Brian Panebianco at the ever-enduring ABC Ledges. Photo via Mike Heikkila, who actually has an interview over on the Skate Jawn site.
“The only survivor of this whole mess of skateboard media is Thrasher. And why? Because they’re still owned by a skateboard family…If I ever were to start another magazine, that’s how I would do it.” Hanson O’Haver wrote wrote an awesome oral history of Transworld, which closely parallels the greater story of skateboard media in the last thirty years.
“I didn’t want to be that kid asking for stuff. I’d rather just buy it.” Josh Davis wrote a rad profile of T.J. for Hypebeast’s magazine. They just put up online.
It’s one of those “more words than videos” weeks :)
“But skateboarding’s worldview can often become so totalizing that commitment to it far into adulthood, past the age when it’s socially acceptable to ride around in a school bus smoking weed and listening to Slayer, can look like protracted adolescence. This is why skateboarding, for a large chunk of the country, will never fully outgrow its degenerate associations. And that’s fine.” It is notoriously difficult to produce a genuinely great piece of writing about skateboarding, but Noah Gallagher Shannon’s profile of Grant Taylor ticks all the boxes. Send it to your mom.
QS Sports Desk: More excited for the off-season, than we were for like, the entire second half of the postseason. And if you think Lebron is coming to the Knicks you need to move to Mars.
Quote of the Week: “Hell no I don’t watch soccer. A bunch of buddies kicking balls? I’m good.” — Meatball
QS is perpetually giving 90% of skate video editors a hard time for their uninspired marriage to Big L + and this idea that basically all rap still needs to sound like nineties rap (how boring does that sound tbh?), but we’ll throw you guys a bone here because there’s a substantial chance you haven’t heard this one before, and it’s really fun:
“The Process” refers to the Philadelphia 76ers’ management philosophy under former General Manager and President of Basketball Operations, Sam Hinkie. In a nutshell, The Process contains three guiding principles:
A. Minimize competitiveness in order to obtain high draft picks. B. Stockpile those draft picks in order to maximize trade values. C. Delay “trying to win” until the team drafts a transformational, once-in-a-generation player. Based on the history of the NBA, this is mainly how teams have set themselves up to win championships.
This strategy requires a shit-ton of patience. Nevertheless, over the years “Trust the Process” has become a mantra, a philosophy, and a rallying cry for 76ers fans.
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Back in the essay on the Philadelphia sports mythos, I focused on #toughness as Philadelphia sports’ guiding principle. Nothing exemplified this in 2017 more than Sabotage 5, in which Brian Panebianco and his usual suspects — plus some new additions — skated Love Park until every last slab of marble had been extracted and nothing remained but a few dirt banks into which to ollie.
On the other side of town, perhaps as a form of karmic balancing of the universe or some shit, something happened to the 76ers basketball club: They became sick-ass fun to watch.
So here we are, at a crossroad in which the Sixers are displaying flashes of basketball genius, Process believers looked ahead to a promising future, and the Sabotage crew released their final video chapter. As an homage to both #theprocess and the extensive Sabotage legacy, let’s take a deep dive into how the two crews match up.
Webstore orders from last week were caught up on by Friday afternoon. If you’re in the U.S. and don’t receive your goods by the end of this week, feel free to get in touch for tracking info. Hats are sold out, hoodys are still available :) Thank you everyone for the support.
“The stories I wrote were shit, it turned out. I hate to spoil the ending, but it’s true: skateboarding really is super fucking difficult to write about. How am I supposed to fix that?” — “Skateboarding in Fiction: A Brief History in Failure,” a smile-inducing article on the daunting task of writing fiction about the act of skateboarding.
“‘People always call me an asshole,’ he said over the dull roar of our wheels as I caught up to him. ‘That’s because I don’t stop.’ As if to punctuate his point, he ran the next red light. I watched from the limit line as a truck driver slammed on the brakes.”
Before Slap was the behemoth of skate gossip that it is today, it was…a magazine?
Three straight ledges in a row from the nineties, and not only talking about them but also remaking them fifteen years later. Meanwhile, there aren’t two consecutive ledges within a two-mile radius of the QS office…
QS Sports Desk: During some very bleak years — actually, they’re all pretty bleak — David Lee provided Knick fans with a flicker of hope. He’ll always hold a special place in our hearts, just like Kristaps will once Dolan decides to trade him in hopes of signing Paul George in three years or some shit. Glad to see the bro finally get his ring.
Quote of the Week: “I didn’t know I was beast until I varial flipped a trash can.” — Genesis Evans
Truth be told, nobody did the line with a towel-in-hand as good as S.A.D. twenty years ago. Connor Champion already elevated the bottle-in-hand line by having said bottle switch hands depending on which stance he was skating. The canon of tricks in the rain is too deep to bother breaking into. (Actually no, Matt Schlager is the only entry there — sorry Duffy.) Andre Page looked cooler than you ever will skating in the snow. Even with 95% of modern skateboarders suppressing regrets that they never applied to fashion school — how fresh or #weird of an outfit could you possibly have to leave an imprint in the jaded viewer’s mind c. 2015?
As we descend deeper towards PornHub levels of skateboard content, the spice rack of how to liven an everyday trick is getting slimmer. There aren’t many shortcuts to our memory bank because we’ve seen everything.
According to the EPA, the average American produces 4.4 pounds of garbage a day, which tallies to 1,600 pounds of garbage a year. That trash ends up in a landfill and is sadly not used for #creative purposes. We have skated over garbage for as long as the ollie has been around, and even on garbage for as long as conceptual web videos have existed. But what about with garbage? We’re constantly being called “garbage” by the women in our lives, so why not begin to embrace it?
In 2015, the easiest way to pierce into the short-term-memory-loss-laden brain of your average guy who watches skating on the internet is to skate with some trash stuck under your board. There are plenty of lloonngg back lips to go around, but it has been years since we’ve remembered one that didn’t have a piece of newspaper wedged under the wheels. And what other explanation is there for the fact that after 68 minutes of Love Park lines in Sabotage 4, two of the most memorable ones incorporated litter?
