Brian Panebianco | Quartersnacks

Sabotage 5 — #theprocess Continues…

January 4th, 2018 · 5:00 am · 12 Comments

“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.

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Kicked Out the Tiki Bar

March 28th, 2016 · 4:53 am · 2 Comments

moe

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.

Shout out to all the free thinkers who are thinking outside the box.

“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.”

There are a handful of Bloby Instagram compilations out there, but this new one of Vincent Touzery is the best Bloby IG comp out there #skatevideohouse.

An interview with Brian Panebianco about the final days of Love. They’re still skating.

Andrew Wilson, Loose Trucks Max, Nik Stain, and Mitch from Philly all went out to Los Angeles and came back with an extended edition of Cell Jawn.

Volume 15 of LurkNYC “New York Times” B-sides. VHS cam + some midtown spots that are seldom skated in our modern era give this one some extra nostalgic vibes.

Here’s an artsy New York edit from Antosh and the Club Gear dudes who came through with one of the better “Summer Trip To…” clips in recent memory last fall.

A new mostly Rhode Island / some New York video from the Mood NYC crew: booM.

An interview / podcast with Roxanne Oldham, the music supervisor on “cherry.”

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…

Aaannnddd here’s a five-year-old skating Chelsea Park.

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

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I listen through this a dozen times once it starts getting warm every spring.

#TRENDWATCH2015: Trash

September 25th, 2015 · 4:56 am · 9 Comments

gilbert trashy

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?

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Love Park in 2015: An Interview With Brian Panebianco

August 7th, 2015 · 4:46 am · 12 Comments

Looking in from the outside (or from 100 miles north on the interstate), Love Park seems to have always existed in eras. There was the Ricky / Eastern Exposure era, the Kalis / Wenning / Pappalardo et al. / Photosynthesis era, and now, after some downtime last decade, there is the current “pink planter” era. And there’s no crew or series that has been pushing footage of Love Park and Philly in 2015 like the Sabotage videos. Below is a conversation with Brian Panebianco, one of the principal filmers and creative forces behind Sabotage (video #4 is due out 9/11/15), about skateboarding’s most iconic skate spot as it stands in 2015, and all that surrounds it.

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Are you originally from Philly?

I’m from the suburbs, like 35 minutes out.

When was the first time you went to Love Park?

Probably when they had the first X-Games street contest at City Hall [in 2001.] I remember everyone was skating the Municipal Building, but you couldn’t skate Love because the cops were waiting there. By the next year, all the pink planters were in.

Where would you skate in those years after downtown Philly got shut down?

I grew up skating this D.I.Y. spot in Lansdale, Pennsylvania that’s actually still there. Or we’d just skate around the neighborhood.

Did you ever go into the city?

Once I got my license, I did, but by that time, Love was completely shut down. I grew up without it being skateable. We’d try to skate City Hall and sometimes get lucky, but usually not. We’d go to the three block, Temple and those shitty spots.

There was also that D.I.Y. spot with the parking blocks under I-95 that Wenning and Kerry Getz used to always skate.

How’d you get into making videos?

I’d film with this shitty camera until 2005, when I got a VX1000, and that’s when I got hyped on it. I was never a Skate Perception dude or anything, but I had a few friends who were. Some of the first people I started going out skating with were Ant and Dom Travis. Ant had a VX and he was into cameras. We started making little montages from that D.I.Y. spot, but nothing much beyond that. We still didn’t skate downtown much.

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