2020 — the year that we hold responsible for many of our present woes — didn’t even start that bad.
They fixed the ground at the ledges across from Columbus Park! Seemingly out of nowhere! Here was a spot that we had only vicariously experienced in old videos, passed by zillions of times thinking, “Man, if only the ground wasn’t shit,” and maybe forced a session on every half-decade. And it was renovated!
Two ledges! With ends! A block from the hellish Bermuda-esque Triangle formed by Family Court x Blubba x Courthouse at that!
2021 began with a similar moment of spot serendipity. The Money Longer alien who took over the lease of the Men in Black towers in 2016 descended and flattened out the second, less iconic fountain at Flushing.
Summer 2020 QS stuff should be available at most, if not all, U.S. accounts now. Still arriving in Canada + Australia. Japan + Korea been had it. Arriving in Europe early June. Thank you to everyone who grabbed something from the webstore. We’ll be shipping all week, and yes, you will get a shipping confirmation + tracking when your order goes out. There’s still a good bit on there, though a lot of the tees are down to smalls and mediums. So funny how 3-4 years ago, it was XLs that were leftover, but now everyone seems to have sized up. Spread via Orchard.
And on a day when the wind-chill brings the temperature down to 12 degrees, we bring you some… good news.
Space 198, the new free, INDOOR Vans park is opening on January 2nd at 198 Randolph Street in Brooklyn. Unlike the belated House of Vans, which was more of an event space inside of a skatepark (and brought out people’s inner savages anytime there was a mid-winter open day there), this park is a community-oriented space built for skateboarding.
It’s going to be open Thursday through Sundays — you just need to to sign up on the website beforehand. And it’s off the Jefferson L stop in Bushwick, making everyone’s life a bit easier than a 20-minute walk through the snow to Greenpoint that we used to do ;)
As they were putting the finishing touches on it, they gave a handful of crews the chance to check out the park last week, and here’s what we came back with. Be nice to Jersey Dave when you see him, because chances are, his phone has not stopped buzzing for the past two weeks.
Filmed by Will Rosenstock, Paul Young, Max Hull, Cristian Berrios & Kyota Umeki.
Backing this recent uptick of people reviving their dormant YouTube / Vimeo accounts as we ease into spring. (Could a new Krispy Du-Rag edit be around the corner?)
Matt Velez just put up his first [non raw files] edit since uploading Calzone in full over a year ago. It feels like a handful of b-sides from the last Bronze project, that Brad Cromer New York part, and whatever Wade Desarmo was filming for until it started raining — but definitely has enough to get you hyped for whenever the fuck it gets consistently warm outside.
And as far as spots you skate before succumbing to Commodore’s gravitational pull go: they might look boring, but we’re definitely all fine with getting stuck at those plastic benches on Metropolitan instead of Reggaeton for the next year or eight.
Kurt Havens, the Academy Award winning filmmaker behind 2012’s Twomanji video, is back with another full-length VHS / Hi-8 / old camera (?) project entitled Ballhog. It’s pretty much a vintage-tinged Bronze B-cam video from the past couple years, and features iconic parts from Mark Humienik, Billy McFeely, and Josh Wilson.
Gang Corp, Frog, Humble, The Skate Kitchen, and Hardbody all have spreads in the new issue of Japan’s Eyescream mag. Probably won’t do you much good if you can’t read Japanese (the Google Translate camera feature is sick though), but still rad to see nonetheless. Shout out to everybody.
Oh, and Genny posted the raw photos from the Humble pages.
Damn, imagine wanting to skate the Veteran’s Memorial 12 that bad? ;) jk. Marco Kada covered a lot of ground across the city and outlying areas (who even remembers the last trick on the Jersey City Hamilton Park five block spot…Zered’s Vicious Cycle part?) for his rad “New York Nice Guy” part.
“You know he’d get his mental health check and go straight to Ralph and drop two grand on a fucking moleskin pair of trousers or something.” Some Monday motivation for anyone currently living on a couch in an apartment they don’t pay rent for: Freeinterviewed Lev Tanju about all the cool shit Palace has been doing in London these past couple years.
Can’t say the QS Rap Desk has actively been checking for new Wayne songs these past ~five years, so a bit “late” on this one (came out on Christmas), but wowwwowow.
There’s a fire remix video dropping on here tomorrow Wednesday ♥