entire video. White blocks? Zero. That gap into the street that was all over the Supreme Miami video? Nope.
So of course you gotta skip town once in while ;)
(And don’t you wish all security guards were like that guy?)
Brayan Albarenga is no-doubt one of the first names associated with IG clips at Barcelona’s enduring landmarks: MACBA, Universitat, Para-lel. Those three have endured as fixtures in videos for three decades now, but over time, Barcelona-heavy parts and edits have widened their radius, extending into the city’s less-touristed zones for fresh spots.
And that applies to Mr. Albarenga’s actual video parts as much as it does for any other third-eye-open skaters scouring the outskirts of the city. His last two for Free are filmed everywhere.
This new one for Hélas though, is back on the home turf 📍
We get many messages to help push out videos, but often from the well-traversed corners: New York City itself, the midwest, Europe, Japan. This was the first edit from Cuba that ever got pitched our way. Much of what we know about the Cuban skate scene comes from American pros visiting the island — some with Cuban backgrounds themselves. There are no skateshops in Cuba, so the hard goods that make it to the island come in the form of donations from those visiting teams.
