Flo Marfaing | Quartersnacks

Skate the Ledges

Daily News February 15th, 2016 · 1:43 pm · 5

love

Brian Panebianco’s Instagram has been the go-to for all end of Love coverage. Respect to anyone who made it down there to skate in single-degree temperatures.

Damn.

You likely caught it already, but Yaje went on a tear for his welcome part to the resuscitated AWS. (Yes, he’s still alive.) Malfa also posted all the photos from Yaje’s interview in this month’s TWS, although you’ll have to grab the issue for the text.

Pretty much all Morningside Heights + Harlem spots in this Mikey Perdomo remix part by Bluecouch NY, which is refreshing to see. Surprised more people don’t try barging a lot of the stuff on the Columbia campus beyond the bank-to-ledge. Ollie over the wall at Morningside School was a pretty wild and unexpected one too ;)

Flo is skating the Le Dome Hubba again. [Previously]

Said it before, but Tom Knox’s Vase section is probably the most re-watched video part around here since Reider’s Gravis comeback. For those just getting up to speed, Sidewalk gave a complete rundown of his video part history. (A notable early-30s nosegrind technician recently told me he preferred the 11th Hour part, so…) Thrasher also just went live with all his Vase extras and raw files. We’d remix it, but nothing on the new Boosie goes well with British skateboarding.

Bobshirt has a fifteen-minute video interview with Long Island legend and owner-of-a-famous-nose, Frank Gerwer. They talk about board graphics, Wallenburg, first trips to the Banks, etc. FYI: The Number Nine part he mentions can be found here. It has a good bit of cool early-90s midtown footage.

Raw footage reel via Matt Velez, Diamond Days #86 via Rob Harris (where’s the party for #100?), and another extended All City Showdown edit via Tony Choy-Sutton.

Village Psychic with a timely article on maintaining private skateparks on the east coast during the winter. I still never forgave whoever stole the plastic benches from the Fairway on 125th Street to put in that Red Bull park on N. 11th circa 2004.

Boil the Ocean re: skating’s willingness to re-embrace its wandering prodigals.

Oh no, is jump cut editing a la The Reason coming back? :/

Another preview of the Big Brother book. Labor had copies as of a few days ago. Not sure if they still do.

QS Sports Desk Play of the Week: Russell Westbrook’s All-Star Game entrance. Also, to anyone talking about Carmelo trade rumors — stop. Just stop.

Quote of the Week: “Bernie Sanders is gonna win off memes.” — Martin Davis

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Thanks to everyone who came out on Saturday.

SremmLife

Daily News March 10th, 2015 · 5:30 am · 17

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Landmark. Photo by Brian Kelley.

In honor of Paris Fashion Week, our interns GIF-itized most of Flo Marfaing’s tricks down the hubba ledge at Le Dome / Palais de Tokyo — which, as you are well aware, is the site of many prominent #PFW shows. Been waiting for that ledge to have a bit of a resurgence a la how Clipper has come back into fashion these past ~two years. Watch some trend-setting skater switch back 5050 it (assuming it’s too high to no comply into?) in an artsy photo and the floodgates will open.

Luis is the best.

The future is NOW — #jkjhnsn is now @jkjhnsn.

Lenny Kirk was / is a psycho.

The bro Adam Zhu got a chill one-minute part at the 3:30 mark of this video.

Frozen in Carbonite examines Gold Goons through the lens of the latest Drake album, while Boil the Ocean uses it as a springboard to contemplate the 5-0 grind’s place in the modern skate trick canon.

This guy is a bit of a cult hero around here: Andy Bautista’s circa 1998-99 Thrasher Firing Squad outtakes via Jim Hodgson. The original part can be found here. There are a lot of really good nollie back heels in it.

Check Ciber Wave, the new vid from the crew at Humidity Skateshop in New Orleans.

Cutty shared part between Tom Penny and Javier Sarmiento can be found at the 13:20 mark of this Spanish video. It’s dimly lit and 90% in skateparks, but you know… Javi.

Skate Jawn has a clip of the Paych dudes’ trip to Puerto Rico and Colin Sussingham is selling a 48-page zine of photographs from the same excursion.

J.P. Blair uploaded a throwaway reel of some guys who skate in New York.

Someone who’s really good at bump-to-bars once observed that “after you do two or three, they all start to look the same.” Adidas isn’t into that line of thinking.

An interview with Dan Wolfe about the low-key classic I-Path promo.

Ollie up, early grab gap to 5050 on those two ledges under the High Line is intense.

Ever wonder what happened to Scott Kane? Here you go.

The ~30th attempt at a skateboard fashion blog: Kit Report.

“Rich Homie Quan seems like a really nice guy.”

Rest in Peace Sam Simon. No piece of pop culture has made me laugh throughout my time on this earth like The Simpsons has. Thank you.

QS Sports Desk: Maintaining our position that Russell Westbrook is the greatest basketball player to ever live is really tough with Steph Curry doing things like this. Also, if you think James Harden should be MVP, please leave a comment so we have a record of your IP address and can ban you from visiting this website.

Quote of the Week
Observant Gentleman: “Sometimes I see people wearing bootcut jeans with actual boots, and I think ‘Oh wow, that doesn’t look that bad.'”
Will R.S: “Bruv, you’re a fucking dimwit.”

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It’s over:

spring

P.S. If you’re going to be one of those assholes complaining in June about how 85 degrees is “too hot,” you can live comfortable knowing you’re worse than the “James Harden for MVP” guys ;)

Firing Line: Artsy Edition

Time Capsule June 12th, 2013 · 4:28 pm · 13

long lens

Long lens lines are chill. Though with our multi-decade dependence on fisheyes, they come few and far between. It’s tough to think of one from a classic video short of Ricky Oyola’s ollie into traffic line from Eastern Exposure 2, which certainly would’ve had its impact dulled a bit if the filmer ran up on the ledge to follow him or something. Much like Vine, you probably had to have attended film school in order to be good at filming lines without a fisheye. Framing, zooming, it’s a whole process.

Strangely enough, keeping the fisheye off sometimes gives you a better glimpse of how gigantic certain skate spots are, probably because we’ve grown jaded of seeing the same crouched down at the bottom of the steps angle with so many of them. This long lens version of Flo Marfaing’s infallible “Skateboard Line Hall of Fame” entry from the They Don’t Give a Fuck About Us bonus footage falls into that category. In the part’s fisheye version, it’s more of a “Oh, he’s skating the two big hubbas in Paris, that’s crazy” reaction. The fisheye angle doesn’t really drive home the fact that he ran the risk of falling over a fifteen-foot drop on two occasions in the same line. From the top of the spot, you might get the best view of this exemplary feat of line choreography. Still can’t think of anything like it done in the decade since…

P.S. Is there a scan of that Skateboarder “Greatest Lines in Skate History” article from the mid-2000s online anywhere?

The Most Influential European Sweatpants Skater

Time Capsule June 3rd, 2012 · 4:06 pm · 6

Souljah Griptape (grip companies need content too!) uploaded a handful of Flo Marfaing footage, donning it as a “lost” Seek A.K.A. Hip-Hop Workshop part. (For people who started skating in the past seven or eight years, Seek is a company that was under Alien and Habitat for a little while in the early 2000s. It had Kalis, Dyrdek, Mike Taylor, Colin McKay, Alex Carolino, and Flo on the team.) The footage isn’t really “lost,” because more than a few tricks have since appeared elsewhere. It looks like part one of a multi-part clip.

Flo’s 2002 output in worth note for skateboard historians because 1) He pre-dates the rediscovery of flatground 360 shove-its by five years (the downtown L.A. line in Carroll’s Fully Flared part…Gino technically “brought it back” in Yeah Right!, but it did not have as widespread of an effect), and 2) He’s the most influential European in the “skating in sweats” movement.

It was just a feeling, like before, everyone was cool with each other, and it was like nobody got on the team unless everybody was like, “Fuck yeah, let’s do this.” Seek happened because we wanted to do a world company, where it was like riders on the team, but it wasn’t like, “He rides for the Euro team” or “he rides for the Brazilian team,” but just, “This is our team and we’re all homies.” Like, Flo and Caralino are two of my favorite people and skaters, and we didn’t want to rock with them on some Euro team shit. Flo was like, “I want to do this and show the world we can skate for U.S. companies.” And it was working and we were filming, and I thought our video was going to be sick.

The story I got told was that there weren’t enough graphics people and they weren’t able to spend enough time on the company, so they just deaded it. They just deaded it overnight. They wouldn’t bring Flo and Alex back on board with us, which was another thing that pissed me off, and they just wouldn’t do anything. They were just like, “No, we’re over it.” We were like, “Hey, well wait ‘til the video comes out, and see what happens,” and they just deaded it. So, I went back over to Alien, and I think that was the time when they were slowly changing into this new direction that they were going. It was never the same. — Josh Kalis, November 2010. Read more Seek conspiracy theories here.