4 P.M. Links :(

unis

UNIS.

Manolo’s “20 Years of Chocolate” remix will bring a tear to your eye.

Still one of the craziest things ever done on a skateboard. Dude was too futuristic.

“Tyshawn Jones is really getting some air! Now I hope that he and others of his ilk are billed for the damage they cause to the steps and walls of monuments and public areas around the city.” TJ got a photo in the Times this past weekend. Some commenters were upset. We should ban everything except walking. That’d be cool.

SMLTalk has been doing some hard-hitting investigative journalism as of late. First, they use Kevin Bradley’s bump-to-bar grab from “cherry” as a springboard to assess the history of acceptable grabs on street, and though it went online a few weeks ago, this piece on the demise of the pop shove-it is also worth your consideration.

Boil the Ocean on Stativ IV and the future of full-length videos.

Some Bronze B-sides. ICYMI: Jenkem interviewed Peter about dark corners of the internet last week. (Here’s another interview with him and Pat from last fall.)

Quick Acapulco Gold clip with a 2013 Q.S.O.T.Y. Leo Gutman sighting.

This “Steep Banks” account on YouTube started uploading a lot of Long Island-based gems from the nineties: Frank Gerwer in midtown circa 1997 and R.I.P. Burritoville and Broadway Bump, two of the greatest lil’ kid spots in New York skateboarding history.

Well, a summer montage to “We Dem Boyz” was pretty inevitable.

Columbus Circle is fun.

A look at the current breed of skate videos coming out of Philadelphia.

Wasn’t expecting to link a video of a guy on Jart today, but some of the stuff in this Fran Molina part is undeniably insane. He destroys MACBA without even hitting the ledges much, and skates sorta like a Euro Torey Pudwill. (Who, by the way, was recently discovered to be maybe the third Jewish pro skateboarder ever. Time to amend this post.)

Uhh…Young Thug was on The Tonight Show.

Quote of the Week: “Yo you know what’s fact? Most pretty girls have bigass foreheads.” — Overheard at Lenox Ledges

Sorry for the slow start to the week. Cool stuff soon?

Seagulls & Arabian Burnouts

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Thanks to inflation and skyrocketing cheese costs, hundreds of sixteen-year-olds are approaching death from starvation at the L.E.S. Park as you read this. R.I.P. New York Skateboarding 1993 — 2014. It was a fun 21 years :( Photo via @stillweii on Instagram.

Week late, yeah, and yes, “real hip-hop” music supervision is making the entire QS office want to only listen to Migos until the end of human history, but the new GX1000 clip is a New York montage of the year contender. It has everything: Jake, Aaron Herrington, lines in building lobbies, tricks on two-second bust spots, Brendan Carroll finding two new ways to skate Union Square, and near-death experiences.

FYI if you need to watch Jake’s Montreal wallride on loop

“Nobody naturally skates like Dylan Rieder, not even Dylan Rieder.” With skateboarding’s renewed emphasis on post-land poses, Muckmouth put together a compilation of “Storks” A.K.A. one-foot rollaways. Yes, Gino is obviously the king. (They’re not completely extint…Ishod slips out of a chill switch one in this clip.)

New Anthony Correa footage at the ~20:30 mark of this Houston video.

Man, this incarnation of Girl and Chocolate was incredible — just thank the heavens that the jump-cut era of skate video editing got phased out by 2004. Have you tried watching The Reason lately? It’s seizure-inducing.

Lamenting the demise of slam sections in skate videos. Didn’t they just get renamed to “fail comps” and move to YouTube? …and what person 25+ needs more reasons to get discouraged from skateboarding? Parkour slams are way better anyway.

An indoor park clip that’s actually fun to watch! Last line is intense.

A teaser for Bleach, a new video by Paul Young, who made Nevermind. Features many Bronze 2.5 affiliates.

Skateboarders riding first class to the literary establishment’s innermost sanctums, plus some reviews of books pertinent to the act of riding a skateboard. “cherry” is apparently a work of literature? And David Foster Wallace is a narc.

Omg German engineering.

Steven Cales calls into the last episode of Skate Wise.

Quote of the Week: “Is bae a thot?” — Dave Dowd

New PWBC news clip in a few hours ;)

Weekend Viewing: The Chocolate Tour 2000

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These Tennyson Corporation remixes are turning into the skateboard version of posthumous 2Pac albums — it’s perfectly reasonable for us to pretend Girl/Chocolate 1.0 never disappeared each time they come out. We’re thus unable to fully fall in love with Cory Kennedy, no matter how much he may deserve our admiration, or even begin coming to terms with Raven, Stevie and those other immensely talented individuals who just don’t tug at our heartstrings the same way a color-blocked and tan khakied Carroll switch flip does. And good God, the Carroll switch flips in this video…

The latest ode to the best pair of companies to exist at the peak of their powers comes in the form of a B-sides video from the team as it constituted in The Chocolate Tour days. As good as that video is, you sorta wish the proliferation of DVDs in the 2000s coincided with skitless versions of skit-heavy videos — from The Chocolate Tour right down to Parental Advisory. The Tennyson version of the former is completely devoid of them, and is the best 12-minutes you could spend watching skateboarding this weekend. As with all of these Girl/Choc remixes, you’re stuck there wondering how so much of this could have been considered “outtakes” at the time.

Is there any skateboarder born before 1990 whose favorite skater isn’t Mike Carroll? And has this Tennyson guy been paid millions of dollars for his work yet? The Chocolate Tour 2000 has legitimately gotten more burn these past 24 hours than the official Four Star “Anthology” edit, which wasn’t too bad itself.

Previously: Kenny Anderson Pretty Sweet “Snack Pack” remix, Rick Howard “Super International Tour Zone” remix, Mike Carroll “Dog” Remix

P.S. All July 4th tees have been shipped. Have a good weekend.

Sorry For Not Realizing How Awesome This Was When It Actually Came Out – Volume 2: The Kenny Anderson Pretty Sweet Tennyson Corp. Remix

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(Volume one being the late pass on Chrome Ball’s Daewon interview.)

2013 had the odd distinction of being the first year when Girl and Chocolate weren’t indisputably the best skateboard companies in existence. That is not to say they weren’t still many people’s favorites or not among the elite — just that for the decade-and-a-half prior, it was them, and then everything else in skating following suit. A variety of factors are responsible: decreasing #relevance of the company video, a booming interest in smaller companies, and many of those who grew up with Girl and Chocolate adjusting to their favorites fading behind the scenes.

Those qualified to speak on the matter said Pretty Sweet was about the guys who never had Girl/Chocolate parts. Malto and Vincent Alvarez had been on for deep, and the video featured their first real parts, so it made sense. The thing that didn’t make sense is why Kenny Anderson, a dude who also never really had a full Chocolate section either, got relegated to shared part status. (Even though Hot Chocolate is great and has all the hallmarks of a “real” part, it’s still tempting to think of it as “Oh, that was a tour video.”) Lord knows Pretty Sweet was already long enough, but a “Kenny and Friends” part felt like an odd concession, especially given skateboarding’s current infatuation with handsomeness ;) ♥

Beyond being an antidote to anyone going through first and second generation Girl withdrawal, last year’s barrage of Tennyson remixes also remedied a lot of known issues with Pretty Sweet. They made a Kenny Anderson part, for one. (Plus they used an Al Green song straight out of the companies’ 1993-1999 “maybe” music supervision pile. Made it feel more Mouse than Pretty Sweet.) Snack Pack somehow got lost in the shuffle. Better late than never. Watch the full thing here. Follow the Tennyson Vimeo page, too.

A-list skateboard companies outsourcing reedits from fans is becoming less and less taboo. Is it really that unreasonable for Girl to mail this guy two hard drives of raw footage, a box of boards, and a few racks to re-edit Pretty Sweet in its entirety a la what DGK did earlier this week?

Onto more important matters…Who has recent history’s cooler post-trick turnaround maneuver: Kenny Anderson or Busenitz?

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20 Years of Girl: The Ben Sanchez Tribute Post

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Before anything: Manolo’s Tapes went live with an incredible retrospective of all the Girl and Chocolate videos yesterday. We can talk about Keenan’s switch flip, or how ahead of its time each Koston part was, or all the crazy stuff Marc Johnson has done, but let’s talk about some real shit…Ben Sanchez.

A longtime personal favorite Chrome Ball post is the dual tribute to Ben “Burger Boy” Sanchez and Shamil Randle. For a pair of twenty-year-old companies, very few of their riders have been afforded the ability to fade into obscurity like those two, and nostalgic reminders of less prominent names are among the greatest joys of The Chrome Ball Incident.

If Richard Mulder, Mike York, Chico Brenes were the seventh, eighth and ninth guys off the bench, then Ben Sanchez was something like the twelfth. Not to sound like a broken record, but the era when Girl and Chocolate were a batch of the best skaters alive surrounded by dudes who were more style than pushing the envelope is the one we most frequently put on a pedestal. Those guys helped the videos feel more like skate videos, and less like blockbusters. Koston and Guy were there to show you how good skateboarding could possibly be. Mike York got you hyped to try some pretzel spin noseslide combo that inevitably ends with a tic-tac. Ben Sanchez, on the other hand, was the guy who made you remember, “Damn, I haven’t done a half cab noseslide in a while.”

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