To wrap up this mildly Girl/Chocolate themed week, here is a quick clip of Koston cruising around downtown circa 1995-ish, via the B-roll tapes from his Epicly Later’d series that came out earlier this year. Not much by way of actual “tricks,” just cruiser footage from the area around C.I.A. Ledge and the road that surrounded the Twin Towers (to the side of where the white stone benches were.) Thanks to Chris and the crew at VBS for sharing this with us. The audio is jacked in a few places, but you can deal with it. Have a good weekend.
The crew behind the Eric Koston Epicly Later’d episodes had some product to throw around and hit us up for ideas. This week’s episode is about Menik Mati (the most “serious” video of its time) and Chomp On This (the least “serious” video of its time.) Chomp was a crucial part of your life if you were in your early-teens in 2002. If you were 14 back then and claim to have never drawn a Pac-Man on your board with a Sharpie, you’re probably a liar.
We don’t normally run contests around here, but this one could be fun: Film the dumbest, silliest, most absurd line as a homage to Chomp, and win a Girl, Indy and Spitfire complete, a bunch of Four Star gear, a pair of Oakleys and a pair of Nike SB Koston 1s (no éS Koston 3s with custom Pac-Man paint marker art were available for this contest, sorry.) Runner up gets a pair of Koston 1s and a set of Spitfires. Do eighty unnecessary manuals, backside 5050 a ledge in a full Kobe Bryant uniform, do the most annoying no-comply trick imaginable, do a misty flip into the Courthouse Drop, do a five-trick line on a row of three-foot-long manny pads. The stupider, the better. Bring the circus tricks out. Preferably no skateparks.
The entries will be judged by ten dudes in a room drinking three thirty packs, so you don’t need to do the “best” trick to win by any means. The more absurd, the better. The best ones will be thrown into a compilation clip at the end of the contest.
Submissions: All entries must be submitted to qsvicecontest [at] gmail [dot] com by the end of the day on Friday August 31st, 2012. You can send private Vimeo links, unlisted YouTube links, file sharing site links to raw files, whatever. Please make all your entries at least 480p quality. Video format does not matter. VX, Hi8, HD, VHS, iPhone, GoPro, etc. are all fine. No, you do not need to live in/near New York. This contest is open to anyone anywhere. If you have anymore questions e-mail qsvicecontest [at] gmail [dot] com and we’ll get back to you. Have fun.
The new Bronze / Flipmode video, 56K premieres at Wreck Room in Brooklyn (940 Flushing Avenue, off the Morgan L stop) this Friday, at 10 P.M. Flyer & more info here. According to an anonymous QS commentor, the premiere will soon be followed by a release of the past three videos on a DVD disc. Who said DVDs were dead?
To get all the events out of the way — Black Dave is opening up for Chief Keef at S.O.B’s (Varrick & West Houston Street) tonight. Flyer here. Doors open at 7:30, show at 9. Age 16+, so you can cool with your young’ns. Tickets are $20.
Watch what “throwaway” footage from Lucas Puig and Mark Suciu looks like. Apparently, there are still a bunch of kids out there today who think they have a chance of going pro. Good luck with that.
Gravis has a new clip out with a minute of unseen Jake Johnson footage from the past year or so. Lots of gnarly, middle-of-nowhere midwestern spots. “Perfect trick selection, pants improving” — Ted Barrow. Ripped Laces has a post detailing the sketchiness of the bank to rail in Yonkers he backside 5050s.
$$$ is a New York-based video with a bunch of young kids ripping around the city. Teaser here. It has a couple of really sick lines down the double-sixes at FedEx.
It turns out that the Slap message boards have a purpose beyond gauging imminent skate nerd critical darlings / future recipients of “Why isn’t he properly hooked up yet?!” inquiries. Slap, despite its many faults, is the internet’s leading destination for all things pertaining to Forrest Edwards. (Why isn’t he properly hooked up yet?!)
Amidst searching for a link to Edwards’ new video part (it got deleted), there was another thread with a photo of him back lipping a nine-stair handrail while holding a Little Caesar’s box. It looks like Little Caesar’s has done what many actual skate companies have been hesitant to do, and inked a long-term endorsement deal with one of skateboarding’s few genuine characters. If the prime Russell Stover product placement in the teaser for his new part is any indication of a future business relationship, then Edwards may already be two steps ahead of the entire skate industry.
In the same thread, someone posted a similar photograph of Eric Koston from over ten years ago. Given energy drink companies’ monstrous (right?) involvement with skateboarding these days, it’s odd that pizza chains haven’t approached more skaters with sponsorship opportunities. Based on a large sample size of acquaintances, pizza appears more frequently in our day-to-day skateboard activities than energy drinks, which are typically only useful for 3 A.M. drives on road trips. (“I’d drink a tall can of Monster and get through at least three states, easy.” — Marquez.) Dominoes, Pizza Hut, Little Caesar’s, Papa John’s, high-end spots like Grimaldi’s, and even Two Bros are missing out on a bountiful pool of endorsements.
Below is a diagram of pizza giants, and their projected corresponding skate industry equivalents.
April 19th marks one year since Keith “Guru” Elam passed away. While there are plenty of sites to read about the impact of his music on a grand scale, the fact that Gang Starr probably occupies the upper tier of “Most Songs to Appear in Skate Videos Throughout the Nineties,” if you were to tally up individual artist appearances (at least as far as rap is concerned), will receive zero mention.
If you’re currently in your late-teens or early-twenties, you most likely began skating in a period bookended by Fulfill the Dream (1998) and Yeah Right (2003). In a time before the internet became a daily onslaught of new music, and you had to ration your money between skate videos and actually purchasing CDs (or scouring Limewire, Kazaa, or whatever spyware-infested file sharing service you chose to use back then), skate videos themselves provided a window to music / rap that wasn’t necessarily on BET, MTV, The Box, etc., or older songs that you were too young to have experienced when they were actually released. You didn’t necessarily have to be one of those kids who organized their first iPod by skate video title as opposed to album, but it’s hard to deny that videos played a much larger role in shaping music discovery ten-plus years ago than they do now, when everything is available. Without the internet, or the presence of an older, more knowledgeable sibling, skate videos introduced plenty of nine, ten, and eleven-year-olds in that period to rap that did not necessarily begin with shiny suit era Bad Boy and end at Jay-Z. (Although it is a shame that skate video soundtracks shunned the “Tunnel Banger” sub-genre at its height.)
One of those key moments was Steve Olson’s part in Fulfill the Dream, which introduced me, and a whole bunch of kids just like me, to Gang Starr, as our formative years of becoming pop culture / musically aware occurred in that four-year drought between Hard to Earn and Moment of Truth.
“Above the Clouds” came from what would be the last great Gang Starr record, but there was an extensive period preceding 1998, when the group’s music was in a whole grip of 411s and a slew of memorable company video parts as well.
