Heat Wave / End of Summer 2011

Fresh off stealing mad bottles from the Rick Ross concert last night (here’s Ross without his trademark sunglasses), and combined with this morning’s crisp, early-fall temperature, it’s only right to present to you our End of Summer / Heat Wave video. It encompasses everything we were up to throughout the past three months: Barcelona, the Wave at Bowery Stadium, skating at night to beat the heat, and perhaps most impressively, somehow coming up with four or five minutes of New York footage entirely filmed in Manhattan (save one trick.) It’s also proof that our recent HD conversion had minimal effects on our attitudes towards production values.

Thanks to everyone who came out last night to support Quartersnacks, and the crew at Bowery Stadium for putting together a great event. Thanks to everyone else that helped us make this video possible as well. Until next summer…

Clip features Daniel Lebron, Doug Brown, Tyler Tufty, Thomas Taylor, Michael Mackrodt, Josh Velez, Andy Henrie, Mike Cuneo, Marcel Veldman, Sven Aerts, Andre Page, Ty Lyons, Corey Rubin, Jahmal Williams, Zered Bassett, Phil Rodriguez, Bryce Golder, Conor Fay, Sean Kelling, Justin Brock, Dan Plunkett, Emilio Cuilan, Mark Nardelli, Ritchard Swain, Alexander Mosley, and Young Chris. Cameos by Mannie Fresh and DJ Roctakon.

Pad’s quote about his party footage outdoing his skate footage came true…

(Alternate YouTube Link)

End of Summer Slump

So as the summer ends, we start a new season…” Slow update week last week. Though it’s Labor Day, our end of summer project won’t be out for another week and a half. Here’s the one from last year.

Pretty sick that people could fly to New York all the way from Denmark and still be down to session Three Up Three Down instead of hucking themselves down the Courthouse Drop or something more tourist-like.

There’s about ten seconds of Gino footage in this Nike Barcelona clip. (He also has an ad in the newest Antenna magazine, unfortunately one-upping the great Geo Moya.) There’s another similar crew clip with Omar Salazar shredding a lot of Barcelonian landmarks as well.

The ratio of lifestyle footage to skateboarding in Alex Carolino New York clip is horrible, but there are a few cool clips in there. Skating over trashcans off those high benches on Wall Street and South Street is getting real popular now, huh?

Crailtap Fives with the Chrome Ball Incident. (Thanks for the support.)

Depending on your tolerance for absurd northeastern conceptions of what a skate spot is, you may find that Hurricane Irene left some new terrain behind following last weekend. (Not sure how to skate that particular obstacle in the link though.)

Spot Updates: 1. They replaced the clunky ground on the Maiden Lane C-Benches with even more clunky ground. 2. NYU put new knobs on the recently unknobbed frontside for regular/backside for goofy up ledge on Mercer and Third. If you just moved to New York and are beginning school at NYU this semester, you will be expected to remove all the knobs from this spot. 3. Budweiser 24 oz. cans are now available in 3 packs.

Rumor of the Week:Alex Olson has a longboard.” — Tron Jenkins

Quote of the Week:Are you guys hipsters?” — A girl in shorts and lime green Doc Marten’s with an Electric Zoo ($250 electro/techno festival) wristband on the 6 train

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Filming Clips, Straight Off the iPhone

Contrary to what Rick Ross may insist, the iPhone probably isn’t well suited for “selling dope.” However, it’s great for second angles and quick clips when you’re sitting around lurking at skate spots, as many have learned. (It’s not ironic that a former law enforcement official encourages impressionable youths to perform illegal activities on a highly traceable piece of technology, but perhaps he’s just trying to make his colleagues’ jobs easier.)

If Universitat is Barcelona’s (vastly superior) version of Union, then MACBA is the city’s (vastly superior) version of Tompkins and 12th & A. People kind of just get stuck lurking there, and avoiding it is a badge you can proudly wear, just like “I haven’t been to Tompkins in weeks” is a controversial conversation piece for any New York skater. Further similarities exist in that it’s too dark to skate MACBA at night (doesn’t stop people from trying), and it is a premier location for “homie cam” clips. If Diamond Days clips were based in Barcelona, they’d undoubtedly have their 3:1 duration ratio of 12th & A to non-12th & A footage replaced with MACBA footage. As a result, here is an iPhone clip, largely composed of footage filmed while sitting bored at MACBA, and other joyful moments.

Features Ishod Wair, some lil’ homie (who also appears in a recent Clint Peterson Transworld clip), Tyler Tufty, Vladamir Kirilenko, [poached footage of] Omar Salazar, Andre Page, Ty Lyons, Doug Brown, Andy Henrie, Marcel Veldman, and E.J.

Alternate YouTube Link

Skate Spot Porn: Barcelona Edition

If you skateboard, you don’t exactly need anyone to recommend a visit to Barcelona. Some people with more extensive experiences of going there claim that “It isn’t the same,” as say, five years ago, due to spots getting blown out, knobbed (yes, that happens out there), or whatever else. But compared to America, or more specifically to the northeast, you could take Boston, New York, Philly, Baltimore, and D.C., (even throw in the B-list cities like Providence, Hartford, Stamford, Newark, Jersey City, etc.), combine them into one city skate-spot-wise, and you still wouldn’t even come close to the “remaining” terrain it has to offer. No, that’s not being hyperbolic.

This fact goes well beyond the more design-attuned nature of the city (basically, if any New York spot was designed in Spain, it would be made infinitely better, not just in terms of unintentional pro-skateboard terms, but quality, and aesthetic-wise too.) Culturally, the public approach to skating is much different than in the U.S. You get the feeling that people in Spain don’t experience surges in dopamine whenever they get a chance to scream out “No skateboarding!” the way that Americans do, a place that has a fetish for prohibiting pretty much everything except sitting and walking in 90% of its public spaces. We were kicked out of three spots while we were there, and all three were in neighborhoods where the demographics lean heavily above sixty-years-old. If MACBA, Universitat, Forum and Parallel were in any American city, they would have been knobbed six times over. American culture loves to find things to complain about, and you don’t necessarily get the same feeling from the Spanish. (All of these conclusions were drawn in a matter of two weeks, so take them with a grain of salt. America sucks for skateboarding though, that’s a fact.)

During our time in Barcelona, we utilized an oft-recommended, yet could-be-better spot resource for Europe called SkHateYou. It didn’t have any information by way of directions or descriptions, just clickable subway stops and photos of what’s around there. (You’re welcome.) And some of those photos were crooked, out of date, depicting insane spots that no human being could/would skate, etc.

The internet didn’t offer much by way of decent Barcelona spot photographs, so in turn, here are some photos we took while out there, encompassing maybe 50% of the spots we had a chance to skate. If you haven’t done it — save some money, go to Barcelona, forget that you have ten minutes to skate something before security comes rushing out or some dumb person with nothing better to do than worry about architecture they never cared about in the first place starts complaining (“DON’T YOU REALIZE YOU’RE RUINING EXPENSIVE ART?!”), and have fun. Do it while you’re still young, motivated, and healthy.

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Barcelona Update 2 of ?: Damm Estrella Edition

Beyond the enticing “legality” of street beers in Barcelona, which allows American tourists to maintain a mild state of intoxication at all hours, another perk is the availability of the beers themselves. New York, unlike most of the U.S., has a 24/7 window for beer purchases (barring Sundays after 4 A.M. if your local bodega happens to abide by that regulation.) However, it doesn’t have an army of immigrants from the Middle East walking the streets and around skate spots delivering cold Damm Estrellas in exchange for 1 Euro (equivalent to $1.43 by today’s conversion rate.)

Universitat, the spot best known to the rest of the world as the three long black marble ledges on perfect ground, is sort of like Barcelona’s Union Square. The similarities are in the mixed crowd of late-teen to early-twenties tweakers blended with tourists and junkies, plus the centralized location that becomes more spacious for skateboarding as the night progresses. The comparison starts to fall apart once you account for fact that the three ledges would invariably be the best ones in all of New York, not to mention the reliably of the green-bag-carrying Estrella vendors that could be summoned by yelling out “AMIGO!”

Below is a clip featuring Josh Velez, a drunk homie at Universitat, Ty Lyons, and Andre Page. It was filmed under the discretion of street-bought Damm Estrellas. We have been trying to bolster our rap to non-rap soundtrack ratio, and it should come as no surprise that Quartersnacks has a soft spot for songs from the 1950s when it comes to video clips filmed entirely at night.

Alternate YouTube link