Fall QS merchandise is arriving at U.S. & Japanese shops now. Check your local shop’s IG for availability, and our stockists page for a local QS dealer (that page actually needs to be updated, tbh.) Arriving in Canada, Australia and Europe this week and next. Fall 2019 gear will be available in our webstore next Monday, October 28th @ midnight E.S.T. (So technically Sunday night.)
You have 72 hours left to vote in the QS Readers Survey about the best parts and full-length videos of the 2010s. We’ll have the results for you in November ♥
You may have heard that the city approved plans to cover Tompkins with synthetic turf after a hearing this past May. There is very sparse information about this, outside of the Tompkins courts being outlined with a rectangle in a PDF. Several friends with, um, knowledge of how to navigate these things have begun to reach out for more info, as groundbreaking looks like it is set to begin this winter. Anyone with insight into how this could be debated and compromised with Parks, even after it has been approved, please feel free to share what you know. We’ll try our best to keep you updated as well.
“My project in Malmö felt unreal. Imagine that happening in New York. I wouldn’t even know where to start.” Hmm, on that note… MIT Masters degree holder, Alexis Sablone, has been heavy on the interview circuit lately, and everyone is happy about it. Alexis for president of skateboarding :)
Josh Kalis re-did the ender that capped a video part he filmed at age 23… at 43 ♥
Go Skate Day videos aren’t exactly the first things that get clicked on around here — unless they’re from the Sabotage dudes, who, rather than running the whole “this is the one day I refuse to skate” thing that contrarian “core” guys do, went out and got nine minutes worth of Philly footage in 24 hours. (Yo, where is that mini windowsill ledge? Figure it’s Center City somewhere and sucks IRL, but that thing looks super fun.)
“Without that skater/photographer communication, you have no choice but to sit and wait for the photo to show itself. It felt like I had photographed a wild leopard in the jungle.” Bobby Worrest — 360 flip noseslide. Photo by Jeff Comber. Head over to King skate mag for the full blurb.
*First great video part of 2019 alert* The scientists at Palace realized they needed some young blood on the team and got Heitor Da Silva (alum from the same Swedish skate school as Oski) onboard. He has an awesome new Adidas part out right now (that backside flip, switch frontside flip line…), and an interview about his journey from Brazil to Norway to The Triangle™ over on Grey. Could have probably dug a bit deeper on the song, but oh well.
Me, you, and Cyrus Bennett have the same favorite skateboarder. Hint: he skates more than everyone, for longer than everyone, is older than everyone, and is more oblivious to what’s going on in skateboarding that everyone.
Traffic scanned a 2005 TWS article about a D.I.Y. tour they did in Hartford, Albany, Rochester, Akron and Pittsburgh back in the early days of the company, with words from Ricky, and a bunch of rad photos. Never knew they were the architects behind that still-running Albany bank-to-ledge. #respect.
The Village Psychic guys like Borough Hall a lot A.K.A. they made a video of all their 2018 iPhone footage. They look high, but when the hell were those plastic orange blocks there?
Spot Updates: Not the most oft-skated spot these days (unless you’re winding up there after getting kicked out of Bigscreen or something), but there’s not much to skate at Penn Plaza anymore, as the building put astro turf all over the upper portion of the spot.
All the stuff from the longest T.F. obstacle run in the spot’s history is gone, as of last week. Sometimes you need to cleanse your palette so new flavors can flourish, and we’re excited to see what sort of debris tumbles into Tompkins for 2019. (Still kind of curious about how they let us rock for AN. ENTIRE. SUMMER. — softball leagues and all — then finally decided to get rid of it in…November? Not complaining though.)
“Nevertheless, the same 2018 skateboarding memes exist in each city. Wherever you go there will be the body varial guy. Someone, eyes closed, will spin their board one handed above a precipice. It is now universally accepted that baggy pants give you the illusion of having more grace on a skateboard, you simply have to be very good to throw the right shapes in skinny jeans. There will always be a bottle tosser.” — LOVED this. Daryl Mersom offers up some observations on skateboarding via his travels in post-Soviet Eastern Europeans counties. We out to Estonia, and shout out to apple trees.
“Someone told me you got into a fight with Wu-Tang a while back?” To follow-up the jump ramp story, Mackenzie uploaded the full audio of his ~15-year-old interview with Macaulay Culkin’s friend, Harold Hunter.
Wasn’t expecting Theories to post a video that had 6ix9ine songs and crooked grind nollie front foot flips in it, but 2018 has been all about expanding your horizons, yaknow. “Legana” is a 20-minute video from a Peruvian skate crew that’s 50% filmed in New York.
And on that note, The Atlantic has a wild article about why we’re all not hooking up enough. (There’s a SoundCloud embed on there that you can listen to in the event you don’t want to read a 10,000 word article about not having sex.)
Recently went out for dinner in a place that had no real traces of being a skater-run establishment, but for whatever reason, they were playing Pretty Sweet. None of us had watched it in full since roughly around the time it came out. Two things became obvious: that we’re okay with not seeing it in full for another five years (…sorry), and that Kenny Anderson had fire footage in that video, which seemed to float under the radar during its initial release. The whole “it’s a *normal* Marc Johnson part!”- narrative kind of took the reigns when Pretty Sweet dropped, but Kenny really did have the best bits of the video as far as Girl’s 30-years+ riders at the time were concerned.
We were gassing up this Tennyson remix hard back when it first dropped, but you should give it a whirl if you haven’t in a while. It’s the best part from Pretty Sweet ;)
The good news is we finally switched over to a circa 2018 design that’s mobile compatible, etc. Hopefully it’s not a Crailtap-getting-rid-of-the-iframes shock to the system, because let’s be honest: it basically looks the same, just moderne. We purged a couple spots that have been gone long enough for people to forget about, cleaned up some shit around the pages, etc. If anything seems to not be working properly, feel free to drop us a line.
The bad news is we are still amidst the same general skate internet content slump we have been experiencing all month. Nearly nothing happened last week…
On the off chance that you didn’t catch it, Jawn Gardner continues his streak of being one of the most contagiously good vibed skaters to watch in 2018, via his DC Streetsweeper raw files. That A/C contraption he made is nuts…
Gunes’ new FTC part is up there with John’s raw files as what got ran back the most at the office last week. Shout out to everyone who looks like they’re having fun while being really good at skateboarding.
Don’t know much about this one, but “Long Shots & Low Odds” is a ~moody~ seven-minute New York video from Canon Hastings featuring all your New York 2018 dietary staples (wallies, .T.F., a pit stop at the Grand Street courts) + a stubborn commitment to skating those red double cellar doors next to Motorino.
“I feel good because I can make money, because I can help my family, but I don’t give a fuck about the Olympics. I don’t care and I don’t want to be there.” Grey has an interview with Olympian and European life enthusiast, Tiago Lemos.
“The big underground music in America is like house and dance stuff, based on what I see in the shop, and that’s what skaters are buying. When I was getting into deep underground hip-hop growing up, the only other kids listening to it were skaters. Like, you guys know Hieroglyphics? Why? ‘Oh, it was on the blah blah blah VHS.'” This link actually has nothing to do with skating, but is an insightful conversation on how people consume music (particularly rap) in 2018, and a reminder that it’s ok to not have an opinion on some stuff!
Quote of the Week: “If you’re having fun, chances are, you’re breaking at least one law.” — Conor
It’s eerie how well this clip has aged. If you sent this to us sans titles as a “hey my friends went to Paris and here’s our clip!” in 2018, it’d probably get a pass…
