City of Scaffolds

“The pop guys are good looking and the drop guys are weird looking.” Lurker Lou and Aaron Herrington head out to Staten Island to skate “anything besides ABC Ledges” in the latest installment of Village Psychic’s “Lurking With Lou” series.

It takes Shaggy nearly 100 blocks to spend $100 in the latest installment of Skate Jawn‘s “$100 Chill” feature, which spans from World Trade to the Upper West Side. If you’ve always wondered what goes on inside the mind of skateboarding’s most prolific letter-writer, this is a nice intro ☺️

“In response to an art-making AI, the only comforting thing is, who cares? Art has never been about being proficient and skilled at making images with mediums. It’s always been about the time and the place and the person behind it and the story, and a computer doesn’t have any of that.” Jenkem spoke to Alexis Sablone about AI art, secret societies and invisibility cloaks.

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Tried To Tell Them It Was Boot Season

Listen to the soothing sounds of Nick Boserio’s voice — like light rain on a windowpane or cascading waves — for over an hour on the latest episode of The Bunt. Bar-none one of the best people you could have on a skate trip ❤️

This is really sick of The LA Times to do: The Oral History of the Hollywood High 16, with stories from many of the names most closely associated with the spot. (#lol at the visible QS sticker on the headline photo.) Can’t wait for The New York Times to do the oral history of the Courthouse Drop.

Our buddy Max Hull uploaded “I’M HERE,” his short submitted to the New York Bicycle Film Festival, onto his YouTube. Not skate-related obvs, but a very simple yet beautiful story :) “We outside, not inside.”

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Alltimers’ New Video, ‘You Deserve It,’ Is Now Live

If you were too young to have experienced the real-time reign of the skaters most synonymous with the nineties — but had already clocked your 10,000 hours of watching skate videos by the time, say, Jake Johnson hit the scene — there’s a decent chance you carry a vivid memory of first seeing Zered in a video (especially if you grew up in the northeast.)

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Somewhere Over the Seven Rainbows — The 2022 Dime Glory Challenge

It is tough to imagine that the Dime crew went even a day through the grimmest days of lockdown without plotting the next Glory Challenge. (Montreal, by comparison to anywhere in the U.S., had way gnarlier COVID lockdowns.) The early days of the pandemic were fraught with unknowns, which gave way to hyperbole. Large-scale gatherings seemed like a fleeting figment of a recent, unreturnable past. There was that stupid meme mocking us for ever having gone bowling. One friend claimed that casual sex would forever cease to exist — a concept that had already survived the AIDS epidemic.

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‘A Canvas For the Psyche’ — The Politics of Griptape in Skateboarding

Intro + Interviews by Frozen in Carbonite
Illustrations by Requiem For A Screen

I’ll never forget the wildest grip job I ever saw.

At the local park, this dude had clear grip with a collage of pornographic photos underneath. This raised a few questions. First, where the hell does one still buy physical pornographic magazines?

Next, the why. Did this particular pastiche of photography stoke him out like nothing else? Were these women his muses, like a current-day version of those paintings on WWII bombers and shit?

Maybe he needed to look at naked ladies 24/7.

ANYWAY, you may have noticed a plethora of new griptape brands sprouting up in the past year. Griptape is the one skateboard component we are in contact with (visual and/or tactile) almost 100% of the time. Just like Narcissus stared into his reflection until he died or turned into a flower or whatever, we stare at our griptape until the deck eventually dies — either broken or devoid of pop. It also functions as a canvas onto which one can project one’s psyche: the serenity of plain black, an inside joke, or a call to arms.

Skaters reserve some of their most hardcore gear opinions for this seemingly innocuous piece of sandpaper. With all this in mind, we present the The Politics of Griptape.

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